A big problem we face today is that we have not made use of these authentically American ways to refresh our institutions. Our leaders have essentially doubled down on patching up the existing model that was created out of the Depression and postwar era, even as their limits and lack of suitability to today’s world become increasingly apparent.

Before we can talk about Christian nationalism, we first have to talk about nationalism. As many people conclude that something has gone fundamentally wrong in America, nationalism is just one of the proposed solutions. Christian nationalism is a variant of that.
Catholic integralism is another variation on this same theme. Others promote “post-liberalism.” The Left, of course, wants some kind of socialism. Some call for an American Pinochet. Some people on the dissident Right even flirt with discredited continental political philosophies.
While it is understandable that people want to see America change for the better, these approaches won’t work because they are foreign to the American political and cultural tradition.
America is not a “nation” in the European sense. Nationalism was a 19th-century European state-building movement. It was about constructing national identities out of the people in various estates and villages who spoke different dialects of the same language. America, on the other hand, is a continental empire—even if, like “nationalism,” “empire” is another word we would not use to describe ourselves. Manifest destiny was not about forming a nation out of a pre-existing sub-region with a shared history but about conquering and taming the West. America has always been something of a protean nation: restless, forward-looking, growth-oriented, constantly churning, changing and building. This makes it a bad fit for the imposition of some static concept of “nationhood.”
This is why “nationalism” is not a word that Americans have traditionally used to describe what they want for their country, even in the halcyon days of the 1980s. Even if the content of something like nationalism is said to be what Americans have always believed, the word itself is a foreign symbol. It doesn’t compute for most Americans.
As Georgetown professor Joshua Mitchell has shown, wokeness shot rapidly through American culture because it exploited Protestant religious themes that are embedded deep in our public consciousness, whereas Marxism never got traction because concepts like “class” don’t resonate in America. Opponents of wokeness should learn from this: the language and symbols we adopt will have to resonate with Americans’ own self-understanding.
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Bible believers may still benefit from some apocryphal writings as historical or devotional materials. The testimony of Jesus and the apostles as well as the mainstream of church history, however, weighs against their being recognized as Scripture. 

When Protestants talk about the Bible they mean the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. To these, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy add several other apocryphal or deuterocanonical books, plus additions to multiple biblical books. Even more apocryphal books exist, but they are not recognized as Scripture by any branch of professing Christianity.
Obviously, at some point choices had to be made about which writings would be recognized as Scripture and which would not. The process of recognizing some books and rejecting others is known as canonization, and the collection of recognized books is known as the canon. No doctrine of Scripture is complete without a discussion of canonization and canonicity.
The word canon was originally the name for a particular kind of straight reed. People would cut this reed to length and use it as a measuring rod. Eventually the word became a metaphor for any standard of measurement. Then it was applied to the collection of things that measured up to the standard. When we talk about the canon of Scripture, we are talking about the collection of writings that measure up to the standard of being recognized as the word of God. To say that a document is canonical is to say that it is God’s word and consequently that it is authoritative for faith and practice.
What is the standard for canonicity? The short answer is inspiration. A writing is canonical if and only if it has been inspired by the Holy Spirit. Properly speaking, human beings can never declare a writing to be canonical. Even the declarations of church councils do not make a document canonical. All they can do is to recognize its canonicity. Its canonicity depends entirely upon whether it has been inspired.
Consequently, discussions about canonicity are really discussions about inspiration. To know which writings are canonical, we must simply discover which writings have been inspired by the Holy Spirit. How can we do that? This question will have different answers depending upon which testament we are asking about.
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I believe my ten arguments for a literal reading of Genesis 1 and my five response to objections sufficiently demonstrate the validity of the Westminster Confession (4.1) when it declares: “It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for the manifestation of the glory of His eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning, to create, or make of nothing, the world, and all things therein whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days; and all very good.”

In Part One of this piece, I offered 10 reasons for reading the six days of creation as six chronologically successive periods of 24-hours each. Today, I will answer five common objections.
Objections to Literal, Chronological Days
1. Objection: Genesis 2:4 speaks of the entire creation week as a ‘day,’ showing that ‘day’ may not be literal.
Response: The phrase here is actually beyom, an idiomatic expression meaning “when” (NIV, NRSV, NAB).[1] Besides, even had Genesis 2 used “day” in a different sense, Genesis 1 carefully qualifies its creative days (see points 2–5 in the previous article).
2. Objection: Genesis 2:2–3 establishes the seventh day of God’s rest, which is ongoing and not a literal day. This shows the preceding six days could be long periods of time.
Response: (1) Contextually, this is an argument from silence—one which contradicts Exodus 20:11. (2) If true, it would imply no fall and curse (Genesis 3), for then God would be continually hallowing and blessing that “ongoing day.” In fact, God does not bless his eternal rest, but a particular day. (3) Days 1–6 (the actual creation period) are expressly delimited; Day 7 is not. (This is, however, because the creation week has ceased. To mention another “morning” would imply another day followed in that unique period.) Since this is the seventh in a series of six preceding literal days, how can we interpret it other than literally?
3. Objection: On Day 4 God creates the sun to provide light; but light was created on Day 1. This shows that the days are not chronologically ordered, but thematically cross-linked.
Response: This “problem” is answered in the context. On Day 1 God declares “good” the newly created light, but not his separating it from darkness to form “evening and morning.” This is because the final, providential mechanism for separating (the sun) is not created until Day 4. Thus, when Day 4 ends we finally read: “it was good” (Gen. 1:18). This is similar to the separation of the waters above and below on Day 2, which is not declared “good” until the final separation from the land on Day 3 (Gen. 1:9). Or like Adam’s creation not being “good” (Gen. 2:18) until Eve is separated out of him. Also, Scripture elsewhere suggests light was created separately from the sun (2 Cor. 4:6; Job 38:19–20) and can exist apart from it (Rev. 22:5).
Besides, most of the material in Genesis 1 demands chronological order—even for Framework advocates. This suggests that the surprising order of light-then-sun is also chronological. Not only is Genesis 1 structured by fifty-five waw-consecutives (often translated “and”) that indicate narrative sequence, but note: Separating the waters on Day 2 requires their prior creation on Day 1 (Gen. 1:2d). Creating the sea on Day 3 must predate the sea creatures of Day 5. Day 3 logically has dry land appearing before land vegetation later that day. Day 3 must predate Day 6, in that land must precede land animals and man. Day 6 must appear as the last stage of creation, in that man forms the obvious climax to God’s creation. Day 6 logically has man being created after animal life (Days 5 and 6) in that he is commanded to rule over it. Day 7 must conclude the series in that it announces the cessation of creation (Gen. 2:2). And so on.
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