The Case for Christian Nationalism

9. Liberty of Conscience | II. Principle (Part 3)

Previously:

The Case for Christian Nationalism

The accusation that restraining and punishing heresy will produce hypocrisy goes back at least to the 16th century… The principle is, all have the right to express outwardly what they affirm inwardly. If they don’t have this right, then they are forced into hypocrisy, as the claim goes… But this is arbitrary. Criminalizing sins of the Second Table - such as murder, adultery, theft and defaming character - also makes men hypocrites. One might inwardly want to murder his enemy and even believe sincerely that killing him would be just, but the fear of civil punishment might lead him to act like a friend.¹

We are yet again presented with a false equivalence, in that the act of murder has the most quantifiable amount of harm, and the strictest definition of causation, of all crimes. We can absolutely know when it has been committed, because there will be a dead body, and we can categorize the level of intent of the perpetrator based upon predefined standards for premeditation. By contrast, the amount of “harm” caused to a “victim” who heard a false idea is entirely arbitrary.

I have little doubt that, in Wolfe’s vision for theocratic Caesarism, the right to express outwardly what one affirms inwardly would be strictly limited in far more subjects than just doctrinal matters. After all, the Christian Prince “mediates divine rule”² and is a little-g god with veto power over doctrinal decisions. Why would Wolfe not see public questioning of the prince’s actions and authority as condemnable religious dissent worthy of civil punishment?

To avoid [the above conclusion on hypocrisy], one would have to claim that the sins of the First Table and those of the Second Table are different.³

Wolfe either does not understand his opposition’s interpretation of Scripture at all, or he is deliberately strawmanning them again. Under the New Covenant, the Christian is given instructions to leave those who revile God in peace (1 Peter 2:20-25), which has nothing to do with the moral implications of the First Table versus the Second. This position is similar to how all foods are now clean and how circumcision is no longer required - the Epistles provide new rules on how believers are to deal with blasphemy and heresy. The question at hand is whether there is an exception to this instruction allowed for an explicitly Christian government. As I argued previously, a Christian government is a collective Christian and is bound by all of the same commandments as individual Christians.

It is true that whenever Christ himself is not at work, your [i.e., the magistrate’s] work…⁴

Through a literal injection of the civil magistrate into the Berner Synodus, a document meant to settle clerical disputes, and that was primarily concerned with pastoral directives, Wolfe is once again playing fast and loose with Reformed thought. He then closes the subsection on hypocrisy by repeating the false notion that utilizing state-violence in the punishment of thoughtcrime is not an attempt to alter the “inward man”. His usage of 1 Timothy 2:2 to justify arbitrary governmental restraint of “outward expressions of false religion”⁵ is especially eisegetical, in that Timothy was whom Paul instructed to patiently endure such evil (2 Timothy 2:24-26). The “quiet and peaceable life” we are to pray for is one that is free from government interference in the church.

I have sufficiently demonstrated that Wolfe has not “sufficiently demonstrated the truth of [his] principle.”⁶ There are so many leaps of logic, selective quotations, and false statements of his opposition’s position that this section fails, on every front, to make the case for the magistrate’s right to violently suppress religious dissent.

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The Case for Christian Nationalism

1. Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2022), 369.

2. Ibid., 290.

3. Ibid., 370.

4. Ibid., 370-371.

5. Ibid., 372.

6. Ibid., 372.