Jason Daye 
Welcome to FrontStage BackStage. This week we have a hand-picked highlight that we believe you will find valuable. If you do, we invite you to listen to the full conversation. You can find the link to the complete episode in the description. As always, please like, comment, subscribe, and share, so we can continue to bring you meaningful ministry content, helping you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you flourish in both life and leadership. Are you ready? Let's go. As we look at kind of the landscape of politics here recently, and we have this, as you said, this great division. One of the things that you share in your book is this idea that being an American, at least in part, means that we celebrate the historical good deeds, you know, of our past. They are a part of our shared story, and we give ourselves to engaging in more good deeds in the future, while at the same time, and this is kind of the tension at the same time we are acknowledging and even lamenting our past misdeeds and committing ourselves to working for justice in the future. Now, Paul, can you talk to us a bit about the importance of this actual tension, because we see a lot of people gravitating to either, you know, celebrating good deeds and kind of dismissing problems, dismissing issues, or vice versa. They see everything as a problem and kind of want to erase history altogether, and don't even look at the good that has come from America in the past. So, talk to us a little bit about this tension.

Paul D. Miller 
So, the first thing I'd say there is, I think, as a Christian, I think patriotism is a virtue. I think it's a good thing. I think it's the virtue of gratitude. I think we should be grateful for our homes, for where we come from, for the things that have shaped who we are. C.S. Lewis has this thing in the four loves about how it's, it's a normal and good affection to be kind of loyal to where you came from, to the familiar sights and sounds and smells of home, and I think that's true, and if you don't love where you came from, I think it's sort of the sin of ingratitude, of being an ingrate and taking for granted the things that have helped you be who you are, and so Christians should be grateful. And in America, we got a lot to be grateful for, despite our problems. I think it's still the greatest country in the world. I've studied the world, I teach international affairs, I've traveled, and I've, you know, served in Afghanistan. I've seen what some of the rest of the world is like, and I tell you, we Americans, we really do have it pretty good, and so there's a lot to be grateful for. If, however, our patriotism is blind tribal loyalty, we can miss the things that our country doesn't get so good. I think a true patriot sees our country with clear eyes, we see the truth about our country, and we want our country to be better than it is. Seeing our country with true eyes means we recognize a pretty long and substantial record of national sins and wrongdoings in the past, and that should lead us to contrition, sorrow, lamentation, and a passionate desire to see justice done, and to see us do better in the future, and so we shouldn't be only triumphalist, celebrating everything we've got right, we shouldn't be only full of lamentation and cynicism about America either, I think it's both, and.

Jason Daye 
Yeah, and so talk just a little bit about that, that, that attitude, that posture, and how that relates to some of the things that we've seen bubbling up through Christian nationalism, because one of the challenges, and again, you share this in your book, is that when it comes to, as you said, justice, liberty, human rights, stable government, freedoms, whatever it might be, America really comes out on top. Historically, we have so much to be proud of, but there is this danger to that it can become idolatrous, right? We can love it so much that it displaces really what Jesus has called us to. So, Paul, how do you see that at work in what we see in Christian nationalism?

Paul D. Miller 
Well, maybe to answer that question, I should give you my understanding of what Christian nationalism is. Having just defended patriotism, I think it's good for us to love our countries. I should say Christian nationalism isn't that, it's different than this patriotism. I think some people maybe are confused because when they say nationalist, they think that just means patriotism. And for those listeners, I want to clarify that nationalism is really an argument about how you define your country. If I ask you, what does it mean to be an American as a patriot, I'll answer something about just loving my country as it is and loving the Constitution, the Declarator. What it stands for, and our history, and how we've overcome and done better, but a nationalist tends to answer by talking about American culture or heritage, specifically our Christian or Judeo-Christian heritage, and that's the thing that they love, and they insist on defining our country by those terms and not other terms. Christian nationalism is sometimes an attitude, an attitude of that we Christians ought to be kind of the first citizens, the first among equals in the public square, because, because they say, or they imply we kind of invented America, and now we have to share it, and we kind of deserve pride of place, where the first citizens, the guardians, the architects of the American experiment. There's almost an attitude, sometimes, of a kind of a Christian tribal chauvinism that we, again, we deserve recognition in the public square. I think that's how Christian nationalism kind of manifests sometimes in our culture, which is again very different from patriotism. I can love my country without falling into the trap of all this stuff, and I just want to caution listeners that that kind of attitude, I'm not sure it's loving towards our neighbors. Many of our neighbors are not Christians. Many of our neighbors think of America differently. If you insist on recognition of Christian supremacy in the public square. Tell me how that's loving for our neighbors. I think it's incumbent upon us to love our neighbors politically by working for justice, which is a different thing than working for Christian predominance.

