6 Answers on Christian Nationalism: Complete Edition
All 7 posts
Six Answers for Kevin DeYoung on ‘Christian Nationalism’ (I)
A good article, with questions I can answer
What is Christian Nationalism?
I pinned a question something like that to the top of my X account for a while (and got a conversation out of it).
Kevin DeYoung is right to say that, “There is still no shared understanding of what the term means.” I’m quoting this article, which will be the subject of a series of these Substack Exclusives (possibly to be gathered into a main-website article eventually).
In an early part of that article, DeYoung explains why he’s not a Christian Nationalist, starting with point #1 quoted above. He points to The Case for Christian Nationalism, a book I reviewed here, stating that it had severe issues, some of which I noted, the first of which (blurring race and nation) I can’t disagree with, though I’ve not read it recently enough to agree. He expresses a disquiet with the term ‘nationalism’ (not entirely unjustified), particularly as connected to religion, and finished with a few sentences I find worthy of quoting: “Increasingly, the loudest voices arguing for Christian Nationalism are marked by juvenile insults steeped in online jargon from the dissident right. What’s more, some of these proponents traffic openly in racist ideology, antisemitism, and Neo-Nazi sympathies.“
Yuuuup.
I do not mind if somebody calls me a Christian Nationalists, but increasingly I am unwilling to pro-actively adopt the term. Of DeYoung’s four issues, I can echo points #1 & #4 wholeheartedly, while issuing a caveated agreement with point #2. For point three, I’m not really worried, though I don’t have a particular love for the term ‘nationalism,’ as it too easily becomes a synonym for ‘jingoism.’
For now, I prefer ‘(Christian) theonomist.’ It seems clearer. Perhaps ‘Christian patriot’?
All that aside, I do stand as a proponent of what can accurately be termed ‘Christian Nationalism,’ at least as much as anything can be called ‘Christian Nationalism,’ given the term’s ambiguity. More precisely, I believe that God’s law given in Scripture should be the explicit binding authority in designing and operating a civil government, just as it ought to be in every human occupation.
DeYoung poses a set of six questions, some quick to answer, some not so quick. But I have answers to all of them (and I’m going to inflict that on you). Some of the answers (like #1) I’m absolutely certain of. Some, as you’ll see, are vaguer; I know the outline and many salient points, but I’ll gladly admit that further study is needed to refine the whole.
Regardless, I’ll get the first question DeYoung poses out of the way. Racism (holding ancestry or biology proper ground for hatred or devaluation) is wicked; antisemitism, meaning racism directed against Jews, is similarly vile. Nazism, like all false religions, is wicked, particularly dangerous for its close relationship to the mindset and theology of many modern Westerners. I disregard entirely the equivocatory accusations of racism which base their definition in wokeness or other rebellion against God; call me a racist, and I’ll be no more offended than if you call me a Roswell grey.
Next time: “When and how does the nation act as a corporate moral person?”
Spoilers: this is one of the complicated ones.
Part II
Can a ‘nation’ sin?
DeYoung’s second question is: “When and how does the nation act as a corporate moral person?”
The first job here is to define our terms, just as his first question required defining ‘racism.’ What is a ‘nation’? Two definitions present themselves. First, the ‘nation’ might be the people group- a culture, generally with a focal ethnicity, a focal religion, and a distinguishing aesthetic, as well as, definitionally, a shared history. This meaning, frankly, is the meaning I prefer with ‘nation,’ but it’s not what DeYoung means here. Second, then, is DeYoung’s probable meaning: the nation as the body politic, consisting of a state (whether nation-state or empire) and citizens. So the United Kingdom is a ‘nation’ under this definition, but ‘Britain’ is not. ‘Scotland’ occupies an odd middle-ground, what with its devolved parliamentary structure.
If this is what we mean by a nation, then, we can divide the question farther: ‘How does the state act as a moral agent?’ and ‘How does the citizenry as a body (henceforth termed the “state’s nation” act as a moral agent?’
The answers are complex.
For both questions, we must establish that the entities in question- the state and the state’s nation- are not individual moral agents. The government and the citizenry are both collections of human beings, individual moral agents who are individually accountable.
