A Blue-Collar Guy with a Whip

27 January 2026

Of recent I found myself discussing immigration policy and the protests thereof with some folks. One of them—not a Christian, as it happens—quoted Matthew 25:40: “And the King will answer and say to them,`Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.'” This was presented as a mic-drop moment that required no further comment or argument: of course all Christians should be pro-immigration, legal or not, at all times and under all circumstances, because Jesus.

Perhaps you’ve encountered this kind of argument yourself. Are they right? What does one say to this?

We’ll get to the argument itself shortly, but before we do, there’s something we shouldn’t miss. Here we have someone, not a Christian, arguing in all seriousness that our national policy should be a certain way because that’s what Jesus wants. Or at the very least arguing that I, as a Christian, should support a particular national policy because that’s what Jesus wants.

Now, let me be the first to say that I agree! We, both individually and as a nation, should definitely do the things that Jesus wants. But isn’t this the Christian Nationalism that everybody from PBS to Kevin DeYoung warned us about? Why is the pagan, of all people, both encouraging me to be Christian Nationalist and arguably being a little Christian Nationalist themselves?

This is the sort of thing that you should point out when it comes up in conversation. Having done that, you can then proceed to the argument itself. Concerns about Christian Nationalism aside, does Jesus want us to have unrestricted immigration?

The verse doesn’t quite say that, does it? What it does say is that the way you treat “the least of these” is the way you’re treating God. He takes it that personally. So what should you do? Paul offers some very practical advice: “For if there is first a willing mind, it is accepted according to what one has, and not according to what he does not have. For I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened; but by an equality, that now at this time your abundance may supply their lack, that their abundance also may supply your lack—that there may be equality. As it is written, ‘He who gathered much had nothing left over, and he who gathered little had no lack.'” (2 Cor. 8:12-15)

So you should live generously. As a person or a church can be generous, a nation might also choose to be generous. But as with personal generosity, so with national generosity: it is accepted according to what one has, and not according to what he does not have. You can’t give what you ain’t got, in other words.

For example, my martial arts students and I used to run a team with Denver’s Severe Weather Shelter Network. We didn’t have the manpower to run a shelter all winter, but on the really cold nights (below freezing and wet, or below 20 regardless) we would activate the network. In those days, it was actually illegal, if you can believe it, to house people overnight in a church in Englewood city limits (yet another instance of government actively impeding charity). So we would gather people at a site in Englewood to warm up, and then bus them to suburban churches outside city limits for a hot supper and an overnight stay. The goal was to keep everybody safe on the most dangerous nights of the year. We had the manpower and space to do that for about 30 people at a time.

Unfortunately, there were some nights that we had to turn people away, because we didn’t have enough beds. And even when we had enough beds, there were violent offenders we couldn’t serve in that program—made it unsafe for everybody else. It wasn’t perfect, and it didn’t help everybody, but we did what we were able to do.

These people we couldn’t help…why didn’t I just bring them home with me? Because my home ceases to be a safe place for my wife if I have a couple meth-addicted rapists crashing on my couch. I can only do what I can do. And you know what? Everybody kind of understands this. In all the guilt-tripping I’ve seen in life—and I’m a pastor’s kid; I’ve seen a lot—nobody has ever condemned me for keeping my home a safe place for my wife. My home has a primary mission, and everybody understands these sorts of things when we’re talking about their own living room.

What people seem not to grasp is that the same thing is true for a nation. A nation also has a mission, and finite resources to accomplish that mission with. The United States is presently a place that people flee to rather than flee from, for which all thanksgiving. If we become inhospitable and hostile to everybody that ain’t us, if we just put up barbed wire at the borders and don’t let anybody in, that’s sin, and it would have to be reckoned with. But that’s not really the problem we have right now.

At the moment, we’re confronting the opposite problem: we cannot assimilate an infinite number of people fleeing from the most violent and tribalist places on earth without becoming just another place that people flee from. If we want to remain a place that people flee to, we have to decide how many people we can assimilate, and how we’re going to actually assimilate them. That number’s not zero, but it’s not infinite either–and since it’s not infinite, we have immigration laws and the law enforcement that goes with them.

