A Response To Kevin DeYoung's Critique Of Christian Nationalism
Why Kevin DeYoung's critique of Christian Nationalism is really an unbiblical promotion of Negative Liberty.
I have just read through Kevin DeYoung’s monstrosity of an essay on Christian Nationalism and I can comfortably say that DeYoung has officially joined the tone-deaf, ideologically crippled, liberal, narcissistic, and blind evangelical theological class of the modern age. These men will go down as the worst class of theological minds in Protestant history. His “questions/arguments” against Christian Nationalism are mostly 90s neoliberal Democratic arguments rooted in a deep seeded desire to maintain a modern American hedonism built on negative liberty.
I am personally not convinced of Christian Nationalism as set forth by Doug Wilson and his sycophants, but DeYoung and other Evangelicals have literally never brought any sort of political philosophical theory to the table that is not simply negative liberty wrapped in niceties, fancy language, and eisegesis. His continual use of “seperation of church and state” is a classic trope and a historically inaccurate use of a statement not found in any of America’s founding documents, but rather in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists.
In fact, as has been stated countless times by Conservatives, nine of the first thirteen colonies had established state churches prior to the Revolutionary War. In some cases, you were not allowed to vote in those states unless you were a member of a church. That brings about a whole list of problems in and of itself, but the issues that established state churches bring about are much lesser than the issues negative liberty has unleashed on Western Civilization over the past century. Remember, the negative liberty men like Kevin DeYoung implicitly fight for has produced over 60 million slaughtered babies in the past 60 years in America alone. Almost any form of government and political ideology is better than what produced that atrocity.
But let us take a deeper look into DeYoung’s arguments against Christian Nationalism (of course, the Christian Nationalism that he claims he cannot define at the beginning of his essay but still brings forth six arguments against).
Question #1: Do you unequivocally renounce antisemitism, racism, and Nazism?
What would you imagine as the best first question or argument against a Christian Nationalism you claim you cannot define? If you guessed “do you renounce Nazism, antisemitism, and racism?” you would be correct (if you’re a 21st century evangelical liberal)! Of course, nobody in their right mind would think this ought to be the first question to ask of a Christian Nationalist unless you had already had preconceived notions and definitions of what a Christian Nationalist is (which Kevin DeYoung claims to not have in the beginning of his essay). Kevin DeYoung is playing a familiar game in his critique of Christian Nationalism — one that is often played by neoliberals and progressives — he is implicitly planting a caricature of a Christian Nationalist identity that is wholly constructed in his own mind and building up this view of Christian Nationalists as racist, Nazi’s, and antisemites so you, the reader, will be more open to his future remarks regarding Christian Nationalism.
This Straw Man tactic is exactly what pseudo- intellectuals like DeYoung have done for years; begin their arguments with characterizations of the people with whom they argue that are overgeneralized, highly simplistic, and in some cases simply wrong. He then implants this characterization of his enemy in the readers mind right from the beginning and expects his readers to carry this false conception of Christian Nationalists through his essay, ultimately convoluting it with Christian Nationalism in the end.
This pulls on the emotional strings of the reader and doesn’t allow for him to truly understand a political ideology or philosophy, but to create a caricature of a particular type of person by using inflammatory and misleading language to describe these people. In this case, DeYoung is taking the Devil to task by using Lucifer’s age old questionnaire tactic so he can always hide behind the “I was just asking questions” platitude to evade taking responsibility for his idiot insistence that most people who are self-proclaimed “Christian Nationalists” are racist, Nazi, and antisemitic.
I would guess, though he never clarifies, that DeYoung is thinking of people like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson, three of the largest names in “Conservative” media when he wrote this. If not them, then he may be thinking of people like Joel Webbon, Dale Partridge, and their crew of social media warriors. In either case, DeYoung is not dealing with or responding to the best of Christian Nationalist ideology, rather is choosing to take on the weakest of self-proclaimed Christian Nationalists because, well, it’s much easier.
