Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity
Miles Smith IV begins his review of Another Gospel by telling the reader that the book is about Christian Nationalism—which, he writes, can mean “nearly anything” pastors, professors, or politicians find “exotic” at “the intersection of politics and religion.”
At such a characterization, the discerning reader will likely raise an eyebrow. Surely this book must be about something more specific than that, she will say. Then, if she glances back at the list of topics Smith includes under the umbrella of Christian nationalism, she may notice that they all code as politically right wing. Ah, the reader will think. Looper is against these right-wing political commitments. He must be another Christian leftist attacking the right.
Here Smith, a capable historian, has relied on inference and assumption—which, as it happens, he also accuses Another Gospel of relying upon. To be sure, the book does make use of inference and assumption, and Smith’s right to scrutinize its argument at those points. Yet we think it’s worthwhile to discuss two massive, connected assumptions Smith himself makes in his write-up on Another Gospel. Because, if they are left unexamined, they can have insidious theological consequences—consequences far greater for the church than that of one book or one review.
In examining Smith’s first assumption, however, let’s begin with what he gets right. “Neither Christ, nor Gelasius, nor Martin Luther, could conceive of a churchly politics or a politics of Jesus as Americans understand the term,” he writes, “precisely because Jesus’s mission was salvation, not politics. Likewise, Caesar’s mission was politics, not salvation.”
Few would doubt the accuracy of this quote’s first clause. Certainly not us. After all, no one in the ancient world thought about politics like most Americans do, not even Caesar. When we hear the word politics today, we think of statecraft—that is, the business of gaining access to and exercising the power of the nation-state. In antiquity, however, the referent was much broader. Politics involved the ordering of a community’s day-to-day life through such things as law, narratives, and rituals, and its purpose was to make its citizens good and noble people.
Both Israel and the early church shared this understanding of politics with the gentile world. They saw themselves as chosen people among whom the Lord (note: a political title) was the primary political actor. He, above all, was making them a good and noble people. Yes, Saint Paul said our citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20), but that citizenship and thus our “salvation” involves being part of a this-worldly polity: the body (politic) of Christ.
To judge by his review, Smith’s approach to salvation involves only the individual soul. If so, it’s a modern innovation. William Cavanaugh has argued persuasively that religion began its journey toward becoming a “transhistorical, transcultural, essentially interior, and essentially distinct from public, secular rationality” in part because it placed political demands upon people that might undercut loyalty to the early modern state.1 John Locke’s and Immanuel Kant’s individualistic approaches to religion, for example, were downstream of this transformation. If Smith does sympathize with such modern theologies, it implies more than he suggests: not that our Christian confession should not conflict with national politics, but that it cannot.
The biblical problems with this approach are manifold. If salvation involves only the individual soul, it becomes difficult to understand why Jesus was crucified at all. A man rarely gets murdered by the state for individualistic, apolitical work on the inner life. The powers-that-be murder you when you become a political threat—which both first-century Jewish ultranationalists and their contemporaries in bed with Rome believed he was.
Then there is the church. The New Testament speaks about Christ’s body as a defiantly multiethnic people who, from the beginning, had the ancient equivalent of the electric chair at the center of its community life. That certainly seems political. They knew of no dispensation from the Spirit-led, word-fed politics of church for those involving “real” empire politics. No wonder the Epistle to Diognetus said that early Christians lived “in their own countries but only as aliens; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign.”2
The fact is, any subnational community that gives its allegiance to another Lord is bound to run into conflict with its government on occasion. The Reformational tradition has the theological tools to deal with this truth because they emphasize pledging allegiance to Jesus Christ. If this sounds unfamiliar, let us translate it into a more familiar idiom. We call this pledge of allegiance our confession of faith. As Paul wrote, “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord”—note again the political title—“and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9, ESV).
So then, salvation and politics are anything but distinct theological spheres. Rather, politics is internal to salvation.
Now for Smith’s second assumption. Though it’s dependent upon his first largely false assumption, there is a sense in which he got this right too. “Another Gospel,” he writes, “[advocates] for a specific type of religious politics, and a theocratic politic at that.”
We are indeed theocrats—but not in the sense that Smith’s anachronistic definition of politics as statecraft assumes. We instead confess and teach with the psalmist, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it” (24:1), and as members of the body of Christ, we are called to order our daily lives to the sovereignty of God as disclosed in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection and the sending of the Holy Spirit. What we do not say or claim is that God has delegated that sovereignty to any earthly polity or power, certainly not the church.
Smith rejects this “theocratic” position along with positions that might more normally be called theocracy, even calling it syncretism. But his alternative seems to be the complete segregation of politics and salvation. And the implications of this position are clear. Obedience to Christ would then no longer mean obedience in every area of life. “Faith” would end up divorced from obedience—that is, from works. The tree would be called healthy despite bearing rotten fruit.
This is not what the church fathers or the doctors of the church believed. In City of God, Augustine developed no theory of church and state. Neither did he divide sacred and secular or private and public into separate domains. He certainly posited no division of labor between Caesar and God.
Unfortunately, Pope Gelasius did allow something like this. Having misunderstood Matthew 22:22, Gelasius divided worldly authority between the empire (possessing potestas) and the church (possessing auctoritas). This was a monumental error. But take note: this fifth-century pope still wrote that these two powers “ruled the world.” Gelasius still believed that the gospel had political consequences. Absent this assumption, the entire papal letter Smith references is rendered nonsense.
Luther’s version of two kingdoms theology went still further—but again, he never backs the church-state division Smith advocates. Luther’s secular government restrained evildoers based on God’s law, what Lutherans call the first use of the law. Therefore, evildoers need to be taught this law—at which point the dichotomy Smith sees in Luther begins to break down. It breaks down still further when Luther claims that the secular sword has no use among Christians.3
Smith might simply reply that Gelasius and Luther had not yet shed their theocratic assumptions. The gospel should warm the home and heart, but it cannot responsibly be let out into the public arena.
Take this modernist route, however, and the gospel-formed public community we call the church disappears. It is left with no theological role; it becomes just another identity group or an association of like-minded people. No recognition remains of Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky’s insight that church and nation are two distinct societies, each animated by different virtues and ordered toward different ends.
That makes it easy for the nation-state to usurp the church’s place. Because if the gospel cannot hold God’s people together, culture, a homeland, and the rejection of outsiders will.
Which brings us to Donald Trump and contemporary evangelicalism. Smith apparently finds it exasperating that Another Gospel mentioned Trump so often. But it could not be helped. If this book were written in Russia, it would target the Russian world’s blurring of the gospel with its national culture. This blurring, after all, is the very definition of syncretism.
Modern American evangelicalism has become similarly syncretistic. For many (though not all) evangelicals, the church has collapsed into the world, its status as holy transferred to America.4 Trump bills himself as a messiah, the “only one who can save this nation,” yet key evangelical leaders and too many evangelicals in the pews venerate him—and as always, we become like those we venerate. No wonder open crassness, hatred of enemies, open disdain for others, racism, selfishness, sexual immorality, xenophobia, and greed have become increasingly publicly acceptable among evangelicals. No wonder there seems to be little euangelion left in evangelicalism.
Another Gospel is a call to theocracy only if theocracy means living as if Jesus reigns over the earth. It’s a summons to evangelicals: “Today, if you heard his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Heb. 3:15).
Footnotes
- William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9.
- “Epistle to Diognetus” in The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, ed. Michael Holmes (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007), 541.
- Martin Luther, “Secular Authority: To What Extent it should be Obeyed” in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1961), 369.
- See William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011).
