Five Views on Christian Nationalism by Douglas Wilson, Joe Rigney, Paul D. Miller, R. Albert Mohler Jr, & R. R. Reno

The bogeyman in the modern political sphere is the man or woman who is caught in the open with his beliefs in plain sight, especially if those beliefs happen to be part of conservative Christianity. The words Christian nationalism are tossed about anytime someone appeals to biblical ethics, or addresses their faith in a public way, making demands of others based on it. It is also clear that the founders of America did not want a political realm where Christianity, or any other religion for that matter, was state-enforced. The wall of separation between church and state, overused and misunderstood, was nonetheless true Jeffersonian language, coming from the same man who had confessed “nature and nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence.

Yet while progressive news agencies and liberal, or illiberal, politicians toss these terms around irresponsibly, there is a legitimate debate happening inside a certain circle of Christianity on whether to embrace the term once and for all and stand for it amid the negative onslaught. In Five Views on Christian Nationalism, five prominent Christian leaders lend their considerable talent and authority to investigating and debating the questions surrounding this debate: what is a nation? Can a nation survive without an ontological basis? Is America a creedal nation? Who are the enemies, and what is the problem that we face? What is the solution to that problem? Can Caesar be entrusted with the keys to the kingdom? Two Baptists, Al Mohler and Paul D. Miller, two Presbyterians, Joe Rigney and Douglas Wilson, and one Catholic, R. R. Reno, take on this issue in what may be the authoritative debate on the merits and demerits of Christian nationalism written this decade.

Instead of allowing the reader to hide behind vague terms, the authors clarify exactly what they mean by Christian nationalism and exactly what they do not mean. The catch? They don’t all agree. For starters, the authors disagree on what a nation even is. Is it a nation-state, as we have seen in the modern political world, especially since the rise of the so-called right to self-determination in the twentieth century? Or is it simply a diverse group, or group of groups of people, united under a common government? Paul Miller is the only one of the five to give an actual definition of Christian nationalism that would survive etymological scrutiny, though all define it throughout the process of writing their essays. “Christian nationalism” is, then, a collection of beliefs about nation and state: it is the belief that one’s nation and culture is definitionally “Christian” in some sense; that it should remain Christian; and that the government has a legitimate role keeping it that way.

But what is a nation? Joe Rigney defines nation as the following: “a people marked out by a combination of 1) shared ancestry, 2) shared history and experience, 3) a common language, literature, culture, customs, and religion, 4) a shared attachment to a particular land and place, and 5) a common law and ruler.” Further, as Rigney notes, the biblical terms used in this argument are the words goy (for nation) and am (for people). Rigney equates the two, as Mohler, Reno, and Wilson would agree, but Paul Miller offers a counterattack to such a view. Noting that Rigney infers their synonymity, rather than proving it, Miller argues that while the words goy and am are used together in the Bible, in Isaiah, for example, they are not collapsible into a singular word, serving rather as cumulative parallelism, that is, their use is to make a point, not to make an equation. That nations are present in a significant way in the biblical account is undisputable. It does not follow automatically, however, that the Bible provides us with a detailed definition of what constitutes a nation in the modern political sense. Scripture may affirm the reality and providential significance of peoples without giving Christians a single, comprehensive political definition of nationhood.

The problem with both Rigney and Miller’s argument is that they both assume more than the evidence gives. Rigney assumes that goy and am are synonyms, which lends credibility to his argument for Christian nationalism, while Miller assumes that they are not synonymous, thus boosting his interpretation against Christian nationalism. Either could be right, and the other wrong, but the evidence cited isn’t conclusive either way.

This leads to the next question. Is America a nation like any other? At the outset, it would seem that the Christian nationalists are committed to America’s exceptionality as a Christian nation, while Miller is arguing against it, but this again is a misconception. On the contrary, those arguing for Christian nationalism seem to base their argument on proving the definition of nation and therefore proving what America must be, dismissing out of hand the idea that America could be anything other than a mere nation. While Miller doesn’t defend American exceptionalism per se, he does defend American creedalism, that is, the idea that the United States gains its identity not in its ethnicity, geography, or culture, but in its propositional nature, something which is not true of most other nations, a fact which must be readily admitted with a simple glance at history. Miller’s argument rests on what he sees as both the basis and the solution for the American experiment, what he terms natural law republicanism. It is these ideas: that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator, and so on and so forth, which give America its creedal nature and its unique opportunity for religious liberty, freedom, and unprecedented opportunity. Nor is this only Miller’s argument, for America has long been seen as different by a large portion of the world. British thinker and wit G. K. Chesterton wrote that “America is the only nation that is founded on a creed.”

