#266 | Faith, Politics, and the American Identity: Navigating Christian Nationalism with Paul D. Miller, Pt. 1

Today's episode is brought to you by Cristobal Orozco. Thank you for helping move the church forward.

American Christian nationalism is when you look at America and you say, America is a Christian nation and the government ought to keep it that way.

Welcome to Apollos Watered. In the Ministry Deep Dive podcast, we tackle the big questions few are willing to ask about ministry, culture and the challenges you face every day.

Ministry is hard and the road ahead isn't always clear. But with God, nothing is impossible.

We come alongside pastors and ministry leaders like you, exploring obstacles, uncovering opportunities, and sharing practical ways to thrive. Our vision is simple to see thriving ministry leaders and churches noticeably transforming their world. So let's dive deep together.

Refresh your soul, renew your vision and get ready, because it's watering time. How do faith and patriotism intersect in America today? Are they meant to go hand in hand or do we risk blurring sacred boundaries?

Welcome back to the show. By the way, at Apollos Watered, our mission is simple. We equip ministry leaders and churches to thrive in a rapidly changing culture. That's it.

And we do it through two unique ways. Number one, we do it through cultural apologetics.

And then number two, we do it through what we call missio holism, our whole life gospel centered approach to following Christ. I know that talking about patriotism and faith can become very heavy and feel rather uncomfortable.

And if you're feeling that way, I want you to know that you're not alone. This is not an easy thing to talk about, but I would encourage you to stick with me. And we're going to try to navigate this faithfully together.

And one of the ways that we go about evaluating this is through cultural apologetics. Cultural apologetics.

You might be able to figure out what cultural apologetics is just by looking at the words, but I want to give you a working definition because I think that brings a great deal of clarity to the discussion and helps us to be able to zoom in in and see what exactly is going on when these two patriotism and faith unite.

Cultural apologetics is the work of establishing the Christian imagination, conscience, voice and practice within a culture so that Christianity can be seen as true and satisfying. We say it's work. This isn't something that's easy. It requires a lot of study.

It requires going through a lot of literature, going through original documents. It requires understanding how beliefs have been formed over time. It is work. Work.

It's also the work of establishing the Christian imagination, which means how does God want the world to be? And what is our role in it? How do we help other people to see that within the world? That's why it's work as well as conscience, our conscience.

What bothers us as Christians? Is it what bothers God? Do we actually have compassion? Do we actually love? How do we feel when we see evils done?

That's what it means to establish the Christian conscience as well as the Christian voice. How do we sound the world around us? Are we actually communicating in the way that Jesus wants us to, as well as practice?

How are we living it out within our American culture? And it could be within any culture, by the way. We have to be able to understand how to live out our faith in any culture.

And we do so in such a way because we want Christianity to be seen as true and satisfying. Now, this work requires three main things and it's vitally important for our discussion today.

Number one, it requires analyzing the deep structures of both church culture and the broader culture. Think of an iceberg.

Most time when we talk about culture, just talking about what's on the surface, but we want to be able to explore the stuff beneath the surface. This is why we talk about history. This is why we talk about neurotheology.

This is why we talk about missiology, because this is how the mission of God has been worked out in a given place.

Very Rarely, if ever will you find anyone having a discussion about patriotism and faith and talking about missiology and bringing that to the discussion. And I think it is vital because it offers a corrective. It helps us to see how the Gospel is seen in a different culture. Culture and how it's.

How it's communicated in a different culture.

And not only do we analyze the deep structures of both the church culture, what's going on in your church, how did your denomination come to be, so on and so on. Right? We could add to that and the broader culture.

But how do these structures actually affect the gospel's authenticity, the reality of it, its viability that people want to be able to believe in it, and its communicability? Can we actually communicate it in such a way that other people will want to follow Jesus because of it? And we do this, we have to be careful of this.

Let me read this again. Understanding how these structures affect the Gospel's authenticity, viability and communicability, both explicitly and implicitly.

This is an extremely important distinction because it's not only about what we say, it's about what we communicate with our lives. We communicate it a lot with our lives. We do it with glances, we do it with how we treat people.

When you walk into to church, right, and you see someone offering a handshake, you'll stick out your hand and give a shake and a smile. But there's other people maybe you don't want to see. You communicate with your body language what you actually like.

