As readers will recall from previous writings, I think the label “Christian Nationalism” is freighted with too much ambiguity and too liable to abuse to be worthy of adoption.
One of those concerns is the haphazard use of the adjective “Christian.” If “Christian” means that a nation’s laws and customs are shaped by Christianity, then there is no problem, and perhaps I can stop writing this essay and cautiously adopt the label “Christian Nationalism.” That is one of the challenges of Christian nationalism, after all—who sets the precise guardrails for the term? I will gladly accept the fact that in some precincts, my views would be defined as Christian nationalist. If, though, “Christian” means that the government and a Christian body are mutually tied to one another—say, magistrates calling for synods—then I remain unpersuaded.
In response, those who favor adopting “Christian Nationalism” often reply that if you cannot have a “Christian nation,” you cannot have a “Christian family,” either. According to critics of my view, if a natural institution like the nation cannot be Christian in how it orders itself, neither can the family be “Christian” in the totality of how it orders itself—since, for a Baptist, the label “Christian” refers only to entities that are regenerate. Hence, if a member of the family is not yet a Christian, one must also surrender the label “Christian family.” As someone who would profess to have a “Christian family,” ordering the totality of my household’s actions toward Christian ends, why am I unwilling to apply the same logic to a nation ordering its citizens toward Christian ends? Am I yielding to a godless secularism that wishes to sanitize the public square—and the government—of any religious ethos, logos, and pathos? Not at all.
In this essay, I argue that there are three intertwined but distinct categories of authority, jurisdiction, and means by which we should think about the purposes of the state and the family: punitive coercion (chiefly the state’s sword, exercised over external acts), formative/tutelary authority (chiefly the parent’s, native to its jurisdiction), and acknowledgment (public recognition, open to both family and state).
Two Terms: Acknowledgment and Administration
Two terms—“acknowledge” and “administer”—must be distinguished before anything else, since the whole dispute turns on them.
By acknowledgment, I mean the state’s or magistrate’s recognition, in its own public acts, of the God who authors its authority and its law—a declaratory posture directed Godward, proper to the magistrate as a creature and not as a priest. To wit, this would include a nation’s governing documents acknowledging the indebtedness it owes to Christianity as the moral architecture underneath its conception of law. Think of Franklin Roosevelt’s many overtures to Christianity as the bedrock of American identity. The state, in this paradigm, does not legislate or coerce belief. What’s allowable? “In God We Trust” as a motto, an oath sworn before God, a day of public thanksgiving, the naming of a civil holiday. Think of Christian devotions being hosted by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon that are entirely voluntary to attend. In each case, the state orders its own speech, coinage, and calendar toward its Author, touching neither the internal forum of the citizen nor the office of the church. Acknowledgment bears true and faithful witness to God the Creator as the ground of morality and political justice. I endorse this framing.
By administration, I mean something categorically different: the state’s or the magistrate’s instituting, regulating, and enforcing of religion as such—establishing forms of worship, adjudicating orthodoxy and heresy, binding the conscience to a confession, and lending the sword to the whole enterprise. Administration acts not upon the state’s own conduct but upon the religious acts and beliefs of persons, by coercion. The line between the two is therefore not one of degree or fervor but of object and instrument: acknowledgment is declaratory, falling within the state’s own end as a creational ordinance called to exercise public justice according to God’s moral law; administration is regulative, reaching past that end into the formative office belonging to family and church. The former the magistrate may, and arguably should, undertake; the latter he has no mandate to touch at all. Thus, a civil holiday—Christmas—and “In God We Trust” are acknowledgment—the state ordering its own calendar and coinage—while a blasphemy prosecution is administration, since it turns the sword against a person’s religious speech to enforce a confession. There is “play in the joints” on the wide varieties of actions that fall in between administration and acknowledgment; think, for example, of Sabbath laws—Sabbath laws concern the external ordering of society toward religion by freeing man’s time for religious activities.