Now that doesn’t mean that whoever happens to be doing that job in this moment in this country is getting everything right all the time. We need not believe that ICE is administered from heaven and peopled entirely with seraphim to believe that immigration enforcement is necessary. And unless you slept right through the entire Biden administration, you can’t possibly be unaware that we have a major problem with illegal immigration. So on the one hand, the fact that immigration enforcement is necessary doesn’t mean it’s being done well; on the other, we should not be surprised or disappointed to find that we’re in a season of vigorous enforcement.

Which brings us, alas, to Minneapolis. Having discovered in the wake of the Good shooting that interfering with actual ICE operations might have real consequences, protestors targeted a church instead. Now, judging from the video, these folks could stand to spend more time in church! Perhaps next time they’ll learn to listen more than they talk (which is a good rule of thumb for church, even for preachers. Especially for preachers, actually.) Why this particular church? The protestors had learned that one of the pastors of the church also has a day job working as a supervisor for ICE. Feeling that these two roles are a moral contradiction, and moved by compassion for an erring brother (James 5:19-20) and seeking his restoration in a spirit of gentleness (Galatians 6:1), they respectfully sought reasoned dialogue…

…oh wait. No, protestors invaded a church service chanting slogans, shouting down the speaker, and generally making a nuisance of themselves and seeking to intimidate worshipers, which was the point. “But wait, Tim,” you’ll say, “didn’t Jesus kind of do the same thing–or worse–in the Temple?”

Why yes He did. Twice, in fact. And then again, no He didn’t. Let’s look closer.

The Second Temple religious authorities were running a racket, and everybody knew it. According to the Levitical law, when you came up to make an offering, the sacrificial animal had to be without blemish. The original intent of the law was for you to bring your own animal, but of course if you didn’t have an unblemished lamb (ox, goat, turtledove), it was permissible for you to buy one from someone who did. When you brought the animal, the priest would inspect it to ensure it was truly unblemished and fit for sacrifice, and then the ceremonies could proceed. With me so far?

Well, over time, here’s what happened. The Temple authorities decided to provide for sale (for the worshipers’ convenience, of course) pre-approved, unblemished animals, available right there on the Temple grounds. Of course, all that pre-approving and keeping animals unblemished takes effort, so you paid handsomely for the service. And since your homegrown animal competes with that lucrative enterprise, what do you think the odds are of your animal passing inspection?

But we’re not done yet. In the sacred precincts of the Temple, of course only sacred money may be used, so you have to buy your pre-approved sheep with Temple shekels. For your convenience, there are money-changers right there on Temple premises where you can exchange your everyday money for the sacred Temple shekels you need to buy that pre-approved sheep. For a “reasonable” fee, of course.

Long story short, these guys are getting rich fleecing the worshipers, but it gets worse.

The whole operating principle of Old Covenant worship was “draw near to God, but not too near.” Temple was therefore built in a series of layers; who you are determines how close to the center you can come.

  • At the center, the Holy of Holies, the dwelling of God Himself. Only the High Priest enters there, and then only once a year, on the Day of Atonement.
  • Just before that, the Holy Place, which housed the altar of incense, the table of showbread, and the golden lampstand. Only specifically consecrated priests could enter that far.
  • The next layer outward housed the laver where the priests washed and the altar of burnt offering, where (only circumcised Jewish male) worshipers would present their sacrifices to God. This is as close as most Jewish men would ever get.
  • The next layer out was the Court of the Women, where the women would come to pray–and that was as close as they could come.
  • The next layer out from that was the Court of the Gentiles, which was specifically intended to be a place where all nations could come approach Yahweh and offer up worship on Mount Zion. The Court of the Gentiles was as close as a Gentile was allowed to come to the physical, earthly dwelling place of God.

Guess where the Temple authorities housed their whole money-changing-and-animal-bazaar? That’s right — the Court of the Gentiles. Imagine being a God-fearing Gentile: you come up to the Temple to pray, and the one place you’re allowed to be has been turned into a crooked flea market! There you stand, up to your ankles in manure, trying to pray with swindlers hard at work all around you. Do you see why Jesus quoted the prophets as He did? “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you have made it ‘a den of thieves!'” (Isaiah 56:7, Jeremiah 7:11)

So Jesus trashed the place. Twice. Once at the beginning of His ministry, and again at the end—fitting bookends for a life that was going to put the whole enterprise out of business for good.

