Well, in the early 5th century, Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, found himself on the precipice of unparalleled societal collapse. The Roman Empire was on the verge of falling and the Visigoths were basically knocking at his door and his congregation was asking him questions about how to understand the fall of Rome.

And here was the dynamic that Augustine was trying to navigate as you looked back through the previous centuries of the Roman Empire, when Rome was at its strongest is when they were persecuting Christians. When Christianity was on the rise, Rome fell. So how do you navigate that as a pastor when people are asking you what is the Lord doing?

Why is God bringing this empire to a screeching halt? People were quick to blame the Christians. If only the Christians would have also served the Roman gods, then God would have seen fit to extend the length of the Roman Empire, but instead the Romans were being converted to Christ and the empire fell.

Augustine spent, you know, ten years plus writing an answer to that question, which is the form of his book, The City of God, and the book is so complex, if you've read City of God, you know it defies summary, really. It's part philosophy, part theology, part history. The first eight or nine books or so he spends largely making fun of the Roman deities, which should not win him friends or influence people.

From there he moved on to addressing the reality that there is a city on earth, it's a city of men. They have hopes in the city of man, they have loves, compassions, desires, they have all the ethos and pathos of city of man is alive in people's hearts, and there's a city of God in the world as well.

You have people that interact with both of those cities, but they couldn't be more different. On the outside, the two cities could even look the same, but their ends are categorically different. I think we would all agree with that, and I think the American church by and large would agree with that as well.

But what would get Augustine in trouble today if he were to say it is his main conclusion of the book as I read it, which is that the fate of the city of man is disconnected from the activity in the city of God. That as the kingdom of God advances and waxes and wanes, it does not affect the duration of the city of man.

I mean that's, as I read Augustine, I take that away to be his main point. Augustine's militates against the idea that is so prevalent in American Christianity that if only the church would stand up and do this, we could win back our culture. If only the church would do this or that or the other thing, you're sick of inflation, you're sick of open borders, you're sick of rainbow flags on your elementary school teachers' lapels.

Well, if only the church would stand up and be the church, we could bring a stop to that. And there's this contradiction in so much of American Christianity that the United States is a nation under judgment by God for our conduct and at the same time, the church has the power to stop that judgment or to avoid that judgment or to direct society in a different direction.

And you can see that those two are in conflict with each other. Either we're under the judgment of God or we're not. How do you engage with people that are under God's judgment? Of course, you preach the gospel to them and appeal for repentance. Augustine comes along and says, "The spiritual condition of a society is disconnected from the rise and fall of the city of man." Nations come and nations go and the word of the Lord lives forever.

And you cannot, as a Christian, try to manipulate that or direct that. You cannot control the way God causes nations to rise and fall. If Augustine couldn't control the rise and fall of Rome, what do you think you're going to do? That's the reality behind Augustine's city of God.

It's in that context today that I want to talk to you about Christian nationalism. The title is how you shepherd Christian nationalism or shepherd people through Christian nationalism in an election year, which is like three subtitles in that, but that's fine. I thought of that while I was reading Augustine.

He's the king of 87 subtitles. You know, does your church hand out voter guides? Do you have the American flag on the pulpit? Do you organize little buses to take the elderly to go vote and cure their ballots? Do you get involved in elections? Do you have people running for office come and speak to your church?

Do you tell your church to mobilize and get active in order to win over society? Do you go after an election as a motivation in your church? And Christian nationalism is rising right now. I think there was by and large a consensus that ten years ago it was waning, that it was on the decline, but then COVID comes and churches get closed and, you know, the borders get opened and inflation goes up and you have the kind of the so-called evangelical elites that sat back and seemed to cheer all of that on, didn't they?

They seemed to rejoice in the open borders and they seemed to rejoice in the churches being closed. And when you have groups like the ERLC and other groups like that that are really celebrating restrictions on church, you have a lot of people in your own churches, I'm sure, that are looking at that and going, "Our Christian leaders, our religious leaders are selling us out.

There has to be a better way to navigate this." And so they're drawn to people that are talking with conviction and clarity in the political world. At least that has been my experience. The people that I have met in the last few years have been drawn towards Christian nationalism.

That's what's drawn them that way is they think, you know, it used to be, even five years ago, it was just in Christianese, when you were asked a layperson in your church to pray before a meal at a church potluck or before an evening service or whatever, and they weren't prepared, they would get up behind the pulpit or behind the casserole and they would start their prayer by saying, "God, we're thankful that we live in a country that is free and lets us meet here without restrictions and we don't take that for granted and thank God for the casserole." And you don't hear those prayers anymore, do you?

And the people that used to pray them are looking around going, "What happened?" And they're being drawn towards Christian nationalism. So of course any discussion on Christian nationalism has to begin with definitions. How do you define Christian nationalism? I'll start there. If you ask NPR, which I don't recommend, a Christian nationalist is anyone who is to the right of Justice Sotomayor.

A Christian nationalist is anyone who is pro-life, has a Bible, a Jesus fish on their car, or has voted Republican in the last 20 years. Would make you a Christian nationalist. Not a very helpful definition. If you ask somebody like Al Mohler, he defines, he describes himself as a Christian nationalist.

The definition he operates from is kind of just the two words exist independently of each other. And Mohler's lexicon, nationalism, is the belief that there are nations and that nations should generally speaking look out for their own interests above other nations. That's just a larger political theory. Christian is attaching the word Christian to that.

