Kingdom Separation
Church officers serve a different prince
By Brad Isbell
If we grant that there cannot be absolute separation (in every way) of church and state, we must admit that an ethnic emphasis in one realm will affect the other realm. As Machen noted, one is voluntary and the other is involuntary; one is spiritual, and the other is earthly. Per Machen, there is an important:
“…difference between involuntary and voluntary organizations. Involuntary organizations ought to be tolerant, but voluntary organizations, so far as the fundamental purpose of their existence is concerned, must be intolerant or else cease to exist. The state is an involuntary organization; a man is forced to be a member of it whether he will or no. It is therefore an interference with liberty for the state to prescribe any one type of opinion or any one type of education for its citizens. But within the state,individual citizens who desire to unite for some special purpose should be permitted to do so. Especially in the sphere of religion, such permission of individuals to unite is one of the rights which lie at the very foundation of our civil and religious liberty. The state does not scrutinize the rightness or wrongness of the religious purpose for which such voluntary religious associations are formed--if it did undertake such scrutiny all religious liberty would be gone--but it merely protects the right of individuals to unite for any religious purpose which they may choose. (C&L chapter 7)
This is why churches can require more of their members than an earthly government can. Church officers must be cognizant of racial and ethnonationalist views among their congregation that may cause division and erect needless barriers. Thoughtcrime cannot be prosecuted, but—to use a polity phrase—those who "industriously spread" divisive views should be warned.
It’s also why church officers must be careful with politics in general and ethnonationalism in particular, since they serve a different "prince" and a heavenly kingdom which is not national. The “houses” of God find themselves within nations, but cannot be of nations.1 The churches are to be places of preparation and refreshing, not strife or division.
Is there no refuge from strife? Is there no place of refreshing where a man can prepare for the battle of life? Is there no place where two or three can gather in Jesus' name, to forget for the moment all those things that divide nation from nation and race from race, to forget human pride, to forget the passions of war, to forget the puzzling problems of industrial strife, and to unite in overflowing gratitude at the foot of the Cross? If there be such a place, then that is the house of God and that the gate of heaven. And from under the threshold of that house will go forth a river that will revive the weary world.
(C&L, chapter 7, last paragraph)
One thing we hear very little about from ethnonationalist Christians is concern for missions. The world, including all nations, must remain the concern of the Reformed churches. Machen (pictured below) in the 1930s saw much of one part of the world—Europe—from the Alpine peaks he scaled. And he was concerned about the rise of fascism and the coming loss of life and freedom (religious and otherwise) in those lands. 2025 is not 1935,2 but there are valuable lessons to be learned from our relatively recent past.
There’s a reason, for instance, why it’s the Presbyterian Church in America rather than of America.
In 1935 Machen said, “…all over the world these elemental forces of evil are mightily at work, these forces that have given us Stalin and Mussolini and Hitler…”