The Case for Christian Nationalism
The Case for Christian Nationalism
6. What Laws Can and Cannot Do | I. Law in General
Previously:
That distinction which is put between the Laws of God and the laws of men becomes a snare to many as it is misapplied in the ordering of their obedience to civil Authority; for when the Authority is of God and that in way of an Ordinance, (Romans 13:1) and when the administration of it is according to deductions, and rules gathered from the word of God, and the clear light of nature in civil nations, surely there is no humane law that tends to common good (according to those principles) but the same is immediately a law of God, and that in way of an Ordinance which all are to submit unto and that for conscience sake. (Romans 13:5).1
The chapter on civil law is opened with a quote from the preamble of the 1647 Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, which references Romans 13 to justify the people’s requirement to submit to the laws of that theocracy.2 As mentioned above, most conservative American Christians would consider many aspects of these laws to be quite undesirable; this includes the law that drove the Salem Witch Trials and one where a boy who was raped by a man could face corporal punishment of up to forty stripes.
IF any man after legal conviction shall HAVE OR WORSHIP any other God, but the LORD GOD: he shall be put to death.
If any man or woman be a WITCH, that is, has or consults with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death
If any man LIES WITH [A MAN] as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed abomination, they both shall surely be put to death: unless the one party were forced (or be under fourteen years of age in which case he shall be severely punished)
That no Jesuit, or spiritual or ecclesiastical person [as they are termed] ordained by the authority of the Pope, or Sea of Rome shall henceforth at any time repair to, or come within this Jurisdiction: And if any person shall give just cause of suspicion that he is one of such Society or Order he shall be brought before some of the Magistrates, and if he cannot free himself of such suspicion he shall be committed to prison, or bound over to the next Court of Assistants, to be tried and proceeded with by Banishment or otherwise as the Court shall see cause: and if any person so banished shall be taken the second time within this Jurisdiction upon lawful trial and conviction he shall be put to death.3
Wolfe does not directly address the preamble quote, or explain its context, in this section; the only statements remotely related to it are a section on “deductions” and a reference to God granted “types of power” in the end of the section, but neither are tied back to this colonial law. This quote also refers to several beliefs that seem contradictory to ideas Wolfe promotes in his book. It mentions the “clear light of nature in civil nations”, secondary to “rules gathered from the word of God”, meaning that those without special revelation are not able to properly deduce God’s will through general revelation (natural law); this is something that would be obvious to colonists living in close proximity to native peoples. It is especially interesting that Wolfe decided not to include the first half of the first sentence of the paragraph, because its appeal to a unity between the “[Mosaic] Laws of God and the laws of men” works slightly against his later dismissal of modern theonomy (though it works well for his arguments against neo-Anabaptism). He also never addresses the two references to Romans 13 in this section, though they are the driving force behind the quote he chose to open the chapter with; let us examine them in their historical context.
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. (Romans 13:1)
Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. (Romans 13:5)
The book of Romans was written during the reign of Emperor Nero, who was anything but a friend to Christianity. Church history tells us that, approximately two years before Paul wrote these words, the Apostle Philip was scourged and crucified in Roman-controlled Phrygia. Paul would later too be martyred under Nero, who, among other tortures, “had some [Christians] sewed up in skins of wild beasts, and then worried by dogs until they expired; and others dressed in shirts made stiff with wax, fixed to axletrees, and set on fire in his gardens in order to illuminate them.”4 We should never lose sight of the fact that Paul was martyred by the highest governing authority, the very person he told his readers to obey in all earthly matters, or face “God’s wrath”. The context of Romans 13 tells us that Christians should submit to the civil requirements of all governments, as long as they do not demand we violate the commandments of God, even if those governments are a supreme tyranny to Christians. This is not modern interpretation; Calvin was insistent, as far back as the 1536 version of the Institutes, that Christians must be obedient to tyrannical governments.5 The quote that Wolfe uses to open his chapter on civil law negates his later chapter, The Right to Revolution, and his call, just a few pages back, for “opposing, suppressing and excluding the very sort of people who run the American regime.” Wolfe will address Romans 13 in that chapter, including the context of Nero, making the incredibly theologically dubious claim that “no power ordained of God can command what is evil”6, using that as a way to wiggle out of God’s command of subjection to authority. I will revisit this context when that section is reached, and break down his poor hermeneutic, which does not account for similar instructions from Peter and Christ, nor Calvin’s appeal to 1 Samuel.
In the previous chapter, we discussed social custom… But this prejudicial ordering has limitations: it is neither centralized nor possessed and exercised by a decisional authority, nor does it permit the use of outward force to achieve compliance.7
The previous chapter was not about generic customs, such as holding a door open for someone or respect for elders, but was dedicated to how cultural Christianity can be used to force people to pretend to be Christian, which supposedly maintains the social order. All the talk of its effectiveness is now thrown out the window, for Wolfe has implicitly admitted, right at the outset of this chapter, that his nation would use such “social power” as little more than an implied threat of state violence for “achieving compliance” with religious doctrine. Perhaps he knows the reader is not ready for that explicit admission, and that is why he retreats into the more secularized language of “social custom”, now that legal authority is being brought into the equation. But, the truth is that every social pressure in his nation, laid upon religious recalcitrants by their neighbors, would come with an implied “or else”.
Are you one of the twenty percent of Americans who believe in justification by works and papal authority? Keep that to yourself, or else.
