How Should Christians Think about America? A Conversation with Paul D. Miller

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined today by Dr. Paul D. Miller. He is the author of The Religion of American Greatness, What's Wrong with Christian Nationalism, that's published by IVP. He's also a professor of the practice and co-chair for global politics and security at Georgetown University. And so we're going to have a conversation about Christian nationalism and some of the attendant problems that are created by that movement. And Paul, it's just great to have you here and welcome. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me on your show. I appreciate it. Yeah. Hey, before we get started into some of the more scholarly arguments here or the positions that you put forth in your book and again that I've talked about on this podcast several times, what's your background like? Talk about how your background sort of fed into your interest in even writing a book about Christian nationalism or Christians in politics. Yeah, thanks for the question. And again, thanks for the invitation to that conversation. So as I share in the book, I'm a Christian raised going to church my whole life. And throughout most of my life, that was combined with political conservatism. Right. To be a Christian also meant to vote for the pro-life position and family values and those things naturally go together and they go together with Republican politics. I, by day, I'm an international affairs professor. I teach about America's role in the world. And I noticed that my view on America's role in the world was premised on a certain idea of what it meant to be an American, a certain idea of American identity. But around 2015 or so, it turned out a lot of people didn't agree with that. And in fact, it was the folks in the pews with me, other conservative evangelical Christians who seemed to not have the same idea of what it meant to be an American. And that's what led me down the path of writing this book and trying to disentangle these things. What does it mean to be a Christian? What does it mean to be an American? And what is America's role in the world? All really interesting questions, but they can get pretty thorny and complicated when you ask them all together. Yeah, I appreciated the way you, you know, your mixed experience, I think, probably adds to your perspective on this. But one of the things I really appreciated about your book was the definition in terms that you did early on. And one of those I'd just like to kind of hone in on, if you wouldn't mind talking about it a little bit, is evangelical. We hear evangelical all the time. You know, you reference Bevington's quadrilateral and the more theological and academic definition of what evangelical is that you and I might use in academic writing. But the reality is that's not common. That's not the common use of the word evangelical. So can you talk just a little bit about that? Yeah, so you referenced the Bevington quadrilateral. The word evangelical comes from Greek, just means somebody who wants to share the good news. That's evangel, good news, Jesus Christ. And that's how the reformers used it 500 years ago. And American evangelicals were generally Protestants, not quite usually of the high church traditions, but Baptists, Methodists and others who wanted to share the good news. But in the 20th century, it has taken on cultural, political and social connotations. So it tends to mean somebody who's politically on the right. It's mostly white Americans who use the phrase evangelical. It's very interesting that black Protestants who are theologically very similar to evangelicals don't tend to like the label because they tend to shy away from the political and social connotations. And so in common parlance or in journalistic writing, to be an evangelical, an American evangelical kind of means to be a white conservative living in a red state in the middle and lower classes. That's essentially what it means to become a tribal designator more than a religious one. I think much to our loss, I think it should be. We should keep the old view of evangelical as a religious label with meaning to it. I am an evangelical in the older sense, and I'd like to be able to reclaim the word. I think that's really interesting because it's sort of, and I think maybe the reason I key in on it so much was that it's almost part and parcel with what I see happening with Christian as well. You know, Christian has these differing connotations where Christ has become relatively dispensable from the word Christian in a more common vocabulary. So even something that you talk about with regard to the religious right or the end of your book and this notion of Christian values, I think there's a general sense in which I could assume I know what that means. But if I just am looking at the term Christian and what that describes, Christian values seems to differ from something like, let's say, Christian doctrine or Christian worship, which would have a very distinct, very narrow and a very exclusive understanding of Christian. That is something dedicated to Christ or people united in Christ doing something or believing something versus Christian values, which seems more open. Is that a fair way to think about it? When we think about how do we live, you have to translate a lot of the Bible's broad moral principles into specific actionable do's and don'ts, right? And heart attitudes. And it gets especially complicated when you do that in politics, right? What are the right and wrong things to do in our political lives? So that's maybe where the word Christian values, what it means. It's the applied Christian ethics in the political sphere. I think the number one Christian value in politics is justice, right? God is a God of justice. God loves justice. He commands us to do justice, love mercy. Justice is the foundation of his throne. We should emulate a God of justice. And so in our political lives, I think the preeminent Christian value is justice. And we should always work for justice above all. And now the next question is, what is justice? And for the third hour of my talk. Yeah, I mean, that's where it sort of gets a little sticky for me when we talk about Christian values and we talk about justice and then we try to enact that in a political sphere. We're almost always going to be enacting something that is limited. In other words, there's going to be a remainder there once we've done justice in one realm. It isn't as if we've done justice. There's, you know, these these areas where we simply can't complete the task of doing justice and showing mercy on that political level. Yeah, and I think it's important to recognize that we don't simply do justice in the political sphere narrowly understood. It's justice isn't just something the government does and we engage with when we vote. Justice is a whole life calling in every realm of life. We are called to bring order and flourishing to all things. And the bringing of order is the work of justice because you are arranging things in the order they are meant to be ordered and giving them their due. That is definitionally what justice is. So when parents order their household and raise their children, they are doing justice in a sense. And when we in our workplaces bring order and flourishing to our lives of work and bring flourishing from the work of our hands, that is the work of doing justice. And it goes on and on in a sense from there. And we participate in a small way in the work of governmental justice, which is the one we tend to think of. When you think about it, I think that's a really helpful distinction. When you think about nationalism, if we kind of dive into that part of this conversation, is nationalism really just an incomplete and probably, I don't know, from my perspective, a wrongheaded way of enacting a particular form of justice? I mean, I think there's a sense, and just to say this, when I say wrongheaded, I don't necessarily want to say that anybody who's a nationalist is a horrible person. What I'm trying to do is just say, I think there's probably a kernel within nationalism that is altruistic, that it has a good in mind on some level. It's just that the mechanism for getting there, for enacting that justice, for enacting that good is skewed. Yeah, so I'm enough of an Augustinian to say that every single thing in the world has a seed of goodness in it and is also distorted. And in its distortion is disordered and leads to sin and injustice. And so the good that nationalism, I think, maybe reflects or reaches for is unity, oneness, cultural solidarity, and the strength that comes from groups that are unified. Those are true things. I think that nationalism doesn't actually accomplish any of that. Actually, it's quite counterproductive. It is actually divisive and it undermines unity and creates division and so forth.

