The Christian Nationalism Debate Is a Debate about Means

Or how to advocate for a Christian nation without sacrificing Baptist convictions

In his chapter, “Jefferson and the Baptists” in Separation of Church and State—a book that demythologizes the Jeffersonian image of an impenetrable ‘wall of separation’ in America’s constitutional order—Philip Hamburger concludes, “At the very least, in their social attitudes Baptists seem to have had no quarrel with the commonplace that religion was essential for morality, republican government, and freedom.”[1] Similarly, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has recently written, “Baptists, along with other Protestants, certainly did come to question and oppose the concept of an established church, but they never meant to disestablish Christian morality or the basically biblical definitions of civilizational order.”[2]

Such claims frequently get cited by contemporary Baptist advocates of a more muscular union between church and state. Mohler, for example, relies on this historical observation to buttress his argument for “a robust doctrine of acknowledgement that affirms theism as an a priori to the American experiment.” The logic goes something like this: “Baptist theology and the aim of instituting a more explicitly Christian government are not inconsistent. In fact, if you look back at history, our Baptist forefathers believed religion was necessary for a healthy republic. Therefore, any resistance to Christianizing American government ‘on the basis of some imagined Baptist principles’ proves, to borrow Mohler’s indictment, ‘surrender to the secularist legions.’”

Mohler’s desire for a more Christian America is certainly commendable, but Baptists have historically pursued this goal without looking to government for help. In fact, Baptists have traditionally affirmed that a healthy republic requires Christian faith and a virtuous populace while also resisting top-down efforts to Christianize America. Rejecting calls for a renewed Christendom hardly indicates compromise with secularism. I would argue, to the contrary, that many of the renewed Christian Nationalist visions need to be rejected specifically because they aren’t supernatural enough. Such calls effectually seek to Christianize culture apart from the Baptist insistence on spiritual regeneration.

Both sides of this debate agree on the end goal or at least they should. As Doug Wilson has recently written, “To confess that you want America to be a Christian nation (again) is not to embrace a slander. It is simply to recognize that the Great Commission did not exempt America from the Lord’s charge to disciple all nations.”[3] Every Christian should want America to be a Christian nation, just as we want China and Ecuador and Afghanistan to be Christian nations. As patriotic Americans, it’s even right and proper to have special interest in America’s fate, for it’s the nation we love and call home. If a Christian Nationalist is defined as someone who wants every nation, especially their own, to submit to Christ, then count me in.

But the sensible person knows that’s not what we’re really debating. The debate, you see, isn’t about ends at all; it’s a debate over means. Wilson writes as if the Great Commission—Jesus’s call to make disciples and baptize all nations—is given to nations. (He also casually posits that America was formerly “a Christian nation,” but I’m going to leave that vexed debate alone for now). He assumes that governments validly play a role in fulfilling Christ’s call. He holds these assumptions because he, writing as a Christian Reconstructionist, understands the covenant structure of the Bible in a way completely at odds with Baptist covenant theology. In Wilson’s scheme, God still deals with nations as nations—as geopolitical entities with shared customs and territories.

However, Baptist covenant theology follows the Bible in seeing more discontinuity between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Baptists believe that the New Covenant, prophesied in Jeremiah 31:31–34, is actually new and fulfills all God’s previous covenant promises in Christ. In contrast to the Old Covenant, every single member of the New Covenant is regenerate. No one is born into this covenant, for entrance depends on sinners responding in repentant faith to the preached gospel. The visible church, therefore, is exclusively comprised of regenerate and baptized believers. God’s people are not recognized by national identity but by baptism—the visible demonstration of their newfound identity in Christ. The nations are not saved as geopolitical units but as persons from each nation believe the gospel, receive baptism, and join the church. In fact, importing Old Covenant Israel into the New Covenant Church is exactly what our Baptist forebears were critiquing.

For Baptists, America cannot disciple the nations, for that mission belongs exclusively to the church. As the Baptist Faith and Message (2000) states, “God alone is Lord of the conscience. . . The church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work. The gospel of Christ contemplates spiritual means alone for the pursuit of its ends” (Article 17). In denying the government a role in the pursuit of Christ’s mission, Baptist churches preserve the integrity of the New Covenant. Only Christ can bring about true and lasting spiritual change. We rely on the sword of the Spirit, not the sword of the magistrate, to convince stubborn consciences. Christ has not handed the keys of his kingdom to the state; he’s entrusted that job exclusively to his church (Matt 16:17–19; 18:15–20).

Many Baptists who oppose calls to impose the faith from the heights of government power do not disagree with the end. We too want a Christian nation. However, we believe, following our Baptist predecessors, that a Christian nation requires Christian citizens and that Christian citizens require regeneration by the Holy Spirit. We, therefore, disagree with the means. We don’t believe that the gospel of the kingdom prevails through government fiat but through the church preaching the gospel, making and baptizing disciples, and teaching them everything Christ commanded. We reject a top-down approach because we believe Christ left us with a bottom-up mission, and we do not have the liberty to pursue Christ’s end with our own means.