Such groups do have moral agency. If a church chooses to support abortion, the ‘church’ has sinned- but the actual guilt, the actual sin, attaches to the church members who either sought that end goal or fought it with insufficient vigor, insufficient wisdom (the person who resisted maximally and never endorsed the atrocity, he is not guilty). If Israel, in the Old Testament, chose to follow after the Golden Calf (Ex. 32), the sin was the sin of each individual participant in the apostasy. Yet we can say that Israel sinned because the Israelites sinned in their capacity as Israelites.
My answer to DeYoung, then, starts thus: the sin of a nation is the sin of its people, whether its officials (the government) or its citizens (the state’s nation), insofar as they sin in their capacity as officials and as citizens. ‘Citizen’ here is not used in the legal sense; I merely use it to identify those who are participants in the body ruled by a particular government.
As such, a nation is a moral agent in its individual constituents are moral agents whose actions constitute the actions of the nation. A state sins when it slaughters the innocent (Canada) or oppresses the righteous (Britain, America), but it does not sin as a person sins. The official sins as a person (because he is a person). The state, meanwhile, is morally accountable only in this sense: the people which make up the state are morally accountable.
The state’s nation are accountable on structurally identical terms: each part of that people acts with moral agency, and the moral agency of the state’s nation is the collection of their individual moral agency. If the American culture’s desire is to kill children, ‘America’ is sinning- by which we mean that Americans in general are sinning, though some hold-outs resist the temptation. The collective moral status is a product and expression of the individual moral statuses comprised in it, being drawn from them as they are relevant to it.
In parting from this question, DeYoung asserts that “nations can be called to account before God without insisting that the government of those nations make declaratory statements about Christian doctrine or suppress non-Christian forms of religious expression.” Nothing I have said directly answers this, but it does provide a path to analyze it. including both the state and the state’s nation within the term ‘nation,’ because a nation’s moral agency is composed of the moral agency of the individual agents composing it, we know that DeYoung’s assertion translates to saying, ‘members of a nation, in their capacity as members of a nation, need not ensure (or ought not seek) for the government to be explicitly Christian or for it to suppress non-Christian religion.’
The answer to that question lies in Scripture. Does God’s law tell us that a people ought to do either of these things? I contend that it tells us most emphatically to both in very specific ways; certainly, many of the possibilities encompassed in DeYoung’s words are forbidden. So the nations, both as governments and as persons, have a responsibility to explicitly honor the God of Scripture as defined in Scripture (as described in the Nicene Creed, if you want to appeal to church history). This command is given clearly enough in Psalm 2 (“Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling” (v10-11).) and Deuteronomy 29:29 (“… the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”), among others. The government is meant to enforce a certain aspect of God’s law (Gen. 9:5-6), and it fails in its duty if it hides that the law it enforces is indeed God’s law (Ps. 14:1; James 2:10-11).
Meanwhile, Scripture commands the government to suppress certain forms of pagan religion: “Any one of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech shall surely be put to death. The people of the land shall stone him with stones” (Lev. 20:2). Leviticus 20:10 also implicitly forbids much of cult prostitution, as was a common part of ancient pagan worship (and arguably of types of woke religion). God gives the civil government no authority to force conversion upon pagans, however.
The material point here is that answering the civil government’s duties rests on determining what authority God gave the officers of civil government, and the same goes for the nation ruled by that civil government or even the cultural nation (the ‘εθνος’). The moral agency of them all is a bundling of their members’ individual moral agencies, an aggregation which does not itself possess native moral agency.
Ultimately, the mechanism for sanctifying a nation is sanctifying its people individually. However, part of that sanctification is holiness in their capacity as members of the nation. This holiness as members of a nation means officers and citizens who seek righteous government and righteous response to government, as per Psalm 2 and Romans 13:1-7, and do so precisely because of God’s law compelling and shaping that pursuit.
God bless.
Can a nation sin? Yes- meaning that the members of a nation can sin in their capacity as members, creating a sin which, upon it becoming predominant, we term the nation’s sin.
Part III
DeYoung’s third question really breaks down into three different, significant questions, each of which could easily be a full-sized Creational Story article. In his commentary on the question, he asks: “What is the purpose of civil government?” but also “Does this purpose justify church-state institutional connections?” and “Does this purpose call for the state to ‘direct’ people towards God?” I’ll address each briefly.
Question A:
What is the purpose of civil government?