and it ends up being unjust and destructive, but we can affirm maybe the vision that they hold up. I think nationalism ends up being unjust because, just the shortest way to say this, nationalists want to sort of fabricate by coercion that cohesion, that solidarity, that oneness. It doesn't actually exist anywhere. There's no such thing as a culturally homogenous nation anywhere on earth, and certainly not in America. We are a culturally pluralistic people. Nationalists feel that as a problem because pluralism is hard. It can be inconvenient. It can be uncomfortable. And so a nationalist kind of rebels against that and wants to create a sense of unity. I would respond, our unity as Americans should be around the principles of the Declaration, the Constitution, and it should be around our story, our story of progress over generations in becoming a people more truly aligned with those principles of the Constitution and Declaration. We are growing more just over the generations. That's the story of being an American, and I love it. It's inspiring. That should unify us. We are not and cannot be unified by a common Anglo-Protestant cultural template. That might have been true in the 1790s, but it was only true because we deliberately excluded Africans and Indians and women and the lower classes from us. And so, yeah, we were united culturally at that point only because of coercive exclusion. That's the danger of nationalism. All manufactured unity depends upon coerced exclusion. And I don't want to go back to that. I don't think anybody does. Yeah, that's a really great way to think about it is that it does require a coerced conformity to a set of norms that are determined by a ruling class. It has almost like a proletariat bourgeoisie feel to it, you know, if we applied some of those Marxist terms. There's an odd identity politics embedded within it that require anyone who wants to be a part of the group to conform to the ideals and way of life of that group. And that certainly isn't something that rings true in America. I mean, you talk a little bit about, you know, the liberal, you know, the context of liberalism, but then also the interesting illiberalism that comes out of things like the Christian right or Christian nationalism, because there is a sense in which There's a real movement in which Christian nationalists, the Christian right within their political ideology, they want people to conform, which is an illiberal idea. Yeah, you mentioned identity politics there. That's Yeah, I say in the book, I think it's helpful to think of identity politics and nationalism as the same thing seen from different angles, right? People on the right criticize identity politics as minorities practice it because that's Balkanizing America, because that is fragmenting our unity. Well, what is Christian nationalism, if not identity politics for mostly white Christians? That's exactly what Christian nationalism is. And identity politics for minorities is essentially the nationalism of small groups, right? It's ethnic nationalism. And if it's uncomfortable for, you know, we used to have a black nationalist movement. There were black secessionists in the 1960s, Malcolm X and so forth. And conservatives generally frown on that. And so if it was bad back then for them to do it, why is it okay for us now to do it? I tend to think that all of these sorts of identity politics movements can be unhelpful. There's a version of identity politics which is necessary just for kind of group survival. I understand that. And maybe we want to talk more about that, but, you know, it's by and large unhelpful and fragmentary. Yeah, why don't we go ahead and talk about that? You know, what is that version? You have a couple things in the book that I want to, I think will connect with this part of the conversation. So there's a, what we could almost say a soft version of identity politics that's almost necessary for cohesion amongst difference. And so talk a little bit about that. When I say that, pardon my voice. When I say there's a version that is necessary, under Jim Crow, like during the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement was in a sense a form of identity politics. It was African-Americans advocating for their rights. Nobody's going to complain about that. So if you're under assault, of course, you're going to have to advocate for your rights. And if that's identity politics, let's all embrace it. Yeah. But then there's a- Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. 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Today, I know there's actually a lot of Christians who feel that they are under assault and who think that we need to embrace whatever you want to call it, we need to embrace the nationalism or the identity politics of advocating for Christians' rights. And I think my response there is, we've been really successful in advocating for principles of religious freedom over the last several decades. Religious freedom is now more well entrenched in American constitutional law today than it ever has been in our entire history. I know that's going to sound counterintuitive to some people because they might think, oh, wasn't it so much better 100 years ago? Not if you were Catholic. Not if you were a black Protestant. Not if you were charismatic. It was not great at all. You had no religious freedom in the full sense. What we've done is we've lost, sort of high class Protestants have lost some power, but we have gained in principled religious freedom. So right now, are there some Christians who are under assault culturally, getting sued for their businesses or mocked or were some churches shut down during COVID unfairly, like where they targeted? Yeah, I think some of that is actually true. It's also true the courts have been really, really good about