I don't want anybody to talk to me right now, or I don't, I'm mad at you, or whatever it might be. There are, that's just a small way of doing it. And we communicate the gospel both explicitly and implicitly.

How we communicate verbally and with our bodies, our lives, everything else that's underneath that.

And then thirdly, this work requires redeploying the church in ways that are faithful to its mission, what God is actually calling us to do, while engaging the realities of the broader culture head on. Now you might be saying, wow, that sounds like a lot. Well, it is, it is a lot. But don't worry, we're going to try to break this down as we go.

And one of the factors that we're going to be talking about, actually what we are going to be talking about today is the subject of Christian nationalism. Now I know that I've referred to it before on the show, but I think it's funny.

I think it's also necessary to talk about this, but I do think it's funny because what's the one thing if you grew up in America and your parents said, what are the two things that you don't talk about publicly? Religion and politics. And Christian nationalism successfully combines both. Now you might be thinking, I love Jesus and I love my country.

Does that make me a Christian nationalist? Well, that's the, that's the question that we're here to explore.

And I believe that there are well meaning Christians out there who have no idea what they are.

But I think that as Christians, we have to be very careful because we can mix our love for God with our love for our country in ways that, that I believe actually distort the gospel and compromise our witness. This is not an easy subject.

It's very layered, touching on how we interpret scripture, how we understand history, and how we think about national identity. And if you've wrestled with this, you're not alone. Many believers have struggled with these same questions. So you're not alone there.

Over the past few years, as I've been doing this show, I've had guests both affirm it and challenge it. And honestly, I didn't know what to think. I didn't know what to say. I Respected all of them when they spoke, and I know they all love Jesus.

That caused me to do a deep dive myself, immersing myself in talking to Bible scholars, church historians, theologians, sociologists, and as I said before, missiologists. Most of the discussions I've seen fail to integrate these perspectives in a comprehensive way.

But through this study, as I went about this, one of the most insightful voices that I found was Dr. Paul Miller, author of the book the Religion of American greatness. Dr. Miller holds a PhD from Georgetown and is professor of the Practice of International affairs at Georgetown School of Foreign Service.

He spent a decade in public service, including the National Security Council, the CIA, and the US Army. His writing has been featured in Foreign affairs, the Washington Post, Providence Magazine, the Gospel Coalition, and many more.

He is the author of Just War and Ordered Liberty. He loves our country and he loves Jesus. And I'm excited to have him here.

And whether you agree with me or not and you hear our discussion, I would encourage you because Dr. Miller offers a perspective that I believe is thoughtful, thoroughly and deeply researched and fair minded. Exactly what we need to understand why Christian nationalism is actually something we have to deal with.

Now, I know this might challenge some of your assumptions, and that's okay.

My hope is that by the end of this conversation will all understand more clearly why the gospel should should always be at the center of everything we do. Now let's get to the conversation. Dr. Paul Miller, welcome to Ministry Deep Dive.

Travis, thanks so much for having me on the show.

So here we go. We like to start off with a fast five to get to know you a little bit. Are you ready for the Fast5?

Let's go for it.

Okay. Of all the places that you visited and you served, what is the one food that stands out that you remember trying? It doesn't have to be the good food.

It could be a weird food. What is it?

Well, let's see. I have tried escargot. I was on a cruise ship many years ago, but I don't want that to be my answer. I think I do enjoy Afghan food.

I didn't actually get a chance to eat Afghan food when I was there with the army, but in years since, I've tried to visit as many Afghan restaurants as I could. And it's a wonderful blend of Indian cuisine and Persian or Iranian cuisine. It's wonderful.

We got a couple of Afghan restaurants here in D.C. well, that's awesome.

All right, here's number two. How about this one? Since you have served in different cultures and you've gone around. What is your funniest cross cultural experience?

Oh, boy.

So here in D.C. i was a professor at a place called the National Defense University, and it was my privilege just to teach military officers from around the world. My classroom was mostly officers from Latin America, Africa and Asia. I remember distinctly one class when I was lecturing on American foreign policy.

And I did have a couple of Americans in these classes. And there's a student from Libya, this is 10, 15 years ago, who had some pretty strong criticisms of American foreign policy.

And he got into an argument with an American officer and it got heated and they started to yell at each other in the middle of my classroom, which had never happened to me before and has never happened since.

