Below is my answer to the second question addressed to the participants at the recent Christian Nationalism panel. (For Part 1 of this series—My answer to the first question: here).
Question: What is the relationship between Christian Nationalism and the founding principles of religious liberty (the First Amendment, separation of church and state, etc.)? Is the former contradictory to, consistent with, supportive of, etc., the latter?
Answer: Concerning the topic of religious liberty, I find it useful to repurpose a quote from G. K. Chesterton. He helpfully said, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything but his reason.” Reason in the void is insanity; it is a spinning of the wheels. And so it is with religious liberty. I am all for religious liberty if we can situate it appropriately, but I am entirely against it if we cannot.
Reason, of course, needs somewhere to stand. It needs a first axiom from which to run the syllogism. But if revelation, be that biblical or creational, does not supply reason with somewhere to stand, then a stationary bike it is—and we all know how miserable that is.
If you have no standard for what a religion is, then you are doomed to grant “freedom” to every form of vice. If you have no standard to distinguish a good religion from a bad one, then the worship of Baal must go on in harmony with the worship of Yahweh, however much Elijah might protest about choosing between them.
While the state is not the home, and these two jurisdictions should be sharply distinguished in many ways, there are some principles that guide both. And one of those principles is that, as long as there is a universal standard, the governing authorities can and should permit some liberality, even if that liberality tends toward the foolish. However, there will come a time when those governing authorities will and must put the proverbial foot down.
So it is with the founding principle of “religious liberty.” So long as we are first and foremost committed to the Christian faith, the civil government can permit a bit of tomfoolery. I am entirely against conversion by the sword. But it is high time that the common man comes to grips with the nature of civil government’s very practical incentivizing of good behavior over against the naughty kind. The Muslim should be free to pray to his idol if he’d like, but that does not mean he gets a call to prayer from the minaret, as once woke me in Kosovo before the sun had risen (and before I had had coffee and breakfast). The Hindu can have his puja (worship), wherein he offers prayers, flowers, and incense to his deity. But he cannot have his sati, where he would burn the widow alive along with her deceased husband on the funeral pyre.
My point is not only that second-table violations are prohibited sternly while first-table violations are permitted to a degree. I assume there is agreement that prudence is required when determining these two types of violations. Calvin, by the way, insists: “The duty of magistrates, its nature, as described by the word of God . . . extends to both tables of the law.” He continues, “No polity can be successfully established unless piety be its first care, and that those laws are absurd which disregard the rights of God, and consult only for men.”
My point is rather that the Christian faith must receive pride of place in the warp and woof of the civil government if religious liberty is to have any room to breathe.
As to the First Amendment, it is clear that this standard grew out of soil that was thoroughly Christian. The same John Adams who said, “The Constitution is made for a moral and religious people; it is wholly unfit for the government of any other,” also said, “I love and revere the memories of Huss, Wycliffe, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon, and all the other reformers . . . As you justly observe, without their great exertions & severe sufferings, the USA had never existed.”
There has been significant historical work on the disestablishment of the American colonies and states that demonstrates that the First Amendment really had nothing to do with it. Even today, you could have an established church in a given state that would not be in violation of the First Amendment, because the civil authorities in Idaho are very much not Congress, which is the only entity that can violate the First Amendment.
I do acknowledge that Catholics and Jews have been granted a significant amount of liberty within this nation steeped in the hot water of Protestantism, and that is all well and good. But it should be readily acknowledged that such liberties are not the same as granting equal rights and privileges to Muslims or to the worship of Cybele, “The Great Mother” whom Augustine castigates for her vile practices—most reasonably.
In short, as the question has been worded, Christian Nationalism would not at all be contradictory to religious liberty and is very much the only plausible support for it. But it would be at odds with the notion of religious equality of liberty, as it would be with the secularization of the state.
