Stephen Wolfe’s Case for a Protestant Byzantium

Political theorist Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism is a wide-ranging work that traces a number of important historical and theological themes associated with the marked absence of God in contemporary American public life. He outlines the French revolutionary articulation of secularism, where any political implications of God and his will for man must be set aside. Wolfe opposes the notion that there is a high and impregnable wall between church and state whereby the government must be indifferent to the public role of religion. Contra this secular theory of the state, Wolfe draws on the writing of theologians like Johannes Althusius, Richard Baxter and Samuel Rutherford, endeavoring to set forth a Reformed Christian theory of politics, favoring the idea of a renewed Christian commonwealth. Interestingly, Wolfe essentially finds himself arguing for what amounts to a quasi-Byzantine approach to church-state relations.