The Case for Christian Nationalism

6. What Laws Can and Cannot Do | II. Civil Law

Previously:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

Wolfe’s explanation for the need of civil law begins quite agreeably, but starts to crumble when he presents two logical issues. First, he expands upon his previous definition of law, giving his characterization of civil law the same, subjective “legitimate civil authority” and “good of civil communities” that is wide open for abuse.¹ He then presents another statement of extreme subjectivity:

Hence, it is a derived authority, and so laws are just only if they command what proceeds from the natural law.²

Whose interpretation of “natural law” is correct? Christendom is full of socialists who would argue that capitalism works against natural law; one could make a case, no worse than Wolfe’s, that the prelapsarian good would be to share all things in common. With no exegesis to back up his postulations, by what authority, other than his own subjective reasoning, does he dispute such a statement? He then confirms his personal, subjective claim to legitimate interpretation of general revelation, when he writes, “However, a purported law that does not order according to reason is no law at all. That is to say, unjust laws are not laws, properly speaking, and so they do not bind the conscience to obedience.”³ With these sentences, he confirms that he places pagan philosophy above Scripture, because both Paul and Peter tell us to be obedient to all authorities, which would include any unjust law that does not force us to violate the commandments of God; Wolfe and I agree that slavery is unjust, as a universal principle, but twice in Scripture Paul tells slaves to obey their masters (Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22).⁴ Wolfe then calls supposedly correct interpretation of natural law, “divine civil rule”, a quality he will later transfer to the Christian prince.

What are the limits of this interpretation of law? If Wolfe considers taxes to be excessive, does that make it no law at all? Since, through his interpretation of natural law, he would enact all manner of civil punishment against those who proselytize other religions, is the First Amendment no law at all? He next writes of the limits of civil law and its subordination to other spheres of life (family, church, etc.) until those other spheres “cannot effectively regulate to the common good”, such as the civil restraint of a “husband’s abuse of his power”.⁵ Yet, in the preceding chapter, He chastised Russel Moore for alluding to how cultural Christianity often upheld such abuse. Again, his own internal contradictions negate his argument for the sufficiency of human reason in the creation of fully just law.

Though civil command is backed by penalties for non-compliance, it is not inherently a coercive power.⁶

As previously shown, this is patently false. As Bastiat wrote, the law “is made, generally, by one man, or by one class of men. And as law cannot exist without the sanction and the support of a preponderant force, it must finally place this force in the hands of those who legislate” (emphasis mine).⁷ There is no such thing as a command that is not born from the preexistence of, nor not irrevocably intertwined with, coercive power. Power is the difference between “you should” and “you will”. If the “civil command” is to redistribute wealth, and someone refuses to give up their possessions, what happens next? Does the government ask, “pretty please”, and then abandon their pursuit if the person remains obstinate? No government institutes law until they first have the coercive power to enforce it. From laws against murder to the traffic ticket you get for missing a stop sign, all carry the implied threat of the preexisting governmental authorities breaking down your door, dragging you out, hog-tied, and putting you in prison if you refuse to comply. Law does not “become coercive”, as he argues, but is always coercive, even though most people knowingly avoid being made physical examples of that coercion.

Wolfe attempts to justify his backwards order of operations with, “Also, since man’s private judgment concerning suitable civil action is naturally limited, public judgment is both necessary for living well and natural for him to obey. Thus, civil command is not inherently coercive, for man is naturally willing to be directed in life by a civil authority.”⁸ Wolfe is in an incredibly minuscule minority of Americans who wish to bring about a Protestant theocracy - most who believe this to be a “Christian country” want to stop well short of instituting a state church and enforcing doctrine; even if they did, the overwhelming majority would not choose a paedobaptist church. By his own logic, he should be at least somewhat willing to be directed by the “civil determinations” of the overwhelming majority of Americans who, even among many Republicans, have little interest in abandoning relative morality and the secularization of government, because he is still mostly left alone by them. He cannot live by the very rules he would subject others to, a hallmark of authoritarian political theory. This is further confirmed when he states that “most people are unable to sufficiently judge the reasons for every action required of them.” He has implicitly placed himself in the class of a ruling intelligentsia, worthy of the “deference” of the masses and capable of “discerning the public good” without their input or consent.⁹ In his chapter on revolution, he will explicitly say that a Christian minority has the right to violently overthrow majority non-Christian rule and “disregard the non-Christian withholding of consent”.¹⁰

He then confuses his own argument of the inherent non-coercive nature of civil command through a lengthy description of civil power as “a power to command” through a deference to “legitimate civil authority”, as if the command exists separately from the power of the authority to enforce it.¹¹ His use of the military chain of command further undermines this claim, because the assumption that superior commanders are making better informed judgments is buffered by the restraint of military law, in the United States the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The UCMJ would be a worthless piece of paper if it was not backed by the coercive force of court-martials and military prison. He puts the cart before the horse, for how could a list of civil commands ever come into existence before the existence of a preponderant force? Those are not commands, but merely the suggestions of a political theorist; the majority of Americans can tell Wolfe to take his purported universal principles and pound sand, and there is nothing he can do about it until he gathers enough force to make them comply. Even God’s natural law proceeds from His preexisting authority over all creation, and cannot be separated from it.

