If by Christian Nationalism you actually mean dominionism—the belief that the Church should seize the machinery of the state because only Christians are called by God to rule in the civil sphere—then yes, you’re right. Christian Nationalism is bad, and it should be resisted. History proves this.

But if by Christian Nationalism you mean an ideology fixed on the premise that the best ethic for governing is the Christian one—because it is already more than proven by the moral architecture of Western civilization its better concern for human dignity, true equality before the law, the sanctity of life, religious and civil liberty—then no, Christian Nationalism is not the problem. In your unfortunate grappling with bad definitions, you are the problem.

By opposing Christian Nationalism, you think you’re opposing theocratic rule. At least that’s what people standing against Christian Nationalism want their listeners and readers to believe. Certainly sounds virtuous. It sounds like concern for preserving pluralism. E pluribus unum, and all that. But it’s actually selective secularism, which is soft tyranny, just with better branding.

I explained this in a roundabout way during my Sunday morning adult Bible study this past weekend. I don’t remember how (because we were talking about something else entirely), but the discussion drifted into America’s founding documents. I explained that the kind of opposition described above doesn’t actually remove moral authority from public life. It merely replaces the moral tradition at the heart of the documents with another, all while pretending to be neutral. The inevitable result is always to baptize its own ideology as better while treating the Christian claim as dangerous to pluralism. For them, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness get shackled if the Christian ethic is the truest heart of America’s founding. It means a man claiming to be a woman is unacceptable. It means traditional marriage—the foundation of family—remains the real building block of society. It means killing babies in the womb is to be despised rather than heralded as a right. Quite simply, it means a person cannot be or do anything they want without consequence, if only because there is a very real morality behind life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In the end, genuine Christian Nationalism is the defense of a sacred inheritance that makes life better, not worse. To oppose it is to oppose people who refuse to apologize for their nation’s foundations, people like me who will not stand idly by as America is scrubbed clean of Christian moral influence.

So, in short, America needs more Christian Nationalism, not less. You’ll certainly read as much in my new book from Fidelis Publishing, Christ Before Caesar: Faithful Public Witness in an Age of Retreat.

You can purchase the book at https://www.amazon.com/Christ-Before-Caesar-Faithful-Witness/dp/B0FFRGNHYQ/.