Christian Patriotism, the Social Kingship of Christ, and a Durable Catholic–Evangelical Alliance
In A.D. 700, St. Boniface swung his axe against the pagan Thunder Oak. When the great tree fell, a young fir stood unharmed in its place — the first Christmas tree, a living sign that Christ had conquered the old gods of the North. More than a thousand years later, in 1775, General George Washington ordered a different pine raised as a battle standard. On it were the words “An Appeal to Heaven.” That flag still flies today, not as a museum piece, but as a quiet declaration outside homes, at rallies, and in the hands of ordinary Christians who refuse to surrender the public square.
I wrote Pine Tree Politics to draw a straight line between those two trees and the moment we now inhabit. The media calls the thing “Christian Nationalism” and then paints a cartoon of theocrats and cranks. I reject the cartoon. I keep the substance. What I offer instead is Christian Patriotism — the American application of Catholic integralism in a Protestant-majority, secularized republic. It is neither a European confessional state nor a coercive theocracy. It is the ordering of public life to the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ through subsidiarity, a durable alliance of Catholics and Evangelicals on the domestic goods we actually share, and the Great Commission applied to government, culture, and commerce instead of two-kingdoms retreat. Politics is downstream of religion. A people who forget that will eventually lose both.
What Christian Patriotism Is — and What It Is Not
Christian Patriotism is simply this: Christians who love their country enough to bring the Faith into its laws, customs, schools, and commerce, without pretending that the State can save souls or that the Church should collect taxes. It is Christian, which means trust in Jesus Christ. It is patriotic, which in the American experience is not the same as European blood-and-soil nationalism or a centralized imperial project. In America, patriotism and nationalism have never been functionally different, because this country was dedicated from the start to a public acknowledgment of God. Washington’s pine already confessed that.
It is not forcing people into a church. It is not burning heretics. It is not priests running the IRS. It is not turning a politician into a messiah. Those are the smear terms the Left needs in order to avoid the real argument. The real argument is whether a nation may publicly prefer the true religion and the natural law, or whether it must pretend that Christ and the Marquis de Sade have equal claim on the schools.
Catholic teaching has always occupied the middle ground between two errors. Theocracy blends the two powers: religious law becomes civil law, and clerics appoint magistrates. Secularism pretends the State is independent of the Church and confines religion to a private hobby. The Catholic position is integralism with secularity: a structural distinction between Church and State, with the State still owing obedience to the moral law and a duty to acknowledge the true faith where a Christian people makes that possible. I have called this integralism of the solidarity kind, not the theocratic kind. You cannot impose the Social Kingship from the top down on a people who do not love Christ. You also cannot keep a republic if you pretend that love of Christ has no public consequence.
The American Constraint
In a Protestant-majority, secularized republic like the United States, Catholic integralism cannot mean a Hapsburg restoration or a Spanish confessional state. That is not a betrayal of the tradition. It is an application of it. The temporal power must still be ordered to man’s last end. The spiritual power remains superior in dignity. But the means in this nation run through families, parishes, towns, the several states, and a political alliance that does not require either side to surrender its creed.
That is why I refuse the two-kingdoms privatism that has trained so many Evangelicals to leave the public square empty and then wonder who filled it. The Great Commission was not limited to living rooms. Disciple the nations. That includes this one. Catholics already know this under another name. Pope Pius XI, in Quas Primas, established the Feast of Christ the King precisely because modern states had begun to deny that Christ’s empire includes civil society. Pope Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei, taught that the State cannot be godless. The Catechism still teaches that the political community and the Church are mutually independent in their own fields, and yet both serve the personal and social vocation of the same human beings. Vatican II did not repeal that. Dignitatis Humanae defends the right not to be coerced in belief. It does not require the State to be religiously mute. A society may honor Christ without frog-marching anyone to the baptismal font.
The Common Good Is Not Liberal Neutrality
Here the contemporary Catholic recovery of classical politics is useful, even when I do not follow every institutional conclusion drawn from it. The Josias project has restated the old teaching with welcome clarity: man has a temporal end and an eternal end; he is ruled by two powers; because the temporal end is subordinated to the eternal, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual. Politics is not a machine for maximizing private preference. It is an ordinance of reason for the common good.
