When the Cross Becomes a Crown - The Dangers of Christian Nationalism

In my 2020 book Birth Pangs, I warned of something I didn’t really have a name for. I saw a trend where Christian’s were expressing outrage at their rights being trampled upon. I pointed out that, as believers, we have been purchased and have a new owner. We lost our rights when we gave our lives to Jesus.

At the same time, we are citizens of a nation-state. And we do have certain rights as citizens. In America, we have a beautiful document called the Bill of Rights, which is the first 10 amendments to the Constitution and guarantees freedom of speech, expression, the press, and religion.

The problem comes when we merge the two. When we start expecting the State to honor us as Christians and not merely citizens. I wrote a book a few years after that called When Kingdoms Collide. The premise of that book was that we live in two worlds at one time. We are citizens of the kingdom of heaven, yet also citizens of our individual countries. We must learn how to navigate in those realms according to the laws of each domain.

Suddenly, people began to call that dynamic Christian Nationalism. And many of its adherents are not very Christian at all.

Taking Control of Our Culture

There is a version of Christian nationalism that sounds, at first hearing, like simple faithfulness. It says: our culture is drifting, our children are being catechized by forces hostile to the gospel, and the only remedy strong enough to meet the moment is the coercive power of the State, wielded on behalf of Christian truth. “After all, we are a Christian nation, right?” The fact is, there’s no such thing as a Christian nation—only individual believers living in a country.

And the truth is Christian nationalism does not protect the Church. It endangers it. And American history — not merely modern political commentary, but the actual record of the colonial period — already ran this experiment once. It failed, and it failed at the expense of devout, Bible-believing Christians, not secularists.

A Colony Built on a Warning

This morning, I read an article by Mikale Olson in The Christian Post about Roger Williams. I remember studying about Williams in high school, but could not have told you anything about him. I was re-introduced to him when getting my master’s degree a few years ago. I was intrigued because he articulated, hundreds of years ago, some of the things that were concerning me in 2020.

In 1631, a young Separatist minister named Roger Williams landed in Boston. He was no liberal by modern standards — he was a rigorous, conviction-driven Puritan. But Williams saw something his fellow believers could not yet see: once the civil magistrate is handed authority over the conscience, the State does not sanctify itself by borrowing the Church’s symbols. It corrupts the Church with the temptation for political power. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with, and it should be encouraged for Christians to have influence within the political world. But the idea of a nation for Christians where non-Christians are compelled to live as Christians is not something we see in the Great Commission.

Roger Williams called compelled worship what it was — an offense against God rather than a service to Him — and insisted that no government has a biblical mandate to police the soul. I have studied the phenomenon of forced conversions of Jewish people throughout the centuries and know that it produces bad fruit. Olsen writes, “He argued that forcing unregenerate people to attend church or pray was ‘forced worship,’ which he famously declared ‘stinks in God's nostrils.’ Furthermore, he insisted that civil authorities had no biblical mandate to punish spiritual offenses.”[1]

The Massachusetts authorities saw Williams's idea of religious liberty as treasonous. In the dead of winter in 1635, the high court ordered him banished. Williams was forced to flee his home and trudge through deep snow in freezing woods, surviving only through the hospitality of the Narragansett tribe, before founding Rhode Island — a colony explicitly built on full liberty of conscience (an idea that took root nationwide over a hundred years later).[2]

Williams described the needed boundary as a wall between the “garden” of the Church and the “wilderness” of the world — not because the world does not matter, but because a magistrate who tries to tend the garden ends up trampling the flowers.

Christians Persecuting Christians

The colonial record that follows Williams is even harder to romanticize. Olson writes about Quakers who entered Massachusetts to preach were whipped, mutilated, and banished under threat of death. When several returned, including Mary Dyer, the colony hanged them on the Boston Common. In Virginia, the state-established Anglican Church used civil law to compel attendance and tax dissenters to fund its clergy; Baptist preachers were beaten by mobs and jailed simply for preaching without State license.

I know what you’re thinking—they were a bit more primitive than us. We would never do that. Tell Mike Pence. In addition to the fact that a throng chanted on January 6, “hang Mike Pence,” a gallows and noose were erected just for him. President Trump’s lawyer, L. Lin Wood, accused Pence of treason and predicted that the VP could "face execution by firing squad."[3] Wood also accused Chief Justice John Roberts and Senator Mitch McConnell of treason.

Another Trump lawyer, Joseph diGenova, said in an interview: “Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot [Chris] Krebs [Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] who used to be the head of cybersecurity, that guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.”

Let’s remember. Mike Pence, no matter what you think of him, is no pagan. He’s not a Muslim. He is a traditional evangelical Christian. He didn’t jump off a boat as a refugee. Pence is as American as baseball. Both his father and son served in the military. This was the man that people were calling for him to be killed by the government. This is the fruit of Christian nationalism.

