Baptists and Christian Nationalism
Should Baptists Rethink Their Disdain of Establishment?
It is hard to think about Baptists without thinking about their critique and rejection of Christendom and its established churches. From the Baptist perspective, partnership with the state corrupted the church and cheapened faith, thus leading to widespread hypocrisy and a watered down, nominal form of religion. In the same way the Reformation sought to redirect the church toward scripture, the Baptists sought to return to a more scriptural model of the church unbound from the state and to a model of baptism more appropriate to the pattern observed in the New Testament. No longer would baptism essentially coincide with entering the civil political community.
On this understanding, God has given the church the tasks of evangelism, worship, and discipleship. He has given the state a mission that is moored to the temporal. It is geared toward protection more than perfection. This can be overstated, but I think the general idea is correct.
What makes government different from every other institution of human society is its legal monopoly on the coercive use of force. This coercion is suitable for the restraint and punishment of various threats such as crime and invasion, but it is inappropriate to matters of faith.
A coerced faith is without value and promotes hypocrisy and violence to the conscience. Roger Williams famously described forced religion as a stench in the nostrils of God.
While the idea of a Christian establishment in the government holds fascination and appeal for believers, the historical precedents are not encouraging. The places that held onto (or continue to hold onto) established churches are the places where secularism is at its strongest point and where the church is weak and often compromised. See the Churches of England and Sweden. While I don’t often quote Karl Marx, I can’t help but mischievously appreciate his observation that the Church of England would rather compromise 38 of its 39 articles before it would give up 1/39th of its income. That may be unfair, but it sums up much of what we have seen from churches tied too closely to government authority.
In short, church establishments violate freedom of conscience and tend to promote compromised religion. There are good theological, philosophical, and pragmatic reasons to oppose them.
If you accept the idea of religious liberty, that leads to other ideas about the nature of the state. If we believe that religious liberty should exist, then that means there is an area in which the state is forbidden to act or in which its actions are constrained in some way. To say that the state can and should be constrained is to reject the concept of a total or comprehensive government and to embrace the idea of limited government.
If we agree with the idea of limited government, then the question is what are the different ways it might be usefully limited without crippling it and preventing it from carrying out the tasks with which it is entrusted and which we need it to accomplish. It is not surprising that as I consider the question, I come to American style conclusions, but I think it is more than my cultural location which leads me to think that a belief in religious liberty sits well with other features found in limited governments such as free speech, a free press, the right to assemble and petition, etc. Religious liberty protects the idea of the individual as someone who has important interests (such as their soul) that can legitimately be distinct from the state. These things flow together.
It is also important to understand that part of what drives the insistence upon a limited state is our recognition that human beings are sinful, which includes those who wield power as ministers of the state. Given our understanding of government as the institution in society with a unique license to use coercive force, then Christians should appreciate the necessity of limitations and boundaries upon the exercise of that coercion. One can also see why free speech and other associational rights are needed to protect the ability to criticize the state and to try to correct it.
If I were to attempt to develop a useful phrase to describe an appropriate Baptist view of the state, I might say we believe government can draft you into an army, but not a religion. I would add that Baptists easily resonate with the need to hold the state accountable to laws rather than to men and should protect citizens — a better designation than subjects for human beings made in God’s image and sharing in rule over the creation — in their capacity to give and receive justifications for state action.
What I’ve set out so far are fairly wide parameters for the state. There are many possible variations in terms of policy and political arrangements within the boundaries I’ve set out. I actually don’t think there is a great deal to say in terms of specifying what they should be. The reason for that is that the great majority of the activity in which the state engages occurs within the zone of prudence. In other words, these things don’t take on the character of theological doctrine where compromise risks heresy. I think that David VanDrunen is convincing when he argues that the state should largely operate along the lines of practical wisdom. As an example, he points to the emphasis one sees in Proverbs on industriousness. A Christian should probably try to encourage his/her government to use wisdom in policymaking, of the type that would not undercut industriousness. But this kind of wisdom can be possessed by any human being. It is of the type that Roger Williams said he found among the Indians, which led him to believe there are general principles of leadership and rule that are beneficial to all peoples.
The other point that VanDrunen makes about the Christian view of the state (and one which I think is wise for Baptists to adopt in light of their primary concerns) is that we should encourage it to be modest. He uses the language of “protectionist” rather than “perfectionist.” The state should be modest in its evaluation of the common good and of justice and of its own ability to achieve those things, especially given that its force is coercive in nature and that the users of that force share the sin nature. The governments that have been the most ambitious in pursuing some high vision of the common good or justice have tended to be the greatest violators of human rights. Virtually all of history’s greatest villains have had government power behind them. Three of the most ruinous – Hitler, Stalin, and Mao – inhabited the same century and aimed at almost eschatological outcomes.