vindicating Christians' rights again and again for the past two, two and a half decades. So I feel pretty comfortable that we can continue to advocate for principled religious freedom, and that doesn't mean Christian supremacy. And we shouldn't cross the line and advocate for Christian supremacy. That is deeply unhelpful. It was interesting when I was looking at some of the early American history on this and sort of trying to untangle that notion of Christian nation and what that really meant and how people were taking it. But if I, if I look back at, let's say, you know, in the 1800s, you still have In particular states, established religion. There were still state churches. There were still, you know, potentially tax money or benefits going to particular denominations within Protestantism. And that certainly created problems within Protestantism, but it also created problems with Jews, with Catholics who were part of those states. And so Pennsylvania, for instance, had religious tests for governmental service that was specifically Christian and precluded Jews. Well, that was ultimately flagged, changed. And that became one of those moments where I think you're what you're describing. You're seeing now an increase in religious freedom, but probably a decrease or at least a potential decrease in Christian power. In other words, you know, if only Christians can serve in government and only a particular stripe of Christian can serve in government, obviously Christians are going to exercise an undue influence within the culture. Once that sort of opened up, then it raises the ability for Jews, for Muslims, for whomever to serve in those offices and exercise influence in that way. And so throughout America's history, what I found was that We may have been founded, and I wouldn't deny the influence of Christian principles, Christian ideas, even the Bible on some of the founding documents. I don't think it's exclusive. And you reference that in a couple of your chapters. But I would also say The movement has been away from an exclusive Christian nation and toward a more religiously free nation.

Yeah. I agree with that sort of description of how things evolved. Now, I know that some Christian nationalists and some people on the right use the history and they say, look, we had state-established churches in the 1830s, so therefore, the founders were OK with it, and we should go back to that. Or they say, we had mandatory prayer in public schools clear into the 1960s. We need to get back to that. And my response is, no, no, no. Actually, it was bad when we had state-established churches in the 1830s. The founders were wrong, and we shouldn't feel imprisoned by their mistakes. We were not imprisoned by their mistakes on race. We've overcome that. Let's also overcome their mistakes on church-state relations. The founding is really interesting. There was really two contradictory principles at work during the founding on church-state relations. On the one hand, you have the First Amendment. I like to joke that the drafting committee that wrote the First Amendment, there were six guys on it. I think it was like a Presbyterian, two Congregationalists, a Unitarian, a Catholic, and they adopted the political theology of the Baptists. You're welcome, right? I'm a Baptist. And the First Amendment is, you know, it's about the closest you can get to a perfect political theology in a written earthly document. Religious freedom, disestablishment for all. The government's not going to be involved, and we will have governmentally free churches. At the same time, you had a lot of carryover from Christendom happening in the colonial era and into the state governments. And so these things coexist inside by side in tension. Over time, the First Amendment has essentially won out, and that other tradition has died out, I think for the better. But that's why I think some Americans, they look back at history, they cherry pick the things they like, and they say, well, we need just to get back to that. No, no, no. It's good that we've moved on. Yeah, and I think it was fascinating. I think one of the things that I found as I dug into it was the one of the early antagonists, let's say, to state-established churches was Isaac Backus, a Baptist preacher. And his concern was deeply theological. It wasn't even about a principle of law. What he was saying is that these state-established churches don't allow the church to be the church, and they don't allow the state to be the state, and that when these two come together, neither one functions properly. And so they need to be not isolated from each other and kept totally apart, but they need to be distinguished from one another and have clear lines of, for lack of a better term, separation. And his, you know, it seems like his primary concern or the Danbury Baptist letter that often comes up in separation of church and state issues, these are Protestants concerned about state-established Protestant churches. This isn't about, you know, Christians versus Muslims or Christians versus sectarians or, you know, anything like that. This is a working out of the First Amendment, really, at the state level. And I think as, you know, some of those things work themselves out, I agree with you. I think we're in a better place. I do think the church should be segmented off. That does kind of, oh, go ahead, please. Sorry. I was going to riff on the wall separation thing for a little bit, if that's OK. Yeah, yeah. You probably know this, but the guy who coined the term wall of separation was a Baptist theologian, Roger Williams. Roger Williams, yeah. He said was, we need a wall to protect the garden of the church from the wilderness of the world because of millennia of history that showed that when they intermingled, the church got the raw end of that deal. Caesar is really good at hijacking the churches and abusing them, taking them as handmaidens and cheerleaders for his secular agenda. And so the Baptists and now most Protestants understand the need to protect the integrity and the independence of the church from the state's predations. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that letter to the Danbury Baptists, it was a campaign document. He was trying to win their support by appealing to the Baptist doctrine of the separation of church and state. Now, I understand today, maybe we can go too far to the point of a state enforced secularism. And that's not at all what I support, but I think it is helpful to remind ourselves, we as Christians should jealously guard the prerogatives and the independence of the church. That's a good thing. But I think that that drives into another question you address in your book, you know, this sort of idea of neutrality. And so as we think about working out the relationship between the church and the state today, there is a sense in which I think we'd love to have the state just be neutral. But the reality is that that's virtually impossible. Even just if we hearken back to our conversation about justice, what is justice? Well, that's going to be driven by some sort of framework, some sort of intellectual way of seeing the world, understanding of what justice actually is. And as the government goes about its job of ensuring justice, that model of justice is going to be pulled in. There's a sense in which I think, you know, common grace, you know, some sort of overwhelming good, this idea that, you know, we can recognize what justice is sort of innately is going to play into that. But then there's also other things that influence that and sort of skew it. And so as you talk through that sort of neutrality issue, I really like the way you framed that. And I'm wondering if you can just comment on that and give a little bit of a summary for folks. How do you think through that neutrality issue? Yeah, this is a really, really tough one. And the language of neutrality comes from a constitutional doctrine espoused by the Supreme Court called viewpoint neutrality. The First Amendment says that the government can't tell us what to worship or say or print. Then the government ought to be neutral towards different views on these things. Right. That's viewpoint neutrality. Now, a lot of philosophers and theologians have taken issue with this and said neutrality is actually impossible epistemologically. If you push on it hard enough, you can't really be truly neutral. And I think that if you really push on the argument, theologically, they're correct. But I think the practical implications of that they've overblown. I think that the government should aspire to be as neutral as possible. And I recognize it's not possible to be fully, perfectly neutral in all things. You know, for example, what does it mean to be a man? Right. Are biological males men or can you just decide that you're a woman? Like you can't be neutral on that. The government can't be neutral. It has to make laws that say one thing or the other. So I acknowledge you can't be neutral on that. In some cases, the government simply has to kind of decide. Yeah. But by and large, neutrality is a good thing to aspire to wherever we can. This came up a lot in the famous debate about drag queen story hour. You're familiar with the debate. You're shaking your head. Yeah. Yeah. Can we as Christians mandate that the local public library prohibit drag queen story hour from holding an event at the public library? If you believe in a viewpoint neutrality, as I do, you have to say, well, you can't actually ban groups from public resources just because you disagree with them. In theory, the Nazis have a right to use the library and even to reserve event space and read Mein Kampf. Like I think that that is a correct, you know, I would defend the right of a Nazi to rent library event space and read Mein Kampf out loud. And that's how far I will go in defending the idea of neutrality. I think it's wrong in principle for the government, for a library administrator to coercively exclude anybody from public resources merely because of who they are, what they believe or what group they belong to. Now, library administrator can certainly regulate what happens inside that library. They can regulate conduct, behavior. So if the Nazi starts beating people up, yes, you can regulate that. If drag queen story hour turns into a strip tease, you can regulate that. You can say, no, we have standards of public decency. You can't do that kind of stuff. Right. You can't ban groups or people on the basis of beliefs or identities or who they are. But you can regulate conduct once inside. That's, I think, how we should exercise neutrality in the public square. Cannot discriminate on the basis of values, identities or beliefs. And I tend to agree. I mean, I think that if we were to get down to those points, what we're going to end up doing is we're going to end up in that sense of we need to coerce this sort of uniformity, whether it's a true uniformity or not. In other words, there are going to be people who may just want to participate. And so they're going to set their entire identity aside and come in and just play by these very specific rules, look and feel like everybody else. And you're going to create an artificial unity when there's really an underlying diversity. I don't think that's the right move. I also don't think it's the right move to police these various different things. I think it's an appropriate neutrality to hold. It does open up these questions. And I think these are the appropriate questions. Right. If we sit back and we say no viewpoint neutrality is something that we should retain, then the next logical questions are, so what do you do when...

