The Problem With “Religion”
A review of James Baird’s book "King of Kings," and a meditation on the concepts we use
James Baird’s new book King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government is exactly the sort of volume I appreciate. It is cleanly written, succinct, and analytically clear enough to allow for ready engagement. And I’m largely sympathetic to its driving concern—the relevance of the Christian message for all domains of life, including politics—even if I fundamentally disagree with some aspects of Baird’s formulation.
Indeed, I found King of Kings a fascinating and challenging read precisely because I agree with so much of it. Earlier in my career, I spent several years as a senior political staffer in the U.S. Senate. Many young Christians who find their way to Capitol Hill are passionate about the life of the unborn, about protecting a biblical understanding of marriage and gender, about defending religious liberty, and so on—as I am. But one of the things that surprises many people is how little time Congress spends working on those issues on a day-to-day basis. These all typically get lumped together into a single policy area that’s nicknamed “values issues.” A Senator might have a staff of 40 people, and maybe one of them has the “values portfolio.”
There is something unsettling, even grotesque, about this. Talking about “values” in this way evokes a host of other, rather condescending terms like “faith groups” or “faith perspectives,” which implicitly marginalize the actual truth-value of any Christian claims. The obvious implication is that most of what Congress does is something that “values” have basically no bearing upon. And from a Christian vantage, that’s totally wrong. As Baird recognizes, if Christianity is true, that means its claims necessarily implicate the work of civil government. Contra John Rawls, no account of the public good can stand entirely devoid of theological assumptions. And so the background beliefs that inform policy determinations matter.
Unlike its intellectual forerunner, Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, King of Kings never gets bogged down in complex questions about the phenomenology of nationhood or the morality of violent revolution. Instead, it sets out to defend an elegantly simple thesis: civil government must promote Christianity as the only true religion.[1]
Most of Baird’s readers—if they aren’t already aboard the “Christian Nationalism” train—will likely find that thesis jarring and controversial. By contemporary standards, the claim feels illiberal and obscure, and like a warrant for coercive violence. And so it’s not surprising that virtually all the other reviews I’ve read of Baird’s book replay a series of now-tired fights about the intersection between politics and religion, Protestant and early American history, and so on.
Those will not be the subjects of this review. Rather, my concerns with Baird’s approach are very different—even radically different—than those of most of his critics: namely, I don’t think his analysis goes quite far enough.
* * *
Baird’s book is built around a single straightforward syllogism, which forms the basic architecture of the text that follows:
Premise 1: Government must promote the public good.
Premise 2: As the only true religion, Christianity is part of the public good.
Conclusion: Government must promote Christianity as the only true religion.[2]
To lay readers, this may seem like an unfamiliar or off-putting argument. But on basic Christian premises about reality, it certainly coheres. The first premise simply follows from the nature of government as such—what is government, teleologically speaking, if it’s not aimed at the common good?—from the biblical text, and from the Reformed confessions. The second premise is a logical extension of what it means to actually believe the truth-claims of the Christian faith. If what Christianity teaches is in fact true—a true statement of the universal moral order woven into the fabric of creation—then of course it serves the public good.