This is where the Christian nationalist critique of creedalism has considerable force. It is one thing to say that America is founded upon propositions; it is another to assume that propositions can sustain themselves indefinitely once the worldview that gave them meaning has been discarded. “All men are created equal” is a proposition. But why are they equal? Why does every human being possess inherent dignity? Why are rights natural rather than merely granted by the state? Why should government be limited? Why should the majority be restrained from violating the rights of the minority? The Declaration provides answers, or at least clues toward answers, but those answers are not philosophically neutral. They rest upon a particular understanding of nature, morality, and God. This is the ontological basis for America, a basis which, argues R. Albert Mohler, is not religiously neutral, but is based on Christianity. Of course, Miller does not deny the Christian basis of the nation: the disagreement comes over whether America should confess its identity publicly or, as Mohler urges, enshrine Christianity, or an admission of its necessity, into the US Constitution. A counterargument to Mohler is that reading the founders as exclusively Christian ignores the effect of the Enlightenment, and of thinkers such as John Locke and Algernon Sidney on the Founding Fathers. Yet even Locke and Sidney were manifestly operating within a Christian worldview, as when Locke urges banning atheists from holding public office, pushing for a Christian understanding of man and his role in society.

Reno, Wilson, and Rigney, all in different ways, attack the idea of America as a creedal nation based on a simple argument. If America is based on a creed, and its creed gives it its identity, then those who attack its creed therefore forfeit their right to be called Americans. This is a logically sound and compelling argument, which, unfortunately, Miller doesn’t take the time to respond to, but it does have one weak spot. The argument would be true if it were just any ideal, or any proposition, yet as Miller notes, it’s a particular proposition, that of the dignity of every individual, that is the basis of the creedal nation theory. To put it succinctly, the right to attack the creed is the creed: freedoms of liberty, of expression, and of religion are a natural outflow of the imago Dei endowed on each man and woman.

Moving on, the main question in this book is what to do about the modern threat to American identity. Whether that identity is primarily Anglo-Protestant, merely Christian, or liberal, the authors disagree, but all agree that the identity must be defended. To a large extent, all five agree on what the threat is: the forces of secularism or of anti-Westernism, Islam, communism, the creed of the sexual revolution, each of which, in its own way, rejects some portion of the moral and philosophical inheritance of the West. The disagreement is less over whether America is facing a serious crisis than over how that crisis should be understood and what Christians ought to do about it.

For Rigney and Wilson, the Presbyterians, who by and large agree, the solution is Christian nationalism. Both are postmillennialists, holding that the task of the Christian is to further the gospel of Christ until every square inch of the world is under his physical dominion, whereupon the earth will be ready to receive its King. Although only a simplistic statement of postmillennial eschatology, this idea figures prominently in their defense of Christian nationalism. It’s based on a simple argument: that if Christ is truly in control of all, then that all must include the governments of the world, which are also subject to his rule. For Rigney and Wilson, the question is not whether Christians should attempt to make Christ Lord over the nations. Christ already is Lord over the nations. The question is whether Christians are obligated to recognize and advance that reality in the political order. Their answer is essentially yes.

This position has obvious internal coherence. If Christ is Lord of all, then there can be no genuinely autonomous sphere of life over which Christ has no claim. The Christian cannot say that Christ is Lord of his marriage but not his politics, Lord of his private morality but not his understanding of justice, Lord of his family but not his government. If the Christian faith makes comprehensive claims about reality, then political life cannot be carved out as a permanently Christian-free zone. This idea notwithstanding, a problem remains, for asserting that Christ is King of all doesn’t exactly tell us how his vassals, the Caesars whom he has left in charge, should rule best, or even if they should acknowledge him. Because Rigney and Wilson are Presbyterians and paedobaptists, however, they approach this question from a conception of the Christian community that differs in important respects from a credobaptist one. In Presbyterian covenant theology, the children of believers are included within the visible covenant community and receive baptism as members of that community. Christianity is therefore not conceived merely as a voluntary association of individuals who have each made an independent profession of faith. This makes it more natural for Presbyterians to speak of a Christian people or society rather than merely of individual Christians living within an otherwise religiously neutral political order. If the political community itself is understood as capable of being Christian, then there is far less conceptual difficulty in saying that Caesar, too, ought to recognize the authority of Christ. Reno, a Catholic, would likely agree in general with such a view.

Christian Nationalism is not, for any of these three men, about coercion. None is in favor of mandating Christianity for citizenship, for this will inevitably cheapen the redeeming message of Christianity, but they are in favor of changing society to reflect a Christian understanding, both of man, Anthropos, and of the goal of man, telos.

This distinction is important because it separates Christian nationalism as understood by Rigney and Wilson from the caricature of a theocratic state in which Christianity is imposed by force. Their argument is not that the state should manufacture Christians, but that Christians should seek to order the political community according to the truth claims of Christianity. In other words, the goal is not the conversion of Caesar by the sword, but the submission of Caesar to a reality that, in their view, is already objectively true: Christ is King. It is, in many ways, Christendom 2.0, as Wilson calls it. Not under a pope or a monarch, though it could certainly work in such a way as well, but with the church in the center, and the kingdom surrounding the church.

