The Roads We Pave

I attended a Christian Nationalist dinner and discussion the other evening. These were guys that I have genuine love and respect for. Fathers, friends, pastors, scholars, etc… and I get why they hold the line that they hold. It makes sense. But I disagree on the means to the end. Hopefully love and respect can be had, even though I don’t agree with the platform or the way to and through towards a desired goal. The food was delicious and the conversation was profitable, on multiple levels. For me, it was profitable to understand my own position.

It got me thinking how archaeologists keep finding Roman roads under Europe. A field gets plowed a little deeper than usual, or a drought drops the water table, and there it is: the old stone paving, straight as a rule, running for miles under farmland that forgot it was ever there.

Two thousand years buried and the engineering still holds: cambered surface for drainage, layered foundation, stones cut to interlock without mortar. You could still walk on most of it. Some of it, people still do. I came across some story mid-sermon prep, the way most things find me these days: not on a trip (I don’t take those because planes are scary and cruise ship are a hard no), or in a book I was meant to be reading, just a headline that stopped my cursor on the way to something else. I read it and kept reading about it. And got to thinking…

Good intentions pave the way for hellish outcomes. Everyone knows the proverb. Almost no one applies it to their own theology.

We apply it to other people’s certainties easily enough. The Inquisitor believed he was saving souls. The magistrate who drowned the Baptist believed he was defending the peace of God. We read those chapters of history and shake our heads at how sincerely, how confessionally orthodox, the cruelty was. Nobody in those rooms thought they were building hell. They thought they were building Zion.

The Pattern Isn’t Confined to the History We Already Feel Safe Condemning

It’s tempting to stop there; Münster’s Anabaptist theocracy devouring itself in 1535, Geneva’s consistory fining a woman for dancing at her own wedding, the Salem court hanging nineteen people on spectral evidence a Puritan magistracy was certain God had granted it eyes to see. Tempting, because those examples are far enough away that we can admire the engineering of the argument without feeling the weight of the road under our own feet.

But the pattern doesn’t stay conveniently in the past. It shows up wherever sincere conviction reaches for coercive machinery to do what only witness was built to do, and it shows up in movements nobody would call theocratic on the label. It shows up in a well-meaning church discipline process that technically follows every step of Matthew 18 while actually functioning as social control. It shows up in a Christian school board using accreditation leverage to enforce doctrinal conformity a statement of faith never actually specified. Small roads, same engineering.

The Inquisition and the overbearing elder board are not morally equivalent, but they are structurally related: both reach for enforcement because persuasion has started to feel too slow, too uncertain, too dependent on a Spirit whose timing you can’t control.

So when Christian nationalism argues that Christian liberty properly understood requires the abandonment of religious neutrality, that a rightly ordered nation punishes public heresy, that the magistrate bears the sword not just against theft and murder but against false worship; I don’t think the danger is bad theology. I think the danger is that some of it is competent theology. It can cite Calvin’s Geneva. It can cite the Westminster divines before the American revisions softened them. It can build a case that holds together, sentence by sentence, the way good doctrine is supposed to.

And here’s where I have to be honest: I don’t think the first half of that claim is wrong. The church has no business retreating into a private, unoffending faith while a hostile culture writes its own story unchallenged. We are called to stand on the convictions of the gospel in a culture that doesn’t share them: to contend publicly, name sin publicly, preach Christ crucified into rooms that would rather not hear it. That much I’ll grant without hesitation and even stand on business for.

Where I part ways is the next move; the one that reaches for the magistrate’s sword to do what only witness was ever built to do. Standing on gospel conviction and legislating gospel conviction are not the same act, however often they get treated as two verses of the same argument. Paul didn’t ask Rome to enforce the resurrection. He preached it in the Areopagus and let it stand or fall on its own persuasive weight, unarmed (Acts 17:22–31). That’s the difference Christian nationalism keeps collapsing: conviction without apology, but never conviction with a badge.

And that’s exactly the problem. James didn’t say faith without works is incoherent. He said it’s dead (James 2:17). You can have a fully assembled, internally consistent, confessionally defensible theology of power, and it can still produce corpses.

Right Function, No Formation

I got a version of this same critique on a covenant document I was reading for ministry leaders. It was correct: every line did exactly what a leadership document is supposed to do. Clear expectations. Clear accountability. Clear function. What it didn’t have, as someone pointed out, was formation. It could produce leaders who did the job flawlessly without ever becoming the kind of people the job was supposed to shape them into. Right function, no formation. That’s the same diagnosis at church-committee scale, and I’d critiqued it myself before I ever thought to ask whether a whole political theology could be running the same trade at the scale of a nation.

