Robert Joustra on Christian Nationalism, Global Politics, and Just War

What should Christians do when global politics becomes personal, chaotic, and violent? 

Dr. Robert J. Joustra, Professor of Politics and Spoelhof Chair at Calvin University and author of Christ and Covenant in Global Politics, joins Faithful Politics to ask what Christian theology can actually contribute to international relations. Joustra argues that Christians have often thought carefully about domestic politics, but far less about diplomacy, war, trade, climate, Israel, China, Iran, and the moral responsibilities nations have to each other.

Drawing on John Calvin, Augustine’s idea of rightly ordered loves, covenantal pluralism, and the just war tradition, he explains why “Christ is King” should limit state power rather than sanctify it. The conversation moves from America’s 250th anniversary and Christian nationalism to Israel, Iran, World War II, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the moral purpose of force. At its core, this is a conversation about whether Christian politics can be serious enough to pursue justice without turning nations into idols.

Book Mentioned
Christ and Covenant in Global Politics: A Christian Introduction to International Relations by Robert J. Joustra
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/christ-and-covenant-in-global-politics-a-christian-introduction-to-international-relations-robert-j-joustra/fe15a081a65ad89d
Relevant Links & Resources
Christ and Covenant in Global Politics - IVP Academic
URL: https://www.ivpress.com/christ-and-covenant-in-global-politics

Guest Bio
Dr. Robert J. Joustra is Professor of Politics and Spoelhof Chair at Calvin University. He is a political scientist whose work focuses on international relations, public theology, religious freedom, pluralism, and the moral responsibilities of political communities. He is the author of Christ and Covenant in Global Politics: A Christian Introduction to International Relations, a book that brings Christian ethics into questions of diplomacy, war, political economy, climate, global justice, and covenantal pluralism. He has also authored and edited other books and serves as Senior Editor with The Review of Faith & International Affairs.

Support Sarah Stankorb’s work and preorder Damned If She Does: Why Women Quit Church and What It Means for the Future of Religion, Releases September 15, 2026.  Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9798889837091

Website: https://www.sarahstankorb.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So, so I actually think, I mean, one of the things that it would really help evangelical Christians is an actual retrieval of the just war tradition, right? Because I feel like we're just kind of throwing around, we're saying, well, the United States of America, of course, it's God blessed, and you know, it's it's my community and I love it, and I'm patriotic. Of course, you shouldn't. It's nothing wrong with some of those things in proportion, right? But when they include or they start to color in a way, are it gives us sort of a hard time seeing, well, hold on, is this what are our motivations for war? What are we trying to achieve here? Are they, you know, the the the way that you measure a just war is it must be aimed at correcting a standing injustice, and the application of lethal force must be preferable to the continuance of that injustice.

SPEAKER_03 0:42

Well, hey there, guys. Welcome to another episode of the Faithful Politics Podcast. I am your faithful host, Josh Bertram. Super excited to be here with you. Of course, we have our political host, Will Wright. It's good to see you, Will.

SPEAKER_02 0:54

It's good to be seen.

SPEAKER_03 0:56

It always is good to be seen. And today we're super excited to have Dr. Robert De Jay. De Jay Justra. Or Joustra. You just told me, and now I screwed it up. He's a professor, he's a professor of politics, and the Spohlhoff chair at Calvin University. He's a political scientist and author specializing in the intersection of international relations and public theology, the thing everyone grows up wanting to do. And his groundbreaking book, Christ and Covenant in Global Politics, Jostra systematically evaluates mainstream international relations and their traditions, including realism, liberalism, Marxism, and constructivism. And he's looking at them through the critical lens of Christian scripture and reform theology. We're super excited to have him on to talk about this and figure out hey, why we shouldn't love Christian nationalism and why we should go towards something like covenantal pluralism. Come on, somebody. That old crunch, Robert. It's good to have you on the program. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Yeah, Josh. Well, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to talk about the book with you guys.

SPEAKER_03 2:02

Yeah, I gotta ask, you know, I kind of made a joke that it's everyone's dream to grow up and study at the at the intersection of systematic theology and um international relations. So, but all jokes aside, super important. We're in an extremely uh, it seems hostile time, if it seems chaotic time. It seems like we're in a time where international relations are kind of up in the air. What's going to happen? Things NATO that's been around since World War II is in threat, and we're trying, Trump's saying, I'm not gonna defend Taiwan if they attack Taiwan, all sorts of crazy stuff. International relations, you know, that boring stuff of international relations. So talk to us. Why did you get into this? And why do you think that theology has anything to do with international relations?

SPEAKER_01 2:52

Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for having me. I mean, the old joke I sometimes tell my students, especially today, is you know, you might not be interested in international relations, but international relations is interested in you. And we're all sort of feeling that. I think, you know, every time we drive past uh a gas pump at this point, even at your, I have to say, somewhat more compressed prices than we have here where I am in Canada. And one of the things I found actually as I was a student of politics, so my first semester of college was on September of 2001. So as you can imagine, I had a very focusing event for thinking about the world of international relations, you know. This was sort of, you know, a moment in time where I think, you know, in maybe in the North Atlantic world, I think here it was in Canada, but in America especially, thought that a lot of this stuff was going to recur, but boy did it, and boy did it end up being a very important thing. And one of the things that I found is that Christians in the English world had spent a lot of time thinking about justice and politics as they should. Scripture is thick with the stuff, but really it had been focused primarily in domestic politics, right? So, how do we think about voting at the ballot box? How do we think about poverty initiatives? How do we argue about great big moral questions, you know, but most of which are sort of taking place at the domestic sphere? Very few Christians, if any, had done a lot of systematic work on international relations, had thought about what are the demands, how do we follow Jesus, as it were, not only at home politically, but how do we imagine and expand that political discipleship to be abroad, to be in the world of global politics. That was my first, my first inference was, you know, why aren't there more people sort of talking about this? It seems sort of urgent, it seems sort of needed, it seems like a discipleship gap in terms of sort of bridging the world of Torah and scripture with the present day and how to live. And some of this had been done, especially, I might add, after the Second World War in the North Atlantic world. But it had kind of fallen into atrophy, you know, a lot of people didn't know the names or the voices or the ideas anymore. And so part of the project is really just a sort of project of retrieval to say, hey, actually, some people have thought about this, and here's how we might apply it in admittedly different circumstances in, you know, 2026 than you know, when some of this stuff was sort of originally being sort of thought out in the after the Second World War. My but my second answer to that question is a bit more autobiographical. You know, my dad was born under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands in 1943. And he was one of these sort of stereotypical little Dutch boys who got his first taste of chocolate from the Canadian Army, because it was the Canadians who landed on Juneau Beach and went north as part of Operation Market Garden to liberate the Netherlands. His vill his village free uh in Nyland was liberated on April 17th, just before victory in Europe in May. And and, you know, so I I grew up in Canada, and that was not an accident. You know, the Netherlands, much of continental Europe was a ruin. I mean, it was a catastrophe. I mean, not just in Germany, of course, but all throughout Western Europe on the brink of starvation. And many people left because they had to. And my parents immigrated, you know, as in 1959, and then eventually they came back permanently in the early 60s. As part of that, I went to the tulip festival every year on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Those tulips were still donated by the Dutch national government in recognition of Canadian, of the Canadian Armed Forces. Every Christmas, Dutch school children go and clean the graves of the Canadian soldiers who gave their lives for the Liberation Day of the Netherlands. So, by the way, in my house, when you say Liberation Day, we think of something very specific, and it doesn't have anything to do with tariffs. And uh, and so I knew, you know, from the cradle that there is this work that countries and states do for each other out of love, you know, that even in the going to war, even in the intervention, you know, in Europe and in the Pacific in that war, there was an act somehow, there was a way of thinking about what does it mean to follow Jesus? And we experienced that justice, we experienced that mercy at the hand of the Canadian Armed Forces and of the Allies in my family in the 1940s, and then were welcomed into a new home here in Canada very warmly, so that, you know, so that my dad's last name and my last name and my son's last name all carry with them Canadian passports, an imprint of that of that work of mercy. And so I wanted to think about that because I thought, you know, what does it look like? What do we owe each other? And what has been the sort of good work that has come out of the justice that was done? What of that do we call biblical? What of it do we do we not? How do we draw those lines? How do we think about that? And how when it's not just war, but when it's treaties, when it's trade, when it's climate, you know, when it's tariffs, you know, what does it mean to love our neighbor? You know, and I grew up, I think, with a very thick and rich sense of what it meant for people a world away who did not know my dad's name and did not who know who we would be, who showed us deep compassion and deep love. And I wondered, you know, what would it look like for us to recover some of that moral vision? So that's sort of the autobiographical bit about why do I think a book like this is still worth writing today? Um, because I think that work and that act, it still merits witness, and I think it still merits a kind of path that we also still can follow in our time.

