Does God Need Caesar’s Sword?

I came across the recent controversy involving Al Mohler and Christian nationalism, and what caught my attention was not really the phrase Christian nationalism. We have heard that phrase so often over the last several years, and it has come to mean so many different things depending on who is using it, that I am not sure the label by itself helps us very much anymore. What caught my attention was something much more specific.

Mohler had argued, in a hypothetical political scenario, for the criminalization of blasphemy. Then after criticism from other Southern Baptists, he reconsidered that part of his argument and publicly said, “I think I blew it.” Baptist Press reported on his September 14 clarification.

That got me thinking, because underneath the disagreement is a question much older than our present political moment. It is a question Christians have wrestled with for centuries, and I think it is worth wrestling with again: What has God actually authorized civil government to do when it comes to defending Christianity?

That is a different question from whether Christians should participate in politics. We should. It is different from whether biblical truth should shape the way Christians think about justice, law, human dignity, marriage, life, sexuality, poverty, war, or any number of other public questions. Of course it should. If Christ is Lord, we do not suddenly stop believing that when we enter the voting booth or begin talking about public policy.

The question is narrower than that, and in some ways harder. Should government itself enforce Christian doctrine? Should civil authority punish theological error? Should the state have some role in protecting God from blasphemy?

Once you put the question that plainly, I think we need to slow down.

What Mohler Actually Said

The controversy grew out of Mohler’s contribution to the 2026 book Five Views on Christian Nationalism. The contributors were asked to respond to an intentionally hypothetical future in which the present United States had fractured and a new political order had to be established in a region where evangelical Protestants made up a large majority of the population.

Within that hypothetical, Mohler argued that the new constitutional order should acknowledge Christianity, including the God of the Bible and the Trinity, as foundational to the nation. He also argued that citizens and public officials should substantially acknowledge that Christian foundation, and he included blasphemy among the things that could be treated as offenses against the political order. Baptist Press reported that Mohler later continued to defend the broader idea of constitutional acknowledgment while withdrawing his position on criminalizing blasphemy.

Richard Land, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, challenged Mohler from within the Baptist tradition. Land argued that requiring an “authentic acknowledgment” of Christianity from public officials sounded very much like a religious test for office and raised the obvious problem of who would decide whether someone’s acknowledgment was authentic enough. Mohler responded that he did not intend a test of personal Christian belief. The Christian Post summarized the remaining disagreement after Mohler’s clarification.

So we should be fair about what happened. Mohler did not announce that he had rejected every part of his argument about Christianity and the political order. He did not suddenly become a secularist, nor did he abandon his belief that Christian theology has profoundly shaped the American understanding of human dignity and law. What he did say was that he had gone too far on blasphemy and that the Baptist understanding of religious liberty gave him a clear reason to correct himself.

I actually think that correction makes the whole conversation more useful. Instead of asking whether we are “for” or “against” Christian nationalism—a question that can become hopelessly vague—we can ask something much more concrete. If blasphemy really is a serious sin against God, why should Christians hesitate to allow the government to punish it?

That question takes us directly into Scripture.

We Cannot Solve This by Pretending Blasphemy Does Not Matter

I want to be careful here because there is an easy way to argue against blasphemy laws that I do not think Christians should take. We could simply treat blasphemy as though it were not very serious. We could say religion is private, words do not really matter, people should believe whatever they want, and therefore government should stay out of it.

But that is not a biblical argument.

God’s name is holy. God takes His glory seriously, and Scripture takes the dishonoring of His name seriously. Under the Mosaic covenant, Israel had an explicit civil penalty for blasphemy. Leviticus 24:16 says the person who blasphemed the name of the Lord was to be put to death.

So we cannot simply say, “God would never allow government to punish blasphemy.” At one point in redemptive history, He commanded exactly that.

The real question is why we should not simply carry that command over into a modern nation. And that forces us to think about something Christians sometimes skip over when we move from an Old Testament law to a contemporary political question: Where are we in the story of redemption?

Israel was not simply a modern nation that happened to contain a lot of believers. Israel was God’s covenant nation. Its worship, priesthood, civil order, land, sacrifices, festivals, and national identity were bound together under the Mosaic covenant in a way that is not reproduced by any nation today.

That does not mean the Old Testament suddenly becomes irrelevant to questions of justice. Far from it. The character of God has not changed, and the moral wisdom revealed in His law continues to teach us. But we have to read those laws in light of the coming of Christ, the fulfillment of the old covenant, and the creation of a new-covenant people drawn from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.

