A Conservative Denomination Just Took Christian Nationalism Apart — From the Inside
A major conservative Christian denomination has released an interim report on Christian Nationalism, and it does something I did not expect to see done this thoroughly. It denounces the thing. Not with a press release or a strongly worded tweet, but page after page, leg by leg, taking apart the structure that props Christian Nationalism up and dismantling it theologically.
When I first saw it, my reaction was the lazy one – why does anyone need a year of study to figure out that this is wrong? I already knew it was bad. But after reading it, I understood why. There are PhDs and serious scholars on this committee, and instead of swinging wildly at a caricature, they went after the actual load-bearing arguments and knocked them out one at a time, with Scripture and with their own confessional standards.
What makes this notable is the source. This is the Presbyterian Church in America – the PCA – and the PCA is a conservative denomination. We all know progressive churches will line up against anything with Trump’s name attached. That is expected, and frankly it persuades no one who needs persuading. This is different. This is a conservative, confessional, Reformed body saying these things officially, in writing, and that carries weight in exactly the rooms where it needs to.
I spent years in the PCA myself. So I know this tradition, I know it leans conservative, and I know there are plenty of people inside it who are sympathetic to Christian Nationalism. I have no illusion that a study committee report is going to change those minds overnight. But having the denomination put its name to these conclusions is a big thing, and I am glad they did it.
A word on what this actually is. It is a partial report from the Ad Interim Committee on Christian Nationalism, prepared for the denomination’s 53rd General Assembly, with the committee asking for another year to finish its supporting appendices. It runs more than thirty pages. The committee was created by the 52nd General Assembly to study whether Christian Nationalism, ethno-nationalism, and related teachings line up with the system of doctrine in the Westminster Standards – and to give pastors practical guidance. The chair is Dr. David Strain of First Presbyterian in Jackson, Mississippi. This is not a fringe document. It is the considered work of the denomination’s own people.
Let me walk through what stood out, and add a few things the committee did that are worth your attention even if they are less quotable.
The church and the state are not the same thing
The pastoral letter opens by stating something that should be obvious and somehow no longer is. “The church and the state are both institutions created by God, each with its distinct calling and sphere of responsibility. The church is not called to direct the affairs of the state, nor the state the affairs of the Church.”
This is basic. It is also exactly what a lot of people inside the New Apostolic Reformation, the dominionist orbit, and the broader Christian Nationalist world have never actually been taught. And the committee is careful not to overcorrect into withdrawal. In the very next breath they affirm and celebrate “the rights and responsibilities of Christian citizens to engage in political and civic life, including holding high public office.” So this is not pietistic hand-wringing about staying out of the world. It is a boundary line, not a retreat order.
I will add one thing of my own here. The higher the office you reach for, the more pressure there will be to compromise your beliefs to keep it. That is not a reason for Christians to avoid public life. It is a reason to be honest with yourself about which jobs you could never hold without surrendering the very convictions that sent you there.
Why the “clean speech” section is not a throwaway
Here is the line that a lot of readers will skim past as filler. “We cannot help but be alarmed by the intemperate and unclean speech adopted by some of those who call themselves Christian Nationalists.” And then the hammer – “nothing can justify ungodliness in speech, or in conduct.”
This is not filler. This is a huge deal, and I am genuinely glad they named it.
When I first started disagreeing with Trump-supporting Christians back in 2015, what blew me away was not that they disagreed with me. It was the way they did it. People who called themselves Christians – some of them I knew personally, from my own church – were cursing me on social media, using vile language, going after friends of mine, including women, in ways I will not repeat here. And the justification was always the same. The nation is under threat. The stakes are too high to be polite.
The Bible does not grant that exemption. Paul tells us to keep our speech clean and our conduct righteous. And James, especially in the second chapter, makes the point even sharper – do not tell me about your faith, show me your faith by what you do. What good are the words if the life behind them contradicts them? The report puts it plainly. “Crass language, unclean speech, and disdain for the good name of our neighbors must not be excused.” It does not matter how convinced you are that the other side is destroying the country. We do not fight with the weapons of the world. We are given spiritual ones.
