The Wrong Machine: Power, Structure, and the Failure of Christian Nationalism

A common charge leveled against Lancastrian theonomists is that we are naive about power. We are told that our commitment to God’s Law as the exclusive standard for civil justice leaves us on the sidelines — well-intentioned but toothless, able to identify injustice but unable to remedy it. The solution offered by Christian Nationalists and others in the broader Reformed political sphere is straightforward: get the right men into the existing system, use the machinery of the modern state for righteousness, and the problem is solved.

This argument sounds practical. It is not. It confuses a personnel problem with a structural one — and in doing so, it misunderstands both the nature of power and the clear teaching of Scripture that form and structure are never theologically neutral.

What Power Actually Is

Before we can evaluate competing theories of power, we need to understand what power actually is. Power, at its most fundamental level, is the capacity to have people do what you say. This is not a cynical definition — it is a biblical one. The Roman Centurion understood it: “I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes” (Matthew 8:9). Authority is demonstrated in compliance.

This definition has a critical implication that is rarely followed to its conclusion: power is never self-generating. It is always dependent on the compliance of people who choose — even under duress — to act. The agents who raided Amos Miller’s farm did not descend from the sky. They drove there. They got out of their vehicles. They followed orders. The state’s power in that moment was the accumulated compliance of individuals making individual choices.

Which means this: if enough people refuse to comply, the power evaporates. This is not a theory. It is how power has always worked. The state is not omnipotent. It is only as powerful as the people who enforce its will.

Lancastrian theonomists are not afraid of power. We simply have a different — and we would argue more biblically accurate — understanding of where power comes from and how it is rightly exercised. If enough Christians embrace God’s Law and live under it, build communities around it, and refuse to be instruments of man-made laws — that is power. Real, durable, community-rooted power. Not borrowed power. Not captured power. Earned power.

The Christian Nationalist (CN) Argument and Its Fatal Flaw

The Christian Nationalist answer to the power question runs something like this: the existing legislative machinery is not inherently the problem. The problem is who operates it. Get godly men into Congress, into governorships, into appointed offices, and that machinery can be turned toward righteousness. Politics is the civilized means by which power is transferred, and Christians ought to be competing for it.

This argument has surface appeal. But it commits a fundamental error that Scripture does not permit: it treats structure as theologically neutral.

Consider two analogies.

A pastor tells his congregation: we have a Muslim congregation in our city. If we can simply get the right imam into that mosque, it will function as a true church. The form does not matter. The personnel does.

Every Christian immediately recognizes the absurdity. The form is not incidental. The form is definitional. A Muslim congregation led by the most sincere, knowledgeable, well-intentioned man alive is still a Muslim congregation. You cannot sanctify a structurally disordered institution by improving its leadership.

Or consider the claim that a household with two fathers can function as a proper family, provided those fathers are devoted and sacrificial. Again — the form matters. God designed the family with a specific structure, and that structure is not an aesthetic preference or cultural tradition. It is constitutive. The best possible version of a structurally disordered institution is still a structurally disordered institution.

These are not edge cases. These are the logic of the CN argument applied to institutions we can evaluate clearly. The same principle applies to the civil sphere — and unlike the analogies, this one is not hypothetical. Christians have held significant political power in America for generations. The experiment has been run. The result has been expanding government, multiplying legislation, and shrinking liberty. When I raised this directly with one Christian Nationalist, the response came back without hesitation: those Christians failed because they were captured by dispensationalism and the postwar consensus; they were ignorant of their Reformed roots; had genuinely Reformed men been in charge, things would have gone differently. Just get better men.

Notice what this argument does: it is unfalsifiable by design. It can survive any failure, be recycled after any disappointment, and absorb any counterevidence. No matter how many generations prove the point, the answer is always next time, right men, different result. This is not a political theory. It is the same faith claim made on behalf of every failed totalizing system in history — real socialism has never truly been tried, the revolution just needs purer leadership, the experiment failed because of the wrong personnel.

But there is a deeper problem still: systems do not sit inert waiting for the right man to arrive and redeem them. They select for, shape, and ultimately compromise the men who operate them. The machine makes the operator as much as the operator makes the machine. You cannot separate the question of who runs the system from the question of what the system is built to do.

God Was Specific About Structure

This is not a novel insight. It runs through the whole of Scripture. As mentioned, God designed the family with a specific structure. The form was not negotiable.

Most directly: when Israel demanded a king like the nations, God did not say the problem was that they might get a bad king. He warned them that the institution of kingship — as a structure — had predictable, built-in tendencies (1 Samuel 8). A king will take your sons. He will take your daughters. He will take your fields. This was not a prophecy about one corrupt monarch. It was a structural critique. The institution itself, by its nature, tends toward accumulation and expansion.

This is precisely the Lancastrian theonomist critique of the legislature. A legislative body has structural tendencies independent of the character of the men who staff it. It tends toward the expansion of law. It tends toward the accumulation of power. It tends toward the punishment of conduct God has not defined as criminal. These are not the tendencies of bad legislators. They are the tendencies of the institution. Putting godly men inside it does not change what the machine does. It changes who is pulling the levers — temporarily.

Justice is not simply a goal to be achieved through any available means. The means matter. The structure matters. God has not left us without instruction on how civil authority is to be structured, what it is authorized to do, and what lies outside its mandate.

The magistrate’s God-given role is judicial, not legislative. He applies God’s already-revealed Law to specific cases brought before him. He does not create new crimes. He does not build regulatory bureaucracies. He punishes genuine evil as God defines it and leaves the righteous alone. Critically, the biblical system is accusatorial — justice begins when a specific person brings a specific charge against a specific person and is willing to stand behind that charge. The accuser has skin in the game. There is no standing prosecutor, no state filing charges in the absence of an aggrieved party. No agent of the crown can raid Amos Miller’s farm because no neighbor has been harmed and no neighbor has come forward to say so. Contrast this with our system, where justice has been handed off entirely to the state — where the EPA, the FDA, and the Department of Agriculture can prosecute a man with no specific victim, no neighbor who was actually wronged, nothing but a regulatory violation. The state has made itself the perpetual accuser, the perpetual judge, and the perpetual enforcer simultaneously. Scripture never authorizes this. This structure is not a preference — it is what Scripture prescribes, and departing from it is not a minor adjustment. It is a fundamental inversion of biblical justice.

The Christian Nationalist project is not a path to justice. It is a path to a different kind of tyranny — one with Christian branding and better intentions, but built on the same structural foundation that produced the injustice we are trying to escape. You cannot fix the machine by improving its operators. You have to build a different machine.

That is what we are calling for. Not the capture of existing power. The patient, faithful, community-rooted construction of a different kind of order — one built on the only foundation that can hold it.