I am glad this committee has been established and I hope and pray that it will produce something of value to the church. I, along with Christian Nationalism’s proponents, sincerely hope that the committee will, as they say, “do the reading,” and will likewise avoid any imprudent anathemas of positions within the pale of our confessional tradition.

At its recently held 52nd General Assembly, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) passed an overture establishing an ad interim committee on “Christian Nationalism.” The stated reasons for the overture were several: there is a question, for example, whether those ordained in the PCA who hold to the view of the civil magistrate outlined in the original form of the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) must “take an exception” to the American form of the WCF (1788), which is the version adopted by the PCA. There is a question whether the 1647 WCF is “Christian Nationalist,” and whether “Christian Nationalism” and “Ethno-Nationalism” are coterminous, or at least comfortable bedfellows. And, most importantly, the overture states that these and other issues “have caused confusion, division, and dissension even among the congregants of PCA churches and affected PCA pastors and officers.” The committee is thus tasked to study “the relationship between Christian Nationalism, Ethno-Nationalism, and related teachings” and “write a report that gives pastoral guidance when addressing congregations, new members, and future officers of the PCA.”

To some extent, this controversy and consequent overture may seem a bit too “inside baseball” to warrant outside attention. However, the questions raised by this committee, and by proponents of Christian Nationalism more generally, are related to a broader ongoing conversation within intellectual Protestantism about retrieval of historic Reformed thought, a project of “Ressourcement” about which much has been and continues to be written. Have we, some wonder, gone astray from important aspects of historic Protestant teaching on social and political issues? Are there older, better ways of thinking waiting to be gleaned from various reformers, both the famous and the obscure?

The landmark case for this was made several years ago by Stephen Wolfe in his book The Case for Christian Nationalism (Canon Press, 2022). Wolfe is a political theorist by training, having published scholarship on Reformed political thought in the American founding era before writing his most famous work. In it, drawing on both secular and Christian sources, Wolfe advocates for the justifiability of the “principle of similarity:” that similarity between people facilitates fellow-feeling and therefore that it is right and natural to desire to dwell with people like yourself, with whom you share a common “ethnos.” Defining who should fall within this principle of likeness is difficult, and Wolfe denies it is identical to physical appearance or skin color; instead, the likeness is predicated on a combination of language, culture, and highest ideals that unify nations. The principle of similarity and its relationship to Reformed political thought dating back hundreds of years will undoubtedly need to be addressed in whatever report the committee produces.

To be clear, Stephen Wolfe is not the only representative of Christian Nationalism, nor is his book the best or only resource for the committee to assess.

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