How does this cash out in practice? Well, for instance, Christianity teaches that God created human beings male and female. This teaching therefore militates against any law that would allow young people to consent to the mutilation of their bodies via “gender reassignment surgeries.” That mutilation is bad for those who undergo it. Accordingly, one can quite reasonably say that the Christian metaphysics of gender, instantiated in law and custom, serves the embodied good of those who dwell under it. Extending this logic across-the-board, Baird straightforwardly concludes that civil government ought to promote Christianity because it is both true and good.[3]
In Baird’s telling, there’s ample precedent for this approach, even when pursued by political leaders who aren’t especially pious themselves. Baird points to a range of Old Testament monarchs, from David to Nebuchadnezzar to Darius, intervening directly in the religious life of their subjects in order to promote truth and refute error. And the New Testament, as Baird sees it, extends this principle: rendering “to God what is God’s” (Matt. 22:20–22) means that Caesar himself, as God’s human creation, ought to subordinate his power to God’s law.[4]
Does this mean reigniting the great wars of religion? Probably not. Baird clearly shies away from any authoritarian solutions, reasoning that under contemporary conditions, the role of a Christian statesman is primarily to serve as a sort of national moral exemplar. Trying to compel church attendance, under contemporary conditions, would be “foolish.” Instead, such a statesman ought to “encourage the people to go to good, gospel-preaching churches,” and “set a good example by going to a gospel-preaching church every Sunday.” The statesman might also “directly tell his people to go to church” and “give periodical ‘fireside chats’ where he reads Scripture to the people.” While he should ultimately have higher aspirations, these steps discharge the statesman’s “civic duty to promote true religion and display sound wisdom.”[5]
None of this sort of thing, Baird stresses, is particularly novel or unprecedented by historical standards. In the American context, Founding-era understandings of religious liberty left plenty of room for state establishments of religion, and even religious tests for state office. Religious liberty did not entail religious neutrality on the parts of the states or public officials. Indeed, a lively religious culture was central to the Founders’ understanding of the necessary conditions for the thriving of a democratic republic.[6]
Finally, is there any conflict between the exercise of political power and Christian love or charity? Probably not: as Baird explains, there is nothing wrong with the exercise of power informed by love, particularly because the alternative—unwillingness to take our own religious beliefs seriously—is itself profoundly unloving. Shouldn’t all of us be concerned for the eternal good of our neighbors? As Baird nicely puts it, Jesus “requires us to seek the public good—and there’s nothing better for the public than the Good News about him.”[7]
* * *
King of Kings gets a fundamental point right: the dividing line between theological commitments and political implications cannot be neatly drawn. God, as the True, is also the Good. In the face of modern efforts to marginalize Christianity in the public square, by claiming it has no relevance for the day-to-day realities of civic life, Baird offers a sharply clarifying rejoinder.
This is a very salutary goal. And that makes it all the more unfortunate that, despite its good intentions, King of Kingsends up reinforcing the very modern dualisms it seeks to critique. Put differently, my difficulty with King of Kings has little to do with its expansive understanding of the scope of Christian commitments. The actual problem is the book’s pervasive retrojection of a decidedly modern concept of “religion,” which necessarily subverts the book’s own central thesis. This claim, however, requires some unpacking.
We all know that “religion” is a familiar term, and we treat it as a sort of cultural universal. In everyday speech, we often refer to some set of belief systems that we call “world religions,” such as Christianity, Taoism, Sikhism, and others. But like so many other concepts, the term “religion” itself has a fraught and contested history, which embeds a set of assumptions about the nature of the underlying phenomenon in question—specifically, early modern assumptions that diverge from older Christian understandings.[8]
The English term “religion,” or the Latin religio, originally derives from the Latin verb religare, or “to bind again” (as in “ligation”). The noun religio, in the classical sense, was not conceived as a specific set of beliefs or propositional truth-claims among others. Rather, it was a sort of virtue or characteristic: one who is “religious” has the property of holding fast, or fidelity. That is why the term “religious life,” in the Middle Ages, was not a descriptor of one’s personal theological conviction. Rather, it referred to those who had bound themselves to a particular monastic or lay rule of life.[9] In other words, almost everyone was Christian, but the phrase “the religious” referred to those who’d adopted a particular set of intense devotional practices.
On this older paradigm, individuals exemplifying the virtue of religio were those capable of seeing God as “what He is, namely the summit of all goodness, the truth of things, the light by which the mind operates” and so choosing to “sedulously revere Him in act, in goodness, in truthfulness of speech, in clarity of mind, in love,” as Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes.[10] On this view, crucially, religion was not something other than natural; rather, it was a particular disposition toward the apex or limit condition of reality itself. “Since philosophia is the love and pursuit of truth and wisdom, and since truth and wisdom are, precisely, God, it follows that true philosophia and true religio are identical.”[11]
This has important implications for Baird’s syllogism: when the relationship between domains of knowledge is conceived in this way, it would simply make no sense to speak of “religion” as “part of the public good” as Baird does in his second premise. “Religion” is not a discrete and specifiable set of commitments or practices, having to do with the obtaining of some “heavenly good” that is largely separated from the business of everyday life.[12] “Religion” was, rather, an attitude toward “the common good of the whole universe which is God himself.”[13] The virtue of religion could be exemplified in politics, in philosophy, in what came to be called natural science, and every other field.