As Christians, as the church, as Baptists, we should acknowledge that we will not produce a detailed Christian public policy deserving of an exclusive imprimatur. It will be possible for us to argue that various policies are acceptable from a Christian point of view, but not to define specifics as THE Baptist or Christian policy. We are better positioned to argue in terms of boundaries, and then to deal with specifics from the position of a more generic wisdom basis.
I also want to highlight a point made by the Baptist Congressman Brooks Hayes, who wrote (in a century wracked by totalitarianism and authoritarianism) that Baptists can work with a variety of political regimes as long as they maintain religious liberty and freedom of conscience. In so saying, Hayes underlined the great Baptist emphasis on evangelism and missions. By remaining as politically open as possible, Baptists could maximize their opportunity to preach the gospel in the widest set of political communities possible.
There are some extremely pressing problems into which Baptists can speak. We have traditionally been eager to defend religious liberty, but the nature of the challenge has shifted radically. We have gone from a union of church and state that threatened the purity of the church sponsored by the state to a union of state and ambitious secular progressivism that contemplates direct defeat of the church.
Let me offer an example. Regrettably, I will venture into the now common drag queen controversy. It offers a useful illustration. Let us imagine a class of third graders in public school. The day’s activity is that a drag queen will come in and read a children’s story comparing the change of a caterpillar into a butterfly to the transformation of a man into a colorful drag queen. Parents might protest, but there would be considerable uncertainty as to the proper basis upon which to found their disagreement. We no longer live in a society that is sure at all that drag queens should not encourage children to engage in a similar quest.
Now imagine a second situation. The teacher of a class of third graders in public school invites a local female merchant to come to the class and read. She shares a Bible story and a song. I think we generally understand that this second exercise is likely to be policed as an establishment clause violation. Church-state boundaries are pretty scrupulously enforced in public education settings. And we understand why. If the Christian merchant were replaced by a Muslim one, some of us would be concerned.
But how is it that the damage done to the parents of the children (and the children themselves) in the second class is greater than that done in the first? Assuming there are parents of the first group of third graders who are troubled by the drag queen phenomenon, is the offense against their conscience and sensibilities any smaller? The answer is obviously no. But we also know what the rejoinder would be from secular progressives, which is that they can make no allowance for bigotry.
This takes me to another aspect of Christian and Baptist thinking about the state that doesn’t receive enough attention. The United States has a well-established belief in the consent of the governed. Had you proposed to the founding group that “consent” would become all, they would have been gravely concerned, as they generally worked against the possibility of majorities inflamed by their passions. They acted structurally in important ways (the famed checks and balances, the timing of elections so that the entire government is never up for election at the same time, and federalism), but they also relied upon religion (as in the examples of the Northwest Ordinance and funding for missionaries to the Indians) to build and maintain virtue.
Consent of the governed, unmodified by God’s authority and no longer tethered to his creation order, has become a kind of idol. Maybe it always has been. David Koyzis presents it as such in his Political Visions and Illusions. We can observe that in previous times, voters and governments acted heedless of the existence of God’s image in African men and women to deny them their rights and to treat them as property. The deafness of the current age (and corresponding shouting) has settled in with regard to gender, sexuality, and other matters related to personal autonomy such as the unjust taking of unborn lives. It is important that Baptists engage the people in churches and those with whom we interact in evangelism and missions to understand the more authentic nature of government authority, which is that God’s authority is the source upon which all lesser authority depends. When we recognize that, then we can understand there is a zone of action which is not simply open to our collective or majority wishes, whatever those may be.
Attempting to fundamentally alter God’s creation order is the kind of betrayal that invokes Adam’s sin and the apparent arrogance of Babel. There are two sources of government authority, but they are not coequal or freestanding. Government by consent (and they are all governments of consent ultimately whether by virtue of election or revolution) sit on the foundation of God’s greater authority. We live in a world that increasingly rejects the existence of any authority from God other than cheering us on in whatever we wish to pursue. A society that specifies God’s role for him in such a way would seem to be in terrific danger.
Having offered a description of what I’m calling a Baptist view of the state and a challenge we face, I want to turn still further in the direction of problems faced by modern Baptists and to ask an important question about where we stand. Eric Smith authored an outstanding book on the Baptist religious liberty advocate John Leland. I asked him whether Leland could have foreseen that dismantling official Christendom would result in the development of an official secularism that simply cannot be characterized as neutral. Slowly and over time, this supposedly neutral secularism eased Christianity into the margins where it could be gerrymandered away from legitimacy in law, government, politics, academic writing, business, and virtually any other field of endeavor outside of the church. In these same places, ideologies such as Marxism, feminism, critical race theory, liberalism, and a wide variety of other frameworks of thought could operate without the limiting descriptor of religion being applied to them. Complaints about this lack of neutrality have been largely unavailing
Steven D. Smith, has written about the transformation of a positivistic secularism into what he describes as a pagan secularism. This pagan secularism represents a tremendous threat to the church as it sees less and less need to make a pretense of neutrality toward religion and instead acts more aggressively toward it. It has far more ideological range and romantic appeal than positivistic secularism.