If this is the case, which I cannot say because DeYoung failed to explain who he was responding to and why he was even asking this question to begin with, it would be difficult to argue that any of those people are Christian Nationalists. It would be even harder to argue that any of those people are Christians. So, who is Kevin DeYoung talking about? It isn’t Doug Wilson because he says “I commend Christian Nationalists like Doug Wilson who have called out these destructive sympathies on the right.” So who is it? And is it the Christian Nationalists that he’s calling out or is it the modern right wing Populist Nationalist movement headed up by Nick Fuentes? Or does Kevin DeYoung not know what he’s saying and is conveniently relying on the incompetence of his audience? You be the judge of that. All I am saying is that throwing around labels like “racist, antisemite, and Nazi” at whoever you disagree with is not a way to argue in good faith — it’s actually the exact opposite way to argue and it proves that DeYoung is not arguing in good faith at all.
Question #2: When and how does the nation act as a corporate moral person?
This, of all of DeYoung’s questions, is maybe the most interesting. Here he asks when and how a nation acts as a corporate moral person. Of course, there is no simple answer to this question from a Biblical perspective — but that does not mean that there is not an answer at all. It seems clear that in both the Old and New Testaments large groups of individuals are corporally judged. Of course you have the countless OT references of God judging the nation of Israel and her enemies on particular occasions and Jonah being commanded by God to call Nineva, an entire city, to repent of its sins. In the NT, and more specifically in the book of Revelation, God judges entire churches for their sins. What does this mean? I am not entirely sure — but at the very lease, it means that the hyper-individualistic modern Evangelical tendency toward reductionistic theology is most likely wrong on its face. It seems clear both historically and Biblically that groups of individuals can be judged as moral persons by God.
DeYoung makes the following argument,
“While the Bible teaches that nations can be judged for their wickedness, this is not the same as saying that the nation as a nation is a corporate moral person. Robert Dabney (1820–1898), for example, argued that although a nation is bound to obey and worship the true God, this “obligation is nothing else but the individual obligation of all the members, and nothing more is needed to defend or sanction it than their individual morality and religiousness”’
It is all nice and dandy to quote obscure theologians from the 1800s (I am not knocking all theologians from that time, I love some of them) but DeYoung fails to ponder through the 1,800 years of church history that preceded the industrial revolution and the rise in liberal individualism in the West. Why quote a man living in the most tumultuous and riveting period in human history — during the abolition of slavery in America, the Industrial Revolution, the first Wave of Feminism, the American expansion Westward, the rise in Evolutionary theory, and countless other massive historical events and movements that are characterized by modern Enlightenment philosophy and individualistic assumptions of human nature and telos. It’s a very modern thing to only quote the modern scholars.
This is nothing against Dabney, I know little of him or his work, it’s more an indictment against the lazy and cherrypicked scholarly work of Kevin DeYoung. Why quote a theologian from the time in human history when individualism was the dominant theory regarding human nature? Because, again, Kevin knows his audience won’t do the work to see if other interpretations and theological convictions are more prominent in church history — spoiler alert: they are!
Question #3: What is the purpose of civil government?
DeYoung begins this brilliant critique as follows,
“Many advocates of Christian Nationalism are champions of limited government. At the same time, they speak of government having authority to direct man to his highest and heavenly good. These two sets of convictions seem to be at odds.”
As he does, DeYoung continues to equivocate, convolute, and mismanage definitions of political philosophies. He claims that many Christian Nationalists are champions of limited government — who? Ayn Rand? I don’t think so. It remains clear that the only definitive characteristic of “Christian Nationalism” DeYoung is capable of reciting is “racist, antisemitic, and Nazi”. He now is convoluting libertarianism with Christian Nationalism — so be it. His point is still utterly indefensible and proves his lack of serious political or theological study (or comprehension).
If DeYoung believes that “government having authority to direct man to his highest and heavenly good” is at odds with limited government, he may be surprised to learn that God gave the Israelites only 10 commandments to follow to begin with which later grew to 613 which is a relatively small number when considering that in the United States we have tens of thousands of federal laws. Did God fail to direct man to his highest and heavenly good when giving those commandments? It’s clear from a theological standpoint that a relatively short list of rules and laws can prevent a catastrophic amount of chaos. Of course, this is not to say that those laws can convert a soul to Christianity, as no Christian Nationalist would argue, but it is to say that those laws can prevent, say, the mass slaughter of infants and the widespread American obsession with sodomy.