You know, public schools take kids to a drag queen story hour, right? How do parents handle those kind of issues? Those are things that I think need to be worked out and figured out and that different parents could react to in different ways. It does create that sort of capacity problem of me as a parent, how much do I have to actually work through with every child that I'm sending into a particular public school system or what have you? But I think that in principle, I agree with you. I think it just creates these different problems that, honestly, I think every system would create. There are going to be different problems, but there's not going to be a system where we can all agree to it and love the way that it works itself out, you know? You're right. We're never going to reach a solution. Culture war is never going to end. It really isn't. Right. And so these disagreements will always happen, but they, I think this is important, is they happen within a constitutional framework of laws. Yeah. And the preservation of that framework is itself just and good. And it's a, I think it's a Christian principle to sustain that framework. Yeah. And I want to stress this quite a lot because I think it's something that Christians, well, I think all Americans have lost sight of. I think you hear a lot of voices on both right and left who are ready to give up on the Constitution because it's not efficient enough, doesn't give them their, doesn't guarantee their agenda or their victory. And Americans are just frustrated and impatient. And they see the inefficiencies and the corruption and the, you know, the ways the system is kind of ground to a halt and there's a lot of paralysis. But the danger is, I'll just focus on the right for the moment, that you hear voices on the right who are ready to throw out the Constitution to replace it with some kind of, you know, Christian Caesar. And I just want to know if the people advocating that have ever read a book of history. You know, do you know how that turns out? There's not a good track record of unaccountable government. The Constitution is the method of keeping the government itself accountable. Remember what James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers. You know, the first point, the first duty of a government is to control the governed, and the second is to control itself. Control itself, yeah. Exactly. The entire history of mankind is a history of governments abusing their power and doing terrible things. And the Constitution is what helps keep the government reined in, and we throw that out at our peril. You just don't know what Pandora's box you're opening up when that, when we lose the Constitution, we lose everything. So you might try to elect a Christian Caesar. How are you going to guarantee that he keeps the faith or that the next Caesar is a Christian or that he's going to do anything right? Right. And I think there's only so far that Christian principles can actually take you when you're governing. I think this, there is a, I would argue that there's a reason that the church and the state are distinct. And part of that distinction has to be that the state has to make decisions in and about a fallen world that requires some level of compromise, that take into account all of the people that are being governed. Whereas the church has a much different task, which is remaining faithful, speaking theologically, you know, evangelizing the world. And those two tasks don't always cohere together in the best possible ways. I came across this, if you remember this year, the Transgender Day of Visibility and Easter ended up falling on the same day. And there was a lot of frustration from certain Christians that Biden would ever have allowed this to happen. But if you look back at it, it's always been on this date. The Transgender Day of Visibility has always been on this date. And this year, Easter happened to land on that date. Easter moves around a little bit. And so the question becomes, what's he supposed to do? He's not going to win either way. If he moves it, the transgender people are going to feel like, well, why are you moving it just to please the Christians? If he doesn't move it, the Christians are going to say, you're attacking us on this sacred holiday. And those are the points, I suppose, where I would look at it and say, this is a nice example of governance. You know, it's messy. It requires compromise and negotiation. And it can't seek to please all groups or any one group. It's a very difficult sort of mess. And I'd say that that's a dilemma that you will only find when you think that the state's job is to affirm identities. Right. If you're looking to the state for validation of who you are, you have just created never-ending culture war because there's never-ending proliferation of identities that will demand recognition. That's exactly the debate here between ethnic identity politics and nationalism. And as a kind of in my libertarian moments, I think, let's just get out of the business of doing all this. Let's stop with all the month for this, month for that, day of this, day of that. Just stop. That should not be the national federal government's job at all. Maybe state and local communities can do that kind of stuff, but I don't know why the national government does that. And then you would avoid the clash of Transgender Day falling on Easter again. Right. Why is the government doing this stuff? Well, let me pivot the conversation. I think this is an appropriate time to kind of pivot into this. Civil religion and this notion of, you know, we've been talking about the government and how it remains neutral or doesn't remain neutral, where it's appropriate for it to remain neutral and not remain neutral. And yet we also have this sort of bigger discussion around civil religion, how these national symbols can honestly come to represent, I think, at its strongest form, idolatry. Right. Where it's trying to supplant and make theological statements that are simply not true. And so how do we wrestle with the notion of civil religion in a society? I can appreciate Reno's perspective. You note Reno's article in your book, and he talks about the inevitability of civil religion and almost the necessity of it to bring coherence to a society. I can appreciate that. But at the same time, there's something in me as sort of my theological brain says, yeah, but I'm not sure that Christians can just accept it and move on. There has to be more to it than that. So can you talk a little bit about civil religion and how you see it functioning and even maybe where you see it today? So let me start by talking about patriotism and then I'll talk about civil religion and the different messages I would give to different generations. Great. So the first thing I want to say is I think patriotism is generally a good thing. I actually think