In practice, yes.

Is revival prerequisite to a Christian government? The question is a significant divide in the world of Christian Nationalism. Stephen Wolfe argues that it isn’t, that revival is “not the only antecedent condition” to Christian laws, though he acknowledges (as every plausible position does) that revival is a possible foundation for such a political change. He is wrong.

Let’s get a technicality out of the way: Christian laws, good laws, can be emplaced without a Christian people, in the most basic sense. No physical barrier obtrudes. The problem is that an assembly of non-Christians will not like those laws and will eventually change them. The problem is that pagan man simply will not obey God’s law (Gen. 6:5, 8:21), not even to save his own skin (Rom. 1:18-32), and so Christian laws, set over a pagan people, will receive little respect and eventually no obedience. We see this today in the increasing disregard given to our federal Constitution.

To understand this issue better, let’s look at history, at the relationship between law and culture.

America was founded by a pervasively, though not uniformly, Christian people. Some of those Christians, no doubt, were nominal, but a culture-defining amount (whether majority or minority) were, to all evidence, actual Christians. The result was that pagans typically held to nominal Christianity and even those who did not typically operated on grounds still retaining much of Christianity’s appearance. The result of this dominantly Christian culture was the American governmental philosophy, a flawed but genuinely Christian edifice erected between 1620 and 1800.

Then, in the culture, Christianity became more nominal. Real Christianity became less pervasive, and nominal Christianity became ever more nominal, even abandoning the name at times. Cults popped up by the dozen; heresies proliferated. Even the professedly orthodox made excuses for slavery (the South), for usury, for slave-trading (New England), for other sins. Concurrent with this, the ‘Christian laws’ of the founding, already imperfect, came under assault. Marbury v Madison, Martin v Hunter’s Lessee, and McCulloch v Maryland popped up. Eventually, America fought a war to subjugate its constituents, and we went from a confederation to a nation, from fifty states to one unitary government.

The process continued. Evolution, apostasy, and heresy abounded. America has, in the past century and a half, grown ever more Godless. Her laws have followed suit. At times, such as in Roe v Wade or Stump v Sparkman, some law raced ahead of parts of the culture, though never by far.

The lesson of this is that nominal Christianity doesn’t last very long, and if it does, it often doesn’t mean much. King Charles III of England is a nominal Christian, the head of the Church of England, and he’s more likely to pray to Allah than to Yahweh. Nominal Christianity, furthermore, gets its virtue only by the legacy given to it by actual Christianity. After all, except by Christ, we refuse (Ps. 53:1-3; Rom. 1:18-20) to know the truth of God and His law, as Luke 7:35, Titus 1:15, Job 14:4, 1 Samuel 24:13, and many more passages make clear. Without a backbone of real Christians, without real Christianity being a dominant force in society, nominal Christianity quickly lapses into rank paganism, perhaps still bearing His name, except now only in blasphemy.

If we hope to found a Christian government on nominal Christianity, we act like Hezekiah, who was glad that his children and not he would be destroyed (2 Kings 20:19). Certainly we ought to strive for good government, as we strive for righteousness in all parts of life (1 Thess. 5:22), but we must recognize that regeneration of a significant portion of the culture (measured in heavenly, not earthly, terms) is the only path to have long-term change. Good laws, though, can be an aid to this process, to ensuring their own foundation, as all acts of righteousness are (Rom. 8:28). The important point is to recognize that the foundation lies always below the superstructure, rather than being, as Wolfe proposes, technically superfluous to requirements.

God bless.

P.S. I highly recommend Chapter 6 of William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of Real Christianity for an even better explication of this topic.