Both with Pence and those Christians who did not have the right confession for Massachusetts, there were no confrontations between faith and secularism. They were Christians using the sword of the State against other Christians whose only crime was worshiping outside the government's approved orthodoxy. That is what state-enforced religion produces in practice, whatever its architects intend at the outset.

Why the Founders Refused to Repeat It

The generation that wrote the Constitution had watched this coercion firsthand, as Olson recounts. James Madison, as a young man, listened to jailed Baptist preachers speak to their congregations through prison bars in Fredericksburg. When Patrick Henry proposed a Virginia tax to fund “teachers of the Christian religion,” Madison answered with his Memorial and Remonstrance, warning that fifteen centuries of state-established Christianity had produced, in his words, “pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”

If you ever do a survey of Church history, you will see that whenever the Church obtains temporal power—that is, political power—it not only becomes corrupt; it becomes really corrupt, often using the power of the sword to enforce religious standards that they often themselves have long ago forsaken. There are stories of unmarried Christian bishops with children out of wedlock. The reformers did not merely face disagreement in debate, but threats of death that were often realized. The Church had the power to kill and used it.

Thomas Jefferson reached a parallel conclusion from his study of Europe's religious wars, observing that centuries of coercion in matters of belief had produced no unity of conviction — only violence and hypocrisy. The Constitution that followed barred religious tests for federal office and forbade Congress from establishing any national religion. None of this was hostility to faith. It was hard-won recognition that the State cannot be trusted to arbitrate the soul, because whichever faction holds the State will eventually use that power against everyone outside it.

This is why Paul pinned Romans 13 to make a clear distinction between the power of the clergy and the power of the State. The clergy has domain in spiritual matters. It can disfellowship someone for moral living—but it cannot kill someone and certainly cannot put someone in the electric chair. God has given the power of the sword to the State, not to the Church. “[The state is] God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.”

Why the Danger Is Still Alive Today

Olson raised the question modern advocates of Christian nationalism tend to skip past: “Which Christianity?” A Reformed magistrate, a Baptist congregation, a Catholic diocese, and a Pentecostal church do not share one enforceable political program. Hand the state power to impose “Christian” law, and you have not settled which Christians get to write that law — you have simply guaranteed that some Christians will end up on the receiving end of it, exactly as the Quakers and Baptists did in the colonies.

Olson also names the second danger: elections change hands. All my adult life I’ve been a conservative, but I believe that the American system of government operates best with free and fair elections—even if the people I don’t vote for get in power. I would prefer a Democrat president to a Republican king.

A government apparatus built to enforce religious conformity does not stay in friendly hands forever. As he puts it, building that machine and handing it to the state is to risk handing “a turnkey machine of state coercion directly to people who may despise your values” the next time the country votes differently. The tool a movement builds to compel its opponents is the same tool its opponents inherit once they win.

Four Reasons the Church Should Resist This Path

1. It misreads where the Church's power actually comes from. The gospel does not advance by decree. It advances by proclamation, changed lives, and the visible witness of believers who love their neighbors — including neighbors who disagree with them. A Church that leans on Caesar’s sword to do what only the Spirit can do has already conceded something essential about its own message.

2. It corrupts the Church’s witness before it ever “wins.” Historically, established religion did not produce deeper devotion. Jefferson’s blunt verdict on centuries of religious coercion in Europe still applies: it made “one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.” Compelled belief is not belief. A culture forced into Christian observance by law is a culture trained in performance, not conviction.

3. It cannot survive its own internal disagreements. Christian nationalism speaks as though “Christian” were a single, settled political platform. It is not. The moment any one tradition captures State power, every other tradition becomes a target — which is precisely the story of Roger Williams, the Boston martyrs, and the jailed Baptists of Virginia.

4. It hands a loaded weapon to the next administration. Every coercive power built to enforce one group’s vision of righteousness eventually falls into the hands of people with a different vision. A movement that would be horrified to see its own institutions conscripted by a hostile government should be far more cautious about building the conscription machinery in the first place.

A Better Inheritance

Olson reminds us of Benjamin Franklin’s words, which still stand as a fair test: a faith that needs “the help of the Civil Power” to sustain itself has already conceded that it cannot persuade on its own terms. Put simply, Christian nationalism does not need God; it has force.

The answer to real cultural decline is not to seize the State's sword and swing it in the Church’s name. It is to do what the Church has always been called to do without needing Caesar’s permission — preach, disciple, build strong families, plant faithful congregations, and love a watching world well enough that it takes notice.

Roger Williams paid for that conviction with a winter exile into the wilderness. Baptist preachers paid for it behind Virginia’s jail bars. The Church does not need the State’s crown to be faithful. History suggests, rather forcefully, that reaching for that crown is how the Church loses its cross.

[1] Mikale Olson, “‘Christian nationalism’ already failed America once,” The Christian Post, September 3, 2026.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Baker, Peter, and Susan Glasser. The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021. (New York: Doubleday, 2022), 25.