Peter can call the church a “holy nation” in 1 Peter 2:9 while writing to Christians scattered among earthly nations. That should tell us something. The holy nation of the new covenant is not a geographical country with borders, an army, and a civil code. It is the people of God united to Christ and scattered throughout the nations of the earth.

That changes the question considerably.

God Gave the State a Sword, but He Did Not Give It Everything

Romans 13 is important here because Paul does not describe civil government as spiritually meaningless. Government is ordained by God. Paul says the governing authority is God’s servant, and he says that the ruler “does not bear the sword in vain.” There really is such a thing as legitimate civil authority, and there really are evils that government has a God-given responsibility to restrain and punish.

I think Christians sometimes make a mistake in the opposite direction and talk as though religious liberty means government has no moral responsibilities before God. That is not Paul’s argument. Government is accountable to God precisely because government exists under God’s authority.

But government does not possess every kind of authority God has established in the world.

Christ also gives authority to His church. In Matthew 16 and Matthew 18, Jesus speaks about the keys of the kingdom. The church teaches the Word, proclaims the gospel, baptizes disciples, guards doctrine, practices church discipline, receives believers into fellowship, and when necessary removes people from that fellowship. Those are real acts of authority, but they are not the same kind of authority exercised by the magistrate.

Historically Christians have sometimes described this distinction by speaking of the sword and the keys. Civil government bears the sword. The church exercises the keys. I think that distinction helps us because the trouble begins when we hand the sword the responsibilities Christ gave to the keys.

Suppose we decide that government should punish blasphemy. Before long we have to answer some very practical questions. What exactly counts as blasphemy? Does denial of the Trinity qualify? What about denying the deity of Christ? What about Mormon theology? What about Roman Catholic teaching in a majority-Protestant nation, or Protestant teaching in a majority-Catholic one? What about a Christian who holds an unusual interpretation of Scripture?

And then there is the biggest question: Who decides?

Somebody has to.

Once the state is responsible for punishing theological error, government officials have to begin making theological judgments. Somewhere there has to be a legal definition of orthodoxy, and somebody has to possess the authority to enforce it.

Christian history should make us very cautious at exactly that point.

Why Baptist History Matters Here

Because Mohler and Land are both Southern Baptists, Baptist theology is not incidental to their disagreement. The Baptist tradition has historically defended religious liberty not because theological truth is unimportant, but because faith and conscience are considered too important to be produced by coercion.

Article XVII of the Baptist Faith and Message begins with the conviction that God alone is Lord of the conscience. It distinguishes the church from the state, says that the church should not resort to civil power to accomplish its work, and says that the gospel pursues its ends through spiritual means rather than state coercion. It also explicitly rejects civil penalties for religious opinions. The full text is available in the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.

Those convictions did not arise as a recent concession to secular culture. Versions of that concern have appeared throughout Baptist history, shaped in part by communities that knew what it meant to live under governments where another religious group possessed enough civil power to decide which beliefs were acceptable and which were not.

Then in 2024, Southern Baptist messengers addressed the issue even more directly. They reaffirmed Article XVII, opposed establishing a state religion, and specifically rejected government coercion of religious belief, including blasphemy laws. At the same time, that resolution did not tell Christians to retreat from public life or stop making moral arguments in the public square. The resolution explicitly combines religious liberty with robust Christian engagement in public life.

That distinction is useful far beyond Baptist circles because discussions like this tend to become polarized very quickly. One side hears “religious liberty” and assumes somebody is arguing for a secular public square where Christian convictions are not allowed. The other hears “Christian political engagement” and immediately assumes somebody wants a theocracy.

There are a lot of positions between those two caricatures, and we should have enough patience to find out what somebody actually means before we decide what category to put them in.

What Does the New Testament Church Actually Do With Blasphemy?

The more I thought about this question, the more I found myself coming back to Acts 17.

Paul walks into Athens and sees a city filled with idols. Luke tells us that his spirit was provoked within him. Paul is not impressed by religious pluralism, and he certainly does not believe that all these competing forms of worship are equally valid expressions of spirituality. These people are worshiping false gods. They are wrong about God, and Paul believes their error has eternal consequences.

So what does he do?

He reasons with them. He goes into the synagogue and into the marketplace. Eventually he stands before the Areopagus and tells them that the God they do not know is the Creator of heaven and earth. He tells them God commands all people everywhere to repent, warns them about coming judgment, and proclaims the resurrection.