Wolfe has locked himself into this inversion of command and power, because without the commands’ inherent authority, derived from his personal interpretation of natural law, his claim to possess the right to dictate the “good of civil communities” becomes nothing more than a single, subjective position in a postmodern game of competing power-dynamics. He wishes to determine the absolutes of a Christian nation without basing its law on the only absolute, inerrant authority for Christians; he has no choice but to do this, because, as I have shown, a plain reading of Scripture contradicts the very foundations of his argument. His avoidance of Scripture is made painfully apparent in the next subsection, Righteous and Good Laws, which does not once refer to the revealed moral laws of our righteous and good God; though there is a later subsection in this chapter on Mosaic law, his initial defining of good law without mentioning God’s Law is yet another red flag, in the context of Christian nationalism.

There is a twisting of words at the end of this subsection that disqualifies Wolfe as an arbiter of God’s natural law, as well: Demosthenes is quoted as saying “all law is a gift of God”¹²; the pagan, Greek philosopher was not speaking of θεός (theos, God), but his pantheon of θεῶν (theōn, gods). The true quote, “All law is an invention and gift of the gods,” that Wolfe puts in the footnote, demonstrates that Demosthenes was, in many ways, a fool “claiming to be wise” who “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man” (Romans 1:22-23), and whose deductions should not be held in equal reverence to the special revelation of God. Wolfe would likely argue that he does not do this, but his own predilection for referencing pagan philosophy exponentially more than Scripture, throughout his book, says otherwise.

This might seem overly abstract, but my interest is in ensuring the preservation of individual agency and vitality.¹³

The last thing that a government engaged in prosecuting thoughtcrime does is preserve individual agency. He will later justify oppressing heterodox religious thought by fallaciously comparing it to suppressing the Second Table crimes of “murder, adultery, theft, and defaming character”¹⁴, all of which have victims who are not the all-powerful Creator of the universe, who repeatedly in the New Testament tells us to let Him judge offenses against His name. For all his talk of how law cannot engender belief, Wolfe would still seek to control the minds of the people in his “nation perfected”. His claim to be interested in individual agency is akin to an abusive parent who says his violent methods are for the child’s own personal development.

The scope of objects [for civil law] includes all outward things, except spiritual ceremonies and the ecclesiastical order (which are matters of divine law).¹⁵

How does a nation with a single, sanctioned state church, and which enforces religious doctrine through civil law, not have at least some jurisdiction over “spiritual ceremonies and the ecclesiastical order”, even if only tangentially? How would such a nation not quickly become a bureaucratic commingling of church and state apparatchiks? The history of Northern European Protestantism, over the last two hundred years, is that of just such a mixing of concerns, where the blurred lines between state and church allowed state-sponsored seminaries to be ideologically subverted by intellectuals more interested in earthly concerns than heavenly truths. Imagine the type of politicking that takes place today inside large denominational polities being given the power of civil enforcement. Why bother with a whisper campaign against an ecclesial rival, for being too “liberal” or “fundamentalist”, when you can leverage your civil political connections? Why would the Christian prince allow his church’s power structure to contain elders who might contradict his political aspirations when he can guarantee, through the ecclesiastical appointment of loyalists, that the people would hear his praises sung from the pulpit? Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s maternal grandfather, the son of one of the nation’s most highly-regarded theologians, Karl August von Hase, was chaplain to the Kaiser until he was forced to tender his resignation for holding contradictory political beliefs.¹⁶ This is how the type of unrealistic hypotheses that Wolfe promulgates play out in the real world.

When he writes, “Of course, communities that lack self-governability will require more law and more law enforcement,” one cannot help but think he is referring to the demographics he considers “reliable sources for criminality”. Following this, his statement that people have the natural right to make “a claim against others to conduct free, unhindered, and undistracted worship,”¹⁷ without expressly specifying the limitations on which interpretation of God they are allowed to worship, is laughably disingenuous. Many religions beyond orthodox Protestantism - including those of Mormons, Jehova's Witnesses, and Black Hebrew Israelites - consider evangelizing an aspect of worship; Wolfe would have these people, at the very least, jailed and banished. Truly, he is either a man of immensely conflicting visions or an outright liar. Either way, his definition of the bounds and purpose of civil law should be rejected by Christian audiences.

Next:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

1. Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 248.

2. Ibid., 249.

3. Ibid., 249.

4. A good, historical example of when such laws rise to the level of justifiable civil disobedience would be segregation, because it required the citizen to consider another human being, made in the image of God, to be of an insurmountable lower caste, based solely on their ethnicity. In our time, the attempted medical coercion from the Biden administration in 2021 also rose to this level, in that it wished to place the state over the bodies of Christians, when they are temples to God (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).

5. Stephen Wolfe, 250.

6. Ibid., 251.

7. Frédéric Bastiat, The Law (Creative Commons, 2013), 6.

8. Stephen Wolfe, 251.

9. Stephen Wolfe, 252, 255.

10. Ibid., 346.

11. Ibid., 252-255.

12. Ibid., 257.

13. Ibid., 258.

14. Ibid., 369.

15. Ibid., 258-259.

16. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1st Paperback ed (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 12.

17. Stephen Wolfe, 259.