On the nature of nations

I think Christian nationalism at the base, like every iteration of it, every version of it that at least I've examined, seems to have this idea that the nation itself should conceive of itself as Christian, including the government.

So they should see themselves as, just like you have a Christian bookstore or a Christian school or these other institutions, a Christian family, you have a baby that's born. Is that baby a Christian yet?

Well, if the baby's still a member of a Christian family, don't get all Presbyterian on me, but I'm a Baptist and I think that we use this term and we're not saying that the baby's regenerate in a sense, we're saying that it's a member of this social group that can conceive of itself as Christian.

And so that's what I've seen in Christian nationalism. I think that maybe some of the concerns here, and I say maybe because I don't know completely, but it sounds to me at least like the concern is the nationalism part, that some of the problems are, correct me if I'm wrong, that these nations, that the way that nations are being conceived of by these Christian nationalist thinkers is in more of a rooted ethical or ethno sense and less of a spiritual sense.

Nations in Scripture, Lineage, and Ancestry

Am I getting that right? Is that an accurate? So I don't know, maybe I disagree with this, but I think when you look at nations in scripture, the definition of nation, like Genesis 10, 11, 12, you are looking at lineage, you are looking at ancestry, you are looking at families, places, languages are associated with this kind of thing.

And there is this core group that sees itself as tied together, as responsibilities to each other. And so I think a lot of, in studying some of the social justice stuff, a lot of the social justice guys, because they don't like that, they'll tend to say, I'm not saying you guys are social justice, but that's what I've done most of my study on.

They will say, hey look, Israel, it's a mixed multitude, look at Ruth and Boaz, look at these interracial relationships, look at, but I think what you see though is that there is this core though that can always look back to the fathers, that there is this line, there's integration within it, but at the height of Israel's empire, so under Solomon, estimates are with this foreign labor force, which is the most it's ever been, was about 10 of the population.

Israel, Samaritans, and the Limits of Mixing Peoples

So when you have too much of a mixing going on between people groups, you get the Samaritans, and that's not a positive example in scripture, that's like a new group coming to fruition. So I do think that the Christian nationalists who try to emphasize there is this rootedness, I don't sense, at least in talking to some of them, that they're not like genetic or biological determinists on that question, but they do see this intrinsic shared experience that people have together that develops over the course of generations living in a place, and this is the kind of thing that builds trust, that ensures that you wanna defend yourself against enemies, that builds an identity, and I don't think that identity is in conflict with the spiritual identity.

I think that they can complement each other, just like you have a family that can be a Christian family, but they also have certain characteristics that demarc them as a family. So I don't know if I just started a debate, but that's my opinion on it.