Smith astutely observes that while the modern social and intellectual vanguard promotes their embrace of science and reason, they have been unable to live with the positivistic consequences of their view. Instead of dwelling in the darkly comic (or flatly despairing) world of cosmic accident and values that can be based on little more than either power or aesthetics, they seek some form of sacredness to impart meaning and some sort of foundation to the rights they believe must exist beyond their imaginations. The result is a move over time from the Christian separation of church and state toward a positivistic secularism (a brief stay because few can live with it) and then on to a pagan form of secularism. That which is explicitly Christian is ruled out of bounds almost as a matter of course with little explanation other than an “everyone knows” sort of narrative, while the pagan secular sensibility (maybe like the one offered by Anthony Kennedy in his jurisprudence on sexual autonomy) thrives unfettered.
We arrive at our current state. The transcendent has come to be seen as dogmatic, intolerant, and as an infringement on liberty. While the Christian tradition may have helped us to develop the foundation of rights, freedoms, and limited government we enjoy, modern pagans believe they can offer a sacred grounding without the transcendent baggage through their immanent religion. This is the legal version of being “spiritual, but not religious.” But the spiritual merely sanctifies the opinions and acts of the ruling class. It’s the Tocquevillian dystopia, complete with ostracization via “cancellation.”
Facing this increasingly untenable situation, a number of influential figures are moving away from the separation of church and state and toward some kind of new Christendom. I’ve even heard some use the term Christendom 2.0. It is highly evocative. Even a little exciting. There is no doubt some attraction to the idea that we will take the gloves off and stop wearing the straitjacket imposed by political liberalism.
Many of us took note when Joe Rigney left his post as president of the Bethlehem College and Seminary on the basis that his beliefs no longer lined up with the Baptistic tradition and principles of the institution. First, I laud the forthright and open way both parties handled the issue. But second, the announcement contained critical information. For Rigney, infant baptism has become an open question. In addition, he looks for the Christianization of the civil government. The announcement characterizes his political philosophy as “Christendom-building.” Infant baptism, of course, traditionally goes along with the unified civil and ecclesiastical order.
Some may have wondered whether Rigney would soon decamp for a place with more similar views. That occurred. He has taken academic and pastoral positions in Moscow, Idaho. Canon Press published Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism. The book is provocative and deserves credit for the sheer amount of conversation it has generated over things many believed had been long settled.
The situation underscores the importance of serious Christians thinking through the state/church complex of issues. On the left, we have progressives attempting to wholly delegitimize our views to the point of non-engagement. To them, even natural law and practical wisdom illegitimately echo the Catholic magisterium. On the right, Christians are looking back with longing at the old European Christendom. There is little doubt that this sentimentality is driven in part by the shocking speed and aggressiveness of the various revolutions launched by partisans of critical theory and institutionalized by almost every elite institution (public and private) in the U.S.
The question, then, is are the Baptists the Baptists without the backdrop of semi-established or informally established Christendom? If John Leland, for example, had known the place we’d reach in 2023, would he have persisted in his course? Would his confidence in the separation of church and state and religious liberty have been as great?
There is a reasonable argument to be made that Baptists are one of the Christian groups with the strongest connection to political liberalism. Political liberalism is the philosophy (or the set of arrangements or the practical development) that has given us the separation of church and state, religious liberty, free speech, freedom of the press, limited government, etc. It is political liberalism, really, that we could say Francis Fukuyama was talking about when he declared the end of history in the 1990s. When the Soviet Union fell, it seemed to be the death knell of totalitarianism and a concession that political liberalism would be something like the last model for government regimes. Part of political liberalism would be a plausibly neutral secularism. This was, after all, a time when it was believed that faith-based initiatives might be part of a constructive public policy. Certainly, it seemed that aggressive, atheistic secularism had been repudiated by the Soviet failure.
Instead of the chastening of secularism that seemed possible at that time, we’ve seen a version of events play out that empowers the pagan secularism Smith has written about and which has left the church and Christians increasingly marginalized and vulnerable. So, again, I ask. Are our beliefs about church and state and Christendom the same in this new environment?
To conclude and to circle back to my earlier comments on the Baptist view of the state, I would argue that the Baptist view of the state is the limited state paired with a regenerate church. As political liberalism becomes more unstable and as our unofficial, non-established Christianity ebbs, we see more people reconsidering the abandonment of this Baptistic viewpoint in favor of a Christianized civil order. To do so, I would argue, is a dangerous step that reinvigorates the idea of the total state as opposed to the limited one.
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