But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the meaning of “religion” began to change. The term came, as Cantwell Smith emphasizes, “to designate now that in which [interlocutors] were increasingly interested, namely the intellectual construct, presently the various intellectual constructs, systematic and abstract, that were to be elaborated in the religious realm.”[14] That is to say: religion became a name for “the system, first in general but increasingly to the system of ideas, in which men of faith were involved or with which men of potential faith were confronted.”[15] Just as a “system” in this sense, historian Tomoko Masuzawa argues, “religion” began to be deployed as a universal Western category capable of encompassing and “explaining” Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and the hitherto-unknown Buddhist tradition. It became “an effective means of differentiating, variegating, consolidating and totalizing a large portion of the social, cultural, and political practices observable among the inhabitants of regions elsewhere in the world.”[16]
Put bluntly, thinking of “religion” in terms of a discrete system or set of propositional claims, rather than a quality or virtue more like piety, was extraordinarily useful to national leaders seeking to strengthen their regimes in the face of external political pressures. “Religion,” understood as a zone of commitment to a particular set of supernatural beliefs rather than as a pervasive orientation toward the divine in all of life, could be increasingly pushed into the realm of private belief and separated from the actual business of governance on military and economic matters. As Talal Asad notes, “the attempt to allocate ‘religion’ or its surrogate to its own private sphere, defined and policed by the law, was also an attempt to clear a space within the state for modern ethics”[17]—meaning that now, a leader might in theory hold the “right” religious beliefs, while ordering brutal or murderous actions justified according to political expediency. Within this new horizon, treating “religion” as part of the public good implies that there are lots of other “parts of the public good” where “religion”—that is, anything specifically drawn from Christian theology—shouldn’t bother trying to stick its nose.
Now, this is a total inversion of what I take to be Baird’s agenda—working out Christian commitments, which are true and good, within civil government. But over and over again, Baird deploys a concept of “religion” that unintentionally concedes the critical ground. “[T]he core of religion,” Baird writes, is “what we believe about God and our relationship to him[.]” “[T]rue religion” is, on this formulation, something essentially epistemic or cognitive, which can be “progressively added” to “bare-minimum beliefs” about nature, creation, the world, or what have you. In Baird’s telling, “piety, religion, and morality” are subjective internal forces that “compel [people] to do what is good for their community.” Hence, promoting true religion in public office is mostly a matter of telling people to go to church.[18]
All of this means that, on Baird’s paradigm, “religion” as a domain is constantly privatized, interiorized, and depoliticized. I agree that internal cognitive assent is certainly important, but why are Baptism and the Lord’s Supper—which are consummately political practices—not similarly at the “core of religion”? I appreciate how William Arnal and Russell McCutcheon frame the matter:
“Religion” . . . comes to form a special political category in modernity—one that creates a peripheral space for, and serves to account for, individualize, sentimentalize, and especially to domesticate whatever forms of persistent social and collective action happen to retain a positive or utopian orientation that ill-accord, in other words, with the personalization and individualization of the modern political subject.[19]
If Arnal and McCutcheon’s claim is a bit abstruse, allow me to clarify: the modern reduction of religion to private assent, rather than a disposition with implications for all domains of reality, logically empowers the “secular state,” disempowers the church, and renders Christian affiliation a mere shadow of one’s supervening membership category, which is citizenship within the nation-state. The state, thereby, comes to define the shape of Christian theology to serve its own purposes.
To be clear, I don’t believe this is what Baird necessarily wants to do. But this is where the logic of his syllogism—especially formulated as it is, with “religion” considered just one “part of the public good”—ultimately leads.
