Christian Nationalism Is Submission to God

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm Wo. So today we're going to be talking about Christian nationalism. This is a subject that has been hot and heavy in the news very recently. Uh it has been a number of books have been published. There's a lot of chatter online about it. It's a subject that you and I, Corey, have been talking about for a number of years. It's something we've both written about to some extent in the past. And it's frankly we know more about it than a lot of people, just because we've been thinking about it for a long time. Uh and so this is well-trodden ground for us. We're not gonna this will be more of a a conversational episode, hopefully, than the last couple, just because

1:19 uh we we can we can freewheel this and we're gonna do a good job because this is our home turf. Um and the reason is because it is so vitally important to recognize that a Christian nation is what God desires. Christian nationalism is what God expects from us. And we're going to talk uh at some length uh initially about the definitions of both nation as in nationalism and then Christian, uh, because those are the reflections of what's commonly called the two kingdoms in theology, the kingdom of the left hand of God and the kingdom of the right hand of God, with the left hand being political and the right hand being spiritual or soteriological, basically church and state, or state and church.

2:08 The reason that this is something that there are a number of historical reasons why why people sort of go off the rails when they tackle these things, but first we're going to talk about why the words themselves, particularly the word nation and national nationalist have been so profoundly subverted. Uh as we go on in the series, uh listeners will will recognize that we are frequently spending a lot of time defining terms. And I hope that that never comes across as gimmicky. Uh it's not something that we're just doing to to be spurgy or to kind of wheedle and and make bizarre points. The reason for discussing the the etymology and the origins of words is specifically because so many words have been intentionally subverted by those

2:56 who seek the destruction of godly things. Uh this was one of the premises of nineteen eighty four was that when the language itself is captured, it's possible to render certain thoughts literally unthinkable, as in the human mind can no longer process a thought contrary to the desired dogma. And they do that by redefining words until there's no word for the thing that you're trying to say anymore. Because if you can't if you don't have a word for it and you can't say it, you can't think it. And that's it's a weapon. it's something that's weaponized and it's being done deliberately in certain words and language and nation and nationalism are a prime example. So I would for anyone listening to episode three this episode, I

3:46 would first recommend that you go back to episode two and spend about the first fifteen minutes or so listening to to uh Corey's monologue talking about genealogy in scripture and how God uses genealogy of man begetting man throughout time in particular places to to God's ends. Uh it's worth noting that when Adam emerged from the garden, he was a father. There's he was a husband. He soon became a father. He was also king. He was the king of the world, despite having been, you know, demoted from from his perfection through his through his sin, he remained king. And when he had children, he was their father, he was also their king. He was also their priest. And he was he was a religious leader as he was of

4:36 Eve. The reason that God repudiated his actions in the garden was that he listened to his wife instead of controlling her send her inclination to listen to the serpent. If If Adam had faithfully upheld his role as husband and as priest, that error would have been set right, and we don't know how human history would have played out. The same circumstances were repeated when Noah stepped off the Ark. He was father, he was husband, he was king, and he was priest. And it is only as the expansion of those families occurred again, the role of priest and king became separated. And that's we're not suggesting that that's a bad thing. It is perfectly godly for the political to have its sphere and the religious the Christian to have its sphere, but to say that

5:35 the Christian sphere is separate from the political sphere is to fundamentally with misunderstand what it is to be Christian. So that'll be the second part of this podcast. So we're going to begin with nation. Uh nation is a word that came into the English language around the thirteen hundreds from French. Uh the the French word would I'm not gonna pronounce because I'll butcher it. But the definition is the same as it is for us. A race of people, a large group of people with common ancestry and language, uh, from the old French for birth, rank, descendants. And if you trace that back even further, it goes through old Latin and it ends up in the Proto-Indo-European root gene, which means give birth and beget.

6:19 I think it was in the first episode we talked about that as well. That or maybe it was second is an episode. We're going to talk about this over and over again because it's so fundamental. the genes, the the natal nature of begetting of people, it's how God operates in creation. It's one of the things that separates mankind today from mankind in heaven. In heaven we will be like the angels and that there won't be any more reproduction. All of the names that are in the book of life will be born in a fallen world. There won't be any more people coming after Judgment Day. The creating aspect of God's history will come to an end with Judgment Day. No more giving birth, no more begetting. The genealogy, the lines, the beginning will all be locked in.

7:12 But for this time, for our lives, all that we know, we don't know before the fall and we don't know judgment day or after it. We know that right now, this is how God operates. So the reason I'm pointing first to the definition of nation is to make clear that it is explicitly racial. And that's a vital point because today nation and country are used as synonyms. To say that something is a country or it's a nation, people virtually always mean the same thing. Um you say the United States is a country, you say it's a nation. No one's gonna think you're talking about two different things. When the United States was founded, when the colonies were founded, and then the United States was formed from that, it was a nation.

7:58 Uh this was New England. It was founded over 400 years ago by people coming from England to New England. They were not immigrants. they didn't leave one place and go to another place that was different. They went to a new place that was empty and they recreated as best they could from whence they came. They recreated England. Now not as a perfect copy because that wasn't their desire. Frankly, I three quarters of my ancestors were here by about sixteen fifty because they were so sick of what the English were doing nearly four hundred years ago. So while they brought the language and they brought a subset of some of the religion, they brought cultural mores. They were also seeking to do their own thing, but it was

8:45 not in rebellion. It was simply let's go live in peace among ourselves and continue to be English in a manner that doesn't violate our consciences. And of course that was the the case for all of the European keep people groups who came over here. You had the Spanish who set up colonies and attempted to remain Spanish, to different degree from the English, perhaps, and then you had, of course, the original name of New York, New Amsterdam. The they were setting up extensions of their nation, they were not creating some new experiment to mix everyone together and create a new nation or realistically a new babel. Exactly. And you know, as the the case in Canada was mostly French. Uh the Louisiana North was mostly French.

