What Kind of Christian Are You?

You are losing your home. Not in some metaphorical or spiritualized sense, but in the most concrete way possible. The country your fathers built is being handed over piece by piece while the people doing the handing tell you that noticing the transfer is the real crime. Your schools do not teach your children to love God or honor their fathers or tell the truth or serve their own people. They teach them to despise everything you believe and everyone who came before them. Your courts do not apply one law to one people.

They invent new laws for favored classes and new punishments for Christians who refuse to lie. Your money loses value every year because wicked men have built an economy on debt and inflation and managed decline and they call the theft prosperity. Your borders are treated as suggestions while your history is treated as an indictment. Your faith is treated as a private hobby at best and a public threat at worst. This is the fruit of a civilization that has rejected Jesus Christ as King and that is the fruit of liberal democracy.

I do not have to tell some of you all of this, but unfortunately many Christians still do not know what time it is and walk around in a stupor.

Nations can forget God, they can rebel against Him, and they will be judged by Him for it. This actually good news because it means nations can also repent, be discipled and be ordered under the authority of Christ. Christian Nationalists are Christians before anything else. Before we are activists or voters or members of any earthly people, we are followers of Jesus Christ. We confess that He is the eternal Son of God, crucified for sinners, raised bodily from the dead, ascended to the right hand of the Father, and reigning now as King of kings and Lord of lords. Christian Nationalism is simply the public application of that confession. It is the refusal to lie about what it means for Christ to be Lord over every square inch of creation.

The world has tried to reduce Christianity to a private feeling and the Church has largely accepted the reduction. The result is a Christian population that cannot answer the simplest political questions without stammering. We are shamefully embarrassed by our own faith in public, we have surrendered the institutions of Christian civilization to men who openly despise our King, and we stand back watching the slow dissolution of our own people while insisting that the dissolution is a “complex issue with many perspectives.” This cannot continue, we must reclaim our backbone. The cure to this state of affairs starts with realizing what every Christian before our time took for granted: that Christ is Lord of the nations, the nations are real, and that the Christian is bound to bring his nation under the rule of the Lord he serves.

Many unbelievers think they hate Christianity when they have never actually encountered it. What they have encountered is a counterfeit: a thin and therapeutic and regime-approved religion that borrows Christian language while denying the public authority of Jesus Christ. They have seen pastors who bless every fashionable lie and churches that preach niceness instead of repentance, weakness instead of courage, emotional management instead of holiness, and political surrender instead of the Kingship of Christ. They have seen a faith that apologizes for its own existence, hides from conflict, flatters the powerful and calls cowardice compassion. If that is what they think Christianity is I understand why they despise it, because well: I despise it too. It is Christianity with the rule of Christ removed and it deserves nothing but anathema.

There is another counterfeit version of our faith as well, a Zionist religion that calls itself Christianity while binding the conscience of American believers to foreign interests, prophecy charts and a false theology of modern Israel. It treats support for a foreign nation-state as a test of orthodoxy while neglecting the actual duties Christian rulers owe to their own people. That lie will get its own post later, but for now it is enough to name it as one more distortion that has confused millions.

The Christianity I am defending is not any of that. It is the faith of the apostles, martyrs and saints who confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord and meant it with their lives. It is the faith that built hospitals, universities and nations. It is the faith that tells kings to kiss the Son, fathers to govern their homes, pastors to preach the whole counsel of God, magistrates to punish evil and nations to repent. That is the Christianity our enemies fear, the one the Church has forgotten, and the one Christian Nationalism exists to recover.

Some readers will flinch at the term Christian Nationalism and the flinch is exactly the point. It is the response the liberal (dis)order has trained us to have. TV man tells you Christian Nationalism is bad. Effeminate liberal pastor tells you Christian Nationalism is bad. You believe it without question. Why?

For two centuries the gatekeepers of our society have insisted that Christianity and nationhood are incompatible, while our churches told us that the Gospel dissolves every particular loyalty and that the Christian is a rootless citizen of the world rather than a member of his own people. On the contrary, the Christian who loves his people is the only one taking the Gospel seriously enough to apply it to the fullness of national life.

That is exactly what the Great Commission commands when we are told to make disciples of all nations. Nations are not erased by the Gospel. They are discipled by it, retaining their identities and cultures and languages and inheritances, but brought under the Kingship of Christ and sanctified by His truth.

You conflate the universality of grace with the ordered love and particularity of nature, which makes you no better than a liberal in your understanding of both. In Matthew 8 Jesus tells a Roman centurion that no one in Israel had as much faith as him and that the apostate JewsShow more

If you flinch when you hear Christian Nationalism ask yourself whether the term is actually sinful or whether you have simply been conditioned by a system that finds the idea of a Christian nation fundamentally threatening to its power. The recovery of our national soul begins the moment we stop asking permission to be who God made us to be.

The argument of Christian Nationalists is not an American invention, nor an exclusively Protestant brainchild or a fringe online experiment. The vision that Christ is Lord of the nations and that we have a duty to order our public life under His authority is the ancient and shared heartbeat of the Christian faith. It has been confessed in substance by every major branch of the Church in every century since the apostles and in every civilization that took the Gospel seriously.

You are not a lonely extremist when you say these things. You are an heir joining a conversation that was ancient before your country was ever mapped. The different Christian traditions have argued with each other for centuries, sometimes bitterly, but they share a foundation: Christ is King of the nations, the civil magistrate is God’s servant, and God’s laws apply to him whether he likes it or not. Once you realize this, you stop feeling like a voice in the wilderness and start understanding that you are included in a vast army that stretches backward through time.

I want to be clear that I’m not making a plea for doctrinal surrender or lowest-common-denominator Christianity here. A man should remain loyal to his confession, his church and the truth as he understands it. But he should also recognize that the enemies of Christendom are not waiting for Baptists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans to resolve every dispute before they destroy our children. To our enemies, we are all simply Christians and that is enough for them to want us, our children, our faith and our way of life to die. Collectively we are the remnant: those who have not fallen into the liberal lie nor the Zionist lie that have subverted our faith for their own ends.

We must be willing to set aside our differences in order to work together to reclaim our faith, our particular traditions, and our nations from these lies. Hardliners will call me overly ecumenical here, but we need to realize what time it is. We are embarking on a multi-generational political and spiritual project that requires collaborative effort and a deep understanding of the friend enemy distinction. We have to be willing to work together in some capacity to clean the rot both within our own churches and in our nations.

Christian Nationalism gives us a theology of inheritance and the recovery of an older Christian wisdom that built the institutions that made the West worth defending. You will find arguments for the family, the Church and the magistrate, the household economy and the Kingship of Christ over all of it. You will also find an argument that names the enemy, because the naming is the part the Church has refused to do, and the refusal is what has produced the weakness. Love without the ability to name what threatens the beloved is not love. The Christian loves his people and because he loves them he names the forces destroying them.

The situation is dire but not hopeless. We can no longer sit on the sidelines or wait for someone else to fix the problem. The future of our people, the safety of our children and the survival of the Christian West hinge on a small remnant waking up to reality and choosing, by the grace of God, to fight. Christian Nationalism is your battle plan. It is a call to abandon the false gospels of self-preservation and political quietism, and to embrace the hard and sacrificial and glorious work of reclaiming our nations for the King who has owned them since the foundation of the world.

The only question left is: what kind of Christian are you?