He then says “Is the purpose of government to protect God-given rights (e.g., life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness)?” To which any Bible reading person would respond “yes and no” — DeYoung should know that Romans 13:4 says
“For he [the magistrate, the government’s representative] is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” So, if by “protect[ing] God-given rights” you mean serving God and carrying out His wrath on the wrongdoer, you would probably be a Christian Nationalist… But again, DeYoung is not constructing his argument in good faith, he is continually equivocating making it almost impossible to follow his line of thinking due to his lack of knowledge related to political philosophy and Biblical theology. I could dissect every single idiot paragraph of DeYoung’s essay here, but I don’t have the time or desire to do so. I will finish with this,
“America’s constitutional order is not oriented to man’s heavenly good. It is designed to keep people safe, peaceable, prosperous, and free.”
This sentence keeps on track with DeYoung’s coming out of the closet as a pseudo- intellectual. He claims that “American constitutional order is not oriented to man’s heavenly good”. Is that so? Just before saying this, DeYoung quotes the Declaration of Independence’s claim that each person has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — what of those three things are contrary, in any way, to man’s heavenly good? To go further, it should be noted that Thomas Jefferson, while writing this, changed what John Locke had written before him; “life, liberty, and property”. This change is seriously significant because it shows that the Founding Fathers valued happiness, or in the modern context the word “joy” would be a better fit, over personal property (not to say that they didn’t value property, they most certainly did). Thus, the Founders were even more in line with the Biblical mandate to pursue joy over earthy things.
Going further, it must be understood that in the time of the Declaration of Independence and the writing of the Constitution up until the end of the Civil War, Americans referred to America as these United States of America, not the United States of America. This switch in vocabulary is critical to the understanding of the thought process behind the purpose of the Declaration and the Constitution. The Founding Fathers we’re building the framework for a nation made up of sovereign states who would join together in certain military and common good efforts, but the individual States held much more authority in the lives of Americans than the Federal Government. DeYoung fails to recognize any of this in his ungrounded statements.
We must understand that the American federal governing system was set up to allow sovereign states to rule their citizens in a way that they deemed best for the common good and flourishing of their people. The modern mind finds this concept very difficult to comprehend because of the large shift in power over the past century from the States to the Federal Government. That said, when discussing the intent of the Founding Fathers and the meaning of the Declaration and Constitution, we must have at the forefront of our minds the understanding that the Federal Government served the States, not the other way around. And many states did have established State Churches prior to the Revolutionary War and this desire to maintain a tolerant Christian Nation was not lost during or after the Revolutionary War.
In fact it was made stronger in some sense when the Founders declared in the Declaration that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,”. This explicit statement made by the Fathers made it clear that the American experiment was founded on the monotheistic God of the Bible. Further, it is well known that the Fathers, even Thomas Jefferson, used the book of Exodus to justify the Revolutionary War with England and their fleeing from tyranny. Pluralistic deism was not in the minds of the Fathers in any way, shape, or form. They believed, in some way or another, in the God of the Bible and built the entire Governing system on that belief. To argue otherwise is unfounded and based on entirely fictitious fantasy.
Thus, to answer DeYoung’s antagonistic question; Civil Government in general is to serve God and to carry out his wrath on wrongdoers. In the United States that is made more explicit in that the job of the Government is to protect the God-given rights of citizens which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So, in the United States of America, it can be much easier to argue for some type of Christian Nationalism on the basis of the Declaration and Constitution rather than a Government built on secular negative liberty. There is absolutely no basis for the latter, and DeYoung, had he done any reading on the subject, would have known that. But instead he opted for calling Christian Nationalists racist, antisemitic, Nazi’s. Bravo!
Question #4: What does it mean for the civil magistrate to promote the true religion?