There's nations that look out for their own interests and some of those nations are Christian and Mohler would clarify that that's by their Judeo-Christian heritage, the Anglo-Protestant legal tradition is the phrase Mohler often uses that Western civilization has come out of this Anglo-Protestant tradition from the Reformation forward that has given us common law, the notion of common law, and the sense of liberty and democracy and all of that.

And that's what he means by Christian nationalism. And I think Mohler's description of Christian nationalism makes so much more sense if you just take it out and substitute the word conservatism. When he talks about it, he really means conservative, not in like conserving, slowing down the cultural decline, but in recognizing that there's a legal tradition that stretches back hundreds of years that is the basis of liberty and democracy and we should embrace that legal tradition.

And that's fine and well. I mean, that's fully compatible with every statement of faith that is probably represented in this room. There's nothing overly controversial with that form of Christian nationalism. And so that's not my desire to critique that form of Christian nationalism at all for lots of reasons.

But the form of Christian nationalism that is more prevalent in our churches, in my experience, that is more dangerous in our churches, and is probably why you're here today, is much more of the active form of nationalism, the call for some kind of Christian prince or Christian leader to engage in leadership in our nation, to galvanize the church, and to see some kind of melding of the church-state relationship.

I'm thinking of, I brought this up for show and tell today, The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolf. This is a, it's a long book. It's very well written and well researched and it's had an outsized impact on a lot of our churches as people have read it and they're reading it and they're being drawn to the answers that he's offering, that there's hope in the church by placing this desire to see a reformation inside of government and see our nation linked with a kind of Christian nationalism.

Wolf, in this book, defines Christian nationalism as, quote, "The totality of national action consisting of civil laws and social customs conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ." So it's a, it's a detailed definition. It's a little bit circular.

His version of Christian nationalism is basically things the Christian nation does. So it becomes a little bit circular, but when you go through his understanding of Christian nationalism and what is appealing to people about it, it's very much an active role from the government in propagating the Christian faith.

It's this idea that the government is, has an active command of God or an active duty from God to propagate the Christian faith, to guard the church from heretics, to rebuke slothful or lazy ministers, to summon church synods and councils, to clarify statements of faith, to fund missions, to have oversight and general sense of the church of God on earth.

Say it in a way that I think would honor Wolf's larger argument in most of the Christian nationalism books that I have read. They would argue the government has a role in fostering true religion, in keeping the church accountable, in guarding them from heretics. The core of that form of Christian nationalism is the idea that a nation properly expressed exists of one ethnicity and ethnicity there is almost a synonym for nation.

Wolf would say, you know, there's some differences between them, but as I read him, he defines a nation properly constituted as existing of only one ethnicity, and that ethnicity is a shared culture, language, values, traditions, calendars, you know, foods and social customs and all of that. And then Christian nationalism is a nation that is deliberately and intentionally Christian in those holidays, Christian in those rituals where a government guards the Sabbath and facilitates church worship on the Sabbath is an example he often uses.

And again, rebukes slothful ministers and has oversight in a general sense of the church. In this form of Christian nationalism, the political leader, in a sense, is the protector of the church. The political leader in this kind of Christian nationalism is not a pastor. He's not doing the sacraments or the ordinances.

He's not preaching. He's not baptizing babies in this form of Christian nationalism. He's not doing those things, but he's keeping watch over it. That has an appeal to our current generation of evangelicals, especially younger people who are drawn towards kind of an authoritative protector of the church when they see, as I mentioned earlier, a previous generation of people who were to be protecting the church have kind of abdicated their responsibilities.

I won't drag you through all of this book, but I did just to let you know where I'm going. I have four critiques of this form of Christian nationalism, not just this book, but that form of Christian nationalism that are philosophical, and then I have five critiques that are theological.

So that's where I'm headed. I want to critique this view of Christian nationalism from a philosophical perspective or kind of just like reading the book and saying, "Here's four things that I really don't like, and then I'll give you five theological reasons that you should not be a Christian nationalist." That's where we're headed.

So first of all, I will say this, there are some good things in this kind of Christian nationalism. There are some good things. The way he esteems parts of our country's past kind of Christian heritage, the way he defends Mayberry. There's a section in this book where he defends Mayberry like, "Don't you wish your kids could grow up in the kind of cul-de-sac where they can play with their neighbors, and you don't have to know where your 10-year-old is 24/7." There's a kind of wholesomeness that's there that he feels like we've lost, and not only have we lost it, but you have people that had criticized it, that spent decades criticizing the Christian cultures, creating false morality, and Pharisees, and Christian culture are bad, it interferes with the gospel.

And so now everybody's listening to them, and now we've lost that culture, and we've lost Mayberry, and we've lost the cul-de-sac where kids can play in, and all of that. So I do appreciate that about his book, along with other things as well. But I do want to clearly say my four big concerns with the book from a philosophical perspective.

First of all, it idolizes the past. It idolizes the past. He calls on Christians to kind of bring a restoration to our nation's own Christian past. He describes it as, quote, "a recovery of a former shared Christian ethic and ethnic tradition and heritage." And when you start describing it like that, it forces you to reexamine the past.

It forces you to ask a question, was our nation founded properly as a Christian nation? Was there a period in our nation's past where we really did function like a Christian nation? Once you start using the language of recovery, it's appropriate to ask, what are you recovering, and where are you looking for it?

You know, what are you retrieving from the past? Not everything that you retrieve from the past is good. Sometimes your golden retriever brings back a dead squirrel. You didn't want that. So what exactly is being retrieved from the past? And you would ask yourself, was there a time in the U.S.

history that it was functioning as a Christian kind of nation or culture? And it's very difficult to identify that time. I mean, I dare you. Start naming a decade where you're like, that's where we had a Christian culture. And here's a thought experiment for you. You would think of that and go back to that decade and ask yourself, the Christian leaders and pastors and ministers who were around back then, what did they say about the culture when they were there?

