Witchcraft, Wokeness, and the Gospel Coalition’s War on Christian Nations

Jd Hall, Incite to Insight, Dec 6, 2025

Most Christians have never heard of Joe Carter, but they have probably felt the downstream effects of his work without knowing his name. Carter writes for The Gospel Coalition, which functions as the respectable watering hole of safe, polished, middle class evangelicalism, where the professional Christian class tells suburban believers what is serious, what is fringe, and which ideas will still get them invited back to the conference circuit. When Carter decides to take aim at Christian Nationalism, it is not a random blog spat. It is the institutional evangelical machine sending a memo.

His article, “What Wicca’s Origins Teach Us About Christian Nationalism,” is not mere opinion. It is an attempt to brand a rising movement as the theological cousin of witchcraft, white nationalism, and antisemitism, and to signal that anyone sympathetic to Christian Nationalism should be viewed as an unstable crank. If you care how pastors and lay people are trained to think about nations, law, and public morality, you cannot ignore it when an institutional mouthpiece starts comparing your political theology to a broom closet cult.

Carter’s structure is straightforward. He begins with an Egyptologist, Margaret Murray, who invented a debunked theory that medieval witch trials were really the persecution of an underground pagan fertility cult. Her myth inspired Gerald Gardner to stitch together a new religion from Murray’s fiction, Freemasonry, and ceremonial magic. That religion became Wicca. Sociologist Gabriel Rossman calls Murray’s idea a “performative” theory. It was not true when she wrote it, but people believing and acting on it eventually made something like it real. Carter then announces that “we see something similar happening today with Christian Nationalism.” He wants the reader to carry the smell of occult fraud from the Wicca story straight into any thought about Christian Nationalism before he ever bothers to define his terms.

From there he claims that Christian Nationalists have built their vision of America on invented history and discredited scholarship, just as Murray’s disciples built Wicca on bad history. His main villain is David Barton. Carter notes that Barton’s book on Jefferson was pulled by its publisher after historians criticized it, then treats this as proof that the Christian America Christian Nationalists want to restore never existed. He points to Jefferson cutting miracles from the Bible, Franklin’s lack of church attendance, Washington’s refusal to take Communion, and concludes that the founders were not devout in any meaningful sense. In his telling, the America Christian Nationalists appeal to is as imaginary as Murray’s pagan covens.

To keep the narrative from sounding completely hostile to the past, he concedes that America was “demonstrably Christian” in culture until the late nineteen sixties, even if it was never officially Christian in law. Protestant Christianity did shape public assumptions, moral language, and civic habits. He even admits that it is good for “gospel centered Christianity” to flourish freely. Then he draws a bright red line. Cultural Christianity is allowed. Political Christianity is not. The moment anyone suggests that the state itself ought to acknowledge Christ, Carter drags them back toward the Wicca comparison. That is the caricature he needs in order to keep his analogy alive.

He also insists that Christian Nationalism, as a label, is a recent stunt. Until roughly a decade ago, almost no one called himself a Christian Nationalist, and the term lived mostly in academic journals and hit pieces. The word nationalist, in his telling, is so stained by twentieth century regimes that any Christian who adopts it is already halfway to idolatry.

From this launchpad Carter introduces theology. He argues that nationalism contradicts Christianity because it divides humanity along lines that the gospel erases. He cites Paul’s claim in Galatians that there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ and describes the church as a transnational, multiethnic community drawn from every tribe and tongue. Christianity, he grants, can inform public engagement and love of country, but nationalism as an ideology tries to invert the hierarchy and make the nation an ultimate object of loyalty. With help from political theorist David Koyzis, he distinguishes healthy patriotism from ideological nationalism and concludes that while a Christian may rightly be patriotic, he cannot be a nationalist in the technical sense. The label Christian Nationalism therefore yokes a universal faith to a particularist ideology and corrupts both.

Finally he claims that nationalism does not only contradict Christianity. It contradicts “Americanism” itself. He appeals to the Declaration of Independence and its language about all men being created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. He describes the founding as rooted in universal principles, not blood and soil. Nationalism, he says, rests on ethnicity, language, and ancestry, which stands in direct opposition to America’s creed. When some voices on the right speak of European heritage or demographic change, Carter accuses them of importing a neo Marxist European ideology that the American founding explicitly rejected. That move sets the stage for his later assertion that nationalism almost always tilts toward racism and antisemitism and that Christian Nationalists should not be surprised to find their movement attracting bigots and Nazi sympathizers. By the time he is finished, Christian Nationalism has been framed as fraudulent history, theological confusion, political idolatry, and a gateway drug to racial hatred.