And I had to raise my voice and shout them both down, which is very unprofessor like conduct, and then haul them out in the office and dress them down and give them a talk or two. So not something they train you to do as a professor, but, you know, that was a cross cultural experience of some kind.

Well, your military training, this is how you de. Escalate the situation.

Yeah, shout them down.

So, number three, you've occupied various government positions over the years. What is the one saying of government that has been proven true to you?

The one saying of government?

Saying of government, what people say, this is true of government. Have you found like. Yeah, no, that's true.

Yeah. There's old phrase good enough for government work, which means you do a job, you do it 60 to 70% well, and then you move on.

And I think that's fairly true. There's nothing. Always a culture of striving for perfection or excellence. I'd say there probably was in the White House and in most of the CIA.

But you do find it in the bureaucracy as a whole. There's a lot of complacency.

Okay, all right, well, here's the next question. Now you work at Georgetown. What's the best thing at working at Georgetown?

The flexibility of a professor's lifestyle. My first 10 years I worked for the government and I had no flexibility. Very high pressure jobs, 10 to 12 hours a day, day for years on end.

And now for the last 15 years, I have the privilege of essentially choosing my hours.

Working from home gives me the ability to serve my family, to do the errands, the chores, to pick up the kids, drive into their sports practice, their scouts, medical appointments, that sort of thing. And it's been a real blessing to us.

So I've appreciated that part about being a professor of that and the Ability to write whatever I want, whenever I want. That's nice, too.

I thought you were going to say yelling at students. That might be one of them in there, but it's not. But it's not. All right, number five, here we go. Here's another one.

Because you just talked about your family, if your family were to write a biography of your life, what do you think that they would title it?

Oh, My Kids. Knowing how much they love to make fun of me, it wouldn't be anything flattering. They might emphasize my hobbies, like hiking and video games.

So the Life of a Gamer, the Life of a Hiker, something like that. Something that, honestly, they. They have kind of no idea what I actually do for a living.

I try to tell them I'm just a social studies teacher, and they're. They're baffled, baffled by the idea that people want to hear me talk, because they certainly don't. They're my kids.

They have no interest at all in what I have to say.

And so the idea that people would invite me, as you have kindly done, or in some cases, actually pay, fly across the country and give lectures, they just have no category for that.

One of my good friends growing up, his father was the president of a seminary. And I said, when did you realize your dad was smart? He's like, I thought he was an idiot for many, many years. He didn't know math. He didn't know.

He couldn't help me with my homework. He was an idiot. And then one day I came home, and I'm like, mom, where's dad? And he's like, oh, he's speaking at Harvard.

And he's like, dad's Harvard?

Yeah.

So I get that. I feel something very similar with my own children. Well, let's talk about your book, the Religion of American Greatness.

Not a title that I would think. I mean, it's a provocative title, just right off the top. What made you, or what stirred you to write about Christian nationalism?

So, as you know, from my background, my specialty is foreign policy, foreign affairs, with a career in that field. And I'd been writing a couple of books on that subject, on America's role in the world and making that case.

And I was politically involved, and I did that for 10 years.

And specifically, they didn't understand. They didn't agree with how I understood American identity to relate to my faith as a Christian.

And so that led me to kind of pivot and think about American identity, what it means to be an American, what is the relationship between America and Christianity, how do these things rightly relate to each other? And that's a more important than a prior question to everything else I've been working on about America's role in the world.

So that's how those things fit together, at least in my brain.

Okay, so let's then talk about Christian nationalism as a subject. Can you give us a working definition so that we don't just talk about the subject? We need to get a good idea of what it actually is American.

Christian nationalism is when you look at America and you say, America is a Christian nation and the government ought to keep it that way. America is a Christian nation and America, the government ought to keep it that way. That, I think, is Christian nationalism.

The first part could be just a historical observation. If you just say America is a Christian nation, maybe we mean that as history. A super majority of Americans have professed Christianity.

That's a true statement. Or maybe you mean it as a culture, like obviously Christianity exerts the greatest religious influence on American culture compared to, say, Islam.

Right? That's true.

But if you mean it as a political ideology that America is somehow in some fashion, definitionally Christian, and the government should make it its point, its business to keep us a Christian people as a point of policy and law and judicial decisions. That's Christian national. That's a political ideology. It's not a statement of history or a statement of culture.

