In the ongoing debate concerning Christian nationalism, James White, Jeff Durbin, Doug Wilson, Toby Sumpter, Joel Webbon, Stephen Wolfe, Eric Conn, Brian Sauvé, Andrew Isker, Andrew Torba, and others are debating questions worth debating. What constitutes a nation? What place should biblical law occupy in civil government? How much religious toleration should exist? Does Christian political order emerge primarily through evangelism, families, churches and institutions working from the bottom up, or may Christian magistrates begin using legitimate political authority before a population has been substantially Christianized? How important are ancestry, ethnicity, culture, place and historical peoplehood? These disagreements are real. But almost everyone appears to begin by assuming that the political entity to which these theories must be applied is the United States of America as presently constituted.
That assumption needs to be examined before anything else.
Before asking how to Christianize America, perhaps we should ask whether America remains the kind of nation that can be Christianized as a single political unit. More than 340 million people occupy a continent containing profoundly different regional histories, cultures, religions, economies, and moral convictions. Increasingly these aren’t simply disagreements. Americans disagree over marriage, sexuality, abortion, education, immigration, crime, family, property, religion and even what constitutes a man or woman.
Perhaps we are attempting to Christianize something that increasingly resembles an empire, and not a single nation.
If so, that question has to become a precursor to Christian nationalism. Before Christian nationalists determine what laws a Christian nation should have, they need to determine whether a nation is what they have to work with. Before deciding how a Christian magistrate should govern, they need to identify the political community he is supposed to govern. And before debating whether nationhood is primarily covenantal, cultural or ethnocultural, they need to ask whether the present United States actually constitutes one coherent ethnos to begin with.
Scott Alan Buss gets underneath this problem in his 2024 book (for which I provided the underwriting) Free to Leave: Secession and the Christian Principle of Peaceful Separation. In it, he examines whether freedom means more than merely having periodic opportunities to compete for control of an increasingly powerful central government. There is another kind of freedom that Christians readily recognize in almost every other sphere of life—the freedom of peaceful separation.
This principle isn’t foreign to Scripture.
A son grows up, marries and leaves his father’s household. Genesis describes this explicitly: a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife. He isn’t declaring war on his parents. He is establishing a new family-government.
Abraham and Lot give us another example. Their households became so large that continued occupation of the same territory produced conflict. Abraham didn’t propose establishing a more powerful central government to regulate both households. He proposed peaceful separation: “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee.” The land was before them. Lot could go one direction and Abraham another.
Paul and Barnabas eventually encountered a disagreement severe enough that they went separate ways. Churches recognize the same principle. When a church abandons doctrines a Christian regards as fundamental, he may leave it and join another rather than spending the rest of his life attempting to seize control of the congregation. Even regarding marriage, Scripture recognizes separation and covenant-breaking under grave circumstances rather than declaring every human relationship absolutely indissoluble.
Then we come to one of the most remarkable political separations in Scripture: Rehoboam and Jeroboam.
After Solomon died, the northern tribes asked Rehoboam to lighten the burdens imposed upon them. Rehoboam rejected the counsel of the older men and threatened to make their burden heavier. The northern tribes responded, “What portion have we in David? neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse: to your tents, O Israel.”
The kingdom divided.
Rehoboam assembled an army to reverse that separation by force. God intervened through Shemaiah and ordered him not to invade: “Ye shall not go up, nor fight against your brethren the children of Israel.” Then Scripture gives the remarkable explanation: “for this thing is from me” (1 Kings 12:24).
Jeroboam’s subsequent apostasy was unquestionably condemned. But when Rehoboam prepared to use military force to preserve the political union, God told him to send the army home. Indeed, the text explicitly says that the division had come from God.
God didn’t commission Moses to make Egypt great again, to capture Pharaoh’s government, or to remain in Egypt until enough Egyptians had been converted to Yahweh that Israel could win control of the existing political institutions or peaceably coexist. God removed His people, and constituted them as a distinct people under His government. They received laws covenantal institutions, judges, standards of justice, worship, property protections and a distinctive social order.
Exodus therefore gives us something contemporary Christian nationalism ought to contemplate seriously:
Sometimes God’s answer to an ungodly political order isn’t capturing it. It is leaving it.
That doesn’t establish a universal command that Christians must withdraw from every non-Christian government. Joseph served Pharaoh. Daniel served pagan kings. Paul invoked his Roman citizenship. Scripture gives us several legitimate ways God’s people may relate to political authority.
But Exodus destroys the assumption that remaining inside an existing political order and transforming it from within is the only imaginable biblical strategy.
Sometimes the command is simply:
Come out.
And what emerged from that departure was something Christian nationalists themselves say they desire—a distinct nation ordered under the law of God.
