Christian nationalism is all over the news as public figures daily endorse or denounce it. But what exactly is Christian nationalism? How does it differ from patriotism? And what happens when we misunderstand the relationship between Christianity and the American nation?
In his book The Religion of American Greatness, political theorist Paul D. Miller explores these questions. He will help us to understand, amid many forcefully asserted visions, the lines that separate faithful and idolatrous ways to engage in political life. The dialogue launched our series of four Online Conversations on Faith, Freedom, and Flourishing, in partnership with the Pepperdine School of Public Policy.
We held an Online Conversation with Paul D. Miller on August 9 at 1:30 p.m. ET. As part of our Navigating 2024 Faithfully effort, he helped us explore the relationship between Christianity and nation and to ask: What’s wrong with Christian nationalism?
Thank you to our sponsor, Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, for their support of this event!
Cherie Harder: Thanks so much, Campbell, and welcome to all of you joining us for today’s Online Conversation with Paul Miller on “What’s wrong with Christian nationalism?” We’re delighted that so many of you have joined us today. I believe we have over 1,200 people registered for this Online Conversation, and just really appreciate the honor of your time and attention. I’d like to give a particular shout-out to our more than 90 first-time registrants, as well as our international guests. We have, I think it’s close to 100 international guests, from at least 19 different countries that we know about, ranging from Bosnia and Belgium to India and Italy. So welcome from across the world and across the time zones. And if you haven’t done so already, drop us a note in the chat feature. Let us know where you’re joining us from. It’s always fun to see people tuning in from all over the world.
And if you are one of those folks joining us for the very first time, or are otherwise new to or unfamiliar with the work of the Trinity Forum, we work to cultivate, curate, and disseminate the best of Christian thought for the common good and provide a space where leaders can wrestle with the big questions of life in the context of faith, in order to better come to know the Author of the answers. And we hope this conversation will be a small taste of that for you today.
The topic that we’re discussing today is one that is both controversial as well as confusing. On one hand, there are those who seem to regard almost any expression of Christian faith in the public square as somehow akin to Christian nationalism. But on the other hand, there have been a rash of books and journals over the last few years very explicitly making the case for Christian nationalism, even arguing for the fusing of Church and state, and arguing that God has called Christians to exercise dominion over sectors of state as well as society. So it’s not surprising that this topic often generates more heat than light.
So what is Christian nationalism? What are its aims and consequences? How should we distinguish between living out our faith in the public square and instrumentalizing faith for political ends? Why wouldn’t the government, or why shouldn’t the government, declare the US to be a Christian nation? In short, what’s wrong with Christian nationalism?
To grapple with this question, I’m delighted to welcome back our guest today, Paul Miller. Paul is a professor of practice in international affairs at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He’s also a senior fellow with the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council, a research fellow with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, previously served as a military officer in the US Army, including a tour in Afghanistan, an analyst with the CIA, and the director for the Afghanistan and Pakistan desk at the National Security Council, where he served during the George W. Bush administration. He’s also the author of Just War and Ordered Liberty, a scholarly book published by Cambridge University Press, as well as the author of the excellent work The Religion of American Greatness, published by IVP, which we’ve invited him here today to discuss.
Paul, welcome.
Paul Miller: Thank you so much for having me back on the show. It’s an honor.
Cherie Harder: Well, it’s great to see you again and much to discuss. So your work has been out for two years now, and we so often hear about Christian nationalism in the context of electoral politics. But you’ve written this from a different vantage point, one that certainly draws on your Christian background, but it’s primarily a work of political theory. And I would love to sort of hear the story behind the story. What led you to write this book?
Paul Miller: Yeah. Well, thanks for the introduction and thanks for the question. On one level, I wrote the book because I’m a Christian and I’m an American, and both of those things are really important to me, but they are different. And I’ve always been interested in how they relate. So that’s one origin story for this book.
A bit of a longer answer, as you heard from my background, I have a background in international affairs. I found myself over the years advocating for a certain understanding of America’s role in the world, which is premised on a certain view of American identity, what it means to be an American. But about ten years ago, I looked around and realized, there’s a lot of Americans who don’t agree with me about that. They actually have a different understanding of what it means to be an American. So before I could go on and argue for our role in the world, you know, leading the free world, I kind of had to rewind and talk about what it means to be an American and how that relates to Christianity.
Cherie Harder: Well, let’s dig into that a little bit. And it always makes sense to start with definitions. And this is one of those topics where the definitions are highly contested and often very angrily so, in that, you know, on one hand you hear people saying, well, that term itself is an example of fear-mongering. You know, it’s an attempt to label and perhaps silence Christians in the public square. And then there are a number of books out that argue very explicitly for the fusion of Church and state, even for the second-class status of nonbelievers. And these are books that are widely read and much discussed right now. So I’m hoping you can kind of cut through the contestation of what it means and kind of help clarify for us what exactly is Christian nationalism?
Paul Miller: I’ll try to answer that question without the anger, if I can. There are perhaps a lot of kinds of Christian nationalism. I could even draw you a chart with a topology. Because I’m a scholar, I got to do that. But the simplest way, I think the one thing that I’d say all Christian nationalists have in common is this: if we say that America is a Christian nation, and the government ought to keep it that way, I think that’s Christian nationalism—of all stripes and varieties, moderate and extreme and up and top down and bottom up. I think they all share that view that it’s the government’s responsibility to define for us who we are as a people, and that it’s the government’s job to say we, you, are a Christian people and we’re going to make sure to keep it that way at the point of law. We’re going to pass laws and policies and regulations and court decisions that uphold and defend and enforce a certain religious cultural template for what it means to be an American. I think that’s Christian nationalism.
Cherie Harder: One of the things I appreciated about your book is that you did try to lay out the argument for Christian nationalism in a way that was, I think, quite fair to its adherents. What’s the case for Christian nationalism? Why is it appealing and sort of what problems does it solve?
Paul Miller: So there’s a number of problems that I think Christian nationalism is trying to respond to. And they are genuine problems. Many of them are genuine problems. So a lot of it is simply opposition to the progressive left. And I share concerns with the public policies proposed by the left, by the Democratic Party. I’m contentedly independent myself these days. I think another concern is what Christians perceive as the decline in public morality. There’s been a lot of cultural change, a lot of change in our norms and in public morals. And I think Christian nationalists look at that and they say, “We don’t like where this is headed, and we want to get back somehow to a sense of a more Christian America, where we had a consensus around what public morality looked like and we could say no to certain things.” I think that’s another concern they’re responding to.
But I think there is more to it than just a concern about public morality. I think there might be a broader anxiety about cultural change. And it’s related but distinct from a public morality, because cultures can change in ways that are neither moral nor immoral. And certainly American culture has changed drastically over two and a half centuries and especially over the last couple of generations. And I think that as our culture has become more pluralistic, it is true that American Christians, particularly white Protestants, have lost some social dominance and social prestige. We’ve lost our place at the table, so to speak. I say “we” as a Christian, as a white American Christian myself. And it’s uncomfortable when that happens. It is just, it’s anxiety-inducing when we lose our spot. And I think that some of Christian nationalism is an effort to reclaim that place at the table and to say, “Look, we made America. This is our place. We have the right or the— we’re the first citizens, and we have the right to define what it means to be an American.” That’s sometimes the sense you get when you listen to Christian nationalists speak, is that sense of permission or proprietorship over the American brand.
Cherie Harder: Let’s switch a bit and talk about, well, the title question, what’s wrong with Christian nationalism? And you argued in your book—I’m going to quote you—that “Christian nationalism is a bad political theory, illiberal in theory and in practice, and at odds with key features of the American experiment.” How so? You know, essentially, you’ve argued throughout your book that part of Christian nationalism is a misunderstanding of the relationship between Christianity and the nation, and would love to hear you describe more about what you think that misunderstanding is and what are the consequences when we get that wrong.
Paul Miller: It’s very hard to do this concisely, but I’ll do my best. I want to say there’s one whole bucket of answers that has to do with theology. And I think there’s something theologically wrong. But let me set that aside and just focus on what I think is wrong with Christian nationalism politically, practically, and maybe constitutionally. I think Christian nationalism invests our government with too much power to regulate our culture. I think the First Amendment, free speech, free religion, should also mean, by extension, free culture. We get to decide not only what we say and what we believe, but also the webs of meaning and significance that we weave for ourselves. That’s the broader cultural milieu.
But Christian nationalism is really an effort to give the government the power to define our cultural identity, to say that this template, whether it’s Anglo-Protestantism or Judeo-Christian Christianity, something to that effect, is our official identity. And I don’t think that’s wise. I think it’s sort of constitutionally suspect because it ends up treating some citizens as second-class citizens. What does it say to all the people who are not Anglo, not Protestant, not Christian? I also think it’s not very workable. I think it’s a very impractical expectation to put on the government. I don’t know why anybody thinks our government is capable of doing such a thing. We have a nation of 320 million people, and our government can barely deliver the mail, much less define and regulate and enforce a standard uniform culture for all 320 million of us. So there’s just a couple of concerns I have practically and constitutionally with Christian nationalism.
Cherie Harder: At one point in your work, you—well, not at one point, at several points—you distinguish between American culture and the American creed. And the creed being what you believe should really unite us as a people. And that is something that, you know, obviously is within the purview of government. But I can see the question arising in many readers’ minds that, in many ways, a creedal faith seems like a very sure and reliable support for a creedal nation. And the line that separates creed and culture is not always all that clear-cut. What do you say to those who believe that, essentially, cultural support is necessary to basically sustain and undergird a shared creed?
Paul Miller: And that, by the way, that is precisely the Christian nationalist argument, that— you know, they say they value the creed, but they believe the creed cannot exist without the underlying culture. And Samuel Huntington calls it the Anglo-Protestant culture. Others will call it the Judeo-Christian culture. By whatever label. And so they think that there’s this inextricable tie between creed and culture, as you say. And if that’s true, in order to preserve the creed, we actually need to preserve the culture, and the creed will just follow.
The response to that is to observe the spread and the survival and the adaptability of the institutions of an open society all around the world. This is where my background in international affairs comes in. I’ve seen the reality that democracy can, in fact, survive and thrive and adapt in non-Western, non-Christian, non-European societies. I think it’s about a third of—it’s in chapter four of my book; I actually run the numbers—and I think it’s about a third of all democracies worldwide are non-Western. And I kind of run through the argument and look at the history of different non-Western democratic societies around the world. And it shows to me that the sort of Anglo-Protestant cultural template, it is separable from the creed of liberty and equality for all people.
And that should give us some hope that as American culture changes, as we become less Anglo-Protestant or less Western or less European, that says nothing at all about the survival of democracy in America. Democracy is a very adaptable thing. All around the world people really like having a say in their government. And it is not uniquely Western to not want to be oppressed. There’s lots of examples of non-Western people who really love and cherish and upkeep the institutions of free societies. So I think we Americans can maybe relax a little bit. There are threats to democracy at home, no doubt about that. But I don’t think the threats come primarily from cultural change.
Cherie Harder: Now, I’m assuming that there are many aspects of a shared culture that you believe are very much worth preserving and of great worth. Does relying on the government to try to shore them up, does that help or hurt?
Paul Miller: Thank you. That’s a great point to clarify. I don’t want to disparage anybody’s effort to cultivate and preserve their own cultural identity. So if you really like Anglo-Protestantism, great. Form a civil-society group, publish a newspaper, have a reading club, host a tea party. Do Anglo-Protestant things. But I’d say don’t look to the government to enforce it or to spread it to other people. I think it should be voluntary. It should be civil-society led.
And by the way, I understand the argument that the nationalists say is that, hey, the progressives are over there using the government to force their cultural values on us. Well, yeah, you’re kind of right. And I would say the same thing to them: Lay off. Don’t use the government. Cultivate your own cultural values voluntarily. So I’m all about the constitutional doctrine of viewpoint neutrality. Theologically, there’s some problems there with neutrality. That’s a little footnote. You can’t be perfectly neutral. But for the cash value here, when you get down to nuts and bolts, we should strive for neutrality as much as we possibly can. So yeah, cultivate your culture, enjoy your culture. Don’t expect the government to do your job for you in preserving your culture.
Cherie Harder: You also have drawn a link between nationalism and violence. And you’ve said that nationalism is almost always authoritarian in spirit and often violent in practice. What do you see as the link between the two? Does nationalism almost always lead to violence, or is it more that the spirit of it where it’s an implied threat?
Paul Miller: Yeah. I want to be real careful with my words here, and I don’t want to impugn the many millions of people who might have some nationalist inclinations or sympathies or Christian nationalist tendencies. What I’m trying to say, as carefully as I can in the book, is that nationalism as a political ideology is, in its seed, in its essence, has illiberal tendencies. By illiberal, I mean inconsistent with the American Constitution, and that if you empower nationalism, if we actually voted in a nationalist government and kept it in power for decades and decades, we will see that illiberalism, that oppression, become manifest over time. I think that’s almost inevitable, and that will manifest as oppression and, yes, perhaps violence as well.
I’m not trying to be alarmist and say, watch out, we’re about to have genocide around the corner. That’s not what I’m getting at. I do think that over time, the more airtime you give to nationalism, the more it will be clearly and overtly oppressive and, yes, violent.
Cherie Harder: You’ve also argued that nationalism poses a threat not just to the state, but also to the Church. That does not necessarily seem intuitive. What do you see as the threat being posed to the Church?
Paul Miller: Yeah. And this is where that other bucket of arguments comes in, the theological arguments. This is very specific to Christian nationalism. I think that Christian nationalism sounds appealing to many American Christians, because what could be wrong with wanting our nation to be more Christian? So there’s an intuitive appeal on the surface with the labeling and the rhetoric. Well, I think we need to keep in mind that our king, King Jesus, has created different institutions with different purposes and different jurisdictions. It is good for us to want a body of people to reflect the glory of God, to be his chosen nation, and to be a Christian nation. And I think that that institution is called the Church. And I think that the civil government has a much humbler commissioning in Scripture. I’d look at Genesis 9 and Romans 13. It’s a pretty humble and pretty basic commissioning: to keep order and do as much justice as possible in this world. That’s what government is for. That’s what Jesus has told the government to do and not much else.
And the key thing here is that Jesus has given the Church the exclusive prerogative to be the voice of God on earth, to be the embodiment of God’s message, to be the foretaste of his Kingdom. He is not giving that to Caesar. I’d be very, very careful about asking Caesar, our civil government, to step in and start calling the shots, to start teaching Sunday School for us, so to speak, to start proclaiming the gospel—because you never know what kind of gospel you’re going to get when you ask Caesar to do that. I think Christian nationalism is the mistaken attempt to resurrect Christendom, to resurrect a Christian society by fiat, by government decree, and that is asking the government to do something that the government is not authorized to do. It is not authorized to make the call on what is the gospel and what is not.
Cherie Harder: There’s a lot we could dig into here, but I do also want to ask you about, you know, you described yourself a little bit earlier as a patriot. You’ve served in the CIA. You’ve served in the military and in Afghanistan. You’ve served in the White House. And since you called yourself a patriot, presumably you think that being a patriot is a good thing and that patriotism is a good thing and something that should be encouraged. So what do you see as the difference between a laudable patriotism and a more problematic nationalism?
Paul Miller: Yeah. So I absolutely am happy to embrace the label of a patriot. I love America. I’m very grateful for the United States, and I think maybe that’s the seed of patriotism. It’s gratitude. I think that God has made a garden, put us all in it, and he’s commissioned us to tend and keep the garden of his creation. And patriotism is tending and keeping the little patch of garden that we happen to call home. And for me, that’s the United States and the state of Virginia and the city of Alexandria. This is my little patch. I’m going to try to cultivate it, tend it, love it, keep it, and pass it on, I hope a little bit better than what I found. That, I pray, is the appropriate spirit of patriotism.