Returning to the Minneapolis question: did Jesus interrupt a worship service? Not a bit of it! He interrupted the racketeers who were impeding the worship! If we apply this story to the Minneapolis fiasco, the protestors are not Jesus; the protestors are the money-changers making it hard for people to worship. The part of Jesus would be played by a brawny blue-collar guy who drove the protestors out of the building with a whip so people could worship in peace. A cop with a taser would be a culturally acceptable substitute, I suppose.

Maybe next time…

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Posted by Tim Nichols

And the Rest of DeYoung’s Six Questions

20 January 2026

For reasons I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m taking up Kevin DeYoung’s Six Questions for Christian Nationalists. I tackled the first one in that post, and got sidetracked — or did I? — talking about the rhetoric of that one. That turned out to be a discussion unto itself, so we’re handling the rest of them here. To review, here are the questions:

  1. Do you unequivocally renounce antisemitism, racism, and Nazism?
  2. When and how does the nation act as a corporate moral person?
  3. What is the purpose of civil government?
  4. What does it mean for the civil magistrate to promote true religion?
  5. Was the First Amendment a mistake?
  6. What is the historical example of the political order you would like to see in America?

When and how does the nation act as a corporate moral person? Based on how God talks to nations, always. Now of course we’re using a metaphor here; a nation is not a person. But a nation can sin; Daniel and Ezra both confess the sins of their nations, and the prophets regularly take whole nations to task for their sins. A nation really isn’t just a collection of individuals; there’s authority in the entity. When we went to war in WWII, it wasn’t just a collection of Americans who all decided to grab a rifle out of the closet and go across the pond to pot a German or three. America went to war. The war is just or not; the treaty that ends it is just or not; we keep it or not. All these are things the nation does, and they have moral qualities.

Likewise, the nation has internal responsibilities, and those responsibilities include limitations. We can’t make certain sins illegal, because they’re beyond the province of the civil magistrate (lust, hatred, covetousness). We must make other sins illegal, because they are within the province of the civil magistrate, like adultery, murder (including in utero), or theft.

What is the purpose of civil government? Paul says the civil magistrate is God’s servant (diakonos) to be a reward to good and a terror to evil. The one time God ever laid out a whole system of law, it was in Torah. God did not say that system should spread to all the Gentile nations, but He did say that the nations would see it in action and be impressed by the wisdom of it. God institutes multiple authorities (family, civil, ecclesial), each with their separate responsibilities and powers.

What does it mean for the civil magistrate to promote true religion? Solomon built the Temple and dedicated it; he didn’t serve as a priest in it. The civil magistrate should never endorse a false religion, should be visibly devoted to the true religion, and should have the sort of public space that the true religion cultivates. Ultimately, every single person in the civil government should be an orthodox Christian, not because there’s some sort of religious test for office, but because every single person in the world should be an orthodox Christian. That’s what the Great Commission means, and it’s high time we embraced it.

Was the First Amendment a mistake? Of course not. Some of the uses to which it’s been put certainly have been, though. We’ve had some absurdly broad readings of the establishment clause (e.g., pretending it requires a federal judge to be officially agnostic on the question of whether God has spoken in the Ten Commandments) and some absurdly narrow readings of the free exercise clause (e.g., pretending that covid panic justified closing churches but not BLM rallies).

What is the historical example of the political order you would like to see in America? Having begun with a trick question, DeYoung is ending the same way. The American political order was historically unprecedented, and he knows it. It was an experiment, widely acknowledged as such at the time, and continues to be widely acknowledged. (For evidence of this claim, if you need it, Google “the American experiment” and have a look at the 575,000 results.)

There’s no reason to think a more Christian America is going to morph into something we can find in a history book. Our past has lessons worth mining, and there have been some wrong turns that we should repent of — taking the Ten Commandments out of the courthouse comes to mind — but we’re headed to the New Jerusalem! You can’t ignore the rearview mirror, but “Eyes on the road!” is an expression for a reason — you gotta look where you’re going. Our goal is to get closer to the New Jerusalem within the framework we’ve been providentially given, not to recapture some bygone age.

DeYoung is, in the main, a grounded and sensible guy, and his work is often helpful. I hope that this reflection on his questions will be helpful to you.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

That First Question

13 January 2026

Christian Nationalism has gotten to be enough of a talking point that even I am speaking to it; it has come to this. I commend to your attention Kevin DeYoung’s Six Questions for Christian Nationalists, but not particularly because I’m a fan. Beginning by talking about how he could almost be a Christian nationalist (but not quite), DeYoung positions himself as the loyal opposition, the thoughtful friend who’s just raising some things that more impetuous voices maybe haven’t thought of. By most accounts, he’s eminently qualified to be just such a voice: frequently grounded, charitable, and quite thoughtful.

