The Christian nationalists get the New Testament sort of right and history very wrong

The “West” is a complex civilisational phenomenon. It is pagan Europe converted to Christianity, divested of Eastern Orthodoxy, intellectually reinvigorated by the Renaissance, violently split between Protestantism and Catholicism, expanded by Colonisation, empowered and enriched by the Industrial Revolution, disenchanted by Modernity, shattered by the Great Wars of the twentieth century, and now deeply fractured by a Crisis of Identity at all levels of society. What does it mean to be white? What does it mean to have been so privileged? What does it mean to be female or male or whatever? What does it mean to have this history? What does it mean to be human?

One quite recent response to the crisis has been an attempt to recover the Christian value system that for long shaped the West’s identity and sense of moral superiority. This has been done by well-mannered philosophers and historians who have drawn attention to the fact that the West is still, by and large, the product of its Christian past. But far more media coverage has been gained by the bad-tempered and noisy populists who argue that only the restoration of a thorough-going, conservative Christian national identity will save Western societies from disintegration.

Peter Lynas has written a rather good analysis of Christian nationalism in the UK for the Evangelical Alliance. He differentiates helpfully between the American and UK contexts and offers a neat categorisation of the forms that Christian nationalism takes.

He then attempts to define the “prophetic task of the church.” How should the church in the UK shape public life—by feeding “grievance and exclusion” or by bearing witness to the “reconciling power of the gospel”?

Is this the best way to frame the controversy?

Let’s consider Jesus here.

There is a great deal of grievance and exclusion in the Gospels. Jesus came not to bring peace to the land of Israel but a sword:

For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. (Matt. 10:35-36)

He provoked intense resentment in certain quarters. He expected many Jews, perhaps most Jews, to be excluded from the restoration of national Israel, confined to an outer darkness, where there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

There is some ambiguous engagement with the odd gentile, but his mission is to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It is lost Jews who must be found, not the sojourner or the foreigner. It is alienated Jews who must be reconciled—not to God but to Abraham. The parable of the Good Samaritan is a critique of the Jerusalem establishment in the light of an extraordinary historical incident, not a simple morality tale about loving neighbours.

Jesus was executed as “king of the Jews”—not as king of the Samaritans or of the gentiles or of the world.

Peter declares to the “men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem”—disregarding, it would appear, the multitudes of diaspora Jews in the city during the festival—that God has “made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). The bad news was that this “crooked generation” of Judeans would suffer a devastating day of the Lord. The good news was that those who repented and were baptised in the name of this crucified Lord would be forgiven their sins and would be saved from the coming, real-world destruction.

This narrow, Jewish-nationalist programme is superseded, of course, when the story about God and Israel is told among the gentiles. Lynas is on more solid ground when he says:

At its core, the Christian confession is not Christ is King as a political slogan, but Jesus is Lord as a radical reordering of allegiance. When we proclaim Jesus as Lord, every other loyalty—nationality, ethnicity, political ideology, even family—finds its place beneath His rule.

But the statement is still misleading.

Undoubtedly, the ancient confession required a “radical reordering of allegiance” from both Jews and gentiles. It required the recognition that Israel’s crucified messiah had been granted a status and authority above all other powers, all other commitments, in heaven and on earth—nationality, ethnicity, political ideology, family.

But the radical reordering of allegiance was for the sake of a future outcome, and that determined the prophetic task of the churches: “There will be the root of Jesse, the one arising to rule over nations, in him will nations hope” (Rom. 15:12*; cf. Is. 11:10 LXX). The nations have been given to him as his heritage; he will shepherd them with a rod of iron (Ps. 2:7-9; cf. Rom. 1:4; Acts 13:33; Heb. 1:5; 5:5; Rev. 2:27; 12:5; 19:15). He will rule over his people in the midst of hostile nations (Ps. 110:1-2, 5-6; applied widely to Jesus in the New Testament).

So both in Israel and beyond, in the Roman world, the prophetic slogan “Jesus is Lord” was understood from the start to have profound and transformative implications for the political-religious life of nations and civilisations.

Contemporary Christian nationalism is in some respects closer to the outlook of the New Testament than we may be willing to admit. It can reasonably be seen as an attempt to recover the eschatological dynamic that drove the early Christian movement, culminating in the confession of Jesus as Lord not merely by individual Christians but by nations, by kings, by a culture, by an empire.

But that doesn’t make modern Christian nationalism right.

History only moves forwards, we cannot put it into reverse; and the prophetic task now, I think, is to imagine the relation between church and society after Christendom, after the Christian nation state, after the triumph of the pervasive secular-humanist worldview.

That means that the New Testament vision is not our vision. New Testament eschatology is not our eschatology except insofar as we share a final hope—beyond history, at the outer margins—for a new heaven and a new earth.

The sort of old fashioned evangelicalism represented by the Evangelical Alliance has already tacitly, unwittingly, conceded the point. The church prefigures not the parousia, not the rule of Christ over the nations, not Christendom as a regional political-religious entity, but a happy, transnational society in which “ethnic, social, generational and cultural differences” are overcome.

Yes, there is a belated recognition that globalisation adversely impacts native communities in the West: “While welcoming the refugee, we must create space for honest conversations about the impact of and limits to immigration.” But it still strikes me as a naïve, over-optimistic, idealised vision of the future that takes no account of the traumatic change that the world is going through.

What the church needs to be now, in America, in the UK, pretty much everywhere, is a prefiguring of what it means to live in the presence of the living God under immense social and ecological stress. The framework for the prophetic task is the disruptive arrival of the Anthropocene in all its Godless, costly, crushing glory. Christian nationalism will not serve that purpose.