| instauratio magna | President of Institute of Christian Politics | Author of The Case for Christian Nationalism | email: stephen@christianpolitics.com
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Kevin DeYoung has chosen the CN study committee members. They are free to contact me at any time.
To aid them in their study, here's a selection of my work:
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Stephen Wolfe retweeted
This is also bad. Todd Friel says Christian Nationalism is not biblical because "it erases the lines of realms of jurisdictional authority.” Both @PerfInjust The Case for Christian Nationalism and our book, Reformed Christian Politics, literally says the opposite.
Don't these guys get tired of attacking straw men all day?
piped.video/watch?v=b56fekzu…
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Stephen Wolfe retweeted
Preview it on Amazon
@BasedAudioBooks
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Obama is right, if you assume a modern liberal framework.
You can’t deny the possibility of Christian nations (as many Christians do today) and also ground civil policy in the Christian faith. Doing so effectively establishes the Christian faith.
Barack Obama's now mostly-forgotten 2006 speech on faith and politics as the last gasp of a certain kind of liberalism.
wisdomofcrowds.live/p/the-la…
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Phil Johnson “carefully explained” that we want the “church to run the state” and that we are like “Roman Catholic integralists” when we are, if anything, the opposite. (No, I do not want the state to run the church.)
The sermon was honestly one of the worst critiques of CN I’ve seen, at least among prominent people. The effect of it is only the spread of ignorance.
Yes, there has been good criticism, but it typically comes from those who understand scholastic theology and its terms. Or from people who are smart philosophical liberals.
But evangelical pastors like Phil Johnson are just not equipped to critique it, and for the most part their understanding of “Christian nation” comes from their old debates with Kuyperians and eschatology. None of that is relevant to the current discourse.
If you listened, I carefully explained at the outset why I took the approach I did. I had roughly 50 minutes to detail my biggest concerns about the movement and then give biblical reasons why it’s a bandwagon I’m not jumping on.
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Stephen Wolfe retweeted
“The magistrate can’t coerce faith.”
“The magistrate cannot usher in the kingdom of God.”
“The magistrate isn’t the Christian’s ultimate hope.”
“The church’s mission isn’t political.”
We often hear these arguments against CN or CN adjacent views.
Yet, none of these arguments are relevant to Reformed Christian Politics because they are aimed at straw men rather than the positions we actually hold.
Read for yourself 👇
amazon.com/Reformed-Christia…
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Stephen Wolfe retweeted
"When the state privileges Christianity, it is firstly recognizing that true piety is necessary to virtue—the latter being its principal end."
This is exactly what we see in Art. III of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution's Declaration of Rights, authored by John Adams. This was the consensus view at the founding. It is discouraging that @AndrewTWalker does not understand this.
When the state privileges Christianity, it is firstly recognizing that true piety is necessary to virtue—the latter being its principal end.
Secondly, it recognizes that outward conditions—over which the church has no authority—can help or harm the work of the church.
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To understand the separation of church and state, we have to understand the difference between formal and material objects.
Church and state share material objects. Both will act by their respective powers against the murderer (assuming he’s a church member).
However, their formal objects differ: the act of murder as crime vs. the act of murder as sin. One seeks civil good and the other spiritual good (repentance). So both “govern” the same act but in different respects and for different ends.
The act of blasphemy may be treated in the same manner. The fact that it is a “religious act” or concerns God is irrelevant. If the act is bad for civil society, then it is a legitimate object of civil authority. And the church would consider it bad for the soul. The same act is under dual “governments” but in different respects for different ends.
So, you can’t use church/state jurisdictions or governments to limit the state’s material objects. The question is whether the state may act upon outward “religious” acts and whether those acts are deleterious to its end of virtue, order, and peace.
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What we see here is a high-brow version of the same confusions we’ve seen for several years.
Every church is “beholden” to and “dependent” on the state in some sense. Every church relies on “political conditions” for its activity.
Churches are able to gather because the state has created the outward conditions to do so. That isn’t a “weakness” of the blood of Christ or the church. It’s the role of the state in relation to the church.
In a sense, the state “drives forward” the kingdom of God, though it does it “per accidens” or as an effect of ensuring civil order. Without the state doing its work, the church would (ordinarily) not be able to do its work or, at least, not as well.