At the (necessary) risk of anachronism: consider again the examples Baird gives from the Old Testament—such as the stories of Nebuchadnezzar and Darius. After the episode of the Fiery Furnace, King Nebuchadnezzar declares that no “people, nation, or language” may speak against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, or Abednego. (Dan. 3:29) And after Daniel survives his night with the lions, King Darius decrees that all shall “tremble and fear before the God of Daniel.” (Dan. 6:25)
Is this true religion? Baird seems to think so. But the fact of the matter is—we don’t know. These Darius and Nebuchadnezzar episodes certainly—as Baird acknowledges—are not exactly conversions to the true faith. Perhaps these are one-off edicts issued by the monarchs in question, as survival strategies designed to ward off divine judgment. Power recognizes power.
Or, more sinisterly, perhaps we are witnessing the incorporation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob into a larger pantheon of Babylonian or Median deities. Making this move—adding the One God to a preexisting pantheon of elevated “beings among other beings”—amounts to a reduction of God to merely one powerful cosmic force among others, which is false religion in its most strictly idolatrous sense. After all, in the words of the Apostle Paul, “we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.” (Acts 17:29)
From a more critical vantage, then, these Old Testament stories may admit of a very different interpretation. Perhaps these are stories in which the worship of the true God is “domesticated,” by being brought within the ambit of a preexisting state structure that—necessarily—changes the nature of the faith itself in the process. What sort of understanding of the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is then being mediated to the Babylonian or Median onlookers? How might this synthesis change the nature of Israel’s own catechesis? At best, the political-theological message here is more ambivalent than it appears.
And with this, we arrive at last at a fundamental question that looms over Baird’s book, and indeed over much of the entire present conversation surrounding Christian politics, Reformed retrieval, and the relationship between religion and civil order. Is our primary concern, as Christians, maintenance of the integrity of the state qua state? Or is our primary Christian concern fidelity to a truth that exceeds, relativizes, and disciplines that same state?
Now, I freely concede that there’s plenty of support, within certain parts of the historic Protestant tradition, for something rather like the former position. Towards the end of his volume, Baird briefly, and almost in passing, draws a sharp distinction between the categories of “natural” and “supernatural”—consistent with a reduction of (supernatural) religion to the private sphere. And he is not the first recent writer on “Christian nationalism” to make that move: in their recent study Reformed Christian Politics, Zachary Garris, Sean McGowan, and Stephen Wolfe largely echo Baird’s central thesis—that civil government must promote true religion—while rendering this natural/supernatural disjunction even more starkly. And I do mean stark. In their words, “[t]heology does not supply the political art’s principia, formal object, means, or end.”[20] Rather, “sacred theology and politics have different principia—the former being faith and scripture, and the latter being reason and nature.”[21]
In my view, there are numerous problems with Garris, McGowan, and Wolfe’s formulation. For one thing, their description captures exactly how “religion” already functions under modernity—as a disciplinary category safely hived off from other domains, and so subordinated to a larger domain of political power that bridles it. It is, in short, exactly how contemporary secularity operates. Is this “Christian nationalism”? If so, it doesn’t count for much as a strategy.
For another, this framing rests on the philosophically naïve, and historically unsound, view that there are in fact such things as “reason” and “nature” unmediated by theological considerations.[22] That is plainly false: as a legion of ideologically diverse philosophers from Alasdair MacIntyre to Michel Foucault to Bruno Latour to Peter Harrison have all demonstrated, the very standards that constitute our sense of “reasonableness” and the “natural” are wildly divergent over time and profoundly shaped by political imperatives.
Garris, McGowan, and Wolfe complain that “Christians tend to mash together elements of ethics, politics, and theology, resulting in an unsystematic, incoherent, and ad hoc set of ideas suitable for mass consumption in a liberal environment.”[23] Rightly understood, though, it is Garris, McGowan, and Wolfe who are the historical innovators. That is because their project hinges on a set of arbitrary disciplinary divisions that would have been unintelligible to many Christians prior to early modernity. Far from reflecting “a liberal environment,” an ad hoc synthesis of disciplines probably better reflects, however dimly, a recovery of the “analogical-participatory worldview”[24] of Christian life-worlds past. (Really, go back and read Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Luther, and so on. In practice, they constantly mix and blend disciplines.)
Ultimately, drawing the disciplinary divisions this sharply gives rise to the precise opposite of a Christian theology of politics. One ends up with an approach to political life to which any specifically Christian insights have little relevance at all: Christianity may function as a sort of glue that shores up the functions of the secular state and builds social cohesion, but it is the secular state which is always in command.