You know, Al Mohler often goes to the 1960s. That's where everything changed, he said, you know. 1961, Democrats and Republicans basically were the same when it came to social issues. And the sexual revolution comes, the wheels come off the car and, you know, here we are. But go back in your mind to that era of world history or American history and ask yourself, what did the leaders of that day say about American Christianity?

Evolution was on the rise. This is the decline of inerrancy, the attack on the fundamentals of the faith. This is the era where Martin Lloyd-Jones lamented American culture, particularly for its materialism, its embracing of liberalism, the racism that was rampant back then. All of that is worthy of substantial critique.

Or you go back further, okay, the 1800s there. Certainly that was the Christian zenith, the 1800s, before all of liberalism, before evolution became a thing, when the denominations were rocking and you got evangelists preaching in the streets, like that's where you're at. And then you go and read Spurgeon about that time period.

Christian George's introduction of the Lost Sermons of Spurgeon has some quotes of Spurgeon about the United States then. He called the American culture of the 1800s, quote, "shameful and abominable, abhorrent and bloodthirsty." And he said that unless the United States was punished with a graphic and brutal civil war, then the kind of justice he associates with God must not really exist.

Spurgeon did not mince his words when it came to the United States. And largely Spurgeon's critique was over slavery and race relations, which he didn't excuse England from either. He said, quote, "if slavery would not have come to the United States had it not been carried there from Manchester and Liverpool," he understood his own nation's complicity in that.

Nevertheless, he critiqued the American culture for its bloodthirsty and shameful and abominable ways. I mean, you can go back all the way to the United States founding and think about what the evangelists of that era said about our culture. Think of the kind of things that are in our founding from the Revolution forward.

Even, you know, the religious test clause in the Constitution. You can't have a religious test for government service. It's in our Constitution. That's not the kind of thing that you would put in your Constitution if you were deliberately constructing a Christian nation. And to prove that, you could ask any of the Christian nationalists you see today, in your view of Christian nationalism, should unbelievers be allowed to have high seats in the government?

Of course, it's antithetical to what they're putting forward. You know, the truth is our country wasn't founded by that concept of Christian nationalism. Obviously, there's an Anglo-Protestant legal tradition in our country. There's a form of liberty. There's a form of God providing rights to us, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all men are created equal kind of language.

You can't say people are created equal unless you believe that there's a creator. I mean, that's just straightforward right there. That's obviously in our country's fast, but our country chose the route of e pluribus unum, not in Christosolis. You know, we chose to embrace multiple ethnicities, multiple cultures, and amalgamate them into one nation rather than to say that we are a nation of a distinct Christian ethnic identity.

It's also not the 1619 Project. My point is that at no point in America's history did we have really a Christian culture, the kind of which that is argued for by proponents of Christian nationalism. My second concern about this form of Christian nationalism is that, first of all, it idealizes the past, but second, it impossibilizes the present.

Impossibilizes is not a real word, but it's going to fit with my outline, and I'm a preacher more than I am an English major. It impossibilizes the present. It presents an ideal for people that draws them in that is impossible to obtain. Wolfe says that Christian nationalism has never truly been experienced in our country, but that's almost, he reads as if he's saying it's because we haven't tried enough.

We haven't sought to put it into place with enough effort. In other words, all that's missing is willpower, but the truth is that's not what's missing in our country. It's not a matter of the church standing up and being the church and getting more of your congregation to vote and finally take our country back.

That's not it at all. The problem in our own country is that we're just dealing with a numbers game. The way is narrow that leads to life. If you're dealing in a democracy, the majority wins, and the church, the true church, is never going to be the majority. We're dealing in a culture now that is what is often called the negative world for Christianity, and that language I think is helpful.

Before the 1960s, Christianity had more or less a positive connotation in our culture. From the 1960s to 2010 or so, it had a neutral connotation. In other words, if you wanted to excel in politics in the 1940s or '50s, you probably had to be a church member. From the 1960s to 2010, it didn't matter.

You could be or you didn't have to be. Nobody really cared, but now it's a detriment. Now it's a negative association with you. If you want to rise in society, being associated with the church has a negative impact on you, so it's hard to make that jive with this idea of Christian nationalism that if only the majority of people would rise up and reclaim their Christian identity if you're functioning in a society with a negative view of Christianity.

The reality is that we are the remnant. I mean, I even think back to what presidential election was in the 2000s where Rick Warren moderated the debates. Do you remember that? He moderated a presidential debate. Could you imagine today? And he got lambasted for it even back then for being too, you know, too Christian and what's President Obama doing in this age with Rick Warren, of all people.

The whole thing just seems comical in retrospect. It's such a different world even from now. The truth is the church is the remnant. The church is the remnant. And when you start angling for a victory at the box office, that makes you at the ballot box -- California football right there -- if you're angling for a victory at the ballot box, it forces you to make coalitions and partnerships and political alliances to drum up a majority.

That's the way politics works. If you're going to lobby for a certain measure to be passed, you have to partner with the Catholic church. You have to partner with the Mormon church, what's so called. You have to partner with all of the different groups to get it across the finish line because the objective is political.

In our culture today, the church cannot advance something that far. If you take the Benedict option as your political model that you're going to, you know, retreat and make your own Christian society, don't be surprised if you have to partner with Benedictine monks. That's how that strategy works. Now for law issues, that's fine.

