Does something deeper, perhaps even spiritual, animate the strong opposition we witness today to nationhood as traditionally understood? I believe so, for this simple reason already cited: Nations are the object of the Great Commission. Jesus commands us to disciple the nations by preaching the gospel to them, baptizing those who believe, planting churches, and teaching them to obey everything Christ commanded. This is precisely what Satan seeks to hinder in this age.

Our post-Christian culture is at war with reality.

If this were not the case, there would be no market for documentaries asking such simple questions of ontology, like Matt Walsh’s 2022 film “What Is a Woman?”

Prescient as always, G.K. Chesterton saw an age like ours coming when he warned that soon “Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.”

What is a baby? What is a marriage? What is a woman? These questions have only one right answer. Yet offering that answer indeed causes many to draw their swords in a world violently rebelling against the fabric of nature itself.

But, as the Roman poet Horace once remarked, “You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she will always hasten back.” 2025 may be the year that nature (or “creation order” if you prefer) hastens back with a vengeance.

As such, many have begun to ask another elementary question: What is a nation?

Google Trends data shows that global interest in this question has steadily risen since 2004. Starting with a relative interest score below 25 (on a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 represents peak search volume), the question began gaining more attention, particularly after 2014. By 2020, the interest score frequently hovered around 75 or higher, with occasional spikes hitting 100 in recent years.

The recent debate over legal immigration, H-1B visas, and the “work ethic and culture” of working-class Americans only underscore the widespread confusion on the question of “What is a nation?”

This turn in the conversation is of particular interest to me, as someone conversant with evangelical missiology. Nations, after all, are the object of the missionary imperative in Matthew 28:19. The disciples of Christ aren’t commanded to “Go, therefore, and disciple an idea”—they are told to disciple nations.

In 2020, I hosted a virtual roundtable of missionary thought leaders to debate this very question—sparked by dueling articles that had made some waves. But five years ago, we were ignorant of any political undercurrents in what seemed like an intramural debate among cross-cultural ministry strategists. The past is a foreign country.

Today, by contrast, this question is no longer isolated to the obscure missiological backwaters of the internet. It has sprung into our political discourse in a newer, more simple form: Who are we?

Who are we as Americans? Who are “we the people” that Christians are called to evangelize and disciple in America? Who are the other nations we are trying to reach in obedience to Christ to fulfill the Great Commission?

I would argue that there are, essentially, two primary ways of answering this question. First, nations like ours are mere “credal polities” or economic zones erected atop abstract, a priori propositions. Second, nations are, as we have traditionally understood them to be, peoples.

The former option—that of the notional or propositional nation—has reached shibboleth status in media and education and among ruling elites, including our current president. America, we are told, is simply an idea—one of egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and some version of individual autonomy.

The propositional nation model appeals to our modern sensibilities. It smells of the postwar air we have breathed our whole lives.

The only problem is that it is utterly meaningless.

Ideas alone cannot repent, declare independence, write constitutions, expand Westward, put men on the moon, abolish the slave trade, and pass on a certain way of life to its progeny. People with ideas do such things.

This leaves only the second option—the answer which has been heretofore uncontroversial among most missiologists and exegetes—namely, that of peoples.

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