This, as Tim points out, is going to catch a lot of British pastors unawares. Most of us are not comfortable with political theology, let alone adept at it. We may occasionally address political issues - especially when they relate to the Ten Commandments (life, marriage, etc) - but we are mostly untrained in political thought and unused to political conflicts within our congregations. In a world where political discourse operates symbolically more than logically, and online more than in person, this may prove tricky. “When everything is symbolic, but we don’t share the same key to understanding the world, reading other people’s behaviour becomes difficult,” Tim explains. “When the keys we are given to the world through a variety of media that are themselves fractured and polarising, we are inclined to read those who are different to us in the worst possible light.” We are indeed.

So one thing we need to get clear on is what we actually mean by the term “Christian Nationalism.” Tim argues that it could (and sometimes does) refer to any of at least fifteen different things, ranging from the self-evidently good to the totally unacceptable. Six of them, it seems to me, are biblical-theological in nature, differing over the extent to which we should expect to see God’s ways taught, lived out or even legislated for in the current age. They form a kind of spectrum, ranging from innocuous, kingdom-not-yet amillennialism to muscular, kingdom-now postmillennialism:

1) Christians who think that God’s word contains wisdom for running a nation
2) Christians who think that churches should be able to preach God’s wisdom for the nation to the nation
3) Those who think it’s appropriate to consider what the political theology of a Christian nation would look like, though they might expect this to be brought into being through conversion or revival
4) Those who want a “Christian nation” to be formed (presumably, whether its citizens have converted or not)
5) Those who want “Christendom” back
6) Theonomists, who think a nation’s laws should look like the Bible’s law code

Another six are practical-political in nature, differing over the extent to which “nations” - cohesive, self-governing and usually ethnically related groups with shared history, that are larger than a tribe and smaller than an empire - are natural, biblical, beneficial and in need of defending from globalist mush. (The remaining three, as I read them, are essentially common misunderstandings of the term.) Again, these six form a spectrum, with patriots at one end and downright racists at the other:

A) Those who are patriotic and love their nation and are Christians
B) Nationalists, in the broad sense of ‘anti-empire,’ who are Christians
C) Nationalists in the much tighter, protectionist sense, who are Christians
D) Those who are democratic post-liberals (or ecclesiocentric ones)
E) Those who are anti-democratic post-liberals
F) People who think a Christian nation means a white nation of ‘Anglo-Saxons’

Needless to say, most people (though not all) who think of Christian Nationalism in terms of 1A will probably be favourable towards it. Most people (though not all) who think of it in terms of 6F will probably be hostile towards it. And those of us who do not make any of these distinctions, and use the “Christian Nationalist” label indiscriminately of G. K. Chesterton, Viktor Orban, Danny Kruger, apartheid South Africa, Charlie Kirk, T. S. Eliot, Vladimir Putin, C. S. Lewis, Queen Elizabeth II and the KKK, will find ourselves either baffled or enraged (or both) by what is coming.

More to follow, I suspect.