Duane Larson: "We Belong, Not to Ourselves, But to Christ" 4
Second: Countering Christian Nationalism with the Two Kingdoms
Christian Nationalism (CN): “Right” Term and “Right” Target
In an earlier post I responded to Ted Peters’ worry about the possibly slanderous use of the term “Christian Nationalism” in the Old Retired Professors (centered in Chicago) statement “We Belong, Not to Ourselves, But to Christ,” I argued that the term is so used conventionally now that public theologians can’t avoid it. “CN” now governs the theo-political verbal economy, kind of like the American dollar ruled global monetary policy until recently. But yes, like Traveling Wilburys in Roy Orbison tones, we plead and try to handle our words with care.
Ted also thinks that CN is not the right target. As the face of greedy Jaba the Hut MAGA-ism, Trump is. We OPA colleagues mostly addressed CN, but we mentioned Trump too. I’ll own the drafty equivocation. But the choice isn’t an either/or between CN and Trump. It’s about how to ally against both. As theologians our baptismal and professional duty is to redress the heresy that is CN. By such theological counsel we spiritually nurture our charges and ourselves for the necessary political work of love for the neighbor, including stopping Trump’s egregious trespasses. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer encouraged, “We can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings.”[1] This is the Christian’s new life of obedience to God’s law of love.
Theological work is a form of prayer. Our politics too as theology, as a word from and about God for us, can only begin from prayer. In-forming God’s people theologically extends our prayer life into theirs. Only so en-livened can we together do the work of justice. And prayer is not generic. Do we speak with friends only in general terms, like some impersonal scripted prayer for mass gatherings that go into the recycle bin? Authentic prayer is concretely attuned to the day’s real worries and joys. It’s not only that, but spirituality is politicality.
Don’t Discard 2Kd
There’s a protocol that helps us do “both/and,” the so-called doctrine of Two Kingdoms.[2] The 2Kd reminds us that God instituted authorities in the spiritual and civil realms to ensure intimacy with God in one and the justice of neighborly love in the other. Christ’s law of love is to be nurtured in the former and then equip the nurtured to respect and act in the secular realm where God intends the natural law of the “Golden Rule” to guide everyone.
The realms are real and related but not confused; distinct, but not divorced. Their respective authorities are to stay in their lanes, but also to hold each other accountable when boundaries are crossed or when authorities don’t do their respective appointed work. But (!) when the freedom of the gospel is attacked from within or outside the spiritual domain, Christians must non-violently counter the threat. This means that pastors and theologians are dutybound to preach and teach about any “content” that threatens the free proclamation and celebration of the Gospel. We are equally dutybound to support the gospel’s inspiration of loving care for the neighbor and society as it is mirrored in the Golden Rule. CN replaces both the gospel and the Golden Rule (natural law) with its false content of Dominionism.
So, acting against CN is just as necessary as is practical action against the fascist receiver of CN’s performative worship. Because God’s two kingdoms run through me as well as over the world, I’m a Christian and a secular-savvy citizen alive to my different job descriptions. I will pray, preach, preside, and teach. And I will write letters, make phone calls, and raise signs. My first job informs my second job, but I don’t collapse them. I prioritize the first so I can do the second. My two-fold ministry is more urgent yet when people claiming to be of Christ attach messianic images to one who actually manifests the Spirit of the Anti-Christ.
CN is a spiritual mass casualty event that requires theological triage. If that means that we should yellow tag civic authority Trump in the ER parking lot to shiver in the wind of the Spirit while I care for the red tagged victims of spiritual epistemic fraud, that’s ok. We’ll get to him. That is neither cruelty nor Schadenfreude. It is immediate care for neighbor and society, like dosing an addict with Narcan, or like putting a steel stick into the spokes of the wheel that halts other gears of institutionalized malevolence. We must stop the CN gassing of church and society while also binding CN’s strong man. This is an office of the keys task. Not an either/or, the task requires simultaneous differentiated theological acuity and civic responsiveness.
CN the “Content” Creator: Old Propaganda in New Wineskins
CN insists that America can only be a blessing when America is wholly Christian in only a certain way. The New Apostolic Reformation form of CN sees its Dominionist mandate as full control of the basic institutions of American society: Church, Family, Business, Education, Arts & Entertainment, Military, and all Civil Government. R. J. Rushdoony codified this hyper-Reformed theocratic vision. Lance Walnau, with many others, popularizes Rushdoony’s work for mass-indoctrination. Few call it catechesis. I call it a doctrinalism stuffed with more “spiritual” emotivism than any good Catholic or Pentecostal mystic could possibly swallow. The Schwärmer of Luther’s day were mere free-ranging anarchists in compared to these true believers who’ve long had the plans readied to take over society by force.[3]
This intended fusion of church and state capitalizes on anything, including religion, to serve itself rather than the common good. As Ted wrote years ago about how evil inverts holy symbols, CN supplants religiosity with political ideology while still calling it religion. Hitler substituted Blut und Land for the Blood of Christ and the Promised Land. Crematoria smokestacks mocked the Pillar of Smoke and Flame that led the chosen through and not just into the wilderness. CN’s MO is similar; Jerusalem the Golden will be a Whitewashed DC. But I don’t grant such Jungian archetypal intuition to the Project 2025 cohort that plans the CN itinerary. Their flat biblical hermeneutics are insufficiently capacious, their evil more banal, their simple words more fit for the uninformed kitchen table, where Dad is taught to teach the rest of the family (again) with a misreading of Romans 13 and Luther’s declension of Two Kingdoms. Maybe because of their banality, CNs have been effective.
