The Christendom Ecosystem: A Theology of Glory

Christian Nationalism and the LCMS - Part One

The battle against Christian nationalism should never feel resolved. There is always more to understand and more to do. Unfortunately, within the LCMS, Christian Nationalism is not treated with caution or concern, but with eyes seeking “charitable readings.” We see this in a recent debate between Rev. David Ramirez and Dr. Joel Biermann, linked below.

According to the YouTube description featuring the debate, “Dr. Joel Biermann has served for over two decades as professor of systematic theology at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, where his teaching and writing focus on Christian ethics, vocation, and the two realms. A prolific author and respected voice in Lutheran theology, he brings deep pastoral and academic experience to questions of church and state.” I would also note that he has entertained the idea of running for Synodical President of the LCMS.

His debate partner, “Rev. David Ramirez is a parish pastor, founder of the Bugenhagen Conference, and scholar of Martin Luther’s teaching on religious liberty. With years of experience teaching, preaching, and leading in the LCMS, he has been an active voice in current discussions on political theology and the Christian’s vocation in public life.” For those who follow this Substack, you may know of my writing on the Bugenhagen Conference of 2025 (https://junkerjorg.substack.com/p/when-certainty-trembles?r=6ehxi0).

The questions they considered were, “What does it mean to speak of ‘Christian nationalism,’ and ‘How should Lutherans think about Christendom, the state, and our public witness in a fractured world?’”

As we move through this article, I want to make my goal explicitly clear. I will show that both Ramirez and Biermann treat Christian nationalism as a theological and vocational question about Christianity’s place in society. Scholarship, however, shows that Christian nationalism is a political and social project of ordering belonging. Viewed through this lens, the debate’s central “pick your poison” framework collapses into a false choice. Political coercion and cultural coercion belong to the same Christian nationalism ecosystem because both depend on othering human beings. A real alternative exists outside this ecosystem: a Christian witness grounded in love, persuasion, and trust that God does what Christians cannot do.

What is Christian Nationalism?

Defining “Christian nationalism” matters. You will see that in contemporary scholarship, the term refers to a political and social ideology—an identifiable way of ordering national identity, power, and belonging. In the debate between Ramirez and Biermann, however, the discussion moves in a different direction. Rather than treating Christian nationalism as a sociological phenomenon, both men approach it primarily as a theological and ethical question.

Philip Gorskii is a sociologist of religion and politics who studies the relationship between religion, nationalism, and democracy. He starts with an important distinction: “A common misunderstanding would be that Christian nationalism is the same thing as being a patriotic Christian. [However,] patriotism is an adherence to the ideals of the [country], and nationalism is loyalty to your tribe and not the country.”¹ He goes on to argue that Christian nationalism fuses religious identity with national identity and treats the nation as a sacred community that must be defended and preserved.

Building off this distinction, Anthea Butler, a historian of religion whose research focuses on race, politics, and American Christianity at the University of Pennsylvania, names the tribal impulse of Christian nationalism: “Simply put, it’s a belief that America’s founding is based on Christian principles. White Protestant Christianity is the operational religion of the land, and that Christianity should be the foundation of how the nation develops its laws, principles, and policies.”²

Combining these points, we get at the very basic definition of Christian Nationalism, provided by Bradley B. Onishi, a scholar of religion and philosophy who studies political theology and contemporary religious movements. He says, “Christian nationalism is an ideology that is based around the idea that this is a Christian nation, that this was founded as a Christian nation, and, therefore, it should be a Christian nation today and should be so in the future.”³

These definitions reveal that Christian nationalism is not simply a theological claim about the past. It is an ideological project that seeks to organize public life around a Christian identity, shaping how belonging, authority, and moral order are defined within a society. This ordering can appear through formal political authority, but it also operates through cultural expectations, social pressure, and shared assumptions about who properly belongs within the nation.

To get at the fullness of Christian nationalism, we should also note its forms. Not every person who follows it does so intentionally or blatantly. Neighborly Faith helpfully identifies three forms to consider: adherents who loudly couple Christianity and government, sympathizers who share the vision with less force, and spectators who cheer it on or passively allow it.⁴ In other words, it is not a single posture or a single level of commitment. Some proclaim it openly. Others nod along quietly. Many more sit in the background, content to let it grow unchecked, often enabling adherents and sympathizers to do their work.

