At the heart of Baird’s conception is the language of the public good. He finds it in the twenty-third chapter of the Westminster Confession, and it informs a logical syllogism that is the backbone of his argument. The confession affirms that God ordained civil magistrates to be subject to him and rule their people for God’s glory and for “the public good” (Westminster Confession of Faith 23.1). Later, Baird deduces that because government “must promote the public good,” and because Christianity, “the only true religion,” is “part of the public good,” civil magistrates “must promote Christianity as the only true religion” (22). By including Christianity in the public good, Baird has ipso facto made Christianity part of the civil magistrate’s responsibility. Public good then is essential to Baird’s argument. He defines it as synonymous with the common good, or “public welfare,” or “the people’s welfare” (5). He asserts that this idea has been “a permanent fixture in the Western legal and political tradition,” though he does not mention that before the fourth century, among the Greeks and Romans, Christianity was hardly part of the ancients’ understanding of “public good.” Baird also finds the language of “general Welfare” in the preamble to the United States Constitution. Later when discussing the American Founding and the First Amendment, Baird asserts that the Founders wanted the state governments, not the federal authorities, to promote Christianity and that few agreed with Thomas Jefferson’s separation of church and state. He avoids entirely the reasons that led all the original states to embrace Jefferson’s position and abrogate government support for established churches (the last two establishments to disestablish religion were New Hampshire in 1819 and Massachusetts in 1833). By situating the “public good” in the Western and American political and legal traditions, Baird makes it seem like promoting Christianity has been at the heart of the West’s understanding of government’s proper function since the days of Aristotle.
Baird’s sleight of hand in relying on “public good” avoids any discussion of demographics. Public is, after all, shorthand for the people in a community or society. What happens when the American public is religiously diverse? What then constitutes the general interest of a diverse public? To be sure, the United States was overwhelmingly British and Protestant at the Founding, even as the small number of Roman Catholics and Jews practiced their faiths freely in places like Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. In the demographic mix were African slaves (almost twenty percent of the population) who could not practice their indigenous faiths. But after 1850, immigration changed fundamentally the demographics of the United States at the same time that it increased the number of non-Protestant and non-British Americans. Baird’s failure to acknowledge the country’s diversity, consequently, leaves his definition of the public good either stuck in the year 1800 or implies support for a policy of deporting non-Christian (more likely non-Protestant) Americans. To be fair, Baird admits that he has no policy prescriptions and also advises prudence when considering how the government should promote Christianity today. “We must adapt to our circumstances,” he writes, and to “our fellow citizens” (79). At the level of definitions and logic, however, Baird does not adapt his basic category of “public good” to the current circumstances of the United States.
The author’s abstractions also led to a faulty history of Christianity and government that also deceives readers into thinking that promoting Christianity as the public good will return the United States to its previous order and stability. (By another sleight of hand, Baird manufactures examples of good government from Old Testament kings, the pagan rulers, Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus the Great. He does not stumble once over the anachronism of using ancient, divine-right monarchies as examples for modern republican government.) Baird quotes Protestant sources freely from John Calvin and John Owen to Charles Spurgeon and John Murray with no regard to the political circumstances of sixteenth-century Geneva, seventeenth-century England, Victorian London, or 1960s Glenside, Pennsylvania. Granted, if the purpose is to apply basic definitions, attention to different forms of government and citizenship between 1545 and 1965 might seem unnecessary (and add another hundred pages to the book). Even so, Baird might have at least paid some attention to Calvin’s relationship to Geneva’s city council and compared it to Owen’s relationship to Oliver Cromwell to see how well the Protestant governments in the past adhered to the ideal governments espoused by Calvin and Owen. Read more»
D. G. Hart, “Bite-Sized Christian Nationalism: A Review Article,” Ordained Servant, March, 2026
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