There is nothing timid about Paul’s approach. He is not afraid to say that Athens is wrong.

But what strikes me is the kind of weapon he reaches for.

Paul does not appeal to the magistrate and ask Athens to outlaw the worship of false gods. He does not try to get the city council to impose Christian orthodoxy. He confronts false worship with truth, and he calls people to repentance through proclamation.

We see something similar in 2 Corinthians 10, where Paul says the weapons of his warfare are not fleshly but possess divine power to destroy strongholds and arguments raised against the knowledge of God. We need to respect the context there; Paul is describing apostolic ministry, not giving us a generic slogan about every kind of conflict. But that is precisely why the text is so relevant. When Paul thinks about confronting lies that stand against the knowledge of God, his confidence is in the spiritual weapons God has actually given him.

That raises an uncomfortable question for us. Do we sometimes look at those weapons and quietly think they are not enough?

I Think This Is Where the Issue Gets Closer to Home

It is one thing to have an abstract argument about religious liberty. It is another thing to live through a time when Christianity seems to be losing cultural influence.

A lot has changed in a relatively short period of time. Beliefs about sexuality, marriage, gender, the sanctity of human life, the authority of Scripture, and even the basic idea that Christianity is good for society no longer carry the cultural weight they once did in many places. Christians who remember a different America can feel that change very deeply.

And when we feel something slipping away, we tend to grab.

I understand that instinct. I feel it too. When we believe something is good, we want to protect it. When we believe something is true, we want our children and grandchildren to inherit it. When we see ideas taking hold that we genuinely believe will hurt people, it can be frustrating to watch the culture move in that direction.

But this is exactly where we need to examine our hearts, because a legitimate desire for faithfulness can gradually become a desire for control.

I have been thinking about the difference between those two things quite a bit. Faithfulness asks, “What has God actually given me to do here?” Control asks, “How do I guarantee the outcome?”

Those questions sound similar until you sit with them for a while.

Christians have real responsibilities in public life. We should vote. We should advocate for just laws. We should protect the vulnerable. We should tell the truth. Christians who serve in government should govern according to conscience before God. We should not pretend our faith becomes irrelevant the moment a question becomes political.

But none of those responsibilities make us sovereign over what happens to the culture.

That belongs to God.

And I wonder whether some of the attraction of Christian political power comes from a fear that if we do not secure Christianity’s place ourselves, Christianity may lose.

If that is what is underneath our thinking, then we need to remember who Christ is.

Jesus Was Standing in Front of Caesar’s Representative

John 18 has always been one of the most important passages in this discussion for me. Jesus is standing before Pilate, and Pilate wants to know whether Jesus is a king.

Jesus tells him, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Then He explains that if His kingdom were of this world, His servants would be fighting to keep Him from being handed over.

We can misunderstand that verse if we hear Jesus saying that His kingdom has nothing to do with this world. That cannot be what He means. This is the same Christ who will tell His disciples after the resurrection that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Him. There is no little secular corner of creation outside His lordship.

The point is not that Christ’s kingdom is irrelevant to this world. The point is that His kingdom does not come from this world and does not advance by the ordinary methods worldly kingdoms use to establish and preserve their power.

Just look at what is happening in the scene.

The King is standing before Pilate. Rome appears powerful while Jesus appears powerless. Pilate has soldiers, Jesus is bound, and Pilate seems to be making the decision about what will happen next while Jesus is on His way to a cross.

If we froze the story right there, we could easily misunderstand who actually holds the power.

But we know what Pilate does not know. The cross is not the collapse of Christ’s kingdom. It is part of the victory. Jesus gives His life for sinners, bears the wrath of God, defeats sin and death, and rises from the grave. Then this crucified and risen King sends ordinary disciples into the world with a message.

He does not send them with an army or with the ability to compel conversion. He sends them to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to observe all that He commanded. And somehow the gospel begins spreading through the Roman world.

That ought to affect the way we think about power.

Christ Is Not Waiting for the Government to Recognize Him

There is a sentence I keep coming back to as I think through all of this: Jesus does not become King when a government acknowledges Him.

He is King already.

That does not answer every question about whether a nation’s laws or founding documents should acknowledge God. Christians can continue having that discussion, and there are historical, constitutional, theological, and prudential questions involved in it. Mohler and Land clearly continue to disagree about some of them.

But whatever conclusion we reach on those questions, the kingship of Jesus is not at stake.

