Mere Christendom Quotes

“Anyone who subscribes to the Westminster Confession of Faith is a Christian nationalist.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“This tells us that the fundamental law/gospel divide is not to be found in the text of Scripture. It is found in the difference between regenerate and unregenerate man. For the regenerate, everything from God is sweeter than the honeycomb. All of it is grace. For the unregenerate, the whole thing is the stench of death, including the good news of Christ on the cross. All of it is law and condemnation.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“One of the reasons why Christians are so discouraged by the turn events have taken is that they have not been steeped in the right kind of stories. Smaug is great, but Bard has one arrow left.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“We are currently living under a form of government that our Constitution was explicitly designed to prevent.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“This is not making an omelet with three eggs instead of two. It is making an omelet with three rocks instead of two eggs. And the average diner will not be able to get it down, no matter how many tolerance seminars you make him attend.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“Secularism is the idea that it is possible for a society to function as a coherent unit without reference to God. It is the idea that a culture can operate on the basis of a metaphysical and religious agnosticism. It is the idea that we can understand what human rights are without knowing what a human being actually is.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“Anyone who conforms to the Westminster Confession of Faith is a Christian Nationalist.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“Faithfulness can be found in apparent defeat as easily as in victory. Deliverance is given to faithful men, and faithful men are those who care about certain things more than deliverance.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“We cannot pray for the purification of the silver, and then despair when we begin to approach the furnace that removes the dross.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“What we call Enlightenment modernity was just the period when our public authorities fell into unbelief. Postmodernity is when they discovered that unbelief is a slippery place, and they fell into it deeper. The guy at the bottom of a collapsed ladder does have some bumps and bruises, and perhaps a broken bone or two, but he also has better things to do than to call his condition post-structuralism.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“A people who are enslaved to their lusts will never be the kind of people who successfully throw off tyrants. We have been offered a series of bribes—free love, porn, drunkenness, government handouts, and other forms of lotus-eating—and these are the bribes that make us content with the dimensions of our prison cell. But a man set free by the gospel will begin to think like a free man, and that will soon enough affect his body, his business, his travel plans, and so on. It is all grounded in obedience, and obedience is not possible apart from the grace of God that is offered to us in the gospel. Efficacious grace is first, and holiness second: “So shall I keep thy law continually for ever and ever. And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts” (Ps. 119:44–45).”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“Anyone who believes that Romans 13 offers a blank check to tyrants is someone who simply has not read it carefully and is not comparing Scripture with Scripture (Isa. 5:20; Ps. 11:3).”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“What we desperately need in these times of amoral chaos is to recognize that the obedience of the Christian man will frequently be taken by tyrants as something other than the righteous obedience before God that it actually is.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“We are not privileged to imitate the American Founders in one respect. We do not have the option of sailing to a new world and starting over. We cannot move out of this dilapidated house in order to go build a new one. No, it must be a remodel project. The house is run down, and so we must fix it up. Not only so, but we have to do this while the house is also on fire. And at the same time, many of the other residents like it just the way it is and are fighting us tooth and nail. All this means that we need to have a robust theology of resistance.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“The question of secession goes right to the heart of an incipient idolatry of ours that is found in the word indivisible. Only God is indivisible, and all others are pretenders. If the idea of a state going its own way is “unthinkable,” then it would perhaps be a good idea to inquire into why it is unthinkable. Only God is indivisible”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“The greatest act of blasphemy our race was ever guilty of was committed in the name of fighting blasphemy.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“Whenever you give the state power to punish a blasphemer, you are in that moment giving the state the power to blaspheme, and limiting a government’s power to punish blasphemy is actually limiting a government’s power to blaspheme. And the biggest blasphemy culprits in human history have consistently been these so-called lords of the earth—and not the mental patient who got off his meds and is saying erratic things in aisle 7 at Safeway. The state has always been the principal blasphemy threat, in other words.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“The mission assigned to the Church in the Great Commission is the eradication of idolatry in the entire world.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“We do not hang on to free speech so that we might talk about Jesus. We hang on to Jesus so that we might talk with each other.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“The Christian framework for society is one that brings form and freedom together and allows both to be maximized in a Spirit-given balancing act. Without the pervasive influence of the gospel in society, freedom will collapse into form only, or form will deteriorate into anarchy only and you will have the free speech equivalent of a failed state.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“In order to be rights at all, human rights have to be grounded in a reality that is completely out of the reach of our elected and appointed officials. And that means religion. For the best results, it needs to be the true religion. False ones let you down.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“If you take God’s law as absolute, you will not take it upon yourself to act coercively without warrant from Him. This will result in an enormous amount of economic liberty. If you restrict only those transactions that you have biblical warrant for restricting, then the result will be far more freedom than we currently have. This is why accusations that a “mere Christendom” would result in “oppression” are so risible.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“The real reason why our current rulers want us to react violently whenever we hear the word theocracy is that petty gods are always jealous of their position, and dread any talk of a Lord who rose from the dead.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“Because Jesus is Lord, we proclaim free grace, which results in free men, which results in free markets.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“The Spirit of God is the spirit of liberty. The Holy Spirit is not the spirit of coercion. The impulse to control everything is the machinery of Isengard, and those who want to be a cog in that machinery have all their aspirations pointed in the wrong direction.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“Secularism is simply not capable of sustaining limited government. It cannot be done, and this is a problem. Because men are sinners, they require governance. Because men are sinners, they cannot be trusted with governance. Limited government is therefore the first and foundational problem to be solved in any exercise of practical theology.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“Among a free people, laws are only binding (i.e., they are only laws) if they are passed and approved by the legislature. The legislature is not authorized to delegate this authority to anyone, and when they attempt to do so, it is dereliction of their solemn responsibility. Someone might plead necessity, and say that administrative law is too extensive and too complex for a legislature to understand, still less to pass. The reply to this is simple—if a set of regulations is too burdensome for the legislature to pass, then it is too burdensome for us to live under.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“Liberty cannot be locked up in a cage, whether that cage is a party platform, a national constitution, a bill of rights, or a campaign slogan. Liberty exists, or does not exist, in the hearts of the people. If the people are free, then civic freedom for the people becomes a possibility.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“Civic liberty is an impossibility for a people who are enslaved to their lusts. For such a people, constitutional liberties are nothing but paper liberties—the kind of thin surety that tends to satisfy slaves who need to be flattered by their masters.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom

“When the Church is healthy, and doing what it ought to be doing, it is establishing, promoting, and edifying entities that are distinct from itself. The Church imitates the Lord in this—this is the same thing God did in creating us. All the families of the earth are to be discipled by the Church (Gen. 12:3). All the nations of the earth are to be discipled by the Church (Matt. 28:18–20). And when the process is done, these families and nations have not been absorbed into the Borg. Rather, they have become more like themselves than they ever could have done on their own.”
― Douglas Wilson, Mere Christendom