Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity
In the past decade—or perhaps more precisely since the advent of Donald Trump into Republican politics—evangelical Protestants have debated so-called “Christian nationalism,” a term that is so nebulous and so ill-defined that it can loop in secularist Trumpist politics, Christian Reconstruction, and nearly anything else that is exotic enough to pique the interest—or derision, or desires—of ministers, scholars, and politicians interested in the intersection of politics and religion. Into this conversation Joel Looper offers Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity. Looper sounds a familiar refrain, warning that the church’s—what church, exactly, is left somewhat undefined—entanglement with Trumpist politics has harmed the witness of evangelical churches. Trump and Christian nationalism, at least in Looper’s work, are symbiotic, and Trump’s shadow looms even when he is not mentioned in the work, although he is mentioned often, even repetitively. There are chapters that try to confront right-wing affinity for Russia, as well as a chapter against Stephen Wolfe’s Case for Christian Nationalism, but the lodestar and core interest is Trump.1 Looper is not against the church doing politics; he is against the church doing Trumpist politics.
Looper confidently tells us that, whatever positive political motivations there are in voting for Trump, “there is a prior issue few evangelicals have seriously considered, one that dwarfs the fate of the American republic in importance: how the Trump strategy affects the life and witness of the church” (56). This statement exposes the first serious weakness of Looper’s earnest and undoubtedly well-intentioned work: the book relies on inference and assumption. It appears in Another Gospel that the author is actually asking for a specific type of religious politics, and a theocratic politic at that. Looper, almost definitely unintentionally, rejects outright the historic Protestant doctrine of two kingdoms, wherein religion and politics are separate spheres of that rule, sacred and secular spaces respectively. In attempting to push back against one form of syncretism—Trumpist religiosity—Looper would have us return to an older syncretism, the Medieval papal milieu wherein the church did politics and religion, rather than Christ’s own proposition that the state, rather than the church, is the primary institution governing temporal politics. Looper, like many right-wing evangelicals he opposes, flattens politics and religion, (unintentionally?) annihilating a historic division between sacred and secular, and between church and state. To Looper’s credit, he is honest about his position. Trump “encourages Christians to identify the nation [we assume Looper is not using a precise definition of “nation” downstream from its Greek root and instead means the American republic] rather than the church as their primary community and to practice America’s politics rather than the politics of Jesus” (56). Jesus of course never asked Christians to practice his politics. Politics was, according to Christ, meant to be rendered to Caesar.
The development of the Christian church in the apostolic era and subsequently the era of the church Fathers mitigated the Caesaropapism of the Constantinian order. At the end of the 5th century Pope Gelasius reminded Emperor Anastasias that the church and the state ruled the world through separate spheres. There were, Gelasius wrote, “two powers, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely, the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power.” Even the emperor, the pope noted, bowed his head before mere priests in matters that were spiritual. But the church had to submit to the emperor in political matters. The two kingdoms doctrine, identified by Christ in his “render unto Caesar” discourse in Matthew 22, charged ministers of religion with recognizing the political “supremacy” granted to the emperor “from heaven in matters affecting the public order.” Priests were to obey the politics of the emperor, “lest otherwise they might obstruct the course of secular affairs by irrelevant considerations.” Likewise, the emperor owed the church deference and “obedience to whom is assigned the dispensing of the sacred mysteries of religion.”2 The church owes political leaders deference in politics, and rulers owe the church deference on sacramental matters.
Protestant reformer Martin Luther echoed Christ and Gelasius when he stated that “God has therefore ordained two governments: the spiritual which by the Holy Spirit produces Christians and pious folk under Christ, and the secular which restrains un-Christian and evil folk, so that they are obliged to keep outward peace, albeit by no merit of their own.”3 Neither Christ, nor Gelasius, nor Martin Luther, could conceive of a churchly politics or a politics of Jesus as Americans understand the term, precisely because Jesus’s mission was salvation, not politics. Likewise, Caesar’s mission was politics, not salvation. Looper says that Trump encourages American Christians to “believe another gospel, the gospel of America, which is not gospel at all” (56). More likely what’s happening is that Looper and Trump’s most ardent defenders are engaged in dueling theocratic propositions. When Trumpist Pentecostal pastor Greg Locke says that “there is no reason why the church of Christ can’t rule this country,” he too is asking for the politics of Jesus that rules over Trump as an ostensibly willing conduit.4 Anti-Trump evangelicals similarly ask for a politics of Jesus wherein the church makes decisions about who does and who does not have the divine right to rule, a proposition that is more consistent with the High Medieval papacy than the Protestant Reformation so-called evangelicals claim as their heritage. The bad news for most fanatical Trump devotees, and for his most violent enemies, is that there is not, nor has there ever been, a politics of Jesus for Christians to participate in, because politics is by its nature engaged in ordering political society, which by its very nature is not sacred.
