On Chappell Roan, Christian Nationalism, and Christian Republicanism

Why Christian Republicanism Will Probably Fail

In my last post, I looked at Paul D. Miller’s book on Christian Nationalism. As a secular liberal, I find his Christian Republicanism superior political philosophy to Christian Nationalism. But as much as I’d welcome more Christians embracing Christian Republicanism, civic pluralism, and liberalism, I don’t think we can expect more Christians to join Miller. I expect them to embrace Christian Nationalism instead.

There’s a fundamental tension between traditional Christian sexual ethics and contemporary sexual ethics, and unfortunately that’s dividing contemporary American Christianity.

Even if this wasn’t the case, I don’t think Miller’s Christian Republicanism is a superior philosophy to simple civic republicanism. In fact, I think a Christian Republic (or rather, secular republic with Christian Republican majorities or pluralities) would have many of the same problems as a Christian Nationalist government.

Conservative Christianity Doesn’t Like Homosexuality

In my last post, I summarized one of Miller’s principles of Christian Republicanism as:

“The state cannot be neutral between mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, non-divisible beliefs that have unavoidable implications in public policy. For example, with human sexuality the government cannot be neutral “between the belief that human sexuality is fixed, objective, and set by nature, on the one hand, and the belief that sexuality is malleable and socially constructed, the expression of which is a fundamental human right which should not be hindered, on the other.” There are some things that the government has to take a stance on because it has public policy implications.”

A secular reader will have two reactions to this. First, it’s true; second, why did he have to mention sexuality? Abortion would have been a better example: the government has to side with someone metaphysically, based on how they govern abortion. If they allow abortions to happen, yet legally recognize that people have a right to life, then fetuses or zygotes in the womb aren’t people. If they don’t, they are.¹

The fact that Miller needs to mention sexuality here is to signal his conservative credentials. He very likely believes homosexuality is at least morally wrong or somehow disordered. In this way, Miller is like many conservative and “moderate” Christians who genuinely believe that:

1. The way we express our sexuality reflects our virtue

2. This has downstream effects on culture

3. Homosexuality is morally wrong and unvirtuous.

I just want to state my objection to point three in a footnote here.² It’s not relevant to most of this post, but I feel the need to post it for the record.

The Chappell Roan Ultimatum

Anyway, not all Christians believe that homosexuality is morally bad or unvirtuous, but it’s a major point of disagreement in the church, causing many denominations to schism. This is an issue that is breaking institutional American Christianity.

I call this the Chappell Roan Ultimatum, after the flamboyantly LGBTQ affirming pop star. Young, moderate, and liberal Christians may not have a strong opinion about Chappell Roan. They may like or dislike her, but their opinion likely has nothing to do with the ethics of her sexuality or promotion of homosexuality.

For Conservative Christians, though, Chappell Roan and other public expressions of queerness³ are a moral threat to the virtue of the church and public, and so they are committing themselves to purging their theology, churches, and public spaces of gay people. Many non-conservative people, especially post-Obergefell, think this is weird and react accordingly.⁴

Miller had a great part of his book where he talks about how Anglo-Protestants in the 1950s erected Christian Nationalist symbols (“One Nation Under God,” “In God We Trust,” etc.) as a reaction to losing their dominant status. The same dynamic is at play today for white conservative Christians. Their views of gender and sexuality are an increasingly shrinking proportion of the population, even within Christianity, as young people are more accepting of LGBTQ people. As a response, these conservatives are schisming churches and ramping up culture war politics.

What’s worse is that these conservatives often foolishly include their pet Republican beliefs within their definition of Christianity. So the schisms often also become about Christian Nationalism too. This turns younger people, who tend to be more Democratic, even more off to Christianity. And when they leave the Church, they don’t typically look for another church, but stop being Christian in some capacity (believing, behaving, or belonging) altogether.

The Christian Nationalist/Secularist Cycle

In a weird way, conservative Christians like Miller are contributing to the problem of Christian Nationalism. Drawing lines within the church on LGBTQ issues and arbitrary conservative politics is enabling the CNs more than anything.

Conservative or traditionalist Christians may have a valid interest in establishing and policing the orthodoxy of their beliefs, including those on sexuality. But the consequences of them pursuing this interest is more people leaving the church, and the church becoming more nationalistic and losing cultural power.