Did Baptists historically believe that a healthy republican government depended upon the people’s morals and thus upon religion? The answer is yes. But how do you get religion into the hearts of citizens? Richard Furman (1755–1825), an early American Baptist, captured it well when he wrote, “Without virtue there can be no real happiness, either to individuals or the body politic; and without religion there can be no genuine, stable virtue.” Henry Holcombe (1762–1824), a Baptist contemporary of Furman, stated how virtue would take root in the nation when he anticipated “that the blessed Gospel may diffuse its divine influence, and exert its transforming efficacy throughout this favored land! That all vice may be suppressed, virtue and piety promoted, our excellent government perpetuated, and our civil and religious liberties and privileges, transmitted unimpaired to the latest posterity!”[4]

Isaac Backus (1724–1806) didn’t merely anticipate America becoming a Christian nation; he looked forward to the entire nation joining the Baptist cause. Here’s Backus scholar William McLoughlin’s description of the New Englander’s views: “He was also among those who thought the United States was and should be a Christian nation. That would be true as soon as all those outside the churches were persuaded to become members. Religious liberty would create an open marketplace for preaching the various forms of Christianity and, in his opinion, the United States would ultimately be a Baptist nation, for the Bible says that ‘the Truth is great and shall prevail.'”

These early Baptists believed that religious liberty would free the church to proclaim the gospel without government interference, resulting in transformed lives and a transformed citizenry. Further they anticipated that transformed citizens would lead to laws and policies consistent with Christian truth. They weren’t erecting a “wall of separation,” for they envisioned, as the Charleston Baptist Association so eloquently put it, a nation in which “each Christian has his sphere of action, in the Church, in civil society, and in relative connection; in which it must be his care to move with regularity and faithfulness. . . To arrive at the highest usefulness in either character or station, the love of God and man must be our leading motive, and religion our governing principle.”[5] They envisioned a nation becoming more Christian by the leavening impact of the gospel.

Recent calls for more government involvement in instituting the Christian faith in America and thereby returning the nation to its former glory skip an essential step—making disciples of American citizens through the church’s gospel witness. Roughly 1/3 of America’s citizens claim “none” as their religious affiliation. Only 1/3 self-report attending religious services regularly and that number includes other religions. Whatever America has been historically, we are not a Christian nation now. Blame it on secularism or the failure of our constitutional order or the church dropping the ball or any combination—it doesn’t really matter. The attempt to make us a Christian nation through government fiat is akin to sealing up soured milk in a brand-new container. Call it what you want. It doesn’t change the substance. It still reeks.

Why not both? What’s wrong with a double approach of top-down and bottom-up at the same time? Why can’t we preach the gospel and ask the government to acknowledge our faith and help us fulfill our mission?

The means Christ ordains match the character of the end Christ ordains, and when we implement foreign means in service to Christ’s end, we misrepresent the character of the end. Let me illustrate. At the National Conservative Conference earlier this year, Doug Wilson expressed his desire that Donald Trump give glory to God in the name of Jesus Christ in the event of his re-election to the office of president. As Baptists, we understand that Donald Trump cannot properly give glory to God in the name of Jesus Christ unless President Trump has submitted in faith to Jesus Christ as Lord. Regardless of your opinion of Donald Trump as president, it’s blatantly obvious that he does not represent Christ. At last check, he claims to have never committed sin requiring divine forgiveness and scoffs at Jesus’s call to love your enemies.

When we ask the government to acknowledge and identify with theological truth claims, we are asking it to represent the character of Christ’s kingdom before the world. However, only the regenerated people of God can rightly represent Christ’s kingdom. Any earthly government that makes the attempt will inevitably fail, perverting the nature of Christ’s kingdom and consequently hindering the church’s mission. This dynamic has historically led Baptists to identify the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine and the subsequent uniting of church and state in the fourth century as a pivotal point of departure from the church’s purer beginnings.

God ordains government to its proper end and gives it distinct means for accomplishing that end. God ordains the church for a different end with distinct means appropriate to its end. When improper means are employed in service to wrong ends, values get blurred.

The church evaluates success and failure differently than the world around us. Jesus’s death was really life. Those who serve are ranked first over those being served. In this kingdom, loss is gain. Sacrificial love defines true greatness instead of rank and capital. If we want to save the world, we must reckon with the fact that it will not come in the form we expect. When we look at history, we see example after example of Christ triumphing through the sacrifice of his people. Jesus isn’t the means to the nationalistic vision of our dreams. He doesn’t serve the agenda of America First or Make America Great Again or the perverted progressive utopia of Drag Queen Story Hour. He’s the way to the end of himself. He alone defines—in his person, his life, and his words—the way his followers must live in the world. Christ himself is the substance of the New Covenant. Therefore, he defines, in his very person, the agenda of his regenerated people.

The work of Christ does not depend on government assistance programs. God takes small beginnings—people of humble estate and churches full of the world’s rejects—and he brings about unfathomable ends. He does it this way “so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor 1:29). He does it this way because in the end, all the glory will belong exclusively to King Jesus. If the United States of America topples tomorrow, the church will prevail because the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. But, in the meantime, let’s work and pray for a strong Christian nation, relying solely on the means of Jesus our King.

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[1] Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 180.

[2] Albert Mohler, “What Is Missing from Our Constitutional Order?: Our Government Should Acknowledge Christianity,” Christ Over All, November 15, 2024, https://christoverall.com/article/concise/what-is-missing-from-our-constitutional-order-our-government-should-acknowledge-christianity/.

[3] Douglas Wilson, “Christian Nationalism Basics,” Blog & Mablog, December 30, 2024, https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/christian-nationalism-basics.html.

[4] Both quoted in Hamburger, Separation of Church and State, 175–176.

[5] Hamburger, Separation of Church and State, 173.