Here I was, enjoying my day (as us extremist Christ-followers do) and I came across this tweet from Kristin Du Mez, a professor of history down the road from me at Calvin University in Michigan (you know, the one supposedly named after that "Christ is supreme" guy John Calvin):
Yes, she's talking about Speaker Mike Johnson, who actually does Christian things with his Christian beliefs instead of the hellbent "piety" American Christians have fallen into that makes a show out of making faith "private and personal," as if such an oxymoron could exist.
Here is a recap on why Johnson is a scary "Christian nationalist":
This professor at a Christian university thinks living out your faith in your job (you know, working to have God's will done on earth as it is in heaven... that kind of extreme stuff) is "supremacy." She uses the term as if God is up in heaven shaking His head at the thought of us working to make our nation look more like Him.
Well, I'm here to tell her: Christ is supreme.
- Kristin, as a history (and gender) professor, would you kindly look back the last few thousand years and point to anywhere in the Islamic world where democracy, a bill of rights, constitutional law, and liberty to speak, worship, and petition the government has formed organically?
- What about in Asia? Certainly the Hindus and the Buddhists created some system - at least one? - that involves inherent natural rights, the equality of all people, the idea of loving one's neighbor, multiethnic harmony, etc.
- What about Africa? The natives of America? Surely they respected religious liberty, right?
Now, what about that thing we used to call Christendom? What has it produced?
The very reason Kristin can criticize people who would dare do Christian things to honor the King of kings and Lord of lords, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end is because she lives in a society that is the result of thousands of years of "Christian supremacy."
Let me go over here to my handy NET Bible and OH LOOK AT THIS HEADER:
I wonder what's in those verses that might have inspired such a header by the translators...
All things in heaven and on earth were created in him — all things, whether visible or invisible, whether thrones or dominions, whether principalities or powers — all things were created through him and for him.
He himself is before all things and all things are held together in him.
Idaho rascal Doug Wilson had a great podcast this week discussing this very issue, although he was responding to Pastor Owen Strachan.
Too many American Christians are like Obi-Wan Kenobi, out here talking about their love for diversity, the Constitution, and duh-macracy, and they treat anyone who doesn't put such things on a pedestal beside Christ as if they are Darth Vader incarnate.
Pastor Wilson made an astute observation about such people: They are like a person who say they love peaches, but hate the leaves, branches, roots, and soil that produced the peach.
We curmudgeonly Christian theonomists like democratic principles, the republic, the Bill of Rights, equality, separation of powers, religious liberty, and due process. Why? Because it was created by Christian theonomists.
Quote from Wilson:
You cannot consistently believe in the Constitution unless you also believe in the type of society that produced it. And the kind of society that produced it was a Christian one.
Christians are in the Christ business of transforming the world, including every system of governance and authority, in accordance with the Great Commission command from Christ Himself to make disciples of the nations and the promise that every knee will bow before Christ at the end of days.
But the squishy types who like to dabble in demonic deception have kept us in the "liberty without morality" framework of secular pluralism for decades. That isn't Christianity. Call it what you will, but it has nothing to do with Christ.
How do eternal critics like Kristin Du Mez respond to this supremacy of Christ and Christendom?
Why, by calling everyone who lives out their faith a racist, of course!
Here's that Doug Wilson podcast for ya:
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
