The Case for Christian Nationalism

9. Liberty of Conscience | II. Principle (Part 1)

Previously:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

Those in the denial camp typically affirm that civil government ought to regulate outward religious actions that cause public harm. But they limit public harm to physical harm.¹

This is a major categorical error and strawmanning of his opposition, in that a physical crime, when prosecuted, is wholly separated from its religious motivation. Human sacrifice is prosecuted as a murder, not a religious murder, just as sexual abuse by a pastor is prosecuted in the same manner as when it is perpetrated by a public school teacher. Thus, “outward religious actions” are not being regulated, in the Baptist model of liberty of conscience. Instead, crimes against other human beings that are illegal for everyone are not given religious exemption.

I will grant here that civil authorities should not prosecute crimes solely against God, as if civil punishment right wrongs committed against him. But the assumption that external false religion does not harm souls is clearly false.²

If someone burglarizes your home and steals your valuables, a quantifiable amount of financial harm has been done to you, and you are required to state that amount in the police report. If someone assaults you, there is a quantifiable amount of physical harm done, often measured by medical costs and recovery time. In civil suits resulting from injury, professional and emotional harm is specifically measured by how the physical damage prevented someone from working or normally functioning.

How do you quantify the damage done to souls from hearing false ideas?

One might point to the Second Table offense of vularity as an example. We consider it damaging for unwilling persons, especially children, to be exposed to expressions of debauchery, but that is because those expressions represent quantifiable acts of physical abuse that we use as a benchmark. How is the damage from simply hearing false religious ideas quantifiable in the same way? Some would point to the judgement that faces all who do not place their faith in Christ, but is that a quantifiable earthly damage of the same type by which all other civil judgments are determined? How much can one exact justice along those lines before he sins himself (Romans 12:19)? Even crimes that we prosecute for their potential to cause harm, such as public drunkenness, have distinctly quantifiable consequences that are immediate in effect. What is the backstop for a line of thinking that equates publicly expressed thought with physical crime? According to Wolfe, it stops or proceeds by his own arbitrary determination:

(1) Any outward action that has the potential to cause harm to others is rightfully subject to civil restraint or punishment (in principle).

(2) External false religion has the potential to cause harm to others. Therefore, (3) external false religion is rightfully subject to civil restraint or punishment.³

Could there be any looser and less legally justifiable definition for a thoughtcrime than “the potential to cause harm”? Wolfe engages in a game of semantics, claiming that “belief itself is neither the ground of the civil action nor the object of the action.”⁴ But spoken belief is indeed his grounds for punishment, for it is the action that “has the potential to cause harm”. External circumstances may inform the level of potential harm, when punishment is meted, but it is still the actual act of expressing belief that would be punished.

As for the minor premise, there is no question that those who actively and outwardly espouse damnable error can lead people astray, especially when they have skill and personality.⁵

Take a minute to appreciate the irony that this sentence was written by the same man who bases his entire political theory on a wildly unsound imagining of prelapsarian earth and of our post-fall nature, built upon no exegesis of his own, that was roundly rejected by nearly every theologian who reviewed his book. For example, Andrew T. Walker, a professor of ethics and public theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary wrote:

He points to what the world must have been like in Genesis 1 and 2 had they continued without the fall. But the argument about the natural principles in Genesis 1 go beyond what the text allows. “Duty” denotes the idea of authority to command such outcomes. But, again, the most that Wolfe does is make inferences from an unfallen Adam to the role of government today. He fails entirely to give sufficient attention to the Bible’s creation-fall-redemption-restoration storyline and assumes we can simply repristinate Eden without calling attention to the developing saga of the covenants and what they require for government’s calling. Wolfe seems to think that the world of Genesis 1-2 is the world that contemporary governments are called to resurrect. This notion, however, ignores massively the fall and the calling of government within a fallen era, as detailed in the Noahic Covenant in Genesis 9.⁶

The last person qualified to discuss punishing “damnable [theological] error” is someone who is guilty of it himself and who, as Walker points out, fails to even properly incorporate the four points of the gospel into his expressed worldview.

Next:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

1. Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 360.

2. Ibid., 360.

3. Ibid., 361.

4. Ibid., 361.

5. Ibid., 362.

6. Andrew T. Walker, “Book Review: The Case for Christian Nationalism, by Stephen Wolfe,” 9Marks, accessed May 16, 2023, https://www.9marks.org/article/a-baptist-engagement-with-the-case-for-christian-nationalism/.