It’s worth naming plainly what that trade looks like when a whole society runs it, not just a leadership document. A nation with an established church can produce, with remarkable efficiency, citizens who attend the right services, recite the right confession, and never once darken a magistrate’s docket for heresy, while producing almost no one who has actually met the God the confession describes. England’s parish system after the Act of Uniformity managed this for generations: near-universal conformity, and by most honest accounts of the period, a laity substantially catechized in form and substantially untouched in heart. Right function. No formation. The machinery worked exactly as designed and delivered almost none of what it was built to deliver, because what it was built to deliver was never actually available to machinery in the first place.

The Diagnostic Augustine Already Gave Us

Augustine already gave us the diagnostic tool, centuries before anyone needed to argue with a modern Christian nationalist. The earthly city, he said, is held together by a libido dominandi “a lust to dominate” and it does not become something else when Christians are the ones holding the reins. Rome didn’t stop being Rome when it was baptized. Constantine’s sword didn’t become a shepherd’s staff because a bishop blessed it. Augustine wrote The City of God watching an empire that called itself Christian sack and burn, and he refused to pretend the two cities had merged. Whatever Christendom promised, the libido dominandi was still underneath it, wearing new vestments.

It’s worth sitting with how specific Augustine’s diagnosis actually was, because it wasn’t a generic complaint about power being corrupting in the abstract sense every civics textbook already grants you. He located the libido dominandi in the will itself, prior to any institution: the same disordered love that drove Cain to kill Abel over unequal sacrifices (a fight, notably, with no empire yet in existence to blame) is the love that later drives empires to war and councils to condemn. Which means baptizing the empire was never going to touch the actual disease, because the disease was never structural in the first place. You cannot legislate your way out of a libido dominandi using the very apparatus that particular lust invented to satisfy itself. That’s not a policy failure. That’s asking the disease to write its own cure.

Every empire that called itself holy thought it was building Zion. The day the church stopped being persecuted and started being useful was the day it started needing an empire to protect it. A church small enough to be martyred doesn’t need Rome’s roads. A church that’s become Rome’s business partner can’t survive without them.

Jesus was more direct than Augustine, and less patient with the argument. “Those who are considered rulers lord it over their subjects… it shall not be so among you” (Mark 10:42–44). Not it is misused among the rulers of this age. Not it needs a Christian hand on it. It shall not be so among you: a different economy altogether, not a corrected version of the old one. He said this while refusing, in the wilderness, every kingdom Satan offered him outright (Luke 4:5–8). If the kingdoms of the world were available to be baptized into righteous use, that refusal makes no sense. He didn’t say not yet. He said no.

And we still think we’re building Zion.

Truth That Needs Coercion Is Telling You What Kind of Truth It Is

Irenaeus knew what it looked like when truth tried to secure itself by force instead of witness; he just watched it happen inside the church rather than through it. His opponents in Against Heresies were the Gnostic teachers, who guarded their “truth” as secret knowledge handed down through hidden channels to an initiated few, unaccountable to the ordinary believer standing in the pew (or wherever the second-century equivalent of a pew was). Irenaeus’s answer wasn’t a rival hierarchy with sharper teeth. It was the rule of faith: the gospel taught openly, in every church, checkable by anyone, defended by the apostles’ plain testimony rather than by power held over people who couldn’t verify it. Truth that needs coercion to survive contact with scrutiny was already, for Irenaeus, showing you what kind of truth it was.

That’s worth pausing on, because it cuts both directions and Christian nationalism’s advocates would do well to feel the second edge as much as the first. Irenaeus wasn’t just diagnosing his opponents. He was implicitly setting a standard for his own side too; the rule of faith holds precisely because it can survive being checked by anyone, held up against apostolic testimony that isn’t controlled by the very people invoking it. A theology of power that requires the magistrate’s sword to survive contact with dissent has failed that same test, regardless of which side of the second century it’s coming from. If your gospel needs the sword to keep standing once the argument gets hard, Irenaeus already told you what that means about the gospel you’re actually defending.

The earliest Christians didn’t have the option of coercion, of course; no sword to reach for even if they’d wanted one. But read the Didache‘s Two Ways and you find they weren’t waiting for one. “There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and the difference is great between the two ways,” and the whole document that follows is instruction, not legislation. Catechesis, not code. It assumes a community that will choose the way of life freely, repeatedly, without Rome’s cooperation, centuries before Rome had any interest in cooperating. That’s not a strategy born of weakness that Christians outgrew once they got access to real power. It might be closer to what discipleship actually is.

Heteronomous at Best, Theocratic at Worst

Let me name it more precisely, because vague disapproval is easy to wave off and precision isn’t.

What Christian nationalism produces, at its most restrained and best-intentioned version, is a heteronomous culture: a society governed by law imposed from outside the will rather than law that has taken up residence inside it. Heteronomy is an old philosophical category, but it names something the New Testament already knew before philosophy gave it a name: the difference between a people who keep commandments because a sword stands behind them and a people whose hearts have actually been rewritten. Paul knew the difference intimately, it’s the entire argument of Romans and Galatians, the whole case against a righteousness achieved by keeping the law from the outside rather than one that flows from a heart the Spirit has already gotten to first. Christian nationalism, in its more careful, more restrained versions, doesn’t ask for less than that. It asks for exactly that: compelled conformity, enforced from outside, mistaken for the righteousness the gospel actually promises can only be worked from within.