SPEAKER_02 8:08

You know, I'm I'm curious about how how Christians view global events kind of through the through the lens of how it affects Israel. Because I mean, I I'm uh I've been a Christian for a while, but I wasn't I wasn't born in the Christian church. Like I came to the faith in 2008. So so my affinity or my connection to Israel outside of what the Bible says uh isn't nearly as strong as somebody that you know may have grown up in a more traditional conservative, like religious right upbringing or something. So so whenever I think of like how Christians think about global events, like the first thing I always think about is like, well, what do they think about Israel? Because you hear them talk about Israel a lot. You hear them hear us talk about Israel a lot, but you don't hear them talk about Ukraine, or you don't hear them talk about Mexico, or you don't you hear them talk about you know other countries that may be suffering if you know equally, if not more, kind of the the way that they talk about Israel. I'd love for you just to kind of just help help us understand, you know, how Christians think about global affairs, you know, and and Israel, and they seem to be sort of like not the same, or they're not thought about in the same kind of like way.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Yeah. I I I I may share a little bit of that with you because even though I think I do I did grow up pretty religious and pretty conservative, I didn't grow up American. And I I have to say some of those accents really do matter. I remember I did a book with a friend of mine about 10 years ago in the apocalypse, and we did a lot of Christian radio, and they kept on asking me about Israel. And eventually I came up with a line. I said, Well, I have good news about that. I said, one, I'm a Calvinist, and two, I'm a Canadian. And so I said, So as a Canadian, American foreign policy in Israel isn't actually any of my business. That's your business. So best of luck, God go with you. And I said, Secondly, as a Calvinist, God will use the nations how he will. And it is ours to give grateful witness, you know, to his mercy. And I didn't like those answers very much. But no, I I mean, I think you're right. I hear this too. I I didn't quite tune in in the same way, probably growing up here in Canada. I mean, we heard about Israel, but even in the United States, of course, as you know, the history of the American attachment to the to the state of Israel, um, it's not immediate, right? It's actually not until later in the Cold War, actually, you know, more or less after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, that the American administrations start to think, oh, okay, an attachment to Israel in terms of, you know, security, and a lot of that is actually driven less through, you know, what we might think about as kind of, you know, evangelical kind of theology, and actually more just about Cold War politics, right? It's like, well, you know, these guys are on the Soviet side of this equation, and you know, the Israelis seem to be making a bit of a go at the capitalist democracy thing, which by the way was also not a foregone conclusion. Some of the earlier strains of Zionism were much more socialistic in their orientation. And so this kind of feels like the right, the right balance. So, you know, I would I I get asked this question by students all the time. They say, well, what's the eschatological lens, you know, that we should be thinking about Israel in terms of foreign policy? They say, No, you've grabbed the wrong branch of Christian ethics, right? For me, the branch to grab the branch to or the wrong branch of Christian theology, the branch to grab is ethics. You know, and in that branch, then we're thinking about relationships with other states in the world in terms of who they are, in terms of what they represent, in terms of what they believe. And on this, I genuinely do believe that there is an opportunity for comedy, for coordination, for diplomacy with the people of Israel and with the state of Israel. But, you know, it's not like some kind of odd, blank eschatological check. You know, so I've always thought about the Israeli state, frankly, the same way I think about kind of the French state, you know, um, you know, or or the Italians, you know, which is to say, okay, these are people with whom we share a history. There are many ideas, you know, in the basic law of Israel and the constitutions of Canada and the United States of America that make a lot of sense. We could understand why we might speak the same language on some things, but we are not somehow uncritical of any of these governments or states. And we don't imagine that, you know, that there is this kind of, you know, moral blank check being written along the way. And so, you know, I suppose I'm I'm sometimes interested in the way I hear some of these eschatological debates unfold. But for me, I mean, particularly as a Calvinist with particular views on these things, I'm much more interested in the ethics side of that debate. And on that, well, then I think it's a debate like all of global politics, actually, in the way that we think about how we should and do relate diplomatically in terms of security, in terms of geopolitics with other states around the world. Not above reproach, but neither ourselves. You know, how what what good Calvinist would mission with miss an opportunity to say that?

SPEAKER_03 12:34

So somebody. No, I totally, I totally agree with that. And I I love that explanation. I'd love to dive into the theological foundations here, right? So we know that we have a secular state today, right? We call it a secular state. You kind of trace some of where that started, in particular the Treaty of Westphalia. But before we get into there, right, in terms of the secularity and the sovereignty of the state that came, what I I would love to talk about the theological foundations of this, especially two things ordo amoris that you talk about, and then two books of revelation. Um, because I think that one, people have no idea what those are. I think the Ordo Amoris is very interesting and very different than the way that we approach politics. And I think it's worth mentioning and explaining to our audience. And then these two books of Revelation, because no matter where our audience is, if they're Christian, if they're not, Christianity is affecting their life, especially if they live in America. And really, if they live anywhere, it's affecting their life at some level, right? But especially here in America and Canada, to probably not to the same extent, but of course, then the uh the effects of Christian nationalism and what's happening in America spill over into Canada, there is no doubt. And I think that what at least no doubt to me. What are these things? What's the Ordo Amoris? What's the two books of salvation? How do they help us think through how I treat China or how I think about Vietnam or how I work through Russia or North Korea? Uh some of these things that might me might consider even more evil in their regimes. So what from an American perspective, then maybe much broader, obviously, but what do you think? What what can you help explain those things to us so we can make sense of it?