HOW CARTER RIGS THE GAME BEFORE IT STARTS

Once the scaffolding is visible, it becomes clear that Carter has rigged the game before any serious debate can begin. He does not start with a biblical definition of nations. He does not begin with the historic Christian understanding of magistrates, law, and the duty of rulers before God. He starts with witches. He starts with covens, invented cults, and Nazis cataloguing witch trials as evidence of “Semitic assault on Aryan women.” This is not how a theologian opens a careful argument. This is how a propagandist primes emotions. When you lead with witchcraft and Nazis and only later mention Christian brothers you disagree with, your goal is not clarity. Your goal is contamination.

The Wicca analogy is not only manipulative. It is insulting. In Murray’s story, the people who built Wicca were self conscious inventors. They took a debunked thesis and treated it as raw material for a new spirituality. No one familiar with serious Christian Nationalist thinkers believes that is what they are doing. They are working from Scripture and from centuries of Christian political reflection. By directly linking Murray’s fantasy cult to Christian Nationalism, Carter suggests that CN leaders are consciously trafficking in fake history. He is not just saying they are wrong about the founders. He is implying that they know better and do it anyway because myth is useful. That is a serious charge to aim at men who are actually opening Bibles and quoting Reformers, and he makes it without once engaging their strongest arguments.

The second way he rigs the board is by turning David Barton into the whole scaffolding of Christian Nationalism. If Barton’s popular level work on Jefferson has problems, Carter thinks he has disproved Christian Nationalism as a project. This is like claiming that if one apologist butchers a Greek verb, Christianity is disproved and we should all go home. Christian Nationalism, in any serious form, does not stand or fall on the claim that Jefferson was orthodox or that every founder secretly yearned for the Westminster Confession. It rests on the far more basic and ancient claim that Christ is king, that nations are real entities with moral obligations, and that rulers are accountable to God to enforce justice in accord with his law. That claim would be true even if every founder were a cold deist.

Carter knows this, which is why his silence about the broader tradition is deafening. Instead of dealing with Augustine, Calvin, the Magisterial Reformers, the Puritans, and the Protestant jurists who all spoke of Christian nations, he lights a bonfire under Barton and pretends the entire edifice is gone with the smoke. This is not argument. It is exorcism. He hopes that if he can make Barton smell toxic enough, the reader will flee from anything that sounds like Christian Nationalism. The strategy only works because most of his audience has never been introduced to historic Christian teaching on nations. They do not know that for century after century Christians assumed nations were real communities with duties before God. They do not know that Calvinists in Scotland and Puritans in New England built entire societies on the belief that God rules over nations and that rulers must honor him. Carter has to erase that record in order to make Christian Nationalism look like a new cult. If he acknowledged it, his Wicca analogy would die in his hands.

HOW CARTER BETRAYS SCRIPTURE AND HISTORY

Carter’s central trick is definitional. He cannot defeat Christian Nationalism on its own terms, so he quietly alters the terms until the movement looks like something scraped off the floor of a European politics seminar. He claims nationalism is a technical ideology born in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shaped by Marxist analysis and ethnic conflict, and he speaks as if this were the only legitimate meaning of the word. He never acknowledges that Scripture uses the term nations with perfect ease and with no hint that nations themselves are morally suspect. He never acknowledges that pre modern Christians spoke of nations long before modern ideologues began to abuse the language.

By defining nationalism as an ideology that always divides humanity into an oppressive “us versus them,” always demands that every loyalty be subordinated to the state, and always turns the nation into an idol, he wins the fight before it begins. The key word in all those descriptions is always. If nationalism always does this, then no Christian may ever touch it. What he never considers is that nations might simply be peoples who share a common story, a common inheritance, a common moral vision, and a common duty to order their public life according to truth. He never considers that nations might have obligations before God, because that would require him to pull his political theology from Scripture rather than from Enlightenment liberalism. He begins with the assumption that nationalism is intrinsically corrupt and then retrofits the Bible around that assumption.