It's a statement of ideology, and that's Christian nationalism.

So when we're talking then about this ideology, I mean, where did you see it start to come into its own, like flex its muscles on the American stage? It's not a term that I remember growing up with. There might have been other terms that have been employed for it.

But when did you start to see it actually become a quote, unquote, movement?

Not terribly good books, but they were there and they. They sort of coined the phrase. The more, the more I looked, the more I came to believe that an unhealthy mixture of religion and politics.

I Want to be really careful with my words here. Religion, politics will always overlap. You can't avoid that.

But the unhealthy mixture of Christianity with American identity, it goes back super, super far. I literally found a recruiting pamphlet to recruit Englishmen to be farmers in colonial Virginia in like, 16, 17.

And the pamphlet said, come build God's kingdom in the New World.

Like, that's a very early version of the kind of thing we're talking about where you're saying, engage in a political project here on Earth, but we're going to call it a religious project. That's building God's kingdom. That's really unhelpful. That's really theologically wrong. That's not what we're doing. We're not building God's kingdom.

You can work for justice. You could build a good earthly polity. That's a good thing, but it is not God's kingdom.

So I think there's something deeply baked into at least part of the American DNA that has always done this.

You know, I was talking with. Oh, go ahead, go ahead.

You know, to maybe answer your question more recently, like, where did the kind of contemporary version of Christian nationalism come from? I think it's an outgrowth of what we used to call the religious right or the Christian Right.

So I'm not condemning the whole movement, but I am observing that what was then the Christian Right has morphed into this contemporary Christian nationalist movement that has, I think, gone beyond the old Christian right in its claims about Christian identity and American identity. Well.

So let me pause here for a minute as we. I want to unpack this a little bit. I remember reading Isker and Torque's book talking about Christian nationalism.

We talked just briefly about that in the pre show walkthrough. And, and they, they take great pain to. To say that we were founded as a Christian nation.

Now, having talked with James Davison Hunter, it became pretty clear that, no, it was always a hybrid. There was a hybrid Christian, there was a hybrid nationalist, I mean, excuse me, enlightenment element.

But why do we have so many people that are gravitating so much to this idea that we're a Christian nation, that they're willing to fight for it?

Well, the idea of the founders founding America as a Christian nation, that's a version of the genetic fallacy, the idea that if you find something at its origin or its root, you've therefore found out definitionally what it is, or something like that.

And people want to claim the authority of the founders for their argument, and so they argue over which founder said what and who was a real Christian. Well, look, they were almost all of them professing Christians. Some of them were pretty heterodox and a few deists in there, that's fine.

And as I said, it's true that Christianity influenced their worldview, but it wasn't the only influence. Your question was why are people.

Well, I mean, it seems that people are like, this is a language that's come out for some time. Right.

But we're seeing people that are really grabbing a hold of it now, and it seems like they're not letting it go and they're not willing to even listen to other opinions on the subject. To me, the scholarship is pretty obvious. It's always been a hybrid enlightenment.

Even if the Founding Fathers did hold a variety of different opinions, which we both established, they were all educated within a Judeo Christian worldview. You can't remove that. Yeah, but as.

As Hunter said in our conversation, he said that it created a cultural reservoir of civic religion that was opaque enough that people could read whatever definition they had of God into it.

Yeah.

Do you agree with that?

Yeah, No, I think it's a very good way of putting it. And think about it.

In.

It's only when you have a couple generations of pretty dramatic cultural change and demographic change and encroaching secularization that you now feel a kind of a defensive need to reassert the traditional notion of American identity. That's why today people are more insistent on our Christian identity when it's actually less true than it ever has been. Right.

Because of all the change, we're less Christian. And that's precisely why there's.

That some segment of people who just want to double down on that and make sure everyone knows this is a Christian nation. Does that make sense?

Oh, yeah, it totally does. It's interesting.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with Andrew Walls, who kind of pioneered the subject of non Western Christianity, and his expertise was in the expansion of Christianity and its transmission, and he wrote a lot of book. A lot of books on the subject. But one of the things that he had noted is that Christianity has been transmitted historically in one of two modes.

And he said even with colonialization, it still fits into one of these two modes. One he called the missionary mode, one he called the crusader mode.