I will reserve final judgment on anyone’s salvation. That is not mine to render. But I will say this much – when professing Christians talk that way and feel righteous doing it, it tells you something about the heart driving the whole project.
The ugly leg they refused to leave standing
The committee did not dance around the racial element, and I respect them for it. The pastoral letter explicitly warns against expressions of Christian Nationalism that “embrace forms of antisemitism, race realism, and Kinism,” and against those who “advocate for the segregation of different ethnicities and cultures.”
The affirmations and denials go further. The committee affirms that God made all humanity in His image and ordered the human family into distinct peoples and nations, then denies “that race, ethnicity, or biological descent establish intrinsic moral hierarchies, or confer superior spiritual worth, political legitimacy, or ecclesiastical authority.” They flatly reject Kinism “and all theological and political systems that treat racial hierarchy or separation as in any way permissible.”
They even close the most common back door. Christian Nationalists who know better than to argue raw racial superiority often retreat to the Augustinian idea of ordo amoris – ordered loves – to smuggle ethnic preference in through the side. The committee handles that directly. They affirm that Christians cannot love everyone equally and identically at all times, but they deny “that the ordo amoris provides a warrant for the preferential treatment of one’s own ethnic group ahead of any other.” That is the argument shut down at the root, not just at the surface.
There is also a quietly important denial about the so-called crisis of masculinity. The report acknowledges the cultural anxiety, then refuses to let it become a license – it denies “that cultural anxieties or social change justify profane speech or contempt for women,” and affirms that complementarian convictions do not bar women from education, civic life, or public service. If you have spent any time around the harder edge of this movement, you know exactly which rhetoric that is aimed at.
“Rededicate” – and who actually has to repent
The pastoral letter calls the denomination “back to its principal task,” which is the gospel – “to bring the good news about Jesus Christ to a lost and dying world.” And then the word that jumped off the page at me. “Let us rededicate ourselves to the praise of his Name, the spread of his gospel, and the conformity of our lives and churches to his perfect likeness.”
Rededicate. This document was a year in the making, so that word was sitting there long before the recent flag-waving “rededication” spectacles we have been watching. So set them side by side. The report calls Christians to rededicate themselves to praising Christ, spreading the gospel, and conforming their own lives to His likeness. Compare that to what those rallies actually do, which is catalog the sins of everyone else – liberals, Democrats, immigrants, former Republicans like me – while saying remarkably little about the speaker’s own.
The committee gets the direction of the finger right. “The greatest need of the church is for spiritual renewal. Let us bow before our God in heartfelt grief and repentance for our worldliness and many divisions.” Repentance for our worldliness. That is what the Bible actually asks of us. Not a roll call of other people’s failures.
Government is real, ordained, and penultimate
The affirmations and denials follow the old confessional pattern – we affirm, then we deny – and this is where the report does its most surgical work.
They affirm that civil authority is ordained by God, straight out of Romans 13. Then comes the denial that pulls a central beam out of the whole Christian Nationalist house. “We deny that civil government can accomplish the redemptive work that belongs to Christ alone. The church – not the nation – is the primary community through which Christ manifests his reign in the present age. Civil government remains provisional, penultimate, and subject to divine judgment.”
Read that again, because it answers the slogan you hear constantly. “Christ is Lord of all.” Yes, of course He is – Lord and Creator of the universe. From that the Christian Nationalist leaps to the conclusion that He must therefore reign through the government, now, by force of law. But that is not how the Bible orders this age. Right now Christ reigns over His church. The Scriptures even call Satan “the god of this age.” One day Christ will take open lordship over everything. In the meantime, He builds His kingdom through the church, not through the machinery of a corrupt human state.
And government is a corrupt human institution, even though God instituted it for our good. That is not a contradiction. Marriage is a good gift from God, and there are bad marriages and bad people in them. Government is a good gift, and it is full of sin and headed for judgment all the same. So to the Christian Nationalists looking to seize the state to redeem the culture, the committee’s answer is that you are trusting the wrong institution to do a job God never assigned it.