Here is where Miller’s arguments come back in force. If Caesar is to become the enforcer of Christianity in making its view of telos the standard for the state as well as the church, how confident can we be that Caesar will not misuse the keys? As a political scientist, demonstrating the historical and political realities of more abstract ideas is where Miller’s attack on Christian nationalism really starts to make some headway. By enshrining Christianity in the current Constitution, would that not give the Supreme Court the authority to decide who Christ was, or what Christianity was about? While all the advocates of this form of nationalism steer clear of the pitfall of allowing for an official state church, Caesar is still given an extraordinary amount of power, in Miller’s view, to define what constitutes blasphemy, which Mohler, Reno, Wilson, and Rigney all wish to criminalize, to determine the boundaries of acceptable religious discussion, and ultimately to decide which version of Christianity is sufficiently accurate to merit the approval and defense of the state. The problem is not that Caesar might become a Christian, the problem is that Caesar might wish to be the pope. By his very nature, argues Miller, Caesar, like Sauron, does not share power. History, too, gives little reason to assure us that even the most well-meaning Caesar could remain helpful to Christianity for long. Christian nationalism assumes and requires, he posits, a Caesar who is both sincerely Christian and willing to submit his own power to the power of a higher being. Such a man is not impossible to find, but he is extremely difficult to keep, especially across generations.

What is Miller’s alternative? The natural law republicanism of the founders. “Republicanism,” he writes, “is nature’s government.” Because the church should be preoccupied with the spiritual state of man, and the government with the outward state, or how he behaves himself, the moral order of general revelation proves sufficient for the ordering of human society. Appealing to Romans 1 and St. Paul’s defense of the law written on the hearts of the Gentiles, Miller’s point is that the founders knew exactly what they were doing in starting the nation: they didn’t make it secular in the modern sense, but they didn’t make it explicitly religious either, and this was not an error; not a bug, but a feature. It is natural law which can give us the basis for our laws, our constitutions, and which gives enough ontological grounding for all of this: it is an acknowledgement of the Creator, which does not specify what Creator, a defense of the imago Dei, without specifying what image and what God it is, but admitting that both are present. Miller gives another authoritative definition when he writes that natural law is “the moral order of creation, applicable across time and culture, for all peoples and all nations, available to the rightly trained human reason without special revelation.”

Wilson comes back swinging, asking how exactly the state, or Caesar, can understand the natural law, but not understand the clearly spelled-out commandments of the Old and New Testaments? If he cannot be relied upon to interpret Christianity well, how much less natural law? Miller responds by not responding: he says simply that the questions about how to ground natural law are exactly the questions that should be asked once we have agreed on the natural law framework. This is perhaps Miller’s weakest answer, but he goes on to say that natural law is not meant as a systematic course on theology. It isn’t an endless investigative process whereby more knowledge can be acquired and a better understanding gained. Rather, it must be the basis for all future conversations themselves. Miller does not seem to be arguing for the superiority of natural law over special revelation; rather, he seems to be taking a more prudential approach: natural law republicanism is superior to Christian nationalism not in that it sounds better, but in that it works.

Reno, the lone Catholic contributor to the book, makes some excellent points concerning nationhood. Ironically, though he argues against a creedal nation, several of his arguments could be used to defend precisely such a doctrine. A nation is, in his opinion, bound together by civic friendship, and he quotes Aristotle in asserting that the friendship is stronger the more friends agree on the highest good. Because of this, argues Reno, a nation bound together by a common religious faith is stronger than one lacking such a faith. He quotes G. W. F. Hegel, who wrote in his Philosophy of History that “Religion is the sphere in which a nation gives itself the definition of that which it regards as the True.” Reno proves helpful in showing the necessity of, as Mohler also points out, an ontological and religious grounding. What he does not say, and what he cannot prove based on the premises, is how such a religious faith should be presented, whether as the official stance of the state, or a bottom-up approach, by the virtue of the people.

Reno then commits the error common in post-liberal philosophy. Like Patrick Deneen, Reno is unsatisfied with liberalism. Like Deneen, Reno attempts to show that the classical liberal experiment of Locke, Sidney, and the founders led to the secularization and progressive radical individualism of the modern day. Of course, this is an interesting philosophical point, but it’s horrendously unhistorical: the fathers of progressivism, be it in education or in politics, denied the very principles of liberalism which Deneen and Reno point to as the basis of their philosophy. John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, who began the progressive movement, rejected the natural rights liberalism of Locke and Sidney, so to equate the two is to engage in a false historical comparison. Now, admittedly, Reno doesn’t make this exact argument in the book, but his skepticism of the liberal experiment and his position that liberalism itself led to the modern crisis is easy to see and easier still to trace. Mohler, too, seems to be affected by Deneen’s theories, believing that liberalism is not sufficient, even with a Christian basis, as Locke gave it, for the preservation of society. Next, Reno proposes the solution by saying that “It is entirely proper for the magistrate to concern himself with the common good of the people and not only their individual rights.” Except that this gives the magistrate, or Caesar, the power to define what he ought not to define, namely, what is the common good, and who are the people?

