Written by Meredith L. Myers |
Sunday, December 17, 2023
Biblical doctrine is for the preacher and for the pews. Theology is for “plain people.”7 The study of God is accessible because God has made Himself known in the person of Jesus Christ. The study of biblical doctrine is not cold, boring, or impersonal. On the contrary, it is heat, “a lamp shining in a dark place,” and a covenant history (1 Peter 1:19). It is the story we have been made for and called into. It is communal and alive.

“If you want to make it in journalism, you’re going to have to learn to write what people want to hear.” It was my first day of undergraduate journalism, and my professor’s description of what people want to hear was ironically contrary to what I found myself hoping to hear that day. I wanted to be a truth-teller on the front lines, and this introduction confused me. According to this academic, reporting was no longer about the facts but about what it made the reader feel. I changed my major to literature and philosophy that afternoon, hoping to hear from truth-tellers in exploration of knowledge and reality.

The type of attitude that my professor voiced permeates many aspects of our culture, but this is not a modern issue. A fundamental part of learning involves hearing. The active hearer asks questions. A self-aware hearer knows best how apply this learning, but only when anchored. Paul confidently prepares Timothy with the reality that “the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (2 Tim. 4:3–4). Paul does not tritely critique the human condition. This distaste for sound teaching and attraction to myths motivates Paul’s charge to “preach the word” with readiness “in season and out of season” (2 Tim. 4:2). In moments of achievement, at minor roadblocks, in dire straits, what motivates what we ourselves most long to hear?
Exercising discernment towards what we hear often feels like American short-story writer Stephen Crane’s description of the sea: “After successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats.”1 When we approach truth as one option in a sea of noise, any grasp for a clear methodology can be overwhelming. Moderns described this as a “widening gyre.”2 This anxious dread reveals that we often come to the biblical text with our philosophical baggage unawares. Sometimes we’re afraid to ask the deeper questions, and oftentimes we don’t realize the ways that we are products of our times, students of our philosophers, and introspective instead of objective. Paul seems to speak with conviction here. What does he really mean by “sound teaching,” and what does he suggest “suit[s] [our] own passions”? A close read shows that there’s no need to speculate. Paul was able and willing to offer further insight here. You can hear this imperative to preach the gospel echoed throughout his letters.
Our Anchor, the Doctrine of Christ
Surely, if anyone ever knew what it meant to wander off into myths, it would be the Apostle Paul. He counted his former mastery of systems as rubbish (Phil. 3). Paul repeatedly warns again and again of this distraction. Recognizing the undercurrent of chaos and change, Paul calls us to hold fast to doctrine—not every doctrine, but to biblical doctrine alone. The only unchanging thing in the world—the God “who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17; see also Num. 23:19; Heb. 13:8). Biblical doctrine has no need for change; it was breathed out by an unchanging and eternal God. This is a foundational truth for doctrine, for teaching, for participation in Christian worship.
This urging to build on solid ground is seen in many ways throughout the New Testament. Paul urges the Ephesians to take hold of our confident access to God through Christ, which is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20).

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As Hillsdale’s Thomas West notes, a serious Christian nationalism must engage in a potentially unpopular challenge to existing civil rights laws, which “frequently limit religion as practiced outside of the narrow realm of ‘religion as such’…. Civil rights laws protect the right of unwed mothers, gays, and transgenders to nondiscrimination—which means religious schools or businesses may be required to admit them or hire them, contrary to their Christian moral convictions.” In such a situation, where Christianity cedes the public square to state atheism, it can become functionally impossible “to follow and teach in daily life the moral beliefs of Christianity as understood by most believers.”

