Please see a very rough, disorganized first draft below. Would love feedback, pushback, suggested additions and subtractions. I know I’ve left out a lot, so help me out.
- All public office holders must sign a “mere Protestant Christian” confessional statement. This is different from mandating that all office holders be truly regenerated. Yes, this requirement – indeed the whole enterprise of a Christian state – opens the probability of an expanded “cultural Christianity” or even the possibility of a swelling religious hypocrisy, but that’s ok.
- The power of the State and State actors should be circumscribed. A Christian State has Christian officials with limited power because the Christian State recognizes its officials to be only human, and thus vulnerable to (prone to?) overreach and corruption. One major way of limiting power in the State will be separating its powers into branches that have different and even competing priorities. Another will be through not permitting the State to limit certain outside powers, especially those of Religion and the “Fourth Estate” of the Press. In some ways working against itself, the Christian State enshrines freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
- The Press constantly should be expected to peer into every level of state and federal governance and to hold officials accountable. To be generally on the side of the public.
- The Church should be expected to exercise a Prophetic role and to be a regular thorn in the side of State power that has always tended toward overweening authority. To be fundamentally non-partisan and calls balls and strikes on everyone.
- Because the Christian State is Christian, there will be no religious compulsion. The Gospel is spread only through Church proclamation and reproducing itself.
- The Christian State, on the other hand, does not consider itself as a neutrally religious entity. As appropriate, it occasionally calls for National Days of Prayer to the Father of Jesus Christ – both thanksgiving and lament.
- The Christian State comes into being not through force nor through nakedly authoritative statements premised on divine revelation, but through the power of persuasion, offering compelling arguments for Christian oversight and policy from philosophy and history.
- There are quotas set for immigrants from non-Christian countries, set especially low for immigrants from Islamic and communistic countries since those tend toward militancy and subjugation.
- Colin’s Ideal Christian State isn’t idealistic. That is, because the State is Christian it’s not attempting to realize a utopia or return to some pure mythological past (e.g. Reagan era, before the Civil Rights era, before the post– WWII consensus, before the Industrial Revolution, before the Founding…). Rather, it is Christian by attempting to make the conditions as stable and safe as possible in a world that is essentially fallen. And doing so guided by divine revelation and Christian tradition. The Christian State doesn’t expect to purge society of all evil and poverty; it often is content with leaving good enough alone, it works hard not at expanding but at limiting/focusing its role… as much as possible getting out of the way to let individuals act on their own incentives and reap the rewards of the same. Realism, practicality, incrementalism are key words.
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