And in that sense, I think every human should be a patriot for whatever patch of earth is your home. In some cases that gets difficult. If you’re a Russian patriot, I think that probably means opposing your government right now or a German patriot in the 1930s. I think it means opposing your government, because that’s what it means to love and cultivate and tend it well. Happily, in America, I think I can actually be grateful for almost everything that we have here in the United States.
That’s all simply affection and care and gratitude for our home. Nationalism is about drawing boundaries and defining what counts as our home. For a nationalist, a nationalist might look at their home and say, “My home has changed too much and I no longer recognize it as my home, and I don’t like it anymore, and I reject it unless it gets back to what I remember it being.” That’s a nationalist spirit. And in some ways, nationalism can be profoundly unwelcoming to the nation as it actually exists. They have such a firm view on what it should be, that they can be ungrateful for what it really is.
Cherie Harder: I see the questions already coming in, but before we go to questions, we’d love to sort of hear how you are thinking about really the next few months. I mean, we are in a very polarizing election year. People are being torn apart, drawn to the polls. Our little home plot is becoming more and more contested, angrier, and more fearful. And would like to hear how you think about both cultivating gratitude and a proper patriotism at this time, but also the difference between advancing Christian principles in the public square and advancing Christian nationalism.
Paul Miller: Yeah. So I think you’re asking about sort of an ethic of Christian citizenship, as well as, you know, what do we do if Christian nationalism is not the answer? On the ethic of Christian citizenship, I think my most practical advice is to turn off the TV and turn off most of the internet. I see almost no value anymore to most forms of social media and to all forms of television media. Those are for-profit corporations that make money off of your worst emotions, off of fear, anger, and anxiety. So stop participating. Just stop watching. Stop clicking. Check out completely and don’t give them the clicks and the ad dollars. And that will eventually, over time, change their business model.
If you want to stay informed, then read good media. We all know that the media has some biases, but you know, we’re adults and you can kind of engage critically with your mind to read a bias on this side or bias on that side. It is much easier to do that with print media than it is with visual media, with television and TikTok videos. Right? So turn those off, engage your mind, read, and that will help, I think, your Christian engagement.
There’s other things I could say that have certainly been said before. Don’t argue online with strangers. Avoid the ad hominem. Speak always with graciousness. Just think about the golden rule, right? Treat others the way you want to be treated. That holds true in politics as well. I think sometimes we use this idea that politics is a dirty business to justify being really dirty. I don’t think that’s how it works. I think we’re supposed to be the salt and light in the world. We’re supposed to proactively treat others the way we want to be treated, and that should actually help clean up our politics a little bit.
And maybe we can save this bit about like, how then shall we vote? So maybe I’ll save that.
Cherie Harder: Well, feel free because we’re going to turn to questions from our viewers in just a second.
Paul Miller: Okay. So how then shall we vote if we’re not going to be Christian nationalists? Can’t we as Christians still advocate for justice in the public square? I think the answer is absolutely yes. I think we do need to keep a few things in mind as we vote our values. It’s not Christian nationalism every time we want to vote for something we believe in. Voting pro-life is not Christian nationalism, for example. But as we vote our values, let’s keep a few things in mind. Number one, there is a history here of American Christians using their values as a fig leaf to cover over bigotry, just to say it plainly. A hundred years ago, American Protestants thought it was really important to protect their values by keeping Catholics out of public life. Thankfully, we don’t do that anymore. But today, let’s be careful that we’re not maybe unconsciously doing something similar and excluding people under the guise of our values.
Number two, let’s keep in mind that our values, it’s not always wise to look to Caesar to enforce our values. A hundred years ago, we passed prohibition, the prohibition on alcohol. It was largely a religious effort to do that by Protestants. And it was a really bad idea. It was pretty stupid. It fueled gang warfare, black market on American streets for a decade. So I want to be really careful before I look to the government to criminalize whole swaths of activity. I don’t really trust our government to enforce that kind of stuff very well.
And then the third thing I’d say is just respect the appropriate boundaries between religion and between Church and state, and not look to Caesar to be our Sunday school teacher. So, so long as we keep those things in mind, yes, vote your values, but just do so with your eyes open.
Cherie Harder: That’s great. Well, Paul, the questions are piling up. Just as a reminder to our viewers, you can not only ask a question, but you can also like a question. And that helps give us an idea of what some of the most popular questions are. So we’ll just dive right in. Our first question comes from an anonymous attendee who asks, “Should Christians maintain a singular set of kingdom ethics—think Sermon on the Mount—in both the church and the non-church worlds?”
Paul Miller: Singular set of ethics? I think the answer is yes, but I want to make a few distinctions. There are some things that apply to individuals and other things that apply to institutions. So Jesus says, “Turn the other cheek.” But the Apostle Paul says, “The ruler bears the sword to bring terror to the evildoer.” Those are not in conflict because Jesus is speaking to individuals, and Paul is speaking to the institution of government. Those are, in a sense, different ethical principles, but they are consistent insofar as they apply to different actors.