Philippians 2 tells us the Father has highly exalted Christ and given Him the name above every name. Scripture points forward to a day when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. That future does not depend upon Christians maintaining enough political leverage to make it happen.

And that should give us a different posture toward the world—not withdrawal, indifference, or cowardice, but confidence.

We can tell the truth without panicking when people reject it. We can participate in public life without pretending political power is the hope of the church. We can advocate for righteous laws without imagining that righteous laws can regenerate the human heart. We can defend religious liberty for our neighbor while still believing our neighbor is profoundly wrong about God.

Those things can all be true at the same time.

The Holy Spirit does not need Caesar’s sword to produce the new birth. Paul calls the gospel itself “the power of God for salvation.” Sometimes I think we say we believe that, but then the political climate changes and we begin acting as though the gospel needs a little more help than Paul realized.

That is worth examining.

So What Do We Do With Mohler’s Correction?

For one thing, I think we should appreciate the fact that Mohler publicly corrected himself. We live in a culture that rewards people for doubling down, especially when they have an audience cheering them on. There is something healthy about a Christian theologian saying that criticism caused him to reconsider an argument and that, on this point, he believes he was wrong.

We should also resist the temptation to make the correction say more than it does. Mohler still believes the American political tradition rests upon theological assumptions that ought to be acknowledged. Land still believes portions of Mohler’s proposal cross Baptist and constitutional lines. That disagreement did not disappear when Mohler changed his position on blasphemy.

But for the rest of us, I think the conversation is useful because it forces us to make distinctions we often avoid.

There is a difference between saying that government is accountable to God and saying government should enforce Christian orthodoxy. There is a difference between Christians influencing public policy and the church using civil power to accomplish its mission. There is a difference between acknowledging that Christianity has shaped a nation’s history and giving the state authority over religious belief. There is also a difference between defending freedom of conscience and pretending all religious claims are equally true.

If we do not make those distinctions, we end up talking past each other.

More importantly, I think we need to ask what our political instincts reveal about our confidence in Christ. When Christianity loses cultural influence, do we become fearful? Do we begin to think the church cannot flourish without cultural approval? Do we start looking toward political power to accomplish something Christ gave to preaching, discipleship, prayer, worship, Christian community, and the work of the Holy Spirit?

Those are not merely political questions. They are questions of faith.

The Church Has Something Caesar Does Not

There is a strange irony in all of this. When Christians begin to envy political power, we can forget that Christ has already entrusted His church with something far more powerful than coercion.

He has given us the gospel, the Word of God, prayer, the fellowship of His people, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and most importantly His Spirit. None of that means government is unnecessary, and none of it means Christians should abandon public life. Romans 13 is still in the Bible. So is Acts 17. So is Matthew 28. We need all of them.

Government has work God has given it to do, and the church has work God has given it to do. The wisdom comes in refusing to confuse the two.

Blasphemy is serious. Idolatry is serious. False doctrine is serious. Unbelief is serious. We do not need to make any of those things smaller in order to defend religious liberty.

What we need is confidence that Christ knows how to build His church.

The early Christians proclaimed Jesus in a world filled with idols, sexual immorality, religious pluralism, political oppression, and open hostility toward the faith. They did not control Rome, and for long periods Rome actively opposed them. Yet the gospel continued to move.

That should humble us, but I think it should encourage us too.

We are not the first Christians to live in a culture that does not understand us. We are not the first Christians to watch powerful institutions embrace beliefs contrary to Scripture. We are not the first Christians to wonder what faithfulness looks like when the surrounding world seems to be moving in another direction.

And our calling has not changed.

We tell the truth, love our neighbors, protect the vulnerable, pursue justice, pray for those who govern us, and make disciples. We refuse to call evil good simply because the culture demands it, and we refuse to grab tools Christ has not given us simply because we are afraid the tools He has given us will not be enough.

Maybe that is the question underneath this whole controversy. Not simply whether there should be blasphemy laws, and not even simply what Christians should think about Christian nationalism. The deeper question is whether we trust Christ enough to be faithful with the authority He has actually given His church.

The state may bear the sword. Christ gave His church the gospel.

And I am increasingly convinced that whenever we begin to think the gospel needs Caesar’s sword in order to succeed, the problem is not that we have taken the kingship of Christ too seriously.

It may be that we have not taken it seriously enough.

Sources

Through the Hope of Truth examines the events and ideas shaping our world through the truth of Scripture, seeking faithful Christian discernment and hope in Christ rather than cultural outrage or partisan allegiance.