I call this the Christian Nationalist/Secularist Cycle: The catalyst of growing Christian Nationalism is older, whiter, better connected, institutional Christians feeling threatened due to declining cultural power, and in response, drawing and policing lines of Christian identity, leading to detractors leaving the Church and aligning themselves with more secular identities. The church then has less power than before, starting the cycle over again.

Though Miller’s framework creates space for Christians to engage politics in a manner that embraces pluralism and political liberalism while rejecting nationalism, this Christian Nationalist/Secularist Cycle will be more influential to the breakdown of institutional Christianity and the ascent of Christian Nationalism than any political philosophy book. Unfortunately, his conservative Christian Republicanism with its thick conceptions of virtue contributes to the cycle.

Secular Virtue vs Conservative Christian Virtue

Far be it for me, a former Christian and current secular liberal, to comment on church politics, but the reality is that everyone else has to live with the consequences of this shrinking yet increasingly-Nationalistic religious movement. But even if this weren’t the case, there would still be serious problems with Miller’s Christian Republicanism (CR).⁵

CR affirms that we should punish moral evil, promote a free culture, loosely promote civic virtue, while also taking sides on unavoidable, insoluble moral issues that have policy repercussions. In this regard, CR is lower-case-l liberal, and to many on the left of center, agreeable.

Thick Vs. Thin Definitions of Virtue

The problem is that the meta-ethical conception of virtue for conservative Christians and secularists are incompatible. A secular virtue ethicist can evaluate virtues and vices based on their consequences. A Christian virtue ethicist, on the other hand, is more restricted by his tradition.

Going back to the homosexuality example, conservative Christians believe it is morally bad and unvirtuous to be gay because that’s what scripture and tradition preach. The secular virtue ethicist, however, would say that homosexuality in and of itself is neither moral or immoral; you can express both virtue and vice within one’s homosexuality, just as you can express both virtue and vice within one’s heterosexuality.

The secularist and the Christian may agree with the civic republican conclusion that a critical mass of citizens needs to be virtuous to maintain a country’s freedoms and political institutions, but they will disagree about the definition of virtue. In this way, the secular virtue ethicist has a “thinner” definition of virtue than the Christian. They may both believe that temperance, justice, courage, and wisdom are virtues, but the secular definition will not have as many commitments to specific attributes of these virtues, or their metaphysical foundations.

Between secular philosophies in a pluralistic society, this disagreement would be minor, but the logical implications of the Christian virtues Miller advances paradoxically entail a form of Christian Nationalism. The problem with this Christian Republicanism is that it combines principles of punishing moral evil, advancing a theory of justice, and taking sides of mutually exclusive morals with public policy implications, while also over-moralizing and arbitrarily condemning homosexuality.

This Is A Fundamental Disagreement

I want to be clear here, I’m not trying to “cancel” Christian conservatives like Miller, or exclude them from a political coalition that opposes Christian Nationalism or promotes pluralistic liberalism. I don’t think Miller and conservative Christian Republicans like him personally hate LGBTQ people.⁶ I just think his conception of Christian Republicanism creates too much division in a secular coalition, while doing little to deter homophobia.

Put simply: If you believe God is the author of virtue, and that homosexuality isn’t virtuous (while heterosexuality in some capacity is), you’re going to be less friendly to gay people. If you believe that the Bible gives moral instruction that cannot be overturned by reason and evidence, that among that instruction is that homosexuality is morally wrong, you will likely also believe homosexuality is morally wrong.

But What About Free Culture?

As a promoter of free culture, Miller would assert that this isn’t a problem, as the state is not the best promoter of moral virtue, and we should probably not police speech under the pretext of virtue and morality. Under this principle, he could argue that my framing of this problem is misguided and there would be ample reason to let gay people live their lives undisturbed.

There are three problems with this, under Miller’s framework:

1. If it is the case that homosexuality is morally evil (as many Christians believe), then that would permit persecution of gay people.

2. Given one, If a state’s theory of justice is informed by homophobia, it will probably persecute gay people.

3. If some expressions of heterosexuality can be virtuous (monogamous, faithful marriage), but no expression of homosexuality can be, there’s good reason to think that institutional norms will not encourage further discrimination. Separate, as they say, is not equal.

Regardless if he himself supports same sex marriage, the problem is that the Christian Republicanism he postulates enables attacks on pluralism, not unlike Nationalism.

“Promoting Free Culture” is not a “get out of jail free” card.

