I want to be as sure as possible that nobody gets the wrong idea about what I advocate, and what being a Christian Nationalist means to me in practice....  but I really wish I had someone like-minded to talk me through some of this and help me flesh out these ideas... Some of this gets really complicated, and I have to walk my mind through from scratch to my conclusions over and over in order that I don't forget why I believe these things.

In this post, I'm going to walk through one such train-of-thought. This is, real-time, me confusing myself and then reminding myself about why I believe what I believe.

When I talk about Biblical civil laws and their penalties, I recognize that in large part, for any person or group in America to enforce those penalties would be to violate U.S. Law.

The question is not whether we ought to have a Christian government with laws that directly conform with scripture. By any imminent definition of "ought", we ought to. In fact, we are in an awkward position because there is no such Christian government on earth. There is no civil authority to execute justice justly.

As I've written before, we do have the church government, which is structurally similar (if not identical in some churches) to the Biblical civil government, and in many ways the church government is functionally identical to the system of judges in the OT. However, consider this: as I've established in prior posts, we are not to file lawsuits against our brothers and sisters in Christ according to the normal civil means. However, no such injunction exists for the "foreigner" (with respect to covenant Israel, the foreigner is the nonbeliever), and the law says multiple times, "you shall have the same law for the foreigner as for the native born" (Exodus 12:49; Leviticus 19:34, 24:22; Numbers 15:29; Deuteronomy 10:19).

We have so carefully impressed in our minds a difference between the role of church and the role of state. This difference is indeed Biblical inasmuch as the judicial government in Scripture was distinguished from the priesthood. But what does it mean, then, that the priesthood is fulfilled in Christ? Biblically speaking, what is the church if not the full body of believing people, physically indistinguishable from the people themselves? And if that is the case, can a government be anything if not composed of people? Doesn't it mean that the NT "church" is not the "priesthood" in that sense, and so the distinction is moot in the New Covenant?

Suppose we decide that the church government is suddenly the in-force civil government for Christians. Wouldn't the consequence be that we thereafter go to the church for civil issues regarding the foreigners living among us? After all, if Jesus is King over earth right now, (and he is, Matthew 28:18), then it is not us who live as foreigners among them, in their land, but they who live among us, in Christ's land. And then what? Penalize ignorant strangers for crimes against God's law according to God's civil penalties, and thereby start a war with the secular government of the land we're living in? No way! We would make ourselves seem no better than radical Muslims!

No, the NT church in the days of the apostles was surrounded by Roman lawlessness, and they conducted no such violent action in the name of justice -- neither should we. Thus, there is something seriously and dangerously wrong with the above chain of reasoning.

Why didn't the apostles immediately establish a community executing just laws? It's because they had a higher priority task, as do we. They were sent to make disciples of all nations, teaching and baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Given the injunction to not file civil suit against your brother in Christ, how could they even practice such a government among Christians alone?

So we suppose that working to establish an independent or sovereign state with its own civil system in the midst of a secular nation is not high enough on the Christian priority list to fight for it. However, given the option to establish either a just law or an unjust law, we are compelled to choose the just in accordance with God's statutes. And, given the option to formulate our own system of government, we may only choose the best, which is God's government.

What then do we make of the commandment to rescue those going to slaughter? And when do zealous, active forms of civil disobedience become justified?

Guys, I have no idea.  For lack of an independent and sovereign Christian Nation, I don't see true justice succeeding in the law of the land. Only, I'm talking to an empty room! There's nobody else like me as far as I can tell! Even apologia now seeks rather to "restore america to the Constitution" somehow as if that is similar to restoring America to the Bible directly. And even if I had a following, there's no available land in the world! Where can we establish ourselves? Antarctica? I'm certain God would bless his faithful with abundance even there... but the means by which such a Christian nation would be established are so overwhelmingly wild in my mind, and my heart so discouraged by the apparent lack of people interested in God's standards of justice, that I struggle to see how any such place could come into existence.

Wait wait wait... let's examine that commandment given to the apostles again: "Go and make disciples of all nations." What if the progress of the Christian church is not just to make disciples of groups of people, but to take secular nations and establish such a large group of believers there that they conform to God's law because of the people's desire to submit to God? After all, any true believer will acknowledge that God is just, and so isn't it natural that Christians will love God's law and seek to conform our civil laws to its statutes?

The conclusion is, in fact, that we are already at war with the rulers and authorities -- the government -- of the land we live in, but it isn't a war with flesh and blood, and we fight not with weapons of this world. On the contrary, our weapons have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. And we will be ready to punish every act of disobedience, once our obedience is complete. (Ephesians 6:10-16; 2 Corinthians 10:4-6)

That path to achieving civil justice feels much further out of my reach, because my life is surely too short to see so many people converted and a nation become established in that way... it's much more easy to imagine the Christian Nation coming into existence slowly.

Then again, in scripture we regularly see God accomplishing the impossible by means of the unexpected:
God promises to make Abraham a great nation, and fulfills it by giving him a single son in his old age; God saves many nations by making an imprisoned slave into a king overnight; God rescues a trapped Israel by putting a tornado of fire behind them and parting the sea in front of them; God brings down the high court of the philistines by strengthening a slave whose eyes had been gouged out; God saves exiled Israel from genocide by revealing that the queen of Persia herself came from Israel; God brings the Messiah into a cursed royal bloodline by means of a virgin birth;

God infuriates all Israel by healing their sick; God wins the battle by dying; God proves his ultimate supremacy by simply being alive.

Perhaps God will establish justice in our land during my lifetime.... How I hope and long for it.

"Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven."