Prior to reading Stephen Wolfe's The Case for Christian Nationalism, I thought I would be disagreeing with the "nationalist" part. Not because of the facile and specious identification of nationalism with fascism that is so common among the small-minded chatteratti. I was never in danger of that mistake. When I think of nationalism I think of the 19th century phenomenon, which denigrated the classical cultural unities that held together Christendom as a civilization, and which shifted the basic locus of culture to the vulgar ethnicities, while simultaneously drawing power to the top of each ethnostate through national bureaucracies, undermining traditional local authorities. As you can probably tell, I take an ill view of this sort of thing. As it turns out, however, this has nothing to do with Wolfe's project. What he wants are Christian societies governed by Christian laws. He is not a nationalist in the sense in which I use the term. And I am a nationalist, and a Christian nationalist, in the sense in which he uses those terms.

All the same, I can agree with his conclusion while criticizing his arguments. And that is what I will do here. I have loaned my copy of his book to a friend, so I'm going to criticize an article of his where he makes the case more briefly: "The Church among the Nations," at American Reformer. 

He there makes three arguments for the legitimacy of Christian nations. Here is the first.

1. A people, as a corporate entity, is a moral entity, which explains why nations can be held responsible for their actions (Ps. 110:6). All moral entities must acknowledge not only the moral law but the lawgiver (which logically follows from the very reception of law), and thus nations ought to acknowledge God. Acknowledging God requires both word and deed. Thus, nations ought to act in their acknowledgment of God. And since those who acknowledge God must acknowledge the true God, they must acknowledge the Triune God in action.

This argument goes wrong right from the start. Corporate entities are not moral agents. Otherwise there is no final justice. No nation will suffer eternal torment in soul and body in hell, which is what all sin deserves. So nations do not sin. Obviously this is not because nations are always perfectly just; it must be because the locus of moral responsibility for national sin is in the individuals that constitute the nation, not in the nation as such.

What, then, are we to make of the language of both Scripture and common discourse which seems to hold nations responsible for their actions? An ethnonym can refer, on the one hand, to a people in corpore, or, on the other hand, to the plurality of individuals that constitute it. So when a people, e.g. Edom, is said to be responsible for its action, this can mean that the plurality of Edomites bear responsibility for the actions of the corporate unity that they compose. At any rate, we must say something like this if we believe in ultimate justice: corporate unities cannot be moral agents properly speaking.

The last step of the argument is also in trouble: a national obligation to acknowledge the true God would not entail a national obligation to acknowledge the Triune God. There is an old sophism (found somewhere in Plato or Aristotle, I think) that goes: You don't know who the man behind the screen is; the man behind the screen is your father; therefore you don't know who your father is. In modern terminology the fallacy involves illicit substitution in a referentially opaque context. Wolfe's argument has the same problem.

Abraham was obliged to acknowledge the true God. The true God was (even then) the Triune God. Does it follow that Abraham was obliged to acknowledge the Triune God? Well, there's debate about how much Abraham would have understood about the Trinity, but surely this argument can't settle that debate. In a sense, Abraham certainly was obliged to acknowledge the Triune God, that is, he was obliged to acknowledge the very same God who in fact was Triune, whether or not Abraham had any knowledge of that aspect of His nature. But from this it does not follow that Abraham was obliged to acknowledge the Triune God as such. In the same way, Wolfe has not given us a reason to think modern nations must acknowledge the Triune God as such, which is what is at issue.

So Wolfe's first argument fails at both its first and last steps. His second argument commits the fallacy of four terms:

2. Nations ought to arrange themselves such that they procure their complete good. Eternal life is a good. Therefore, nations ought to arrange themselves, within the limits of their powers, to procure the good of eternal life. [emphasis added]

To be valid, the second premise should read, "Eternal life is a national good," which is dubious, to say the least. Alternatively, the first premise could be changed to say, "Nations ought to arrange themselves such that they procure the complete good of their citizens." But this begs the question against opponents who typically think nations ought only to procure public goods, while defending a neutral space of liberty for private pursuit of private goods.

Finally, the third argument begins, 

3. Loving your neighbor includes seeking the best possible outward conditions for your neighbor to procure both earthly and heavenly good.

So far, so good. 

A Christian nation is, ordinarily, the best possible condition for such procurement, ...

