You cannot pack Jesus up and store him away in an attic space until Christmas season arrives. Our progress in marriage, parenting, managing a family budget that honors God, work-life-balance, time management, and a hundred other daily activities are all very much connected to Jesus (Heb 4:13).

When I was in seminary, I was called to pastor a very small church in farm country south of Louisville, Kentucky. It was one of the great joys of my life. I was young and zealous to serve Christ in pastoral ministry. Very early on in pastoral ministry, one man who opposed me openly within the church. He raised his hand during Sunday school one week as I was teaching the church on evangelism and said, “I don’t think we need to be out advertising our Christianity to everyone.” I thought he was joking. He wasn’t kidding. I ended up meeting with him in the community a few weeks later, and he walked into the door wearing an advertisement button on his jacket for a local state politician.
What we learn as we read the Bible is that Jesus is concerned with far more than our Bible study and evangelism. Far too many people live as if Jesus should be left at the church campus each week or confined to the annual Christmas celebration each year. Did you know that Jesus impacts the way you spend money, the way you parent, your relationship with your spouse, your weekly worship of God, and yes—your politics?
Jesus and My Personal Space
We enjoy privacy fences. It doesn’t matter where you travel, you will see fences lining properties. We like to put up big fences and create personal spaces where we can live life apart from the watching eyes of our neighbors. We enjoy freedom and privacy. We crave autonomy. However, when it comes to Jesus, we can’t leave him in the Sunday school class or coffee shop where we hold our small group meetings. Jesus impacts the whole of life—including the most private details of our family life including health care, education, business, and marriage.
In the book of Hebrews, the first twelve chapters are focused on the highest and most pristine Christology found anywhere in the pages of the Bible. Yet, after looking at the supremacy of Christ over prophets, angels, and the priesthood—we come to the final chapter of Hebrews and we notice something unique. Jesus is concerned with our sex life, our use of money, and interpersonal relationships.
Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”1
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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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Christians do not need to adopt the Neo-Marxist theory of race as a social construct in order to do battle against the CRT of Neo-Marxism. It is better to recognize the truth that distinct races do exist in objective reality, and that good and bad attributes become characteristics of races as a result of the religion that dominates them.  This includes both black and white. 

After reading a number of books on Critical Race Theory (CRT) by evangelical and reformed authors, I have become convinced that sometimes good men get it wrong.  Some of the writers I respect the most are saying that the existence of distinct human races is not real.  It is just a social construct.
What is a social construct?  It is a convention adopted by society that has no basis in objective reality.  For example, Peter Pan is a social construct.  We all know who he is, but he is not real. He exists in the mind for entertainment purposes.  A dollar bill is a social construct.  It only has value because society has given it value.  In reality, it is only paper and ink.
Social constructs are usually identified with Neo-Marxist thinking.  For example, Neo-Marxists say that binary sexual identification is not real.  The concept of sex that separates humans into male and female is a social construct.  They push the concept that, in reality, there are a multitude of sexes (they prefer the term gender).  As another example, the traditional family is a social construct.  The idea of a male and female parent with children is a convention created by society to oppress other legitimate families like those who have two males as parents.
I am hearing from my respected brethren that race is not a biblical term, and therefore the concept of race does not exist.  At the same time, these same men will say that there is only one race, and that is the human race.  The human race includes all of us because we all come from the same Adam. There is no difference between us other than the degree of melanin (pigment) in the skin.
It seems rather contradictory to me to assert that the concept of race is not real, but then to turn around and use the term race to describe all of the descendants of Adam.  There are no races, but yet, there is one race.
It is true that the Bible does not use the word race in any English translation.  More common terms are nation, tribe, clan, and peoples.  However, the Bible does not use the term “banana” either, but that does not mean it is wrong to use the word banana. Historically, mankind has been divided into races. Three prominent races are whites, blacks, and Asians (with variations in-between). They have differed in more than pigmentation of the skin. They have been associated with not only the color of the skin, but with the texture of the hair, the shape of the eyes, and even in physical speed and agility.  If you have ever watched a college NCAA basketball game, you will see what I mean. I don’t believe that speaking this way is racist. It may be more racist to avoid reality and to say that all athletes are the same in ability whether white or black.  We need to learn to be honest.
Race has been associated with the word nations or peoples who have a common geographical boundary, a common language, and a common religion. This is certainly not necessarily true of our experience here in the United States, but our nation is a rather new experiment in societies, and it appears to be disintegrating rather quickly.  The United States was once a Christian nation, and this common religion provided a basis for the unity of the various races among us.  We have changed religions and therefore we no longer have any basis for peace. A nation without a common religion will not long endure, just as a nation without a geographical border or a common language will not long endure.
Now, although we all do descend from Adam, and we all are sinners needing a Savior, we do still exist as distinct races (who probably have more in common than not).  Jeremiah identified the Ethiopian as a man who could not change the color of his skin (12:23).  Just as important as noting the color of his skin, the prophet noted that the man was an Ethiopian (Cushite) who probably lived south of Egypt, and who could be identified with a nation that had geographical boundaries, a separate language, and a separate religion.  In the New Testament the Ethiopian eunuch became a Christian, which certainly teaches us that the gospel came as a blessing for all nations and races.
The Book of Revelation speaks of the New Jerusalem as being a dwelling place for the nations and the kings of the earth (21:24).  Nations will not disappear, even in the very presence of God himself.  All the distinct nations along with their kings shall be one in Christ.
God allowed various distinctions to develop among the descendants of Adam.  God loves diversity in colors, flowers, fruits, the two sexes, and even races.  However, absent from most discussions today about race is the fact that nations (and often the distinct races that define them) will always adopt a particular religion.  This religion will have the major impact on the character that nation. For example, while our white American forefathers were writing the very complicated United States Constitution, blacks in Africa, who were sold as slaves by blacks to white Europeans and Americans, could not read or write.  Why?  The grace of God!  Christianity conquered the continent of Europe and not Africa.
Christians do not need to adopt the Neo-Marxist theory of race as a social construct in order to do battle against the CRT of Neo-Marxism. It is better to recognize the truth that distinct races do exist in objective reality, and that good and bad attributes become characteristics of races as a result of the religion that dominates them.  This includes both black and white.  Most of the average guys that I know in the pew think that this “Neo-Marxist social construct invention” is nonsensical. There is nothing to be gained by denying the obvious.
Larry E. Ball is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is now a CPA. He lives in Kingsport, Tennessee.