The survival of the United States hinges on establishing a thoroughly Protestant Christian nation and encouraging young evangelical adults to marry and have a lot of babies, according to Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Mohler pitched his preference for a Christian nationalist country with high birth rates during a wide-ranging interview with the American Reformer published on Substack Aug. 18.
“I believe that the continuation of the American experiment is entirely dependent upon an explicit reference to the Christian and indeed overwhelmingly Protestant nature of our origins,” Mohler said. “And I believe the abandonment and repudiation of those origins will lead to the demise of the American nation as we know it.”
“The continuation of the American experiment is entirely dependent upon an explicit reference to the Christian and indeed overwhelmingly Protestant nature of our origins.”
The country was founded by Puritans and other Christians not as an anti-monarchal movement but specifically to extend Christendom, Mohler asserted. “We need to understand that at the time of the American founding, there was no such thing as a secularized society. The basis of law, the origin of morality, the authority of government itself was understood to rest upon explicitly Christian foundations.”
Mohler reiterated that those foundations must be Protestant because that defined the worldview of the Founders.
“The fact that so much of this was not articulated is a reflection of the fact that it was so widely assumed and unquestioned,” he said. “Those who founded this nation and framed its Constitution and laws did not see such an acknowledgment as necessary.”
And that Protestantism, he added, must be “the only lasting form” which is “confessional Protestantism in its classical form, and that has to come with a comprehensive Protestant worldview.”
Catholics have come to play a prominent role in U.S. conservatism because many Americans are attracted to its deeply contextual and coherent theology, Mohler added.
“We also have to show young evangelicals that we too have a thick culture, and that we too have a thick tradition,” he continued. “I point out to people that in Calvin’s Institutes (of the Christian Religion), after quoting Scripture, you’re going to find John Calvin quoting Augustine. You’re going to find John Calvin citing even (Catholic saint) Bernard of Clairvaux. I do this to make very clear that Protestantism doesn’t make an absolute break with everything that came before but is actually a recovery of what had been lost.”
Restoring the Southern Baptist Convention and Southern Seminary to the views of forebears who were Calvinists has been a defining motif of Mohler’s 33-year tenure at Southern Seminary. Southern Baptists emerged from two theological streams — one inspired by a “whosoever will may come” evangelism and the other inspired by the idea of God’s predestination of some people to salvation and others to damnation.
Throughout the 20th century, the SBC increasingly left behind the Calvinistic theology of a limited atonement and embraced the generous orthodoxy of a general atonement for all who call upon the name of the Lord.
But with Mohler’s election at Southern Seminary in 1993, the repressed Calvinistic stream came roaring back to life.
One thing Mohler and the non-Calvinist conservatives of the SBC share is a disdain for the Mainline Protestant churches and what they consider liberal theology.
“Almost every civilization from ancient Sparta to the United States of America faces the challenge of channeling the energies of young men into productive manhood.”
Mainline Protestantism must be utterly rejected just as that movement rejected the gospel in favor of liberal secularism and consequently declined, he said in the interview.
“This is not a group sent into exile. This is a group that completely burned down their own house. Furthermore, they did it in every way conceivable. They did it ideologically, they did it culturally, they did it financially, but they also did it biologically — they just stopped reproducing.”
Mohler has made well known his fixation with birth rates as a measure of a nation’s religious and moral character. He laid out the argument in a podcast series earlier this year with episode titles such as “Secularism and the Decline of the Birthrate: When Belief in God Goes Away, So Do the Babies.”
But there is hope in the ongoing rise in young men highly committed to faith, he told American Reformer. “It is the emergence and visibility of convictional young men that is the game changer.”
That’s because it is “male energy” channeled into the masculine and productive roles of husband, father and citizen that will rebuild society, he said. “There isn’t a single civilization in human history that’s really had a struggle with assisting young women to move into responsible female roles, especially in marriage and in the home. That’s happened organically in almost every civilization. But at the same time, almost every civilization from ancient Sparta to the United States of America faces the challenge of channeling the energies of young men into productive manhood.”
In other words, societies can be rebuilt when young Christian men and women marry to raise children, Mohler added. “And so, I don’t believe, fundamentally, that any correction comes until you see it in organic form, as in young men, young women moving the age of marriage much earlier, young men and young women once married, beginning to have babies much earlier and to have more of them.”
American Reformer is a far-right online journal and advocacy group co-founded by Josh Abbotoy, Nate Fischer and Aaron Renn. The organization is closely tied to New Founding, a venture and network firm also associated with Abbotoy and Fischer.
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