Put not your trust in princes

The media worry over so-called “Christian nationalism” continues unabated. The Washington Post recently lamented that Texas is considering legislation regarding prayer, Bible reading, and the posting of the Ten Commandments in schools, calling it Christian nationalism. A transgender legislator in Montana has accused Republicans in Montana of spreading the same.

Parallel to these critics, we find an intense debate over the concept in Christian circles. In one sense, the discussion among believers extends a debate over Christian expectations regarding politics extending back millennia. In another, the discussion reflects particulars of our own time, especially focused on how Christians should respond to trends of secularized hostility to God’s people.

Regardless of how we define Christian nationalism (and there are many definitions), we should be open to thoughtful criticisms about Christians engaging in politics for the wrong purposes and in the wrong way. But we must resist one particular criticism that essentially calls for believers to disengage from meaningful political engagement entirely.

Such calls sometimes ground themselves in cautions that echo the 146th Psalm: “Put not your trust in princes” but instead “Blessed is he … whose hope is in the LORD his God.” Such critics often speak of the choice here as a zero-sum matter. To have serious hopes or expectations regarding human government means to misplace your trust. To hope in God, by contrast, requires viewing politics shorn of real hope, void of any but the most base expectations. Renouncing serious political ambitions, we should focus only on Word, sacrament, and evangelism.

This view is wrong. The choice between political expectation and hope in God is not an absolute antithesis. Belief in this antithesis does not preserve trust in God. It essentially lacks such trust.

How does Scripture speak about human government? Consider two classic New Testament passages on the subject: Romans 13:1-7 and I Peter 2:13-17. Romans 13 clearly states that God establishes all human political rule. Paul twice refers to human rulers as God’s “ministers” or “servants.” God’s ministers or servants, whatever the divinely ordained institution—church, family, or state—carry out a mission from the Lord.

For the state, is this mission non-existent? Or is it merely to showcase human evil and folly that we believers might long for Christ’s return? Not according to Paul or Peter. Neither of these Apostles give such purposes for God’s ordaining of human rulers. Quite the contrary, Paul in his letter to the Romans declares that rulers exist “for your good.” This good, moreover, involves giving approval to what is good and punishing what is evil. Along the same lines, I Peter describes human rulers as sent by God “to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good.”

Does this description mean human rulers always fulfill well their God-decreed purpose? Of course not. Scripture itself freely admits that point, including brutally honest revelations about Israel’s failed monarchs and God’s condemnation of unjust rulers in Psalm 82. But to argue that government can realize little to no justice ever, would be to say that God cannot, or at least does not, accomplish His own purposes through His own established means. Such a posture is itself a kind of unbelief, an unbelief that misreads the Scriptural witness. Even those pictures of unjust rulers assume a divine standard for critique that can be leveled in hope of reform, in expectation that better rule can be achieved.

Thus, part of our trust in God includes a properly understood trust in His ordained institutions. Those institutions clearly include government. That trust clearly entails a hope for, even an expectation that, human rule will pursue justice as God sovereignly defines it.

Human rulers cannot live up to God’s perfect standard due to their own mortality, finitude, and fallibility. Thus, we will not bring heaven to earth in even the best of human governments. Only God will do that in eternity.

But until that day, human governments still can be a means through which God exercises His ultimate rule here and now. Thus, in hoping for good government, we do put our trust in God. We do therefore participate in our political communities, advocating for justice and for truth as God ordains. Let us reject the critics of “Christian nationalism” that call on us to surrender all political expectation. Put not your trust in princes, yes. But do put your trust in God, whose plan for such princes are plans for our good.