So perhaps the problem facing Christian nationalism isn’t primarily that Christians haven’t discovered the correct strategy for achieving their objectives. Perhaps Washington simply controls a political territory so large, culturally fragmented and economically burdened that unilaterally transforming it is the wrong objective in the first place.
The Declaration of Independence begins by recognizing circumstances in which it becomes necessary for “one people to dissolve the political bands” connecting it with another. The United States exists because thirteen colonies asserted the right of political separation. I am not proposing war over secession. I am asking why peaceful separation should required at all.
Daniel Miller, founder and president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, explicitly presents Texas independence as a lawful, peaceful question of self-government rather than armed rebellion. His published case addresses not only cultural or ideological grievances but currency, trade, federal debt, military arrangements and economic viability. His organization describes its proposed route as peaceful and ballot-driven.
The economic argument deserves particular attention because it doesn’t depend upon everyone in Texas sharing the same theology or political ideology. Miller’s movement points to federal debt, taxation, regulation, border policy, and money flowing from Texas to Washington as parts of its case, while arguing that the underlying issue is who gets to govern Texas. He makes his case primarily on economic viability and not ideological grounds
That brings us back to Christian nationalism.
Suppose the existing continental political arrangement became radically decentralized or, eventually, peacefully reorganized into several republics. Suddenly the Christian nationalist problem would look significantly less imposing
A Christian population wouldn’t necessarily have to persuade hundreds of millions of Americans before establishing a substantially Christian political order. A smaller political community with a coherent history, culture and religious outlook could make its own decisions about education, family policy, public morality, immigration, economic organization, and the relationship between Christianity and civil government.
Other republics could choose differently.
One might explicitly recognize Christianity. Another might retain substantial religious pluralism while preserving a broadly Christian culture. Another might emphasize historical ethnic continuity. Another might define membership primarily through citizenship, assimilation, language and shared culture. Still another might remain aggressively secular. The important difference is that every political community wouldn’t have to reach the same answer.
And that introduces something almost completely missing from our winner-take-all national politics: A Christian family living in a thoroughly secular republic might migrate to a neighboring republic whose laws, schools, institutions and culture better reflected its convictions. A secular family living in an explicitly Christian republic could choose a political community more congenial to its beliefs. A person who preferred a strongly ethnocultural nation could seek one out; another who valued a more integrationist society could choose that instead.
People already do this on a smaller scale when they move between American states. Political decentralization would simply make the differences considerably more meaningful.
The present system encourages us to regard political opponents as existential threats because we are all fighting for control of the same enormous machinery. Currently every cultural or moral disagreement therefore becomes a national struggle for control.
This is where peaceful separation becomes something more interesting than a constitutional argument about secession. It becomes a mechanism for allowing genuine human diversity without requiring perpetual political warfare.
The irony is that advocates of diversity frequently assume political uniformity. We are told that radically different cultures, religions and moral systems should coexist—and then told that all of them must remain permanently subject to one increasingly centralized government whose decisions apply from one ocean to the other.
Perhaps genuine pluralism sometimes requires allowing political communities to be different.
This is why the question of political scale must come before the Christian nationalist program.
Before Doug Wilson explains how a Christian civilization grows organically, we should ask what geographical and political community is capable of developing that civilization.
Before Stephen Wolfe defines Christian nationhood in terms of people and place, we should identify the actual people and actual place.
Before Joel Webbon discusses the application of biblical law to civil government, we need to know which civil government.
Before James White and Jeff Durbin describe bottom-up Christianization, we should ask whether trying to Christianize a continental administrative empire makes that task unnecessarily remote.
And before Torba, Isker, Conn, Sauvé, or anyone else settles the relationship between ethnicity and nationhood, we should consider whether different peoples and political communities might legitimately answer that question differently.
In other words, Christian nationalists need a definition of the political geography before they can have a workable doctrine of Christian nationalism.
Scripture gives us many examples of The solution to insoluble differences, without providing a detailed blueprint for twenty-first-century American secession. But it challenges the assumption of Americans generally and Christian nationalists in particular, that preserving an existing political arrangement is necessarily a viable situation, much less the objective.
That is why I think “Are we free to leave?” must precede “How do we build a Christian nation?”
Christian nationalism’s greatest practical obstacle may not be that Christians haven’t yet agreed about the perfect Christian constitution. It may be that they are trying to impose one political settlement upon a continental society that no longer possesses enough agreement to sustain one.
Let Christian communities build Christian institutions. Secular communities can organize themselves differently. Ethnocentric communities and integrationist communities will make different decisions.
Before asking how to make the United States a Christian nation, perhaps Christian nationalists need to ask whether preserving one continental political unit is making their objective unnecessarily difficult—or even impossible.
The preliminary question isn’t yet what laws the Christian nation should enact.
Until this question is considered, the rest of the Christian nationalist debate may amount to competing architectural plans for a house whose foundation nobody has bothered to inspect.
Article posted with permission from Bill Evans
