https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPCNmrp9IUk
[ The video above is a selection from an LCI Greenroom episode. In this selection, Gregory Baus explains the beginning of Presbyterian disestablishmentarianism in America, and contrasts historically Reformed “National Confessionalist” establishmentarianism with Christian Nationalism. Then, Jacob Winograd (of the Biblical Anarchy Podcast) and Gregory listen to a 2026 presentation by Pastor Matthew Cotta (of Pasadena Orthodox Presbyterian Church) given at Providence Christian College, and they highlight and comment on key points. Below is a timestamped outline of the discussion, followed by a transcript of Matthew Cotta’s talk (original recording here). ]
00:00 Intro
01:00 Origins of Presbyterian disestablishmentarianism
02:44 Contrasting CN with a historical confessionally Reformed (‘National Confessionalism’) establishmentarianism, which we also reject
04:15 Cotta’s intro
05:55 CN failing to define civil government properly
07:50 continued Cotta’s intro
08:15 First Point – Machen against civil religion
12:35 comments on First Point
a) CN erroneously makes Christianity a means for a social and political agenda
b) to do this, CN ‘genericizes’ Christianity; but enforcing anti-idolatry requires specification
c) CN is a seemingly conservative version of Progressivism
17:28 We reject political ‘preparationism’
19:05 Second Point – The state is the Borg
25:45 comments on Second Point
a) in a cultural-anthropological (and biblical usage) sense, ‘nation’ means an extended family (ethnic) group with a common culture
b) “Nation-state,” however, is a totalitarian ‘Borg’ that uses aggression to destroy particularities in order to construct an artificial uniformity and assimilate everything
c) National-ISM is an ideology that inherently places ‘state interest’ (disguised as ‘common good’) above the God-given norm of civil justice and necessarily opposes genuine particularist, historical Christian religion.
d) if it were ‘natural,’ it would not require state aggression
32:29 Third Point and Conclusion – The Church is the Kingdom of Jesus Christ
41:12 comments on Third Point
a) Ways of relating Christian Faith to society, culture, and politics: subordination, isolation, or consecration (Neo-Calvinist subjective sanctification of cultural activity)
b) Consecrationist: Christian faith & worship testifies not only against sin, but against the permanence of this present pre-consummate age
c) Reformed libertarianism is the political philosophy best grounded in and most conducive to a proper view of Christianity
d) True Christianity functions by eschatological-consummation hope, not “cultural hegemony”
51:38 The key to consecrated cultural engagement is the doctrinal particularity of the confessionally Reformed Faith
54:36 A better society is possible, but can ONLY come by anti-statism.
Reflections On Christian Nationalism
by Pastor Matthew Cotta
Introduction
An overture is going to come before this year’s [2026] General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church asking the General Assembly to form a study committee on Christian Nationalism. The Presbyterian Church in America has already formed such a committee. Likely there are other churches wrestling with this issue as well. So it seems to be on everyone’s mind today. I’m sure you guys have been discussing it in some of your classes. I know some of the students that come to my church have been coming up to me [asking:] Can you tell me about two kingdoms (and all this kind of stuff)? So, I know you’re talking about it.
The subject of Christian Nationalism is quite vast. I cannot cover everything in this brief time. I won’t even try, and I’m not an expert on all the matters pertaining to it. But there are three thoughts that I would present to you. Just things for you to chew on as you’re thinking about this subject Christian Nationalism. (I’m speaking also from a historian kind of perspective because that was my undergrad; history).
Three Points
The first is this. Whenever Christianity is put into the service of some worldly agenda, even when that agenda may seem laudable, it is invariably distorted, diluted and eventually becomes another religion altogether. J. Gresham Machen saw this clearly in his day, and we could stand to heed his warnings anew today in ours. (I’m going to expand on each of these points.)
Second point, Nationalism is an ideology which is necessarily opposed to actual historical biblical Christianity and quickly becomes an idolatrous rival to it.
Third, the Church of Jesus Christ is the Kingdom of God, outside of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation. The church is a kingdom of priests and a holy nation and those who are citizens of it manifest their citizenship as pilgrims and aliens in this world as we await the glorious return of Christ. Christian Nationalism, it can’t be reconciled with this.
First Point – Machen’s warning about instrumentalizing Christianity
Let me start with point one man’s warning. J. Gresham Machen was a theologian writing in the 1920s and before that, during what was called the fundamentalist modernist controversy. Machen saw something deeply troubling happening among American Protestants. Modernist theologians were attempting to separate Christian morality from Christian doctrine, keeping Jesus’ ethical teachings while discarding what they saw as outdated supernatural claims about His person, His resurrection, His redemptive work.
Their goal was to make Christianity relevant to modern people with a focus on making society better. The old Christianity, historic Christianity was too supernatural, too otherworldly, too specific, too tied to historical events, and too catholic, which is to say too cross-cultural, cross-national, cross-ethnic. These modernist theologians, financially backed by wealthy industrialists like the Rockefellers, wanted a generic Christianity that could serve whatever social, political, or national changes they wanted to achieve.
Let’s call it an industrialized Christianity that produces better workers. Workers whose familial, tribal, ethnic and religious ties needed to be destroyed in the name of national pride, unity and productivity. Machen saw this for what it was, the prostitution of Christianity. And he argued that what was happening was the creation of an entirely different religion. When you eliminate the supernatural, reduce Christianity to generic moral principles, and treat specific doctrines about Christ as merely symbolic, you no longer have Christianity at all.
And Machen spoke about three ways the church can relate to the culture around it:
You can subordinate Christianity to culture where cultural values, national values determine what Christianity is.
You can withdraw from culture into isolation.
Or you can consecrate your engagement with culture to God’s service. You can engage with culture, make use of art, science, politics, but never allow culture to redefine her inheritance.
The modernists chose subordination. They made social progress, the national interest in their minds, the goal of Christianity or their goal, and Christianity would become the instrument toward that goal. The result was a substitution of truth for a lie, the casting away of Christ for an idol. Christian Nationalism today is another, you might say, conservative version of that modernist error. Christianity again today is being subordinated to cultural and political goals, ethnic goals. Sometimes it is again a vehicle for social reform.
Christian Nationalism grows out of nostalgia, pining after some lost heritage, traditional values, Western civilization. And the idea that we’re hearing, especially among the garden variety versions of Christian Nationalism, is that what we need is a more robust, manly kind of Christianity that can help us reclaim that lost heritage. And as always, specific theological content will become secondary to that cultural program. What matters is not sound doctrine, but whether you’re on the right side of the culture war.
Denominational distinctives, hear me out, mark my words, will get flattened out in the interest of some kind of vague civil religion. Christianity will be reduced to a cultural marker, a team identity, a political coalition. And just like the modernism in Machen’s day, what will continue to bear the name Christianity will actually be a counterfeit. Machen held the conviction that historic Christianity was fundamentally narrow, exclusive, and partisan. Not politically, but in its truth claims.
Christianity makes specific exclusive claims about who Jesus is, what He accomplished, what the church is, and what God requires of us in terms of our lives in this world. The moment you subordinate those specific biblical claims to some broader culture or cultural or political or national goals, you will lose Christianity. Machen was right, and I fear he’s going to be prophetic in our day.
Second Point – The state’s machinery of destruction
Secondly, we talked about the Christianity in Christian Nationalism. Now we’re going to talk about nationalism itself.
What is a nation? Some argue, and I think especially the more academically intellectually inclined Christian nationalists argue, that nations are primordial communities. They are organic groups bound together by affinities like shared language, culture, history, ancestry, ethnicity, kinship. Which, by the way, as an aside, if you ever wonder why “Kinism” keeps coming up today, this is why. Anyway, the idea is that nations are just organic. They grow out of the organic soil of shared affinities. And they exist before states and would exist without states.
And there may be some truth to that definition for, you might say, maybe some premodern nations, tribal peoples who maybe gathered together because they had a shared kinship, language, customs, and so forth. And you might say those nations were kind of self-governing. There was no “State” (capital S) as we know it today. Those nations way back in the day were not nation-states like we have today. Nation-states are a modern invention.
And what is called a nation today is more like an empire. If you think about it, it’s more like an empire where there is a specific group of people having dominion over people in a large given region, and they have dominion over all those people in that region regardless of what those people in that region have in common. Right? In fact, it is in the state’s interest. It’s in the nation-state’s interest, and I would argue to a degree back, in the day even when you had the other kinds of nations, it was also in their interest that differences in the region, diversity in the region, be eliminated.
What the state wants is uniformity because nation-states comprise people from different kinships and backgrounds. The state seeks to dissolve those natural bonds, customs, language, cultures, religions, and to replace them with one identity that will unite them all under the state, to loyalty to the state. And here’s some historical examples.
Consider France. In 1789, only about half of France spoke “French.” The rest spoke Breton, Basque, [Occitan, Alsatian], and dozens of other regional languages. The French state, however, systematically eradicated those differing regional identities. The regional diversity had to die so that “France” could live. Schools banned regional languages. By 1900, all the other languages that existed in what we call France, were nearly extinct in the public life of France.
Or closer to home, let’s talk about Native Americans. Military conquest, confinement to reservations, boarding schools with the explicit mission “kill the Indian and save the man.” Legal policies designed to break up tribal lands and dissolve tribal connections entirely. The goal was assimilation or elimination. And many tribes were eliminated, completely destroyed.
Or you could look at the British Isles. Celtic tribes, Welsh, Scots, Cornish, Irish were progressively incorporated into Britain. these primordial tribal communities, identities were assimilated, transformed into either regional variations within British identity or competing little nationalisms.
Another great example is China. Look at China’s history. Over a millennia, hundreds of distinct tribal groups, nations, were conquered and what they call “Synicized.” Their languages became dialects or they disappeared entirely. Today’s Han identity represents the assimilation of countless diverse peoples.
The pattern is consistent across continents and centuries. Nation-states impose unity through a standard process, administrative incorporation, language suppression, mandated public education that inculcates a national myth while erasing tribal histories. Economic integration that breaks up traditional ways of life. Legal systems that replace customary law with state law, and always under the threat or use of violence. That primordial unity of peoples that the Christian Nationalist pines for is not preserved when it’s absorbed into today’s modern nation-states. It’s systematically destroyed.
And that highlights, in my mind, the irony of Christian Nationalism today. If nations are really primordial communities with organic bonds of affinity, then Christian Nationalism’s interest in getting control of the levers of nation-state power to serve that end of Christian Nationalism is hilarious. They’re actually grabbing hold of something that is designed to destroy what they hope to preserve.
The state, the nation-state today, is a Borg. If you know the Star Trek reference, it’s a Borg that assimilates or destroys primordial communities. Christian Nationalism claims it wants to recognize and restore America’s Christian identity. But you need to ask which Christian America identity? Is Christian America a pre-existing primordial nation that the state should simply recognize? Or would defining America as a Christian nation itself be an exercise of state power that creates that identity and imposes that unity. The analysis I’ve given you, the history, suggests the latter.
American national identity, like all national [nation-state] identities, has been constructed through state power, through publication, public education, through immigration policies, civic rituals, legal definitions of citizenship. Appeals to America’s Christian heritage conveniently ignore the diversity of America itself and the diversity that’s always existed, and that’s being held loosely together (or it’s being it’s being held desperately together) by state power.
There’s been diversity even among Christians in America and the violence and exclusion, historically, that is required to enforce unity is something we also conveniently forget. If America were to become an explicitly “Christian” nation-state, the historical pattern tells us what would happen. The Christianity, as Machen said, would be “Sinicized.” It would be watered down. It would be transformed into something else. And communities that refuse to go along with it —and I think and a Reformed institution like this one, we would be one of those communities. We don’t think our distinctives are unimportant as Christians, as Reformed Christians— so, I think we might be some of the minorities here that find ourselves resisting what’s going on.
We would face harsh treatment, as such [ie, Reformed]. Because how does Christian Nationalism advance its agenda? It has to use, it would use, the mechanisms of state power. It would also use other mechanisms, podcasts, whatever, to convince people. But if it can, as soon as it can, it will grab hold of those mechanisms of state power. It will get a hold of the educational systems teaching a Christian Nationalist version of our history and identity. It will get hold of the legal system and start having legal privileges for prefer preferred groups. It would get a hold of financial economic controls and pressure people with economics to conform. It would marginalize and persecute anybody who resisted. And they would say it’s in the national interest to do so. And this isn’t speculation. It’s what nation-states do. It’s what they’ve always done.
So the historical record shows that creating congruence between nation and state, making political and cultural boundaries align, requires violence against existing diversity. Christian Nationalism, in so far as it seeks congruence between its vision of Christian identity and American political sovereignty, would just replicate that pattern.
Third Point –the Church is the Kingdom of Jesus Christ
Third, last point, the church is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, as we confessed this morning. And she is a pilgrim, an alien people, a holy nation, and a kingdom of priests, herself existing among the nation states of this world.
So what’s the alternative to Christian Nationalism? Of course, I’m not arguing for withdrawing from politics or public life or [from] cultural engagement or anything of the kind. Machen himself rejected that, calling it isolation. Scripture doesn’t call Christians to abandon the world, but to live faithfully within it, and to do so as strangers, as pilgrims, as aliens. And not just in the sense that we’re aliens and strangers from those things that are bad, evil, sinful, but as those who recognize that here we have no lasting city, but we’re seeking that which is above, which God will make.
Machen proposed consecration, engagement with arts, culture, science, politics, but always with those things consecrated to God’s service rather than allowing them to redefine Christianity’s content. Christians should be involved in public life, but never by subordinating their faith to the political goals. Consider again what the church actually is. As the Westminster confession professes, the church is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are here, Christians, as an embassy of another kingdom altogether. And combined with Scripture’s teaching about our pilgrim identity, this gives us a clear framework for Christian engagement in society.
We participate in earthly communities. We pray for them. We seek their well-being as Jeremiah said, not as those who are hoping one day to dominate it. One day we’re going to take this all over in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ? No, but as those who are sojourners, seeking the good of the cities where we dwell, knowing that what these people need is to become part of our kingdom. And so we evangelize and seek to bring them in, wherever they’re from, whatever their ethnicity, whatever their background. Because all of us as Christians know that our citizenship ultimately, our loyalty ultimately is entirely bound to something else.
Five Practical Applications
This means several things practically. [First,] it means maintaining a distinctiveness of Christian truth. Christianity is narrow and exclusive in its theological content. Not in a mean-spirited way, but because it makes specific claims about reality, about redemption, about God, salvation, that matter. Jesus either rose from the dead or he didn’t. Salvation either comes through Christ alone or it doesn’t. The church is either the kingdom of Christ or it isn’t. Our citizenship is either heavenly or it’s not. These aren’t negotiable based on what’s politically expedient and useful.
Second, it means rejecting the instrumentalization of our faith for political ends. Whether the goal (Christianity is always [by some] trying to be brought into serve some kind of political cultural social agenda), whatever that is, be it some kind of progressive social reform or conservative cultural restoration, the moment Christianity becomes a vehicle for achieving those goals, it will cease being Christianity.
Third, practically this means we embrace our identity as strangers and exiles. We should not seek to be at home in any earthly political order. We should always feel a little bit like we’re out of place, even in our own our own homelands and nations. We should not confuse citizenship in an earthly nation with citizenship in the kingdom of Christ. And that really does happen when you start going this [Christian Nationalist] direction. You start confusing categories. And we should not mistake political victory for the advancement of God’s kingdom. (Oh man, I could go on about that.) Our hope is eschatological. We await the city whose builder and maker is God. We await the return of Christ, the resurrection, the New Creation.
Fourth, this will mean as Christians, as as the church of Jesus Christ, we’re going to reject the nation-state’s promise of unity through homogenization. Again, the record is clear. The congruence between nation and state requires destroying existing diversity. The church, as I mentioned, as we know, is a catholic [universal] body under Christ, under the gospel, and it (the church) refuses, by definition, identity with any one particular nation. As we heard in our confession, “not confined to any one nation.” The church transcends national boundaries. The church brings together people from every tribe, tongue, and nation. Her unity is not forged by state power, but by the spirit of God who joins us to Christ and to one another in Him. A communion that we celebrate every Lordsday at His table. The church’s existence in fact is itself a rebuke to nationalism’s vision of state-imposed uniformity.
Fifth, it means understanding political community differently. Not the enforcement of some primordial unity, but living among and negotiating among diverse peoples. And this this doesn’t have to be some syrupy western liberal value. It’s just what it is. We live among diverse peoples. And for my part, I praise God for that. I love Pasadena’s diversity and I think we would be impoverished if that were to be reduced to one ethnos, one people group. In any case, I know the church would suffer from that. But we’re not looking for one identity to dominate all others through state power, but as a church, we’re actually interested in genuine pluralism while we can maintain our own distinctive convictions.