9:29 And in some of those marks even exist to this day. And when people come to a new place, there will naturally be some degree of intermixing, particularly when you have so much in common. Uh twenty years ago, if an American went to most Western European countries, apart from the language difference, most of it would feel very similar. Uh the customs vary, but they're not completely alien customs. They're just variations on themes that are familiar to us because we have that shared culture, which is a part of our our shared ancestry. they're inextricable. And as we as we look at what nation means, you know, you had mentioned the the intermingling, we when we skip forward one hundred and fifty years from the founding of the colonies to when the

10:23 United States uh rebelled against England and became its own political entity, uh I want to point to the preamble to the Constitution which used to be memorized in school. I don't it probably isn't anymore, but it reads We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this constitution of the United States of America. Now the reas the the word that I want to highlight there is ourselves and our posterity. When they said that, they meant it. When we hear it, we don't hear anything.

11:09 Posterity is really kind of an archaic term that's not used anymore So I want to take a look at what where that word came from, what it meant when they wrote it. Uh for the discussions I'm using, and we'll put the link in the show notes. There are two websites that I recommend everyone look at. Whenever you want to have any conversation about what a word means, go to two places. Go to etomonline.com. That's et y-m as in etymology. Uh it will give details going back to where the word first entered English and then its origins in previous predecessor languages. The other website that is invaluable for any of these discussions is Webster's dictionary 1828.com. It's a full copy of the original Webster's Dictionary.

11:58 It was as it was published nearly 200 years ago. The reason this is important is that as I said, these words are under attack by those who are trying to change the very fabric of existence for us. And they do that by making us unable to discuss certain certain things by removing the words or redefining the words that we would use for those discussions. So when you look at what those words meant two hundred years ago, it gives an indication, you know, and when we're talking about the original American context, what did those guys mean, but it's also valuable just because it well predates almost all the subversion that has occurred in language, especially in I mean, dictionaries are changing every year

12:42 at this point. You can go back five years and you'll find a dictionary that doesn't say with it does today and it's contrary to what it says today because they're being so aggressive about destroying these terms. Now, eighteen twenty eight was still under the the thrall of the Enlightenment, but beyond the Enlightenment, there was not a lot of subversion present in it. So we're gonna look at the definition prop for posterity from the preamble. Comes from Latin. It means descendants, children, children's children, etc indefinitely, the race that proceeds from a progenitor. The whole human race are the posterity of Adam. Now that's in the Constitution that it's racial. That's not you and I being racist saying we hate people and

13:29 we want to exclude them. We're simply saying when the people who founded this country did so, they understood that it was explicitly racial. I just want to re briefly the race part of the definition for race, also from the sixteen twenty or eighteen twenty uh Webster. The lineage of a family or continued series of descendants from a parent who is called the stock. A race is a series of descendants indefinitely. They're synonyms. They mean exactly the same thing. Posterity and race are interchangeable, unlike country and nation. So the reason for pointing to this first is that when we look at the United States in 1791, It was both a country, a new form, new formed country, and it was a nation.

14:18 It was a pre-existing nation because those roots were genetic roots from their fathers going back six generations. This is uh an important point because uh by calling it racial, it is implicitly excluding some groups. It's excluding Indians who had lived here beforehand and were by and large pushed aside or God killed them with plague. There's also the Africans who were enslaved by other Africans, sold to Jewish slave traders, put on Jewish owned slave ships, brought primarily to southern colonies where they were sold almost exclusively to Jewish plantation owners, where they were kept as slaves and used as labor, sometimes under brutal conditions. When those men were emancipated from their slavery in 1618,

15:15 they did not add automatically become citizens of the United States because it was still understood that although they were were now legally emancipated, they were not posterity. They were not the American posterity. They were unjustly brought here from Africa. And equally importantly, they were still African. Regardless of what language they spoke, they were Africans in America. And when you and I discuss these subjects, I never want anyone to hear that and think that we're being insulting or derogatory. To say that someone is African, I don't think that's an insult. I think that if you're African, you should be proud of your African heritage, whatever it is. Find the best parts of whatever you came from and be proud

16:00 of that. You know what? That's obedience to the fourth commandment. To honor your father and mother is not limited with your immediate parents. It goes back in time. And where your ancestors er, do better. Where they were wrong, be right, but be proud of whatever good they did. So when I say you're not American, you're African, it's not hateful. It's simply precise. And it's precise in a way that has been destroyed by taking the word nation and turning it into a synonym for country. And there are a lot of people listening right now that probably hate hearing that. They probably think that's that's nonsense. That's completely false. I will prove to you right now that you actually believe this.

16:44 And it's in the Bible. When the Hebrews moved into Egypt and over the period of 400 years became slaves to the Egyptians and grew to the point that there were more Hebrews than there were Egyptians, or they were overwhelming them. They never stopped being Hebrew. They didn't become Egyptian. Even after 400 years in that country, they still had their own language, they still had their own race, they weren't intermixing with the Egyptians by and large. They still had their own culture. They still had their own norms in Mores. They were still Hebrew. It didn't matter where they live. And that wasn't yes, it was the case that God was preserving them as a vessel for the promise of the Messiah. But that would have been the case even if God didn't care

17:34 about the Hebrews for that purpose. Even if they had not been shuttled about and and and bobbed around in the ocean of history as part of God's plan, they would have still have been Hebrew. Just going somewhere else doesn't change your nature. If there's a tiger in a zoo in Des Moines, it's not an Iowa tiger. It's a Bengal tiger. It's a tiger on the wrong continent. Now, someone will say, Well, you're a white guy, you don't belong here either. I will tell you this. My ancestors have been here 400 years. I don't the the only ancestors of mine who came through immigration came from Germany in 1870. All the rest were here before it was a country. Now yes. They came from England to New England, not as immigrants, but as people who built

18:25 this country from nothing. Uh there's another illustration that that I use often to demonstrate that the idea that something moving to someone moving to another place doesn't mean that they are never native. Look at New Zealand. New Zealand today has the the descendants of the English uh conquerors and you have the Maori, who were called the natives of New Zealand. When the English showed up in the I think the sixteen hundreds, um the Maori lived there, and so we say, well automatically those are the natives. The Maori got there there were between about thirteen hundred and thirteen fifty. So they'd only been there about three hundred years when the English showed up. They all came from somewhere else.

19:11 And they moved to a place that they took over, they made it theirs, and then someone someone else showed up, moved in, took it over, made it theirs. Are the Maori native to New Zealand? Sure. Are the European settlers who have lived there 400 years native to New Zealand? Yes. I am a native of North America. And if you say that I'm not, after 400 years, you must necessarily say that the Maori are not natives of New Zealand. Now the difference between me and my ancestors moving to North America and the Hebrews living in Egypt is that that was never their country. God didn't give it into their hands. God gave this country into my ancestors' hands, and probably into many of your ancestors' hands.

