Presbyterian Polity: Ordered Liberty After the Protestant Public Square
Published July 7, 2026
Reflections on Christian Nationalism, Protestant Institutionalism, and the Church’s Limits
This article is not intended to replace, summarize, or correct the PCA’s ongoing study of Christian Nationalism. That work deserves careful attention on its own terms, especially because it addresses constitutional and confessional questions for Presbyterian officers and courts. My purpose here is more modest. I am trying to tie together some observations that came to mind after listening to Michael Horton’s recent conversation with Miles Smith and Darryl Hart on the question, “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?”That conversation helped clarify something I have been trying to articulate in our current debates about Christian Nationalism, the civil magistrate, the American revision of the Westminster Standards, and the meaning of political liberty. My comments here are not offered as the definitive way Christians must view the state. They are simply my own attempt to think confessionally, historically, and prudentially about the world we actually inhabit.
The difficulty, as I see it, is not merely that Protestant views no longer dominate the public square. It is also that the very structures of local community have weakened so dramatically that the church is often expected to replace what has disappeared. The church is now pressured to become the local community, the family substitute, the public square, the political refuge, the counseling center, the civic association, the moral academy, and, at times, the policy voice for the state. That creates a real burden on the church and a real confusion about the church’s institutional mission.
The church must speak to rulers, citizens, families, and nations. She must teach the whole counsel of God. But the church is not the state, and she is not a substitute civil order. She has her own officers, ordinances, mission, and spiritual authority. The question, then, is how the church can teach the moral claims of Christ upon public life without confusing her spiritual mission with the work of the civil magistrate.
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