A time for choosing.
Advocating Christian nationalism may seem, at first blush, like a futile enterprise. We live in a country that is de-Christianizing rapidly. America is expected to lose its Christian majority by 2050 and be just 39 percent Christian by 2070. As even Mike Sabo acknowledges in his introductory piece on the subject, “Absent a nationwide crack-up, it could take a century or more for the Christian nationalist project to have any measurable effect at scale.”
Yet despite this, the debate over Christian nationalism has taken on mythic proportions in certain corners of the Right. Christian nationalism has a variety of definitions among those versed in the relevant arcana. As a layperson (literally and when compared with the initiates in these debates) I will adopt a broad and basic but serviceable definition: Christian nationalism is the view that America’s institutions should bear the influence of, and move people toward, Christianity. This definition could obviously include a large variety of policies and perspectives, but it has the virtue of encompassing the vast majority of the Christian nationalist project, while being broadly comprehensible to the average churchgoer.
Before examining the positive case for Christian nationalism, it is instructive to examine the arguments of some of its fiercest critics. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University and author of Jesus and John Wayne, perhaps the most popular current critique of the white evangelical community, told an interviewer that “at the core of Christian nationalism in contemporary politics is really the idea of privileging certain views over others, in terms of determining our laws, in terms of even interpreting our Constitution, and in terms of implementing our democracy.”
Well yes, that’s actually the idea. As Christians we should privilege a Christian viewpoint, I think, rather than the godless viewpoint that has been forced on America, largely illegitimately, by the courts over the past several decades. Of course, this approach could be taken too far. Russell Moore, editor of the liberal quasi-evangelical magazine Christianity Today, cites the case of the Russian Orthodox patriarch who recently implied that military sacrifice in the war versus Ukraine would wash away all sins. Or witness the tight integration between church and a conservative state that can ultimately damage both, as we recently saw in Poland. But while a state which embraces Christianity too closely can cause a collapse in Christian faith from without, a fully-secularized state such as our modern one can also rot the moral foundations of a society from within.
That is to say, while Moore’s attack on Christian nationalism in Russia is fair, he goes too far when he claims that Christian nationalists use “Jesus’ authority to baptize their national identity in the name of blood and soil.”
This is not a description of Christian nationalism that those Christian nationalists I know would embrace. Of course Christianity is a universal religion—there are obviously certain core beliefs. But, as missionaries have learned over many generations, Christianity’s ability to embrace particularities is often as powerful as its universality. What leads people to the Gospel and keeps them in the community of believers can be almost infinitely varied depending on the cultural and national context. Simply put, “nationalizing” Christianity in the sense of localizing, particularizing, and institutionalizing it in a particular place and culture is necessary for the very real work of saving souls. A Christianity that excludes a national mission or that does not integrate with an existing cultural context is a Christianity that will likely fail to save souls for Christ.
Or, as noted Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman wrote in a balanced and perceptive article: “To love one’s country, to be patriotic, is…not to sneer at every other nation or to look with scorn upon other peoples. It is simply the appropriate response of gratitude and love for the place where one belongs, that gives one an identity, that provides one with community and with purpose.”
Our Christian Nationalist History
So why promote Christian nationalism? One reason is that it has been shown to work in an American context previously. A version of Christian nationalism grew America from an obscure collection of colonies hugging the Eastern seaboard of North America in the 17th and 18th centuries to the world’s greatest economic and political powerhouse by the early 20th century. No founder seriously disputed the goal of encouraging Christianity among the populace.
Even the two most famous early examples of the alleged “separation of church and state” were public diplomatic gestures, not forthright descriptions of reality in the founding generation. Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, in which he famously alluded to a so-called “Wall of Separation” between church and state, came from the least religious founder to a denomination concerned about their unfavorable treatment in Connecticut. And the notion that America is “Not in any sense founded on the Christian religion,” is found in the Treaty of Tripoli (1797) made with a Muslim power, a public declaration that was possibly shrewd diplomacy but did not really reflect American reality.
By contrast, the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War, began by invoking “the Name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity.”
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Written by S.M. White |
Friday, April 19, 2024
There is always a danger that intersectionality is a temptation to culturally attuned and influence seeking churches. Yet a commitment to Reformed confessionalism and a recognition that God distinguishes the spiritual and temporal kingdoms he rules over we will have a bulwark against those who would wish to insert worldly agendas, and in particular those who seek to insert intersectional mandates to either syncretize or make use of Christianity towards an earthly end. 

One of the hot topics of discussion among Christians in the United States is the issue of Christian Nationalism. One of the most glaring problems with it is some of the proponents of it make no distinction between the theocracy of Israel and the other common kingdom nations that exist today. They propose that since Jesus is King, that there should be some sort of minimal national fidelity to a Christian creed, or some even suggest applying the moral law, even including the first 4 commandments, which would essentially make the nation a form of Christian theocracy. One can only imagine with politicians swapping out every 4 years or so what kind of God Biden or Trump might get to dictate what we worship, or perhaps which church they would delegate that responsibility to. Rome?
With Biden’s continuation of Obama’s fundamental transformation, and with a sort of cultural decline in general, there is distinct new culture arising to be the Antithesis, and even replacement of traditional Christian, (or so called family) values. Under the name of democracy, and human rights, abortion, race, LGBTQ, trans-humanism, and a host of other intersectional commitments combine where there may be a narrative of grievance or inequality, even down to “healthy-at-any-size” individuals joining together via “identity politics” in  movement that has been termed Cultural Marxism.
Cultural Marxism is not like the old Marxism where the inflection points were between the material divisions between the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat.  The social classes and grievances today have been remapped to a group of intersectionals who oppose issues such as white-privilege, male-domination, hetero-normative dominance, with even traditional families being considered part of racial inequality, and therefore at cultural enmity with the intersectional comradery. These new intersectional cultural norms are considered necessary parts of democracy, which America assumes it has the right and responsibility to spread democracy globally, which now comes with these features such as LGBT included, or else the nation or leadership of that nation is pegged as undemocratic, or dictatorial and are therefore problematic.
One of the nations in the sights of this new values democracy is a more traditional values friendly and therefore new values resistant Hungary. Which is one reason many conservatives in America look to it as a beacon and guide for what America should be like. As a American, Reformed Christian who lives in Hungary, I have thought about these things and hopefully have some insights that might be helpful.
First off, Hungary is a culturally Christian country which reminds me more of the 1970s or 80s America. Hungary is more culturally Christian than formal.  The statistics are that about half of the population identifies as Christian, where most of them identify as Roman Catholic, but about 1/3 as many of those identify as Calvinist. It has been my experience that most of the churches that identify as “Reformed” or Calvinistic, most would resemble more of a sort of “do-gooder” type of Christianity without much doctrinal understanding or confessional fidelity. Still, nearly 1 million people identify as Calvinists in this small country of about 10 million people.
It does differ from America and many of the Western European nations in that there is not much crime, or delinquency in its capital city Budapest. For example, there is not as much street art painted on buildings and hoodlums don’t go around and destroy cars, or art, and most parts of the beautiful city of Budapest are safe for a woman to walk alone, even at night. Right now the bricks on our sidewalk are being replaced, and there is this sense that the government cares for its citizens, the beauty of the city, the public transportation, good affordable food, natural gas heating, and clean water. It’s not a panacea here.
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