Which makes his performance all the more disappointing.

While I haven’t felt a need to embroider “Christian Nationalist” on the back of my jacket or anything, I’ve certainly been accused of being one, and I’ve a bunch of friends who cheerfully cop to it. So it seems like something worth speaking to. Without further ado, here are the questions:

  1. Do you unequivocally renounce antisemitism, racism, and Nazism?
  2. When and how does the nation act as a corporate moral person?
  3. What is the purpose of civil government?
  4. What does it mean for the civil magistrate to promote true religion?
  5. Was the First Amendment a mistake?
  6. What is the historical example of the political order you would like to see in America?

I’ll take up questions 2-6 in another post, because it turns out that first question deserves a whole lot of consideration.

Antisemitism, racism, and Nazism are sin, and not the subtle kind that takes grey hair and decades of walking with God to see. All three of them are big, ugly, obvious violations of very basic biblical ethics. If you’re feeling like antisemites, racists, or Nazis might “kind of have a point,” I suggest prayer, fasting, and several gallons of brain bleach. Of course, all three terms have been badly debased in current discourse; in their slur-from-left-of-center usage, they apply to anybody to the right of Trotsky, especially if he’s winning an argument. That’s another discussion; here I’m assuming the real definitions of all three terms. Which is assuming quite a lot, but let that go for now.

With that said, why a whole blog post about the question? Let’s look at it again: Do you unequivocally renounce antisemitism, racism, and Nazism?

Notice anything odd about this? I see two things that concern me. The first is the rhetorical strategy of leading with this question. The assumption none-too-subtly embedded here is that the mere designation “Christian nationalist” implies some sort of legacy of antisemitism, racism, or Nazism which must be dealt with. If a person is a Christian nationalist, then we should immediately check for those other things too — or so DeYoung would have us believe.

Pardon me, schoolmarm, but who sez? This purported legacy would be news to the Armenians, who were the first to become a Christian nation in A.D. 301. It would be a real shock to the Kingdom of Aksum (in modern-day Ethiopia), which became the second Christian nation shortly thereafter, in the 320s. That’s where Christian nationalism got its start: Asia and Africa. When, exactly, did the idea of a Christian nation acquire antisemitic/racist/Nazi connotations? Or did it ever?

I think this is bald assumption on DeYoung’s part, and a particularly odd assumption given his admission that the term “Christian nationalism” has no single accepted definition. The term is being applied to everybody from George Washington to Randall Terry to pastors who just think America should stop doing things that make God mad. Which is a good idea, come to think of it. What is it about that that somehow suggests antisemitism? Nothing, that’s what — which means DeYoung is just indulging in a little old-fashioned guilt-by-association smear here. Balls.

“Come on, Tim,” you’ll say. “Surely you’re overthinking this. It’s just a question. You can just say you’re against those things and move on.”

Which brings us to the second issue. Look at the question again: Do you unequivocally renounce antisemitism, racism, and Nazism? Consulting a dictionary, I find that “renounce” means to give up something once held, to reject something once believed, to repudiate an authority once followed. In other words, “Do you renounce antisemitism, etc.?” is the equivalent of “Have you stopped beating your wife?” I never held to any of that bilge; I have no need to renounce it. DeYoung thinks Christian nationalists need to renounce these things. What’s he trying to say?

Kevin DeYoung may not be doing this entirely consciously — I don’t know his heart, after all, just what he said — but he’s far too educated and articulate not to know what the words mean. What he’s doing with his very first question is positioning Christian Nationalism as necessarily connected to antisemitism, racism, and Nazism in some undefined way. Then he generously offers the particular person answering the question an opportunity to repent of their associations. “Why yes, Kevin, I have stopped beating my wife” is the price of admission to even have the rest of the conversation.

This is a clinic in well-constructed, if cheap, rhetoric. I commend it as an example worthy of study by all rhetoricians. The mechanics of the smear are subtle; the effect is anything but. It is a verbal act of war, and he’s employing it against his brothers.

Kevin DeYoung should renounce his unjustified smear tactics. And yes, I meant renounce.

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Posted by Tim Nichols