it's a positive virtue for all of us to be grateful and thankful for our homes. And that's how I think of patriotism. Let's be grateful for America, for our freedoms, for equality, for the Constitution. Let's cultivate it, try to leave it better than when we found it. And let's not idolize it, but let's be grateful for it. And I think everybody everywhere should be a patriot of whatever home they're from. And that does sometimes mean being critical because when I love someone or something, I want, I desire its good. And desiring the good means being able to hold it up for scrutiny and accountability when it goes wrong. Right. So there's no tension between patriotism and a healthy criticism, a grateful criticism of how we could do better. That leads into civil religion, which I think of as the pageantry of patriotism. Yeah. I have a soft spot for this stuff. I served in the military, wore the flag on my shoulder. I think it's fine. I think there's a level, a certain level of it which can be healthy. You know, the parades, the flag waving, the John Philip Sousa. I don't really care for the Lee Greenwald hymn. But there's a lot of that stuff. It's good. And here's where my message is different to different generations. I think that the boomer generation needs to be more on guard against the idolatry because I think that that was the besetting sin of their generation. I think you're going to find more boomers who participate in civil religion and feel the pull to idolatry. To the millennials and younger, I have the opposite admonition. Show up at the parade, for crying out loud. Show some gratitude. Serve your country. I think that that generation and younger are in danger of being ingrates, of taking for granted the great things that this country has to offer. They're not in danger of idolatry. They're in danger of just not even showing up and of taking for granted the wonderful blessings of living in the United States. As a proud Gen Xer, we got it right. We're perfect. That's right. Yeah. Yes, I agree with you. I noticed you skipped Gen X, and I wasn't too concerned about that because I do. I think we just got it. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. 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Love for God first and foremost that recognizes that the country we live in is a gift to us where we can now enact our faith, where we can live with relative prosperity, not without all of our problems, but certainly a blessing from God. I think that's the right language. And I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, you know, in the love of country, it becomes a demon when it becomes a God, I think is the quote. Yeah, just beautiful. And so I agree with your analysis. I mean, I think that the civil religion in the boomer generation would have revolved around, right, the Cold War, World War II, you know, all those kind of issues, but particularly the Cold War, oddly the Cold War, maybe, where there is a stronger definition toward theism as opposed to the atheism of the supposed atheism of Russia, which is equally odd given their relationship to the Russian Orthodox Church. And here's a really fascinating and difficult thing. Cold War was a just war. You know, drill me on the history of it. I am a Cold War here. I'm so grateful we won the Cold War and I'll defend quite a lot of what we did during the Cold War, not all of it, but quite a lot of it. You can fight a just war with the wrong attitude. You can fail to have right intent. And in the pursuit of a just war, you can, in your heart, cross the line into triumphalism and crusading. And I think maybe that's what happened with a lot of American evangelicals during the Cold War and, by the way, during the Civil War. You read the kind of rhetoric that the pastors were preaching in the 1860s in the North, and it was bad stuff in service of a just and righteous cause, but they were deifying the nation and they created a sense of America as this chosen instrument of God to unleash liberty for all humankind. You know, it was really kind of damaging stuff. And so when we fight a just war, I wrote a whole book on that, we've got to be super careful to keep in mind the right intention in our hearts and not give into that spirit of crusading. Yeah, it's really, I think the church has to take a high level of responsibility for some of the civil religion overreaches that we've experienced. Just looking back through the history, and you do a lot of this in your book, but that tracing of 2 Chronicles 7.14 and Psalm 33.12 requests for things like a national day of repentance and fasting, the addition of Christ to the constitution, you know, these requests were not uncommon in history. But I think particularly the use of those two verses, 2 Chronicles 7.14 and Psalm 33.12, those are ones that I've keyed in on as well because they are moved over and applied to America in ways that seem, I would argue, are inappropriate to the biblical text. Yeah, they're just not, they're misapplied 100%, but we continue to use them as if America has some sort of special relationship with God similar to Israel. And I enjoyed your treatment of that in the book. I think it was really actually very good to say, these other nations that we form aren't Israel. Israel has this special covenantal relationship with God. Other nations can be blessed, certainly. There were times in history where you could see, you could have described Rome as blessed or Persia as blessed or Babylon as blessed. And they're serving particular purposes for God, but they are provisional. In other words, they're not eternal, they're not guaranteed to last. And so there's a sense in which we just, I think, co-opt a little too much of the theology of Israel and then ultimately of the church into our national conversations and our national identity. I see something very similar happening with the Exodus. Yeah. It's a common thread in American history to refer to America as a new Israel from the colonial era clear up through the early 20th century. And so today, calling America a Christian nation is sort of the new equivalent of that. And so ever since the, not just the founding, ever since the colonial era, we have seen America as a religious mission. And that's, again, just deeply unhelpful. I ran across a recruiting pamphlet written in England in the 1630s. It was trying to recruit colonists, farmers to come and farm in Virginia. And it said, I'm not kidding, it said, come help build God's temple in the new world. So as early as the 1630s, we were turning America into a religious project. Yeah, and what I find interesting, and I've seen this a couple of times, there was an interview, I think it was with Eric Trump, and I don't want to turn this into a, you know, Trump bad, Biden good kind of conversation or anything like that, but Eric Trump said something in an interview that I