A central admonition in Another Gospel is for the reader to orient their life away from the politics gospel of America and to reorient their mind and life “politically toward Christ.” But, Looper asks, what if “a Christian community’s life is directed toward nation, ideology, or some other good rather than the Gospel?” Then Looper warns, “your community is not a church in the full sense of the word” (64). Herein lies another central assumption of Looper’s work: Christian community and the church are synonymous, and when we pair this claim with the admonition to orient our politics towards Jesus, it becomes clear that in Looper’s estimation the church is the only divinely sanctioned power that can rule politically and spiritually. This proposition departs considerably from two kingdoms theology.
The conflation of the sacred and the secular leads Looper to posit an apocalyptic telos for Christian political engagement. He places Christ’s admonition to repent from the fourth chapter of Matthew’s gospel in the context of politics. Christians should orient their politics towards what Looper calls the politics of Jesus—a churchly political order—because “a different political reality is on the horizon” (95). Looper echoes theopolitical divines like Peter Leithart in the pursuit of an ecclesiocentric politics, wherein the church is the center of Christian spiritual and political orders. Leithart echoes Looper, in that the former argues that the “gospel is an inherently political message, announcing the Lordship and Kingship of Jesus.” Likewise, Leithart believes with Looper that “Christian political theory is ecclesiology. Or, more moderately, no political theory can be Christian without a central focus on ecclesiology.”5 The church, for Looper and Leithart, ultimately should call the political shots. Where they differ is not on theory, but on the person of Trump. Leithart believes there is a case for Trump, Looper rejects this out of hand. Christians, he states plainly, cannot vote for Trump.
Perhaps the most significant historical weakness of Another Gospel is the author’s tendency to rely on anecdote and inference rather than scholarship for assertions made through the work. He complains that John Winthrop, for example, used Jesus’s “city on a hill” metaphor in Matthew’s Gospel to praise the Puritan Commonwealth. That might, of course, be what Looper was told about Winthrop in his evangelical circles, but Looper’s claims that Winthrop “poached Jesus’s metaphor . . . and used it to exalt his new American community” are inaccurate (34). Historian Richard M. Gamble capably illustrated in his In Search of a City on a Hill that Winthrop included the statement not to praise the Puritan commonwealth, but instead to warn the Puritan commonwealth that they, like every other political community, would be judged by a holy God.6
Another Gospel is a fundamentally honest book, and for that the author deserves approbation. Looper’s theopolitical commitments do not allow for Trumpist politics. Other evangelicals’ theopolitical commitments, of course, do. Looper’s commitment to the politics of Jesus is a deeply theocratic commitment, so this reviewer in particular is wondering if Looper is actually more worried about politics than say the “witness” of the church, and he wants the church to use its moral authority to make political decisions and distinctions. This isn’t novel, nor is it unique to Looper. Fundamentally, the relationship between the church and politics might be to litigate political disagreements in the realm of politics, and theological disagreements in the church. There is, of course, the place of natural law and the natural order that leads to the intersection of the church and the political order on some level, but the phrase natural law never turns up in the book. What does turn up in the book is Trump, nearly 100 times in just over 120 pages of text. It is clear that Looper doesn’t like Trump and doesn’t like his entrance into American political life, a fair and perhaps understandable disposition. A book with a more historic and secure definition of the church and a more comprehensive understanding of the political might have been more convincing as to why Christians can’t support Trump.
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Footnotes
- Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Canon, 2022).
- Gelasius I, “Letter to Anastasius I,” in James Harvey Robinson, ed., Readings in European History (Ginn and Company, 1904), 1:72–73.
- William J. Wright, Martin Luther’s Understanding of God’s Two Kingdoms (Baker, 2010), 135.
- Max Ridgway, The Church of Trump: How Donald Trump Corrupted American Christianity (published by the author, 2022).
- Peter Leithart, “Ecclesiocentrism,” Theopolis Institute, January 30, 2023, https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/ecclesiocentrism/.
- Richard M. Gamble, In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth (Continuum, 2012).