19:59 When the white man showed up, almost all the natives were killed by disease. And today, because we have germ theory, we're like, oh, well, that was just totally random. And you know, maybe even some cases the Europeans tried to kill them with germs. They had no idea. They didn't know. That was a plague. Plagues come from From God. That was God's will that those European settlers not have to deal with millions and millions of Indians who were trying to kill them. I have numerous ancestors who fought and in some cases were killed by Indians in the first in the first half of the sixteenth seventeenth century because they lived next door and it wasn't that they were in open combat. It was just that the Indians wanted them gone.

20:45 And fine. That's I don't fault the Indians for trying to kill them, but my people won and we took this land. And I'm not ashamed of that because it occurred by God's grace. And that is how the United that's how the colonies became nations which formed the United States. And over time it became an empire. It became the sort of multi-ethnic empire with different people coming from different places not losing their distinct properties because if it's a racial distinction, you don't lose it. I don't stop being European just because I live in the United States. If I colonize Mars, I'm a European on Mars, I'm not a Martian. If my kids are born on Mars, they're not Martians, they're Europeans born on a Martian colony of Europe.

21:38 That's simply how God propagates the genealogies of his people throughout time. And it hasn't changed in the last century just because we think we're clever and we have new, more enlightened ways of talking about these things. And when it comes to the idea of someone being, you know, ex because he was born in ex country. Ultimately you can trace that back and it's clearly ridiculous because if we're all X because we are originally from or born in X, and it only belongs to the people who were natives. Well they were all natives of Ararat. And none of us own anything else because well that's ultimately the place we're all originated from, because of course that is where the Ark landed. And so the idea that the native population can't change is

22:32 it's a really mercenary idea if you actually look at the genesis of the idea to go back to the idea that the source of things matters, because how is it actually employed? It's employed purely as an argument against colonization and modern conquering of heathen nations. It's never used historically to argue that historical conquest should not have happened. It's not used to restore it there's there's not an irredentist argument with regard to older areas that were conquered, but it's just the European colonization. Because what is the ultimate genesis of that argument? Well it's Satan, because Satan hated colonization. Because colonization was European Christians taking Christianity to other parts of the

23:25 world and driving out Satan and the pagans. Because that is how God works. God drives out and destroys faithless nations, and he uses sometimes faithful nations to do it, sometimes faithless nations. Sometimes God punishes one faithless nation with another. That is how God wishes to work, and he can do that if he wants to do that. But in the case of colonization it was European Christians, faithful Christians, driving out evil. And those European Christians became your became Christian in exactly the same way. It was not that evangelists went to every single European individually and said, Hey, let me show it share the gospel with you and let me baptize you. It was the kings who ultimately converted, and when the king converted,

24:18 his nation converted. I uh I'm actually descended from the woman who is directly responsible for all of us being Christian. Um, I was reading last night about uh Clotilda and her husband Clothar or Clovis, yeah. And she was Christian. She basically bullied her husband, King Clovis the first or second, uh first, into becoming Christian. Uh and that was the genesis of what Wikipedia calls Nicene Christianity in Europe. If you look at a map of quote unquote Christianity in Europe prior to about six hundred AD, the only actual Christians were in the East. It was all Aryans in the West. Now Arianism is fundamentally not Christian. It sounds mostly Christian, and they did speak the word the word of God was spoken among them, so surely some of them were

25:15 Christian, but the Aryan confession itself is explicitly not Christian because it denies that Jesus is fully God. So Clotilda, her convincing Clovis to become Christian, him building a cathedral in the center of his seat of power and his influence over the Franks to become Nicene Christians as opposed to Aryan not Christians was the entire reason that Christianity proper spread in all of Europe. It's the reason that we're Christian today. We may well be Aryans and not be Christian at all, if not for that, if not for a king converting. And if you look back in in uh in scripture, it's completely normal for there not to be a separation between the religion of a nation, the king of a nation, and its people.

26:13 And this is even reflected in the fact that so many, especially ancient pagan nations, the king was treated as a god. Now, while this was obviously it was idolatry, but in a sense it was actually an accurate reflection of the godly form, not that the king is God, but that the king is the representative of God in that place. And the fact that the pagan nations said, you know what? There's no God above our king. Our king is the God of all of us That was a usurpation going up, but from the king on down, it wasn't anything more than a misdirection because the king is the God's representative over his people for their benefit. And that is the left-hand kingdom. And so the the notion that there would be a distinction between

27:05 what the king believes and what the people believe doesn't make any more sense than if it happens in a household with a a father who's faithful and a a wife and mother and children who are unfaithful. It should not happen. And we have an example of that closer to our time. We had the whole reason we're called Protestants is because the Emperor went back on the promise to allow individual princes to determine which version of Christianity would be practiced within their realms, whether they would be Lutheran or they would be papist. And of course the Emperor went back on that because his advisors changed basically and the influences on him changed. But we protested that, and that was natural because the prince, the

27:53 head, the king within that region, determined what his subjects believed, because that is the natural course of things, because as you mentioned, the father is the head of the family, and the father makes the decisions. Well, the king is the head of the nation, and so the king makes the decisions. And so yes, most of Europe was converted because a few key people were converted, kings, advisors, whoever it happened to be, they converted those who were in a position of headship, and that affected a conversion of the people as a whole. And that And that is what it means for a nation to be Christian. Yep. And right now there are a lot of people in the audience probably howling at the premise because there were so many abuses

28:40 in history where this was done incorrectly, and that's absolutely the case The case. And that's where the two kingdoms distinction is useful. When Clovis became Christian, he built a cathedral, but it was a bishop who ran the cathedral, it was a bishop who taught the people. Clovis said, I'm Christian, strongly suggested his peace people should be Christian, but he was not directly over the church. What went wrong in Roman Catholicism is not that they spread Christianity, but that they became political, which is not what we are advocating, and that is not what Christian nationalism is. Christian nationalism is not the notion that the church becomes a political force unto itself. The church is responsible for soteriology, it is responsible for the salvation

