Total Depravity: The Guardrail Protestant Christian Nationalism Needs
Calvin’s Realism and the Limits of the Christian Magistrate
In a recent interview on Know What You Believe with Michael Horton, Kevin Vallier critiqued the resurgence of Protestant Christian nationalism. Pointing to Stephen Wolfe, the author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, Vallier argues that the contemporary Christian nationalist project remains vague and structurally thin, contrasting it with Catholic integralism’s centuries of developed canon law. Vallier’s core charge is straightforward: Protestant Christian nationalists know the ends they want—a restored Christian culture—but they lack a clear theological account of the means. What may a Christian magistrate not do to win, and why?
This vagueness has given Reformed Two Kingdoms (R2K) voices like R. Scott Clark, David VanDrunen, and D.G. Hart an easy opening. Clark has painted Wolfe’s project in strong terms, calling it a dangerous slide into “theocratic Caesarism.” VanDrunen’s framework, meanwhile, seeks to keep the magistrate entirely out of the spiritual realm, limiting the state to a purely secular “common kingdom” under natural law.
Both Vallier and the R2K critics, however, operate on a historical misapprehension. The project advanced by Wolfe, Zachary Garris, Sean McGowan, and others is not a move toward tyranny. It is a revival of the best traditions of historic Protestant political philosophy. Vallier’s warning still stands, however. For this revival to maintain coherence and answer its critics, it must explicitly recover its most potent historic safeguard: the doctrine of Total Depravity. Whether or not one accepts Wolfe’s specific formulation of prelapsarian nations, he is right that nationalism reflects a natural ordering of human affections and that a Christian nation should actively pursue its complete good in Christ rather than settling for liberal claims of neutrality. The difficulty is that this vision still requires a clear account of how power is limited when exercised by fallen men.
The Anthropological Divide: Angels, Men, and Rulers
Every theory of governance is downstream of its view of human nature. Classical liberalism assumes a neutral public square where rational agents harmonize competing interests through open dialogue. Post-liberals rightly unmask this as a myth. All civil realms are shaped by some theos. The issue is never whether theology shapes a state, but which theology does. When a state sets out to promote both earthly and heavenly good, as Wolfe, Garris, and McGowan stress in Reformed Christian Politics, the stakes rise sharply. If the state is given an expansive mandate to order society toward the true religion, what prevents the magistrate from becoming a tyrant?
The R2K solution is to castrate the magistrate’s religious authority entirely and bracket out Reformed anthropology from the state’s operations. Christian nationalism offers a far more robust solution, but only when it fully embraces its own heritage. While Wolfe heavily emphasizes humanity’s remaining earthly gifts after the Fall, he leaves Total Depravity underdeveloped as a structural check on civil magistrates. This is the precise vulnerability that Vallier detects. If we celebrate the capacity of the Christian prince while minimizing the corrupting reality of his indwelling sin, we pave the road to theocratic absolutism.
John Calvin gives us a sober assessment of man’s natural inclinations in the title of Book 2, Chapter 2 of the Institutes of the Christian Religion: “Man now Deprived of Freedom of Will, and Miserably Enslaved.” Calvin flatly rejected utopian views of human perfectibility. While the Fall did not leave humans completely devoid of reason to govern, it fundamentally warped human nature. Man’s natural gifts were corrupted, and his supernatural gifts were withdrawn, leaving human reason weakened. The magistrate retains reason to govern, but this corruption means his power must be checked. The safeguard of a Christian state does not lie in the assumption that its leaders are holy; it lies in the certain knowledge that its leaders are sinners.
The Magisterial Witness: Power Bound by Truth
The Magisterial Reformers used the doctrine of Total Depravity as the blueprint for political limitation. Protestant political theorists guided magistrates away from tyranny. Franciscus Junius in The Mosaic Polity argued that because magistrates and subjects alike are morally corrupt, human law cannot build a pristine New Jerusalem on earth; it must be accommodated to human limitations. Gerolamo Zanchi argued that depravity severely obscured human understanding of natural law, thereby necessitating explicit, positive legal restrictions to prevent despotism. Johannes Althusius, the architect of Reformed federalism in his classic Politica, issued a warning against the centralization of magisterial power, maintaining that absolute power breaks through all restraints and reduces sovereign realms into nothing more than “bands of robbers.”
Here we must answer Vallier’s conflation of this tradition with 1970s Christian Reconstructionism pioneered by R.J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen, and Gary North. Modern Christian nationalists explicitly reject the specific postmillennial, high-theonomic reconstructionist blueprint in favor of a recovery of classical magisterial political philosophy. This does not mean discarding the moral law of the Old Testament. As the Westminster Confession of Faith outlines, though Israel’s judicial laws have expired, they bind the modern magistrate by way of their “general equity.” God’s case law remains a guide for what a fallen ruler can and cannot do.
This also exposes the incoherence in Vallier’s own classical liberalism. He rightly notes that stripping morality out of politics makes it almost impossible to put it back in, yet his framework demands a strictly “neutral” public square that refuses to prioritize the truth of any specific faith. But Vallier slips Christian morality through the back door while refusing to name the theos that anchors it. The magisterial tradition is far more intellectually honest: civil power is real, but it avoids amoral warfare because it is explicitly subject to the objective, immutable law of God.