Are you one of the majority of American Protestants who believe that only full immersion of a professing believer is legitimate baptism? Do not advocate against the state church’s view, or else.
Do you believe in a fringe theory, such as well-known Christian apologist William Lane Craig’s belief in Molinism (that God limits his knowledge to make room for free will)? Do not even think of publicly debating your case, or else.
Next, Wolfe argues for the sufficiency of man’s reason to “discern and understand both the laws of his nature and why those laws are good for him,” then immediately disproves that argument by presenting a definition of law that was not fully reasoned:
Law is an ordering of reason by an appropriate lawgiver for the good of the community.8
The 20th century laws that forced Black Americans and South Africans to be segregated from Whites, that forced Indians to serve the monopolistic interests of the British East India Company, and that prevented Protestants in Spain from sharing the gospel were all passed by appropriate lawgivers, the internationally recognized governments that ruled over those people. Clearly, law is not always good for the community, it is quite often only good for the ruling class, at the community’s expense. Natural law, as interpreted by humans, is just as fallible as we are; yet, Wolfe appeals to it as if its interpretation by the reprobate carries the same absolute truth of God’s revealed word; he must do this, because he cannot, or will not, exegete Scripture to confirm what is true and false in their interpretations. A self-negating lack of objective reasoning behind such faith in the human interpretation of natural law is shown in that he, on the one hand, appeals to a biased selection of assumptions from pagan philosophers, such as Cicero, Plato, and Aristotle, as inherently good and considers the neo-pagan assumptions of our current secular order to be inherently bad.
As previously shown, through his argument for pederasty as something natural, Plato would have been fine with much of the sexual immorality at the center of today’s Christian politics. Since Wolfe would not concur with Plato’s approval of men courting young boys, by what reasoning does he determine that other, selected assessments from the philosopher were proper interpretations of “universal principles”? His lack of exegesis to define or confirm universal principles, coupled with an insistence that pagan philosophers discovered these principles as self-apparent truths, continues to come across as more Kantian than Reformed. Calvin occasionally referred to the insights of pagan philosophers, but, with few exceptions (most notably civil punishment of heretics), he completed those arguments with exegeted insights from Scripture. Wolfe fails to meet the bounds of his own argument for these universal principles of natural law being “known in themselves” and “true for all situations” when he uses modern application of Deuteronomy 22:8 (Mosaic roofing law) as the example9, because such ends begin with the special revelation of God.
By Wolfe’s own definition, any law passed by a government that he, through his personal interpretation of “natural law”, believes is detrimental to the polis is not law at all (he will explicitly say so in the next section). Thus, in practical application, he negates his argument for a totality of state action from others, in favor of his own individuality. The only legitimate government is one that fully concurs with his worldview; his definition’s assumption of a beneficial lawgiver is built from a collectivist, authoritarian requirement of his preferred nation over the individual. Frédéric Bastiat, from an inverse perspective of Enlightenment individualism, defined law as “the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.”10 From this standpoint, he would make what is perhaps the greatest moral argument against socialism, that it is a collective form of theft, no different ethically than if a single person robbed another at gunpoint. Under the bounds of Wolfe’s definition, if the “appropriate lawgiver”, through what he thought was an “ordering of reason”, decided that converting the nation to communism, by force, was for the “good of the community”, that would be perfectly acceptable. Certainly, as long as such a government did not force us to abandon God, we would be bound to obey its earthly commands, but we should not advocate for the foundations of our nation to be built upon a definition of law that is so open to abuse. Neither should a raw, libertarian individualism drive us, but Bastiat’s definition is still exponentially better than Wolfe’s, in that it at least has some built-in safeguards against tyranny.
Since every sphere of life is under natural law and that natural law requires particular applications, it follows that every sphere of life requires a suitable authority, with suitable power, to make determinations. For this reason, God has granted specific types of power by which the authorities of each sphere make judgments... civil life has the civil magistrate with civil power;11
By his own reasoning, Wolfe has made the case that “God has granted” what he refers to as the “global American empire”; it is currently far less tyrannical than the global Roman empire was, and he began this chapter by quoting a colonial, Puritan law’s reference of Paul’s specific instruction to be subject to that empire. Since he will spend much of the remainder of the book arguing for the violent overturning of the “GAE”, he has proven, by his own internal contradictions, that man’s reasoning of natural law is insufficient for the creation of the “nation perfected”.
Next:
The Book of the General Laws and Liberties Concerning the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts (1647).
This is the full paragraph that Wolfe quotes from to open the chapter.
Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 243.
The Book of the General Laws and Liberties.
William Byron Forbush, ed., Fox’s Book of Martyrs (United States: The John C. Winston Company, 1926), 3, 4, 6.
Matthew J. Tuininga, Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Christ’s Two Kingdoms, Cambridge Studies in Law and Christianity (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 241.
Stephen Wolfe, 359.
This will be addressed in more detail in chapter 8, but Wolfe seems to forget that God has previously ordained violent, oppressive power over his people (Isaiah 10:5, Jeremiah 21:4), and still told them to seek the good of these nations (Jeremiah 29:7). God will not personally commit evil, but people he places in power over us most certainly can commit evil against us, and we very much can still be conscious bound by Him to submit to them (1 Peter 2:18).
Ibid., 244.
Ibid., 245.
Ibid., 246.
Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (Creative Commons, 2013), 2.
Stephen Wolfe, 247.