By Davis Carlton

This year has brought about another round of denunciations of Kinism from the Southern Baptist Convention as well as virtually all of the confederated denominations within NAPARC, representing the Lion’s share of ostensibly conservative and confessional Presbyterian and Reformed churches in North America. This was kicked off when the Associated Reformed Presbyterian church (ARP) created a study committee to refute Kinism at their synod in 2025, resulting in a document rife with fake citations likely generated by AI. A good deal has already been said about the dishonesty of using obviously fabricated citations and the ARP’s wholly inadequate response boiling down to claiming that these were honest mistakes.

I’m particularly interested in a follow up post recently made by Rev. Benjamin Glaser about the ARP moderator tasking their study committee with defining key terms related to Kinism and Christian nationalism. Glaser reports that the committee is to “provide clear, precise, glossary of definitions of all key terms, including “race, tribe, nation, ethnicity” and related concepts from the scripture and contra the racial realist and Kinists.”

I find this curious given that the committee was formed last year, and only now is the moderator’s committee being tasked with defining key terms at the same time they are being told to “identify and correct any remaining factual, citation, quotation, or other errors in the document if needed.”  Shouldn’t the committee have made defining key terms a top priority before embarking on the undertaking of disproving Kinism or Christian ethno-nationalism?  I’ll be especially interested in how they define nation and ethnicity. My suspicion is that the committee will attempt to strip the concept of a nation of any hereditary meaning or significance, while pushing this onto the concept of ethnicity. The reason for this is so that the ARP and other NAPARC churches can maintain that a Christian man can still have a unique love and loyalty to his country and nation, so long as that isn’t defined as having anything to do with race.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus preaches against swearing false oaths (Matthew 5:33-37). The Anabaptists of the Radical Reformation took Jesus’s teachings about not swearing in a strictly literal sense and to this day refuse to take oaths of any kind. The magisterial Protestant tradition exemplified by Lutherans, Reformed, and Anglicans has understood Jesus in a more nuanced way, in which Jesus isn’t forbidding oaths altogether, but those who attempt to use subtlety in order to abuse the trust of others by giving oaths in order to appear more trustworthy. This aligns with my own understanding. I don’t intend to give a full explanation defending the more standard Protestant understanding of Jesus’s teaching here, but I want to explain why I think that so many are violating the principle that Jesus is teaching here whether they realize it or not.

Jesus teaches that Christians are to avoid swearing in their normal everyday discourse and simply be trustworthy enough that it isn’t necessary. We are let our yea be yea, and our nay be nay, rather than try to equivocate by saying something other than what we mean. This means that when we say “yes,” our yes should be an affirmation without hidden caveats that actually make our “yes” a subtle “no.” This is precisely what I believe that the contemporary condemnations of Kinism emanating from mainstream conservative denominations are doing when they condemn ethno-nationalism. It has been pointed out numerous times on X and Facebook, by me as well as others, that ethno-nationalism is a somewhat redundant concept, since nations in the Biblical sense are grounded in ethnic identity.

I have noticed this trend of abusing language gaining traction among those seeking to denounce Kinism and Christian ethno-nationalists by re-defining words and concepts in order to align them with their worldview. The false dichotomy between nation and ethnicity is a good example of this happening over the past several decades. The word “ethnicity” only appears in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1953 for the first time. That is because it was being used as a place-holder for the traditional concept of national identity at a time following World War II in which national identity was being deconstructed because of its historical link to race and ancestry.

The emerging new world order was one in which anyone within the British colonies, such as a Hindu from India would be considered just as British as an Englishman whose ancestors had lived there for thousands of years as a means of trying to justify the dwindling British Empire in an age of egalitarianism. Essentially the entire empire was to be considered one large, extended nation. The concept of ethnicity was then invoked to explain the differences of language, culture, ancestry, and appearance between all the different members of these re-envisioned “nations.”