You know, to pass pro-life legislation for issues of law where the government is checking evil pro-life legislation, school vouchers, that kind of stuff that is law issues, it's fine to be co-belligerents with people that aren't Christians. That's fine. But not for gospel issues. Gospel issues, there's an exclusivity of it.

You're not a co-belligerent in a gospel issue with people that aren't regenerates. But in Christian nationalism, that divide gets erased. And the way it's presented, as I read this form of Christian nationalism, it presents a union between law and gospel issues both under the general authority of the government which requires a kind of partnership that erodes gospel distinctives.

The majority of a nation will never be able to institutionalize true religion. That's the problem. What's missing from all these books about Christian nationalism is examples of this kind of government actually having occurred in church history. And that's because the majority is generally wrong, the true church is the minority, and at some point you just have to ask yourself, what am I supposed to do?

If I believe in Christian nationalism, I want to be a Christian nationalist, let's roll, let's go do this thing, let's do it. What do I do now? Vote harder? Press the button harder? Harder? I'm running out of options here. Get my neighbor to press the button? I mean, you're in California, how many people you got to get to vote here to make a difference?

It just makes it an impossible situation. My third concern with Christian nationalism, it idealizes the past, it impossibilizes the present. Thirdly, it institutionalizes the church. It institutionalizes the church. The classic Baptist political theory has a separation of church and state, and by separation of church and state, of course we don't mean it as it's often used today, but more of the classic two-kingdom theology.

There's a civil magistrate that rules the civil affairs of the world, the law category in the world, and there is the church that has ecclesiastical oversight that oversees the souls. This form of Christian nationalism erodes that distinction by institutionalizing the church, by giving the government oversight and authority in the realm of the church.

I think it's helpful to think through how this develops, you know, Augustine's approach, the city of God and the city of man, when Augustine's using that language, he doesn't mean by the city of man, government, and the city of God, church, he meant really like your hopes and how you're partnering with people.

It maps onto government really well, but he means more or less that non-Christians are the city of man. But that developed in the Catholic church to what's called the doctrine of the two swords. In the Catholic church, you have really two spheres, you have the kingdom of man, ruled by kings and presidents and whatever, and then you have the kingdom of the church, ruled by the church, and the doctrine of the two swords, it's one person who holds both swords.

One person who has oversight of both, that's the pope in the Roman Catholic church. Well, that's been morphed over time to this idea in Catholicism where the actual political leadership is more of a hands-off kind of association, you have the king of England, he's the oversight of the church really, but not really, he protects it, he's the protector of the church, but he's not really the head of the church, even though that's what the documents might say.

That's the classic doctrine of the two swords. The Puritan tradition went a different way. The Puritan legal tradition went separately and said you have two kingdoms, but let's keep them separate from each other. We don't want one person ruling the church and one person ruling the state. That would be bad.

There has to be distinctions. And granted, in early Puritan history, those distinctions were somewhat unfortunate. Like when you think of the kind of church-state separation that some of the Puritans had like John Owen or Samuel Willard or people like that, I mean, it was often the church IDs the heretics and the government kills them.

That was their view of separation of church and state. They told the government, "Would you stop calling people heretics? Let us do that." And the government tells the church, "Okay, would you stop killing them? Let us do that." Great. Deal. Let's roll. We've moved on from that, of course, but you should have sympathy for some of those guys.

You know, Samuel Willard, he's called to testify at the Salem witch trials. There's somebody on trial for being a witch and the judge says, "What did the pastor say? Call him up. Bring the pastor. Swear him in. Are there witches? What should we do to him?" I mean, how would you respond to that?

It's just, again, such a different world that we're in now. But that was the idea of separation of church and state. Christian identity, Christian nationalism often melds those and brings them back together. To use, I think, their own terminology, I would say that the state should be overseeing the law and not the gospel.

You don't want to give the state the gospel also. The state or the government messes everything up, don't they? Have you ever encountered something the government's done well? And this is hard for me pastoring in DC because when I use the word government, it's like the people. They're in front of me at the pews.

I'm like, "The government's awful." And they're like, "Hey, I stayed late on Friday. Back off." You know, it was Reagan, right, who said the nine most frightening words in the English language. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." There's some truth to that. Would you want to shift gospel implications and church oversight and the power to rebuke slothful ministers and whatnot over to a category of people that don't do their own obligations well?

You want them to have more power and power in the realm of the church? Please no. Please no. You know, you want the government to be able to get power to the church to turn the lights on. To have the water come out of the faucet. Those kind of things.

You don't want them to oversee the ordinances of the church. Fourthly, my first concern is that Christian nationalism idealizes the past. The second, it impossibilizes the present. Thirdly, it institutionalizes the church. Fourthly, it idolizes ethnicity. It idolizes ethnicity. And forgive me for reading now because I want to stay close to my words.

Overall this desire, and presented in books like this, is a desire to guard ethnic heritage. And they use the language of ethnicity, not the language of race. We understand that we are all one race. There's not multiple races. Race is a biological fiction, granted. In their world, they embrace this concept of ethnicity to describe certain shared cultural features.

But then they argue that every nation, properly comprised, is made up of only one ethnicity. And as I mentioned earlier, that's just not the route that the United States took. The United States deliberately was designed with multiple ethnicities embraced inside of its borders, from Spanish Catholics to, you know, the Dutch to the slaves to the Puritans and everyone in between.

You know, the founding of New Mexico predates the founding of Plymouth Rock. Do we count as properly constituted in the United States? And I use the word "idolize ethnicity" because so much of this argument hinges on putting ethnicity back into the Garden of Eden and seeing it before the fall.