When Christian nationalists criticize views like mine for supposedly offering theological justifications for liberal democracy, then Christian nationalism fares no better, for it is quietly beholden to the state and political conditions for its own legitimacy. In that form, Christian nationalism is often a form of Christian Hegelianism, wherein the operations of the state drive history—and the Kingdom of God—forward. Making the legitimacy of one’s political theology dependent on the state’s privileging it evinces a structural weakness in the program itself. The idea that the Kingdom of Christ requires formal dependence on, and enactment through, the state insults the efficacy of the blood of Christ. wng.org/opinions/michael-sco…
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Stephen Wolfe retweeted
No longer do you have to #dothereading
Now you can listen to the reading.
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Stephen Wolfe retweeted
These people are totally divorced from the spirit of the Founding Fathers.
I tweeted a direct quote from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia and idiots like this guy at the Cato Institute hop right on to call it socialism.
What anti-American losers!
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Stephen Wolfe retweeted
I'm not a young guy (you and I are probably around the same age). I don't preach or do the tireless work of ministry. I'm a layman with a family, regular job, etc.
I think you have a point that younger men are heavily invested in polemics and speculative theology. So when a pastor comes online with applied theology, or a pastoral point derived from our dogmatics, they can get pushback from younger men who want to hear how this point gets developed metaphysically or from within the traditional sources. And that can be frustrating when you are not trying to get into scholastic disputes and just do the work of a pastor.
It's worth asking why younger men are interested in polemics and dogmatics. It's easy to write this off as cain speculation or making an idol of the intellect, but I don't think that's what is going on.
Guys under 30, and especially under 25, have grown up in a completely different digital world than we did. Even the Young, Restless, and Reformed trends were tethered to publishing houses and parachurch associations that moderated content and distilled it for the masses. If you're, say, 22-23 years old, you've been in a world where medieval treatises of theology were translated by Claude in 20 minutes, fully searchable, and with additional tools to help you understand them. You have probably watched several of your friends, whether in real life or just in online spaces, leave the Reformed faith and go to Rome or Orthodoxy. And you feel pressed in by the challenges of these factors.
When I was a young man and deeply invested in my studies (at that time, it was in reading Berkouwer, Thomas Oden, Pannenberg, etc), I had pastors that asked questions about what I was studying and why. They took an interest. They tried to understand. They then recommended to me spiritual texts that weren't dogmatics, but were for the flourishing of my inner spiritual life. I listened to these pastors. They affirmed my intellectual pursuits and guided me gently towards sources that would sustain me after I had worked out the scholastic answers.
I had another pastor who showed no interest in this. He even mocked it as vain. Looking back as an older man, I can see this was his defense mechanism for the fact that the study of dogmatics didn't interest them and they didn't like the challenge of a young guy with some knowledge. At the time, it was confusing and hardened my heart to what he had to say. And within a year, I ended up a Papist and stayed one for about 8 years (I haven't been for some time now).
The point of all this is: when a young man tells you "you don't know theology", it's worth asking how he (and we) got here, when you should take this seriously, and when you can - as a pastor- help to shepherd their souls. In my experience, if you just write it off as youthful intemperance, you'll miss some lessons that will benefit them (and you).
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“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness,” except when you lie about Stephen Wolfe.
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Stephen Wolfe retweeted
Every demographic group is considered to be full of “natural conservatives.” Jews, blacks, gays, Hispanics, Muslims, and now Indians.
The only group that never gets praised for its natural conservatism is the one that overwhelmingly votes for conservative policies.
10 months ago, I wrote that Indian Americans’ belief in merit, free markets, the American Dream, faith, family, the list goes on, made them a natural GOP constituency. All Republicans had to do was engage in some outreach and, of course, not be racist. Many (not all) failed.
And this failure will indeed have significant ramifications for electoral politics going forward. The in-roads that the GOP made with Indian voters between 2020 and 2024 were nothing short of remarkable. People are citing voting patterns among Indians, which, don’t get me wrong,are important—after all, more Indian men aged 18-39 said, in 2024, that they intended to vote for Trump than intended to vote for Harris (remarkable!). But consider, too, the massive swings in party identification. All from the Indian American Attitudes Survey @CarnegieEndow:
Compared to 2020, the share of Indian Americans identifying as Democrats dropped from 66% to 57%, while the share of those calling themselves Republicans rose from 18% to 27%, in 2024! This likely translated into electoral victories.
All I can say, after this week, is that I’m certain we’re going to see a reversal; the in-roads the GOP made within the Indian American community over the last several election cycles will be lost. (I would love to be wrong. Really, I would, and if I am, I will gleefully write an article saying so.)
It is all such a shame. Complete political—and moral—malpractice.
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