Christian princes are not church officers, insisted Calvin, but they have “obtained” by God’s sovereign decree. Like David, they should be versed in God’s law in order to apply it justly throughout the nation, leaving the administration of the sacraments and preaching to those with ministerial callings. Calvin’s view resonated with many in Britain where history had prepared the soil for it to take root. Under Elizabeth I’s rule, a diverse array of church leaders echoed Calvin’s political theology including Puritans like Thomas Cartwright and Anglicans like John Jewel and Richard Hooker. 

Recently, a provocative quote from Michael Bird made the rounds through Christian Twitter. “The Bible has a technical term for someone who tries to combine religious and political power,” says Bird, “It’s called antichrist.”
It’s a punchy line, but interrogating it for a moment reveals new vistas of incoherence. It’s obviously appealing to evangelicals who want to countersignal their embarrassment of fellow believers seduced by the lure of Christian Nationalism. But as many pointed out in the replies, does the satisfaction of castigating your socio-political rivals require censuring the lot of Calvin, Luther, the Westminster Divines, Constantine, most English monarchs, and King David as antichrist?
Any sane person will say Bird’s opinion lacks nuance. But how many will admit it represents an ideological bias embedded in American Protestantism whose reckoning is long overdue?
Radical Secularism and American Protestantism
It’s ironic that mainstream evangelicals have come to equate piety with a notion of radical secularism championed by an atheist turned Unitarian. Most are aware that the primary source of modern commitments to secularism comes from Thomas Jefferson’s “Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association” of 1802. There, Jefferson explains that his intentions behind the Constitution’s First Amendment were to build “a wall of separation between Church and State.” More important for today, however, was the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Establishment Clause in Everson v. Board of Education (1947). Building on Jefferson’s wall imagery, they urged it to be “high and impregnable.”
There has since been a post-war consensus about the absolute separation between church and state whose proponents have grown among believers and unbelievers alike. Most concerningly, the former sound just as dogmatic as the latter. 
Examples include David French’s infamous defense of drag queen story hours as a “blessing of liberty” which civil authorities must allow by demand of the First Amendment’s commitment to moral neutrality and  Russell Moore’s criticism of Uganda’s new anti-homosexuality laws which, to him, represent a trading of gospel witness for political power.
Both cases argue for limiting the magistrate’s power to enforce Christian virtues although on slightly different terms. French, for example, mostly appeals to Jeffersonian principles and the inalienable right to religious liberty. He doesn’t need to cite specific Scripture since it’s clear he thinks his views are the right application of the Bible’s teaching. And he’s not alone. A.A. Hodge, the famous nineteenth-century American Presbyterian theologian and churchman, made a similar appeal to religious freedom in his commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith. 
Self-conscious of their desire to faithfully articulate the whole testimony of Scripture, the original authors of the Westminster Confession punctuated each doctrine with biblical citations. In James 4:12 and Romans 14:4, Hodge sees a right to conscience (WCF XX) which, when applied in the civil sphere (WCF XXIII), becomes an “inalienable prerogative of mankind…to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience.” For Hodge, the magistrate’s duty to preserve religious freedom supersedes that of advancing Christian virtues. Add a bit of Frenchian proceduralism and it’s ready for the Sunday column, though Hodge would no doubt be horrified by some of the ways French applies this way of thinking today. 
If French takes a slightly indirect way of arriving at the absolute separation of church and state, Moore is more explicitly biblicist, rooting his case in hermeneutics which reveal important distinctions between Old and New Testament political realities. Conveniently for him, evangelical hermeneutics mandate a church-state arrangement amenable to everyone but conservative Christians while also making it easier to dismiss his opponents to the right as theocrats who simply misread their Bible.
Chad Van Dixhoorn represents the best version of his argument, addressing what he calls the “problematic” parallels between the duties of Israelite kings and today’s civil magistrates codified in the original Westminster Confession of Faith:
The problem with these parallels is that what is good for the old covenant people of God is not always good for the new. In the Old Testament, Israel was the assembly or church of God and God’s chosen nation. And so rulers in the nation also carried some responsibility for the church. In the New Testament the assembly or church of God is Israel, but there is no chosen political nation. The church is scattered among the nations. Neither is any ruler in any nation responsible for the church (Confessing the Faith, 314).