We Real Christians Humbly Have Stars in Our Eyes
CNs depend on the vulnerably uneducated and sleepy-eyed to advance their project. Paul, however, shouted at us in Romans 13 to be woke to Christus Praesens (Bonhoeffer’s term) who enfolds us and what that means for our actively selfless politics. Sparkling Christian faith lives in and with the risen Christ infusing all time and space. Paul and his Roman readers knew that Christ was “eschatologically” present to them in their “now.” That’s why could and should obey the civil authorities. They knew that they were in God and that God had their backs. But if the civil authorities transgressed the natural Golden Rule of love that God had written into the secular order, well, Revelation 13 later would defy the injustice.
I call this quality of knowledge “eschatological imagination.” It is uniquely Christian. Christians who are mere nationalists don’t see this way. Their eschatology is but the end of human time’s narrow arrow. Their vision actually is secular in the extreme; that kind of life-sense where one damn thing after another damn thing with enough patience and fortitude—and force! —will be followed finally by their imagined best thing. This is the ideologically secularist fancy of a flatly dimensioned literalism that fully confuses faith with politics and apocalypse with Hollywood drama. On the other hand, non-evangelical mainliners are guilty too of a faith so separated from politics that faith that is supposed to be active in love is active in little, if not nothing. This is a real “both sides” problem. Just as souls turn to stone when ears attune solely to the CN sirens, no souls are salved when would-be faithful Christians don’t learn of the damage that loud CN heresies do to both faith and politics.
Not addressing CN in preaching and teaching is a dereliction of duty, as is also our avoidance since Hitler (and before) of the Two Kingdoms doctrine. It’s ironic to me that pleas for a return to our 2K sensibility now come from our secular public intellectuals such as Jonathan Rauch. He writes: “the partisan, polarized, fearful, style of Christianity [CN] I am concerned with here…is inimical to liberal democracy not because it is too nationalistic but because it is insufficiently Christian.” What does atheist Rauch want of Christians? He wants that we have the real stars back in our eyes. He asks that we (1) be not afraid, (2) imitate Jesus, (3) forgive each other, and (4) be steeped in spiritual formation.[4] He affirms that these practices themselves contribute to the good of liberal democracy while we would be good citizens to boot. It’s a good call from the temporal realm for us again to attend to the truly spiritual!
One more provocation
I alluded above about responding to enemies of the gospel. It is uncharacteristic for chronically irenic me to ask this. But I must follow the trail I charted. Our varied primary Christian traditions have protocols for what to do when ecclesial or civil authorities suppress or expressly attack the gospel. Then Christians declare a “State of Confession,” denounce the offense, and do all that is possible to resist. It was one thing to declare this about apartheid. Should we do this about CN? If so, how? And how will we pray and do justice even for the neighbor deceived by CN? It is, again, both a spiritual and political problem. One thing I do know, we can’t do it with prototypical “Christian” political quietude. I also know that without the forced faith of CN (Deus vult! is Hegseth’s tattoo), Trump would not be in power.
The next and final post, again thanks for Ted’s generosity, will reflect more on how we as Christians respond to Trump himself. It won’t be easy.
Who is Duane Larson?
The guest author of this Substack post is Duane Larson. Duane Larson is a retired pastor and systematic theologian. In addition to several congregations over his career, he served as a professor of theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg (now United Lutheran Seminary), as a professor and President for Wartburg Theological Seminary, and a professor at the University of Houston. His published writing includes Care for the Sorrowing Soul, Healing Moral Injuries from Military Service and Implications for the Rest of Us, with Jeffrey Zust (Cascade: 2017); “Martin Luther’s Influence on the Rise of the Natural Sciences,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther (Oxford.com); and the soon forthcoming Ubi Deus Dixit, Where God Has Spoken: The Lutheran Doctrine of Two Kingdoms (Cascade: 2025).
Substack PT 3268 Duane Larson: “We Belong, Not to Ourselves, But to Christ” 3
Substack PT 3269 Duane Larson: “We Belong, Not to Ourselves, But to Christ” 4
Substack PT 3270 Duane Larson: “We Belong, Not to Ourselves, But to Christ” 5
Substack PT 3271 Larry Ball: We Belong 6, Presbyterians Debate Christian Nationalism
Substack PT 3272 Brenda Denzler: We Belong 7, Response to Duane Larson
Substack PT 3273 Duane Larson, We belong 8, Response to Ball and Denzler
Substack PT 3274 Ted Peters: We belong 9: Lutherans Doing Public Theology
Notes
[1] From Bonhoeffer’s sermon at the baptism of his godchild, Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge.
[2] Our OPA statement uses the term “Two Governances.” The Two Kingdoms doctrine is the synthetic title for what we get from the Augsburg Confession articles 16 and 28, their elaborations in the Apology 16 and 28. Their limits and further consequences are further stated in the Formula of Concord, 10.
[3] An intro reading list well begins with Rushdoony, Christianity and the State (If you want all the detail, go for his 3 volume The Institutes of Biblical Law, and God bless you); Lance Walnau and Bill Johnson, Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate (if you want to pay the devil his undue, the above are available on Amazon Kindle); Matthew Taylor, The Violent Take It by Force, The Christian Movement That is Threatening Our Democracy (Broadleaf, 2024). Julie Ingersoll and Chris Hedges warned about all this a decade and more ago. See their important books, respectively, Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2015) and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press, 2007).
[4] Rauch, Cross Purposes, 82.