29:36 of souls and for the preservation of doctrine and for the proper use of the word and sacrament among the people. That's not the realm of the government. That should not happen, that the government is dictating which sacraments are practiced or how. We don't believe that, and it's not necessarily a part of Christian nationalism to suggest that So when someone says, oh, well, you just you're gonna end up with Baptists running everything. I don't care. Because you know what? Baptists don't want babies to be murdered. Baptists don't want their children to have their genitals chopped off. Baptists don't want Muslims raping their daughters just like I don't. Baptists are not going to be in charge of the sacraments if

30:21 this were a Christian nation again. They can still be Baptist and we can still be Lutheran. But what will stop is the evils that have befell all of us by ceasing to be overtly Christian, which is fundamentally the purpose of Christian nationalism. It's not necessarily to say, well, okay, this is the correct, this is the correct denomination. Everyone's got to be this denomination. For a Christian to be a participate, a participant in a nation politically politically is to bring how his conscience is informed by God through scripture to his other duties, to his other vocations as a husband, as a father, as a neighbor, perhaps as as a mayor or as a sheriff. If he knows that God doesn't want people to be murdered, for

31:11 things to be stolen, for people to be harmed, that's going to inform his conduct in his role if preserving earthly order. Of course, we should be careful to distinguish that when it comes to papists, they do exactly want to return to Roman hegemony. So in the case of those who are Roman Catholic Catholic in quotes, of course, they do want the conflation of the two kingdoms. They don't want any differentiation because they see the king King as inferior to the Pope, as opposed to being Christ's left hand and the leader of the Church being his right hand or the leadership, whatever it happens to be the organization in the right hand kingdom. Because that's part of what we tend to drop when we're speaking

32:01 about these concepts these days, is we don't say the left hand of Christ, which is what the left hand kingdom is, we use that shorthand, but we're assuming that people understand something that people no longer understand. It is the left hand of Christ and the right hand of Christ. These both belong to God. We're not talking about two separate, entirely distinct things. We are talking about how God interacts with the world in two distinct ways. And when we advocate Christian nationalism, we are saying that the state should uphold Christian values. Now that's distinct from Christian doctrine, and this shouldn't be complicated for people, but somehow it is. Yes, there are historical abuses. Yes, there are some like the papists who would seek to restore

32:55 political hegemony over countries. Not gonna happen. That's the the fact that someone might do something bad with something good is not an argument against the good thing. And this shouldn't be difficult for Christians to understand when we're talking about Christians ensuring that their own nation, which should be under God properly, the triune God, not the deist God that this country evolved into upholding from the top down, incidentally, when when the when all the deists overthrew the Articles of the Confederation and basically came up with a a new government in secret at the Constitutional Convention, they were They were putatively the representatives of the people, but by and large they didn't represent the people.

33:44 They represented landed interests. They represented traders and the wealthy. And many of them were not Christians. Many were, but there were many non-Christians participating. And some of them did terrible things like Thomas Jefferson as a direct result of their not being Christian. So but because they won politically, they wrote the history, and so now everyone thinks that all these guys are heroes. And because they were at the top and because they won, deism spread. the when you look at 18th century America, Christianity began to die in large part. Now it it it mutated as it died. You had an explosion of cults, you had an explosion of uh you know the transcendentalists and other things where people just sort of

34:30 wandered off into nature and and bid did bizarre things that tried to find God outside of scripture. That was a result of their leaders not being Christian and taking the the country in a direction and the nation in a direction that was not Christian. And the subsequent fruits of those decisions are are still with us to this day. I think when the you know the second part of of the conversation we wanted to have today is what is a Christian? And that's we've been kind of answering it all along, but there's this this goofy stereotypical behavior that I see emerging even among people who are good Christians, they intend to be faithful, they're trying not to cross lines that they believe are present, but they

35:19 do so by saying in effect I can only be Christian in church stuff and I don't want to impose on anyone else the rest of my time. And like I mentioned last week, you got an hour in church, you know, maybe two or three hours of Sunday school, and then the other hundred and sixty odd hours hours, you're off on your own. How many of those hours are you a Christian? Is it when you're in church or is it all the time? Now the what is a Christian question is one that makes a lot of Protestants uncomfortable because Protestant doctrine, the souls have basically been collapsed into I love Jesus, I'm going to heaven, everything else is gonna be fine because he paid for my sins, it's all okay. it's happy clappy boyfriend Jesus crap that while in isolation those individual

36:09 statements may be true, if that becomes your ethos, you're toast. I th there's something that I've I've I think I recommend in the first episode, and I'm gonna say it over and over again because I think it's really vital right vital. Go to esv.org and click on the little gear, uncheck all the options, turn off the footnotes and the cross references, turn off the headings, turn off the verses, and turn on red lettering for Jesus, which is gonna make some of the Lutherans in the audience freak out because there are people who say that you can ignore the Bible unless it's in red. Absolutely not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is do that and then read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, just reading the words in red.

36:55 Don't read anything else. Just read the words in red. That is not to say that the rest is not equally important. It's not to say that the rest is not also the inspired word of God. That's not my point. My point is this. If you read only Jesus preaching, it's almost all law. There is gospel there, but it's thin. And there are often times where he lays it on hard and he ends hard when some when he performs a miracle for someone, he says, Go and sin no more. Now, was Jesus stupid? Did he set that person up, or did he think that they would actually be able to not sin anymore? Or did Jesus tell him what his will, what God's will is for each of us, to go and sin no more? That is the Christian life.