While the arguments being aimed at both sides are strong and verge on impolite, none lack in their professionalism. Each side, each contributor, seems to know exactly what he is talking about and exactly what the other is talking about. Unlike many discussions on this topic, the authors don’t talk past each other, but to each other, giving a stronger flavor to an otherwise courteous debate. Mohler and Rigney clearly have their theological and historical strengths, in being able to explain historical Protestantism in the Reformed tradition and explaining the concepts of government of figures ranging from Augustine to Calvin to Kuyper. Miller excels in his political philosophy, connecting it to a particular vision of human anthropology and Noahic duty. Using the arguments of David VanDrunen, among others, Miller is by far the strongest in understanding the practical side of the argument. Wilson and Reno stand in the middle of the pack, which is uncommon for both. Provocative statements aside, Wilson’s arguments are complex and can occasionally become difficult to trace, but his conclusion is, as usual, well-thought out, if not necessarily politically correct. Reno, too, though the obvious weaknesses of post-liberalism are in full view of the reader, is good at understanding and explaining the importance of nationhood to the social imaginary of a people. The armor of all is well-positioned, but so are the arrows of their opponents, which makes for a memorable fight between allies in a common cause.

It would be unfair of those opposed to Christian nationalism to reject Wilson, Rigney, and Mohler’s arguments out of hand. The seriousness and well-rounded theological tradition which they use to back it up makes the argument unavoidable, and the reader will at times feel like the whole world is spinning with the implications of the argument. Likewise, for those of a Christian nationalist persuasion, to ignore the arguments of Paul Miller is to risk political suicide. In the end, the argument may still be unanswered in Christian circles, discussions will likely continue, but no one will be able to say that they don’t know what to think. This book helps make up your mind, one way or another, and it does it FAST!

Review Written by Caleb A. Gerber

August 25th, 2026

The Making of the American Mind by Matthew Spalding

How did our national consciousness evolve? How did our perception of ourselves as Americans form, and from whence did it come? Argues historian Matthew Spalding, it came from the Declaration of Independence.

Before 1776, Americans did not think of themselves as Americans. They were British subjects who were members of their own colony: Virginians, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians; each colony had its own leadership, its own predominant social class, be it the farmer of Massachusetts, the printer from Pennsylvania, or the Virginia aristocrat. They were brethren, yes, but they were not yet a people. When the immortal words “We hold these truths” were written from the Continental Congress, that all began to change: a new nation would form. By 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, declaring that "four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," the transformation was complete. For Lincoln, as for the founders, America was a nation, but not only a nation, not a mere nation; it was a nation founded upon an idea.

Spalding begins his work by discussing a term we have all heard mentioned: patriotism. Spalding writes that a true understanding of this term, which can mean so many things to so many people, “has always been the civic antidote to what C. S. Lewis called ‘the poison of subjectivism.’” Borrowing from Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French philosopher who toured America in its first couple of decades, Spalding posits that there are two types of patriotism: the first can breed the nationalism of Otto von Bismarck or the self-serving, self-interested geocentrism that has today gained a foothold in some of our governmental institutions. This is not a patriotism based on anything longstanding or permanent; it is mere loyalty, a sheer blind love based only on a sense of community and on nothing more. The second type of patriotism is the American brand: the type that allows soldiers to fight the Nazis on the beaches of Normandy and to plant the American flag on Iwo Jima. It is not because we hate what is in front of us, as Chesterton wrote, nor yet because we like what is behind us, or feel some sort of emotional attachment; it is because we understand that the principles for which we fight are longstanding, permanent, and true. It is because they are all these things that we can give our last full measure of devotion, as did the Union soldiers during the Civil War.

The clarification of terms, such as patriotism, that Spalding does in the early pages of this work makes it easy to follow, yet not easy to skim. It makes you think, as great books do, yet does not cloud your judgment through vague terminology.

Quoting Augustine, Spalding makes clear from the start what the purpose of this book is. Nothing, according to the great theologian of the early church, can be truly loved unless the object of love is known. For us today, that means that for true patriotism, selfless in its purpose, determined in its cause to exist, we must understand exactly why the Declaration of Independence was written, how it was written, and what that changed.

The story of the Continental Congress is not new. Many books have been written on this critical period. The chapters that Spalding spends discussing the history of the Congress, the roles of its players, the international response, and its broader geopolitical place are clear in purpose but vague in accomplishment. For those well versed in American history, nothing illuminating will be gained from these chapters. Similarly, Spalding focuses a large part of his time on the particulars: what the complaints laid out in the Declaration were. This is, of course, important for a political historian, much less so for a philosophical one or for the average reader. Certainly, the validity of the claims made by Jefferson and others played a central role in their day, yet it becomes difficult to see how they could make any difference to ours.

The real strength of this book is its philosophy. Why is it that there are certain “unalienable rights”? What makes these “self-evident”? Who determines that among these are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? The answer takes us back into intellectual history. From the Greeks' understanding of reason (logos), which was then transmitted down to the Christian church, for proof, simply read John 1:1, came the realization that as human beings endowed with the imago Dei, we have the capacity, through our reason, to reach truths about our life, about the human condition, about our telos. From a Christian perspective, which the author shares, it is this knowledge that enables us to know the moral law in the first place, and then realize that we have transgressed against it, which in turn forces us to recognize our depravity and need for redemption. In the political arena, this means that the law can be known without being spelled out. Critically, before the Bill of Rights, there was already a bill of rights written in the universe. Before the Constitution, there was a constitution written on the mind. For this reason, the founders did not appeal to English common law, as some would have wished them to do. Jefferson understood that even without English common law, even without the Magna Carta or the Glorious Revolution, their cause would still be just; the universe would still have the same moral structure and natural law because it would have the same architect and the same lawgiver.

This understanding carries profound implications for modern political thought, especially in jurisprudence. We have come to see law as simply that which guarantees the greatest good for the greatest number; this utilitarianism would have been alien to the founders. We have also come to see government as the institution that preserves our rights. This is, of course, exactly what the founders intended, yet today, some carry it a step further; they reason, wrongly, that if government preserved the rights, then government gave the rights in the first place. Yet if government gave, government could take away. However, if they originate in nature and nature’s God, then government is subject to a higher tribunal, and the Supreme Court is not really the Supreme Court.

Jefferson’s ideas did not simply come from looking up at the sky and racking his own brain, using his own reason to determine that certain rights existed and were being usurped by Parliament and the King. He had come from a rich philosophical and theological tradition that dated back from Augustine and Aquinas, down through Algernon Sidney and John Locke. This was the more political side of philosophy. With natural law come natural rights. Unlike contemporary monarchical systems, which saw the monarch as the divinely appointed leader, the founders saw such a concept as flawed. They saw government as a servant of the people, and the people as servants of God. “But where, says some, is the King of America?” wrote Thomas Paine. “I’ll tell you, Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain.”

The author dives into the theological background of the Declaration. The fact that the first entity mentioned in the Declaration is not the King of Britain, but the King of Heaven, at least signifies that these were writers who believed in a divine Providence. “As in its opening, the Declaration here appeals to a standard above and beyond human events to vindicate its cause. And the appeal, as before, is not to some overarching sense of history or to ‘the opinions of mankind.’ But it is also not to ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,’ which man knows through reason. This appeal of the Declaration is to an omniscient God who not only knows all men but also knows the intentions of each man’s heart. While they declared their cause to the opinions of mankind, in the end the Continental Congress seeks a ruling from a higher court.” Spalding goes further, arguing that they had a specifically Christian understanding both of the role of government and of the role of man in relation to government. Writes Spalding: “Only a truly benevolent King, one who is divine and not subject to the passions of man, could be an absolute sovereign. And since governments are instituted among men and not angels, and no individual on this earth has the divine wisdom and authority to rule absolutely, the powers of government must be limited, divided, and checked to ensure the rule of law rather than the arbitrary reign of worldly men.” The Declaration’s signers were not all orthodox Christians; certainly the author, Jefferson, had some unorthodox beliefs, but they were all, down to the last man, versed in the basic presuppositions of Christianity that were predominant in the late eighteenth century, and it was these presuppositions that were basic in the writing, drafting, and approval of this document.

Inextricably linked to a Christian understanding of God is a Christian understanding of man, which the signers also had. These were Protestants, with the exception of Charles Carroll, but they were Protestants familiar and comfortable with the natural law beliefs and writings of Richard Hooker. Man was a rational animal, capable of understanding right and wrong, if not of actually choosing right and eschewing wrong. “It is by his reason, not by allowing the passions to rule or blindly following conventional mores, that man distinguishes between reality and myth, good and evil, the just and the unjust. Nature, as a structure of reality that is unchanging and permanent, and that can be accessed by reason, is the standard of right in making these distinctions. And as man seeks relationships with others to fulfill that nature, man is a political animal, as Aristotle famously observes, men come to live in communities based on agreed purposes and a common understanding of justice.” The author then makes an even more stunning, but likely accurate, claim: “This argument is the basis of Western thought about man and politics.”

Of course, reason is not the only reason. There is a place for faith; in fact, faith is necessary in a Christian society, though not necessarily in the way modern secular critics often imagine. Spalding’s discussion of human nature is especially enlightening in this regard; society today seems to oscillate between two extremes: the utopianism of Marx, Rousseau, and the Romantics, which assumes that human beings are fundamentally good and that social problems can be solved through proper institutions, and, on the other hand, sheer cynicism, such as that found in Thomas Hobbes, which sees humans as utterly depraved, needing a government to compel them to some form of social stability. Instead, Spalding writes, the founders had a diametrically opposed conception of man: “This is not Thomas Hobbes’s brutish world of man against man, violently seeking to avoid death, or of petty man constantly dominated by narrow self-interests and lowly desires. This is a sacred conception of man, altogether human yet willing to sacrifice and suffer for the highest of ends.”

