America Is Not a Christian Nation

Christian Nationalism, Part 2.

Welcome to the second installment of my small series on Christian Nationalism. If you missed it, you can read the first one here. 

We finished the last article with the conclusion that your constitutional rights (life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, leading to free speech, free religion, carrying weapons, private property, etc) are not God-given. There is nothing inherent to your status as a God-created individual that gives you any "right" to express yourself freely, or to carry an assault rifle, or even to enjoy personal liberty (in the human sense of the word). Instead, God created us with the duty to glorify him. Your life is not your own, for you are bought with a price, etc (1 Cor 6:19-20). 

What that means is that all the rights we in America value so highly are established by government, not by God. And although that should recalibrate our perspective of them, I don't mean to devalue constitutional rights. Just understand this correctly: that's all they are. They are formed and granted by our constitutional system, and that is where they get their power, for better and for worse. If three-fourths of the states passed a new amendment repealing the Second Amendment, according to the process detailed in Article V, that would be the law of the land. Conversely, the more we disregard the constitutional order in our society, the less the rights it does grant are worth.  

This brings us to the second major point I would like to make regarding Christian Nationalism: America is not a Christian nation. 

There are two main obvious arguments to support this, either of which would be sufficient. First, consider the obvious. The First Amendment grants all Americans the right to worship as they choose (or not at all). Religious freedom and the separation of church and state were core tenets of our founding and our constitutional system. This was not limited to "religious freedom, as long as it's some sect of Christianity" as revisionists have claimed. Many of the Founders were not Christian, as far as we can tell. Thomas Jefferson, one of the more obvious examples, was clear in multiple places about his desire to protect all religions. Nor was he the only one. But even apparently-Christian founding fathers fully supported religious liberty for those of all faiths. George Washington's letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport is probably the most famous example. Roger Williams remains one of the most famous Puritan supporters of the separation of church and state. 

The Founders' original intent seems clear: when they wrote "free exercise of religion", that's exactly what they meant. Given the care and precision they characteristically put into these sorts of details, that shouldn't be surprising. These guys were classical liberals. They were reading Locke and Paine. Do you think that when Washington wrote (emphasis mine):

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

--that he somehow wrote that on accident? No! The Founders meant to establish a nation where all men could worship freely, and that's exactly what they accomplished. (You could argue that it doesn't really matter what their supposed intent was, and that what matters is the actual text of the law, and you might well be correct. But it is now irrelevant, since the text of the law does match the intent of the authors. Originalism and textualism can be friends). 

So that's the first argument: that our government set up to protect free religion means exactly that. It seems almost too simplistic, but this isn't really groundbreaking territory. A nation that protects all religions equally cannot at the same time be in any meaningful sense an explicitly Christian nation. It would be unconstitutional (and therefore, fundamentally anti-American) to establish laws protecting the expression of one religion and forbidding another. (A topic for another day is the fact that the explicit separation of church and state should be fully supported by Christians, both in result and in process. But I fear I wax eloquent.)

The second argument is slightly more reductionist. I'll begin by emphasizing (as I have before, and I will again) the distinction between people as moral agents, and pretty much everything else as not. Simply, nations cannot be Christian. Therefore, America cannot be a Christian nation. Christians are people. Christian people can and do live in nations. But that does not make the nations Christian. Nations are not moral agents. Towns, cities, states, laws, organizations, systems, procedures, cannot be Christian. They are not moral agents. And this, once correctly understood, makes the anti-Christian-Nationalism argument very easy. America is not a Christian nation, because it cannot be. There has never been a Christian nation. 

Let's make sure we can understand the details precisely. Sure, we personify nations when we make broad generalizations. "America loves hamburgers". This does not mean every person in America loves hamburgers. Nor does it mean that America's laws require you to love hamburgers. Nor would that change anything if it did. It's a generalization: many American people love hamburgers. This is how it's used in verses like Isaiah 34:2 ("For the Lord is enraged against all the nations") and Jeremiah 10:25 ("Pour out your wrath on the nations that know you not"). The nations are not individual moral agents that have angered God, but they are composed of people who have rebelled against God. 

So the nation is not a single moral agent. It's a box that we use to describe a group of people. And since it is people who sin against God and people who must come to an individual relationship with him, no amount of legislation is going to make America a Christian nation. If a theocratic system could have made a people righteous, should not the people of Israel have been more righteous than any nation before or since? And yet they struggled to walk with God like all the rest of us. In passages like Numbers 11:1, was God judging the nation for laws not drawn from Scripture or was he judging the people who had sinned against him? 

This is a good spot to mention the prominent fact that the words "Christian Nationalism" mean lots of different things to lots of different people. If you want America to be a Christian nation in the sense that America, in a perfect world, would consist of mostly true, Gospel-believing Christians, that we should spread the gospel so that more and more Americans trust in Christ, then we share that goal! That is fully Biblical (and fully Constitutional, for that matter). But if you want to modify the Constitution to legislate your view of Christian morality, your position is both futile and unBiblical. That's the Christian Nationalism I seek to combat, since it damages both Christianity and America. If you're Christian Nationalist because you're post-millennial and are seeking to set up the kingdom on your own, well, reconsider your eschatology. Any attempt to create a Christian nation by means that don't involve changing the hearts and minds of the people that compose that nation is doomed to conspicuous failure. 

The thrust of this matter lies in how you view the term "Christian". Christianity is not some blanket term for outward adherence to 1800s (or whichever era you prefer) moral norms. Christianity is not some golden key to establish the model state after God's own image. Christianity is not some team we have to force everyone to join. All of these distort true Christianity to fit man's desires. All of them are wrong. Christianity is a personal, radically life-changing relationship with God, and some of the current conversation about Christian Nationalism almost trivializes that. Christianity is not painting a map. It is not found in polling numbers. It is not a tool that can be wielded to create a better society, or a group that can be leveraged for political power. And although I believe many Christian Nationalists to be well-intentioned, their aims are neither American nor Christian.