Political engagement is love of neighbor — and it has rules
The committee is just as careful on the other side. They affirm that Christians are called to participate responsibly in political life, and they describe “faithful political engagement – including voting, public service, advocacy, and other forms of civic participation” as “a legitimate expression of Christian love for neighbor and concern for the common good.”
This one is personal for me. I have always been drawn to politics, and for a stretch I worried I had made an idol of it. So during the last year of the Biden administration I more or less dropped out – stopped watching, stopped paying attention – and that was healthy for a while. Then 2025 arrived, and I watched my own government begin doing things to immigrants that I can only describe as cruelty, and I could not sit still. What pulled me back in was not patriotism or partisanship. It was love of neighbor and concern for justice and the common good. The committee gave me language for the difference, and I am grateful for it.
But the affirmation comes leashed to a denial, and the leash is short. Political engagement, they say, can never excuse Christians from charitably esteeming their neighbors, and it never “permits prejudicing the truth, scoffing, reviling, rash or harsh words, or partial censuring, especially by those in positions of authority.”
Two things there are worth dwelling on. First, love of neighbor is not a soft add-on. Jesus called it the second greatest commandment – second only to loving God. It is near the center of the Christian life. And there is a wing of the Christian Nationalist movement openly teaching that empathy is a sin. It is not. Empathy is a symptom of love. It is evidence that you actually care what happens to other people.
Second, truth. The denial says Christian political engagement may never prejudice the truth. MAGA and its Christian Nationalist wing run on a steady diet of falsehood, and without the falsehoods the structure cannot stand. It is a lie that Trump won the 2020 election. It is a lie that the violence of January 6th was just another tourist day at the Capitol. A Christian cannot deal in lies and remain faithful. If you are trafficking in them while claiming Christ wants your candidate in power, you are not acting as a faithful Christian, full stop.
The church may speak — but it may not coerce
The committee affirms the church’s right to address the government on matters Scripture actually speaks to, but look closely at how. The church does this “by way of humble petition” and “by way of advice.” Humble petition. Not by storming a stage and announcing that we are strong now and will force our program on everyone. They also affirm that the church is duty bound to speak on biblical morality even when that touches a live political controversy. So this is not a gag order on the pulpit.
Then the limits. The committee denies that the institutional church should meddle in civil affairs that are not its business, and denies that the church may bind anyone’s conscience on political questions without the express warrant of the Word. In practice that means your session cannot tell you which candidate to vote for, because Scripture simply does not speak with that kind of specificity about candidates. One candidate backs this sin, another backs that one. The Bible does not hand you a ballot.
And then the denial that should land hardest on the theocrats. The PCA’s constitution does not allow the civil magistrate to favor any one denomination in law, to ensure orthodoxy in the church, or to order worship. Sit with that. Figures like Joel Webbon of Right Response Ministries have argued out loud that the government should seize control of “apostate” churches and that the state should enforce religious conformity. The PCA is conservative – it does not endorse what those churches teach either – and it still says, emphatically, that it does not want the government touching any denomination, including its own. No special favors for the PCA. Keep the state out of it. That is the biblical instinct, and it is the opposite of the theocratic one.
The committee extends the point to worship itself, denying that the magistrate may “require citizens of civil society to engage in legally mandated acts of Christian worship.” This is more profound than it looks. I keep the Lord’s Day myself – as a rule I do not work on Sundays, and for me that abstention is an act of worship. The moment the government mandates it for everyone, it stops being worship and becomes mere compliance with the law. Force does not produce devotion. No one is saved by being legally prevented from working on a Sunday. Coerced religion is not religion at all, and the committee knows it.
The kingdom does not need the state’s help
Near the end, the report says something the Christian Nationalists desperately need to hear. The spread of the gospel and the building of the church “depends upon the blessing of the Spirit of God on the ministry of the Word and the faithful, often costly, testimony of God’s people.” And then – “It does not require the assistance of the civil magistrate.”
This is the answer to the fear that runs underneath the whole movement. But Jonathan, don’t you want the government to protect your right to preach the gospel? Of course I would prefer that. It would be nice. But losing it is not the end of the world for the Christian, because in many places around the world believers suffer real persecution under tyrannical governments and the gospel flourishes there anyway. As the committee puts it, Christ will build His church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
I will say the quiet part out loud, the way I have come to feel it. I have felt safer as a Christian who dissents under the last administration than I do under this one, because I have watched how the people standing behind the current movement treat Christians who refuse to fall in line. But even that is beside the point the report is making. The point is that the survival of Christ’s church has never depended on who holds power.
