Please Don't Rape the Angels

And they said, Stand back. And they said again, This one fellow came in to sojourn, and he will needs be a judge: now will we deal worse with thee, than with them. Gen. 19:1-9

One of the recurrent criticisms of Christian Nationalism is that it will never happen; it will never have any effect on the real world. Another is: Even if it does, it will just make Christianity odious to our neighbors. They will want nothing to do with Christ because Christian Nationalists will be trying to compel them to obey the Law of God with political force.

I disagree on both counts. Christian Nationalism, whatever it may be, will without doubt have an effect on U.S. politics and on the situation of the Church. It may be that we will have some version of Christian Nationalism in the United States. It seems unlikely, but it’s not unthinkable. Not that long ago, when I was a kid, it was common to see Nativity displays in front of city hall in towns around the Chicago suburbs. Only Nativity scenes; no menorahs, no crescents, no statues of Baphomet.

Besides, with God all things are possible.

But even if no form of Christian Nationalism becomes a reality in the United States, it will still have an effect on our politics and on the life of the Church. Its existence will be used as a pretext for the persecution of Church and the sidelining of Christians from political life. Christian Nationalism is already having a significant effect on church life in the United States. Liberal denominations decry it in their encyclicals, and in most conservative denominations we are seeing a concerted effort to root Christian Nationalism out of the pastorate, even though few people have a clear idea of what it actually is.

But few people seem to acknowledge that Christian Nationalism was going to be a pretext to persecute the Church even if no Christians had written books on it. If there were no Christian Nationalism, it would be necessary for the American left to invent one.

Most criticisms of Christian Nationalism center on its supposed unsavory association with ethnic nationalism. Others find fault with the near universal tendency among Christians through most of the last two millennia to distinguish but not separate the two kingdoms of state and church. In Lutheran orthodoxy, there was universal agreement that it was the Church’s calling to make men Christians through the preaching of the Gospel, but it was the state’s calling to assist the Church by upholding external obedience to the Law of God according to both tables. That is to say, Luther, Melanchthon, and later orthodox Lutheran theologians believed that God’s Word teaches that a ruler is to prevent idolatrous worship among his people, punish blasphemy, and privilege the right teaching of the Word of God.

But the American left in particular, and something like half of Americans more generally, had a problem with Christians long before anyone started talking about these things.

A few years back, I remember a bible class where one of my elders said something to the effect of: “People think that simply upholding the fifth commandment in politics is imposing Christianity on them.” That is obviously true. Long before anyone was writing books about Christian Nationalism, or the phrase had even been coined, people were accusing Christians of being theocrats because they opposed homosexual “marriage”, voted to protect the life of infants in the womb, insisted that it was wrong for people to change their sexual characteristics with hormone treatments and grotesque surgeries and then require us to agree with them that they had changed their sex.

It is much easier to fight against your brothers in Christ for threatening your tenuous position in the public square, for threatening to cut the fraying threads preventing you from falling into the hands of the mob beating on Lot’s door, than it is to face a mob that wants to kill you. It’s relatively easy for us to fight with each other in the Church compared to the difficulty of going before a mob that is unwilling to hear that sodomy is wrong, that those who practice it will be damned, or that murdering one’s children should be outlawed. But for pagan Americans merely affirming those facts makes you a dangerous theocrat. They do not recognize the Ten Commandments, and their reason has become so dark that they will not see that dismembering a baby in the womb is murder, or that it is against nature for a man to lie with a man.

Long before Christian Nationalism was invented, all the anti-Christian Nationalists in conservative denominations (that is, those who weren’t liberals working to subvert those denominations) were already in the position of Lot. “This man came here as a sojourner, and now he wants to be our judge!” the crowd of men cried out when Lot tried to dissuade them from raping the angels that had come to visit. That’s how the American left feels about Christians who think the government should forbid abortion and homosexual marriage.

Peter tells us that Lot’s soul was grieved at the evil conduct of the people among whom he lived. “Righteous Lot, who was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked ⁸ (for that righteous man, dwelling among them, tormented his righteous soul from day to day by seeing and hearing their lawless deeds)…” (2 Peter 2:7-8) Yet in Genesis we see him do no more than take the angels into his home in an effort to prevent the Sodomites from raping them, and then go out to dissuade the mob from violating his hospitality. He tried to live a quiet life with his head down, and Sodomites called him a theocrat and said, “We will do worse to you than to them!”

“Please don’t rape the angels!” Lot pleaded. For merely asking the Sodomites not to rape the angels he was called a Christian Nationalist.

Many people in conservative Christendom desperately want to believe that if they can clean out the radicals from their midst they can avoid the mob beating down their door, and maybe even persuade it not to rape the angels.

I’m afraid not, brothers. Christian Nationalism is going to have an effect on your life no matter which way this goes. Even if you go on ignoring the progress of the woke left in your denominations, which is evident to everyone, and tacitly collaborating with them to purge Christian Nationalists from your midst. But the mob already thought you were a Christian Nationalist before the term was invented, merely because you vote as a bloc against them.

Your options are apostasy, or turning to face the mob with the Word of God.