SPEAKER_01 14:25

I'll I'll I'll do my best. You're right, they are at the foundations, and if I make any mistakes, my wife who has two PhDs in systematic theology will have sure call in and fix it. She'll let you know. She looked at the manuscript. It was overseen, you know. There was a process. So the first, uh so I would say, you know, the retrieval of this idea of the two books, so uh uh of revelation, right? This is it's it's sort of a John Calvin idea, but it well, it is a John Calvin idea. It comes out of also a kind of basic.

SPEAKER_03 14:50

Could you briefly explain who John Calvinist just is?

SPEAKER_01 14:53

A great Protestant reformer of yeah, a great Protestant reformer in the history of the church. He he writes a very influential Institutes of the Christian religion. He does this in Geneva, and he's sort of the architect if people talk about themselves as sort of reformed or Calvinist. He's kind of the one of the ones they're going back to. Um he also, by the way, he also more or less describes his way of talking as a retrieval. So, you know, when he talks about these ideas, it's not like John Calvin is making up a new religion. I mean, that would, he would in fact be very offended. Um, do you hear anybody say that? He's talking about, you know, not a new church, but a reformed church. In fact, sometimes they would call themselves reformed Catholics, right? So Catholics still in the Holy Catholic Church as of the creed, but reformed within a kind of what they would say is what Scripture teaches. And they draw out of that through the church fathers, through people like Augustine, who I'll come to again in a moment with Ordo Amoris, the idea that, you know, we know God by two great revelations, you know. Um, the one revelation that particularly, you know, if people are thinking religiously, Christianly, they'd say, ah, yes, of course, this one, the scriptures. God reveals himself in the scriptures, you know, this is his clearest kind of revelation. But also, and very importantly, God reveals himself through his other word, the word of creation. You know, and we must read both books, as it were. We must have both wide open. So we're studying his creation.

SPEAKER_03 16:15

And we are fallible at interpreting both, correct?

SPEAKER_01 16:18

That's right, exactly. Um, so so and they're they are meant to be read together. And we as human beings, of course, well, yeah, no, so we have two problems. The one is, of course, we've fallen into sin. So that's a big problem, right? So we read stuff, but actually there is this darkening we see through a glass darkly, right? We don't understand. There's a whole spiritual world, the truth, to which we are sort of often blind, sometimes willfully so, but often inevitably. This is really what Calvinists mean by the term total depravity. Not that everybody's as bad as they could possibly be. That's not the argument, but that nothing is untouched by that brokenness. So that's problem number one. And problem number two, and periodically people forget this, is that human finitude is actually not, it's not a bug, it's a feature. That actually the overcoming of human finitude, that we will be, you know, as people say, oh, when we die and come on to glory and we meet Jesus, then all the mysteries will be revealed. Maybe not. Because as glorified humans, where do we get that from? We're still creatures, right? You know, where we got that from, and we tried to fix that mistake actually early in Genesis, and actually what we found out was that we did a mistake. That our dependence on this great mysterious creator, God, does not somehow evaporate. That actually that's the thing. That's the whole, that's the whole sort of story. And so we've got we've got both, you know, sinfulness but also finitude in the way that we read these books. And so that brings us with not only gratitude, but also humility to their reading, one against the other. And so I make the argument that to understand world politics, international politics, yes, we must have the book of scripture wide open in understanding its demands for justice, for right relations, for honest weights and measures, you know, for the for the thickness that's in there, you know, for all of that commentary. But we must also have the book of creation wide open to understand, you know, as you made reference to before, well, hold on, when we say international relations, what are we talking about? You know, are we talking about empires like they would have talked about them in the New Testament? Are we talking about states that operate somewhat differently, but also similarly? Is there a difference between the state and politics and government? Ought we to take the prescriptions that we see in Torah or in the commands of the of what we would call the Old Testament and apply them directly on to today? Would that make sense? Well, well, actually, I think with both books wide open, that gives us a kind of a place to start, a place to start answering that question. So I won't skip ahead to the answer. So that's the one sort of sort of initial point. Augustine's idea of order or morse, and I did use this by the way before your vice president made some headlines talking about this. And I asked them, like, oh, should I take it out? They said, no one will remember by the time this book comes out. Don't worry, you can talk about Augustine, it'll be fine. Because I do invoke it somewhat differently than your vice president did. And, you know, the idea is that political communities are defined by the right by the ordering of their loves. You know, we all have a hierarchy of loves. This is, I think, you know, this was Augustine's idea, but he said, you know, we see this, you know, plainly in scripture that what scripture calls idolatry is often a disordering of loves, you know, and this is why we know that, you know, sometimes when things are really bad, really evil, really sinful, we we know because they are actually a twisting of something that is actually really good, really beautiful, really powerful. You know, I, you know, I'm a simple man, and I think, you know, when it comes down to the things uh that we all really like, you know, it's sex, power, money. It's some combination of these three things, right? And when they get twisted, boy, it goes so bad. But the testimony of scripture is that actually it's so bad, you know, as Abraham Kuyper, one of my you know beloved sort of mentors of the tradition, like to say, that the best corrupted becomes the worst. It's bad because actually they are a gift, that power is gifted to human beings, to name, to rule, you know, that sex is, in a fundamental sense, procreative, you know, um, that it is this deep and marvelous mystery, that money, the creation of entrepreneurship and ingenuity and serving our neighbors' goods and the cultivation of music and art and poetry that it makes possible, all of these things are enormous, extraordinary goods that are right there in the earliest moments of creation. And actually, what Augustine is saying is he's saying that all those things are good, but when we elevate and distort those things disproportionately to themselves, when they become the idols, you know, then they cause unimaginable personal and social destruction. You know, the calf and the golden calf is a great example. I mean, God literally says, Pillage the Egyptians on your way out, by the way. Go to them, ask them for their gifts of gold, and they'll give them to you, and they do, right? And then they've taken all these gifts of gold, things that God has said, these are your gifts, these are your bequests. I have liberated you. Now go out into your liberation. And what do they do? Ugh, right back to idolatry. That gold gets melted down for the comfort and the familiarity of a golden calf, you know. Was it the gold that sinned? You know, was it the gold that's the problem? Well, no, we actually, it's a gift in one verse, and it's an abomination in the next. So this is the picture of idolatry that Augustine gives us. It's what people like David Koises talk about in their in their book, Political Visions and Illusions. And they say, you know, really, that's at the heart of the problem of politics, that we have disordered loves. And Augustine describes political communities as higher or lower, as more like or unlike what God has ordained by the proper ordering of their loves. You know, and so this is what I say too. This is what a state is, this is what a nation is. It's about the ordering of its loves. This is its kind of identity. We wonder well, who are we? What do we mean? Well, how have we ordered our loves? And by the way, sometimes we write that down in ways that are easy to find constitutions, declarations. I understand you guys are having a Bit of a party this year, about 250. You know, it's exciting stuff. Yeah, well, it's exciting stuff. And in part, I think, and let me as a Canadian, by the way, say something enormously generous about Americans here. In part, I think, because there is a moral genius in those first documents.