Adrian Vermeule’s Common-Good Constitutionalism makes the same point against the late-liberal legal settlement. Government is not a neutral referee among autonomous selves. It directs persons, associations, and society toward the common good. Strong rule in that cause is legitimate. Originalism, as a conservative posture of endless defense, has often functioned as a cease-fire with a liberalism that never stopped advancing. Law is not exhausted by the original public meaning of a clause. It participates in an older tradition — natural law, the ius gentium, the inner morality of law itself. I agree with the diagnosis. Liberal neutrality is a lie. Every regime catechizes. The only question is whether it catechizes toward Christ or toward the therapeutic State.
Where I part from some of the more imperial readings of that school is the American application. The Josias is right that the common good is not the sum of private goods. Vermeule is right that authority exists to rule well, not merely to get out of the way. But in this republic the right instrument is subsidiarity, not a fortified administrative center that happens to have better morals. Strengthening families, parishes, towns, and the states is how you order public life to Christ here. Washington last, not Washington first. A common-good jurisprudence that simply swaps one national clerisy for another will repeat the error of the progressive state under a different flag. The pine tree is a local tree. It grows from the ground up.
Christ the King, from the Bottom Up
The Kingdom of God appears in two ways. First, in the Catholic Church Christ founded — and, by extension, in every valid baptism that still names the Trinity. Second, in the daily work of Christians who refuse to treat the Faith as a weekend accessory. The Social Kingship is not brought in by armies, donors, or a strongman. Christ told Pilate His Kingdom is not of this world, which never meant it has nothing to say to this world. It meant it does not arrive by the sword.
That is why I have always insisted on the little things. Learn the Gospel and teach it to your children. Go to Mass. Go to confession. Support a reverent parish. Patronize Christian businesses. Keep your money in institutions that still know what a family is. Homeschool or build parish schools that do not catechize your sons and daughters in the new civic religion. Serve on a city council or a school board before you fantasize about a national throne. If the State claims the child against the parent, it has already forgotten subsidiarity and the natural law. Insisting that public authority respect the Church’s teaching on those things is not “imposing theocracy.” It is the minimum of a sane people.
Catholics and Evangelicals — or Nothing
No Catholic strategy for this country works without Evangelicals, and no Evangelical strategy works if it treats Catholics as useful idiots until the rapture. We do not share a creed on the papacy, the Eucharist, or the status of the modern State of Israel. We do share the unborn child, the natural family, ordered liberty, and a common good that is more than GDP. That is enough for a durable political alliance, provided neither side is required to lie about the rest.
The fracture line is foreign policy, especially Christian Zionism. I have said this as plainly as I know how. If the Catholic–Evangelical alliance dies in America, Christian Zionism will have killed it. I do not deny Israel’s right to exist or to defend itself. I deny that a modern secular republic in the Levant is the Israel of Old Testament promises, or that American Christians have a prophetic duty to underwrite every war in the Near East. The Catholic Church is the New Israel. Fulfillment theology is not antisemitism. Antisemitism is a sin I have condemned by name. But a patriotism that cannot put the American common good first is not patriotism. It is a rival liturgy. Pine Tree Politics charts the only practical way through that fight: lock arms at home, tell the truth about theology, and refuse the donor class that keeps the two sides at each other’s throats so that the uniparty can go on funding both Planned Parenthood and endless war.
Take the Party, Keep the Parish
The Republican Party made its name promoting Christian ideals. It has spent a generation forgetting them. MAGA was Phase One — a necessary revolt against the managerial class. It is not a sufficient creed. After the midterms and the next succession fight, MAGA will have to become something thicker than a personality cult or it will be absorbed by the donors. I have argued that Pine Tree Politics is that thicker thing: traditional Catholics and like-minded Evangelicals reforming the party from within, purging neoconservative and globalist dominance, and pointing it back toward middle-class Christian priorities.
That program is not a third party and it is not a coup. Half the work is already done. The voters are there. What has been missing is a public philosophy that can look an Evangelical in the face and a traditional Catholic in the face and say the same sentence: Christ is King; the family is first; the town is more important than the empire; we will not force your baptism; we will not pretend your baptism is irrelevant to the laws.
