Recently I had a Twitter kerfuffle with youngish academically credentialed Calvinists active in conservative evangelicalism who advocated taking away the vote from women. In civil society, households rather than individuals should be represented, as they largely were before America ratified the 19th amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. The heads of households are typically the husbands and fathers. One of these Calvinists also advocated a state church, to be determined by the local religious majority. Like others of this perspective, he denied that he is a theonomist but is simply a “magisterial Protestant.” Others claim they are simply articulating “classical Protestant” teaching. After all, didn’t the Protestant Reformers advocate for state churches and insist that civil magistrates must privilege and uphold Christian doctrine?
For these so-called “magisterial Protestants,” modernity is corrupt and the aberrant exception to the human story. A return to “traditional” societies, in which humanity was supposedly wiser and perhaps even less sinful, is urgently needed. Whatever their claims, they echo the old Christian Reconstructionism, advocating a return to Old Testament law, that occupied a subculture in the 1970s and 1980s but whose main thinkers, such as R. J. Rushdoony, died years ago. But there is no new thing under the sun, and bad ideas rarely fade forever. They regurgitate.
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Comment by td on March 15, 2022 at 12:45 pm
Hahaha. The funny thing here is that if an official church was chosen based on pure numbers, then in the US outside of the south, probably the rest of the nationwould have the Roman Catholic Church as its official church. If we treated the nation as a whole, then Roman Catholicism would be the official church. Is this really what these protestants are advocating for?
Comment by David on March 15, 2022 at 5:26 pm
The first amendment did not outlaw the states from having their official and tax-supported churches. That in MA survived until 1833. Some states such as PA never had one. Disestablishmentarianism was a major debate in early America.
Comment by Star Tripper on March 18, 2022 at 12:02 am
Not sure I would start with revoking the 19th Amendment. How about we get rid of female clergy as a beginning? That would be Biblical and start to heal the Church so it could resume its function of moral foundation for society. We could move on from there.