SPEAKER_03 22:18

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

The arc of which its own architects clearly did not even understand in its fullness, right? But have taken generations of work, a promissory note, as Martin Luther King would call it, right? A way that it's worked itself out. And I think Augustine would say, well, actually, the genius in those documents is that they have captured a proper ordering, a justice, a right relations between the proximate loves of a political community. Now, sometimes you find them written down. So increasingly these days, I say, well, look at what they wrote down. But also I think look at how they spend their money. That's not a bad place to go. You know, Tim Keller used to say this, you know, you can say, Oh, this is what I believe. And I'd say, actually, just open up your bank account to me for a little bit and I'll show you what you love and what you believe, you know. Um, and that's not a bad way to go. And actually, if you do an audit of the American national government and the way that it spends its money, you know, you'll see some of those tensions there. You'll say, oh, okay. Well, do we love what we say we love? We've got this all written down, but how well are we doing on this? 250th anniversary, I think, is not a bad time to take an audit, by the way, like a little marital retreat, you know. Okay, well, how are we doing on this covenant, actually? You know, are we all still sort of on the same page? And that's that's sort of Augustine's argument. And he says, you know, really, this is the basis by which states not only understand themselves, but also their identity with which they project into the world. And it's really that basis of love that that commonwealths, that political communities are anchored, oriented in the ordering of their loves. That's the thing that gives identity and force. That's the thing that I think provides uh ethical frame in foreign policy and also helps us understand, you know, who are our friends and who are we at tension with? Right. So actually, I think it becomes very, it can actually become very practical. I realize this has been a very stratospheric theological and historical conversation, but suddenly it can get very practical very quickly, you know, to understand, well, okay, well, why are we at odds, you know, with China? Is it just, you know, the Thucydides trap? You know, is it just rising belligerent powers and that's difficult and there are threats to kind of national security? Or are there genuine goods that we disagree about in terms of the ordering of them? And are those disagreements actually quite fundamental to who we are? And are those difficult to get past? And does that inevitably need to lead to conflict? I don't think so. I don't want to be too pessimistic there. But on the other hand, I think we begin to see, oh, okay, this is why we see points of tension here. And I think, by the way, also why countries like Canada, for example, are sometimes a little bit baffled about why recently we've been on the receiving end of some of these points of tension to say, well, hold on. Yeah, I feel like I've woken up next to a stranger. Like everything everything was okay here. Did we did we flip a script on uh on some of this stuff? And you know, I don't think we have, for the record, just to you know put a point of encouragement there, I don't think we have flipped a script, but I do think that the American National Covenant, if I could put it that way, you guys are having a moment, as you periodically do every couple of generations. And sometimes it's more or less violent, by the way, I have to say. And so far, actually, I realize this might not sound good in the moment. This is on the lesser side of some of the other experiments that you've had. So, you know, as a note of encouragement, it's been much worse. Yeah, it's been much worse. But you're renegotiating it. And and some of that is right. I mean, some of it is figuring out the ordering of your loves. Yes. You mentioned Christian nationalism, you know, one of the chapters in the book is does Jesus love the national interest? Well, there is some part of a love of hearth, of home, of community, of solidarity that is actually right and true and I think biblical. But then what is the ordering of that love? You know, and this is where I think, you know, the Christian nationalism, I mean, it sees something, as Augustine says, idolatries do. It sees something that is true, that is right, that is necessary about a political community, but oh no, when it orders them in this way, that's not the way that you would want to do that. That can lead to all forms of injustice and incivility and degradation, you know. And so I think that's this is where Augustine is really helpful in this moment politically.