The civil government’s purpose is to enact justice in a particular sphere- particularly for violence against man’s body and his property, though also against certain assaults on the survival of his social body (the law on blasphemy in Leviticus 24). The basis of this mandate is in Genesis 9:5-6, where God commands mankind to kill the murderer, a commandment which in light of the forbidding of private vengeance in Genesis 4:15 (corroborated in Romans 12:9), required the creation of an institution to accomplish this responsibility without degenerating into vengeance. The Mosaic civil code further delineates the borders of what the state may punish: murder, robbery, fraud, rape, certain types of sexual sin (adultery, some incest, bestiality, homosexuality, etc.), kidnapping, blasphemy, sorcery, and covert paganism (open paganism, unless it transgresses other laws, is legal under the Mosaic code).
Included by implication in these is the particular duty of the government to protect its citizens from murder and theft along its borders, via military force.
Outside of these borders, the state has absolutely no authority. “There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God,” Paul tells us in Romans 13:4, and therefore if God does not give an authority to the civil government, it does not possess that authority. For this part of justice and for this purpose alone does the state bear the sword, the right of permanent harm.
Question B:
Does this justify church-state institutional connections?
No.
The church has a field of authority; the state has a field of authority; the family has a field of authority. As you can see here, I’ve very strong opinions on government transgressing into the family’s demesne. The church and the state are separate institutions, the one instituted in the early days of the New Covenant (in succession to that instituted with Aaron) and the other in the time just after the flood. Moses and Aaron were separate men (Ex. 18; Lev. 8). Uzziah was cursed for attempting to partake in the church’s affairs as if he were part of its leadership (2 Ch. 26:19).
The institutions of the church and of the state should remain separate. Probably active officials in one should refrain from holding office in the other for the duration of their office, as was the law in certain American states for some time (South Carolina, I think, was one). Certainly the state, having no place in the Scripturally-prescribed structure of the church, should not interfere in it (no state-run synods or councils, for instance).
Both, however, can and should speak to the other in their fields of authority. Church governments should administer discipline on state officials and voters who trespass into areas the church has authority to discipline, such as adultery or advocacy of murder (abortion), including excommunication. The state should punish any ‘church government’ which murders, robs, or otherwise breaks laws properly administered by the state. The church body and the citizenry (the material ruled by the institutions of the church and state respectively) should be the same people acting on the same law of God in their whole lives.
Question C:
Does this purpose call for the state to ‘direct’ people towards God?
The state should be explicitly Christian, and the state’s officials should proclaim the gospel. The state’s purpose, however, is not to spread the Gospel. It’s purpose is justice. Therefore, the declaration of the gospel should be a peripheral element of the state, purely the result of its officials being saved, rather than a policy the state pushes. Certainly no state money and no state coercion should be used to ‘advance’ the gospel (1 Sam. 15:23), certainly not by forced ‘conversion.’ Both would be unjust, forced ‘conversion’ directly and the more general category at least by being a mishandling of entrusted resources (at minimum). Always excepted from this condemnation, though, is that the state should ‘advance the gospel’ by providing that part of His justice which is its job- a free (from certain problems) and peaceable (in certain ways) environment. Such advancement, being blessed by righteousness, is the state’s proper and sufficient contribution to ‘directing’ people towards God.
Addendum
Aren’t I worried about the government having the right to choose a religion? Aren’t I worried it’ll choose wrong?
The fact of the matter is: the government will have a religion, simply because the government acts as a moral agent. It can only administer justice if it knows what justice is, and it can only know what justice is by knowing God (Prov. 1:7; Ps. 2:10-12). Like all the men is it composed of, government is historically bad at identifying the ‘true religion,’ but that does not obviate its duty to identify and obey that true religion, the true word of God, any more than mankind’s studied obtuseness frees him of responsibility to heed His law (Rom. 1:18-23).
God bless.
Part IV
Installment #4 of my response to DeYoung’s questions for Christian nationalism hits on an issue this series has already run roughshod over: what should the state’s witness be? DeYoung asks, properly, what it means for the state to ‘promote’ the true religion. He says quite a bit that’s true; he asks some sub-questions; and he presses a worry which I can give an answer to it, though whether my answer allays his worry, I will not guess.
That would require him reading this, for one (if you do, Rev. DeYoung, I’d be happy to hear how helpful you rate me so far).