The other thing I’d say is this: as Christians, we know the ultimate source of our ethics comes from the character of the God we worship. When we act in the public square, I think that it’s important that we expect our government— our government should not be consulting Scripture because that would be involving the government in a religious ruling, so to speak. I think we should expect our government to govern by reference to natural law or general revelation, such as the Golden Rule, such as the second table of the Ten Commandments. Every religion bans murder, every religion in history. Every civilization and culture says lying is wrong, cheating is wrong, murder is wrong, stealing is wrong. And actually, quite a lot of them have a version of the Golden Rule, of treating others the way you want to be treated. Those are the kind of basic ethical principles that should inform our government. Our government should not be morally neutral. That doesn’t mean it should be a theocracy. It does mean that it should govern with reference to general revelation or natural law.
Cherie Harder: So our next question comes from Catherine Hayes. And Catherine says, “I’m struck by your remark that Christian nationalism would not work in practice, that our government can’t actually deliver governance of beliefs and morals. Are there examples of nations that have been able to do this, present or past? And what does it mean in practice to have a Christian nation?”
Paul Miller: Well, governments can certainly try. And I suppose you could point to any number of examples of when a government did promote this or that value and maybe succeeded in pushing it a little bit. So we’re having two conversations. One’s about morality. One’s about culture. I do not think our government is able to uphold one consensus culture for such a large, pluralistic nation. I think that’s intrinsically impossible. When you try, that’s when you become illiberal because you’re trying to force a cultural template on a pluralistic people. And to do that, you have to start using coercion. And that is where the illiberality comes in. So that’s, I think, where I— to clarify my earlier comments. Does that, Cherie, answer the question, do you think?
Cherie Harder: I think so, yeah. Next question comes from Madonna Hamel. And Madonna says, “As a non-American and Canadian who loves these forums, could you address the way Christian nationalism conflates America with “Christian”, for going Christ’s all-embracing love of all humanity and the humility that requires?”
Paul Miller: I’m going to answer a slightly different question. There are versions of Christian nationalism in other nations in the world. We Americans tend to talk about ourselves quite a lot because— just because. But, look, you know, Hungary, Brazil, Russia—they’ve all got versions of Christian nationalism going right now. It’s not uncommon throughout history. In fact, other religions do this with their society. So there’s Hindu nationalism in India. And there’s a very complicated discussion that we might have about Jewish nationalism or Zionism. I think that you can actually make a case for a version of Zionism. So it’s not unique to Christianity. It’s not unique to America. All societies— governments recognize that religion is powerful. So they seek to co-opt it and merge it and hijack it. That sort of religious nationalism is almost universal in human history. It’s pronounced in America right now, still the most powerful country in the world. And in a sense, the American experiment has been driving a lot of world history for a quarter millennium. And so we have a lot of attention on this particular pairing of Christianity with the American experiment. But that pairing of religion and government is very common.
Cherie Harder: So somewhat related to that, Walter Ruby asked, “What happens to adherents of minority faiths like Judaism and Islam in a Christian nationalist America?”
Paul Miller: Yeah, well, and this is where the illiberalism comes in that I’ve talked about. So Christian nationalism exists on a spectrum. Sure, there could be more benign forms. Even the benign forms of Christian nationalism will at least implicitly say to the minority, to the Muslim or the Jew, or to people of different cultural backgrounds, would say, “You know, you’re not really one of us. You don’t really count. Maybe we’ll let you be a citizen. Maybe we’ll let you vote. But it’s still as a second-class citizen.”
But of course, that kind of benign nationalism I don’t think is very sustainable. I think over time, you will encounter demands to make that more explicit, more overt, and more clearly oppressive. And I think that religious and cultural minorities over time will be treated worse and worse. And, of course, we know at the extreme end, there’s genocide, there’s ethnic cleansing, and religious war and all that.
Cherie Harder: So a question from Clay Stopher, who’s asking essentially a clarifying question. He said, “Church and state should be separated, but is it possible to separate politics and moral beliefs? Is that what you’re arguing for?”
Paul Miller: No. And I just a moment ago, I talked about governing by reference to natural law or natural religion. It is impossible for a government to be morally neutral. It can and should be, as far as possible, culturally neutral. And let’s keep in mind there’s a difference between culture and morals. And our particular culture of Anglo-Protestantism, it’s great, but it ain’t the kingdom of God and it is not coterminous with justice, goodness, and Christianity. It’s one particular cultural manifestation of it. So governments are obligated to govern righteously, to govern for justice, but they should do so by reference to natural law, not special revelation, not the Bible.
Cherie Harder: So we have an anonymous attendee who asks, “Please discuss the Christian nationalist argument about our nation being founded on Christianity, even trying to tie our founders’ beliefs to Christianity.”
Paul Miller: Yeah, so there’s a lot of historians who have written books on this. So John Wilsey has written a few books on this. I believe John Fea has written. I think Mark David Hall has written on this. Mark Noll has written on this. I mean, there’s shelves and shelves of books on this. I think it’s entirely appropriate to observe that at the time of the founding, virtually every American was at least a professing Christian—although there was a lot of heterodoxy afoot with deism, Unitarianism, Quakerism—that the worldview in which the founders were writing was saturated with Christian thought. Most of the signers of the Declaration and the Constitution were professing Christians, many of them quite clearly practicing and pious Christians. It’s also clear that some of them weren’t. Thomas Jefferson, not an Orthodox Christian by any measure. Neither was Benjamin Franklin.