His theological argument hangs on a selective reading of the New Testament. He cites Galatians 3, where Paul says there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ, then concludes that the very existence of national distinctions contradicts the gospel. Paul is speaking of spiritual standing before God, not the abolition of concrete identities in history. Paul remains a Jew after conversion. Timothy’s Greek father remains a Greek. The Ethiopian eunuch remains Ethiopian. Scripture never teaches that salvation dissolves nations any more than it dissolves families, and the attempt to pretend otherwise forces Paul to contradict the rest of Scripture, which describes nations as enduring realities under God’s sovereignty.

Carter avoids the texts that undermine his thesis. Nations rejoice. Nations serve the Lord with fear. Nations are condemned for wickedness. Nations walk by the light of the Lamb in Revelation. The Great Commission commands the church to disciple nations. None of this fits his vision of a borderless, propositionally defined mass of individuals who happen to share a passport. If nations are not real categories, the command to disciple them becomes meaningless, so he simply refuses to look in that direction.

He then tries to pit nationalism against the American founding by treating the Declaration as a free floating philosophical essay rather than a political document rooted in a particular people. He claims America was founded on universal principles and not on any sense of shared Christian heritage. Yet the men who wrote and ratified that document lived in a culture shaped by Protestant Christianity. They quoted Scripture. They spoke of providence and divine justice without embarrassment. They assumed a moral order grounded in God. Carter isolates the abstract phrases he likes and ignores the context that gave them flesh. He wants a founding built on slogans, not on saints and sinners in an actual Christian society, because a rootless founding makes it easier to deny that America ever had a Christian inheritance at all. If there was no Christian inheritance, then Christian Nationalism is searching for treasure that never existed.

Once he has defined nationalism as idolatry and Christianity as a purely spiritual identity with no public teeth, Carter can treat every Christian Nationalist as a heretic in training. He does not need to answer arguments from Scripture. He does not need to engage the historic Christian tradition. He does not need to explain why nations appear on nearly every page of the biblical story. He simply relies on the emotional power of his definitions. If nationalism is a path to fascism, then anyone who uses the word is playing with fire. If America was never Christian in any meaningful sense, then any attempt to recover Christian influence is delusion. If a Christian identity erases national identity, then any appeal to a Christian people becomes inherently suspect. His argument stands only because he has built a cage of loaded vocabulary around it.

ALL BOOGEYMAN, NO BIBLE

When the definitions and history are not enough, Carter reaches for his final tool. He turns up the fog machine and starts projecting silhouettes on the wall. Witches. Nazis. Racist internet accounts. Himmler cataloguing witch trials. He suggests that nationalism almost always leads to antisemitism and that Christian Nationalists should not be shocked when fringe figures show up with racist baggage. He never proves that Christian Nationalism as a theology requires any of this. He never distinguishes between a movement’s core and its cranks. His tactic is guilt by proximity. If a handful of unstable people use nationalist language online, then the ideology itself must be suspect.

This standard would destroy his own camp if he applied it consistently. The orbit of The Gospel Coalition has produced scandals and embarrassments. Carter would never claim that those failures invalidate the entire project or prove that its theology is inherently corrupt. He knows that fringe elements do not define a movement. He only forgets that rule when Christian Nationalists are the ones on trial. Christianity has always attracted fanatics and wolves. The existence of Judaizers in the early church did not invalidate Paul’s gospel. The existence of online racists who like the word nationalist does not invalidate the claim that nations remain accountable to Christ.

His most reckless line is that Christian Nationalism is a movement birthed in Marxism and antisemitism. Christian political theology predates Marx by more than a thousand years. The idea that nations should honor Christ predates modern ideological categories altogether. Augustine, Calvin, Knox, the Protestant jurists, and countless others spoke of nations as moral agents under God. Modern Christian Nationalists are drawing from that well, not from the Communist Manifesto. Carter never acknowledges this because he cannot afford to. If he admitted that Christian Nationalism stands in continuity with the historic church, his whole scare story would fall apart. That line about Marxism and antisemitism is not history. It is slander crafted to make ordinary Christians too nervous to even examine the movement.

In the end he tries to hide his fear based strategy behind a thin positive alternative. He tells readers to reject Christian Nationalism and instead embrace enlightened patriotism. He quotes Samuel Miller and Abraham Kuyper in order to borrow their credibility, then empties their ideas of all practical force. He praises a nation that is “demonstrably Christian,” yet refuses to say how a nation could demonstrate Christianity without ever bending the knee in its law or public life. Religious liberty becomes the highest political good rather than a tool that protects the church so it can proclaim the kingship of Christ.