SPEAKER_02 26:16

Yeah, I want to I want to ask you more um about the Christian nationalism part, but but before I do, I I wanted to actually capitalize on the fact that you mentioned that America's having a birthday because we are actually celebrating it here at Faithful Politics by spending all of July doing nothing but iron episodes about about the birthdays. So we actually have this uh this whole series called Church and State 250. We're tracing religion in America since the doctrine of discovery all the way through modern day Christian nationalism with with all the voices that you could possibly think of. I mean the white ones, the Perry's, the Robin Jones, the Mark Charles, Kristen Du May's. You know, we're we're we're looking at it all. And you know, we we are we're gonna finish up the episode with Brian Keeler, who's who has actually been covering like DOD and all that other kind of stuff, and and yeah, just really kind of help us better understand the the relationship between religion and America. Um America, one of the the things that we're dealing a lot with right now is Christian nationalism. And uh we just recently had a rededicate 250 event. It was very, very Christian nationalist y the administration just published a documentary on quotes called by Dawn's Early Light, which is like a video that talks about the anti-Christian bias task force that they've created. So I failed that just to say whenever you take scripture or any sort of like Christian ideals to use as a template to help organize, understand, or you know, operate within like a country, like it it it sins hairs like in the back of my neck to kind of stand up a little bit. So I'd love for you just to kind of detangle that for us because because I I think it's really important uh for people to understand.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Yeah, yeah. Thank you. First of all, I love what you guys are doing with the birthday. It's very fifth commandment kind of stuff to me. You know, how do we honor our fathers and mothers so we can live long in the land the Lord our God has given us? Not not and honoring, but not whitewashing, not saying, hey, you know, everything any kind of criticism is somehow invalid, but actually that's dishonoring, you know. And so how do you how do you do this in a real way that brings the best of what they meant forward? I think that's to me, that's that's wonderful. I'm I'm delighted. And you've got some friends in that list. So I'll uh I'll look forward uh to hearing from them. I mean, this is so this is always the kind of you know church and state risk. And one of the things that, you know, I talk about in the book is that, you know, one always has to be careful, especially when you're going back to scripture, to import these categories of church and state that actually don't make a whole lot of sense within that historical, historical world. So uh this is one of the reasons why the two books are so important. Scripture, yes, but also the book of creation, in this case, social scientific political science and the study of international relations, say, well, what is the state? Where did it come from? What's its origin? How, and in the context of, for example, the United States of America, what role did, for example, different religious views play in the founding of the United States? And and here's, I think, you know, the way that you can say this, and by the way, my view, so I'm a member of the Christian Reformed Church of North America. We don't have a task force on Christian nationalism because Article 36 of the Belgian Confession is actually really clear for us that Christian nationalism is just a big red X. So it's just just it's very, you know what, creeds and confessions, they help. So it's like, okay, yeah, no, that's very, that's very, that's very helpful, actually, you know. And so, okay. The I the idea being, you know, at the origin of these countries, there is a kind of Christian, there's Christianity is in is in the water. You know, you can talk about Locke, you can talk about some of these fellows, but you could also, you know, go to the way that, for example, the checks and balances are there. And I think it's Deuteronomy 17, where they actually lay out, well, actually, the king, yeah, you're gonna have a king, but by the way, they're not gonna get to have a treasury, um, they're not gonna have a lot of interdynastic marriage, they're not gonna get their own stable or army. Oh, and by the way, they have to write out their own copy of the law and they have to keep it with them, you know, the sort of origin of constitutional governance, as you were, as it were. There's actually kind of a template for how to think about political power. And I have to say that the God of heaven and earth thinks that, by the way, a separation of powers and checks and balances seems like a good thing to give human beings. Uh so I think he thought, you know, it's right there, you know, it's right there. And then, and you know, you may not you might not need to sort of copy and paste that, but you may say, well, actually, there's some principles there about the nature of political power that are really helpful. And they're there at the founding, too. Eric Nielsen writes a wonderful book called The Hebrew Republic, where he actually argues that, oh, the Americans, they're always talking about the Greeks and the Romans, but but actually, you know, if you go back, it's it's the Jewish scriptures, you know, it's the old and the new testament that actually have uh this enormous influence on the founders and the way that they're thinking about power and how to how to structure it. Now, this is true of every state in the world, right? The United States of America is not unique. You can go over to India and you can talk about, well, what are the roots of India's democracy, constitutional democracy, and they'll talk to you about Ashoka and his rock edicts. You know, they'll talk to you, they'll say, well, actually, we didn't need Locke. Oh, they'll even tell you we didn't need the Bible. They'll say, they'll say, well, actually, we found the context for pluralistic democracy indigenously within our own Vedic scriptures. You know, you get Islamic arguments about democracy, very similar kinds, you know, in terms of reading the Quran and thinking about it. Obviously, there are hot debates about this kind of thing. All of which is to say that I think religion, philosophical foundations, theological foundations are inevitable and also not, I don't think they need to be anti-pluralistic within the context of a state. You could say, well, this is where this is where people came from. These were their arguments, this is what they believed. But here's the thing: you can get there a different way. You know, Jacques Maritain, very famously, when he was, you know, drawing up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War, he did this with Muslims and Hindus and agnostics and atheists, and they all sit around and they say, well, how should we put together this Universal Declaration of Human Rights? And they did it and they wrote it out. And you can go and you can read it on the internet today. And he said, you know, we all agree on these rights, provided nobody asks us why. You know, and to me, this is the genius of the American experiment. I mean, honestly, this is the witness, this is the testimony that I think that initial declaration and then and then belatedly its constitution again sets out, which is an idea of rights, ideas about the human person and about political power and its purposes that are proximate in the here and now, right, but for which you can have a variety of ultimate rationale, right? So I can be an American citizen and believe, as it were, in the genius of that republic and in the genius of its declaration and of its of it of its charter, but I can do that for distinctively Hindu reasons, distinctively Muslim reasons, distinctively indigenous reasons, and so on and so forth. And that's the genius of it. And that's the pluralism of it. Now, Christian nationalism wants to say there is in fact no way to get to that outcome without the underlying foundations of Christianity. And historically, Christianity does, you know, does play a role in the founding of the United States of America. I don't think we want to ignore that or disagree with that. But on the other hand, I also think it's empirically falsifiable to say there is no other way to get there. I don't know. People are doing it all over the place, you know, including right here at home, by the way. You know, are all of the are all of the Muslim and Hindu and agnostic and atheistic citizens of the United States of America somehow second and third tier class citizens that don't really believe in the United States of America, that aren't real Americans? I mean, clearly, I mean, in addition to this being somewhat concerning, it's just not true. I mean, there's there's an enormous history of this. Now, that isn't to say, oh, well, we all theologically agree on some of these ultimate things. No, we actually, in many cases, profoundly disagree on these ultimate things. And by the way, Maritan would say, he said, by the way, the fact that we don't agree on the reasons for why doesn't mean they're not important. They're fundamentally important. These communities must be doing this rationale. And he said, and by the way, the only real way to get there is Catholic. You know, look, that's what he said, you know. Well, I'm not Catholic, so I enjoy Maritan's barb. But he said, clearly, I would, clearly, I think that, or else I probably wouldn't even be Catholic. I'd be, you know, whatever it is that, you know, is is a better and more sort of consistent foundation for what I what I politically believe. And so I think, you know, that's the that's the challenge. Those of us, particularly who are Christians, who believe in Scripture have, sometimes we face off with Christian nationalism. I don't want to dismiss the Christian history of the United States of America or Canada, because it's important. It's, I think it's historically true. But I also don't want to get locked into then this false secondary leap that says, well, actually, the only way that you can be an American or a Canadian is that you've got to have the same set of religious foundations, as many of these founders did. And by the way, some of these founders had some religious views and foundations that we might not want to keep, you know, in the present day. We might want to say, oh yeah, there were some big mistakes there, right? I mean, including, by the way, with some really, really basic characters like we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Oh man, as it turns out, over the history of the United States, the theological foundations, the exegesis of that phrase has, shall we say, undergone some contestation, right? And some improvement as a result of it. To say, well, actually, some of their foundational commitments were wrong, and we would want to be able to say that, you know, while at the same time there are insights there that were genius that have been carried forward and fulfilled in a more perfect way. And so to me, that speaks to the proximate and historical nature and the contingency of political communities, but I don't think it rules out the pluralism. In fact, if anything else, it invites in and says, you know, you can be a part of this too. You know, this is one of Reagan's great lines about about the United States of America. He said, Well, you know, you can move to Germany, you'll never be German, you can move to Japan, you'll never be Japanese. But you can come to the United States of America and you can be American, you know, because there is no ethno-religious sort of first and second class citizen thing going on here. Or at least there shouldn't be. That's the dream, you know. That's the dream. And it's not the dream if we're, it's actually not the dream in Japan. You know, I lived there for a while. I get chased through the streets by school children, gijin, gijen, gijen. You know me, I'm a very Dutch guy. I've got a certain kind of complexion. I don't look Japanese. You know, they know, you know, that I don't, you know, belong there. You know, and that's actually the rule in a lot of the world today. By the way, I know you Americans are always beating yourselves up about this, but if you're hanging out, how does Southeast Asia or Central Asia or in parts of Europe, you know, actually, you know what? That that generally speaking is the rule, but it's not the rule in the United States of America. To me, it's one of the pieces of genius. And it's the thing exactly that Christian nationalism gets wrong.

SPEAKER_03 36:38

Yes, I absolutely agree with that. And you know, it's funny because Christian nationalists, right, a lot of this, even in some of the people that we've had on, it's predicated on theotomy, the idea again of bringing the Old Testament, applying it directly today, um, things like uh public executions. I'm I'm bringing out some of the worst things, right? That we've seen about public executions, right? That they'd want reinstating blasphemy laws, reinstating anti sodomy laws, things like that, which uh what essentially, right, it creates that it creates uh tension, a lot of tension, a lot of problems with a lot of people, right? To say to put it mildly. And uh I think about the Christian nationalism and how they use uh Jesus, right, to justify their views. And you go into depth on in in terms of you go in rather to creation, fall, you have law, you have Jesus and the church, and and how these uh how these principles flesh themselves out or are fleshed out rather in in these different parts of scripture. What does Jesus do for us? In particular, you talk about his kingship, and I hear people talking about King Jesus, and I love the phrase King Jesus. I I I I absolutely uh agree to the bottom of my heart. Feel it's true to my as much as I can that Jesus is King, and yet this is being used in ways that are really, really problematic in my view right now, especially in America and and probably beyond, right? But um America's my context. What what does Jesus tell us about this? What is his what do we learn from Jesus, what we can take from Jesus in terms of our political involvement in international relations?

