Sam Harris speaks with Douglas Wilson about his book Frequently Shouted Questions about Christian Nationalism. They discuss Wilson's debates with Christopher Hitchens, the landscape of American evangelicalism, young-earth creationism, pre- vs. post-millennialism, the concept of dominionism, what Christian nationalism actually means, the supposed failure of secularism, the separation of church and state, religious tests for public office, women's suffrage, homosexuality and sodomy laws, capital punishment for adultery, the biblical case for slavery, the foundations of morality without God, Charlie Kirk's memorial service, heaven and hell as consequentialist frameworks, the nature of miracles, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
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I am here with Doug Wilson.
Doug, thanks for joining me.
Great to be with you.
Thank you.
So you debated my friend Christopher Hitchens back in the day.
That was probably, I don't know, 15 years ago or so.
Did you remember what year you did those debates?
I don't remember the year.
It was a wonderful time, actually.
Christopher and I got along great, actually.
Yeah, you seem to.
So I watched the documentary that was born of that collision that was literally titled Collision.
Right.
And you guys were debating if memory serves whether Christianity is good for the world.
That was kind of the focusing question.
Yeah.
Yeah, correct.
So we probably won't recapitulate much of that.
I mean, I think we might fall into debate on a few topics.
I think that's inevitable.
But what I really want to start with here is just to have you educate me and my audience about the American religious landscape.
I just have a bunch of questions for you.
I should say you have a new book titled Frequently Shouted Questions About Christian Nationalism.
So we'll get into that.
But just to orient us, maybe just the first question is, how would you differentiate it from what most Americans might think of as mainstream Christianity, if that phrase much?
So in the Baskins and Robbins of Christianity, what flavor am I?
Rocky Road.
That's what I have.
So basically, I grew up in an evangelical home, conservative, Bible-believing parents.
My mom had been a missionary in Japan.
My father was a Navy officer who got out to do personal evangelism.
So I grew up in a home that was decidedly Christian and evangelical.
Evangelical in, I was born in 53, evangelical during my boyhood prior to Jimmy Carter simply meant conservative Bible believers outside the mainline denominations.
There had been a big battle in the first part of the 20th century in the mainlines, the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, and so on, between liberalism and what came to be called fundamentalism.
And basically the liberals won and captured the mainline denominations.
The conservative believers sort of retreated into the woods and built their own alternative structure.
They abandoned the seminaries and built Bible colleges, built Christian radio stations, and stayed there until the 1970s, more or less.
And I grew up in that quadrant of the Christian faith.
In the 70s, you might say, led by Francis Schaefer, polarized by Francis Schaefer, the conservative believers re-engaged in what became known as the Culture Wars back in the days of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, those folks.
And that was something that we were part of.
And there has been in recent years, after the election of Jimmy Carter, who was an avowed born-again Christian, there was a resurgence of people identifying themselves with evangelicalism.
And it grew significantly, so maybe spectacularly, became a movement, and then it too developed a right-wing and a left-wing, you know, conservative and more moderate or liberal.
And the most recent iteration of it would be COVID and post-COVID, where the red-pilled evangelicals who have become more and more pronounced in their willingness to be Christian in public has coalesced.
And the moderates have done what has usually been done, which is try to mute these divisions and play well with others and try to get along as best they may.
That's basically a 30,000-foot flyover of where I think we are.
So would you consider yourself a Christian fundamentalist, a biblical literalist, an absolutist?
How would you differentiate those terms?
And that's true.
Yeah, that's great.
I would consider myself a fundamentalist in the sense of believing the fundamentals of the Christian faith.
I believe the Apostles' Creed, in other words.
And I believe it in the sense that it was held when it was first handed down.
But fundamentalist has also taken on cultural significance.
So like a fundamentalist is someone who's a wears a black skinny necktie and uses is a King James Version only guy and that sort of thing.
That's sort of a cultural phenomenon.
And I'm not necessarily a fundamentalist in that sense, but I do believe the fundamentals of the Christian faith.