Spalding demonstrates that the Founders understood liberty not as the freedom to do whatever one wishes, but as the freedom to do what one ought. Rights existed alongside duties; freedom existed alongside virtue. The American experiment depended not merely upon constitutional structures, but upon the character of the citizenry itself. People incapable of self-government could not remain free for long. A people who do not know what they love will not love it for long. Failing to understand where we came from will result in a failure to go where we ought.

Review Written by Caleb A. Gerber

June 3rd, 2026

Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church by N. T. Wright

Wright's Surprised by Hope is one of the most clarifying and theologically bracing books a Christian can read on the subjects of resurrection, eschatology, and the Christian life. Wright, the Bishop of Durham turned prolific New Testament scholar, dismantles centuries of accumulated Platonic distortion and replaces it with a robustly biblical vision. Frankly, it is more surprising and more exciting than the thin gruel of “going to heaven when you die” that passes for Christian hope in most pews.

The heart of the book is a recovery of what Wright calls “life after life after death.” The intermediate state of the soul with God between death and resurrection is real, but it is emphatically not the destination. The destination is bodily resurrection into the new creation, the renewal and transformation of the present cosmos, not its abandonment. Wright marshals the New Testament with characteristic precision: Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, the resurrection appearances in the Gospels, the “new heavens and new earth” language of Revelation and Isaiah—all of it points to a God who redeems and transforms rather than discards.

This is positive eschatology in the truest sense. Creation is not a holding pen for souls waiting to escape; it is the theater of God’s redemptive purposes, groaning toward glorification. The resurrection of Jesus is not a proof-of-afterlife miracle standing alone; it is the first installment of the new creation breaking into the old. Christian hope, then, is not evacuation; it is the anticipation of a world made right.

This eschatological reframe has direct ethical consequences, and Wright presses them hard. If God is going to renew creation rather than incinerate it, then what Christians do in and with the physical world now genuinely matters. Work, art, justice, care for the poor, beauty—these are not distractions from the “real” spiritual business of soul-saving. They are acts of anticipation, small foretastes of the coming kingdom, contributions to what God will ultimately complete.

Wright is careful not to collapse into a social gospel; he insists the resurrection is the foundation, not political activism. But the directional thrust is clear and salutary: a Christianity that ignores the body, scorns creation, and retreats from culture has been infected by Gnosticism, not formed by the New Testament. The Christian vocation is to be “resurrection people” who live in the present order as though the future has already broken in because, in Christ, it has.

Wright's treatment of the sacraments flows naturally from his broader argument. Baptism and the Eucharist are not merely memorial ceremonies or spiritual hygiene; they are enacted declarations of the new creation. Baptism signifies dying and rising with Christ, a bodily, material act that marks the participant as belonging to the age to come. The Lord’s Supper is the place where the church meets the risen Lord in the breaking of bread, a meal that is simultaneously backward-looking (to the cross), present-tense (communion with the risen Christ), and forward-looking (the marriage supper of the Lamb).

Wright resists both bare memorialism and a rigid scholastic transubstantiation, landing in a sacramental realism that trusts the physical elements to bear genuine spiritual weight without requiring a particular philosophical mechanism to explain how. His approach is characteristically Anglican in the best sense: grounded, liturgically serious, open-handed on metaphysics, and deeply christological.

Surprised by Hope is, at its core, an argument that Christians have been telling themselves a diminished story. Wright’s corrective is not innovation but excavation, digging back to the first century to recover what the apostles actually meant when they said “Jesus is risen.” The result is a vision of hope that is larger, earthier, and more demanding than anything that fits on a bumper sticker.

Review Written by Gabriel Herrmann

March 15th, 2026

The Shepherd: Experiencing Psalm 23 by James Collins

Why is it that today’s shepherds know little about sheep?

In this book, pastor and author James Collins takes our contemporary interpretations of Psalm 23 and sweeps them into the dustbin, then carefully crafts a new, and I would argue more radical, approach to how we should truly approach such a significant biblical passage.

Setting it in its context within the book of the Psalms, Collins reminds us that it is placed between two Messianic psalms. Certainly, David did not know who he was writing of when he spoke of the Shepherd, for it was indeed the Lord—but it was a specific Lord: the Lord Jesus, who had not yet been revealed in full when David wrote the now-famous words.

Moving beyond mere platitudes, Collins’ genius lies in his ability to combine deep theological lessons with Southern wit and personal experiences, without getting the reader lost either in the theological definitions of so many other works on theological matters or in making light of the things of God. In reality, when you read this book, a theological treatise is exactly what you are reading, yet you may well deny it, for it feels more like you are reading the reminiscences of a Southern preacher—which, in a way, you are.

Not only does Collins include everyday experiences and stories that impart rich practical meaning, but he also includes many symbolic details of which Christians today are woefully ignorant. It is easy to conclude, from reading this, that the author did massive research into the symbology behind the Lord as a shepherd, and he writes in this book of the many parallels between the needs of sheep and the tasks of the shepherd, in contrast to the needs of humans as sheep who need a master, and the tasks performed by the Shepherd and Master. Remarkably, the symbolism is neither stretched nor overdone, and the images portrayed do not go further than an explicitly biblical and orthodox interpretation.