Can we see the influence, the echo, of Christian principles on the principles of the Constitution, the Declaration? Absolutely. I think when Jefferson writes in the Declaration that there are self-evident truths and he appeals to “nature and nature’s God,” that’s exactly what I was just talking about. That’s governing in accordance with natural law. That was a Christian concept, widely understood at the time.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the founders intended to create a Christian republic or a Christian nation. I think that goes a little bit too far in conflating what the founders were trying to do. So we need to be a little careful in how we characterize the relationship between Christianity and America at the time of the founding. Other things influenced the founding. The enlightenment influenced the founding and the enlightenment, again, partly derived from Christianity, partly not. And so it just takes a lot of careful historical study to understand these different threads and streams.
The Christian nationalists use this history to say, because they were Christians at the time, because Christianity influenced the founding, therefore, we must keep Christianity as the predominant influence in our public life, to keep the founding, to keep the ideals. And I don’t believe that’s true.
Cherie Harder: Yeah. So a question from an anonymous viewer who asked, “Is a truly pluralistic society possible?”
Paul Miller: I’d actually reverse the question: is a truly homogeneous society possible? I’d suggest that every single society on earth today is pluralistic, sometimes with a larger majority, sometimes with a smaller plurality. But every society is pluralistic to some extent or other. There’s always going to be minorities of religion or culture or ethnicity or race or language, in every culture and civilization. Maybe a few small island nations in the Pacific are homogenous. Japan gets pretty close to being homogeneous, but even then, there are a few minority groups on some of their outlying islands. So, yes, I think pluralism is very much possible.
The real question is, is peaceful pluralism possible? Can we govern with justice and equity for all people in a pluralistic environment? The answer that most governments have given throughout history is, “No, we’re just going to put one tribe in charge and the rest of you are second-class.” That’s the answer that most governments throughout history have given. And I think the United States is exceptional in saying, “Look, we’re going to try. We’re going to try to be a country where different tribes get along.” And the tribes they had in mind were the Presbyterians over there and the Episcopalians over there. They were actually going to try to get along and not kill each other. Right? That was an amazing thing in the 18th century. And today, the number of tribes that have joined the experiment have multiplied without count. But I think that the ideals are still the same, that we are going to be a country where tribes from all over, from every nation, tribe, and country in the world, if they can agree to the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution, then they can be Americans. And we can try to make this experiment work.
Cherie Harder: Well said. So another anonymous viewer wrote in to say that, “You mentioned that the Christian nationalists want the government to enforce a Christian identity. Is that true of all Christian nationalists? Or are there any who aren’t looking to use governmental force to actually enforce it?”
Paul Miller: Well, if you want to spread Christianity and see the victory of Christianity without the government, I’m with you. That’s great. I mean, that’s what’s called evangelism. And I don’t think that’s Christian nationalism. The way I’m defining Christian nationalism, it is a political ideology. It is using the government to spread and propagate one particular cultural template. By definition, Christian nationalism is a political ideology. If you just want to do a non-governmental, civil-society, voluntary effort to either spread Christianity or spread a culture of Anglo-Protestantism, more power to you. Go do it, and just understand lots of people are going to propagate their own values, culture, and religion.
Cherie Harder: So a question from Fritz Heinzen. Fritz says, “As someone who has read some of your work in the past, it would be interesting to know who are some of the political thinkers, philosophers, and theologians you draw on for developing your own thinking on Christian nationalism?”
Paul Miller: Well, I’d say read the bibliography to my book. That’ll give you a good sense. One thinker I’ve drawn on quite a bit for my work on international affairs is Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote quite a bit on America’s role in the world. When it comes to political theology and understanding the relationship of Church and state, I’ve benefited quite a bit from my friend Jonathan Lehman and also recently from David Van Drunen, who’s written a lot on the two kingdoms, the natural law, the Noahic covenant. Who else? I’ll look at my bookshelf behind me. Yeah. Maybe those are the best ways. I’ll stop there. I could just go down the line of my bookshelf right there and list them all off, but I hope that’s helpful.
Cherie Harder: That’s great. So it seems like we have a lot of anonymous viewers writing in. Another anonymous viewer asks sort of an interesting question: “Do you see a similarity between Christian nationalism and critical theory, that is, between perceived oppressed versus perceived oppressors?”
Paul Miller: So I don’t know if this is what the question is getting at, but in chapter five of my book, I argue that Christian nationalism is the identity politics of white evangelicals. And I see a kind of pernicious cycle, a feedback loop, between nationalism and identity politics. And what I mean is this: when the majority tribe advocates for itself as a tribe, we call it nationalism. And in America, that tribe is white evangelicals. And so we have Christian nationalism as the nationalist movement. But that means all the other tribes get a little bit defensive and they think, “Oh my gosh, I have to advocate for myself to escape from the dominance of the majority tribe.” And so they start advocating for the identity politics for this group, that group, that group, whether it’s defined by race or gender or religion or the intersection between them. And that’s where you get the critical theory. And so you have this kind of feedback loop. The more the minority tribes do it, the more the majority feels threatened and feels like they have to hunker down and re-emphasize, “No, no, no, we really are this thing.” And then it makes the minorities feel all the more threatened. And so it goes back and forth and there’s no end. This is the culture war.