But as I have argued before, the implications of Christ’s new covenant were not lost on most early American Protestants. Most wanted a harmonious relationship between the civil and ecclesial spheres no less rooted in Scripture but arranged by robust systematic categories. 
A Mixed Metaphor
One historically popular image for conveying the entire biblical witness to the magistrate’s relationship with the church was that of a nursing father. The admittedly mixed metaphor comes from Isaiah 49:23, and it was Calvin’s penetrating commentary on that verse that established the religious duties of Protestant magistrates in their realm. Beyond an “ordinary profession of faith,” magistrates are to defend the church, promote the glory of God, maintain the purity of doctrine, curb idolatry, and, generally, “supply everything that is necessary for nourishing the offspring of the Church.”
Impossible to ignore in Calvin’s interpretation is a convenient polemic against papal supremacy, which he blames for improperly subordinating civil authority to the greed of the Roman Catholic Church.
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Green and Blair believed in God’s sovereignty to command the obedience of all nations. Ultimately, their sermons are just longer reflections on what the psalmist said in so few words: “For dominion belongs to the LORD and he rules over the nations.” But notice that their point–and that of the biblical text–is not devoid of grace. Certainly, God is just, but he is also merciful. For Blair, if he and his countrymen would only show “real contrition for, and conversion from our evil ways, we may hope for the blessing of God” (30). This is not the evangelism of “winsome politics” but simply a political application of Matthew 4:17: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”

On a late spring day in 1798, two ministers stepped behind pulpits to deliver important messages to their congregations. Both were Presbyterians and in Philadelphia, a city of importance for both the nation (it was the capital city at the time) and their new denomination (the PCUSA). Rev. Ashbel Green was at his home church, historic Second Presbyterian. In 1789, it hosted the PCUSA’s very first General Assembly. Just blocks away, Samuel Blair was addressing those gathered at First Presbyterian, an older congregation pastored by the eminent Rev. John Ewing who was near the end of his ministry.
The occasion for this midweek service was a solemn one: a national day of “fasting, humiliation, and prayer.” The young republic was facing its first major international crisis. 
Seven years earlier, the newly formed French Republic declared war against Great Britain. When President George Washington announced an official position of neutrality in the conflict while also sanctioning the Jay Treaty with Britain, many in France’s revolutionary government saw it as a betrayal by their one-time ally. Frustrated by America’s noninterference, French privateers began raiding American merchant ships who were trading with the enemy. When America stopped paying its war debts in response, the two nations moved toward the brink of war.
International pressure produced an ominous mood in the country, and Adams called on America’s spiritual capital for aid. Far from seeing it as an inappropriate syncretism of church and state, these men believed encouraging their congregations to greater piety was both a religious and civil duty. Indeed, both Green and Blair would serve as Chaplains to the House of Representatives, demonstrating their commitment to a harmonious relationship between the eternal and temporal spheres for mutual benefit.
France, by their estimation, had violated this divinely appointed order by rejecting God and embracing “infidel reason” (Green, 46). America, by contrast, had so far resisted the atheistic impulse, holding fast to Nature and Nature’s God from its founding. 
These addresses are worth studying for many reasons. Their comparisons of the French and American revolutions are fascinating, but my intentions are more pastoral and, I hope, relevant: the remarks by these ordinary pastors, and the ease they felt expressing them behind the pulpit no less, reveals a serious deficiency with the present state of political theology in our churches. The problem is twofold.
The first part relates to biblical interpretation and application. For sermons addressing national concerns, Blair and Green both chose passages from the Old Testament: Isaiah 1:5 and 2 Chronicles 15:2 respectively. The reason why Blair and Green picked these texts and the point they intended to make is straightforward: just as God dealt with Israel, blessing or cursing her for the people’s attention to the law, so too would God deal with America.
Sirens immediately begin to ring in our modern ears at such a proposition. That ministers would try and apply lessons from Old Testament Israel to the American republic is a hermeneutical Rubicon no self-respecting preacher would dare cross today. Israel occupied a special place in God’s redemptive plan. America does not. Any comparison between the two is not only flawed but dangerous. Or so we’re told. 