He said they look very, very similar in disposition, they refer to the same Bible, they have the same language, and it's a Venn diagram that overlaps.

But he said the real issue is when it comes down to power, he said that the missionary mode realizes it's operating at the permission of someone else. So they can persuade, they can demonstrate and they can preach, but they can'. Compel.

However, the crusader mode will use power to compel people into following. Do you feel like that's what Christian nationalism at its worst form is trying to do?

I, I like that model. I like that distinction.

You're assuming that the Christian nationalist has any religious component or, you know, and that might sound a little odd to some listeners ears because, hey, if it's Christian nationalism, of course it's religious.

Well, actually, Christian nationalism is a fairly secular movement of people who are using the language and symbols of Christianity for a secular political agenda. That's the whole point of Christian nationalism.

So yes, there are some people within the movement who are more, honestly, more theocratically inclined and who really want to just take over. The Dominionists, the Reconstructionists and some integralists in the Catholic spaces who really want to use the state to propagate the true faith.

I don't think that's a good idea. Once you decide on that, you have to decide which is the true faith and then all the people start fighting amongst each other.

But honestly, I think that's probably the minority, even among the Christian nationalists. I think a lot of Christian nationalists, they're a little.

They're not actually motivated by their religion so much as the social role that religion plays in shoring up social cohesion, showing up a majority demographics, status and in policing public morals. That's what they want to get out of Christian nationalism and that's what draws them to it.

And it doesn't necessarily mean that they have to evangelize or proselytize at all.

So you're saying then that they're trying to instrumentalize the gospel for political purposes?

Yes. Which, by the way, trivializes the gospel.

Oh, it does.

This is one of my biggest objections. Look, there's a couple of dangers to Christian nationalism. One of them is political religion, tyranny and all the bad stuff.

But even worse than that is hollow religion. A trivialized faith turned into nothing more than social conformity.

Well, you know, it's interesting you bring that up. I was talking to a man in my church a few years ago, and he was lamenting. He was in his 70s.

Because he wanted to go back to the good old days. And I said, you know, Warren Worsby wants to define the good old days as a bad memory with a good imagination. And he kind of smiled.

And I said, you know, it might have been good for you, but I guarantee with our African friend right there, we were, a group of us sitting. I said, it wasn't good for him. And he realized that was true. Do you think that's what we see here?

It's a dangerous nostalgia that people are trying to recover culturally?

Yeah, yeah, Absolutely not. Yoram Yuval Levine had a book a couple years ago. I mean, he writes a book every other year.

I've got to get him on the show. I'd love to have Yuval on the show.

The one I'm thinking of right now, I think it's the Fractured Republic. But he does this whole thing about how American history is these days, told largely through the lens of boomer nostalgia.

I understand you had higher rates of social cohesion and it was less acceptable to cuss in public. Maybe drug use wasn't as prevalent and that kind of thing. I don't want to minimize that. But come on, let's Be real. I think we're much better off.

We have much truer religious freedom today. We have much better equality among men and women and between all races, ethnicities and cultures. These are good things.

A lot of Christian nationalism, a lot of the religious right, tells itself a story of decline and fall.

We've taken the narrative of Old Testament Israel in 2 Samuel 1 and 2 Chronicles, first and second kings, of disobedience, decline and fall and exile. But a remnant is saved. And, you know, and we kind of apply that to our national life, as if America is reenacting Israel's life.

I want to park on that just for a moment.

As you mentioned, and you referred to this in your book where you had Billy Graham giving the verses for Eisenhower to swear on the Bible and when he was inaugurated as president, talking about such verses as blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, or the Chronicles passage. You know, if my people who hear my voice shall, you know, call on me, turn from their wicked ways, and I will turn and heal their land.

Why is it wrong to take those verses, which I agree with you, were applied, that are directly appealing to Old Testament Israel. But how do we miss this hermeneutically, where we can then apply it into this. Or we attempt to apply it into this contemporary American culture.

And I believe if you read scripture, if you're going to kind of try to import Israel's experience into today, it should apply to the church, not to any other polity or group since the American founding. In fact, since the colonial days, Americans looked at themselves and they called themselves a, quote, New Israel. That's what they.

I mean, you all know the famous sermon, John Winthrop. John Winthrop, thank you, City on a hill.