Part the One
I’ll start by answering the list of sub-questions he bases off the original Westminster standard:
· The civil magistrate should preserve peace in the church in the same way that he preserves it in any institution, and against the same disturbances (violence and theft, primarily).
· The civil magistrate ought to preserve God’s truth as it is applied in his government and his daily life; as respects the church’s doctrine, however, he has only the authority of any Christian. His authority as the civil magistrate should not be employed in this duty, which is to say that he should not coerce. He should it apply it just as church government should apply its authority to the state: as an unusually loud witness for God’s side in the matter.
· The civil magistrate ought to punish ‘blasphemy’ with execution, as per Leviticus 24; blasphemy, however, is Scripturally a delimited category (this article will go into a little more depth). Blasphemy is limited completely to cases where a person states both his recognition of God (and His status) and his assertion that he is above God. As to heresy and false religions, unless that heresy/ false religion transgresses into the civil realm (such as by requiring human sacrifice- the British were right to stamp out Thuggee), the state has no jurisdiction to suppress it.
o Even then, the suppression is directed towards conspiracy to commit crime, not the religion per se. Plenty of Hindu rituals (like holding loud festivals in the middle of the street) or Muslim ‘calls to prayer’ might receive prosecution as disturbance of the peace, for instance. In the West, they should not receive the allowance that church bells receive (an allowance founded heavily on culture).
o ‘Christianity’ should be defined with cautious laxity- probably by an amended Nicene Creed. A person’s assertion of adherence to it should be accepted as true for governmental purposes.
· The civil magistrate has no right to interfere in worship, except for criminalities as defined by God’s law (human sacrifice, fraud, etc.).
· Ditto on ordinances.
· The state should not call church synods. It has no such authority.
· Nor to moderate them.
· See answer on heresy.
o Requiring nominal Christianity to vote or hold office is morally acceptable and probably wise. Interrogation of this profession or prosecution for fraudulence thereof (except in context of blasphemy), however, would be improper and unwise.
The Other Part of the Answer
As DeYoung says, “Every political leader must give an account to Christ of his beliefs and behaviors. That is true for all human beings.” So far so good. He then worries that giving the civil magistrate the task of promoting the ‘true religion’ makes him accountable for determining what that religion is, a task in which he is sure to err. To this, I have two answers. First, so what? If I have a duty, my incompetence or fraud in completing it does not make it any less my duty. This only matters if the duty is prudential, if the government is being offered the job because it seems equipped with the power to effectively carry out the task. Yet Christian government gives government nothing on a prudential basis; government has a duty, a duty it must complete, and it has no right to step a single micron past the borders of that duty’s necessities (limited government!).
Second, as a function of limited government, the power of the state to promote the ‘true religion’ is immensely circumscribed. The state’s job is to do justice in certain areas, areas summarized under ‘murder’ in Genesis 9:5-6 but not limited to literal murder; outside those areas, it acts evilly when it uses its coercive powers or the resources entrusted to it to fulfil that role. Its officers may work to promote the true religion, but they may not use the institution to do so, except as providing them with a place to speak from (just as church officers may not speak to the government coercively, threatening the members of it outside their congregation with excommunication or discipline, but they can use their representative status to catch the government’s attention or the world’s, to the promotion of His kingdom.
In the end, all this world is to be God’s and to be used for His kingdom, that we may rejoice in His glory.
P.S. I personally have no love for the ‘promote’ terminology. It’s not inaccurate, but I find it unhelpful.
Part V
The First Amendment is an excellent part of the American Constitution, one quite properly imitated in time by the states (because 14th Amendment incorporation is largely nonsense, particularly as currently promoted). That said, the First Amendment is not an end in itself.
The First Amendment as originally understood should remain a part of our government for the foreseeable future. DeYoung quite rightly distinguishes the abuses of the First Amendment from the proper understanding of it which both he and I support (I say ‘both’ because there really is a lot of overlap). I need to get around to publishing the article I wrote on the establishment clause of the First Amendment, but suffice to say that DeYoung is right in asserting that the First Amendment doesn’t demand secularist separation of church from state.
DeYoung focuses on the Free Exercise clause and asks specifically whether “Christian Nationalists think this First Amendment protection extends to all citizens of whatever religion.”
Now we come to the proviso I made earlier: the First Amendment is not an end in itself. Like all parts of the Constitution, the First Amendment is a means to an end, and that end, in the Christian’s eyes, is justice. Insofar as the First Amendment effectively produces justice, we should advocate for and preserve it; insofar as it fails, it must be amended itself.
