A Review of James Baird’s King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government
Evangelicals who are looking for guidance to understand how their Christian faith affects politics now have an excellent resource. In King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government, Pastor James Baird outlines the basic principles of the Reformers’ way of doing politics, which he argues is just as relevant for America in the 21st century as it was for Europe hundreds of years ago.
In accessible prose, Baird lays out what our Reformed forebears taught about the civil realm. Through a survey of the Old Testament kings to Jesus’s own words recorded in the New Testament, along with deploying the long-lost art of the syllogism, Baird demonstrates that “Government must promote Christianity as the only true religion.” Though this statement may sound authoritarian to our modern ears, this was not only what the Reformers taught but also what most serious Christian theologians believed for over two millennia.
In a series of definitions and clarifications laid out in the book’s introduction, Baird carefully walks the readers through what his statement means. Though it’s a deontological truth that government must promote Christianity, how that occurs is a question of prudence, wisdom, and discernment. As the Westminster Larger Catechism puts it, “That what God forbids, is at no time to be done; what he commands, is always our duty; and yet every particular duty is not to be done at all times.”
Those occupying public offices must understand the specific traditions, folkways, and political principles of the people under their care. As Baird rightly points out, “We do not live in Calvin’s Geneva. Our leaders must make proposals that fit our present context. They can’t merely lift a practical solution from a history book and expect it to work. Different styles call for different measures.” Plopping down a divine right monarch in the White House would neither be feasible nor suitable in a country accustomed to a different political tradition.
Using the Westminster Confession of Faith as a template, Baird outlines the duties that every civil authority—whether spiritually regenerate or not—must carry out. These include setting “a godly example,” recognizing “God as the ultimate ruler,” enacting “biblical laws,” and defending “the church.” These duties are set atop the foundation of the magisterial Reformers’ two kingdoms theology, which explicates the character and aims of the spiritual and civil kingdoms.
Civil authorities must point citizens to the essential truths of the Christian faith—but they do not administer the sacraments, nor do they ordain pastors. Additionally, though magistrates should in principle enforce both tables of the Ten Commandments since they are part of God’s unchanging moral law, they are not called to enact every judicial law the Israelites had to follow.
All civil rulers are called to acknowledge Christianity as the true religion for their nations since that duty extends from the moral law. As Richard Baxter once remarked, “He that thinketh that wealth is the only common good, or greater part of it than Virtue, Piety, & men’s salvation; & that Rulers have nothing to do with the latter…is fitter to be a member of a Herd than a Republicke!” Civil magistrates are to care for the outward man; God’s ministers, meanwhile, care for his inward conditions. Though abuses may crop up, this potential does not negate proper use, which comes from God himself.
In an important chapter for American Christians, Baird shows that the implications of Christianity in the civil realm are part of our country’s traditions. He reviews various early state constitutions, finding that Christianity, either explicitly or implicitly, was promoted as the public religion. The original Constitution gave state authorities wide latitude to preserve citizen morality. Many states, including South Carolina, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Georgia, specifically inculcated Protestant views and wanted only Protestants to hold office. As Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote in his Commentaries on the Constitution, “It is impossible for those, who believe in the truth of Christianity, as divine revelation, to doubt that it is the especial duty of government to foster, and encourage it among all the citizens and subjects.”
This was not only in keeping with the dictates of the duties of all civil authorities, but was also the method by which the Protestant cultures of the states would be kept intact. It is therefore not a question of if but which way of life public institutions will promote—one conducive to Christianity or one that leaves people condemned in their sin?
None of the foregoing was thought to be a violation of religious liberty. Baird writes that “the people were free to practice their religion, but the state would teach people Protestantism.” This was not seen as a contradiction because liberty was not viewed as emancipation, as we tend to think today, but as a duty to “choose the good,” as Baird emphasizes. The magistrate cannot force anyone’s conscience, something that no magisterial Reformer ever taught. Instead, God has charged him with promoting the conditions that lead his people to heavenly things, which is part of the public good.
