The church can teach that liberty must be ordered without claiming the state’s office. The church can declare that rulers are accountable to God without giving the magistrate the keys of the kingdom.

This article is not intended to replace, summarize, or correct the PCA’s ongoing study of Christian Nationalism. That work deserves careful attention on its own terms, especially because it addresses constitutional and confessional questions for Presbyterian officers and courts. My purpose here is more modest. I am trying to tie together some observations that came to mind after listening to Michael Horton’s recent conversation with Miles Smith and Darryl Hart on the question, “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?”

That conversation helped clarify something I have been trying to articulate in our current debates about Christian Nationalism, the civil magistrate, the American revision of the Westminster Standards, and the meaning of political liberty. My comments here are not offered as the definitive way Christians must view the state. They are simply my own attempt to think confessionally, historically, and prudentially about the world we actually inhabit.

The difficulty, as I see it, is not merely that Protestant views no longer dominate the public square. It is also that the very structures of local community have weakened so dramatically that the church is often expected to replace what has disappeared. The church is now pressured to become the local community, the family substitute, the public square, the political refuge, the counseling center, the civic association, the moral academy, and, at times, the policy voice for the state. That creates a real burden on the church and a real confusion about the church’s institutional mission.

The church must speak to rulers, citizens, families, and nations. She must teach the whole counsel of God. But the church is not the state, and she is not a substitute civil order. She has her own officers, ordinances, mission, and spiritual authority. The question, then, is how the church can teach the moral claims of Christ upon public life without confusing her spiritual mission with the work of the civil magistrate.

Two Kinds of Liberty

One of the problems in our debates is that we often speak of “liberty” as if it were one simple thing. Yuval Levin’s contrast between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine is helpful here. Both men were concerned with liberty, rights, and political reform, but they located liberty in very different moral and institutional worlds.

Paine represents a more abstract and revolutionary vision of liberty. In that view, liberty tends to be understood as emancipation from inherited authority, custom, religious obligation, and older institutions. The French Revolution becomes, for Paine, an opportunity to remake society on rational principles. Burke, by contrast, represents ordered liberty. Liberty is not created by severing ourselves from inheritance, custom, law, religion, family, and local institutions. It is preserved through them. Reform is necessary, but reform must be organic, attentive to history, and respectful of the institutions that make freedom possible.

That distinction matters because the Anglo-American world was not simply “the Enlightenment” in the French revolutionary sense. There was a more moderate, Protestant, institutional form of Enlightenment in Britain and America that was not trying to abolish religion from public life. It assumed that liberty needed moral formation, and that moral formation came through institutions that preceded the state: churches, families, schools, local communities, associations, courts, and habits of public life.

This is one reason the current debate can become confused. If liberty means the unconstrained liberty of Paine and the French Revolution, then Christians should be profoundly critical of it. But if we are speaking instead of ordered liberty, constitutional restraint, religious liberty, due process, institutional pluralism, and the moral formation required for self-government, then we are speaking of something much closer to the Anglo-American tradition that shaped American Presbyterianism.

To reject revolutionary liberalism is not necessarily to reject ordered liberty. To defend ordered liberty is not necessarily to embrace secular neutrality.

Protestant Institutionalism

This is where Miles Smith’s account of early America is helpful. Smith argues that the early United States was neither simply secular nor simply Christendom in the older establishmentarian sense. At the federal level, and increasingly in the states, America moved toward disestablishment while remaining a recognizably Protestant public order. Protestant Christianity shaped education, public morality, law, civic rhetoric, diplomacy, and institutional life, but the republic was not thereby subordinated to the institutional church.

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