37:40 And yes, we fail. And yes, Jesus paid on the cross for the fact that we would and will f continue to fail That doesn't mean that we don't try. And the sanctified Christian life is about living more and more in God every day, about spending time in God's scripture, about contemplating his wisdom, and then about living all hundred and sixty eight hours of our week in a manner that is consistent with God's will and pleasing to him. And when these guys only want to talk about the gospel, quote unquote, and Christ's sacrifice, those are incredibly important things, but that's not the entire Christian life. The Christian life becomes at baptism and continues until you die. And most of your days, most of your hours, most of your

38:32 minutes are not spent reading the word or taking communion or hearing preaching. And that's okay. That's God gave us other things to do, but they should be done in a manner that is pleasing to him. The Christian life is obedience to God. And that means the the left-hand kingdom where there is what we call political activity must necessarily be in obedience to God every bit as much as what goes on in church. Just as much as we care about a faithful application of sacramental doctrine, we should care about the proper exercise of the law. And to fail to do that is to fail to be a good Christian and to be indifferent to that is to risk ceasing to be a Christian altogether. Well, we know what happens when Christians are indifferent to the left

39:27 hand kingdom. Satan takes over. Because Satan is not indifferent to the left hand kingdom. And so if Christians are indifferent and do not involve themselves in the left hand kingdom and do not behave as faithful Christians in the left hand kingdom, the left hand kingdom will be ruled by pagans, will be ruled by Satan. And so there are only two choices. This is not something on which you can be indifferent, because if you're indifferent, you're just condemning your grandchildren, great grandchildren, whatever generation it happens to be, you are condemning them to live in a pagan nation instead of a Christian nation. This isn't an option where we have, you know, Christianity on one side, Satanism and atheism on the other side, and some sort of

40:13 neutrality in the middle. This is black and white. You're either a Christian nation or you are an anti-Christian nation. Yes, there are different degrees of being one or the other. You can be more or less Christian and you can be more or less atheist or Satanist. But you can't be neutral. There is no neutrality. There's no middle, there's no third way when it comes to this question. And you mentioned about the the rise of deism in the US. And really, the the modern Christian, many of the churches anyway, are basically a half step above morally therapeutic deism, or moralistic therapeutic deism. It's just it's that with Jesus slathered on top of it a little bit. Just a thin layer, a little bit of Jesus butter on top

41:06 there. It's not really Christianity anymore. It's just it's that one hour, the 90 minutes, whatever it happens to be on Sunday and then I live the rest of my life as if I'm you know, just another member of this society and I do whatever society tells me to do or not to do. And so I have Jesus in it. Yeah, exactly. I well yes, football's actually a great example because how many people spend their sixty minutes, their ninety minutes, maybe they go to Bible study, maybe they spend two hours, whatever it happens to be. They spend that little bit of time for Jesus on Sunday. And then they go home and spend four, five, six, I don't know how many hours, on football, or basketball, or baseball, or whatever

41:48 it happens to be. And then they spend so much of their time thinking about and posting about and arguing over that. Well what's really important in their life, I'm not saying you can't have hobbies, because of course you can have a hobby. You can have a hobby that absorbs a ton of your time even and As long as it doesn't become more important to you than the things that are actually important. And for a lot of people, it seems like sports have become more important than God, because you'll have even pastors who spend their Sundays posting about sports. Why on earth are you doing that? This is supposed to be the day that everyone inherently knows is dedicated to the Lord Maybe say something about the Lord on that day, particularly if it

42:35 is your vocation to do so? If you spend all of your time posting about sports, the people who are looking at that who are watching you are going to think that, well, maybe God isn't so important because he's posting about this particular sports team he likes a lot more than God. And so it matters what we do, how much time we spend on it, how important we make it seem in our life, because often how important we make it seem is merely a reflection of how important it actually is. And so our witness to the world is in part how we live our lives. Are you a Christian when you're in the left hand kingdom? Are you a Christian when you're not in the sanctuary? You should be. In sports is I specifically mentioned professional sports because that is where

43:23 the subversion is occurring culturally. It is not simply that these professional sports were erected on Sundays, Sunday mornings on weekends to consume people's money and their time and their passion. And we're not e we're not making the argument against spending your time poorly versus spending your time well. We're making the point that the NFL is evil. The NFL has done tremendously evil things. They have promoted tremendously evil things. They do it every Sunday. It is one of the key things that they do. It is one of their purposes. Is not to sell advertising, not to throw the pig skin around. It is to promote societal change along avenues that are contrary to Christian doctrine. And the fact that so many pastors and other Christians are either

44:21 blind or indifferent to it is terrifying. If you are living a sanctified life, if you are spending your time consuming godly things, when you're exposed to something that is ungodly, that is is not wholesome, it's physically repellent. It's disgusting. you you physically revolt. I I spent years being large like being being completely indifferent to most of these subjects. I was a Christian, but I didn't really care. Like I was a Christian on Sunday and the rest of the time whatever. Like it's just I knew I was Christian, so it was sorted. I was a Lutheran. I definitely was confident in my baptism, so pretty much everything else was taken care of. In the last couple of years as I started to spend more

45:07 time in the word and less time consuming garbage when I would be then exposed to things I used to love, to songs and to shows that I used to just I I ate 'em up. It was it was part of who I was. There are many cases where I had a I to I now have a visceral repulsion to those things. And it's not rooted in some sort of pietism or like, oh, this is dirty. Like I didn't re-listen to that song expecting to find something gross. I re-listened because I missed the song and found that what I used to love I now hated Now that is something I'm not saying that everyone needs to have exactly that experience, but I am saying if you never re feel revolted by things that are contrary to God, or if you never even

46:01 if you can't even tell that things are contrary to God, you have a spiritual problem. You have a deep seated spiritual lack of discernment. And although discernment is a gift as a matter of degree, it must be present in every Christian or how are you gonna stay Christian? If you can't tell the difference between Christian and not Christian, you're toast, you're lost. And that's the reason we keep talking about Sunday morning versus the rest of the time is that so many of these arguments that are made mostly in good faith by Christians who rightly want to prevent problems that have occurred in the past when people have done things wrong, they end up collapsing the Christian life to Sunday morning.

46:46 And the rest is just, oh remember your baptism and go do whatever. I can tell you from personal experience, that doesn't work. It's a terrible idea. It is an idea that leads people to hell. And more than that, like this isn't just about saved or not. That's one of the things that that we we lose when we think about sanctification as we don't really think about thank sanctification at all. Like when when all the focus is on the sacraments and God's gifts to us, which are blessings, I'm not demeaning those in the slightest, so please don't hear that. When we eschew godly living, godly wisdom, obedience to God, we end up missing out on the good life that God wishes to give us. When you obey God, you are blessed in this life.

47:37 This isn't prosperity gospel. It doesn't mean you're gonna win a million dollars. It doesn't mean you're not gonna lose your job. It doesn't mean you won't go hungry. It means that you will be blessed by God in ways that he sees fit. And whatever God's blessings are for you, you should be thankful for them. And as much as you know we we want to emphasize that not every blessing necessarily looks like a win at the time, most of them are. Most of God's blessings are just normal blessings that anyone can see. If you don't engage in contraceptive behavior, God will bless you with lots of children. It happens automatically. You get it for free. God just gives it to you. When you rebel against God, you don't get those blessings.