A lot of these Christian nationalist arguments hinge on the idea that governments and ethnic divisions would have happened without the fall in the world. Had no sin entered in the world, there still would have been government because people on one part of the stream need the water for farming and people on another part of the stream need it for, you know, cooling metals or whatever.

And so they're going to have to, even though there's no sin, they're going to have to break up into different government divisions to regulate the shared use of resources and that over time will have cultural implications. So it's this desire to put ethnic distinctions and government back before the fall.

And that's why I use the word "idolize" because if you have such a care and a hope in something that is important to you, it existed in a sinless world, it might be an idol. It might be an idol. Of course, they would stay away from the concept of race, as I mentioned earlier, yet so much of their description of ethnicity has racial overtones to it, which leads to all kinds of clumsiness.

In a lot of the Christian national circles, there's, you know, debates over are interethnic marriages appropriate? You know, and I've heard some of these Christian leaders say, you know, interethnic marriages are, you know, marriages between people of two different ethnicities are not wise because your kids will be confused, they won't know, you know, where their people are, they won't know what their culture is, they're just, you're setting them up to lose if they're part of the fruit of an interethnic marriage and it's just, it's sad, really, the way it's described.

And I've heard one of the leaders say, there's a category for a marriage between people of different ethnicities. It's not gay marriage. Gay marriage is no marriage at all, but it's closer to a marriage between a believer and an unbeliever. It's unwise and it's foolish and it's not going to be good, but it's still a valid marriage.

I'm hearing that going, wow, thanks, you know, if you're married to someone who's not your ethnicity, it's in the category of a foolish marriage to a non-believer. It's just unhelpful and very confusing language and, of course, when they're criticized for that, they always say, but you're not using the word ethnicity the right way.

Well, I'm, I'm sorry, I'm trying to use it the right way. I've read all the reading. I've done all the books. Like, I've really done my homework. I'm trying to use it like you're using it and it seems like you're defining ethnicity as shared culture, shared values, shared language, shared traditions, foods, and all of that.

I got a concept for that and people marry from different ethnic groups and, you know, there's a society that you should freeze all kind of marriages outside of your own nation or language group or whatever for a period of time until our country sorts itself out and has its own ethnicity that's kind of recovered from the inside out.

And it's just really insane, honestly, and it's so different in the way the Bible describes Christians with ethnicity. Isn't it? I mean, the Bible doesn't speak of Christian ethnicity like that. The Bible does use the term ethnicity for Christians, of course, but we are a holy priesthood. We are our own kind of nation, so to speak.

So to elevate culture or ethnicity to where you're like, "Oh, it's a close call of two people from different ethnic groups should get married. It's just such a close call," shows that you've really lost touch with the overarching force of ethnicity in the Bible. The New Testament does not give the church the mandate of preserving ethnic groups but of transforming them with the gospel.

That's the great commission. So those are my concerns. Christian nationalism, presented by Wolf and other Christian nationalists, idealizes the past and possibleizes the present, institutionalizes the church, and idolizes ethnicity. Now here's my theological concern. So this is the part where I want to convince you, you're like, "Okay, I get that, but still, can I be a Christian nationalist if I don't, you know, for other reasons?" And so here's why Christian nationalism is just frankly not compatible with premillennialism, not compatible with the Baptist worldview, not compatible with what I would consider proper theology.

So that's the first reason. Christian nationalism presents the partnership of government and church in a confusing way, and I'll give you five of these ways. First of all, those two groups have different covenants. Government and nations have a different covenant than the church. The origin of government -- I know the word covenant makes some of you uneasy.

The origin of government is from the Noahic covenant. Government comes from God entering the world after the flood and telling Noah, first of all, there's animals for you to eat, there's a food source involved, be fruitful and multiply, which is, you know, goes back to the garden, but then God adds, "Whoever sheds man's blood by man's hand shall his blood be shed," and God gives the sword to the world to punish evildoers.

This is the origins of government. Government comes into the world through the Noahic covenant to check evil, and this is how government is often ascribed throughout the rest of Scripture. After government instituted, the nations go their own way. That's the language of Acts 17. God allowed the nations to go their own way.

He appoints from one man every nation of mankind to live, speaking of Noah, on all the face of the earth, having determined the allotted periods and boundaries of their dwelling place. In the days of Peleg, the nations divided and they shifted from each other, and Paul says God did this so that people one day might grope their way back to the gospel.

One day they might encounter Christ. So God designed nations. He designed them to go their own way, but to bear the sword to check evil. They were designed by God. God invented nations, not in the Garden of Eden, but after the flood, and He did not tell nations that their job was to promote true religion, or to check evil, I mean, not to promote true religion, but to check evil, to protect life, and to protect family.

In Christian nationalism, there's a syllogism that they often use. The syllogism is that civil government ought to direct its people to true religion. Christianity is the true religion, therefore civil government should direct people to Christianity. Do you follow that logic? And so what's the problem with that? And not every syllogism is, you know, valid, of course.

You know, people with two legs can run a marathon. I have two legs, therefore I can run a marathon. Something broke down in that syllogism. Civil government's obligation is to promote the true religion. That's where it breaks down. Did God design civil government with the obligation to promote true religion?

I say He did not. The Noahic Covenant is not a redemptive covenant. The Noahic Covenant restrains wrath. It says as long as the rainbow is there, I'm not going to, you know, flood the earth again. There's universal judgment is coming. God will destroy the earth, but the rainbow, in a sense, holds it back.

