Déjà Vu
Stephen Allred January/February 2026The enduring allure of a Christian nation.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a group of American Christians, calling themselves the National Reform Association, grew into a powerful lobby. Many of the NRA’s members had been abolitionists, and now that the Civil War had resolved the issue of slavery, their goal was to finish the job of reforming America. The NRA correctly understood that the United States had not been founded as a Christian nation, with one of their leaders later lamenting that “our Constitution and government has this Godless, Christless character by the design and purpose of its founders.” However, the NRA was determined to change that. In A Manual of Christian Civil Government the NRA laid out its rationale for seeking several amendments to the Constitution of the United States, including one that would acknowledge “the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler of nations and . . . his revealed will as the supreme standard to decide moral issues in national life, and thus indicate that this is a Christian nation, and place all the Christian laws, institutions, and usages of the government on an undeniably legal basis in the fundamental law of the land.” The NRA also promoted the teaching of religion in public schools and a national Sunday rest law.
Members of the NRA saw society drifting more and more toward godlessness and sin and felt that something had to be done. “There are certain evils and certain signs of coming evil which give us anxiety,” NRA vice president Jonathan Edwards noted. “These evils and evil omens we trace back to an omission in the Constitution, and it is evident that if this omission be supplied the evils will be averted.” Many of the NRA leaders viewed public policy through the lens of Reformed covenant theology, seeing God’s promises to the theocracy of ancient Israel as applicable to modern nations. They argued that Jesus Christ Himself wished to reign directly as king over America’s government.
“My Kingdom Is Not of This World”
As the NRA was gaining influence with national lawmakers, Ellen G. White, a founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, warned against their goals. “The National Reform movement, exercising the power of religious legislation, will, when fully developed, manifest the same intolerance and oppression that have prevailed in past ages. Human councils then assumed the prerogatives of Deity, crushing under their despotic power liberty of conscience; and imprisonment, exile, and death followed for those who opposed their dictates.”
White wrote of those who “are working for the establishment of the kingdom of Christ as an earthly and temporal dominion. They desire to make our Lord the ruler of the kingdoms of this world, the ruler in its courts and camps, its legislative halls, its palaces and market places. They expect Him to rule through legal enactments, enforced by human authority.”
White and other early Adventist writers pointed out, however, that Jesus never attempted to sit as king on any earthly throne. Instead, He had refused the devil’s offer of rulership over “all the kingdoms of the world” (Luke 4:5), declaring to Pilate that His kingdom was not of this world (John 18:36). Jesus never raised an army to take back Jerusalem from the Romans. To the contrary, He told His servants to put away the sword instead of fighting to advance His kingdom (Matthew 26:52; John 18:36). By teaching to “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (Mark 12:17, NIV), Jesus showed that His kingdom was not just another political entity, but a kingdom of an entirely different order. Furthermore, Jesus had forbidden His disciples to destroy the Samaritans who rejected Him, showing that Christians are never justified in using force in matters of faith (Luke 9:54-56). Besides, if God is love, religious devotion cannot be coerced, because “when religion becomes an affair of law, it ceases to be a matter of love.”
When History Repeats
The NRA’s ideas never completely died out. In fact, one could argue that they are having a renaissance in the form of different Christian nationalist movements today. Many present-day Christians share the same concerns that animated the NRA more than a century ago. They are concerned about moral decline in society, by the confusion around traditional sexual values, and they fear a secularism that is often hostile toward these traditional values. In many ways their proposed solutions look a lot like those promoted by the NRA more than a century ago: politicians promising to put God back in government; posting of the Ten Commandments on public schoolroom walls; government-led prayer and Bible reading in public schools; and Sunday rest laws. The idea seems to be that if our government simply acknowledges God and uses the power of law to promote religion, He will be happy, and all will be well.
Yet Jesus and the prophets consistently rebuked performative public religion by the religionists of their day. “Everything they do is done for people to see” (Matthew 23:5, NIV). Instead, they taught that the public manifestation of true religion was about serving widows and orphans and doing justice in society. “Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps,” God said (Amos 5:23, NIV). “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (verse 24, NIV; see also James 1:27).
God’s rebuke of performative religion gets to the heart of this issue. When the church imposes public religion as a response to societal injustice, it’s an indication that the church is morally bankrupt. Why? Because it exposes a church that cares more about the forms of religion than the suffering of humanity. And a church that needs the power of government to impose her religion is a church that has lost the power of love and the Spirit of God.
Instead, we as Christians should be the first to live out our faith in acts of justice and mercy in society. But we can never be justified in using the law to impose our religion on others. Unlike religion, which has to do with worship of a deity, societal justice is concerned with how people treat each other. Societal justice promotes values that can be shared by religious and nonreligious people alike. This was the position of Ellen White and other early Adventists, who were strong advocates of societal justice in such areas as the abolition of slavery and prohibition. They agreed that Christians should vote their social values, but they saw the NRA’s goals to Christianize the American government as fundamentally wrong.
How then do we go about influencing the world to be a better place? First, on a political level we advocate for freedom in matters of faith for all people, religious or nonreligious. We should use only persuasion and never coercion in matters of faith or religion. As Christians, we then use that freedom to proclaim the good news and love all people—even our enemies. Which leads to our second point.
In matters of social injustice, we stand up for the oppressed. We do justice and love mercy. We advocate for good and just laws to protect poor individuals, orphans, strangers, and widows (see, for example, Isaiah 58). And we recognize that government may legitimately exercise force to protect the oppressed, but that it may never legitimately use force in matters of faith.
Article Author: Stephen Allred
Stephen N. Allred writes from Yuba City, California.