King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government. By James Baird. Cape Coral, FL: Founders Press, 2025. 120 pp. $21.98 (hardcover).
The effort to renew classical Protestant political thought has been ongoing for the past few years, with Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism serving as a major impetus for the publication of numerous other books and articles on the subject. Up till now, however, much of the discussion has taken place in rarefied (and mostly online) circles—ideas and terms that have attained common currency among participants in this discussion are likely to be met by blank stares from ordinary Christians. That is to say, while the conversation has advanced considerably among a select few, the prospect that it has penetrated the broader Christian mainstream to any considerable degree (in the substance of its historical ideas, rather than the hysteria of its detractors) is dubious.
Fortunately, a new resource has arrived that could rectify this problem. James Baird’s King of Kings is an eminently concise book advocating the idea that “government must promote Christianity as the only true religion” (1). Following the Introduction, Chapter 2 exposits the Christian understanding of government as articulated by Scripture, the Westminster Confession of Faith, and various figures in the Reformed/Presbyterian tradition; Chapter 3 presents the basic argument of the book in the form of a syllogism; Chapter 4 discusses the Old and New Testament textual support for government promotion of true religion; Chapter 5 addresses the concern that basing contemporary government support of religion on Old Testament precedent could lead to theonomy, wherein all the civil laws of the OT are to be adopted; Chapter 6 responds to the objection that government promotion of true religion is antithetical to the American constitutional system; Chapter 7 explains how government promotion of true religion is compatible with religious freedom; Chapter 8 dismantles the popular bromide that Christians should not seek political power; Chapter 9 discusses the importance of wisdom in governing according to true religion; and Chapter 10 takes up the tired notion that because Christians are “citizens of heaven in exile here on earth,” they should not be overly concerned with politics. As this summary should make clear, Baird answers several of the most common objections to the idea that government should promote Christianity, and he does so with skill. Of especial importance is his treatment of the belief that government promotion of true religion is “un-American,” a ubiquitous modern misconception that could take as many years to uproot as it did to sow.
That said, there are two elements of Baird’s argument that it might be helpful to elaborate further. The first has to do with Premise 2 of the syllogism he presents in Chapter 3, which states that “as the only true religion, Christianity is part of the public good” (22). In defending this premise, Baird provides evidence that Christianity is indeed part of the public good. However, there appears to be an unspoken premise contained within the clause “as the only true religion,” which is that it is possible to know with some degree of certainty that Christianity is the only true religion. To be clear, this unspoken premise is true, so the point here is not that Premise 2 of Baird’s syllogism is unsound. Rather, the issue is that some ordinary Christians are likely to object to this claim just as strongly as they would to other parts of Baird’s argument. Christianity, they might say, is accepted purely on faith, rather than on the basis of reason or evidence. This being so, the objection continues, we cannot say with certainty that Christianity is the true religion that government should promote—as strongly as we may believe Christianity to be true, it is possible that some other religion is the true religion, and for this reason government should not promote any religion at all.
In short, it is easy for those in online Christian circles to forget that a not insignificant number of ordinary Christians are fideists. To say with confidence that Christianity is the true religion, and that government should promote it accordingly, is nonsense in their eyes because they think religion is simply not the sort of thing that admits of solid epistemic verification, certainly not to a degree that would justify government involvement. Happily, though this way of thinking is still prevalent today, the Christian apologetics boom of the past thirty years has produced ample enough material to demolish it. Whether one goes the way of Plantinga’s “Reformed epistemology”[1] or Feser’s arguments for God,[2] it remains the case that, at a bare minimum, we can know God as He is revealed in the Old Testament apart from the special revelation of Scripture. On this foundation, it is not too much of a stretch to establish with a fair degree of confidence the resurrection of Christ,[3] and then all the particulars of Christian doctrine that follow.[4] It might seem like a tangent to speak of apologetics here, but it is not—if we want ordinary Christians to be persuaded of the truths Baird argues for, it may be necessary in some cases to lay the groundwork by showing that the truth of Christianity is universally knowable and reasonable in a way that justifies the government acting on it.
The second element that warrants further discussion has to do with one of Baird’s counterarguments against the rejection of Premise 2. Although he grants the possibility that “some other more general religious beliefs,” such as the belief that “there is a higher power—or something like that,” could be part of the public good, he ultimately dismisses such a move as an acquiescence to “Deism” (28). I am inclined to agree with Baird that Christianity is the best possible foundation on which government can reasonably aspire to define and promote the public good. At the same time, the search for an alternative basis on which to ground a robust vision of the public good—one that does not depend on Christianity or any other religion in particular—has been going on far longer and produced much more written scholarship than a brief reference to Deism might suggest. Indeed, parallel to the aforementioned apologetics boom, for decades there has been a natural law boom among Christian academics, engendering a hope that natural law—encompassing all of basic morality, and publicly accessible to all via reason—could serve as the foundation for political society.[5] The dream lives on even now, but its proponents continue to assume rather than demonstrate that natural law arguments can effectively serve as a means of achieving robust moral-political consensus. In theory, it is possible to demonstrate logically the truth of moral principles that are accessible to reason, but in practice such arguments often fail to persuade.[6] This point should be impressed upon readers, as those who live within Christian academic circles might ask why natural law could not serve just as well (or in some ways better) as a foundation for government promotion of the public good.
The excursus on the above two points should not be taken as a suggestion that Baird’s book feels incomplete in any way. Quite the contrary, its refusal to get bogged down in minutiae is one of its greatest strengths, and Baird does a good job of addressing the objections most likely to be raised by readers. It is evident that Baird writes from a Presbyterian perspective, but the ideas he defends are not exclusive to that tradition, making this book a helpful introduction for Protestants in general. Churches of all kinds would therefore do well to purchase copies in bulk and make this potent resource for the ongoing renaissance in traditional Protestant political theory readily available to their members.
Notes
- See Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Plantinga presents the same ideas more briefly and accessibly in Knowledge and Christian Belief (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015). ↑
- See Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017). ↑
- See, e.g., Gary Habermas, On the Resurrection, 4 vols. (Brentwood, TN: B&H Academic, 2024–26). ↑
- For an expansive treatment of the rational and evidential support for Christianity, see Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2017). ↑
- See, e.g., David VanDrunen, Politics after Christendom: Political Theology in a Fractured World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2020), and Robert P. George, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment (New York: Encounter Books, 2025). ↑
- See James Clark, “The False Promise of Natural Law Liberalism,” Front Porch Republic, 27 July 2020, https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2020/07/the-false-promise-of-natural-law-liberalism/; James Clark, “Natural Law and the Prospects of Persuasion,” in James Clark, The Witness of Beauty and Other Essays (Omaha, NE: The North American Anglican Press, 2024), 3–42, https://mereorthodoxy.com/natural-law-prospects-persuasion; and James Clark, “Putting Natural Law in Its Place,” in Clark, Witness of Beauty, 121–29, https://northamanglican.com/putting-natural-law-in-its-place/. ↑