The rainbow does not prophesy a Redeemer. The rainbow hangs in the sky, but it doesn't have blood on it. There's no blood of the lamb in the rainbow. That's a covenant that restrains evil. Much like government, which comes in as part of this covenant, is designed to check evil and restrain it.

The government does not produce the Savior. Government doesn't even point to the Savior. The nations go their own way, because one day the Savior will come independent of them through God's special nation, Israel, through the Abrahamic Covenant. The Savior will come through that, through the Davidic Covenant. He'll be a king from that line.

But He doesn't come as a fulfillment of the Noahic Covenant. He comes so the nations that went their own way, founded by God in the Noahic Covenant, can grow up their own way and find Him. It's just categorically different. The church, meanwhile, comes on the foundation of the new covenant, that Jesus was resurrected from the grave, on the basis of the blood of an eternal covenant.

And we now have a church that's based in the new covenant that is going to the nations. It transcends national divisions, transcends ethnic divisions, bringing the gospel to the world. It's categorically different than the nations. So this idea that the two, the nations and church, have some kind of union under the common administration of government, is so flawed.

It's so flawed. They have different designs. They're from different covenants. That means they have different goals. The goal of the nation is not to promote the true religion. The goal of the nation is to check evil and make sure there's peace. That's what a good government does. You want a good government that punishes evildoers, throws them in jail, and promotes the corporate well-being of the people through common peace.

It's the church's job to promote the true religion. If everybody would stay in their own lanes, things would be so much better. Don't remove those lane lines. They have different goals. Because they have different goals, they have a different focus. The focus of the church is the mediator of the new covenant, the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

The focus of government is the common peace of the people. And because they have a different focus, they have different agents. The government agents bear the sword to check evil. The Christian agents, I mean, are the ministers of the gospel, the priesthood of all believers through the mediatorial role of Jesus Christ.

And because they have different agents, they have different laws. The government operates from common grace, natural law, general revelation, which of course is flawed because of sin. And there's the prophetic voice of believers that tell people, "Hey, homosexuality is wrong and transgenderism is wrong. We use our prophetic voice." So those kinds of things are deducible from just natural revelation and human reasoning.

That's very different than the law that binds the church together. The kind of commands that the New Testament gives for the church are not given to nations. The commands you see to nations, like Romans 13 style, are the same thing nations were told back in Genesis 8. There's not new commands in Genesis 9.

There's not new commands in the church, I mean, in the New Testament to nations. But all of the structuring of the church is brand new in the New Testament. So nations have their origin long before the church in time. They have, because of that, different goals, different focus, different agents, different laws, different ethnicity.

Nations, if you want to grant the case, which I don't. But if you want to grant the case, which again I don't, but if you want to for the sake of argument that every nation should have only one ethnicity, okay, whatever. It's just different how the church works. The church, a multi-ethnic church is a glorious thing.

It celebrates the transcendent power of the gospel. If you say a multi-ethnic nation is prone to divisions and divides and race riots and all that, okay, whatever. I'm not even that interested in that argument. I'll grant it for the sake of discussion. The church is so different. The more diverse the church is, the more glorious the gospel that's presented in the churches.

That's why a multi-ethnic church can be a wonderful sense of the transcendent power of the gospel. And so if you're coming and looking at that, like a multi-ethnic church and you're looking at that and you're going, "Wow, that celebrates the glories of the gospel," and somebody else comes along, "Yeah, but that's not good for civic identity.

That confuses civic identity." You're painting a civic goal that is at odds with a religious goal. And that's a problem. That's a problem. When you're turning something that's positive, namely the transcendent power of the gospel is present in a multi-ethnic church, into a negative, a threat to social cohesion and identity, you're doing something wrong.

In fact, I have a definition from Stephen Wolfe of ethnicity. He says, "Ethnicity is," and listen to this so carefully, "familiarity with others based on common language, manners, customs, stories, taboos, rituals, calendars, social expectations, duties, loves, and religions." I love that definition. That's the church. We have our common language.

We have Christianese. I made fun of it earlier. Do you remember? We have Christianese. We have common taboos. We have common calendars and rituals and ordinances or sacraments, whatever word you want to describe it. We're bound together by a common entity. That's the church. And if you say a nation is only properly composed of one ethnicity, I object.

I object. And because they have all those different things, they have different ends. The end of the city of man is not good. God will judge it. It will burn away. The end of the city of God is triumph. It's triumph. Now in Christian nationalism, they would grant a distinction between the city of man and the city of God.

They would grant a distinction between government and church. They would grant all those. But I'm saying that in Christian nationalism, as I read it, while they would say they function with different ordinances and all of this, while they would say they have those differences, they conflate them. They argue that you should have a Christian prince that leads the Christian nation.

A Christian prince who aspires to rule justly and who doesn't long for power for its own sake, who will fund missions and restrain heretics and can mediate any problems with wisdom and an almost omniscient grace. That's their description of the Christian prince. And I'm reading that description going, yeah, please tell me that's Jesus.

Please, is that, because you just described him. A glorious ruler who's practically omniscient, who knows how to handle every problem and bring societal peace. I want that person. I want him to be my king. Is that who you're talking about? No. No. Well, shucks, because I'm looking at the people on the ballot and I don't see that guy.

All right, so my first theological concern is the two nations are rooted in different covenants, which produced all those other differences. Secondly, they have different law. They have different law. Political authorities make and enforce laws that are grounded in the Noahic covenant to promote the common peace. In the church, there's nothing like that.

There's no new covenant commands to the church about how to make laws for the common good in society. The language of the Christian nationalists is don't you want the government to function according to Christian ethics? And they say it like it's, you know, the second class condition in Greek, like the answer should be obvious.