That’s the ideology at its best. At its worst, it isn’t heteronomy dressed up in careful restraint at all. It’s theocracy wearing heteronomy’s more respectable clothes, rule by those who have appointed themselves, or their preferred magistrate, as the enforcement arm of God’s own authority, punishing not just crime but heresy, not just injustice but false worship. And here is where I have to say the quiet part plainly: I will concede, freely and without hedging, that America was founded substantially on Christian moral and ethical assumptions. That’s simply historical fact, not a concession that costs me anything. But building a coerced, externally-compelled culture and calling it faithfulness under the cover of theocracy, dressing the sword up as if it were shepherding, is not a faithful extension of that founding. It is repugnant, and it is a direct misrepresentation of the crucified Christ.

I use that word, repugnant, carefully, because it’s the only honest one available. A crucified Christ does not reach for Rome’s instruments to accomplish what Rome’s instruments were never built to accomplish. The cross is God’s own refusal of coercion at the exact moment coercion was most available to Him; twelve legions of angels sitting unused (Matthew 26:53) while the innocent one absorbed violence rather than deploying it. To build a Christian theocracy, or even its softer heteronomous cousin, in the name of that same Christ is to stage a coronation for the very posture He laid down on Golgotha. You cannot enthrone the sword in the name of the one who told Peter to sheathe it and then let Rome’s nails do what Rome’s nails do, without the whole thing collapsing into self-contradiction the moment anyone looks closely at what actually happened at the cross.

This is why “heteronomous at best” is not a small concession on my part. Even the gentlest, most well-intentioned version of this project; the one that never touches an actual heresy trial, never banishes anyone, simply legislates a general Christian public order and calls it good, still produces citizens conformed from outside rather than people formed from within. It still trades the slow, Spirit-dependent, uncertain work of witness for the fast, visible, controllable work of law.

And a culture built that way will always eventually reveal, the moment its enforcement mechanism weakens even slightly, that the conformity was never conviction in the first place. Heteronomy doesn’t survive the removal of its enforcer. That’s not a flaw in its execution. That’s the whole design exposed.

So What Actually Gets Built Instead

If the road to an established magistracy is out, the question isn’t whether the church stands down from public witness; I already said, and still mean, that retreat is its own failure. The question is what kind of road we’re actually authorized to build.

The New Testament isn’t silent here; it just refuses to hand the church a sword to build with, which is a different thing than refusing to hand the church any tools at all. Paul, writing to a church with zero political power in a hostile empire, tells Timothy to pray for kings and all who are in high positions (1 Timothy 2:1–2): not to become one, not to install one, to pray for the ones already there, that the church might live a peaceable life while still being fundamentally not of that order. Peter tells scattered, socially marginal believers to keep their conduct honorable among the Gentiles, so that even those who malign you as evildoers may see your good deeds and glorify God (1 Peter 2:12): public, visible, unapologetic witness, aimed entirely at persuasion by way of life rather than persuasion by way of law.

That’s the road actually available: public, costly, unarmed conviction. Preaching that names sin without needing a statute to back it up. Christians who run for office as an act of vocation rather than conquest, who legislate on matters of genuine common good: justice for the poor, protection of the vulnerable, honest courts, without mistaking any of that for establishing the kingdom by other means. A church willing to lose social position rather than trade its unarmed witness for borrowed force. Small, patient, repeatable, and nearly impossible to point to as a single dramatic achievement, which is probably why it’s less tempting to build than the other road. It doesn’t show up on a map. It doesn’t get admired by future archaeologists. It just does, slowly, the one thing the sword was never able to do: it changes what people actually love.

Admired Long After Anyone Remembers What It Was For

Maybe we were never building Zion. Maybe we were just building. This is the deeper argument against Christian nationalism: deeper than “the exegesis is thin” or “this misreads Romans 13.” The deeper argument is that you can pass every doctrinal audit and still fail the only test that was ever going to matter. By their fruits you will know them (Matthew 7:16). Not by their footnotes.

Someday another field outside some other town will get plowed a little too deep, and there it’ll be again: straight stone, still holding after two thousand years, waiting to be admired. Whoever finds it won’t think about the legions it was built to move, only about how well it was built, how remarkable that it lasted. That’s what a road this good does: it outlives every reason it was ever made, and leaves the reason for someone else to dig up centuries later, if they bother to ask. I keep thinking about that field. I keep thinking about how much of what we’re building right now, with the very best of intentions, cited chapter and verse, is going to be found exactly the same way. Admired for its craftsmanship. Long after anyone remembers what it was actually for.