SPEAKER_01 38:34

Yeah, that's a it's a it's a it's a wonderful question. You know, I think too too often, you know, we read scripture in these little bits and bytes, you know, and and we do this with traditions too. I mean, I say this so I'm you know, I've I've self-professedly come come out as a Calvinist already in this uh podcast. Uh and you know, I but I often say tell people, you know, a little Calvinism is a terribly dangerous thing. You know, because with a little Calvinism, you get Christ is king, right? But with a lot of Calvinism, you get the and you are not. You know, because you know, the the problem one fears sometimes is when you hear the you know, the Christ is king, then we hear, well, the church is king, you know, therefore let's get on about it, you know, Cesaro-Papanism, you know, take your take your favorite, you know, you you end up with a kind of version of Christian nationalism. But actually, you know, I think, you know, the the coming of Christ, you know, it actually shows us, and I say this in the book, I mean, three really important sort of different sort of commitments, right? The first thing is that Christ is king and actually we are not. And that's a proper definition of sovereignty. That's sovereignty as the Calvinist theologians like it, not as the political scientists like it, but as the Calvinist theologians like it. That if the state, if the government is to have any kind of sovereignty, always we will mean by that, in a theological sense, a very proximate sovereignty, right? If it if the state has sovereignty, it is sovereign only insofar as it has been gifted. Allah Romans 13, the gift of government, the gift of power, by the way, to do justice. But it has not been gifted, you know, as Thomas Hobbes would have in the Leviathan. You know, it's funny how he reaches for that biblical metaphor, you know, the only creature in scripture to which it which answers only to God, you know, this this sort of uniformity of church and state, which you kind of read out of the Leviathan. You need this code, because that's the only way to get practical sovereignty. Well, actually, I think the Calvinist would say that must be avoided at all at all costs. You know, Abraham Kuyper, I don't think he was thinking of Hobbes Leviathan, but he's got this famous line uh in his lectures on Calvinism the state is not an octopus. Well, choose your aquatic monster, you know. Um the state is not, you know, it cannot be all of these things, right? Because why? Christ is king. So first, Christ is king. And that actually limits state power. That actually limits political authority, right? It gives us, by the way, a political vocabulary for the midwives at the river, you know, in Egypt, who disobey Pharaoh and say, actually, we will not slaughter these Hebrew boys. We will, in fact, deceive you and say, well, gosh, they're so vigorous. They just keep giving birth before we can even get there. And yet somehow, you know, this is exactly, and scripture gives testimony, they have feared God rather than Pharaoh, right? So this is the first thing, that Christ is king, and that this is this actually gives us, I actually think, the the first notes of what political scientists like me will call freedom of religion or belief. Why? Because the state is neither competent nor capable, right, of requiring ultimate theological conviction. Now, the competency question is easy, coerced faith is no faith at all, and so on and so forth. But I also want to say, and here again, a lot of Calvinism I think is much better than a little Calvinism, the idea that the state, that political power, that we here might exercise the tools of the sword to bring your soul, your uh, you know, your resurrected soul and body back, you know, yeah, this is this is actually this is a kind of blasphemy. This is taking upon ourselves the tools of salvation, which are actually very clearly only only in the hands of the one king who waits, right, and who will return to make all things new. So this is the first thing. I actually think, you know, the kingship of Jesus is very much fundamentally it drives us towards the idea that state authority is limited, it is proximate, and in particular in relationship to ultimate matters, it is not given competency or capability to weigh in on those things. Okay, so that's the first thing. The second thing, I think, is that Christ's coming, his kingship, it reasserts the goodness of cultural pluralism, right? That in the old, you know, you might be forgiven if you are reading kind of just in the Old Testament, although I think you have to give a very kind of truncated reading of the Old Testament, by the way, to do this. But you might be forgiven to say, oh, well, you know, God is there for Israel, but actually the other nations of the world, well, they're they're the secondary characters. You know, Israel has the main character drama, as my students would say, and everyone else, you know, God sort of, ah, you know, he's sort of. But actually what we see is these hints all throughout, and I think probably most directly in the book of Jonah, right? Where Jonah, by the way, a good nationalist, if ever there was one, uh, was basically saying, you know, look, the Assyrians are bad guys. Jonah was not wrong about that. By the way, the Assyrians were real bad guys. You know, they're they're the Nazi Germany of their day. They're doing some awfully terrible things. And so Jonah's not real interested in going to them with a message of repent, because he knows just enough to know about this God of Israel that if he goes to them with a message of repent and they repent, they might do it. And then God's gonna have mercy. And by he's not interested in that whatsoever. So he actually goes to some lengths, and of course it's quite a delightful story. But eventually he ends up there, he preaches to the people of Nineveh, you know, roughly modern day Mosul. And what do they do? Gosh darn it, they repent. Right. And he's pretty upset about that, actually. And I, by the way, I I hear a lot of myself and Jonah sometimes about that too, because as my as my wife says, I have a spiritual, I have a spiritual problem with wanting people to get theirs. And I I say, well, yeah, I'm a political scientist. What do you want? I got into the business of power. You're sure, you're sure right I do. But the problem with Jesus, I've got to say, is that he doesn't give people theirs. Right? And that's also, as it turns out, the best news in the whole world, right? Because as a Calvinist, I've got to say that I'm not getting mine, right? Because somebody else got it instead. And so Christ comes and he opens up this work of mercy, and he opens it up, as the canons of Dort in my tradition call it, promiscuously, best use of the term promiscuous, to the nations. So that it is not just certain, you know, you one must be circumcised to enter into it. You know, the Council of Jerusalem and Acts 15 actually works this out. What do we do with some of these Old Testament laws? Do they apply? Do they not apply? Which ones do they do? And, you know, they're pretty, they say, well, actually, they're really helpful, but you know, some of the civil and ceremonial laws, there's a contextual, there's a kind of for a place for a time for a follow, but the moral law, well, that endures. You know, that that goes onward. And that is for the nations, actually, that's for everyone. There's a promiscuity to it. And so he's saying, actually, the Hittites come as Hittites, the Moabites come as Moabites, the Americans come as Americans. And actually, somehow, God brings all of this good cultural pluralism. And you see this, I think, you know, very much centrally in Pentecost. You know, where sometimes there are traditions that kind of read the curse of Babel and they say, oh, well, see, all this linguistic and cultural pluralism, it's a curse. What does God do? You know, he gives them multiple languages, you know, so don't make me take, you know, as my son says, don't make me take French. But no, no, the Lord has commanded for you to take French, my son, and Spanish too. You know, and because he says, well, actually, in in Pentecost, what we see is there is no erasure of human diversity, but that diversity no longer serves as a barrier for solidarity. So they all hear it in their own tongues, right? And this is the good news of Pentecost. So this is God saying again, actually, what I meant, the command that you didn't fulfill at Babel, go fill the earth, subdue it, make culture, make something of the world. I really meant that command. Let me repeat it in Babel, and then by the way, let me repeat it again in Pentecost to say all of that diversity, it's good. Don't let it be a barrier now. The kingdom of God is here. The boundaries are being broken down, yes, between us and God, but also between each other, right? This is the story of Pentecost, I think. And then in the third place, Christ's kingship says, He also meant the cultural mandate that we find in Genesis: fill the world, subdue it, make art and music and science, go to the moon, discover other galaxies. You know, I think, you know, I'm one of these people that thinks we have barely scratched the surface on the wonders of this created order that the Lord of heaven and earth has gifted us. Barely scratched the surface that we are half blind, stumbling around, you know, in our sin, wondering about these things that God has made. And yet he has said, go forward, do it, because I will, you know, I will come and I will make all things new. And even the things that were intended for evil, and even the things somehow I will make them right. Somehow I will make all things, you know, all things new. And so I think, you know, in this that's that's what you get actually in the Great Commission. I think it's kind of a restatement of the cultural mandate, you know, as you are going, therefore go unto all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, bringing them to me, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you, the good life, how it ought to be, what I've designed this created order to do, this love letter of the law, and surely, you know, and so so this sort of restatement of things. And I think now that idea of Christ as King ordering our politics, right, around a kind of what Mauri and Gefuin in their book Pluralism and Horizons call, you know, directional diversity, spiritual diversity, pluralism, the fact of pluralism, but also the good of cultural pluralism, the good of institutional and societal plural formity. Now, this actually gives us the picture of a Christian politics. What should Christian politics do? It should protect and steward each of these things on behalf of the king, who himself will come and fix all of our worst mistakes in those areas. But this is where he calls us to word. Yes, painstakingly, yes, proximately, yes, two steps forward, one step backward, and yet that day will come when all will be made new. And so I think it's fundamental, it's foundational the kingship of Christ. But not so much that it erases, of course, the testaments that precede it, but so that it fulfills it and shows us the true purpose of the law and what God has intended for his world.