48:22 Now, when those things are sinful, Jesus paid for them and you will still receive salvation, but you will not have the temporal gifts that come to those who are obedient in this life. When it comes to football, I'd like to make a sort of practical argument that may reach some members of the audience who would not otherwise listen to us. Now, for a religious audience, undoubtedly, we're going to have some familiarity with a certain section of the IRS tax code, and that would be five hundred one C. And the reason we'll have that is because of course five hundred one C three is where you get tax exemption for religious organizations Organizations. Now what most people don't realize is that scroll down a

49:09 little bit from 501c3, 501c6, football organizations are exempt. Now as a general rule, our government does not do things that are for the good in the greater sense of the term good, things that are in line with Christianity, in line with Christ. And so you would of course be hard pressed to find an organization that is more evil than the IRS there are some in our government, of course but they're certainly at the top. So if the IRS has preferential treatment for an organization, you can generally assume that it's one of a handful of reasons why that is the case. You have either it is too much of a hassle or it becomes too entangled or there's a legal restriction. That would be the case for religious organizations.

50:01 Several of those arguments we won't get into them here. You have particularly moneyed or powerful individuals who can write their own laws, by proxy of course, and then you have things that are being pushed for particularly destructive purposes to destroy society. Often reasons two and three tend to overlap a lot, that's a Venn diagram with a great deal of overlap in that middle section. But the reason that you have the NFL getting so Getting such preferential tax treatment and legal treatment and subsidies and everything historically is that those who are pushing for this have a very clear agenda, and that agenda runs counter to Christianity, as was mentioned. That agenda does all sorts of evil in our society, and it's

50:52 not just the NFL itself, it's the things the NFL shows, it's the things the NFL advertises, it's the things that it does in its press releases and the way that it advocates for changing society and laws, it's the halftime shows it's extensive. This is an organization that exists to undermine what is good in our culture, and many Christians are supporting it not just with their time and their attention, but also with a significant amount of money. And that's not to say that it's not entertaining too, but that's the problem. the entertaining aspect is the hook. The fact that you've maybe played college ball or like you've always been into it doesn't change the fact that what it is being used for today is overt evil.

51:40 And when people don't recognize that, we have a real problem. Um I I think it's important before we wrap up to to make a positive case for what Christian nationalism would look like. what would a Christian nation look like? And I think to start we have to acknowledge that while on the on the right hand kingdom there is not necessarily permission for the church to forcibly baptize or forcibly convert separately from that question, on the left hand politically, a Christian government has a positive obligation to God to prevent false religions from spreading in its lands. If we were a Christian nation, there would be no more mosques, there would be no more synagogues, there would be no more Jehovah's

52:38 Witnesses, kingdom halls, there would there would be no more Mormon tabernacle. These things, the Christian science reading rooms, these things which are overt religions, which are which are antithetical to God, would not be permitted for the very same reason that when God gave the Hebrews new lands, he told them to cast down the idols of those lands, to destroy them. That wasn't political guidance. That wasn't a oh, that was then and this is now. If you're a faithful Christian, you have a positive to desire to destroy that which is evil, that which will cause people to people to go to hell. And if you're a Christian, if you actually believe what Christian doctrine teaches, then mosques and synagogues and Christian science reading rooms lead people

53:32 to hell. They cause damnation by their existence and they would not be permitted. And that is why we will continue in virtually every episode, God willing every episode, we will attack the enlightenment by name and we will give details about why the Enlightenment was a perversion and an assault on God's order, because the notion of the separation of church and state, which has nothing to do even with the initial implementation of the Constitution itself that was was memed later on, but it was an enlightenment value. The idea that well the state can go in one direction and the church can do go another and they don't need to step on each other's toes. There are cases where that's true and there are cases where that's

54:18 false. And if you have a Christian nation, you should seek through the gospel to reach those who can be reached to give them the good news of God. But you're under no obligation to permit them to practice witchcraft. You have an obligation to God to kill them if they practice witchcraft. That's what God says in the Old Testament. And it's not, again, that's not a ceremonial law. If someone is going to behave in a way that is overtly satanic, the left hand kingdom, not the right, not the church. We're not saying that the church should be exercising exercising force or violence. But the king, absolutely, he has a positive duty to do so. And to fail to do so is to fail to be a Christian kingdom or principality or whatever form of government you have.

55:13 It doesn't matter. The bottom line is if it is not upholding the very most basic Christian premise that overt evil, even if it's spiritual evil, even if even if if it's a Satan worshiper who's not actually openly sacrificing humans, doesn't matter. They still must be cast down and they must be stamped out and they cannot be permitted to exist. And if that means that you have to hunt them the way we hunt terrorists and drug dealers, they're in the same category, only worse. Because you don't need to fear the one who can destroy the body. You need to fear the one who can destroy both the body and soul forever. And beyond even that, it's not just that that individual invites condemnation upon himself, invites judgment upon himself.

56:00 If you actually read the passages in the Old Testament, the existence of these individuals in a nation invites invites judgment on the nation. And so we have this modern conception, it comes from libertarian, from enlightenment thought, that, well, my neighbor does his thing over on his property, and I do mine on my property, and as long as I'm not interfering interfering with him, then he can keep doing it, and as long as he's not interfering with me, then he can keep doing whatever he's doing. And that's just not true. Because what my neighbor does does directly affect me, particularly if he is worshiping a false god because he is inviting God's judgment on himself and on me. I live next to him, I'm part of his nation.