found deeply disturbing, which was that his father, in what he had done as president, saved the church in America. And you think about that framing, and it creates a paternalism between the government and the church, that the church is somehow vulnerable and needs the government to step in and care for it and make sure it is preserved as almost this cultural artifact. And you see different things. You quote some things in the book, you know, as people are talking about the connections between the church and Christianity, where I think a very similar observation could be made. But I think that that's an overstepping, obviously, of the, the church isn't vulnerable. The church will survive. It doesn't need the government to protect it. There are certain instances where I think it's appropriate for Christians to step in and say, no, look, let's defend religious freedom. Let's make sure that, you know, let's preserve this time where we can be Christian without consequence, you know. So yeah, what do you think? Yeah, here's, maybe we will talk about Trump a little bit. Yeah, maybe we will, yeah. We probably should. This is one of my frustrations with the new right or the nationalists, is their insistence that old-fashioned conservatism had failed. And that is simply not true. And it is ungrateful. It is libelous. It is defamatory. And it is bearing false witness. Because it is precisely the old conservative movement that for 45 years has worked patiently and with great difficulty to build the conservative legal movement that has resulted now in two and a half decades of unbroken Supreme Court victories on religious freedom and federalism and a whole bunch of other issues. For heaven's sakes, you know, the Dobbs decision just came out, what, 18 months ago? And it's a weird time to doubt the vitality of old-fashioned conservatism. That Dobbs decision is almost the crowning achievement of the 45-year-old conservative legal movement. So I'm frustrated. And again, I think it's bearing false witness to say that the old-fashioned conservatism somehow had failed. No, we're just now seeing some of its greatest successes. And that's not thanks to the new right or the new nationalism. That's thanks to four and a half decades of work, which we're now in the process of throwing out. What I think the interesting part, like I've written on Dobbs, Jackson a few different times, and I think that one of the things that I've tried to draw out is that Dobbs v. Jackson wasn't a Christian decision. It was a conservative decision. The Christian decision is, is that sort of core development, like no more abortion ever. We're done with it. That's a Christian decision. And that's the one that we should be, um, I don't think that's the one we should be looking for, though, from government. I think Dobbs Jackson is an appropriate decision by a conservative court that now entails a variety of other Christian action outside of politics. And so there's just been this sense, though, that I think that I know people who were disappointed in Dobbs Jackson. And it's because they were expecting the government to solve this issue for us. And it's like, well, there's no law that can fix the human heart. So, like, we have, we have

You have to do other things. Yeah. Dobbs was not a pro-life decision. It was a pro-democracy decision. It returned the issue to legislatures in the states. It was a pro-federalism decision. And when that happened, the net result is going to be that abortion remains mostly legal in most of the country with more restrictions in red states and less restrictions in blue states. And it's so strange to me that we have the pro-life movement, with the past year and a half, attempting to pass these sweeping bans on abortion. And I want to live in such a country, but have they read a public opinion poll? Do they understand what country we actually live in? Do they know that democracy works with 51% of the vote? So the pro-life movement is just, it's so baffling to me what they've tried to do. They've just created a backlash. So what we have is an opportunity to work patiently and incrementally. You know, three cheers for incrementalism. Everybody wants to be Abraham Lincoln in 1865, right? And the 13th amendment, banning slavery with one stroke of a pen. And nobody wants to be Abraham Lincoln in 1862, where he's like, passing one law at a time banning slavery in the District of Columbia and then authorizing Union commanders to accept runaway slaves and this and that. And these tiny incremental things that chipped away at the reality of slavery until you got to the 13th amendment. Where is our spirit of incrementalism now? That's my frustration with the new right, is they want these grand solutions imposed on high by a government that doesn't exist, by a movement that can't win elections. Let's get in the trenches, support the 45-year conservative movement on things that matter and make real... Here's another example. I hear people say, let's ban pornography. And I just want to ask, how? Do you want to empower the FBI to surveil every laptop and phone in America? Are you insane? I mean, that is a cure far worse than the disease. But there was a state legislator in, I don't even know what state it was, who passed a law mandating that porn sites verify the age of users. And it shut down Pornhub in 13 states overnight. That's the kind of incrementalism that I can get behind. It makes a real difference. It's actually doable. You can really pass laws and you don't waste time sitting around for the grand dictate from on high. You know, get in the trenches and get some work done at the state level. Yeah, I believe that was Utah, if I'm remembering correctly. And there, yeah, the convergence of this stuff I talk about in my... I wrote a book on aspects of this, but it was the intervention or the intersection of technology and politics. Because you look at those decisions and yes, they did. They did a lot of widescreen good, just like you're talking about. And then you have VPNs that allowed people to log in as if they were nowhere. You know, in other words, they couldn't be located geographically and they can still look at it. And so there's all of these intricacies that are going to have to be addressed at a policy level. But I think the intricacies of some of those things lend themselves to incrementalism. These things have to be addressed at a very small scale in the details, as opposed to just a broad policy and say, oh, we're done with it. Well, how are you done with it? How is that even possible? Real policymaking. And again, I worked for the government for 10 years. Real policymaking is pretty boring. It is full of details and minutiae. That's why people spend their lives studying this stuff and getting degrees in this stuff. And then we get derided as the elites and the experts. And, you know, people don't trust us. It's