Lex Rex and the Problem of the Protestant Conscience
Vallier argues that Protestant Christian nationalism is structurally unstable by design, because individual citizens can always bring a private Scriptural interpretation to bear against the magistrate’s biblical dictates, forcing either sectarian chaos or a violation of Protestant principles through state coercion. In his view, Catholic integralism avoids this because infant baptism legally binds the individual conscience to Rome.
But Vallier’s critique fundamentally misunderstands the structural genius of Reformed political theology. Dissent from a magistrate’s errant scriptural enforcement is not a design flaw; it is a vital, built-in feature designed specifically to account for Total Depravity. Reformed political philosophy actualized this constraint through the lesser magistrate and the rule of law. In The Appellation, John Knox argued that God appointed nobility precisely to restrain unrighteous monarchs, citing Daniel’s biblical example. Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex insisted that kings are depraved men and that the law must constrain them. This doctrine was not chaotic individualism, but a structural fabric woven into every Reformed confession, including the Westminster Confession of Faith. As G.I. Williamson notes, if rulers reward evil rather than good, Christians possess the theological right and moral duty to engage in passive or active resistance, even by force if necessary.
This framework is far more realistic and stable than either Catholic integralism or classical liberalism. Integralism achieves its coherence by granting unchecked coercive power to a central hierarchy, creating an environment highly prone to systemic corruption because it fails to place structural bounds on the depravity of the ecclesiastical rulers. Classical liberalism attempts to build safety by an air of neutrality, but this neutrality is an illusion; it is quickly filled by a secular monoculture that tramples the Christian conscience underfoot.
Historic Protestantism is uniquely honest about sin at every level of government, honoring liberty of conscience not out of chaotic individualism, but out of a sober realism: because magistrates can err, their interpretations must always be checked by the immutable Word of God, bounded by the rule of law, and mediated through local institutional checkpoints.
The Calvinist Ghost in the Constitutional Machine
It is precisely at this junction that Kevin Vallier’s secularized reading of history falters. He channels James Madison and Federalist 10, claiming that the American system of checks and balances is a premier example of classical liberal institutionalism. But Michael Horton reminds Vallier that a sober view of the Fall and human sinfulness was “baked into the [American] project” from the very beginning. Horton acknowledges that the American system of checks and balances was designed precisely because we should “not expect much from humanity and…not expect much from the government.” Vallier concedes the point, admitting that an “Augustinian” institutionalism is the only variant of liberalism that is genuinely amenable to Christian thought.
Horton’s reminder exposes the core of our argument: the American system achieved a functional “stable instability” because its foundation was built on the realism of Protestant political theology. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, studied at Princeton under John Witherspoon, the Scottish-born Presbyterian Minister and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who taught that man is “by nature in a state of sin and misery, under the bondage of corruption, and liable to the wrath of God.” Madison referenced this anthropology throughout the Federalist Papers, writing in Federalist 55 that “there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust….” In Federalist 10, he said that “the latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.” Limited government with separate but equal branches was not a secular invention or accident of history. It was a deliberate mechanism to restrain the depravity of man and the tyranny that often results.
Reclaiming the Guardrails: A Blueprint for the Future
Vallier repeatedly asks whether a Christian state could force people to go to church, framing this as a contradiction unique to Protestantism. But this line of questioning relies on a double standard. All civil law, by definition, is codified morality and uses the coercive power of the state to force citizens to do one thing and not another. Classic liberalism does not eliminate coercion. It simply shifts the Overton window and predetermines who gets to wield it. The real question for any political theory is not whether the state will use coercion, but by what transcendent standard is that coercion bound.
Christian nationalism answers this question honestly. It openly ties civil order to individual liberty by anchoring state power inside three historic Reformed guardrails. First, the institutional primacy of the lesser magistrate: power must stay distributed and localized so that state and local authorities can actively push back against central overreach (Knox). Second, the absolute supremacy of law over the ruler, or Lex Rex: the magistrate is the law’s servant, bound by objective constitutional limits and by the moral law of God (Rutherford). Third, the duty of biblical resistance: because its rulers are fallen men, the people retain both the right and the duty to resist—passively or actively—when the state commands what God forbids (Westminster Confession).
Kevin Vallier is right that any political vision that focuses only on the ends of a Christian society without a serious, institutional account of the means is unstable and incomplete. But he is wrong to think Protestantism lacks the resources to give that account. The doctrine of Total Depravity gives us the theological tools to build a state that can pursue real order while still protecting real liberty, and can do so while keeping the magistrate under God.
For the contemporary Christian nationalist project to faithfully revive historic Protestant politics, it must explicitly incorporate the doctrinal safeguards of Total Depravity advocated by the Reformers and the American founders. Even as grace restores nature and calls the magistrate toward the higher good, Total Depravity serves as the guardrail against overreach. In this way, a biblically informed Christian nation can pursue the good of all its people without descending into secular utopianism or theocratic absolutism, because the same doctrine that restrains man from evil also restrains the magistrate.