The traditional arrangement in America, where the states were the center of moral formation, was derailed not with disestablishment in the 19th century but by the Supreme Court in the mid-20th century. In Everson v. Board of Education, the Court twisted the meaning of the First Amendment—which barred Congress from setting up a national church and interfering in the various Christian establishments in the states. Instead, they incorporated congressional prohibitions against the states themselves, which turned the founders’ republic on its head. The regime change inaugurated by the mid-20th-century Supreme Court is one of the leading causes of the disintegration of our national life.
Perhaps the most important aspect of this revolution was making modern liberalism the new benchmark against which everything must be weighed. This can be seen in how many Reformed Christians completely dismiss the political teachings of the magisterial Reformers. But why is the burden of proof always placed on them rather than on us? A facile Whig history of progress has been no match for Christianity’s opponents, who have done their best to tear down the vestiges of our former American way of life.
Focusing on the immediate culprits behind our moral collapse counters another unhelpful way of thinking. Those on the Right especially like to look back hundreds of years to determine where it all went wrong. For Roman Catholics, nominalism and Martin Luther are convenient punching bags. Though tracing the contours of the history of philosophy has its place, many of our immediate problems are of a more recent vintage. We’d be wise to follow Baird’s model and examine the 20th century far more closely for the sources of infection. At a practical level, it is far more likely that our inheritance was traded in for a mess of rancid porridge last century rather than at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
If all of this sounds far-fetched—the civil magistrate promoting Christianity because it’s part of the public good—that might point to a problem with how we conceive of politics today. One of the chief issues of our age is that we don’t think too much of politics, but too little of it.
Unlike most 21st-century Americans, the Reformers did not automatically equate politics with low partisanship simply. We moderns tend to have, in the words of Leo Strauss, an “unmanly contempt” of politics. In order to change this trajectory, we need to recover the higher domains of politics. And we need statesmen who have a deep and abiding knowledge of the political art in all of its dimensions.
Our knee-jerk anti-political bent has been further compounded by too many in the conservative movement who equate any talk of the common or public good with statism, socialism, or communism. But just because Franklin Delano Roosevelt also talked about the common good doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. Christian and secular thinkers alike have referenced the public good in treatises and tracts on political thought and political philosophy going back thousands of years.
Though it’s common to see civil magistrates like Constantine and past civil orders as only harbingers of tyranny from which we are now thankfully delivered, we should stop and think about what would happen if the people of those times could see our lives today. They’d likely see our age not as a flowering of liberty but as a descent into licentiousness, antinomianism, and the acceptance of the worst sins being taught as good by those in civil authority. Why this thought experiment never seems to go in the opposite direction is itself a symptom of our age.
One final benefit of Baird’s book is his focus on taking the Old Testament seriously as a source of wisdom and moral and practical instruction for our times. This pushes back against the creeping Marcionism being taught by progressive evangelicals and also the tendency for conservatives to look almost exclusively to the New Testament as the source of their political principles.
It’s also an important corrective to the “You’re not David!” approach that became popularized by Matt Chandler. Though understandable in pushing back against the many problems of the Prosperity Gospel, this stance has had the effect of truncating the full teachings of the Old Testament. The consequences can be seen in the tendency among evangelicals to downplay the imprecatory Psalms and reduce great kings like David to merely lowly sinners rather than models of thought and action.
It’s not necessary, of course, that one agree with every jot and tittle in Baird’s book for its publishing to be an important milestone. But if those who think that Baird—and the Reformers by extension—are fundamentally mistaken on this topic, they have a problem they must contend with: Baird is simply channeling the teachings of the Reformers themselves on politics, which cannot be hermetically sealed off from the rest of their theology. They didn’t discuss politics in a vacuum—typically, it was part of a systematic account of theology. If you reject the Reformers’ political theology altogether, root and branch, don’t be surprised if that starts a domino effect that eventually has negative consequences for other areas of your theology.
In King of Kings, Baird shows that our own age—not the great civilizations that generations of Christians built and maintained—is the outlier. For thousands of years, promoting Christianity was thought to be part of the public good. After all, every Reformed confession taught the goodness and necessity of a political order thoroughly steeped in Christianity. King of Kings is a welcome first step toward recovering the theology of the Reformers in the political sphere—and it couldn’t have come at a better time.