SPEAKER_03 48:29

I think that's really, really well said. You know, we are living in a time in America where our current secretary of the Department of Defense prayed and thanked God for the bombs finding their targets, bullets finding their targets. Thank God for you know, the soldiers that die and enter into their glory because they are dying in a righteous cause in service of their country and their God. So again, uh if I were to go into the military, I would want to be serving my country. That that's why I would do it. I would go in to serve my country. Or because I was broke and had no other options, which is why most people have entered the military, by the way, throughout history. Or you could be you'd be court-ordered in. That's a thing. You could be court-ordered in. There you go. I was not aware of that. Okay. There you go. Yeah, in Canada, they can make you go to the army. I mean, in America, they can make you go to the army by a judge. And so if I went into though, let's say, and I I I did it for love of country, that's why I was doing it for my patriotism. There's also be a sense where I had the love of God in there, in this sense that my love of God, because as a Christian, that's my ultimate, that's my that should be my ultimate uh goal is to be like Jesus, to be more like Jesus and to worship and love God exclusively, right? No other gods. And so if I'm trying to worship God, this this this uh love for my country, this this willingness to defend my country of violence is a is ostensibly an extension of my love for God. And I guess what I would want to hear from you as we're working through this, the moral order of force. This is something you uh work through just and unjust peace. Just in our last moments together, uh how do we handle this? Because we have a lot of Christians in America that when I'll just give you again, giving context, give you an example. I posted this thing when Donald Trump said an entire civilization is going to be a race tonight. Literally threatening, putting out there, threatening to destroy an entire country and civilization. Who knows what he meant all that by that, but he put it out there, right? On more than one occasion, he has he has hinted at this. And then not hinted, said it. So then I put it out there, and I have all sorts of evangelical Christians angry at me and telling me about how God, well, number one, I'm an evangelical Christian and I I understand the Bible and I understand what God did in the Old Testament. But hey, don't you remember how God destroyed all these people in the Old Testament and it was part of his fulfillment? As if, like, hey, we're to take out Iran, which is a justified, righteous, good thing. Yeah, that Donald Trump said that based on the Old Testament.

SPEAKER_01 51:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 51:27

So can you help make sense of that? Just war tradition. What do we because people throw this stuff around. Could you help us understand it before we uh close our time today? What a great way to end it all.

SPEAKER_01 51:40

Yeah, you know, every everybody's last question is about Iran these days, which I I, you know, I don't mind. You know, I'm a Canadian, so uh, you know, if you don't if you don't like it, you know, uh, we're up here, you know. So so I would say sort of on the on the first end, you know, so we've got we scripture must interpret scripture, right? So if we're going to the Old Testament and we're sort of saying, oh, well, look what happened to the Malachites, and you know, God has done this, and you know, so now the United States of America is doing that. Well, one, we've misunderstood the United States of America's relationship to God. Um, right? There there are complicated hermeneutical questions in the Old Testament, and I'm not qualified to get into them around some of uh around some of this. But I just want to say, first off, you know, whatever is happening there, it's happening within the context of the nation of Israel and God, you know, and the Davidic kingship. And the Davidic kingship has a king today, and it's actually not the president of the United States, it's Jesus Christ. So that's that's the that's that's the first piece there. And so then we enter into an ethical argument, I think. Then we enter into, well, then how do we understand the use of force? And the Christian tradition, I would say there's actually three broad answers to this. The a substantial and morally serious answer is Christian pacifism. I am not one, but I also do not want to be too quick to dismiss it, as I sometimes especially tell my students, because they want to rush right to the just war. And I say, well, hold on. Actually, the pacifists have a couple of words for us. And some of it particularly includes some really helpful work on not going to war, which by the way, just war is not pro-war. So let's just sit at the feet of our brothers and sisters. It doesn't mean I'm a war hawk. Yeah, that's sit at the feet of our brothers and sisters who are thinking about absolutely anything that can and could be done to build reconciliation and comedy between the nations. Now, as it turns out, the just war tradition believes it will occasionally and periodically come that the use of force may be necessary, right? And so it's given us moral categories from Scripture and Augustine and yes, also that second book of God's revelation, right? Social science and the study of war and Cicero, you know, and some of these people, right? It's given us this set that this set of moral categories to think through what would it look like for a government, for a political community to exercise lethal force under certain kinds of we've, you know, talk about that as use at Bellum, just criteria for going to war, use in Bellow, just criteria in war. And I like to also talk about use post-bellum. Some say it's implied, but gosh, why not say it anyway, which is justice after war. Um, and I actually think one of the things that shows you is the moral arc of war is aimed at reconciliation. That the neighbors who we fight and kill today in the service of justice, of right relations, are our neighbors in reconciliation tomorrow. It's one of the reasons, by the way, that the just war tradition has such a big internal fight about nuclear weapons. Because it's very hard to imagine a nuclear exchange arced at reconciliation, right? It's very difficult to imagine human survival arced after a nuclear exchange, you know. And so we say, well, hold on, how can that be a method of achieving what even Aquinas called a kind of fierceness of love, you know, a kind of you know, a strong disciplining?

SPEAKER_03 55:02

And so there were no nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction when Augustine came up with just war theory.

SPEAKER_01 55:10

Well, I mean, you know, I've got to say the Romans did give it something of a shot. They weren't a particularly nice people, but um uh and and the Mongols certainly did add on to that again, you know. So that's it.

SPEAKER_03 55:19

Yeah, I guess that disease, you're right, sinning some disease.