In the LCMS, we are often led to believe that Christian nationalism is not really present among us. But the subtler forms suggest otherwise. Even if we do not all see the loud adherents of Christian nationalism, many sympathize with its vision or stand by as spectators. Recognizing this helps us see that it may be nearer than we assume, in our communities, our conversations, and even in ourselves. More directly, these are not three separate ideas. They are three positions within the same Christendom ecosystem.

The Debate’s Three Layers

Defining Christian nationalism is a bit trickier through the lens of the debate. As you listen to the debate, you may occasionally find yourself asking, “What are they talking about here?” This is because both Ramirez and Biermann shift between three layers of the relationship between Christian belief and political theory. To note, neither participant outright defines these layers. Rather, they operate within them throughout the debate.

At the political layer, Christianity shapes society through the authority of the state. Laws, policies, and public institutions are expected to reflect Christian moral or religious commitments. Ramiez, especially, refers to multiple historical examples, such as rulers banning certain practices, civil authorities suppressing blasphemy, or governments acting under what is understood to be a responsibility before God. In this layer, Christianity becomes an ordering power of the state, which does not simply protect public peace; it participates in coercing a specifically Christian moral order.

At the cultural layer, Christianity shapes the shared norms and expectations of social life. Communities assume Christian identity as the natural framework for belonging. Neighborhoods, towns, and institutions reflect Christian moral assumptions, and deviation from those assumptions can carry social consequences even when no law is involved. This is the logic behind the “little Christendoms” discussed in the debate. In this form, Christianity defines the cultural atmosphere of a community. Here Christianity functions less as a political authority and more as the dominant social identity.

At the embodied layer, Christianity is not imposed through law or sustained through cultural dominance. Rather, it is lived through the ordinary life of believers: families raising children in the faith, congregations gathering for worship, and Christians serving neighbors in their daily callings. Influence emerges indirectly through witness, persuasion, and example rather than through structures of control. Thus, Christianity shapes society not by ordering it from above but by being embodied within it. In this layer, Christianity functions primarily as the faith and faithfulness of the believer.

With these layers visible, the debate’s movement becomes easier to recognize. Both participants move between them throughout the conversation, rarely acknowledging the different layers. As a result, cultural and political forms of Christian influence can appear meaningfully different when they actually share the same logic of Christian nationalism.

The layered structure of the debate becomes especially visible in the argument advanced by Ramirez. What begins as a discussion of Christian community and cooperation between church and state gradually develops into a vision of how Christianity should order the public life of a society.

Ramirez’s Argument: A Lutheran Christendom?

For Ramirez, Christian nationalism is best understood not primarily as a political ideology but as the aspiration that a community’s public life be shaped by Christianity. He repeatedly frames the issue not as a confusion of church and state but as a proper cooperation between them. In this framing, the question is not whether Christianity should shape public life but how that influence ought to take place.

Central to this framing is Ramirez’s repeated use of the word community, which does significant rhetorical work in the debate. By speaking about “community,” Ramirez is able to sound less radical than his argument actually is. A community can sound like a group of people living together in shared life. Yet as the conversation continues, Ramirez clarifies that by community, he means a town, a country, a nation, etc. The term quietly expands from describing a social group to describing the body politic itself, which implies that Christianity should shape the public order of a political society.

This perspective reveals that the language of “community” also reveals the hierarchical structure assumed by the argument. If a political community is defined by Christian identity, then those who do not share that identity necessarily stand in a different relationship to the public order. They remain within the society, but they are governed by norms defined by the Christian majority. The rhetoric of community softens this reality, but it does not remove it.

Ramirez is quite open about the implications of this position. At one point, he describes it as a “necessary risk to want for and work toward a Christian community on whatever level you’re talking about.” For him, Christians should not retreat from seeking a social order informed by their faith. In fact, he expresses appreciation that the current debate over Christian nationalism forces Christians to move beyond the older argument between cooperation and total separation of church and state. He appreciates this because the question of the public is no longer whether Christianity and civil authority will interact, but how that interaction should be structured.

This posture becomes clearer when Ramirez briefly appeals to academic scholarship. He references a Cambridge article in the journal Politics and Religion titled “The Varieties of American Christian Nationalism.” The article argues that Christian nationalism does not appear in a single ideological form but rather in several distinct theological streams, including charismatic dominionist nationalism, Catholic integralism, and emerging Reformed or Calvinist versions that argue for an explicitly Christian political order. In the debate, Ramirez repeatedly invokes and alludes to the article as evidence that the discussion has been misframed. If there are multiple forms of Christian nationalism, the real task becomes distinguishing which forms are legitimate.