He said, we, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay Colony are in a covenant with God, a city on a hill for all the world to see. And he was wrong. That's not true. The civil polity, the secular government or secular state is not the city on the hill. The church is.

So when we see passages like blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, it's just like it's almost automatic. It's in the American DNA that we're going to look at that and say, America needs to be the nation whose God is the Lord.

And so we need to apply that to ourselves or America. We are the people who are called after God's name. 2 Chronicles 7:14.

And look, do I want America in some sense to acknowledge sovereignty of a higher power, of a providential guidance of God? Yes. But that doesn't make me a theocrat.

And I want to be real careful to not mishandle Scripture and misuse the word of God to make it say something it doesn't say.

Well, even as you're talking about it, and we mentioned earlier this idea of God being opaque enough where people could read in their definitions and the founding as even Hunter created that idea of that civic reservoir. And I'm going to be talking with Christian Smith soon on his new book.

But of course he talks about having a moral, therapeutic deity, and that in many respects is this kind of generic American God, not necessarily the biblical God.

So in some respect, what I think we're seeing, and feel free to correct me on this, because I want to really hear your thoughts, is that as we're talking about these things, we're seeing in some ways bad theology coming home to roost or taken to its conclusion. Because what we're starting to see is as the American experiment, which I love America, I love our country.

I know you and I both would agree with that. I mean, you've served in it, you've fought for it, you're teaching on it.

You don't have to be a Christian nationalist to be patriotic and love your country, which we're going to get into that in a little bit.

But I still think what we're seeing is we're starting to see that there is the biblical conception of who God is, and then there's America's conception of who God is, and there's an overlap to the two, but they don't. They're not the same. Would you agree with that?

Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Noll wrote a Very long book, probably his magnum opus, called America's God, which he traces American conceptions of God and how they, again, as you said, overlapped with the biblical God, but not always and in some ways radically departed from it. And I would commend that book. So I think you're right that this is bad theology coming home to roost.

Specifically, it's bad political theology, and it's bad theology about. It's bad ecclesiology. Right. And it's a bad theology of sort of God's kingship and kingdom and what it really is.

So as a pastor serving in ministry for a variety of years, Billy Graham was almost seen as like the evangelical pope. Whatever he said and did, the church had a way of following suit.

And he said, let's not talk about politics, because he got burned, obviously, by Nixon. And yet we see that he had Eisenhower.

I mean, this is before he learned his lesson, quote unquote, where he had him opening to these Bible passages about political engagement and the nation of the God is the Lord, then, you know, blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord. How do we then have or cultivate, I mean, how do we separate these things so that we can see how to participate politically in a proper way?

Because so many people say, I don't want to talk about politics and other people are nothing but politics. How do we have a balanced and proper political theology?

Yeah, just a word on Billy Graham. You know, he started out as a revivalist preacher, and one of the most common things he talked about was the evils of communism. And so he did.

He talked about politics.

He talked about how bad communism was and why Christians should oppose it and had a moral duty to support their side, which was the American side in the Cold War. I think he was right to do so. I agree with his estimation of communism.

I think it was a deeply unjust worldly arrangement that oppressed humans and led to a lot of misery and destruction. So he was right to do that. As Billy Graham himself later said, he crossed the line. He publicly endorsed Richard Nixon.

He actually campaigned for him, I think, in 72. Later on, he came to realize that was an unhelpful. That was just wrong. It was unhelpful for him as a minister to do that.

As a result, he then later became functionally a quietist. He doesn't talk about politics at all. I think he may have overcorrected. I think he did talk about abortion and things like that.

Today, I think we see a trend, particularly in white evangelical churches. Some are hyper partisan they're like Billy Graham, still in the White House with Nixon. Right. They are MAGA churches.

It's all Republican politics all the time. And by the way, on the other side of the aisle, if there's MAGA churches on the red side, I'll call them rainbow churches on the blue side.

And they're just as partisan. They really are in service of a false ideology. Then there's the churches that are trying to avoid the controversy.

And so they are quietist, which means that they don't involve themselves in politics at all. Except, and again, this is mostly white evangelical churches. They will talk about the evils of abortion and the importance of marriage.

Those are the two really. Those are the two political issues they'll actually talk about.