What “Christian Nation” Can Mean
Further category distinctions matter. “Christian nation” can mean at least three things: a nation whose people and mores are predominantly Christian, which is obviously possible and strongly desirable; a state that formally establishes and enforces the Christian religion, which is the actual matter in question; or a corporately redeemed nation (to be fair, it would be wrong to attribute this last view to Christian Nationalism proper). It bears emphasizing that “Christian” is predicated analogically, not univocally: a Christian family, a Christian church, a Christian school, and a Christian holiday each wear the adjective in a sense fitted to the institution it modifies. For example, a “Christian” college is a people voluntarily submitting to the confession of a university and which can be held in trust by board officers in perpetuity. As the state is non-voluntary and a Christian college or Christian bookstore are constituted on a voluntary basis, I see a massive chasm between a “Christian Nation” and other institutions that bear the adjective. I do not deny that a nation may be “Christian” in the first sense—a people and public order shaped by and conforming to Christianity; that sense I affirm. My quarrel is with the second. The slogan works by sliding from the first sense, in which family and nation are genuinely parallel, to the second. As I will argue, the family is a different creational ordinance in kind; postlapsarian realities relocate religious oversight; and the instruments proper to each differ from those proper to the other—not merely in degree.
The Family as a Different Kind of Institution
These creation-order institutions differ because their generative ends differ. The family is a prelapsarian institution constituted with an intrinsic religious end: Ephesians 6:4 does not invent parental catechesis so much as republish what Deuteronomy 6 already assumed—that the formation of children in the fear of the Lord belongs to the family by nature and by revealed commission alike (Gen. 1:26–28; Gen. 2:18–24). The family also possesses something no political order possesses: a natural head with authority to formally direct the household in religious formation. To state it plainly: “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (Josh. 24:15) is a sentence only a father can utter. The context of that passage tells against reading it as an analogy for state-sponsored religion: “As for me and my house” is Joshua’s, spoken to a nation—but that nation was itself a household, the family of Abraham under a covenant no modern state inherits. Israel is not the template for modern nations; it is the type that finds its fulfillment in the church, not in the magistrate’s sword. Surely the general equity principles that bound Israel to God also bind modern government—not in a covenantal and salvific sense, but with regard to the creational and natural law principles of the moral law.
Deuteronomy 6 suggests that parents possess a singular authority to catechize their children in matters of religion, a power never explicitly delegated to the state. There is a positive commission laid upon the family that has no corollary in the state’s mandate—no comparable charge for the state to administer faith. The New Testament does not extend Israel’s arrangement to the nations; it terminates it in Christ and re-houses it in the church. In the New Testament, the magistrate’s role narrows to external conditions. The royal edicts of Isaiah 49:23 and Psalm 2:10–12 do not transfer to the New Testament magistrate as a warrant to establish religion—though these texts still summon civil rulers, as rulers, to acknowledge and submit to Christ. What does not transfer is any warrant to coerce that submission on others; what does transfer is the proclamation of the gospel through the church (1 Thess. 2:7; Acts 4:12). Parents are commissioned to direct their children before God in a way no magistrate is commissioned to direct citizens’ consciences. That is why “Christian” predicates so naturally of the family: the adjective tracks the reach and scope of legitimate authority over the practice of religion itself.
Thus, we may say that the parent holds a natural, pre-political, representative office over his children, grounded in generation and in the child’s not-yet-autonomy—the parent stands in loco Dei for a soul that cannot yet stand as its own covenant head. That fatherly office discharges the ordering of the home’s religious life because children fall within the parent’s natural charge. The magistrate holds no analogous office over the adult conscience; his office (Rom. 13) is over external acts bearing on the temporal common good. The family regulates its own religious life, and the state may not—not because one uses coercion and the other does not (the family is commissioned to practice punitive discipline on disobedient children), but because religious formation belongs to the family’s constitutive end and lies outside the state’s.