Obviously, you're a Christian, you want the government to function according to Christian ethics. You don't want to just say, "Hold on. What ethics are we talking about here?" When you say Christian ethics, what do you mean? Do you mean turn the other cheek? Do you mean take no vengeance for yourself?

Do you mean those kind of ethics? Because no, I don't want the government to do that. You hit a police officer. I don't want the police officers to say, "Brother, sermon on the mount style. Hit the other cheek." Romans 12, don't take vengeance on people. Let the Lord do that.

Imagine if you tried to have a government that lived out that Christian ethic. In fact, Romans 13 comes with the government bearing the sword. If you want the Romans 12 ethic, you need the Romans 13 government or it will not work. The reason you can turn the other cheek when somebody hits you is because the police are not far behind.

It's so important to see those two spheres operating. There's some overlap, of course. You live in both spheres. You're a Christian. You call 911 and say, "A guy's punching my neighbor." They don't say, "Are you a Christian?" You know, they just roll in. It's different laws. And the laws I'm telling you that the God designed government to engage in are rooted in Genesis 8, apply to the nations at large.

The laws God gave Israel in the Old Testament are different than that for their own particular purpose in the Old Testament, and the instruction in the New Testament does not rewire the nations, but it does rewire the church. We derive our ethic from the New Testament teaching of the Lord.

The personal ethics of the new covenant and the kingdom of God go well so much together. They cleave together so well, and that's not the ethics of a functioning government. Number three, they have different covenants, different law. Thirdly, they have different obligations. As I mentioned, the government's obligation is to punish evil and protect life, to protect the family, to regulate the food sources.

That's the government's obligation. That creates the conditions where true religion thrives. True religion thrives in a nation where the government checks evil. This is, again, Acts 17. God designed the nations to go their own way so that one day they can turn and look for the Savior. So government is doing its job when it checks evil.

The gospel comes in from the inside out. You know, missionaries come into the nation. The gospel takes root in the nation, and the gospel spreads from there while the government is checking evil. The government doesn't promote the propagation of the gospel. The government checks evil, and Christians promote the propagation of the gospel.

They have different obligations. The government should not be making decisions based on what's best for Christianity. The government should be making decisions based on what is best for the common peace. And that's largely – you could say it's a distinction without difference, I suppose, but it is different motivations.

And it's important because then you have non-Christian leaders in your governments. Non-Christians can be excellent government leaders. They really can. They can check evil. They can refuse bribes. They can operate with an ethic that they have achieved from natural revelation for the common good and human reasoning. Of course they can.

That doesn't mean they're redeemed. It's the age-old question, would you rather have a competent non-Christian president or an incompetent Christian president? That's why it's kind of superficial to say, you know, if the guy's a Christian, I'll vote for him. Well, maybe have some other follow-up questions. And if you don't understand that, try owning your own business.

You know, do you want the 16-year-old who doesn't know what they're doing but is a Christian or the 16-year-old who's like a hard worker and shows up early? At least you can evangelize a second one. You know, the government takes liberty away from people. The government, of course, does that.

But the government can't grant liberty. Liberty comes from God. We know that. And so that's why I say different obligations. The obligation of the government is not to grant you rights or grant you liberty but to make sure they're not taken from you. The church's job, then, is to come in and preach the gospel to all people making disciples.

Number four, they have a different identity, a different identity. Government identifies as the majority by definition. There's the British expression. It doesn't matter who wins the election, the government will always take its seat. It doesn't matter if the Democrats win, the Republicans win, the government will be in power tomorrow.

That's just the reality. The church is always the minority. We have a sojourner identity. And that is not just a New Testament reality. That is Old Testament as well. Think of the sojourner kind of language of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. How did they relate to the world as a sojourner?

They entered in contracts with government. They subjected themselves to kings and governors and little city council members. They bought wells and they bought graves. And when they didn't honor the government, they repented, right? When Abraham lied, he repents. Isaac lies, he repents. But they're engaging with the nation, so to speak.

Identifying as a sojourner. Joseph, even, identifying as a sojourner, even though he's rising in power, even though he practically is the government by the end of Genesis, he's still very clearly a sojourner. Daniel, in Babylon, literally in Babylon, not figuratively, literally in Babylon, operating as a sojourner without compromising his own identity.

That's the pattern for the church. And that language is picked up in the New Testament as we are called sojourners. So the question is, does the New Testament change your sojourner identity? And the answer is no. The New Testament embraces the sojourner identity, embraces our identity as aliens and exiles in this world.

And so, this is why premillennialism is not compatible with Christian nationalism. Even though it's, in the last few weeks, I've seen all kinds of Christian nationalists say, "Eschatology has nothing to do with this. You can be a premillennialist and be just happy as a Christian nationalist. Come on, we don't care about eschatology.

Just vote harder." But it's so important because in premillennialism, we recognize the sojourner identity of the church. In postmillennialism, of course, you're operating an assumption that the gospel's going to grow in a nation until it eventually becomes the predominant culture and ushers in some kind of Christian national identity.

That's fine. That's postmillennialism. That's Christian nationalism. Go for it. That's your thing. But it's not my thing because of my premillennial convictions about the nature and the identity of the church. And that touches on my fifth and final point. They have different hopes. Different hopes. The hope of the city of man is fickle.

This is where it's so dangerous for our church, brothers. Election year is coming up. The government's going to win. And you have people in your congregation. Their hearts are going to be so drawn to this. Right now. Let me check what's happening. What did Trump do? Their hearts are so drawn to this.

