“Top-Down Christianity”: Critics of Christian Nationalism Have Spent Decades Compromising to Woo the Elite

Have you noticed that many who accuse “Christian Nationalists” of compromising the Gospel by allegedly trying to “enforce Christianity from the top down” have spent the past few decades attempting to charm the top through compromise?

We’ve all seen it. Rather than deriving their concept of “justice” from the Bible, many of these sorts align their sermons, articles, and messaging with the political talking points of the Progressive, Marxist establishment, portraying them as the only loving, just, and Christian option.

Whether it’s open borders, Black Lives Matter, Covid-hysteria, Climate Change, or Critical Race Theory, the establishment’s Marxist ideologies have long been cloaked in Christian euphemisms to make them more palatable for the people in the pews.

As a result, countless believers end up complying with and endorsing establishment propaganda while being wholeheartedly convinced they’re “loving their neighbour” by doing what their leadership assures them Jesus would do.

But despite what our modern-day Marcionites might suggest, we don’t need to speculate about “What Would Jesus Do.” We have access to the exact standard of “justice” that Jesus lived by. According to Jesus, the two greatest commandments that all Christians are expected to live by are (1) to love God, and (2) to love your neighbour as yourself.

And thankfully, we’re not left at the mercy of our leadership to dictate what this love looks like. Jesus said these two commandments to “love” are simply a summary of all the Law and the Prophets (Matt. 22:40). If you want to know what “love” looks like, turn to the first five books of the Bible—literally, any of the commandments (Rom. 13:9). You know, those “archaic” texts that make our “respectables” blush before the God-hating, unjust world.

It’s precisely for this reason that so many unfortunates in leadership have spent decades attempting to “unhitch” the Old Testament from the New. God is love (1 Jn. 4:8), but these sorts don’t want to permit God to define what love looks like. They’d much rather craft a god in their own image, or rather, in the image of the elites whose approval they so desperately crave.

They don’t esteem what Paul called “holy, righteous, and good” (Rom. 7:12). Instead, they’re embarrassed by it because it violently contradicts what the establishment has deemed “socially acceptable.”

To justify this, they’ll often pit God’s Law against the Gospel, as though the opposite of law is grace, and not lawlessness. They don’t want you to look to God’s moral standard for your measure of justice, lest you discover that what they’re peddling is too often the exact opposite of what God deems loving and just.

In their efforts to gain cultural and political influence, these sorts have traded biblical truth for the approval of the establishment. This is the definition of striving for top-down power.

By distorting God’s Law and cloaking Marxist ideologies in Christian rhetoric, they’ve led countless believers astray, convincing them that compromise, or “nuance,” as they like to call it, emerges from genuine Christian conviction.

But true justice doesn’t kowtow to political trends. It’s fixed on God’s unchanging standard. So, while these sorts claim to be championing justice, they’re doing nothing more than eroding the very foundations of it.