The State’s Different Mandate
The state’s mandate runs along a different track. Romans 13 grounds the magistrate in juridical categories—the punishment of evil, the praise of good—ordered to justice and civil peace, not to catechesis or covenant. This is not to deny that rulers, as creatures, also owe God acknowledgment (they do), nor the historical reality that the magisterial Protestant tradition (one that Baptists do not stand in continuity with on church-state matters) assigned the magistrate some care for religion (even here, the tradition never fixed a single formula for how to do so, suggesting that the state’s interaction with religion is prudential rather than regulative). It is curious that something as potentially significant as vesting the state with religious oversight is never spelled out with any comparative detail in the New Testament as it is in the Old Testament, which suggests that religious oversight is not within the purview of concerns in the New Testament. In my view, the First Amendment allows the state to incline its citizens toward religious ends fully as much as a top-down establishment would, without the accompanying troubling consequences. Outside the Mosaic covenant, Scripture prescribes for a modern state no particulars of a religious program it would adopt if it were to adopt one—Israel’s own religious-civil law being a covenantal order that reaches modern government, if at all, only through the general equity of the moral law.
The asymmetry is not coercion versus nurture. It is jurisdiction: the household has natural authority over the souls in its charge, exercised until those souls come of age before God; the magistrate has no such authority over the consciences of citizens already of age. The family regulates the home’s religious life by right of institution and office; the state cannot, because it holds no representative office over the internal forum of an adult. Once again: church and state are creational offices, but offices of different kinds, with different means and different ends.
But the chief difference, as I see it, lies in the nature of religion as a human good. Even if religion is a facet of the common good (as I would hold, as would Christian Nationalism in its legal dimension), how that good is instantiated does not necessitate the state’s direct role in religion—and indeed, history tells us this arrangement is, at best, mixed, and I would argue counterproductive to the ends of true religion. Society cannot function under naked secularism, to be sure. All of society owes a duty to God, but a duty suited to the kind of end for which each constitutive element of society is purposed: the state and the common sphere owe a creational obligation, while the church owes a redemptive (and creational) obligation.
Religious assent is intrinsically non-coercible: faith extracted by force is not faith (again, to be fair, many Christian Nationalist arguments affirm this principle), and a coerced act of worship fails to achieve the very good it purports to serve. The fairer reading—one Christian Nationalists are owed—is that their project concerns the external adorning of public life, oriented toward God rather than toward coercion as such.
The Strongest Form of the Objection
The most serious form of the objection to my argument does not ask the state to compel belief; it grants, as I do, that faith cannot be coerced. It argues instead that the political community is a natural society, and every natural society has a head who orders it toward its proper goods, God chief among them. The magistrate is God’s minister (Rom. 13:4); as such, he owes God not merely private acknowledgment but the corporate ordering of the community he heads—the public recognition of true religion, the restraint of public blasphemy—precisely as a father orders his household toward God without coercing the interior assent of any soul under his roof. On this account, family and polity are parallel: both order the external and corporate practice of religion, and neither presumes to manufacture faith.
This is the argument that must be answered, and it cannot be answered by the distinction between external and internal, or between coercion and nurture. The father who leads household worship over a dissenting child or teenager beneath his roof is himself ordering an external, corporate cultus without binding an interior conscience. If that is legitimate for him, the mere fact that the magistrate would likewise confine himself to the external forum settles nothing. It must be answered according to jurisdiction and end.
Answering by End, Not by Forum
The answer lies not in the forum but in the end. Authority in any society extends only so far as its constitutive end requires, for the end specifies the office. The family’s end is generative and formative: it exists to bring persons into being and to raise them toward their final end, so that catechesis in the fear of the Lord is not an added function but part of what a family is (Deut. 6; Eph. 6:4). Its corporate worship is intrinsic to its nature. The polity’s end is the temporal common good—justice, peace, and the external conditions of a shared life among agents already formed elsewhere. To be sure, law itself habituates, as seen in Aristotle and Aquinas no less than in the Second London Baptist Confession’s 24.2, which speaks of “wholesome” laws tending to the health of the commonwealth. If law forms character through habituation independent of catechesis or coercion, then the state is not merely receiving already-formed agents; it is one formative influence among several. This does not collapse into “administering religion.” It is a third thing.
The state’s charge is neither to generate its members nor to catechize them in the faith; it receives them already reared by family and church. Religion therefore enters the political common good indirectly: as a good whose space and exercise the magistrate protects and whose Author he acknowledges, not as a religious head he institutes and administers. The father orders worship because worship belongs to the family’s end; the magistrate does not, because it does not belong to the state’s end. The parallel breaks not because one forum is internal and the other external—both are external—but because the two societies are ordered to different ends, and authority, along with the means proper to it, follows the end. In a postlapsarian age, the state is not directly ordered toward the eternal as a purpose of its authority.
The State’s Instrument: Postlapsarian Coercion
The state’s instrument today is, sui generis, coercion—not that it is unique in possessing coercive power, but that it wields a particular kind of coercion: external, and chiefly juridical—punitive, retributive, and remedial. True, the state can exercise a kind of pedagogical coercion through what it prohibits, but such ends are best reserved for actions bearing on the temporal common good (e.g., laws against theft and pornography). Matters of the soul belong to the internal forum, and the measure of coercion the state possesses is not suited to the ends of the soul. Even granting that religious life is itself an element of the common good—since citizens are free to bring their deepest commitments into every sphere of life, and since maxims like the Decalogue and the Golden Rule positively shape the lives of citizens, as I would hold—that still does not require placing each such good within the auspices of state authority.
The good of religion, however, is precisely the good that state coercion cannot deliver. The family requires no such juridical instrument, because its authority over the souls in its care is self-derived, organic, and exercised through nurture, instruction, and example—means fitted to the good in view. The state’s authority, especially as a postlapsarian reality, is most aptly extended to external acts ordered to the temporal common good. To put it plainly, parents possess a type of oversight in religious matters that the state formally lacks, because Scripture specifically places that oversight within the family’s purview. Natural headship in religious matters extends to the family but not to the state. A contrary position, one that holds the state is to mediate or promote “true religion,” depends on an attenuated reading of Scripture—one that makes the text say something it does not posit on its own.
So there is an asymmetry between family and state that is not arbitrary but principled: different ends (the family’s felicity, ordered to the eternal good; the state’s, the political common good), different heads (parents and magistrates), and different instruments (principally catechesis and coercion). A household can be Christian because its natural authority extends to the ordering of worship within it. A nation can be Christian only in the sociological sense—a people leavened by the gospel—never in the sense of a political order wielding the sword on behalf of the faith, because the sword is the one tool that cannot produce the very thing it would enforce.
Testing the Vision: Hungary and America
The Christian Nationalist may reply that establishment concerns merely an external religious order, not an internal reality. The question we must repeatedly return to is whether the state has the competence to engage in such external ordering. As a matter of efficacy, what evidence is there that such ordering has produced either long-term social renewal or individual conversion? One may recall Viktor Orbán’s effort to steer Hungary—a population of roughly ten million, comparatively homogeneous—toward Christian ends, with limited success. How, then, could such a vision be realized in a diverse nation of well over three hundred million Americans? Even here, “external ordering” demands clarity: does it mean ceremonial and largely benign gestures, such as establishing Christmas as a federal holiday, or does it mean efforts to prohibit blasphemy? Acknowledging a Christian people’s religious traditions organically, as the majority belief of a population, is distinct from administering religion through governmental adjudication. To collapse these categories—such that the possibility of a Christian family entails the possibility of a Christian nation—is itself a jurisdictional error. Marriage, for example, is elevated to signify Christ and the church (Eph. 5:32); no political order receives comparable typological freight in the New Testament—the nations appear as the object of the Great Commission, not its formal instrument.
The Prelapsarian Objection
But let us consider this from an alternative set of assumptions. Even granting that the state is prelapsarian (a view I would actually affirm, along with Aquinas), that concession would establish only that the state’s role in religion is directive, not coercive. In an Edenic paradise, the state would have no need to correct anything, since there would be no religious dissent or moral rebellion to correct—no unbelief, no idolatry, no noetic corruption, no plurality of religions.
The central problem Christian Nationalism must answer—what the magistrate is to do with the unbeliever, the heretic, and the dissenting conscience—is itself an artifact of the fall. An Edenic warrant to return national government to its original purpose is therefore silent precisely where the decisive questions arise. Granting that an Edenic government could direct man’s religious life in a state of innocence would not prove that such a task remains possible in a postlapsarian age. To transfer Edenic authority wholesale into postlapsarian conditions is to treat the hardest question as already settled, when the premise, by design, never addressed it. At best, the Christian Nationalist can only impose a prelapsarian hypothetical onto what is now a postlapsarian reality.