56:45 I am not immune to the consequences of my neighbour's evil. Because God doesn't just judge individuals, He judges individuals, families, and nations. And there are clear examples of this throughout Scripture. This is not something that appears in one place, it appears in many places. It is very clear that just as God blesses the faithful, he will judge and curse the faithless. And the the inevitable an inevitable counter argument is, well what if the government doesn't do it right? What if they go after the wrong people? That's why we talk about headship. That is why we talk about the fact that he who is the head faces the stricter judgment. We spent a lot of time in the first episode differ differentiating

57:29 between those who are subordinate and those who are superior. If you're in a superior position, you have a greater duty to God, you have a greater accountability to God. So am I worried that the man who is over my nation politically may err in discerning the proper Christian treatment of things? Of course. Just as I'm concerned that he may make errors in terms of warfare or the econom the economy or whatever, sound judgment and wisdom in godly living are always driven by God and they're always in proclamation of God's will. And the fact that someone might get it wrong isn't an argument for not trying. It's an argument for getting it right and for caring about these things to the point that we

58:19 stridingly pursue them in a faithful obedience to God. Frankly, one that hasn't been seen for a long time. when Christian nationalism is condemned by pastors. I I didn't mention this earlier, but you need to understand for someone to condemn Christian nationalism is to convent condemn virtually all of Christian history. Christian nationalism is why you're a Christian. I alluded to that point, but I want to make it explicit. You are a Christian because of Christian nationalism. You're a Christian because the leaders of the European kingdoms became Christians and their people became Christians. In some cases it was more compelled than others. But you know what? Even if you're compelled to be a Christian, even if you don't

59:04 really believe it, if your kids are baptized and they're raised, they're gonna believe it. God visits his blessings on those who obey him. And that's not to suggest that that you can have some sort of pro forma obedience without faith. I'm simply saying that when you live a godly life, it will bear godly fruit. And that happens at the national level as well. Even godly heathens are blessed by God to a certain degree. Absolutely. Yes. They're blessed with children, they're blessed with long life and health. And you see this all the time. And in It's one of the things that makes it difficult to reach them with the gospel because they're living the good life. They have everything. They're at peace.

59:44 they don't lie. They don't slander. they do everything pretty much by the book. And so And so they they feel self-justified. And no one should ever feel s self-justified. Nothing that ever comes out of either one of our mouths should ever give anyone the indication that we think that we can save ourselves by any of this. All of this is post ser soteriological conversation. We're talking about, okay, I'm a Christian, what now? That's the reason that James wrote his his wisdom epistle. You know, the James is a is a book that scares a lot of Lutherans. It used to scare me because I'd seen the the one verse that says we're not saved that the that there's not that faith without works isn't a thing.

1:00:26 And if you've been inculcated in in the Lutheran doctrine and not seriously engaged with sanctified living and what it means to live a Christian life, that does sound scary, but if you read the whole epistle of James, he was writing to Christians to tell them, okay, you're Christians what now? I am telling you what the Christian life looks like in Jerusalem or anywhere, because his words were the Holy Spirit's words and they're timeless. God gave us the epistle of James, he gave us Jesus preaching. That again, it's not mostly gospel. It's mostly here's all the stuff stuff you should do and not do. And Jesus wasn't confused about how you were saved. He knew why he was here when he came. When he was preaching about obedience to God, he knew that the

1:01:16 people who were hearing him would fail. He knew he was going to the cross to pay for their individual sins as well as well as ours, and he said it anyway. Was it futile? No, it was not futile because it is the means by which God wishes to give us his blessings. When you disobey God, how's he gonna bless you? there are certain blessings you can receive, and those they're mentioned in scripture. The sun shines and the rain comes and the the food is given to the righteous and to the unrighteous alike. But when you live in God's word and you live a sanctified life that is that which is evil and focuses on that which is good, including what your neighbor is doing, you will have more blessings. You might not get richer.

1:02:02 You might still die from cancer. You're still blessed by God, even if the worst things happen to you, because you are living a life that is in conformance as much as you're able with his will, and that pleases God. we've become afraid to say that obeying God pleases God, which is insane because it's all over scripture. You can't open to a page that doesn't talk about a God pleasing life, pleasing God. We have a duty to please God. And when we talk about Christian nationalism in particular, we're saying that our God uh government, our nation should be ruled in a manner that is pleasing to God. And if you have a political environment that is permitting evil, is permitting idolatry, is permitting gross offenses against creation itself, that is the

1:02:54 opposite of pleasing to God, and you're not only going to get wrath, you're going to be judged for it, both in this life and the next, it is open sin for for us to tolerate the government that we have and we're all guilty of it. And blogging about it and complaining about it on podcasts doesn't get us off the hook because it's our government too and we will pay the price for what it does from God. And we are certainly paying the price with the state of our society. But to quickly address the the argument to be loose with the term that always comes up that has been mentioned several times. Those who say that, well, because this thing can be abused, it cannot possibly be good. Well, those who actually have and believe in the sacraments should understand

1:03:42 that that is not the case because we use wine in the Sacrament of the Table in the Lord's supper, and can wine be abused? Certainly. Does that mean that wine is evil? Well scripture is very clear that the answer is certainly no, it is not inherently evil. And to make sure we meet our Latin requirement for the episode, of course that's just abusus usum non tolitus abuse of a thing does not cancel or make void the use of a thing. Those are two separate considerations. Whether or not something is good is one consideration. Whether or not a particular use to which it is being put is another consideration. And so to use a another illustration, there was a military commander who was being interviewed for the news because his base had had

1:04:33 some young boys come to the base to learn various things, one of which was marksmanship, handling a rifle. And the female interviewer asked if that of course wasn't a dangerous activity. She said, Well you're equipping these young boys to be killers. And the general's response was very good. Well, ma'am, you're equipped to be a prostitute, but you're not one, are you? That's what it boils down to. It's the Christian life requires a Christian to live it. And the fact that we have so many who are afraid to even say, Hey, go live a Christian life, it shows that we have ceased to be faithful Christians by by any measure. You're not a Christian on Sunday. You're a Christian every day or you're never a Christian.