DeYoung begins this argument by saying,
“The argument, specifically as it relates to Presbyterians, is that even if American Presbyterians at the end of the eighteenth century rejected church establishments like the ones that existed in England or Scotland, they were still in favor of a “soft establishment.” That is, they were in favor of a pan-Protestant establishment whereby no Protestant denomination would receive government patronage above another, but Protestant Christianity as a whole would be upheld and promoted.”
We now move forward to the end of the 1700s and DeYoung says that Presbyterians were against official Church establishments but promoted what he calls a “soft establishment” of general Protestant Christianity. This is difficult to analyze because comparing Protestant Christianity in the postmodern and morally relativistic world we live in today to the Protestantism of the late 18th century in America that was dominated by a mimetic social imaginary is actually impossible. There is much more in common in 1785 between the Quakers and the Calvinists in terms of their general understanding of objective reality and moral order than between a non-denominationalist and a Reformed Presbyterian in 2025.
One group (non-denominationalists) believe that the Bible is a means to an end, that end being a large conglomerate church system made up of nominally-minded hedonistic Rousseauians who give their money to cult of personality leaders who, in return, tickle their ears with false teaching and heresy. Thus, it is objectively impossible to make an argument about modern Civil Government on the basis of Presbyterian consensus in the late 1700s — it’s actually quite foolish to even attempt. The world changed drastically in terms of the assumed social imaginary after Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Russell, and Foucault. And after the Industrial Revolution, both World Wars, the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, Feminism, the Civil Rights movement, the technological revolution of the past century, and so on and so forth. To compare the ideologies of two time periods in human history that were precisely the opposite of each other is impossible, to sat the least.
It is entirely foolish and even slanderous to assume that the Presbyterians in the late 18th Century, had they know what the world looks like today, would have been adamantly against the establishment of a State Church. To say that their desire (though they had good reason, in the time, to assume that Christians and Civilizations would not one day reject objective reality and morality in such a drastic and destructive way) to uphold a general Protestant Christianity through the means of Civil Government is at odds with modern Christian Nationalism is false on its face. The Presbyterians of the late 18th century, had they seen the mass infanticide committed on 60 million babies, the destruction of marriage, the celebration of sodomy, the manipulation of war powers, and the rogue Intelligence Operations of the past 100 years, would (maybe) have rethought their desire to generalize Protestant belief and reject State establishment of the Presbyterian Church.
That said, it’s entirely true that the Presbyterian Churches of their time were on track to be destabilized and destroyed by liberal, power hungry, Marxists like Kevin DeYoung. Men and women focused on “decorum” and not doctrine.
DeYoung goes on saying,
“But that still leaves the question of whether the civil magistrate ought to promote true religion. That depends, of course, on what is meant by “promote.” Does “promote” mean that the magistrate must have a sincere devotion to Christ? Be a regular churchgoer? Have a credible profession of faith? Adorn the gospel by his behavior? Speak of Christ and the Christian faith publicly and warmly? I am in favor of all these things, as God has called all Christians to these things. I want the civil magistrate to be a Christian, and to be an exemplary one at that.
And yet, I suspect that “promote” is meant to entail more than this. But what? Calling for days of prayer and fasting? Giving fireside chats at Christmas that speak about the good news of Christ’s birth? Defending the rights of conscience and religious liberty? Establishing a military chaplain corps? Tax breaks for churches and clergy? I like all that.
Or does “promote” mean supporting churches and ministers from tax revenue? Making religious tests of office? Reforming the church so that its worship, discipline, and doctrine are in line with God’s word? Shutting down churches and religious assemblies that are false and idolatrous? These are bad ideas in my estimation. I might agree with “promote” but the devil is in the details.”
This is the icing on the cake. Here is DeYoung doing what liberal Protestants do best; compartmentalizing Christian belief from Christian living. Detaching Orthodoxy from Orthopraxy. Here DeYoung is saying that he would love for our elected officials to go to church, to profess Christianity, to not tax churches and clergy (you know, the very things that benefits Mr. DeYoung himself), and talk about Jesus at Christmas. What does this sound like? That’s right, the neocon Republican of the past 60 years who gave verbal commitment to Christ and then did nothing to end infanticide and the moral destruction of America.