* * *
As far as the ongoing debates over “Christian nationalism” are concerned, it seems to me that this dilemma represents a real parting of the ways. One faction is willing to bridle and discipline theology as needed to secure the interests of the state—including by deploying the modern (and so often anachronistic) category of “religion” to render theology largely politically impotent—because the fundamental problem intended to be solved by “Christian nationalism” is not so much secularization as liberalization. Another faction, conversely, places the accent on Christian fidelity and the integrity of the Christian message, because liberalization is not so much a problem to be solved as a background condition to be negotiated.
This is not the venue to properly engage the larger political hypothesis that a sufficiently muscular right-wing government in place, with enough will and conviction behind it, could effectively brute-force solutions to many of modernity’s various problems. Elsewhere, I’ve argued at length why I don’t find these “illiberalization” scenarios particularly plausible or promising.[25] But because King of Kings is the sort of book that will be read by churchmen, I think it’s worth underscoring that the questions here go far beyond now-familiar arguments about “faith and politics.” They implicate fundamental judgments about the history of the nation-state, the relative primacy or marginality of theology as an interpretive paradigm, and the future “Christian strategy” for a secularizing age.
To sum all this up: my basic disagreement with Baird’s book has nothing to do with its concern to restore the centrality of Christian thinking in politics. That is a mission I wholeheartedly embrace. But I have no intention of drawing the line at the place where any particular state or regime says that “religion” begins and ends. “Religion” is not some zone of private belief or set of axiomatic commitments; rather, theology is the love and knowledge of God that orients the Christian way of life. It cannot be privatized, interiorized, or ever depoliticized.
Isn’t that really what it means to call Jesus “King of Kings”?
[1] James Baird, King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government (Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2025), ebook ed.
[2] Baird, King of Kings, ebook ed.
[3] Baird, King of Kings, ebook ed.
[4] Baird, King of Kings, ebook ed.
[5] Baird, King of Kings, ebook ed.
[6] Baird, King of Kings, ebook ed.
[7] Baird, King of Kings, ebook ed.
[8] See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 29 (noting that the “socially identifiable forms, preconditions, and effects of what was regarded as religion in the medieval Christian epoch were quite different from those considered so in modern society”).
[9] See generally Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Mentor Books, 1964).
[10] Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 35.
[11] Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 35.
[12] For a much more comprehensive exploration of this theme, see Kevin N. Flatt, Secularization, Social Order, and World History (New York: Routledge, 2026) (discussing “sacred-social orders” in global perspective prior to the advent of the Western understanding of “religion”).
[13] John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Renewed Split in Modern Catholic Theology, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 88.
[14] Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 38.
[15] Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 38.
[16] Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 20.
[17] Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 255.
[18] Baird, King of Kings, ebook ed.
[19] William Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon, The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 60–61.
[20] Zachary Garris, Sean McGowan, and Stephen Wolfe, Reformed Christian Politics (Berith Press: 2026), 14.
[21] Garris, McGowan, and Wolfe, Reformed Christian Politics, 14.
[22] Cf. Peter Harrison, Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 18; Peter J. Leithart, “Anti-Natural Law” in Natural Law: 5 Views, eds. Andrew T. Walker and Ryan T. Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2025), 249–56; John Ehrett, “Whose Fictions? Which Authority?,” Mere Orthodoxy (Summer 2025), https://mereorthodoxy.com/whose-fictions-which-authority.
[23] Garris, McGowan, and Wolfe, Reformed Christian Politics, 11.
[24] John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), xxiv–xxviii.
[25] See John Ehrett, “Christendom After Comcast,” Ad Fontes: A Journal of Protestant Letters(Feb. 1, 2024), https://adfontesjournal.com/commonwealth/christendom-after-comcast/; John Ehrett, “The New Christendom Already Exists Online,” Between Two Kingdoms (Apr. 15, 2026), https://jsehrett.substack.com/p/the-new-christendom-already-exists; see also Kevin Vallier, All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023) (marshaling serious solvency objections to theories of illiberal regime change).