1:05:20 if you can go sit in a in a pew and take the sacrament and sing the hymns and love the liturgy and whatever performative things you do, no matter how much you feel them in your heart, if you then go on with the rest of your week and forget about it and think that you can engage fully in the opposite direction from God's will. And it's not even that people do that thinking, well, they they don't think it's sinful. they don't even think, well, I'm gonna go sin and Jesus will forgive me on Sunday. They don't think that their sin is sinful, and that's the most terrifying aspect of all this is when we have pastors and other Christians openly attacking Christian nationalism, which is simply obedience to God,

1:06:02 and they they do it with a clear consciousness. That's what that's what all these things boil down to. I mentioned last week that just because you're a Christian and you do something doesn't sanctify what you're doing as itself Christian. You may well do it with a clear conscience and that makes it even worse because not only is it very convincing, but you're unrepentant when you sin. And that is why we will continuously point to scripture and what God says jumping over the last couple hundred years of what's come out of our church or any other church or anywhere in society. Because if something is true and it's from God, it is an eternal truth. And you don't need something that was put on a podcast last

1:06:45 week or written in a book last year or published by a synod fifty years ago for it to be true. If it's true, you're gonna find it in scripture. You're going to find that it's been practiced by Christians throughout time. And what we find is that Christian nationalism has been practiced by Christians throughout time until the kingdoms were of Europe were overthrown and destroyed. And that began with the Enlightenment and it began with the revolutions and we are witnessing the culmination of it now. And as we as we come to the end of this episode, I want to reiterate the point that we made last week about the genealogy of ideas. This idea that Christian nationalism is evil, as I mentioned, there are

1:07:26 dozens of podcasts devoted entirely to saying it's evil. Those people are not Christians. Those people hate God. They're the same people who want to castrate children, who want to do every manner of evil thing to creation. They also hate Christian nationalism. So if you're on the fence or if you actively despise it, it's important for you to look to your left and look to your right and see who you who your brothers in arms are as you go to war against Christian nationalism. Because it's not Christians. It's not the Christians of history. It is the most evil people in this day who are doing the most evil things. Those are the people who are the opponents of Christian nationalism. And they're accompanied by Christians who are doing doing it in good

1:08:12 conscience. I uh there's a point that Dr. Koontz made on the um Brief History of Power Podcast last year that astonished me and I it's something I I re reiterate frequently. When Jeffrey Dahmer was captured and arrested and charged, it was exposed that Jeffrey Dahmer was a sodomite, a kidnapper, a rapist, a murderer, a necrophile and a cannibal. Those were the charges, and that's what was what was exposed about him. He didn't speak in his own defense to say, No, I'm not any of those things. But when it came out that when observing his victimology, there were blacks and Asians that he targeted to kidnap and rape and murder and defile and eat, the press called him a racist, and that's when Jeffrey Dahmer spoke up.

1:09:09 He didn't care about the other things. He cared about being called a racist, because being called a racist was contrary to Jeffrey Dahmer's religion. Not the religion in the sense that there was a church that was devoted to it, but in Jeffrey Dahmer's heart of hearts, the greatest sin that he could imagine anyone committing was to be a racist. And he wanted to set the record straight that I'm not a racist. Yeah, I'm a sodomite. Yeah, I'm a cannibal, I'm a necrophile, I'm a murderer, I'm not a racist. Get let's get that one thing clear. That goes to the genealogy of ideas because if you hold that racism is evil or that Christian nationalism are evil, you need to look to your left and you need to look to your right

1:09:58 and see who it is that is in lockstep with you. And then ask yourself: if I oppose Christian nationalism on the basis of God's word, if I believe that I'm being faithful to God in opposing this thing, you must answer to your own satisfaction and to God's satisfaction. How is it that the atheist to your left and the Jew to your right, who is every bit as angry and hateful as you against Christian nationalism, how did they arrive at that conclusion? Because they don't have God. They hate God. They seek to destroy God's things. And they seek to destroy Christian nationalism. Why are you in bed with those people? How did that happen? Maybe we're completely wrong. Maybe all these evil people they got one thing right or two

1:10:47 things right, since racism and Christian nationalism are all part of the same bucket. Maybe they're perfectly moral and perfectly right with God and they get everything else wrong. But you need to ask yourself, how did that happen? Because if they didn't get it from God, they got it from somewhere else. And when you look at the genealogy of where they got those ideas, it's the furthest thing imaginable from God. And that is the same answer to where you got the idea, because you didn't get it from Christians, you didn't get it from Scripture, you didn't get it from God. And this is a point we're gonna hammer home as often as is people will listen, because it's so easy in an evil world to not question assumptions and not question priors and just absorb whatever

1:11:33 we're given. And someone sprinkles Jesus dust on something and says it's in the name of love and the gospel, you're morbidally you're morally obligated to do it and believe it. That's the story that we're told. that's Satan's story. That's Satan's gospel. To say I'm opposed to everything that God is doing. Here, let me sprinkle some Jesus dust on it so you suckers will eat it up because I know you love that. And then you will run wild and do what I want. That's what's happening with all of these subjects. And I I wish the the Cory and I weren't the the guys who are saying things that are controversial, but they shouldn't be controversial. 200 years ago, they wouldn't have been. Two hundred years ago, it would be unthinkable to have this conversation

1:12:18 because no one could conceive of a a world where people didn't simply already understand it intrinsically. And yet today here we are, because of generations of faithlessness, the more and more we have abandoned godly living to the point that when you say live a godly life, Christians recoil and we need to undo that. No one would listen to this podcast two hundred years ago. Even as fiction it would be somewhat outlandish. Yeah, I mean it it it literally it fits the definition of unthinkable. the fact that you would have to debate over where people come from or whether or not we should obey God and have Christian leaders. That's controversial in the church today and it's not because it they got it out of the Bible.

1:13:01 They didn't get out of the Bible. And so I I just implore anyone listening, figure out where you got the ideas. Because if you didn't get 'em from God, you need to go find some ideas that came from God. And we're here to talk about those. And if you're looking at the genealogy of ideas, a lot of times you can also look at the progeny of those ideas. Because if you look at the progeny the idea that well we're all one race, the human race, well we're all one, male and female are just incidental. God rolled some dice and y your soul came out as one or the other, or maybe it's not even your soul, it's just your body. God stuck your soul in a body that happens to be male, happens to be female. Well, you start off there, and you wind up with transgenderism.

1:13:48 You wind up with sex reassignment, so-called surgeries for children. You wind up with puberty blockers, you wind up with abortion, you wind up with all of these evils. They all flow naturally from these things that people believe and don't think are controversial or evil or wrong. And so just to close out, I'd like to give a quick little summary of a good way for people to think about Christian nationalism and what exactly it is we mean and want by it. In the right-hand kingdom, our head ultimately is Christ, and so of course our head is Christian, being Christ Himself. All Christian nationalism is, is a desire to have a Christian head in the left hand kingdom. If you're a child, you want your father to be Christian.

1:14:37 If you're a wife, you want your husband to be Christian. If you're a citizen, you want your king to be Christian. And that's what we mean by Christian nationalism. Amen.