The Failure Of The Antioch Declaration



Published December 3, 2024

There once was a man who was apparently healthy who nevertheless carried within himself a fatal disease. Remarkably, he did not feel the effects of the disease yet wherever he went he carried and spread it to others. We will call him Typhoid Larry. Wherever he went he left behind a trail of death and destruction. When someone dared to mention the correlation between his presence and the spread of the disease he was offended and even wrote a public letter to denounce the disease and to distance himself from it. The community, of which he was a prominent member, was split with some siding with Larry, who his friends promised was a good and gracious man who would never spread a disease. His detractors, however, were unpersuaded since they could not help but notice that wherever Larry went, the disease went after him.

In our parable, Larry is the Christian Nationalist movement and the disease is racism. By Christian Nationalism we mean that movement that, according to James Silberman, Dusty Deevers, William Wolfe, Joel Webbon, Jeff Wright, and Cory Anderson,

is a set of governing principles rooted in Scripture’s teaching that Christ rules as supreme Lord and King of all creation, who has ordained civil magistrates with delegated authority to be under Him, over the people, to order their ordained jurisdiction by punishing evil and promoting good for His own glory and the common good of the nation (Isaiah 9:6-7; John 1:1-3; 3:35; 17:2; Ephesians 1:20-21; Philippians 2:9-11; Colossians 1:15-18; Romans 13:1-4; 1 Peter 2:14; Deuteronomy 6:5, Matthew 22:37-39).1

When these Christian Nationalists speak about “nations” they refer to “a particular people are necessarily bound together by a shared culture, customs, history, and lineage while sharing common interests, virtues, languages, and worship.”2 They have adopted a view of the state that has echoes of the Covenanter position that demands that the civil magistrate recognize the “crown rights of King Jesus” by acknowledging, as these proponents of Christian Nationalism say, Christ’s “mediatorial rule” by acknowledging his rule “by his Spirit and Word through the saints in their earthly authority.”3 They also echo the language of Roman Catholic integralists and neo-Kuyperians when they inveigh against “any attempt to segregate sacred aspects of life, where God’s Word is authoritative, and supposedly secular aspects of life, where the Christian must operate by a standard other than God’s Word.”4

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