That said, at times the book can feel overly simplified. This is by no means a fatal flaw, nor even an unexpected one given Collins’ pastoral aim, but it does raise the question of whether clarity has occasionally been purchased at the expense of depth. While the avoidance of dense theological terminology makes the work accessible, there are moments when the reader may wish for a more rigorous engagement with the underlying doctrinal issues that the text inevitably invites. Thus, my recommendation is simple: if you wish to move beyond the platitudes of normality, then this is the ideal book. If you wish to move into the profundity of theology, then this is not it. The purpose of this book is not to educate the educated, but, as I perceive it, to call the uneducated to a fuller and more accurate understanding of the truth claims of Christianity.

Collins does not offer a theological tower, but he reminds us of the base upon which such a tower must inevitably be built. It is a call for each of us to remember that only when we recognize that we are sheep can we recognize who our Shepherd is.

Review Written by C. A. Gerber

March 12th, 2026

Masculine Christianity by Zachary M. Garris

There is a crisis in the Western church, and Zachary M. Garris is not interested in beating around the bush. In Masculine Christianity, Garris makes the case that the church's slow accommodation to feminist ideology has not been a neutral cultural adjustment; it has been a theological surrender, one with consequences that ripple outward from the pulpit into the home and society at large. It is a bold argument, and one that deserves to be taken seriously.

Garris’s central contention is straightforward: God has not left men and women without direction. Scripture speaks clearly about the distinct roles, responsibilities, and authorities given to each sex, and the church’s drift away from these teachings has not made it more loving or more relevant; it has made it weaker. Masculine Christianity is, at its core, a call to recover what was never supposed to be lost.

What makes this book worth reading is that Garris does not treat masculinity as a cultural preference or a personality type. He roots it in theology. The authority a husband exercises in his home, the leadership a man provides in his church, and the responsibility he bears in society—these are not artifacts of a bygone era to be quietly retired. They are divinely ordained structures, and abandoning them has costs. Garris is right to press this point, and he does so with clarity and conviction rather than apology.

The book is also refreshingly honest about the scope of the problem. This is not merely a matter of a few liberal congregations going astray. Garris identifies the embrace of feminist assumptions as widespread across evangelical and even ostensibly conservative church culture. The softening of male headship, the sidelining of male leadership, and the reframing of biblical gender roles as culturally conditioned rather than scripturally grounded—these trends have touched nearly every corner of the Western church. The diagnosis feels accurate, and that accuracy is itself valuable. You cannot address a problem you are unwilling to name.

On the positive side of the ledger, Garris is equally clear. The alternative to a feminized church is not a caricature of domineering men barking orders; it is men who take their God-given responsibilities seriously—men who lead their families with love and intentionality, men who step into their churches not as passive attendees but as engaged shepherds and servants, and men who understand that authority and sacrifice are not opposites but are bound together in the biblical vision of manhood.

The principles he articulates—the complementarity of the sexes, the headship of the husband, the importance of male leadership in the church, and the social consequences of getting gender wrong—are not novelties. They are historic Christian beliefs, confessed and practiced across centuries and traditions, before the present moment of confusion set in. Garris’s project is essentially restorative, and there is something deeply sensible about that. The answer to theological drift is not innovation; it is return.

Readers looking for a thorough academic treatment of every relevant passage or a deep engagement with opposing scholarship will want to supplement this volume with additional resources. But that is not entirely what Garris is after. Masculine Christianity functions more as a clarion call than an exhaustive systematic treatment, and on those terms it succeeds. It is direct, blunt, and readable, and it arrives at a moment when directness is badly needed.

The church does not need another round of accommodation. It does not need to find more comfortable language for timeless truths or more palatable framings for unpopular doctrines. What it needs is what Garris is calling for: the willingness to take Scripture at its word, to trust that God’s design for men and women is not a liability but a gift, and to build accordingly. Masculine Christianity makes that case with urgency and conviction.

For readers who sense that something has gone wrong in how the modern church talks about men, women, and gender—and who suspect the answer lies not in further revision but in faithful recovery—this book is well worth your time.

Review Written by Gabriel Herrmann

March 30th, 2026

Mere Natural Law by Hadley Arkes

A critique of modern conservative jurisprudence from a legal scholar and natural law expert. Hadley Arkes makes the argument that conservatives have been failing not because they don't have good arguments to make, but because they aren't making them. We have borrowed turf from our enemies, using their legal positivism as a defense of life and constitutional liberty instead of rejecting it as wholesale nihilism in the realm of jurisprudence. It isn't working, Arkes makes clear. The solution, he argues, is not to return to the moral ambiguity of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, but to go back still further, to the Founders of our nation, who recognized that even without a Constitution, without a Bill of Rights, without a Declaration of Independence, our rights would still exist, and would still be necessarily defensible, because, ultimately, they are founded on the unchanging law of righteousness, as President Calvin Coolidge wrote.