I would describe myself as a biblical absolutist, which is not the same thing as taking the Bible literally.
A biblical absolutist is someone who would take the Bible naturally, taking it the way it presents itself to be taken.
So when Luke writes his gospel and he says at the beginning, I interviewed a bunch of eyewitnesses and I wrote it down carefully.
He's presenting it as sober history.
So I take it as sober history.
Psalms that are poetry present themselves as poetry.
I take it as poetry.
When the book of Revelation presents itself as apocalyptic literature, I take it as apocalyptic literature and not as literal surveillance cameras of the future.
So you want to take the Bible naturally and respect the genre in which it was written, whether it's history, poetry, prophecy, apocalyptic, and so on.
So taking the Bible naturally, what does the concept of biblical inerrancy do for you?
Do you think the Bible is still inerrant, but some sections can't be taken literally?
Is that how that breaks part?
So for example, as a biblical absolutist, I believe the Bible.
So I would say what the Bible intends to convey by what it wrote down, I seek to take it that way.
So I seek to understand it the way it was originally intended and then take that to the bank.
But when Jesus says, I am the door, I don't look for a doorknob or in Psalm 23, you don't have to go find a green pasture to lie down in to be a good Christian.
I don't take it literally that way.
Is there anyone who takes it?
Yeah, I mean, literally, literally.
I mean, I can't imagine anyone is.
There are some people.
There are honestly, there are some people who try.
It cannot be done consistently, but there are some people that try.
There's a school of theology called dispensationalism.
And the watchword for that school of theology is literal unless absurd.
So you take it literally unless you find yourself dealing with round squares.
So why aren't you a dispensationalist then?
All right.
So That's a big question, but I would say it boils down to the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament.
So there are two basic approaches.
One of them says that the Old Testament doesn't apply unless the New Testament says that it does.
And the other view says the Old Testament applies unless the New Testament says that it doesn't.
Right.
So I'm a Reformed Christian, Reformed Presbyterian Christian, and not a dispensationalist.
And I would belong to the school of thought that says the entire Bible is to be taken as the word of God.
And the Old Testament applies to us today unless the New Testament says that it doesn't.
And the principal, the central example of that would be the animal sacrifices in the Old Testament.
So the animal sacrifices are there.
The New Testament says that Christ's death fulfilled all the animal sacrifices.
So we're not to offer up animal sacrifices anymore.
So the New Testament says we're not to.
So I say good, we're not to.
But the other approach basically parks in the New Testament first.
And if the New Testament repeats something from the Old Testament, then okay, that's obligatory.
But they're New Testament centered.
Okay, so just to get my bearings here, so how old do you think the universe is based on your reading of the Bible or any other stream of information?
Yeah, based on my rudimentary math skills, the world is about 6,000 years old.
Okay.
Okay.
So I'm a young earth.
I'm a young earth creationist.
Right.
Okay.
So anyone kind of coming at this from the outside from secular society trying to fit you in the canonical debates around the collision between science and religion and evolutionary biology and Christian theology understands which side of that argument you're on.
Right.
I'm an anti-Darwinist, young earth creationist.
Having said that, and I know that many of your viewers and people who follow you and have read your stuff are going to park me right next to the flat earth guys, you know, because of that statement of how old the world is.
But one of the things that I would just point out in passing is when people say that the universe, the cosmos, is 14 billion years old or whatever the current number is, they are presupposing a Newtonian balcony somewhere that they get to stand on to watch the whole thing.
And one of the things that relativity shows us is that time is not what we, you know, where is my question would be, where is the cosmos 14 billion years old?
Is it at the center at the point of the explosion?
Is it at the event horizon?
What clock are you using to calculate the age of the earth?
Well, generally, the rudimentary textbook answer is we imagine a Newtonian clock and it's like an earthbound perspective.
And I would say things like time and eternity are not that simple.
Okay, but then why would you be tempted to sign on the dotted line with something like 6,000 years old?
I mean, the claim that the world, to take it out of the cosmos for a second and just talk about the rock we're on, to claim that the world is 6,000 years old is to make a fairly straightforward claim about calendar time.
I mean, because you're making that claim about if I said, well, how long ago did the miracles depicted in the Bible, how long ago did they occur?
You're saying, okay, walk back a day and another day and another day in the timeline of your life.
And then it's before you were born.
And then it's about 2,000 years before that.
Right.
And a year is still a year.
It's still 365 days of the sort that we would recognize.
So you have a fairly standard view of time to capture that.
And presumably you're walking that all the way back to the beginning and you just have 6,000 years to deal with.
Right.
That is exactly correct.
If I go back to Genesis, where it gives us the genealogies and it says that so-and-so was the father of so-and-so and he fathered this son when he was 150 years old.
And there's a whole chain that goes back.
And it's just a straightforward math problem.
So if you're going to believe the Bible, I believe the first 11 chapters of Genesis are to be taken as authoritative and not just chapters 12 and on.
So I just accept it in a straightforward way.
I believe in a historical atom.
I don't believe in evolution at all.
Well, let me correct that.
I do believe in variation within species.
So if every creationist, for example, looking at the human race sees the different ethnic groups, Asians and blacks and whites and so on, and believes that they are all descended from Noah and his wife.
So clearly we believe in variation within species, but we don't believe in the transformation of one species to another.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
So I'm resisting the temptation to get into any of those details with you because I really just, I do want you to educate me before we get sidetracked on anything.
Thank you.
So your church is, you're a post-millennialist rather than a pre-millennial millennialist.
Please pick those concepts for us.
So most pre-millennialists are dispensationalists, the fellows I mentioned earlier.
And the three main positions with regard to the millennium, which is the millennium is a thousand years of peace that Christians like to fight about.
So there you go.
So you have the millennium and the premillennialists believe that Christ returns prior to the millennium.
So all of these, you have the fixed time period of the millennium and then where you place the return of Christ with regard to that millennium.
So the premillennialist believes that Christ will return and then there's going to be a thousand years of peace.
The amillennialist, which is another view not mentioned here, the ah is a term of negation, which says that they believe the millennium is a figurative, a figurative symbolic reality, the reign of Christians with Christ in the heavenly places.
And then after some indefinite period of time, Christ returns.
So there's no literal earthly millennium for the amillennialist.
Then the postmillennialist believes that the gospel is going to be victorious.
The nations will be discipled.
The great commission will be successfully fulfilled.
The nations will come to Christ.
And that will usher in the millennium, this golden period, after which Christ will return post-millennium.
So pre-millennial, Christ comes before it.
Post-millennial, he comes after.
And amillennial believes there is no literal earthly millennium.
So in all the talk about the rapture that people are familiar with and the left behind novels that were much talked about in secular culture and widely read in Christian culture, is that entire conversation a pre-millennialist one, or do you have some part in that as well?
No.
That entire conversation is dispensational and pre-millennial.
And most even so the Reformed Calvinist Presbyterian types that I represent are not in the North American evangelical mainstream.
There were a significant presence there, but North American evangelicalism is overwhelmingly dispensational, overwhelmingly premillennial.
So postmillennialists like myself are very much in the minority report.
Right.
Now, it seems to me to have pretty big implications.
So the problem with premillennialism, again, from a secular point of view, is that it seems to invite almost a kind of nihilism.
I mean, it's sort of the worse things get on some level, the better things get from that point of view.
The world can completely unravel.
And at any moment, the good people are going to be raptured.
There's nothing really to construct or to care for, to maintain here necessarily.
But on your view, the post-millennial view, which frankly is a little more like the view of Islam, right?
There's this notion of we, the good religious people who believe in God rightly, effectively need to conquer the world and establish a thousand years of peace and prosperity and good Christian order before history will properly end with the return of Christ.
Correct in broad outlines.
The one difference that I would make is that Paul in 2 Corinthians 10 says that our weapons for doing this are not carnal.
So we don't use physical force.
It's not to be advanced by the sword.
In Romans 4, 13, Paul says that Abraham was promised that he would inherit the world, but not by law, rather through the righteousness of faith.
So that's the one thing.
The other thing is I think you're right about the, and if you had a dispensationalist on, he could present a case for why maybe this is unfair.
I'm not trying to be unfair to them, but as I've watched the dispensational vibe affect Christians, the worse things get, the more people think that we're right on schedule.
You know, okay, Jesus is going to appear anytime and take us out of here.
And so they view the, because they also believe that we're in the last days.
We're coming up on the last little bit.
And they feel like the last helicopter flight out of Saigon.
You know, the rapture is God helicoptering us out of here, and then you let the world go to blazes.
Which is on your account, you're absolutely sure we're nowhere near the last days.
In fact, we're probably not even within a thousand years of the last days.
That's correct.
I believe that future school children will be looking back on our era, studying us as part of the early church.
So I think we've got a long way to go.
And I believe that our labors to make the world a better place are not in vain.
As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, 58, your labors in the Lord are not in vain.
I believe that we can make the world a better place.
And I believe that if God blesses, that will be, he will bless and prosper it.
And we want to leave it better than we found it.
So this seems to be a pretty big point around which to have such a difference of opinion.
How is the difference of view here justified by recourse to the Bible?
What do the dispensationalists say you're wrong about?
And how do you return the compliment?
Yeah, I think that's a great question.
The way I describe it is this.
Let's say someone converts to Christianity while in college.
You know, their life falls apart.
They have a crisis conversion.
They go buy a Bible and they say, I'm interested to find out what it teaches about the end times.
Oftentimes, new Christians want to study the book of Revelation first, which is not smart.
Yeah.
It's the climate.
And so they get a Bible and they start reading through it.
And in Matthew 24, for example, Jesus describes what scholars call decreation language.
Decreation language is what I call collapsing solar system language.
The moon turns blood red, the sun goes dark, the stars fall from the heavens.
And so that's apocalyptic imagery.
And Jesus uses it there in Matthew 24.
So this new Christian reads it, and he says, okay, I'm a Christian now.
I believe the Bible.
And it talks about the sun and the moon and the stars all going out.
And they go out and the sun just went down and the moon is right up there and the stars are all there.
And so they say, okay, since this is true, it must be talking about the future.
It must be talking about the end of the world, right?
It hasn't happened yet.
So it's talking about the end of the world.
That's one way of approaching it.
And that's the way the dispensationalists interpret it.
And that school of thought is called the futurist approach.
So you look at these prophecies and say, they haven't clearly haven't happened yet.
And so they must be something that is going to happen in the future.
I belong to the Preterist school of thought.
And Predor comes from the Latin word for past, where you look at this language in Matthew 24, and the disciples begin that chapter by saying Jesus tells them, you see all these temple buildings, not one stone is going to be left on another.
The disciples come to him and say, when's this going to happen?
What will be the sign of the end of the age?
And then Jesus lays out all of Matthew 24, and in the course of which he uses that collapsing solar system language.
Well, he's quoting from Isaiah 13.
Right.
All right.
And if you go back to Isaiah 13, verse 10, there's that language.
And then you back up to the first verse of Isaiah 13, and it's an oracle concerning the king of Babylon.
And then you say, okay, this same decreation language occurs in Isaiah 34, where it's applied to the king, applied to Edom.
And then it happens in Ezekiel, where it's applied to Egypt.
It happens in the book of Amos, where it's applied to Israel.
It happens in the book of Joel, where it's applied to Israel.
And so you say, okay, I want to interpret the New Testament from the lessons I learned reading the Old Testament.
And everywhere in the Old Testament, where it uses decreation language, it's always talking about the destruction of a nation state or a city.
So you're thinking it's like 70 AD this stuff came to pass?
Absolutely.
So Jesus says expressly that this generation will not pass away until all these things have been fulfilled.
So it's an idiomatic, Hebraic way of saying your lights are going to go out.
Your dynasty, your regime is going to collapse.
It's going to fail.
Everything is going to come down around your ears.
So that language, and that's how it's used.
Every time it's used in the Old Testament, it's always talking about that.
And then Jesus says, this temple is going to be destroyed, not one stone left on another.
The disciples ask when this is going to happen.
Jesus says within one generation and then quotes, quotes the Old Testament to that effect.
So basically, what Bertrand Russell, for example, and others have pointed out, Jesus thought he was living at the end of the world.
Well, I don't think Jesus thought that at all.
I believe that Jesus thought he was living at the end of the Judaic Aeon, living at the end of the old Israel that was going to come crashing down in 70 AD.
Okay, a few more concepts here that I have questions about.
So where does the concept of dominionism fit in here?
What is meant by that term?
Okay, good.
In Genesis, where God creates Adam, he delivers what is called the cultural mandate to be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth.
Then after the flood, the cultural mandate is reinstated and God gives the same basic cultural mandate to Noah and his descendants.
Fill the earth, multiply, replenish the earth, take care of it.
And then in the New Testament, I believe that we have a New Testament variation on the same theme in the Great Commission, where Jesus says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Therefore, go disciple the nations, baptizing them, teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you.
Then the book of Hebrews says, we don't see everything subjected to man yet, but we see Jesus.
So we walk by faith looking to subdue the earth in a productive, flourishing way.
And that is called, in our circles, exercising dominion.
So it's not rape the earth.
It's cultivate the earth so that it flourishes.
But are you part of the new apostolic reformation?
I associate dominionism with that movement.
No, basically, that, as I understand it, is a movement that's going on in charismatic circles.
And I think you'd probably find some areas of what they say that would map onto what we're saying, but we're coming from different places.
Okay, so now to the title of your book, what is Christian nationalism, given all that you have said so far?
Yeah, Christian nationalism is, in the short form, is the conviction that secularism is a failed project.
The attempt to govern ourselves without reference to a transcendent reality is coming up short.
And we're starting to see the pieces fall off around us in a number of different ways.
Post-World War II, sort of the liberal democratic, secular heyday, the high watermark of liberal democratic secularism.
The United States was king of the hill and everything looked like Fukuyama talked about the end of history.
You know, it looked like we've gotten there.
A lot of Christians sort of went along for the ride.
Okay, I love my country and things look swell and everybody, the sky's still blue and everything.
But beginning in the 60s with the sexual revolution and then the downstream effects of the sexual revolution and the place where we are now with drag queens and transsexuals and furries and, you know, all the what I call the normies and the grillers.
You know, the suburban average Christian guy is looking at the world and he thinks everyone has lost their ever-loving mind.
What is going on?
So Justice Jackson on the Supreme Court couldn't answer the question, what is a woman in her confirmation hearings because she's not a biologist, which is to me like saying I don't know whether it's raining or not because I'm not a meteorologist.
But a lot of people looked at that.
A lot of regular people looked at that and it just they're just left aghast.
And they've come to the conclusion, many of them, that the secular project has sort of done a face plant.
And particularly in the last five years, where I travel in circles where people believe that virtually every respected institution in America disgraced itself in the last five years, whether it was the military or Congress or the courts or higher education or the or the CDC or the military, everything just came unstuck.
And so a lot of people don't know what to believe anymore, don't know what to think.
I grew up in a high trust society.
And we are now at the at the dregs level, the basement level of we're a low trust society and then some.
And that leaves a lot of people susceptible to conspiracy theories and the latest thing they read on the internet.
And other people, it's opened them up to things that we were saying 20 years ago or 30 years ago about the necessity of a confession that Christ is Lord.
We need a transcendent grounding for what we say we're going to do as a people together.
And if we don't have that transcendent grounding, then everything comes apart in our hands as it is doing.
So the conviction that secularism is a failed project and that Christians need to be Christians in public and say, I believe that what we need to do is confess our dependence upon God and upon his son, Jesus Christ, and orient ourselves that way.
That's a short form of saying Christian nationalism.
Okay, well, great.
Let me just make sure we're dealing with the same definition of secularism because many people confuse that term with atheism, right?
So secularism in my lexicon has no implication of atheism.
It's simply an agreement, and it's really born of the Christian tradition, an agreement to keep religion out of politics and any kind of coercive posture with respect to public life.
So you can be a Christian in the privacy of your life and in your home.
I can be an atheist or a Muslim or a Buddhist or whatever I want to be.
And we agree that in the public square, it's not that we're not going to express our faith in any conspicuous way.
You can wear whatever you want to wear.
You can announce that you guys are celebrating on any given day, a certain holy moment.
But with respect to the laws that the government is going to make and the requirements on citizenry, those are going to be basically agnostic with respect to anyone's faith commitments.
That's how I think of secularism.
And I can come partway in agreeing with you.
Secular, at first, I agree that secular does not necessitate atheism.
For example, in the medieval period, there were the regular clergy who were living according to monastic rule.
And then there were the secular clergy who were out in the villages and towns ministering to regular people.
Also, there is secular life that is the word profane comes from profanum, outside the temple.
So you could say there's the sacred space, and then if we're using a lowercase S, there's the sacred space, word and sacrament, the worship services proper.
And then there's the secular realm, which is the world of automobile mechanics and computer coding and just regular life.
So I don't mind using the word secular there in that sense.
And a Christian can be in his secular life a believer in God and so on.
But secularism, the way I was talking about the secular project, had to do with the way you just formulated it.
And here's this would be the thing that we find we're up against and what we disagree with.
I believe that corporate entities like nations, towns, nations, cities, denominations, universities are moral agents.
They can launch genocidal attacks, for example.
They can break treaties.
They can oppress a minority within their boundaries.
A university can break a contract that they made with a professor.
They can break their word.
So individuals are moral agents.
But when we come together to act in concert, we remain moral agents.
And when we come together as Americans to make a moral, you know, moral decision, my very favorite question in this is by what standard?
Now, if you have the secular space, we have to be agnostic about our Islam or Hinduism or Christianity or atheism.
Then what possible moral standard could we have?
Can we adopt?
If someone said, well, how about utilitarianism?
I say, yeah, but I'm not a utilitarian.
I don't follow Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill.
You know, why do we do a lowest common denominator morality?
And what is permissible and not permissible?
So, for example, is monogamy the norm?
Because we live in a downstream from a Christian heritage.
Or if we bring in millions of Muslims, do we go up to four wives the way Muhammad taught?
Is that an option?
So basically, I think that we have painted ourselves into a corner with the immigration debate has slopped over into the debate about how we make collective moral choices.
And it's frightfully confusing because not all worldviews generate the same moral system.
And it places they're radically at odds with one another.
And so if someone says, look, why don't we just adopt the morality of the average NPR listener?
I'd say, well, I'm not, I don't listen to NPR.
Why?
You know, how are we going to navigate this when we have- I'm not sure I would sign on that dotted line either, frankly.
Yeah.
Well, if we come common ground.
I think we'll get into the foundations of morality pretty soon.
But again, I still just want to spiral in on what your project is.
Right.
So, and I should remind people who, or inform people who may not be aware of this, we're speaking today not merely because there's this point of contact with Hitch that you debated, my friend, and I find you interesting for that reason, but you have become in the intervening years very relevant in the religious political landscape.
I mean, you've attracted a fair amount of press recently because Pete Hegseth, who runs our war machine, the Department of Defense, if he's not in your congregation, he's been influenced by you as a pastor, correct?
Yeah, he's a member of a church that's in our denomination.
Right.
Yes.
Maybe you can just describe that.
How big is your church and how many churches are in your denomination?
In this cosmic scheme of things, we're a small denomination.
We're about, if you count the mission churches and candidate churches, we have about 170 congregations, mostly in North America, but we have congregations in Europe and in the Philippines and Japan and Canada.
So we have about 170 congregations, maybe 30 to 40,000 people in these congregations.
And so it's a small, it's a small denomination as denominations go, but we are also connected to a number of, you know, we have a publishing house here in Moscow, and we have, we're doing a number of things that have, as you said, attracted notice.
Yeah.
So we're in the game anyway.
Yeah.
Well, I think I just want to ask you some more questions that will perhaps tease out the ways in which this project, the Christian nationalist project, may be at odds with what many people, certainly many secular people, will hope to have achieved in our country and globally.
Can I offer something that might prime the pump?
It might just get it out of the way at the beginning.
Christian nationalism is not about fusing church and state.
Okay.
So you still like the line from Matthew and elsewhere that you render under Caesar those things that are Caesars unto God, those things that are God's?
That is correct.
And so I am a big fan of the First Amendment.
Now, and this has to be parsed out carefully because the First Amendment was addressing the federal level.
The only entity that could violate the First Amendment was Congress.
Congress shall make no law concerning the establishment of religion.
The founders did not want a church of the United States the way there's a church of England or the way there's a church of Denmark.
And I agree with that wholeheartedly.
At the time the Constitution was ratified, three of the states came in with hard establishment at the state level.
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire all came in with the Congregational Church.
And then when Vermont came in as the 14th state after the Constitution was adopted, they came in with a hard establishment also.
Other states like South Carolina had what I would call a soft establishment, where South Carolina said, basically, the Protestant religion is the official faith of this state, but there was no connection to any denomination.
That would be soft establishment.
Now, I believe that a hard establishment at the state level is also a bad idea.
I'm against it at the state level also, but it's not an unconstitutional idea because the states that ratified the Constitution were practicing hard establishment and soft establishment, and they had religious tests for office at the state level, but they were prohibited at the federal level.
So I'm in favor of the First Amendment.
I applaud the separation of church and state.
And I would argue for a separation of form, a formal separation of church and state at the state level.
But then I would, and this would be the place where we'd get into a possible disagreement.
I don't think it's possible to separate morality and state.
And as soon as you are talking about morality, you have to answer the question, which one, which morality?
So, well, I'm sure the devil will be in the details here.
Are you saying there would be no religious test to hold public office?
So Muslims and atheists could be members of Congress or become president?
Or would you then say that how could a Muslim or an atheist have the requisite morality to serve in those offices?
If we were to return to the form of Christian nationalism that we had during the early 19th century, and that's what we had at the founding was a form of Christian nationalism then.
What frequently the states would do is they prohibited public office to someone who didn't believe in God or a future state of rewards and punishments.
That was a common phraseology.
So they did have religious tests, bare minimum religious tests at the state level, but those were excluded at the federal level.
Now, if, and this is another thing, if we're whiteboarding this and you're asking me to describe the ideal Christian republic 500 years from now, I would sketch out a number of things.
we could talk about this Presbyterian utopia 500 years from now.
If you ask me what my interest is right now, my interest right now is not to exclude atheists and Muslims right now.
We've got bigger fish to fry in the moment.
Right.
So just so that I can understand the significance of that, the way you're introducing time there, you're arguing for a kind of pragmatism and incrementalism on the way to the Presbyterian utopia you would want to get to.
If you could wave a magic wand, you'd get us there immediately, but you know you can't.
So you want to figure out a path between where we are now and there, right?
That is correct.
Because I believe that Jesus taught that the way to get from here to there is by peaceful means, preaching, persuasion, church planting.
And that's a time you've got to let the bread rise before you bake it.
And so consequently, I don't want to do anything in a tyrannical, heavy-handed way.
Right.
Okay.
Well, I'm going to go searching for tyranny or the next best thing.
So let's linger on this phrase Christian nationalism for just another second, because what do you do with all the people who will answer to that name who seem to mean a few more things by it?
I mean, there's kind of a white ethno-state yearning that one hears among so-called Christian nationalists.
There's a fair amount of anti-Semitism one can find among Christian nationalists.
How do you view those?
Are those contaminants to this concept or are those parts of it?
No, those are contaminants to it.
And one of the things that we're involved in doing...
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