This is a linguistic sleight of hand to obscure the fact that the working definition of nation had been changed while disguising the massive and sweeping political ramifications as a mere matter of semantics. This is because the English word nation is ultimately derived from the Greek word ethnos (ἔθνος, Strong’s G1484). This word is used throughout the Greek Septuagint, the authoritative Greek translation of the Old Testament frequently used by Christ and the Apostles. The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 is essential for understanding the way that the Biblical authors understood the concept of a nation. Here the nations are defined as an extension of families with an extensive genealogy providing the reader with the origin story of the nations that will be encountered throughout the Biblical narrative.

This leaves Christians without any basis whatsoever for defining nations in such a way that excludes the concept of shared ancestry and descent from common patriarchs as intrinsic to the Biblical concept of nationhood. Other details within the Biblical text confirm this. This includes Israel being “reckoned by genealogies,” (1 Chr. 9:1, see the preceding eight chapters). Israel and Edom are called brothers (Num. 20:14; Deut. 23:7) when this only makes sense if both nations are being defined by their common descent from Abraham and Isaac, rather than any religious, linguistic, or cultural differences that they had at the time. Finally Jeremiah describes the Cushites or Ethiopians having a common shared appearance which would be the product of shared ancestry (“can the Ethiopian change his skin?” from Jer. 13:23).

The twentieth century attempt to re-define nationhood is similar to how pro-abortion advocates operate when they call an unborn child a “fetus” instead of a baby. The word fetus is Latin and simply means “baby.” Latin phraseology had long since been incorporated by Western nations as the technical language of science. Pro-abortion advocates have used the term fetus in order to sanitize the fact that they are advocating for the murder of a baby, creating a sense of detachment between a baby being held in his mother’s arms and a fetus which is considered a mere growing clump of cells. The change in terminology, baby to fetus, is just a way to obscure the truth and hide what actually happens during an abortion. A fetus is a baby in the same way that an ethnicity is a nation.

The reason that this issue is important is that it reveals a strategy employed by those who oppose Christian nationalism, and this is true whether they realize it or not. Almost no one within Christian circles who has made himself a vocal opponent of Christian nationalism would be willing to say that the spread of the Gospel ultimately will bring about the effective end of nations. Most understand that this would be a bridge too far, and that Christian men have a natural sense of particular duty to their own country. Few want to openly engage in advocating for overt globalism that dissolves all national borders and governments. The opponents of Christian nationalism have attempted, wittingly or unwittingly, to evade the force of the implications of their rejection of nationalism by redefining key terms in order to mask just how radical their claims are in actuality.  

Opponents of Christian nationalism assure Christians that a man can have a unique affection and love for his own nation, or even better his own country, so long as nations or countries are understood as being rooted on shared abstract principles or values like vaguely-defined freedom along with other things in common like language, culture, and history. The one thing that cannot be admitted for most opponents of Christian nationalism in any sense is that shared ancestry is essential and definitive national identity. Nations are defined by blood, passed down through generations of shared ancestry. Israel was still Israel when she drifted away from the one true God, and was still Israel when she repented. Israel was still Israel when their common language drifted from Hebrew to Aramaic and later to Greek. What tied them together across the many generations was their descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

This does not mean that religion is irrelevant, for “blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD” (Ps. 33:12). Israel often experienced the consequences of disobedience and apostasy. The goal of Christian nationalism is to make disciples of all nations, and to bring about the glorious day in which what is written is made manifest, “All nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship before thee, O Lord; and shall glorify thy name” (Ps. 86:9). National identity is an essential part of our God-given identity, but our opponents seek to disguise their complicity in the destruction of nations, particularly white nations, by redefining the meaning words. If anyone can identify as a member of any nation so long as they possess the proper paperwork, then nations are rendered meaningless. It is for this reason that I believe that the question of what the Bible means when it speaks of national identity is more important than ever if we are to win the rhetorical war that has been thrust upon us.