His vision is not the vision of the prophets who confronted kings and warned nations. It is not the vision of the apostles who told Caesar that Jesus is Lord. It is not the vision of the Reformers who insisted that magistrates must punish evil and reward good in line with God’s standards. It is an accommodation to the modern liberal order dressed up in evangelical vocabulary. It imagines a world where the gospel saves souls and never touches constitutions, where Christ rules hearts but never nations, where the church influences culture but never expects repentance from governments.

That is why Carter hates Christian Nationalism with such intensity. Not because it resembles Wicca, but because it resembles the Bible at exactly the points where his political theology is weakest. Christian Nationalism, whatever its internal debates and excesses, at least remembers that Christ is king of the nations, that rulers answer to him, and that law is not exempt from his authority. 

Carter wants Christians to be content with influence. Scripture commands nations to obey. That is the real conflict. It is not between Christian Nationalism and witchcraft. It is between the God who rules nations and the professional evangelical class that fears what will happen if the church starts believing that Christ is actually King. 

THE REAL HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM IN AMERICA

If Joe Carter and The Gospel Coalition crowd had been around in 1776, they would have written anxious blog posts about the dangerous Christian Nationalism of the founders. They would have warned that Samuel Adams was flirting with theocracy. They would have fretted that Patrick Henry did not understand religious liberty. They would have scolded the state legislatures for expecting Christ to have anything to do with law. The historical record is not subtle. The America that actually existed was far closer to what Carter sneers at as Christian Nationalism than to the neutered civil religion he is trying to sell.

Before there was a United States, there were colonies writing documents that would give Carter a panic attack. The Mayflower Compact begins with the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith as the stated purpose of their political project. The New England colonies were explicit that civil order existed so that churches could flourish and that magistrates had a duty to uphold both tables of the law. Puritans in Massachusetts did not imagine a state that was neutral toward Christ. They imagined a commonwealth in covenant with him. That is Christian Nationalism in everything but name, and it was not an embarrassing mistake. It was the soil out of which the American experiment grew.

When the colonies became states, they did not suddenly discover The Gospel Coalition view of public life. They wrote constitutions that assumed Christianity should shape the nation. Several early state constitutions required officeholders to affirm belief in the inspiration of Scripture, the existence of God, and the truth of the Christian religion. Massachusetts required a Protestant profession. North Carolina barred anyone who denied the truth of the Protestant faith or the divine authority of the Old and New Testaments. These were not obscure backwater ordinances. These were governing charters. If Carter is right that nationalism which acknowledges Christ corrupts both faith and polity, then he must condemn the actual states that ratified the Constitution he pretends to defend.

Even the supposedly secular founding documents are soaked in the worldview he now attacks. The Declaration of Independence grounds human rights in a Creator, in the laws of nature and of nature’s God, and appeals to divine providence and the Supreme Judge of the world. The Articles of Confederation invoke the Great Governor of the Universe. The Constitution itself is dated in the year of our Lord. The same Congress that sent the First Amendment to the states also passed the Northwest Ordinance, which declares that religion, morality, and knowledge are necessary for good government and that schools must encourage them. They were not talking about Wicca. They meant Christianity.

Carter treats all of this as if it were a kind of quaint atmospheric Protestantism that floated above a purely neutral state. The truth is uglier for his position. The founders were a mix of orthodox believers, muddled Protestants, and polite heretics, but as a class they assumed a Christian frame for law and public life. They did not imagine a government obligated to treat Christ and Baal with equal politeness. They believed in religious liberty, but they also believed Christ had claims upon the nation. That is the thing The Gospel Coalition cannot admit.

This is why the Carter project feels so pathetic once you set it next to actual history. He is not defending the founding against Christian Nationalism. He is laundering the founding for a generation of evangelicals who are embarrassed by their own inheritance. He stands on the graves of men who invoked the God of Scripture over their laws and lectures their intellectual descendants about how unchristian it is to expect nations to obey Christ. The contempt is mutual. Men who risked their lives and fortunes under a Christian canopy would have recognized Carter’s position for what it is. It is not fidelity to the founders. It is complicity with the regime that replaced them.

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