The bare idea of the First Amendment, thankfully, is a recognition of the limitations on the just power of the civil government. Civil government is never in Scripture given the right to determine how people worship or even who they worship. Thus far, the Free Exercise clause is exactly right and applies, as it appears on its face, to all persons properly resident in the United States, as it should.
(I tried, at one point, to argue a position roughly contrary to this in the context of the Establishment clause, but the logic did not hold. Hence my current understanding of the Free Exercise clause.)
In all this orgy of free exercise, however, we must retain sight on the ultimate goal: justice. Justice demands there be limits to ‘free exercise;’ simply asserting religious practice cannot be an exemption from the rest of the law. Thus far DeYoung already has agreed with me (and, honestly, this question is one area where my answer and DeYoung’s is relatively similar). Murder, human sacrifice, and cult prostitution are all within the civil government’s province to restrict and part of their duty to punish, and any religious practice which includes these will go down with them (and possibly other members of the religion connected with the murder brought in on conspiracy charges).
Another exception exists, one less congenial to modern Evangelicals: the ban on blasphemy (Lev. 24:16), secret proselytizing (Deut. 13:6-11), and prophecy in the name of other gods (Deut. 18:20). All three of these are awarded the death sentence, necessarily delivered by the civil government, within Moses’s law. All three are in fact Divinely-prescribed state interferences in religion. No Free Exercise can be allowed, here; the states must recognize that there exists no freedom to blaspheme, to assert Christianity while seeking to lure others into indubitable apostasy, or to use false religion to impinge on God’s prophesy-monopoly.
(Though the framework is limited, we can conceive of these as respecting God’s property rights over His name, His followers (their covenants/ contracts), and His prophecy respectively.)
Note that in no case is the state allowed to compel religious action. The lack of a religious action- say, a refusal to swear by God in the courtroom or a religion which negates the weight of that oath- can have consequences- such as the jury finding the witness less reliable-, but no action is compelled or may be compelled.
In one context, though, the state does have a responsibility: in only very rare circumstances should a country admit permanent immigrants who are not at least ostensibly Christian. Doing otherwise endangers the public virtue and thus the public safety of the populace, not to mention damaging social cohesion. What circumstance would justify such, I will not investigate here, but they are quite limited (the most common would be family members of Christians).
God bless.
Part VI.I
DeYoung’s sixth question in itself takes two paragraphs[1] to answer. The rest of the segment…. Well, you’ll see.
First, I take strong issue with DeYoung’s willingness to adopt ‘Lockean liberalism’ as a desirable fundament of government, American or otherwise (whether it was factually a fundament, I do not here consider). As I lay out in this series of articles and in this more recent discussion of property’s origin, Locke’s ideas are both un-Biblical and eventually disastrous- not just his peripheral ideas, mind you, but the core he based his philosophy on (as well as the ‘universal man’ idea he had some participation in).
Locke’s conceived of the government as the product of social contract, wherein persons give up a portion of their autonomy to the government in order to receive certain benefits- security, for instance. He had some difficulty with explaining how people do this unintentionally and even contrary to their own stance, as with anarchists and criminals, though (if I remember correctly) he settled on a theory of implicit, non-revocable consent.
Such a system has little basis in Scripture’s view of the civil government. Scripture assigns civil government certain duties and grants it sufficient coercive authority to fulfil those duties (and no more). Government is established by the people (Genesis 9:5-6 places the governing authority on the people, not directly on an institution), but that authority does not descend from man’s authority over himself. No, we listen to the government because and insofar as it is “God’s servant for [our] good” (Rom. 13:4). Social contract theory, one of the fundaments of Locke’s philosophy, is not Biblical.
Second, I have some quibble with the appeal to ‘classical republicanism.’ While Roman republicanism (and Greek democracy) had some influence upon the Founders, particularly as mediated through Montesquieu, we should not forget that much of what we call ‘Republicanism’ finds its basis in the legislative and representative bodies of English and European society through the centuries, themselves in part based on Roman designs, in part on local cultural legacies, and in part on Scriptural commands. Such bodies include the eldership system, particularly as present in the Presbyterian church, the English parliament, the various European parliaments, and the state governments which formed, in large part, on the basis of charters (also called ‘covenants’ or ‘contracts’ or ‘compacts,’ the four words being fairly synonymous in the era).