All of this leads to Ramirez’s argument. The central question for him is not whether Christian nationalism should exist, but what form it should take. In his telling, the real task is to imagine how a distinctly Lutheran form of Christian nationalism, rather than Baptist or Catholic nationalism, should shape public life.

The Logic of Ramirez’s Lutheran Christendom

Ramirez’s argument follows a recognizable line of reasoning. Step by step, Ramirez moves from a critique of pluralism to the conclusion that societies inevitably come to be ordered by a dominant moral vision and that Lutheran Christianity should provide that ordering.

As the debate unfolds, Ramirez repeatedly argues that pluralism cannot last. Societies cannot remain divided among competing commitments. So, he confidently states, “Pluralism is inherently unstable and is not going to last… a pluralistic society like most western countries where there are vast differences between religion, political philosophical systems, morality, ethnic groups, all of that kind of stuff… that’s inherently destabilizing, and they are eventually going to become more homogeneous by necessity. So, it’s going to happen.”⁵ Here, Ramirez suggests that a homogeneous vision for society inevitably emerges and begins to shape public life.

Ramirez makes no attempt to validate this assumption other than anecdotal bias. In fact, he uncritically merges two assumptions that are worth questioning. Ramirez argues that collapse is inevitable (1) and that the destabilization that causes such collapse results from pluralism (2). I urge the reader to consider whether either of these assumptions is true. Does research suggest that pluralism ultimately leads to collapse? Is there no way a plural society can remain stable? If you decide the answer is no, then we must ask whether pluralism itself produces instability or whether instability is instead generated by movements that resist pluralism and attempt to impose a single vision upon society.

But, Ramirez must let these assumptions stand because they lead directly to his next claim: if homogeneity is unavoidable, then the real question is no longer whether a society will be shaped by a dominant moral vision but which vision will ultimately prevail. Ramirez states the point bluntly: “It’s going to happen. We might as well have it be our way.”

At this point, Ramirez turns to historical Christendom to illustrate what such an ordering might look like. These examples function as precedents meant to show that rulers have long understood themselves to possess responsibilities before God for maintaining Christian order within a context of pluralistic possibilities.

One example raised in the discussion is the emperor Theodosius banning certain practices in the Roman Empire. In Ramirez’s telling, such actions demonstrate how civil authorities historically acted to preserve Christian order within society. Practices such as public blasphemy or false preaching are portrayed as more than private errors; they are understood to threaten the well-being of society itself. And, if such practices are tolerated, they risk provoking divine judgment and disrupting the moral and spiritual order of society. From his perspective, the ruler’s responsibility before God includes restraining those practices that endanger society’s relationship to God. As such, this is not merely a historical curiosity but evidence that civil rulers once understood it to be part of their vocation to defend Christian truth and suppress what were believed to be destabilizing alternatives.

Together, the logic of the argument becomes clear. If pluralism is inherently unstable, then societies will inevitably consolidate around a dominant moral vision. If such consolidation is unavoidable, the real question is whose vision will shape that order. In Ramirez’s telling, historical Christendom provides evidence that rulers have previously understood their vocation as defending and maintaining a Christian public order.

To be fair, Ramirez does not deny that Christendom produced abuses. Hypocrisy, coercion, and injustice occurred within these arrangements. Yet he ultimately concludes that these failures do not invalidate the project. Even with its dangers, Ramirez concludes, Christendom remains closer to the ideal than the available alternatives.

In the end, Ramirez’s argument moves from a sociological claim about the instability of pluralism to a normative claim about political order: if societies inevitably consolidate around a dominant moral vision, then the task for Christians is not to resist that consolidation but to ensure that it takes a properly Lutheran form. This is Lutheran nationalism.

This reveals that Rameriz’s argument carries a deep theological assumption. Beneath the claim that societies inevitably consolidate around a dominant vision lies the logic of a theology of glory, which looks for God’s work in strength, stability, and dominance rather than in the hidden and cruciform work of God among weakness and foolishness. Lutherans ought to be wary of such theologies.

1. https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2022/10/understanding-white-christian-nationalism

2. https://glasscityhumanist.show/2024/an-introduction-to-white-christian-nationalism/

3. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-is-christian-nationalism-and-why-it-raises-concerns-about-threats-to-democracy

4. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-2qh08f6J6zj-TXZjqKTemPtSfLx5tku/view

5. All quotes from the debate are pulled from the transcript of the YouTube video linked in this article.