Hillsdale College is one of the finest undergraduate schools in the U.S. I say that as someone who for a decade edited the ISI guide Choosing the Right College and so became deeply informed about the state of education in our country. We stopped publishing the guide in 2012, in part because there weren’t enough good schools for us to recommend (or even good professors lingering at the bad ones).
It wasn’t just that most conservative faculty members had died or retired; the open-minded liberal professors who used to make a decent education possible were also disappearing. Replacing them were lowbrow DEI hires, Marxist or LGBTQ zealots, or cynical careerists unwilling to defend the integrity of their disciplines against the ideologues.
Hillsdale is one of the few schools that has bucked the barbarian trend, and I warmly encourage parents with brainy, intellectually ambitious children to consider it an option. Because Hillsdale educates so many who become conservative, Christian leaders, and maintains its independence by refusing federal aid, it’s an important institution. When its president speaks on serious issues, we’re inclined to listen.
And people were listening when Hillsdale President Larry Arnn released this clip from a video podcast on X. Take the time to watch it through:
“A Christian nation is not possible. Because Jesus’s Kingdom is not of this world.”
In the latest @DrLarryArnn Show, out tomorrow, Dr. Arnn hosts @RevKevDeYoung. In this clip, they discuss the difference between toleration and liberty.
Tune in tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/8ooA1zgC3A
— Hillsdale College Podcast Network (@HCPodcasts) August 18, 2025
This short quote, shorn of context, provoked intense reactions — many of them sarcastic, all along similar lines:
A Christian college isn’t possible either. Or a Christian family. Or a Christian business. Or Christian music.
Because we are called to be set apart and not of this world or something
Do you realize how absolutely vapid and stupid this argument is?
— Kangmin Lee | 이강민 (@kangminjlee) August 19, 2025
Arnn took note of the blowback and issued a clarification, which proved equally challenging:
I appear to have made some people mad by saying a Christian nation is impossible. Let me propose another formulation that I have used often and for years: America is the most Christian nation because it recognizes the principle of religious liberty, which comes from the mouths of… https://t.co/rmwX9s1jIQ
— Larry P. Arnn (@DrLarryArnn) August 19, 2025
As someone who has thought and written about this question for many years, I’d like to respond to Arnn and his critics — which include both Catholic Integralists and self-styled Christian Nationalists.
First of all, since Arnn is an intelligent man, I won’t put the most uncharitable spin on his words and pretend that he means no nation can be infused with Christian values and culture. He should have said “State” instead of “Nation,” because that’s what he really meant. So let’s examine that. Should we as Christians want the government to base its laws on the tenets of our religion and use its resources to encourage people to embrace Christianity instead of secularism, or some other false religion?
What Kind of Christian State Do You Mean?
There’s a wide spectrum of options on the table when we speak of a “Christian State,” all of which have manifested through history. Let’s imagine them on an axis from Right to Left.
At the far-Right end, we’d see regimes where the government endorsed a particular version of Christianity as true, like the way our federal government currently endorses racial equality and nondiscrimination against minorities. (Bias against white males isn’t banned because we’re not part of a legally “protected class,” believe it or not).
In such a regime, the Government Printing Office would publish Bibles (its preferred version and translation) and distribute them to citizens. It would monitor the media and censor materials teaching what it considered to be religious “errors.” The preaching of other religions or other variants of Christianity would be strictly regulated or forbidden. “False” Christian churches would not be permitted, though private worship services for unfavored minorities might be tolerated.
This government might take doctrinal direction from the religious authorities of the church it considered true — though if history is any teacher, it would also meddle with that leadership’s decisions, and maybe try to pick those leaders. Given how central church teaching would be to the administration of the State, the temptation to “tweak” the church to serve the State would be too great to resist.
I’ve just described the system that prevailed in medieval Europe, and in most Catholic and Protestant countries through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Catholic Spain and Calvinist Geneva, Anglican Britain under the Stuarts, and Lutheran Prussia under its kings all fit this description. This model is the one preferred by Catholic Integralists and some prominent Christian Nationalists.
Our Founders Said, “Heck No”
The United States of America rejected this historic practice for many solid reasons. Our founders were mostly low-church Protestants, part of the “Reformation of the Reformation,” and their churches had been persecuted both by Catholics and Anglicans. Some of those churches (see New England) set themselves up as official and became intolerant themselves — with witch trials and heresy hunts on Colonial soil. The corruption and laxity of state-sponsored churches, with their well-paid clerical functionaries, loomed large as well. So did the bitter memories of mutual persecution on the part of rival churches.
Our Founders crafted the First Amendment explicitly to reject the fusion of church and State and embraced the “free exercise of religion,” a very broad charter of liberty indeed. The authors of the Constitution counted on the overpowering consensus of Americans on the basic moral truths taught by Christian faith as sufficient to provide the “virtuous people” which alone could guarantee “ordered liberty” for a republic.
That moral consensus has been breaking down for decades, in part thanks to non-Christian immigration but much more because post-Christian secularism has become dominant in all our leading institutions and religious faith has waned. Practices that would have been unthinkable to our grandparents now have the government’s seal of approval — from same-sex marriage to transgender surgery, from ubiquitous pornography to freezers full of abandoned human embryos. The last presidential administration targeted conservative Catholics, pro-life activists, and PTA moms against porn in schools as “domestic extremists.”
You Gotta Serve Somebody
It seems that the government really cannot be neutral on key religious questions. The State will have an official cult, and if isn’t Christian it will anti-Christian or pagan. So do we need to go back to the Reformation/Counter-Reformation era, and endorse a State-sponsored church — then fight among ourselves about which variety of Christianity it will enforce?
Or should we swing all the way to the Left of the spectrum, where people like David French and Russell Moore seem to reside — where the State doesn’t impose any tenets of biblical morality whatsoever, to the point that we declare drag queen story hours “one of the blessings of liberty” and take money from Planned Parenthood donors to bash Donald Trump?
Is there a centrist position, a Golden Mean between soul-sucking secularism and witch-hunting theocracy?
Indeed there is. I’ll state it here baldly to provoke your further thought, then unpack it in my next column. But just for the sake of argument, here’s the sane middle course between those two almost equally repugnant and unsustainable extremes:
The State should enforce the moral judgments that can be defended based on natural law, which is written on every human heart. It should not enforce theological claims that can only be accepted if a person has received the gift of grace from the Holy Spirit that grants redeeming faith.
How would this principle play out in dozens of hypothetical cases? Where do we draw the line? What’s in natural law, and how much of it should the State use its monopoly on violence to enforce? How does classical natural law differ from “natural rights” of the Enlightenment era?
I’ll get into all that next time, dear reader. Stay tuned.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.