Men like Kevin DeYoung (and I will add Gavin Ortlund and his decrepit father, Ray) are proponents of a white washed Christianity. One in which men and women merely give verbal credence to faith in Christ and never actually live it out. They project moralism in public but do the exact opposite in private. It’s safe to say that Jesus Christ hated these types of people, and even more, he hates religious leaders who promoted this blasphemous kind of Christianity. These men do not want accountability at any level, especially at the level of Government because it may mean that they themselves would be held to the scrutiny of a higher power rather than to their own papacy in their local Churches. What DeYoung is promoting here is not Christianity, rather it is what John Piper calls “Christian Hedonism” — that is, pretending to be Christians, but actually being heathens.
DeYoung goes on in this section to quote the Westminster Confession and it’s statements on the Civil Magistrate. I am less interested in knowing what the Westminster Confession (which I have much respect for and take seriously) has to say on the matter than on what the Bible has to say. The Bible that DeYoung has thus far failed to mention or even give thought to in this essay.
Question #5: Was the First Amendment a mistake?
This is, yet again, an age old tactic used by liberals to “annihilate” any arguments against negative liberty. He says this,
“If I had only one question to ask a proponent of Christian Nationalism, this would be my first: What do you believe about the First Amendment?”
Really, Kevin? Then why wasn’t this your first question? Why is it your fifth question? Is it because you had to establish that Christian Nationalists must be thought of as racist, antisemitic, Nazi’s before getting into the rest of your baseless arguments about why you think Christian Nationalism is unthinkable? I think so. But so be it, if Kevin wants to claim that his fifth question would be his first, it goes in line with his thread of illogical thought through this whole damn essay.
He goes on,
“Virtually no one at the founding conceived of a political and social order devoid of religion. The purpose of the establishment clause was not to create a strict separation between church and state, nor even to enforce a studied neutrality, but to ensure that religious minorities were accommodated and that religious pluralism was protected in a large commercial republic.”
This statement goes against so much of what DeYoung has said already, but I will look past the inconsistencies — he states that the Founding Fathers wanted to ensure that a religious pluralism for minorities was protected. This is true in some sense, but again, the language matters here. The idea that the founding fathers had anything other than Lockean rationalistic philosophy and Protestant (and Catholic) Christianity in mind when aiming to protect “religious pluralism” would be a stretch. The modern mind overgeneralizes “religious pluralism” in our globalized world to mean “all religions”. But this is not the case for the founders as they saw persecution from the Anglican Church in England as the main threat to conscience and personal piety and not polytheism or a false monotheistic god.
We must keep in mind that the Founders came from a long English heritage that was deeply rooted in Christianity, whether that be Catholic Christianity or Protestant Christianity, and did not give much thought to, say, Hinduism or Islam. This is because their world was much smaller and more local than ours and false religions were not on their horizon or within the grasp of their imagination in the ways that they are today. So to say, again, that the early American Christians were giving credence and license to false religions in their desire to uphold a pluralistic Christian nation is unfounded and false. The only false religion they would give credence to is that of the Lockean Rationalistic Philosophical tradition.
Question #6: What is the historical example of the political order you would like to see in America?
I will only comment on DeYoung’s final paragraph in his final argument. I encourage you to read his whole argument here and decide for yourself if it is sufficient. To conclude he says,
“The same arguments are made by Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) in his Social Ethics, where he insists that good and evil will grow up side-by-side in this world and that the civil authority is not given the divine guidance necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff (137). If Reformed Christians today wish to do theological retrieval, we should do it as Kuyper and Bavinck did and admit when our forefathers got something wrong, or at least when they did not have the courage of the conclusions that followed from their better principles.”
It’s a complicated argument because you must concede at least one thing before being able to make this statement. One is that Bavinck (whom I love) and Kuyper were right in their assessment that the civil magistrate is not responsible for killing heretics and those who are unorthodox in their Christian belief. Kuyper makes this point by saying,
“2) That the Lord and the Apostles never called upon the help of the magistrate to kill with the sword the one who deviated from the truth. Even in connection with such horrible heretics as defiled the congregation in Corinth, Paul mentions nothing of this idea. And it cannot be concluded from any particular word in the New Testament, that in the days when particular revelation should cease, that the rooting out of heretics with the sword is the obligation of magistrates.”