It’s not “one day if I get the levers of power I’m going to get rid of all the Baptists. Man, it’s time for them to stop, you know. They messed-up for too long.” Remember the state cuts both ways. And if Baptists were in control –there’s more odds of that happening than Presbyterians, actually. Anyway, we acknowledge that we live together among people who do not share our faith, it’s not our city after all. We’re pilgrims and aliens, we’re pursuing justice and the common good, but not by coercing conformity, but by bearing witness to the Truth in word and deed.
And that’s much harder to do than the Christian Nationalist agenda because we’re not being offered a false comfort of cultural dominance. It requires us living contently as a minority or at least being willing to. It means witnessing to Christian truth without the backing of state power. It means persuasion rather than coercion. It means accepting that we are passing through this world, not building a permanent home here.
But here’s what we get: Christianity. We might lose Christian Nationalism. We might lose a seat at the tables of power, but we get Christianity, not a counterfeit. We get faithfulness to Scripture’s teaching about Christ kingdom and the church’s identity. And we have an integrity to our Christian life, our calling in this world. We have a genuine community of the saints, not some state-constructed “natural” bond. The possibility of real witness is ours. And we have, of course, most importantly hope. Christian hope, which is not optimism about some worldly success but confident expectation of God’s promised future, and that’s the hope we really need.
Christian Worship
One more thing about worship. This is the scandal of Christian worship when we gather to celebrate the Lord’s Supper and proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes. We announce something profoundly subversive to all the kingdoms and nations of this world. We’re saying, when we gather on the Lordsday, that this world as it currently exists is passing away. We’re declaring that this world with all its pretensions to permanence and ultimacy, with all of its loyalties and allegiances and idols, it cannot provide ultimate meaning or justification for human existence. We affirm that True Life is found only on the other side of death in this world, the resurrection of Christ.
Christian worship is inherently “political” in the deepest sense of that. It reminds the state, it reminds nations, it reminds every principality and power of the limited and provisional character of its authority and time duration. When the nation-state claims that we need to be subject to it in absolute trust and obedience, when we’re promised salvation through political means, when we’re demanded of to give our ultimate loyalty and identity up in the interest of some national cause, Christian worship protests by its very existence. It testifies that the kingdom and the power and the glory belong to God alone. That’s why we gather for Christian worship.
When we do that, we are making a political statement. We’re declaring our allegiance to another king, another kingdom, another nation. We’re we identifying ourselves as a prophetic, priestly, and royal people who do not belong to this world and who judge the world by the standards of God’s Word. And we claim at the same time to represent the world’s true destiny, if only they would believe.
And the world hates it. And they always have hated it. It seeks always to assimilate us. It seeks to naturalize us to make us think that Christianity has no supernatural source and no transcendent goal. It wants a Christianity that serves some kind of worldly end (which is why I had us read the passage from Peter). Their minds are on earthly things, believing that Christianity can be domesticated and controlled, that it will bless the projects of this world and sanctify its aspirations. I for one, I’m tired of the church doing that. I’m tired of us coming alongside of some culture, some political agenda, and baptizing it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ so you can get some more evangelical voters or whatever. [Witness against that is] why the world hates [Christianity].
And this is why every form of Christian Nationalism, ultimately, is a capitulation of the spirit of this age. It attempts to make Christianity useful for building its earthly kingdom when Christianity exists precisely to proclaim that all earthly kingdoms are passing away. So this is our calling and this is what Christian Nationalism, for all its appeal to our desire for cultural victory and earthly security, would have us abandon. May God give us grace to remain faithful.
Closing Prayer
Father in Heaven, we do cast ourselves upon You, and upon your grace, asking that You would give us wisdom; wisdom from above which You promise to give if we ask. And help your church, guide your church through these cultural quagmires, through these quicksands in which we can easily find ourselves sinking. We pray, Lord God, that You would continue to shepherd and protect your church. And we ask that You would grant to your church watchmen all along the walls of Zion that will raise the alarm when they see such things, as what we’re talking about today, coming on the horizon which is new but yet not really new at all. Help them raise the alarm, and help your church hold fast to the Faith once passed down. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
_____
Additional Resources
“Against Civil Establishment Of Religion” by Gregory Baus
See especially the following episodes:
Episode 8 : The Boetie Option: The Peaceful Underthrow Of The State
Episode 15 : Can Christian Civil Government Be Theocratic?
Episode 16 : The Five Elements And Epochs Of The Kingdom Of God
Episode 18 : Politics And The Church’s Mission
Episode 21: Two Kingdoms And Christian Cultural Activity