But invoking a comparison between Israel and America did not mean these ministers were ignorant of other significant differences. Israel was a “theocracy” while America is not, admitted Green (11). Israel’s polity flowed from the institution of “a complicated ritual of ceremonial observances and temporary regulations,” he explains, which reinforced God’s position not only as the common “supreme governor of the world” but also as their unique “civil chief” (11). In this way, Israel was manifestly different from her peers then and now. Moreover, the salvific purpose of the covenant-nation of Israel presently continues in the international covenant-people of the church–a key theme of the biblical canon not lost on Green or Blair.
But the Israel of the Bible was also one nation among many, all of which appear to be held by a common and divinely ordained standard to obey the moral law. This is Green’s main argument, which he proves by pointing to both sacred and secular history. “What was the cause of the destruction of the Canaanite (sic) nations?” he asks. After all, they did not have the “special revelation” afforded to Israel. Yet, God destroyed them because they violated “those great principles of religion and morality which the light of nature taught” (25).
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What I hope to offer is a practical diagnostic for Christians that helps them discern what technologies they will and will not adopt based on the purpose of technology to support humans in their calling to live freely before God and in community with one another. I call it the Terminator Test: does it aid human life, or does it try to replace it? I recently applied it in my own life to that smartphone I’m not supposed to imagine life without. Here’s what I learned.

I recently sat in on a presentation delivered by the president of a prominent evangelical seminary. The topic was discipling the next generation–what some have nicknamed “the smartphone generation.” At one point, our presenter pulled out his own device. “The next generation will not remember a time without one of these,” he said.
That Zoomers are inured to supercomputers in their pockets is not shocking. But the point is usually meant as a set-up for a more audacious–but no less fashionable–assertion: because the next generation won’t remember a time without smartphones, they can’t imagine a future without them.
Hence, the countless articles from evangelicals about discernment and technology, all assuming a kind of techno-inevitability. These typically present as a moderated position between two extremes–a “third way” between total adoption and extreme luddism. Many writers have recently questioned the third way approach to politics. It’s time to do the same with technology.
In his insightful critique of a “third-way” approach to politics, James R. Wood focuses on retrieving the telos of politics itself. The same can be done–and is being done–for technology, especially with an eye toward emerging technologies like AI. But it is also important that we apply such questions to current technologies–even devices like smartphones which so many of us have grown accustomed to. As Jon Askonas points out in his essay, “Why Conservatism Failed,” it was the adoption of new technologies like the Pill that did more to transform the household than anything else. Like a steroid to a muscle, technology causes the nascent power of the idea to explode. Transgenderism lay dormant in academic circles for a while but has now arrived in mainstream culture largely because of innovation and advancement in sex-reassignment surgeries.
That Christians today are departing from historic Christian teaching about sex, gender, and contraception in the time it takes to fill a prescription or set-up an appointment is a warning to us today. What if the next major technological shift to threaten Christian discipleship isn’t sitting in some R&D lab but in our homes right now?
What I hope to offer is a practical diagnostic for Christians that helps them discern what technologies they will and will not adopt based on the purpose of technology to support humans in their calling to live freely before God and in community with one another. I call it the Terminator Test: does it aid human life, or does it try to replace it? I recently applied it in my own life to that smartphone I’m not supposed to imagine life without. Here’s what I learned.
Smartphones aren’t conducive to freedom.
Everyone from Patrick Deneen to Death Cab for Cutie has discovered the crushing yoke of expectations placed on us by smartphones. So much was evident when I compared my life with a smartphone to someone without one.
As a user, I had special access to life online. I was accessible whenever and wherever. Every bit of content in the world was at my fingertips. And yet, I was far less free than the typical Amish man–an example Deneen employs in Why Liberalism Failed.
The Amish man’s religious views preclude him from owning a smartphone among many other modern devices. He has no internet access, no email, no social media, no online identity. And yet, he rises with the sun and sets his plow down as he wishes. He lives and dies by the fruits of his own labors. He joins his family every night for dinner, undistracted by emails or texts from a workaholic boss. He doesn’t receive a barrage of push notifications warning him of social media trends or new seasons of Netflix shows.
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