1/8. In this article Michael Horton criticizes what he calls "Christian Americanism." He defines this as the ideal of a Xian nation other than the universal church & connects it to "saving faith as . . . legislated & enforced." https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/cult-christian-trumpism/

2/8. His critique is very familiar to me, since I wrote a book on John Howard Yoder & I have read Stanley Hauerwas extensively. Their Anabaptist critique of "Christendom" as founded on coercion has apparently been embraced by Horton, as a Reformed theologian. This is pretty sig.

3/8. It means that Horton rejects a major tenet of the magisterial Ref, namely that a Xian prince, or, in the case of a constitutional republic like the US, a people, can adopt belief in God as the foundational principle of social order & base all law on that belief.

4/8. It is scarcely possible to imagine Western civ. apart from this idea of a Xian nation. When the church is successful in evangelizing the vast majority of the population, the resulting Xian people must choose what kind of polity under which they will live; hence, Christendom.

5/8. To dismiss Christendom as incompatible with the Gospel is to side with the Anabaptists over against Luther, Calvin, Cramner, Knox, Zwingli, etc. This opens the door to the take-over of the state by entities hostile to God & his church, which seems to be happening right now.

6/8. As a Baptist I prefer a state church to what Pope Benedict XVI called "the dictatorship of relativism." In Christendom I may feel cramped; under atheism I may be murdered. Surely these are not morally equivalent. Could we at least require the govt. respect the natural law?

7/8. Is there no 3rd way between a purely secularized polity or an absolute identification of the entire pop. with 1 church? Is there no way to have a broadly Xian ethos as the state religion while making room for individuals to dissent acc. to conscience & worship as they wish?

8/8. History suggest that not only is it possible, it has been done for centuries! Not only that, but the countries in which it has been done (such as Xian America for the first 200 yrs of its hist) have been the most dynamic & most free ones so far in the history of the world.