So, yes, I do see a way in which Christian nationalism is feeding off the same dynamics, the same underlying political philosophy, that is fueling a lot of the identity politics on the left. Maybe that’s what the questioner is getting at. Maybe not. But I do see that similarity there.
Cherie Harder: A question from Kedric Webster. Kedric asks, “Could a key argument against Christian nationalism be the universality of the Church, past and present? The Church was around before America and will be around when America is called something else.”
Paul Miller: Sure. Insofar as Christian nationalism blurs the distinction of Church and state, it’s an awfully small Church, right? Because it kind of reduces the Church to one particular nation, one particular tribe. And absolutely, the Church is called from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation on earth and is the Church invisible through all time, of believers past, present, and future. And that is much, much bigger than America. And so we should not fall into the habit of thinking that the United States— that the fate of the Kingdom of God will rise or fall on the fate of the United States. That’s silly.
Cherie Harder: So Frederick Axelguard asks— Frederick says, “You make clear that our government can’t, maybe shouldn’t, enforce or propagate a shared culture. I hear by implication that that would not be consistent with the democratic form of government. Is it a fair summary that the aims of Christian nationalism would require a dictatorial form of government?”
Paul Miller: By the way, Frederick, great last name. Axelguard. I love that. You know, in my earlier answers, I talked about the, I think, the inherent tendency towards oppression—and, yes, authoritarianism—that’s present within nationalism.
Can I talk about jazz for a moment? This is not really in response to the questioner’s question, but I just I love to riff on this. So in one of the books in favor of nationalism, an author named Rich Lowry, he says that, look, you know, America is great and America is not solely white. It has all kinds of cultural influences in it, like jazz. And he uses that argument to defend preserving American culture, but it’s not racist. And I find that an interesting argument because, you know what Rich Lowry wants to do is, he says repeatedly, nationalism is about preserving the cultural nation. We’re going to keep one culture for all time, and that’s going to be our culture. But if you know anything about jazz, you know that jazz came from a very culturally fluid, culturally pluralistic, culturally changing mix in early 20th-century Louisiana.
So I don’t understand how an advocate of preserving the cultural nation could then celebrate jazz, which is the fruit of cultural, not preservation, but cultural change, cultural pluralism, cultural fluidity and intermingling. You know, jazz is the exact example of what happens when you’re not a nationalist. Nationalists in the 1920s were not kind to jazz. They called it voodoo music. They were very ugly about it. If you were a nationalist in the 1910s, you would probably want a Bureau of European Music to enforce European classicism on American music. That’s the kind of authoritarianism that is inherent to nationalism. You want to stop change. You want to use the government to stop cultural change. And I’d rather live in a world where jazz exists. I want to let culture flourish and flower, and that means culture will change, but it also means we get new things in the world, like jazz. That’s what happens when you step back, you’re not a cultural authoritarian, and you let a thousand flowers bloom. You get American jazz and praise God for it.
Cherie Harder: That’s great. So Kelsey White asks, she says, “I’ve been hearing lately of fear that Christian ‘rights,’ particularly the freedom of speech, is at risk. I see this being a component of the Christian nationalism fervor largely driven by fear. Do you agree that freedom of speech is at risk for Christians, or at least that this perception is driving part of the movement?”
Paul Miller: I agree the perception is driving part of the movement, and advocating for our rights and our freedom and for religious freedom is not Christian nationalism. All Americans should join that effort. It is an old-fashioned conservative thing to advocate for. Do I think that our rights and our freedoms are actually being threatened right now? I think two things are happening. One is we have lost a lot of cultural influence and that there’s an urgent need to make the argument for why religious freedom is important for all people. I think religious freedom is not terribly popular, but I also recognize over the last 20 years, the Supreme Court has— it’s been a unanimous string of decisions defending religious freedom. So legally and constitutionally, we’re winning. We are absolutely winning at the high court. And our rights and our freedoms are being vindicated in case after case after case. It’s a problem that we keep having to get dragged into court to vindicate our rights, because culturally, there’s a growing hostility and people are suing us all the time, but we’re winning. We’re winning in the court. So I’d like to accompany our legal victories with a more concerted cultural effort to explain why the First Amendment is a thing, why religious freedom is a good thing constitutionally and biblically, and why all Americans should support it. I think that’s the right agenda. And that’s not Christian nationalism.
Cherie Harder: That’s great. And just as a note to our viewers, Paul just talked about the importance of talking about religious freedom and better understanding it. And on September 6th, we will be doing exactly that with Knox Thames and Nicole Bibbins Sadaka. So stay tuned for that. Our next question comes from Monica Meehan. And, Monica, apologies if I mangled your last name. Monica asks, “Hi, Paul, you brought up natural law a few times. It seems to me that those who do not recognize the existence of natural law might label an appeal to natural law as ‘Christian nationalism.’ How would you respond to that?”
Paul Miller: They certainly do that. There was several people over Twitter who’ve said such a thing. I would respond by reading the Declaration of Independence to them and reading Jefferson’s appeal to nature and nature’s God. I’d say if you appeal to “self-evident truths” like human rights, the self-evident truth that we’re entitled by our creator to rights like life, liberty, and happiness, that’s an appeal to natural law. A self-evident truth is an appeal to natural law. I’d say, if you believe with John F. Kennedy, that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God, that’s a natural-law argument. And Kennedy said that in his inaugural, and he was not a Christian nationalist.