And they're invested in it. And they want to do more. And you know, you're in a state that hasn't voted red in like, you know, forever. And your people's hearts are all wrapped up in this. And they're distracted. It's too much hope in elections. Last presidential election, you know, the election happened on Tuesday.

And by Sunday, people at church were just like talking about it and talking about it and talking about it. And what's going to happen? And the MyPillow guy is on TV. And it's the whole thing, remember? And so I pulled the car over and I preached Psalm 131, a song of ascents of David.

Oh, Yahweh, my heart's not lifted up. My eyes are not raised too high. I don't occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous. I've quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child within me. Oh, Israel, hope in Yahweh. That's the whole Psalm right there.

That's David as king writing, God, I don't want to think about things above my pay grade. If David can look at the political landscape of the world and go, that's above my pay grade, you can quiet your soul. What's a bigger risk? The outcome of the election or you just losing your first love?

I mean, it's true. And the more you love the election and all that, and the more you love the whatever, politics, it just sucks your heart in. I had somebody come to me and say, you know, the liberal churches in town, all the African-American churches and the denominational churches, they're bringing buses in.

You know, show me clips in their phone of like the preacher who's like, you know, all fired up for Biden and they got buses lined up to help everybody go vote early. And it's like, if only our church would do that, we could offset them. Like those are, that pastor's preaching on election.

I'm like, I'm happy to preach on election. No, not that one. Like why don't we get the buses? Why don't we do the voter guides? Why don't we do all that stuff? If the other, if the liberal churches are doing it, why don't we do it? And it's not a numbers game in that regard.

For us, it's this totally philosophy of ministry, because I'm so concerned you get distracted about this world, the kingdom of man, man, the kingdom, you want to know what's going to happen to the kingdom of man. What does God say about it? It's going to go down. So don't love it.

Run from it. You want other churches to take you, bus you to go get your, you know, vote 27 times for election day. It's not going to be our church. And they say, it's time for the church to stand up. Let me tell you, the true church is always standing up.

That's all we do. That's all we do. And this is why I'm so weary even of saying, yeah, okay, so you want to impact elections and politics. You evangelize people. And once they get saved, they'll vote the so-called right way. It's like, no, because I have Piper sermon from a few nights ago in my head that you can tell the glory of something by the end of it.

If you're like, yeah, evangelism is good and conversions are good, because then we'll finally get an election outcome. That's still missing the point. Evangelism is not the means to the end of better elections. Oh no. Evangelism is the means to the church expanding and magnifying the glory of God on earth.

Don't confuse those two. So what's the alternative to Christian nationalism then? What's the alternative? It's the embassy identity. The church is an embassy. The church is an embassy. We're a foreign outpost in a foreign land. And in our embassy, we have people from all kinds of nations. That's fine.

That's great. Come on in. And in our own embassy outpost, we develop our own culture, our own language, our own rituals, our own customs. We develop all those. And we send our people back out into the foreign and hostile worlds. 1215, Sunday morning, they go back out in the world.

Tell me you, 1230, 1245. They go back out in the world and they're going to come back again next Sunday for strengthening and equipping. And they're going to go back out in the world. That's their embassy identity. And you tear that down when you conflate the two kingdoms. Christian nationalism tears that down.

It says the church isn't an embassy. It's the kingdom. It's headquarters. It's HQ. It's not HQ of this world, my friends. We do not have a lasting city. You want to build a lasting city? You better not be building in this world because nothing will last. We do not have a lasting city.

We fight. We labor. And we strive. And we try to wrestle our eyes off of this world and onto the next. You know, I think talking about voting is fine and helpful, especially in discipleship conversations because it reveals so much of a person's heart. You know, a person's heart is like, you know, I'm just torn, like, you know, this person is pro-abortion, but this person, you know, wants to fight global warming, you know, so I can't tell.

I can't tell which is worse, help. And so those are good conversations in just normal discipleship. That's fine. That brings that stuff out. But your goal in that conversation is not to get the person to vote the right way. Your goal, honestly, is to get the person to get his eyes off of this world onto Christ who will, of course, transform everything else.

Listen, I don't want open borders. I don't want gay flags in schools. I don't want that kind of stuff. But I don't want to lose the preciousness of the church. I don't want to sacrifice our embassy outpost for an election that's going to happen next year because even if you get away with it and even if the person you want to win wins and whatever, it's going to happen again in four years.

Which is sucked into a cycle of craziness. We don't have a lasting city. You want an embassy? Get the flag out of your church. You want an embassy? Get the voter guides out of your church. You want an embassy? Get courage and convictions to compel the gospel forward. You know, people get so wrapped up about an election and it's so helpful to know the theme of this conference, truth triumphs.

Jesus is coming back and He's not going to be voted into office. He's got the throne pre-made. The oath appointing Him the mediator and the King of the world that is uttered in Psalm 2, repeated in Hebrews 1 and 5, that oath already happened. That oath was already recorded back in David's day.

Of course, spoken at an event when He ascends into heaven. It's a timeless oath. And He's going to come back and take over His throne and rule over the nations. We long for that day, and that's the day we set our eyes on. God, we're grateful for the promise of a kingdom that won't fail, for the promise of a new Jerusalem that will come from heaven, established on the earth.

Lord, we do pray for our own country and the leaders in our own country, we pray that You would give them wisdom to rule justly, and we pray that they would leave us alone so that we can work quietly with our hands, leading a quiet and dignified life, spreading the gospel wherever You give us opportunity.

We want to be wise as serpents, innocent as doves, knowing that ultimately, we are lambs among lions. God, give us grace until the day of slaughter causes us to stand for You. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen.