Posted on 07/24/2026 12:41:50 PM PDT by Bratch
There’s a moment in the Gospel of John where a crowd, freshly fed by a miracle, decides to make Jesus their king by force. John 6:15 records it this way: “When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force, to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain himself alone.” He walked away. He removed himself from the equation. The man who could have summoned twelve legions of angels chose instead to disappear into the hills rather than let a mob install him into a political office. Jesus will not be “made king” by people. He transcends human coronation.
This passage is becoming imminently relevant again today.
Christian nationalism, in its various micro-forms, is not a new idea. It’s not even a particularly Christian one. It’s a very old impulse dressed up in scripture language, and the historical record of where it leads is long enough and bloody enough that we don’t need to speculate about the outcome. We already know how that story ends. The argument I want to make in this article isn’t primarily a political one. It’s a historical and theological one and the evidence points in the same direction every time.
You know I’m a lover of history and that’s the angle I’m going to take with this argument, but I need to establish some common definitions, some shared language, to make sure you and I are talking about the same thing when we say “Christian nationalism.” That term gets used in different ways, so let’s nail down one meaning and move forward from there.
The modern Christian nationalist movement isn’t a unified organization with a single confession. It ranges from the relatively mild “America was founded as a Christian nation” camp all the way to the dominionist Seven Mountains Mandate crowd, which openly teaches that Christians must seize control of “seven mountains” (government, media, education, business, entertainment, family, and religion) in order to establish God’s kingdom on earth.
A 2024 poll found that 41% of American Christians now affirm some version of that theology. The New Apostolic Reformation figures behind it, Lance Wallnau, Bill Johnson, and others, have reframed the Great Commission as a blueprint for institutional takeover, and they’ve done it while attaching themselves to political figures they describe as anointed agents of God’s purposes.
At the harder end of the movement, figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Torba have introduced something that should disqualify the whole project from Christian credibility: they’re openly antisemitic. Further, Fuentes has publicly claimed that the New Testament replaces and supersedes the Hebrew Scriptures entirely. That’s Marcionism and it’s one of the oldest heresies named and condemned by Christians. It was declared a heresy in the second century because it severs Jesus from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, making the Father of Jesus Christ a different deity than the one who called Abraham out of Ur and gave the law at Sinai. The early church fathers understood that accepting Marcion’s framework meant accepting a Christianity with no roots, no covenant history, and no continuity with the God who defined himself by his acts in the life of Israel. Christian nationalism that rejects the Jewishness of the gospel has already forfeited the gospel.
Before we get to theology, though, let’s let the historical record speak. If blending the apparatus of the state with Christian religion produces flourishing, we should be able to find it somewhere. The experiment has been run many times, under many different conditions, and the outcomes are consistent.
When Constantine’s Edict of Milan gave Christianity legal status in 313 AD, it ended a century of brutal persecution. That was a genuine mercy. But the trajectory it set in motion was not. Sixty-seven years later, the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD made Nicene Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire. Within decades, the church that had been gathering in homes and catacombs to escape persecution was now burning other people’s books, closing temples by imperial force, and eventually persecuting fellow Christians who held different theological positions.
George Weigel has written that Constantine’s entanglement with the church “marked the beginning of the Christian Church’s deep entanglement with state power,” and that entanglement narrowed theological diversity, marginalized or deleted dissenting forms of Christianity, and produced a church that increasingly looked like what it had prayed against for centuries. The persecuted became the persecutors.
Benjamin Franklin, who had studied this history carefully, put it this way: “If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practiced it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed persecution in the Romish Church, but practiced it upon the Puritans. These [Puritans] found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England.” Franklin was describing an observable pattern: every time the church grabs the state power, it wields it against its own faith family.
The medieval Papal States operated as a theocracy for over a thousand years and produced the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the legal machinery that eventually burned Jan Hus and William Tyndale. Calvin’s Geneva, often romanticized by Reformed types, presided over the execution of Michael Servetus for heresy. The Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony banished Roger Williams (a baptist) for advocating freedom of conscience and pursued Anne Hutchinson until she fled into the wilderness.
The 20th century examples are the least ambiguous. Hungary under Miklós Horthy from 1919 to 1944 is a case study. Historian István Deák described it as a regime that “advocated a nationalist Christian policy, extolled heroism, faith, and unity, despised the French Revolution, and spurned liberal and socialist ideologies.” It ended with Hungary’s participation in the Holocaust. In Romania, Ion Antonescu’s government confiscated Jewish property and justified it explicitly as “a way to honor the old traditions of Romanian Christian nationalism.” The Iron Guard, which called itself the Legion of the Archangel Michael, spoke in mystical Christian language about Romanian national destiny while running on Nietzschean will-to-power logic underneath…a Christianity stripped of its Jewish roots, its ethic of neighbor love, and its universal body of Christ, and replaced with a religion of national strength and racial purity.
The Übermensch wore a cross. That fusion was responsible for the deaths of over 13,000 Jews in the Bucharest and Iași pogroms. This is what happens when you keep the tribal identity marker of Christianity while gutting the theology that would restrain violence against the out-group. You’re left with a tribe, not a church.
State religion doesn’t just produce tyranny eventually. It produces it predictably, because the state’s tool is coercion and the church’s tool is supposed to be the gospel. When you hand a church a sword, it will use it. It always has. I wrote about this phenomenon and how it all started in my two-part series on “How the Church Lost Africa” - Part 1 and Part 2
The Seven Mountains Mandate teaches that the Great Commission is a call for Christians to take control of the seven dominant spheres of culture so that Christ can return. It’s drawn primarily from a misreading of Genesis 1:28, the cultural mandate, and Revelation 17:9. But the “seven mountains” in Revelation 17 are a symbol of an oppressive world empire, almost certainly Rome, not a job description for Christian executives and politicians. Importing that imagery as a mandate for institutional conquest is precisely what happens when you read your political agenda into scripture rather than letting scripture interpret itself.
Matthew 28:18-20 is direct. “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” The commission is to make disciples, to baptize, to teach. It’s a proclamation with a spiritual objective. It goes to all nations, all ethnic groups, every tongue and people and tribe, which means any nationalism that privileges one group over others has already violated the commission it claims to be fulfilling. The body of Christ doesn’t have a flag.
The Kingdom of God in the New Testament is inaugurated and not yet consummated. Jesus announced it, demonstrated it, secured it through his death and resurrection, and then ascended to the right hand of the Father, where he reigns now and from where he will return to bring it to its fullness. That future fullness isn’t something we build.
Paul makes this plain: “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds” (2 Corinthians 10:4). The weapons and warfare and strongholds are real, but the weapons are spiritual, and the strongholds are not other people. It’s principalities and powers in high places. When Ephesians 6 lays out the armor, it ends with our feet fitted with “the preparation of the gospel of peace.” We go out to extend the gospel, not to conquer institutions.
The dominionist reading of the Great Commission has to work around the entire book of Acts to sustain itself, and the more common populist version, the one that doesn’t know about the Seven Mountains Mandate and the NAR but is absolutely certain God anointed a particular candidate to restore America’s Christian heritage, has to work around it just as hard. Two different entry points, same destination. The early church does none of what either version prescribes. They preached and healed and baptized and planted communities that were so radically different from the surrounding culture that people converted simply by watching them. They didn’t seize the education mountain or lobby Caesar’s court. They didn’t anoint kings or organize voting blocs. They turned the world upside down with a message and a Spirit. When Acts ends, Paul is in Rome under house arrest, and the gospel has reached the heart of empire, not through political capture, but through a chained apostle talking to everyone who visits him. If that’s the model, then both the theologian mapping cultural mountains and the pastor telling his congregation who God wants in the White House are reading a different book than the one the apostles left us in Acts.
Here’s what I want every Christian who’s attracted to the Christian nationalism movement to hear. At the leading edge of this movement, not the fringe, but the podcasters and platform builders with millions of followers and books sold, you’ll find open and documented hostility toward Jewish people, and in some cases an explicit rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures as authoritative for Christians.
A 2021 Washington Post survey found a high statistical correlation between holding Christian nationalist principles and affirming classic antisemitic tropes: that Jews killed Jesus, that Jews have too much power, that American Jews have dual national loyalty. Bradley Onishi, who has studied the movement extensively, has stated that antisemitic conspiracy theories and a general disdain for Jewish people are built into the structure of the movement, not grafted onto it.
Nick Fuentes has publicly declared that the New Testament has replaced the Hebrew Scriptures. He frames Christian nationalism as the assertion that America is a Christian nation and not a Jewish one, and crowds at his events have chanted “Christ is King” in that explicit context. Andrew Torba, who runs Gab and has called Fuentes “the civil rights hero of our time,” has built a platform that is documented as a haven for Holocaust revisionism and white nationalist organizing.
What these men are doing theologically has a name. Marcion of Sinope proposed in the second century that the God of the Old Testament was a different, inferior deity from the Father of Jesus. He rejected the Hebrew Scriptures entirely. He was condemned as a heretic by every major voice in the early church (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus) because to cut Christianity loose from its Jewish roots is to cut it loose from the covenants, the promises, the Messiah’s own identity as the Son of David, and the very name of God that Jesus prayed to. You cannot accept the Father of Jesus and reject the God of Abraham. They are the same Person. This isn’t a secondary doctrinal quibble, either. It’s a first-order question about who God is. Marcionism is the kind of doctrine heresy that 2 Peter 2 talked about as “damnable heresy” that has “crept in unawares” and tricks “unstable souls.”
A Christian nationalism that has quietly slipped into Marcionite categories is not a Christianity that can be reformed from within. It’s a different religion altogether.
I want to be clear that none of this is an argument for Christians to disengage from public life or check out of their communities. Salt and light are active metaphors. Christians should be the most involved neighbors, the most committed public servants, the most honest voices in their communities. Faithful civic engagement is a genuine Christian calling.
What it isn’t is the seizure of governmental and cultural power in order to impose Christian outcomes on people who haven’t made Christian commitments. You can’t Christianize a society without first making people Christians. The notion that we can run the institutions and produce the kingdom without the gospel of inner transformation before external transformation is a confusion of means and ends that the New Testament simply doesn’t support.
The church grew fastest when it had the least political power. It’s growing fastest right now in places where it has none: in China, in Iran, in sub-Saharan Africa, in the underground networks of the Global South. The correlation runs in the opposite direction from what Christian nationalism promises. State power doesn’t produce revival. It produces corruption, nominalism, and eventually the kind of backlash that empties pews for generations…like what we see in Europe today.
Jesus fed the crowd, and the crowd tried to make him king by force, and he walked away into the hills. He knew something that every generation of Christians seems to have to relearn the hard way: his kingdom isn’t built that way. It’s built by people who carry his name into places where his name hasn’t been heard, who love their neighbors in ways that can’t be explained by tribal self-interest, and who hold out the gospel, the actual gospel, not a political platform dressed in scripture, to a world that is dying for something real.
The Kingdom has a King already. It’s not looking for a President or a Congress to take the King’s place.
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Great article. Christ’s kingdom is not of this world…Until he returns to rule and reign.
“Christian Nationalism” in lefty rhetoric is a strawman.
Stopped reading right there and so should anyone who is interested in serious dialog.
The author is either very disingenuous or very uninformed.
Maricionism asserts that the God of the old testament was a DIFFERENT God from the God of the new testament.
Nobody who I have ever arguing against dispensationalism believes this. They believe that God is good. Has ALWAYS been good and his promises to the Jews and to humanity were fulfilled in Jesus.
Perhaps someone may not believe that to be true but by asserting that is the same thing as Marcionism is a complete lie.
This author is not dealing in good faith and should not be listened to.
If he feels he must lie to defend his beliefs then his beliefs should be questioned as well.
Christians must seize control of “seven mountains” (government, media, education, business, entertainment, family, and religion)
/////
all these institutions were captured by the woke communists over the last several decades and especially in the last decade.
They do need to be taken back by christians if there is any hope for America to succeed as a republic.
at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. As the story goes, a woman (often identified as Elizabeth Willing Powel) asked ben franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin replied:
TLDR
In skimming, I saw the author wanted everyone to agree to his definition.
In my view the wholesome meaning of Christian nationalism is simply the recognition that Jesus is Lord, as the founders stated in the U.S. Constitution.
your argument didn’t actually disagree with the author
“has publicly claimed that the New Testament replaces and supersedes the Hebrew Scriptures entirely. That’s Marcionism and it’s one of the oldest heresies named and condemned by Christians”
looks the same as your argument that
“Maricionism asserts that the God of the old testament was a DIFFERENT God from the God of the new testament.”