Jason Daye 
Yeah, so talk just a little bit about the idea, because of justice in regard to kind of a biblical ethic, and in the way of Jesus, because some people kind of will pull those together and say, hey, if I'm fighting for justice, then naturally I am fighting for the way of Jesus, and therefore I am pushing forward into kind of idea of a Christian nation.

Paul D. Miller 
Yeah, it's a very fine line to draw, but I suppose I should maybe ask a few challenging questions. Do we believe that non-Christians are incapable of justice? I hope people would join me in answering no, that's not what we believe. We believe other people can reach towards rough approximations of justice, and by the way, our approximation is also fallen and flawed in this world, and we will always in this world be joined in community with Christians and non-Christians alike. Augustine called it the city of man, and within the city of man, when you have a mixture of Christians and non-Christians. We have to work the best we can for a rough kind of earthly order and justice. We have to find areas of agreement, areas of overlapping agreement. Again, to think of Augustine, earlier church fathers talked about the so-called virtuous pagans, the Romans, the Greeks, whom they admired. They admired the Romans and Greeks for achieving some degree of peace and order, and even a rough kind of justice without Christ, without Christianity. They didn't know Christianity. So, I think we today can recognize that our non-Christian friends and neighbors and fellow countrymen, we can work with them, we can find areas of agreement and overlap, if you want to, you know, use a theological label for it. We can appeal to natural law, the idea that God has inscribed a kind of moral order to the universe that we actually can understand, even without the Bible. And so we can appeal to it and say to our non-Christian neighbors, hey, look, here's this standard of justice that you and I can agree on. I'm a Christian, so I believe it because I'm a Christian, but you don't have to be a Christian and agree with me on that. We can together work for order, justice, and peace. I think that's the attitude we should have as we enter the public square with non-Christians.

Jason Daye 
Yeah, that's really helpful. Paul, one of the things that you talk about and write about is this idea of Christian culture sort of swallowing up, you know, kind of true authentic Christian faith, and we see that taking place in the US. This so help us kind of think through how we're looking at this idea of Christian culture versus our Christian faith, because again people begin to draw those two things together and think they're the same thing, so help us kind of process through that a bit, if he could.

Paul D. Miller 
So that phrase I want to give due credit was Roger Williams, the 17th-century Puritan who became a Baptist. He wrote that Christian culture swallows up Christianity, and what he's getting at there is weaken some. Times confuse cultural Christianity for the real thing, the outward, external behavioral manifestations. Christendom, right before the modern age, there was an aspiration to build a united Europe around a single vision of Christian society, they called it Christendom. There's a very close alliance between church and state under Christendom, and I think my argument is that Christendom is not the point of Christianity. Right, Jesus didn't come in order for us to build a society that feigned outward obedience to Christian cultural norms, he came to inaugurate his kingdom, which he will consummate and will make real when he returns. We're not the ones who build his kingdom. We might, insofar as we act as citizens of his kingdom today, be foreshadowing's or foretastes of it, and that's a good thing, but Jesus's kingdom doesn't need our help, and it will come about with or without us. That means that our agenda in the public square isn't building Christian society, it is building peace and justice. Is there do these things overlap? Is there a close connection between them? Can it be confusing to understand where the one stops and the other starts? Yeah, I understand that. You know, we know from the book of Proverbs, what does it say? Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. So we do want to see righteousness done. We want to see justice done, but we also know that Jesus said, 'My kingdom is not of this world. We also know that Jesus gave very different and separate jurisdictional authorities to church and to state, and so when we use the org of the state, when we engage politically, we're not doing it in order to coerce our faith, we're not doing it in order to build symbolic recognition of our predominance in the public square, that's just not our agenda. It just doesn't, that doesn't matter that much. What matters is justice. What matters is working for the flourishing of all Christian and non-Christian alike.

Jason Daye
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