That is why the committee can deny “that political solutions alone, whatever their merits, can address the deepest needs of our society or ensure the survival and progress of Christian values, institutions, or churches.” Politics is not the answer. And as we engage in it anyway, “theological faithfulness requires love for neighbor” and “zeal for the salvation of the lost,” because “no political program can bear that fruit apart from the Spirit’s blessing on the ministry of the Word.”
That includes love toward the very people pushing this ideology. We are telling MAGA Christians they owe their neighbors love – look at how they treat immigrants, and how they celebrate that treatment – and at the same time we are commanded to love them. I will be honest, I find that hard. So let us pray for one another to manage it, because if those of us who oppose this can actually be loving toward the people pushing it, that itself would be a witness.
Put not your trust in princes
The report ends where it should, with Scripture. “Put not your trust in princes, in whom there is no salvation. Some trust in chariots, some in horses, but let us trust in the name of the LORD our God.”
Do not put your trust in those who hold political power, because there is no salvation in them. Some trust in chariots and horses – in the symbols and the raw force of worldly power. Let us trust in the name of the Lord our God instead. When we really do trust Him, we are freed from the desperation that drives all of this. We can still petition the government and urge it toward justice, out of love for our neighbors and concern for the common good. But not out of panic. Not out of the fear that Christ will abandon us if we lose the levers of the state. He will not. It was never about government support.
So why are these people so desperate for it? Biblically, they have no reason to be. That desperation is the tell. It is the sign of a faith that has quietly relocated its hope from Christ to Caesar.
One more thing the committee did that I have to admire
I focused above on the pastoral letter and the affirmations and denials, because that is the part that preaches. But the spine of this report is a careful constitutional argument, and it deserves a mention, because it is what makes the document so hard to wave away.
The PCA does not subscribe to the original 1646 Westminster Confession. It subscribes to the American revision of 1788, and on the role of the civil magistrate those two documents are substantially different. The 1646 text told the magistrate to suppress heresies, reform the church, and even call church councils. The 1788 revision rewrote all of that, declaring that the magistrate may not “in the least, interfere in matters of faith,” and recasting his role as a protector of the church rather than a custodian of its doctrine. American Presbyterians made that change on purpose, because they had concluded the older view gave the state far too much power over religion.
Here is the part I find genuinely fair-minded. The committee does not sneer at the old establishment view. It calls the 1646 position historically respectable, held by giants like Calvin, Knox, and Rutherford, and still confessed today by sister Reformed denominations the PCA considers orthodox. It is not heterodox. It is simply out of accord with the PCA’s own constitutional standard, which means a PCA officer who holds it has to declare that difference honestly to his presbytery and let the court weigh it. That is a precise, charitable, and disciplined way to draw the line – it tells the truth about where the boundary is without pretending everyone on the other side of it is a heretic.
The same precision shows up on theonomy. The committee notes the PCA settled this decades ago. The moral law abides and should inform civil justice through what the Confession calls “general equity.” But the specific penal sanctions of the Mosaic code – capital punishment for idolatry, blasphemy, heresy – expired with the nation of Israel and do not bind modern states. An officer who insists otherwise is, again, out of accord with the standards.
That careful, lawyerly core is exactly why the louder denunciations in the pastoral letter cannot be dismissed as mere politics. The committee did the homework. They built the case from the denomination’s own constitution, gave the historic establishment view every ounce of respect it has earned, and then showed precisely where today’s Christian Nationalism runs off the rails. That is what a year of study buys you. Now I understand why they needed it.
This is worth reading in full, and worth handing to anyone you know who has only ever sat under New Apostolic Reformation or dominionist teaching and has never once heard the historic Reformed answer to any of it. The whole framework they have been told is “the biblical view” is, according to one of the most conservative Reformed bodies in the country, neither biblical nor confessional. Hand them the document and let them see it for themselves.