I don't think that's actually helpful because it conveys implicitly that the Bible's only political message is be pro life and be pro marriage. Right. And that's not true. That is not an accurate reflection of the Bible's political stance or attitude towards human politics.

What does the Bible say about politics? Well, it says this. God loves justice. That's in Psalm, Psalm 68. Maybe God loves justice.

We are to image him and we are to be like him, and so we should love justice. That's a political statement. I should love justice. Now you have to ask yourself, what is justice rendering? To each their due. How do you love justice?

How do you do justice? That's a huge question, but it is political and it's pervasive. Almost everything in life is implicated by justice.

We could and should be doing justice in all areas of our lives, not just at the voting booth, but in how we treat other people, giving them their due of dignity and respect and love. So in a sense, every act we do with other human beings is political in that respect. So I want churches to preach the gospel.

But the gospel isn't just soteriology. It's not just the salvation sermon.

It is the good news that creation is good, that comes from a benevolent, all powerful creator who loves you and made you and wants to be in communion with you. That's the first part of the good news. Then there's the bad news about sin and the fall and our distance from God, from our Creator.

And then the good news of Jesus and the good news of the renewal of all things.

That God is renewing all of creation and adopting us into his family and making anew what he originally intended in the garden doesn't mean we're building the kingdom of God on earth today. We're not but it means that we are to build foretastes through our work of justice.

By working for justice, we are building a foretaste of the coming kingdom and of the kind of world that God intended to make before we screwed it up. That's the good news that we ought to be sharing. And so when churches preach the gospel, it's not just the salvation sermon.

It should be a broader sermon about the renewal of all things, which percolates into all areas of our lives.

Every time you apply the gospel to somebody's life and say, because Jesus died for your sins, and therefore live a life of good works, and those good works ought to include works of justice and mercy towards others. That's a political statement.

It's totally a political statement. And I'm in full agreement with you because we should seek justice.

Obviously, if anyone spent any time reading the Old Testament prophets, you see that justice is highly valued in the sight of God. I mean, you look at Micah or Amos, the cry for justice is always there. As I said before, I think you're seeing bad theology come home to roost.

Is that.

I think what you're seeing is I was in a framework of premillennial dispensationalism for a long time, and I know that there are still people that are in that framework. I'm not in that same framework now. I still have a lot of feelings and love to a lot of the people that are in there.

However, after reading Andrew Lynn's work on Saving the Protestant Ethic, he actually talks about how theological systems have had real world effects, especially in the place of economics.

Pull their money out of any institutional idea to just exclusively do evangelism. And his whole thought and thesis was in the book, is that certain theological systems have real world effects and how we go about it.

And we don't see them actually engaging the world because the kingdom is not of this world. Right. But as I was talking with Tom Wright, he was saying, it may not be from this world, but it's for this world.

And that it is to promote an idea of justice. And that's what we need to be Advocating for not always a cultural privileged position whereby our way of going about it is legislated.

And as James Davidson Hunter had said on the show, he goes, really, government, it's an administrative tool. It can't change the heart. It can regulate behavior, it can stop vice, but it can enable virtue.

Right.

Do you agree with that?

Absolutely. I think Augustine would agree as well. Yeah.

You know, what you mentioned there about theological systems affecting kind of social behavior, I think can explain a lot of American fundamentalism and evangelicalism in the 20th century.

Oh, great.

Yeah.

You may be familiar with Carl Henry's book, the Uneasy Conscience of the Modern Fundamentalist, I think it's called where back in the 40s Carl Henry was kind of calling on fundamentalists to get their head out of the sand, stop being an ostrich and start engaging in society as a whole as sort of his argument back then.

And I feel like we're still having that same conversation because the fundamentalist movement, in their justified effort to save the gospel from theological modernism and liberalism, justified. They threw out anything that looked or smelled extra biblical and that included the church's kind of social and political teaching.

You know, they, they, they threw out, they essentially threw out Natural Law, which is my next book. And Natural law is vital for understanding how Christians ought to engage in society.

That was kind of one of your questions a bit ago was how do we get to the right answer? I think the right answer is rooted in natural law.

I think a natural law is supposed to be a universal moral ethic that shared between believers and non believers alike. Roman Catholics understand this, they speak this language. Protestants largely don't.

Except in the last about 20 years, there's been a kind of a rediscovery of natural law.