very... Again, I go back to the ingratitude. If you really care about this stuff, you've got to drill into the details and show a little gratitude for the folks who actually know what they're talking about. So let me ask, we're kind of getting close to the end of time here. I wanted to talk through just a couple of other things. Number one, you know, as I read your book and I'm looking at Christian nationalism and I'm seeing the dynamics, particularly on the Republican side, that do hold to, let's say, Christian values that would probably be amenable to most Christians. You know, particularly sanctity of life issues, probably some within the educational realm, those kind of things. And yet there's this national strand that isn't doing anyone any favors. And it's probably skewing us away from things like you're talking about, this incremental work within conservatism that can actually produce strong change. How do we as Christians start to think differently about not just... Maybe I'll say it like this. How can Christians begin to frame these issues, not just in terms of the big ticket items, economy, abortion, you know, the big topics, but actually thinking it through from a more philosophical perspective, who is going to sustain and support the things that have actually been making America work? What does that even look like for people? I tend to gravitate towards another big issue, right? The easiest way to talk about it is this. I used to be a single issue voter for abortion. Now I'm a single issue voter for the Constitution. I think the Constitution is under threat from both sides, yes, but I think it's under threat. And I think that sustaining a constitutional framework is the best, most loving thing I can do for my neighbor in my political life. Without the Constitution, it doesn't matter what my opinion about abortion is. I only have the ability to advocate for abortion policy because I live under a Constitution that gives me free speech, free assembly, petition of grievances. I can lobby for my... I can run for office, right? Without those things, it doesn't matter what you or I think about abortion. If we live under a dictator, they'll make abortion policy one way or the other and they don't care what we think. Sustaining the Constitution is a Christian value. Sustaining the Constitution is a vision of justice for all. It is a way of loving my neighbor politically. And I am extremely concerned by the... Let's do the both sides thing. So I think that the left has been unhelpful in its century-long habit of interpreting the Constitution the way it has, and I don't like it and I don't want it to continue. The right has more immediately and quickly assaulted the Constitution with a decade-long onslaught of rhetoric and even some violence. Between those two things, I think that the rightward stuff is a more immediate danger, right? I remember January 6th and I think that January 6th was, I fear, a foreshadowing of more to come. And that kind of thing is not compatible with constitutional government or with love for my neighbor. You can't cheer on January 6th with love for your neighbor. You just can't. So maybe I'll stop there. No, I mean, it's really... I teach a Bible study on Wednesday mornings and so we're recording this on Wednesday, for those of you who are out there. We covered Romans 12 and one of the things you read in Romans 12 is about outdoing one another in showing honor. It's about not repaying evil with evil, but doing what is honorable in the sight of others. And I think that we need to keep that in mind as Christians. What does it look like to discern what is going to be understood as being honorable within the public square? We've sort of lost that notion a bit in our, maybe, overzealous quest for right and wrong. You just control the libs. Yeah, exactly. Well, last question. This is a question I ask all my guests. How do you, what do you think Christians should be thinking about today to help them be more faithful disciples of Jesus Christ? Go to church, read the Bible. I think there's plenty of people out there calling themselves Christians who aren't doing that. Love your families, stay married, raise your kids. You know, if you're not doing those things and you're out there complaining about the state of America today, you're the problem, right? So there's a baseline of human decency that you need to hold yourself up to first. If your question is, what can we do to cultivate our Christian public witness in the public square? I would return to the idea of advocating for justice for all rather than anybody's tribal supremacy. Upholding the Constitution, speaking the truth, discerning the truth prayerfully, resisting conspiracy theories and lies, and speaking with graciousness. Always speak the truth with love. I fear many have gotten in the habit of allowing themselves to speak libelously, ungraciously, uncharitably, hatefully because they say, oh, I'm just telling it like it is because the other side does it too, because they deserve it or whatever the reason is. Well, I mean, actually the Bible tells us to keep your speech gracious and to love even your enemies, love your neighbor and love your enemies as well.

Now, I know how hard that is. Perhaps I've been a bit cantankerous even during this hour. But let's all work hard to keep our speech gracious and loving as well as truthful. Very good. Well, Paul, I appreciate the book. I appreciate you being on the podcast. This has been a great conversation and I just appreciate your work in this area. I think it's absolutely necessary for this day and age for Christians to wrestle with the relationship between Christianity and the state, Christianity and politics. And so I think your book does that really, really well. So for all of you out there, my recommendation would be just go out and get The Religion of American Greatness. I'll put a link in the show notes for everybody. Recommend getting it from IVP. They've given me a 20% discount code. So just encourage you to go and get this book and read it and digest a bit. Paul, again, thanks for being here. Really appreciate it. Having you on the show. Thank you. I appreciate it. All right, everybody, we will catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Have you ever attempted to read the entire Bible? Did you do it or did you only make it partway? I'm John Stonge and I host a podcast that will make it possible for you to make it through the entire Bible one chapter at a time. I've been hosting the Chapter a Day Audio Bible podcast since 2015, and every single day of the week, I read one chapter of scripture, then follow that up with a time of prayer. And if you're looking for daily insights and inspiration directly from God's word, I hope you'll give the Chapter a Day Audio Bible a listen. You can find it at lifeaudio.com or on your favorite podcasting app.