I am not in agreement with Kuyper on this point. As stated before, the Apostle Paul did write in Romans 13:4, “For he [the magistrate, the government’s representative] is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” So, here we must decide what exactly Paul is saying when he says that the Governmental Representative is one who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. Is a wrongdoer one who teaches what is contrary to Scripture? Is a wrongdoer one who blasphemes God? Is he one who murders babies? Defies Scriptural commands related to marriage?
One would have a very difficult time arguing from Scripture that any of those things are not within the biblical confines of “wrongdoer”. But Kevin DeYoung doesn’t discuss any of these questions, he rather evades the topic altogether and hides behind a negative liberty assumed ethic (if there even is one) that assumes that tolerance is the primary virtue embedded in the Biblical concept of liberty. I have much to say about that, but G.K. Chesterton says it better when he says “Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.” And this is DeYoung’s main point throughout this whole essay: he believes in nothing and will critique everything. He will not give ample thought to ideas and will slander those who disagree with his postmodern ideology. In all, he loves tolerance more than he loves Christ.
It should also me mentioned that, had Kuyper and Bavinck seen what the tolerant strand of political thought produced in America, they may have reconsidered their political philosophy. Had they seen that millions of babies would be sacrificed to the pagan climate god, women and men would stop getting married and having children, homosexuality would be enshrined, in law, as within the confines of the definition of “marriage”, people would begin to not only dissect their own bodies and attempt to change gender, but would do the same to their children, and that Americans would watch millions of hours of hardcore porn on a daily basis, I think it’s safe to say that they, in som way, would be advocates of a type of Christian Nationalism that demands justice for wickedness and holds its citizens to a standard that is much higher than mere negative liberty.
Conclusion.
If your heart so desires, you can read DeYoung’s concluding statements. I can also summarize them for you: DeYoung concludes with a messy hodgepodge of postmodern jargon ultimately discouraging his readers from even attempting to bring any semblance of Christianity into the political conversation and into political action. DeYoung makes this argument by scolding the reader for their supposed nostalgia for a political order that is unAmerican “and wasn’t nearly as successful as some people would like to remember it”.
Sure, DeYoung, you can make this argument if you’d like. But you must concede that your definition of “success” in the political realm must be summed up in mass infant sacrifice, mass immigration of criminals, the decimation of marriage, mass suicide rates, the lowest birth rates in human history, a faltering economic system and a monetary system built on nothing found in the objective world, a medical system that is monetized for harming their patients, record mass shootings, and the list goes on. If this is Kevin DeYoung’s definition of a successful political order, than he is correct to say that the regimes of olden days were not as successful as we remember them.
I refuse to accept this jargon though, and so should all Christians. DeYoung, like most modern theologians, benefits from the postmodern jargon that gives modern self-proclaimed “Christians” the option to opt out of political discussion because they are too passive and too stupid to engage. DeYoung’s sickening and overtly passive statement that “I still believe what I have always believed about the mission of the church, and I still believe amidst a new round of cries—this time from the right instead of the left—that we all must “Do something!” and “Say something!” that it’s okay for pastors to still be pastors.” is only a cry of surrender and passive willingness to detach the pastorate from the lives of real people who exist within a political order.
DeYoung can sit on his throne of lies and continue to build out a postmodern theology that is more in line with Michel Foucault than with Christ. And I fear that a day is coming soon when the judgment of God will be poured out on the wretched religious hypocrites of the American church for their unwillingness to see the truth and to act upon it in every aspect of their lives. DeYoung is one of many who values his own individualism and financial security more than the Word of our Lord. And as Christ says, you cannot serve two masters — you will hate one and love the other.
Books to read on the topic:
Why Liberalism Failed — Patrick Deneen
Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth — Robert P. George
The Constitution
The Declaration of Independence
The Bible