We must preserve some sense that there is an authority outside and above the state, and the state is accountable to it. If we lose that, the state is the authority, and the state can do whatever it wants. That’s the straight road to totalitarianism. Natural law is not the road to theocracy. Natural law is the bulwark against totalitarianism. We’ve got to keep something like that. I understand some people don’t like the idea of the religious-sounding language, but you got to convince me how we’re going to preserve an open society without something like natural law as a bulwark.
Cherie Harder: So a question from Feroz Shah. Feroz says, “As a Christian living in India experiencing religious nationalism, I’m disturbed to see a coming together of Christian nationalism in the US. Can you comment on what we can learn from other countries with established religions?”
Paul Miller: That it doesn’t work. You know, everything we’ve said over the past hour, you know, it’s dangerous. It leads down the line to authoritarianism. It is also quite bad for religion. If you want to see the emptiest churches in Europe, they are the established churches, the state-funded churches. They just empty out. America has the most vibrant churches in the developed world, in part because of our culture of religious freedom. And there’s competition there, right? So I think that we need to learn that religious freedom is biblically sound. It’s constitutionally sound, and it’s also the right recipe for vibrant religion in your society. So the state just needs to step back and let religion flourish.
Cherie Harder: All this has been fantastic and really fascinating. And in just a moment or two, I’m going to give you the last word. But before that, a few things to share with all of you who are watching first. Immediately after we conclude, we’ll be sending around an online feedback form and we’d be grateful for your thoughts. We read all of these. We do try to incorporate your suggestions to make these programs ever more valuable. And as a small token of appreciation for your input, we will give you a free code for a free Trinity Forum Reading download of your choice. There are quite a few Trinity Forum Readings that we would recommend that more deeply explore some of the themes that we have talked about today. Perhaps one of the top, Paul earlier mentioned Reinhold Niebuhr. We would recommend Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Children of Light and Children of Darkness.” Other titles that we would commend to your consideration include “City of God” by Augustine, “Politics, Morality, and Civility” by Vaclav Havel, “Who Stands Fast” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Federalist Papers,” “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville, and “A Practical View of Real Christianity” by William Wilberforce.
In addition, tomorrow, probably right around noon, we’ll be sending around a video link with a lightly edited version of today’s Online Conversation, which you can share with friends and others to start a conversation. And we will include in that additional readings, recommended resources, as well as discussion questions. So if you’d like to more deeply dig into or discuss what’s been said today with your small group or book club, we’ll have discussion questions with that email to kind of help make that easier for you to do.
So in addition, we’d love to invite all of you watching us today to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people united to advance Trinity Form’s mission of cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best of Christian thought for the common good. In addition to being part of that mission, there’s a whole variety of benefits attached with being a member as well, including a subscription to our quarterly Trinity Forum Readings, a subscription to our daily “What We’re Reading” list of curated reading recommendations, and as a special incentive with your new membership or your gift of $100 or more, we will send you a signed copy of Paul’s book, The Religion of American Greatness, so I hope you will avail yourself of that opportunity.
In addition, if you would like to sponsor an Online Conversation, we would love to hear from you. So just let us know in that online feedback form. Or you can always email us at mail@tff.org.
We have an exciting line-up coming up in the next few weeks and months as well. Our next Online Conversation will feature Abraham Van Engen around his new work, Word Made Fresh making the case for poetry for all Christians to be reading poetry. On September 6th, we are hosting Knox Thames and Nicole Bibbins Sedaca on religious freedom and persecution. And then throughout this fall, we’ll also be hosting Francis Collins, Yuval Levin, Byron Johnson, and many others. So stay tuned for that.
I’d also like to thank again our sponsor and co-host, Pepperdine, ably led by Pete Peterson, their dean in the School of Public Policy. We so appreciate the chance to work with you and also just want to thank my colleagues Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Brian Gaskin, and Marie-Anne Morris, who put the mission of the Trinity Forum into action. Finally, a big thanks to Paul.
And Paul, as promised, the last word is yours.
Paul Miller: So thank you for this conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. You’ve held up some of those booklets or pamphlets that Trinity Forum has published with past classic writings. I wonder if you’ve ever done one with the speeches of Frederick Douglass. His writings were some of the most hopeful and encouraging I ran across in my research for this book, and I recall his famous July 4th address in 1852. Everyone knows the famous line: “what to the American slave is the 4th of July?” What I love about that speech is that rather than just condemning America straight out, he affirms Christianity, and he affirms the Declaration of Independence and uses those to indict Americans for their failure to live up to those things. And it’s remarkable that he’s able to find things to affirm. That’s, I think, the truest patriotism. He came to love the ideas that informed what America said about itself, and used those ideas to challenge Americans to do better. And I think that’s the perfect way to use one’s Christian faith in the public square, to challenge America to be better and to do better, while recognizing the ways our practices have fallen short. So that’s the last thought I’d leave everyone with. Thank you so much.
Cherie Harder: Paul, thank you so much. You’ll be glad to know we do have the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. That is one more reading that you all can request. And, again, to all of our viewers, thank you for joining us. Have a great weekend.
