The Presbyterian Church in America’s Christian Nationalism committee has released a partial report. It is a momentous piece of writing. It is to my knowledge the only report like it being worked on by any denomination among the three magisterial Protestant traditions—Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed—in the United States, and is undoubtedly the most serious document on the subject written in the 21st century.
There is much to commend in the report. Kevin DeYoung picked serious men from among the various tribes who sit together under the PCA tent. The fact that these men are being deliberative is attested to by their request to have another year to work on their report. This is not a hatchet job, nor is it the work of neoliberal Calvinist grand inquisitors looking to hound out post-liberals in the pews. It appears to be the work of churchmen, trying to address the serious question of how to parse out what is properly political and spiritual in an era when a political settlement that has lasted for the length of a long human lifetime is being revised, for better or worse. The last decade of cultural, political, and social change caught political and religious actors off-guard, and the committee is taking up the difficult task of what their church can do after being caught flat-footed by the rise of social media, the final collapse of Cold War politics, and the increasing power of the digital world.
With said changes to American society in the last decade has come a palpable and at times visceral fury, particularly among millennial and Gen-Z men. To their credit, the committee admits that perhaps these young men have a point. What the committee seems concerned about, with understandable reason, is racial division and exclusion within the church. As important an issue as that is, it is not, at all, synonymous with the question of the principle of exclusion in the state.
And perhaps that is a good place to offer what I hope will be received as good faith criticisms. There appears to be a reflexive conflation of the magistrate’s concern for piety in the civil realm as a civil and natural good into specific issues of establishmentarianism. It is a somewhat basic category error, and to be honest, one that is more likely to be made by a cleric rather than a layman.
The more worrisome provisions are those regarding the principle of the magistrate excluding certain groups from political rights. The specter of race and antisemitism continues to hang over the committee. This is understandable. Many new PCAers are Evangelicals, coming to Calvinist churches in the heyday of the racial reconciliationist moment of the early 21st century. And there are bad actors in the internet. But therein lies the problem. Not every conversation can be, or should be, about race and antisemitism. And those controversies should not govern questions of political theology or religious engagement with political philosophy. If the committee is attempting to address those questions, those are most likely the purview of a church court and ecclesiastical censure, rather than questions of politics. Inasmuch there are obvious ordained racists in online circles and on the fringes of Reformed denominations, those same ordained men are almost certainly guilty of things that a church court can charge them with, like withholding membership or the sacraments on the basis of race, etc. Politics properly can not, and should not, be litigated by the church.
The fear of the principle of exclusion being weaponized leads the committee to certain propositions that smack of clerical overreach. The fundamental Protestant principle is that the state, and not the church, sets the terms of political association in the commonwealth. Civil and churchly terms of association are not, and cannot, be synonymous. It is this misunderstanding that leads the committee to make what amounts to a theocratic proposition in Section 5 when it says:
“Whatever latitude may exist regarding the magistrate’s posture toward false religion, it does not extend to the persecution of persons, the coercion of conscience, the molestation of peaceable religious assembly, or exclusion from public office.”
The committee has, perhaps, swallowed unthinkingly too many of the euphemisms liberal jurisprudence offered in the last century on questions of church and state. The fact is the American state has always discriminated and excluded on the basis of religion, and continues to do so. The 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act aggressively persecuted the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The federal government removed that church’s right to incorporate, confiscated Mormons’ property without due process, and required voters, jurors, and politicians in territorial Utah to affirm an anti-polygamy oath. The discerning inquirer will note that there was no Southern Baptist, or Presbyterian, statement condemning the federal government for the Edmunds-Tucker Act. In fact, most Protestant groups were fundamentally supportive. The rejoinder might be, “but Mormonism was polygamous back then, and it isn’t now.” But Polygamy, for example, is still permitted in Islam. Even in our own day, the United States practices religious exclusion. It says to the Muslim, you can be a Muslim here, but only if you’re an American type of Muslim. So too the committee is—in a paradoxical way—practicing its own form of Christian nationalism regarding ordination. You can be a Calvinist minister, but only an American type of Calvinist minister. The American state might be within its natural rights to demand that. But the church should not baptize the state’s propositions.
I do not believe someone like Fundamentalist Mormon leader Warren Jeffs or Osama Bin Laden deserved the franchise or other political rights even before criminal indictments. And I do not believe the American order offers universal truth—the type of truth that must be obeyed in all times and in all places—on questions of church and state. If that makes me a post-liberal, an illiberal, or someone not fit to serve as an ordained Presbyterian elder, so be it. That the inverse proposition would make me fit is the more worrisome proposition. Not all cultures are equal; not all religions are compatible with the liberal conservative order. Everyone—layman or cleric—intuitively knows this. The church should not engage in theological gymnastics to stay in the good graces of a political order enacted by judicial fiat in the middle of the 20th Century, and an order that, like all political orders, will inevitably end.