I think that that's how we get to working for justice without working for theocracy, working for justice without working for Christian nationalism is re embracing that older language about natural law.

I mean, I think we're starting to catch up to a lot of the Catholic social teaching that Christianity is finally drilling down, or excuse me, Evangelical Christianity is starting to see that. And as you mentioned before, the fundamentalism aspect, where Carl F.H.

henry's the Uneasy Conscience book I still think is recovery from what we saw in the Scopes monkey trial.

And when we became very in bunker mentality and separated, that's when you have the rise of the Bible institutes and the Bible conferences and the prophetic movements and the pendulum principle dictates we kind of move beyond the corrective. We over correct and then we have to be brought back to center.

But today, what we're seeing again, and to me, and feel free to disagree, I think what we're seeing is the, the last gasp breath. And I, and I don't mean to overemphasize it, but of Christendom is we're seeing. This is kind of like I'm going to. This is.

I'm going to redouble my efforts to try to recover some type of cultural footing here. But again, the gospel can't be instrumentalized because if you do you syncretize the gospel and it becomes something reduced or completely malformed.

Do you agree?

Yep. The point of Christianity is not to resurrect Christendom.

Right.

But Christian nationalism is the effort to resurrect Christendom is trying to instrumentalize Christianity to achieve a social and political end, to re. Establish Christian social dominance in America. And again, there might be some listeners who say what's wrong with Christian social dominance?

Christianity is a true religion. Of course America would be blessed by a socially dominant Christianity. And yeah, just insert the entire book here.

A Christianity that seeks social dominance is probably teaching wrong wrongly about itself and about its point. That's not what Jesus. You know, Jesus didn't come for that.

And it trivializes religion, hollows it out and creates the potential for a kind of a religious tyranny in our secular politics.

I love Jesus and I love my country, but not the same way I love the freedoms I have. They're a gift and I'm extremely blessed. But I'm not a Christian nationalist.

I'm a conservative, yes, but I do not believe the Gospel can be instrumentalized without turning it into something else. Historically, Christianity is spread in one of two ways. The noted missiologist Andrew Walls calls them the missionary mode and the crusader mode.

The crusading mode and the missionary mode are sharply different methods of extending the Christian faith. They grew up in the same areas in the same period. They coexisted and went on side by side. But they're totally different in concept and spirit.

The crusader may invite, but in the end he is prepared to compel. The missionary cannot compel. The missionary can only demonstrate, explain, entreat, and leave the rest to God.

The key difference between the two is the relationship to power. On the surface, both look similar. They preach Jesus, they cite scripture and desire conversions. But the missionary mode persuades it cannot compel.

The crusader mode, by contrast, seeks to compel through power. Christian nationalism operates in crusader mode.

Sociologist George Yancey once told me that mandatory DEI training in corporations rarely produces change, but voluntary training often does. For those who want to go, Christianity works the same way. The gospel cannot be forced it must be embraced freely.

Any attempt to coerce or utilize it for power, for unity, national unity, for anything else than what God intended moves it out of missionary mode. Undoubtedly, you have objections or you have questions. And there are implications, of course, to my position.

What does it mean to be an American, then? What does the American way of life mean without Christianity in it?

These are questions that I hope to answer in the near future through the show and my substack.

But if you'd like to engage these ideas more deeply and develop practical tools for ministry, I invite you to join my next Blueprint cohort, based on my book Kingdom Living in the Modern World.

We'll meet for six weeks on Wednesdays from 12 noon to 1pm starting October 1, and for just $49, you'll get interactive teaching and discussion to help you apply the Blueprint framework, navigate culture in a way that doesn't have cultural idolatries and grow in kingdom. Discernment spots are limited to 10, so sign up today.

The link is in the show notes and join me next week as Dr. Miller and I continue our discussion on Christian nationalism, exploring how to faithfully witness to Christ amid complex cultural and political realities. Thanks for joining us.

On today's episode of the ministry Deep Dive, a podcast of Apollo was Watered the center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics. We hope it helps you thrive in your ministry and in today's culture. Let's keep the conversation going.

Check out our ministry@apolloswater.org and be sure to sign up for one of our ministry cohorts. Connect with others in the battle. We need one another. And remember, keep diving deep into zone. Always stay watered, everybody.