Christian Nationalism Lite

In this way, though Miller’s Christian Republicanism is a vast improvement over Christian Nationalism, it leads to a form of “Christian Nationalism Lite.” In the same way that Christian Nationalism asserts the force of state to solve disagreements about culture and instead undermines national unity, Christian Republicanism asserts a thick and specific definition of virtue that undermines civic unity.

It’s not problematic that the state promotes a definition of virtue, or punishes evil, or advances a theory of justice, but rather that the Christian Republican definition of virtue, evil, and justice are so thick that others would reject it. That’s not to say that Christians can’t personally have a conception of virtue, evil, or justice that others would reject. Rather, the point of tension is that Miller is formulating a political philosophy that would aim to set public policy.

When you get into politics with legislating virtue and morality in mind, you’re not practicing a personal faith, but enforcing an ideology upon the public. This is not a problem for a Christian Nationalist or even the secular liberal. But for Miller, whose philosophy purportedly rejects inflicting a niche ideology on the public to avoid division, it is.

Why Not Secular Republicanism?

The typical liberal pluralist concludes that it’s unavoidable to “inflict an ideology” on the public, so we should choose the ideology that does the least amount of harm and promotes the most happiness for the most amount of people.

I will assert the Nozickian solution: The ideology the state “inflicts” on its people should be the one that allows them to make choices about what is good or virtuous for themselves without the threat of state violence. Virtue and goodness means different things for different people, and most of them can be realized in a secular republic with a secular civic culture. That is, a secular republic that promotes “thin” definitions of virtue (that we can demonstrate as beneficial with data) and punishes bad behavior.⁷

The problem I see with Miller’s Christian Republicanism is that he’s trying too hard to promote Christianity, when he should instead try harder to promote Republicanism. This is odd because his audience are primarily Christians, and at this moment of history, conservative Christians aren’t giving up on Christianity, but on secular, liberal pluralistic republicanism.

What’s more, I don’t see how we can get out of this Christian Nationalist era without most Christians accepting the fact that they can’t dictate thick definitions of values, virtue, moral, and culture anymore.

Though it may be too much to ask religious conservatives to separate their personal morality and public politics for the sake of civic good today, it’s a reality they’ll have to get used to in the coming years. Christian Republicanism won’t slow the bleeding of the the Christian Nationalist/Secularist Cycle; in fact, I think it will accelerate it.

My only hope is that the coalition of republicans - secular and Christian - is enough to render the Nationalists politically impotent. There but for the grace of god go we.

1. I don’t think Miller’s formulation of the dispute about sexuality is accurate. Most people, statistically speaking, are heterosexual, and that they are at a genetic predisposition to be heterosexual. There are people who are not heterosexual, and the reason why they become that way is complicated and probably doesn’t have one cause, genetic or environmental. More interesting, I think you can say that heterosexuals can have a “fixed, objective” nature, but at the same time their sexuality is also malleable and socially constructed. Namely, one’s specific sexual tastes may be an out-growth of their upbringing. Maybe they have a vanilla kink that’s easily explainable with entry level psychoanalysis. I don’t pretend to know. My point here is that there’s good reason to think sexuality (how we express sex) is malleable, regardless of what you think about gay people.

2. I think most reasonable people would agree with points one and two, but point three is clearly wrong. Point three is so wrong, I’m tempted to say I don’t believe reasonable people can say it’s correct. Everyone who says that homosexuality is wrong or unvirtuous can’t really point to an act, outcome, or virtue that’s intrinsically wrong or a consequence of homosexuality exclusively. In fact, what bad things they say about homosexuality are also true about heterosexuality. What causes me not to go that far is the knowledge that there are reasonable people who disagree with me. At the risk of coming off as a New Atheist circa 2010, I’ll just say that’s just evidence that sometimes religion makes smart people believe wrong things.

3. I hate using any word with the stem “queer” in it because it seems like a virtue signal nowadays, but it’s the best word I can find here.

4. Speaking for myself, the 2010s are over, and I’m not going to pretend to have an affinity for gay subculture. I don’t care for it. But that doesn’t mean I oppose it or think it’s bad. It’s just not my culture, because I’m straight. These people have a right to exist, a right to speech, a right to be married, and all that other stuff everyone is entitled to. You can not like the “vibes” of someone or a subculture and still think they deserve rights.

5. As it now stands from his 2022 book, the final product has not been written.

6. In fact, perusing his Twitter, I think I’d hang out and have a beer with him.

7. Though I wouldn’t call this bad behavior evil, as I think the word “evil” poisons reasonable discourse on ethics, law, and politics, even if its an accurate description.