We must stop our treatment of moral rights as if it were a question of judicial propriety. Courts cannot avoid making moral judgements; the question is not to judge or to judge not, but rather to judge rightly, or to judge wrongly; and what we base our judgements on. What the court bases its judgements on cannot be only the law of a certain state or the letter of the Constitution; rather, Arkes understands the spirit of the laws. It was the reason for which the Constitution was drafted; the reason why the colonists of our nation broke with the British Empire. It was the reason that the founders of our nation could understand the same principles as we today can and do, yet they, of course, did not have the Constitution to guide them; they had only their souls, their inner conscience, the realization that all laws come from The Law.

Arkes makes several further points, arguing strongly against a “States' rights” understanding of abortion, and rather as a fundamentally moral issue. He also spends several chapters of this book contrasting the segregation of the twentieth century with the abortion of the twenty-first, and the Supreme Court’s correct decision but with flawed reasoning on both issues. Some of the points which he makes may seem controversial to the more libertarian-minded reader; he does not hesitate to argue that the state should punish some forms of what he terms “hate speech”—including, interestingly, the use of profanity in a public setting. While this may seem polemic, Arkes defends his thesis well, and the facts and data he uses are substantive. 

Ultimately, this book is one that those interested in jurisprudence and law should read with open eyes, open ears, and open hearts; we may reject some of the conclusions he arrives at, but as an intellectually rigorous work, with flawless logic, the ultimate conclusion, the end destination at which all the strings tie together, is a conclusion that is impossible to dismiss.

Review Written by C. A. Gerber

March 7th, 2026

Faithful Reason by Andrew T. Walker

Faithful Reason is one of the greatest books I have read in the last couple of years. Andrew Walker does a superb job of working through the philosophical and theological implications of a massive topic. In precise, though at times technical, terms, Walker illuminates the necessity of engaging with and using natural law as a two-edged sword to both defend the Christian faith and challenge the prevailing atheistic narrative of legal positivism. Never shying away from his principled evangelical beliefs, Walker takes Thomism back from the Catholics and shows how we, evangelicals of the twenty-first century, not only can but must use natural law ethics for our good and God’s glory.

Walker does not stand alone; rather, he stands, as we all do, upon the shoulders of giants. He makes this very clear through his use of quotations and arguments from respected theologians and political scientists from all ages. From Cicero to Locke, Augustine to Calvin, Walker argues clearly and succinctly that to engage the modern arena, we must return to the first principles upon which all logical conversation, all moral frameworks, and all laws and regulations must, in essence, be based. The common grace given to all individuals, regardless of time, religion, or geographical location, gives evidence of the goodness of our Creator, “so that they are without excuse.” Everyone instinctively feels horror and hatred when contemplating an image of the Auschwitz concentration camp; yet when seeing a picture of Mother Teresa, a very different feeling surges through our veins. This is the knowledge of good and evil by which we will all one day be judged. We cannot say that we did not know, and Walker makes this as clear as daylight in this masterful presentation of natural law ethics from a distinctly Protestant perspective.

A must-read for all evangelicals seeking to engage in thoughtful, helpful conversation with our culture for the preservation of ordered liberty.

Review written by C. A. Gerber

February 27th, 2028

The Desecration of Man by Carl R. Trueman

The Hour of the Madman has arrived.

Carl Trueman once again delivers a stunning, accurate portrayal of the problems facing modern humanity. “We have killed God,” declared Nietzsche, yet we still want to be subject to His laws. No, he urges, we have unbound the earth from the sun, and we must face the consequences of our actions. If we have killed God, we must become gods ourselves. The limits, ends, and obligations given to us by this Higher Being are no longer applicable, but the only way to prove this is to desecrate Him. We must desecrate the holy, trample underfoot the limits, create our own ends, and leave unfulfilled all the obligations that have bound us to each other and to a higher purpose. Only then can we create our own sense of purpose, our own ends, limits, and obligations.

This is such an accurate portrayal of the modern age. Why is it that there has been such a viciously anti-Christian surge in recent years? Why has that which was held sacred for generations now become commonplace, even vulgar? Why does modern culture deny the basic facts of reality when they are in plain black-and-white letters, staring it in the face?

Yet when we do this, when we defy the sacred and desecrate God, Trueman argues, the end result is very simple: we desecrate ourselves as well. The limits we seek to triumph over are still limiting us. Death is an unavoidable conclusion, a fact of life; biological sex is binding, however much modern culture seeks to claim otherwise. And the cost of denying this is great. We become like the madman; we end up insane, just as Nietzsche did. We reach the bottom, the pit of nihilistic despair.

By desecrating the sacred, we have desecrated ourselves, and the only answer is once more to sanctify the God of our fathers. By doing so, we will find the answer to the question of the ages, the anthropological question: what is man?

The choice is simple. Trueman makes it clear that there is no third route, no alternative. Many have tried, but all have failed. We must either embrace the reality of the Creator of the universe, along with His teleology, or we must go the way of Nietzsche. If we deny the former, we necessarily choose the latter, and in doing so, the madman becomes the only man among us with any sanity. 

Review Written by C. A. Gerber

February 27th, 2026