“Christian Nationalism”, to a leftist, means “Christians cannot vote”. Only Christians who favor abortion, illegal immigration, cutting breasts off of teen girls, etc. get to vote.
The Seven Mountains Mandate teaches that the Great Commission is a call for Christians to take control of the seven dominant spheres of culture so that Christ can return.
Bullshit. That’s not what the seven mountain mandate teaches at all.
Then you don’t understand Marcionism or the arguments against dispensationalism.
Those who are being called Marcionists in the article believe that God in the old testament was good and promised to make the Jews His people and preserve them so that through them he could save the entire world. Then he came to earth through them and saved the entire world fulfilling his promise.
Marcionists believe that the God of the old testament was evil and tormented man. They believe that the God of the new testament was good and replaced the evil god of the old testament.
If you don’t see (or refuse to acknowledge) the difference in these two ideas, I don’t know how to help you.
Since the author of the article took it upon himself to write the article, I assume he was aware of the difference and simply lied about it.
Ok, I’ll take a seat. I’ll go first.
Everyone else in the planet is allowed to be proud of their birth nation and religion. But I’m not? Don’t think so. Conversation is over.
George Washington was a Christian nationalist. He just didn’t believe in a state Church like the British.
You are correct.
The left tried to do this in the late 70’s to fight against Reagan.
Look for more of this in the next year.
Amen, the political left and those that enable them on the right are attacking the morals and values that the United States was founded on which the Founders warned us to guard dearly. They are trying to destroy the foundational bedrock of what is needed for a properly functioning Constitutional society. Anyone that defends those morals and values is labeled by the them as a "Christian nationalist" and painted as someone trying to usher in a theocracy.
Our government only works when the citizens are self-governing through moral restraint and an ethos based on Judeo-Christian ideas. That doesn't mean that you must be a Christian to be an upright citizen. It does mean that you recognize the universal truth behind the ideas and try to live by them:
Rights flow from Creation: Human rights are inherent because they come from our Creator, not from government, culture, or majority opinion.
Dignity is Intrinsic: Every human being possesses equal worth because each person bears the image of God, regardless of ability, status, or usefulness.
Moral Agency is Permanent: Every person is morally accountable for his or her choices. Freedom and responsibility are inseparable.
Justice and Mercy are Distinct: Justice gives what is deserved under moral law; mercy offers compassion without denying the reality of justice. A healthy society requires both in their proper roles.
Government is Limited: Civil government exists to protect God-given rights and maintain justice—not to become the source of rights or the highest moral authority.
Responsibility is Personal: Liberty survives only when citizens govern themselves morally. The upright citizen accepts responsibility for personal conduct, family, community, and the preservation of ordered liberty.
When the morals and ethos that are behind these ideas break down, society breaks down. When citizens stop governing themselves, the government steps in to fill the vacuum by enacting more rules, regulations and laws. Everything those seeking more control over daily lives have done over the last 100 or so years has been geared towards weakening and destroying those ides.
The "freedom" the left espouses has led to a lot of bad things throughout history. The upright citizen seeks liberty, which is freedom tempered by morals and ethics. If you are looking for a hill to die on, there it is.
Indeed. it's a word/term invented by the post-modern American Left. Don't use play their game
Just like the word "capitalist." Marx was not the first to use it, but before him it was unknown. He grabbed it, put it into in the center of his ideology, and used it as his straw man.
Those on the left and those on the right want to define Christian Nationalism into their own narrow viewpoints.
I keep things on the simple side. I’m a White Christian Nationalist.
1. I’m White. Born that way.
2. I’m a Christian. Born Again that way.
2. I’m a Nationalist. Born in the USA and will stay that way.
The poor author is way behind the times.
Nick Fuentes has declared himself to be a democrat ! (May 8 2026 !
“At the harder end of the movement, figures like Nick Fuentes”
https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/p/nick-fuentes-finally-comes-out-as
Cochran’s first point is: “Christian Nationalism is a political ideology informed by the Christian faith, not a religion informed by political ideology.”
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