SPEAKER_01 55:22

That's true. Biological warfare has occurred, you know, in in the history of humanity, which has done enormous damage. But but yeah, you're right. These are some categories that you know we we still struggle with to this day. So so I actually think, I mean, one of the things that would really help evangelical Christians is an actual retrieval of the just war tradition, right? Um, because I feel like we're just kind of throwing around, we're saying, well, the United States of America, of course, it's God blessed, and you know, it's it's my community and I love it, and I'm patriotic. Of course, you shouldn't. There's nothing wrong with some of those things in proportion, right? But when they include or they start to color in a way, are and it gives us sort of a hard time seeing, well, hold on, is this what are our motivations for war? What are we trying to achieve here? Are they, you know, the the the way that you measure a just war is it must be aimed at correcting a standing injustice, and the application of lethal force must be preferable to the continuance of that injustice. You know, we might say that, for example, you know, we Americans and Canadians, we disagree on softwood lumber, and we do. You know, and we've got we've got something of a disagreement about that. Is the best way to resolve that disagreement the application of lethal force? Well, some in the United States have suggested it, maybe. Um but but I think probably most within the Christian tradition of just war would say, well, it's obvious that's a vastly disproportionate. In fact, that injustice is not so serious, it is not so morally weighty that lethal force would be an appropriate response to correct it. But there are instances in the world where just war would say, well, actually, and by the way, if you asked me to, if you said, and actually I've done this on podcasts, if somebody asked me to, although I was, I have to say, at the beginning of this exchange with Iran, not enthusiastic about it from a just war perspective. But if you asked me to sit in front of a teleprompter and make an argument for how might an American engagement with Iran fit within a just war framework, you know, given the following criteria, the inbelo criteria, the adbellum criteria, the inbelo, I could probably actually make something of an attempt at that because the Ayatollahs were not good people, right? And they funded a reign of terror proxy, and they were clearly, you know, having a kind of you know, on-again, off again kind of game with nuclear enrichment, which is very dangerous. You know, their naval assets provided, you know, major, you know, strategic challenges, which we now, by the way, see every day at the gas pump. Oh, yeah, no, that was really a problem. We really saw that through to the other side. I mean, so there are they're they're they're they're they're ballistic missiles. We're a real and present danger. And I mean, so I I could have made that argument, but then okay, so how are we gonna do it? Is it likely to succeed? How are we gonna do it? Right? What are the goals? How will we know when the goals have been met? And what is the what is the road to reconciliation, you know, that is being that is that is being looked at here. The gold standard, the history of this is often, you know, after the second world war. And I know this, particularly given some of the some of my background, right? Which is, you know, Stalin's plan after the Second World War was to do to the Germans what they did after the first, but do it better. You know, to depopulate the whole, you know, to basically force them back into a medieval agrarian society. And Stalin made a pretty good go of it, actually. He put a lot of the uh the heavy industry from East Germany onto trains and moved them out beyond the Urals. They'd had a practice of this, obviously, as a result of their, of their warfare. And yet, the United States of America, and what I think, and what the United States of America continues to experience as one of the most dramatic acts of reconciliation in the history of the world, said that these people, these Germans and these Japanese, with whom we have just fought and died a war of the most insensate violence, we will now sacrifice not only our blood but our treasure to make them our brothers and sisters in reconciliation. And we have been living off the moral capital, I think, of the audacity of that reconciliation, such that Germany and Japan are not even reasonable geopolitical foes. Right? These are some of the most prosperous and advanced and just societies on the face of the planet. And gosh darn it, I just don't know why you Americans are so down on yourselves sometimes when you talk about this, because that is an astonishing story of war, precisely as it is intended, as a process of reconciliation. And there are very few examples of that. You know, the Romans wouldn't have done that, you know, the Greeks wouldn't have done it. Only I think a state and a people who had some had had some contact with an itinerant carpenter who called himself the son of God could imagine doing something as audacious as that. That's war. That's justice. And I don't know if the current conflict of Iran measures up to that. I suspect it does not. But that's the measure that Christians should be using when they come. How does lethal force get apprised, and what is the moral framework?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:20

Yeah, I would say like it does seem like the last, and this is speaking out of great ignorance. It does seem to me the like the last truly justified just war was World War II. No, I don't know. I'm speaking out of an enormous amount of in terms of like America.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:38

I was just saying. I could make an argument for Gulf War I. I'd even, I mean, it's it's interesting. I sometimes wonder with my students, interestingly enough, if you if you compare the justice in going to war criteria, the use ad bellum criteria for Afghanistan were actually pretty good. Canada was there, by the way. Canada was part of that mission. We went to war too. You invoked Article V of NATO, we were right there. Our sons and daughters bled and died in Kandahar, right? We did that too, right? We weren't there in Iraq. And actually, the use, I think, ad Bellum argument in Iraq is a little bit shakier, some weapons of mass destruction, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Right. But now, here's what's interesting. If you compare those wars from a use post-Bellum perspective, Iraq, by way of reconciliation and a society of justice that is meaningfully preferable to the one that Saddam Hussein ruled prior to 2003, well, that's actually not a bad argument. You could you could get there. Afghanistan, I don't think you could. So these are morally and prudentially complex traditions. Well, all of which is to say, you know, it requires that the whole tradition needs to be held together as an organic moral whole, not just you take this piece out, you take that piece out. Because if you give me the use and the USA Bellum argument, wow, 2001 Afghanistan looks great, right? But if you follow it all the way through to use post-bellum, including the withdrawal and the catastrophic collapse, right, of the Afghan state into the most sort of insensate fundamentalism, you know, and the worst sorts of outcomes, especially for the women in Afghanistan, the girls, you know, it'd break your it'd break your heart. And then I think then you're having a very difficult time making a use postbellum argument. So it's so yeah, it is as you say, it it is fraught and it is complex, but how much better would we, especially as evangelicals, be if we could recover just a taste, if we could retrieve a taste of the moral seriousness of that kind of power.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:37

I mean, it would change, it would completely change the world. It would completely change the world. Well, it didn't be a good idea. And there is no serious Yeah, I know. But I don't think it feels like there is no one with that kind of seriousness in terms of their theological conviction within the administration at this point that would have any kind of even concern about just fourth theory, to be honest. But that's me making a very big statement there. As a Canadian, I'm very biased.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:04

No comment, no comment, a very biased statement.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:07

Well, thank you, Robert, for coming on, spending some time with us. How can people connect with you, your work, get the book, all of that?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:14

Yeah, so I I am, believe it or not, as a geriatric millennial, not really on much of social media. I have exercised those demons. I do do podcasts periodically. The best way to probably reach me is to find me at Calvin University, where I'm a professor, and I'll start teaching there this fall. And of course, the book can be found all over great bookshops like Hearts and Minds, local bookstores. And yes, if you want to help Bezos put some more rockets into space, you can find it on Amazon too. So that the title, of course, is Christ and Covenant in Global Politics. And you should find it all over the internet if you put it into the great Google machine.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:47

So hey Robert, they're they're making those ro those rockets for us. Okay, this is for the people, so that we can watch them and get the pleasure and enjoyment of watching these rich people go to space.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:00

I I I do like a good rocket, and I I even tell a story actually on how the mission to Mars is uh swords into plowshares of the V2 rockets from the Second World War. But I I don't know if these rockets are the same kind of project. I'm open to conveying that.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:15

Well, thank you so much. It was super insightful and really uh a delightful conversation for me. Absolutely. Well, to our viewers and our listeners, guys, thanks for joining. Share this with someone who needs it, get thinking about just war politics, get thinking about how does the the philosophical, how do rather the philosophical and theological tools that you have at your uh at your disposal, how do they help you to actually work through the world around you? And they will, and they do. And I and I hope that you'll listen to this again, share this, and hope this sparks more curiosity in you to chase it and um other pathways of research and discovery. And until next time, guys, keep your conversations not right or left, but up.