And if it stopped here, this premise would clearly beg the question. Further argument is needed. And the next word, "since ..." makes it sound like we are about to get some further argument, but alas, what we get is:

[a Christian nation] arranges life with Christian things that order the body politic for temporal and eternal life

which is merely a description of what a Christian nation is, rather than an argument for why being that way ordinarily produces the best conditions for procuring the afore mentioned goods. 

What acts distinctive to a Christian nation might be thought to produce such conditions? Two broad classes can be mentioned: the first involves public enforcement of religious formalities, the second contains the activities described as cultural Christianity. Wolfe's opponents will deny that the first produces conditions conducive to the attainment of earthly and heavenly good. As for the second, I think they ought to concede that cultural Christianity does conduce to our neighbor's good, but cultural Christianity is not distinctive to nations that are Christian in the sense that is in dispute.

So, first, according to Wolfe's opponents, public enforcement of religious formalities does not make heart religion easier of attainment; it fosters resentment and hypocrisy. This is where the analogy between the Christian family and the Christian nation is in danger of foundering. Although being a member of a Christian family does not guarantee a gracious heart, nevertheless, because of the intimacy of family life, it is well within the role of parents, brothers, etc. to address matters of the heart with one another. The Christian formalities of a Christian family need not and should not be mere formalities. They can be expressions of vital Christian life. By contrast, public order concerns outward actions alone. A police officer doesn't detain you because he is worried that your obedience to the law is tainted with bad motives (if he does address such things with you, he is not acting as an officer of the law, but as a friend--an essentially private relation). 

That's law. What about "softer" national action? Wolfe says that a nation is Christian when "everyday life is invested and adorned with Christianity (e.g., Christian manners and expectations)." But to his opponents, manners and expectations are part of private life, not public life. Different social circles, even in "Christian nations" have different expectations. Consider the attitudes of the Bertram family of Mansfield Park, and those of the Crawford family, with respect to religion. Consider again the difference between the manners of those genteel families and the Price family. Now that was a nation in which one particular social circle governed and "set the tone" for the nation as a whole. The expectations and manners of that social circle (they called it "Society") could be said in a sense to be those of England. But I think most Americans see that sort of thing as an inappropriate conflation of public and private spheres.

In the eyes of Wolfe's opponents, the public things of a nation ought to be neutral with regard to the differing customs and manners of the various social circles within it. The fact that some degree of cultural uniformity may be neccessary pragmatically speaking (we need a common language) does not justify an attempt to enforce borad uniformity in social customs or religion, which are, they say, essentially private matters. If every social circle in the nation is Christian, then one could speak of a Christian nation per accidens. But the permissibility of such a happy condition is not what is under dispute.

So I think the best way to resist Christian nationalism is to concede everything Wolfe urges about the goodness of cultural Christianity, but insist that it is a private good: it is salutary for the people, increases opportunities for hearing and accepting the gospel, tends to promote civic virtue -- these are indeed social goods and even goods that happen to benefit the public order. But that does not make them public goods enforceable by the nation as such. Love of our neighbors compels us to promote cultural Christianity, but not public Christianity. Social expectations are one thing, public enforcement something else.

Thus our dissection of the arguments has led us to a more just assessment of the state of the question. It is not about whether cultural Christianity is good, for most of Wolfe's opponents agree that it is. It is not about whether a nation may be Christian per accidens, such that all the social circles, neighborhoods and private institutions within the nation have Christian expectations. It is about whether there should be public enforcement of religious formalities, analogous to how, within a good family, church attendance is enforced patria potestate. Is there a similar power in the civil society? Wolfe supposes that such a power exists and that its exercise would ordinarily be for our good under a Christian regime. Even I have some doubts about that, and I think it's fair to say that opponents of Christian nationalism cannot be expected to find such a proposition at all plausible. 

In sum, insofar as Wolfe accepts a burden of proof by arguing for the permissibility of Christian nations exercising this kind of power, we must conclude that he has failed to meet it. One might yet wonder whether the greater burden of proof lies on Wolfe, who is defending the Reformed tradition, indeed the Christian tradition, or one might call it the classical tradition, or even the human tradition, for the debate is not about which religion is true, but about whether religious practice is a public matter. The urge to draw this sharp line between public and private is entirely modern, and the brash confidence that religion belongs wholly within the private sphere is more recent yet. Even Rousseau believed in the necessity of public religion. One might think the greater burden of proof lies on those who accept the weird hypermodern view of these things. All the same, the weird hypermodern assumptions are what most of our compatriots take for obvious truths. Our arguments should take that into account.