In a state of innocence, authority coordinates free rational agents toward common goods—presumably including ultimate goods such as religion—without compelling, because there is nothing to compel against. The sword, which gives the state its coercive, postlapsarian character in the sense relevant to this debate, enters at Genesis 9:6 and is ratified in Romans 13 in explicitly juridical and coercive terms: the punishment of evildoers. Coercion is precisely the postlapsarian addition to political authority, and its biblical warrant today is primarily remedial rather than directive. The prelapsarian premise establishes the breadth of the state’s end in coordinating, allocating, and regulating actions within the creation mandate, but the instrument needed for enforcement today is postlapsarian, and its warrant today is confined to justice. The state may be prudentially directive in matters of religion; even here, no precise formula is fixed. The First Amendment disposes citizens toward religion by granting them space to pursue it. “In God We Trust” seems prudentially allowable as a principle of acknowledgment—rather than administration—and more desirable than the historical alternatives, but the state’s primary postlapsarian role remains confined to the coercive administration of justice.
We may put it this way: we cannot return to Eden using coercive means accommodated to fallenness. “Ordering” and “compelling” are the operative terms, and both compulsion and establishment run counter to the aims of voluntary religion and free response. Whether the state is prelapsarian, postlapsarian, or something in between, religion remains the kind of good that coercion—the state’s operative instrument today—cannot instantiate, and to which a Noahic frame cannot fully return us. The family is commanded to religious formation (Gen. 18:19, “command his children . . . to keep the way of the LORD”; Deut. 6; Eph. 6:4). The state is commanded to justice (Rom. 13) and, at most, owes the natural duty of acknowledging God as the ground of morality, justice, and rights. Parents have a mandate to catechize; the magistrate has no comparable mandate.
Redemptive History and the Relocation of the Office
Even granting that pre-fall authority had an undifferentiated care for man’s whole good, the post-fall economy assigns the mediation of man’s supernatural end to a specific institution: the church. Christ gives the keys to the church (Matt. 16:19), not to the sword-bearer; the ministry of reconciliation is ecclesial; the ordinary means of grace are Word and sacrament, administered by officers of the church. The objection to my view assumes that the creational religious office of government simply carries over. It does not. Redemptive history did not leave that office lying with the state; it relocated it into an institution Eden never had—the church. Furthermore, the New Testament never suspends the parent’s role in ordering the household’s faith; it explicitly affirms it, as I have already shown. The magistrate cannot retain a competence that the New Testament visibly hands to the church.
So, the prelapsarian premise, at most, tells us what an undivided authority would have looked like in a world that no longer exists. The unfolding of redemptive history has since distributed the offices. The Christian Nationalist needs the state to retain, after the fall, a competence that the New Testament visibly and explicitly locates elsewhere. The family from before the fall, by contrast, survives untouched: the household still has its natural head with authority over religious matters; the nation still has none.
The decisive questions are the state’s instrument (coercion, whose warrant is juridical) and religion’s nature (a good that coercion, or external ordering as such, has no assurance of producing). The church is not called to re-instantiate, within the state, a measure of Eden that never relied on juridical coercion in the first place—even granting that man was commanded by God, under threat of covenantal sanction, not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A nation should refrain from administering the faith—establishing its worship, disciplining its heresies, binding conscience to its confession. It may, and arguably should, acknowledge the God who authors its authority and its law. There is no human, coercive administration of faith in the New Testament, even if granting space for the public recognition of God and for legal conditions conducive to conversion.
Conclusion: Acknowledgment without Administration
The worst interpretation one might draw from this essay is that I favor some strict-separationist account of church-state relations. Let me clearly distance myself from a position I actually detest. My goal for a healthy church-state relationship is for the church to preach the gospel and transform the consciences of its members, and for those members to permeate every lever of society with the moral leaven of the gospel—such that Christian office-holders are free to craft laws consistent with the Second Table of God’s law, and their civil liberties allow them to infuse their public witness with the aroma of the gospel and the fruit of righteous laws.