Part VI.II
This response to DeYoung’s last question got broken up into two parts because it was the length of a Creational Story article.
Third, I must contend with certain elements of what DeYoung quotes Kuyper as saying. I am strongly in favor of ‘sphere sovereignty’ theology (as may have become apparent), but Kuyper is significantly wrong in several parts of his allegations here.
Kuyper alleges that the Old Testament examples “are of no force for us” because they lack the “infallible indication of what was or was not heretical” which was available in the Old Testament days. I have two answers. On the one hand, the Old Testament never gives the civil government the job of executing heretics or even repressing them, at least on grounds of heresy. Blasphemy, yes, and false prophecy, but heresy need not include either. On the other hand, Kuyper’s reason for obviating the perceived Old Testament law is balderdash. They had the infallible Scriptures; we have even more of said infallible Scriptures. We have a standard for heresy, one just as accessible to civil officials as anybody else- and we know from Luke 16:31 that if the Bible is insufficient, then no miracle will do the job better.
Kuyper alleges that the New Testament never calls for the use of the sword to repress heretics. I agree; I don’t believe in the repression of heretics (for heresy). But this reasoning fails to recognize that the New Testament is very, very quiet on the topic of what the civil magistrate should do, except by the implication of the continuing moral law. Why? Because the civil government was run by explicitly non-Christian persons, to the point that Christians in it had little agency to decide policy, in their lowly positions, and because the civil law was already available and needed little modification. The Ten Commandments needed no reiteration in the New Testament, and neither did the civil law. Kuyper’s argument would prove too much, by removing the entire OT civil law.
Kuyper alleges the rooting out of heretics is based on Romish tradition. Here he’s right.
Kuyper alleges that this practice usually backfires. Here I agree with him, but apparently on grounds he did not hold. Kuyper seems to believe that this is a result of the civil magistracy having insufficient standard. I hold that it is a result of government overstepping its proper bounds, so that sin leads to sin. From what I know of Kuyper, admittedly, he’d likely agree with me there (it’s basically an extension of sphere sovereignty theology), but my disagreement with his statement stands. We have a sufficient standard for the government, just as for the rest of life, and our consistent misuse of that standard is not an excuse to forget about using it.
On the whole, while DeYoung and Kuyper are in the right here to withhold the power of judging or repressing heresy from the state, DeYoung draws the wrong implication (if I understand him correctly) in making this grounds for separating the civil government from an explicitly and pervasively Biblical standard. Indeed, I agree with DeYoung’s policy position on Scriptural grounds. What basis other would I have in moral matters than that which is sufficient to “every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17)?
All that said, I should answer the original question. What model do I find in history for the order I want?
Well, in the first place, every human order is flawed and sinful; in that sense, no order man has yet accomplished suffices as our example. In a sense, therefore, I have no problem with being termed a ‘revolutionary,’ though ‘revanchist’ would be more accurate to the goal and ‘reformer’ to the means. I intend to take every thought captive (2 Cor. 10:5), including every idea of civil government, and that means seeking a holiness which will come to be only in the glorification of the world following the Second Coming.
Second to this, however, I can produce a variety of historical examples which instruct us. They are all immensely flawed. They are all, in actual implementation, riddled with sin and corruption. They all have structural defects vast and even ruinous. Some are admirable more for a segment than for the whole. But they exist. The three most comprehensively admirable examples are, from most to least admirable, the Israelite republic under Moses and Joshua, the American republics of the various states and of the early federal government (particularly prior to the conquest of the south in the 1860s[2]), and the English government (particularly under the Puritans). Other orders which are examples for us in part include the medieval system[3] (particularly its emphasis on relationship), the Hawaiian kingdom post-Christianization (an explicitly Christian constitution), and the Dutch government in various eras- early days and Kuyper both.
God bless.
[1] I initially said a ‘single’ paragraph, but that turned out to be false.
[2] No, I’m not asserting the Confederates were pure and holy. I am asserting that secession was and is thoroughly legal, meaning that the Confederacy was a legitimate foreign state which the United States conquered, occupied, and incorporated by force.
[3] Yes, I’m summing up a lot of different ‘systems’ in these two words, ridiculously squashing the lot.