Christian economics belongs in the same sentence. Property widely held, small business, cooperatives, just wages, resistance to both predatory capital and socialist administration — that is the old Catholic social teaching, not a think-tank novelty. A people that cannot own a house, raise children on one income, or keep a shop without kneeling to a human-resources creed is not free, no matter how many rights it recites. Promote fertility. Defend parental authority in education. Prefer the worker and the father to the platform and the NGO. That is the common good in plain English.
Ten Objectives, One Banner
The program I set down in Pine Tree Politics can be stated without academic fog.
First, unite Catholics and Evangelicals on life, family, ordered liberty, and the common good, while allowing honest disagreement on foreign policy so that neither side surrenders its creed.
Second, restore Christian Patriotism as the historically grounded alternative to the media’s cartoon, centered on the Pine Tree Flag and its continuity with earlier Christian political witness.
Third, apply the Great Commission to government, culture, and commerce instead of retreating into private piety.
Fourth, affirm the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ, drawing on Catholic integralist tradition and compatible Protestant insights, while rejecting both secularism and coercive theocracy.
Fifth, practice subsidiarity: strengthen families, local communities, states, small businesses, and intermediate institutions against bureaucracy, monopoly, and globalism.
Sixth, use practical, non-coercive means — persuasion, example, institution-building — never forced belief.
Seventh, reform the Republican Party from within with the strategies I outlined in the book.
Eighth, rebuild the family as the first cell of a healthy society.
Ninth, advocate a Christian economics of the middle class.
Tenth, overcome militant secularism, modernism, anti-Christian prejudice, and our own divisions until a renewed form of Christendom — ordered liberty under Christ’s Kingship — is not only possible but already visible.
That last clause is not nostalgia. The 2024 reelection, the exhaustion of militant secularism, and the quiet return of young people to reverence are not the Kingdom. They are a clearing. In a clearing you can plant.
The Appeal Still Stands
I am a Catholic convert from Evangelicalism, a catechist, and a citizen of a small place in the Ozarks. I do not write from a faculty lounge and I do not want a throne. I want a country in which a father can raise his children in the Faith without the school treating him as a suspect, a parish can form Saints without the State rewriting the creed, and Catholics and Evangelicals can fight the same domestic fight without being blackmailed by someone else’s foreign altar. That is not extremism. That is the minimum of a Christian people who have not yet given up.
Boniface cut down the oak. The fir remained. Washington raised the pine and asked Heaven to judge. We are not the first Americans to notice that a distant power — whether a crown across the water or a managerial class across the Potomac — will not save us. We appeal again. Not to a party. Not to a strongman. To Heaven, and then to the ordinary work of families, parishes, towns, and states that still remember who is King.
The pine still stands. The only question left is whether we will answer it.
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Sources
- Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas (1925), on the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ and the public duty of nations to acknowledge His reign.
- Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei (1885), on the Christian constitution of states and the impossibility of a godless public order.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, nn. 1897–1912, 2104–2109, 2244–2246, on the common good, the political community, religious liberty rightly understood, and the limits of the State.
- Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae (1965), on freedom from coercion in matters of faith, read with the tradition rather than against it.
- Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura (1864), and the Syllabus of Errors, on the rejection of a State indifferent to the true religion.
- The Josias, “Introduction” and collected essays in Integralism and the Common Good, vols. 1–2: the two powers, the subordination of the temporal to the spiritual, and the primacy of the common good.
- Adrian Vermeule, “Beyond Originalism,” The Atlantic, March 31, 2020; and Common Good Constitutionalism (Polity, 2022), on law as an ordinance of reason for the common good and the bankruptcy of liberal neutrality.
- George Washington’s Pine Tree Flag commission and the Revolutionary motto “An Appeal to Heaven” (1775), the historical banner recovered in the argument of Pine Tree Politics.
- The Life of St. Boniface and the felling of the Donar Oak at Geismar (c. A.D. 723/724 in the traditional dating used in the book), the typological root of the Christmas tree.
Shane Schaetzel is an author of Catholic books and he is an Evangelical convert to the Catholic Church. His articles have been featured on LifeSiteNews, The Remnant Newspaper, Forward in Christ, and Catholic Online. You can read Shane’s books at ShaneSchaetzel.Com
