Postliberal Protestants

Review of Hunter Baker's New Book

Hunter Baker
Postliberal Protestants: Baptists between Obergefell and Christian Nationalism
Greenville, SC: Courier Publishing, 2025.

This book argues that Baptist ecclesiology, with its emphasis on a regenerate church that is independent of the state, simply cannot acquiesce to notions of Christian Nationalism or Catholic Integralism. While he is sympathetic to critiques of political progressivism, he is robustly pro-life, and opines the secularization of America, Baker believes that any marriage between the (Baptist) Church and political authority will be disastrous.

His conclusion is:

The project of this book is to describe the world in which Baptists exist today, to acknowledge the losses, to understand the desire to mount a response along the lines of Christian nationalism, and despite it all to urge persistence in our belief in the regenerate church. … We have not been called to triumph in elections. We have been called to lay down our lives for the sake of the gospel (106-7).

Hunter is right on many things.

Back in the early 1990s, everyone was saying that liberal democracy had beaten communism, and it was “the” system. Furthermore, liberal democracy was a product of a Christian context and it combined the Christian view of the imago dei (therefore “equality” and “human rights”) with the Christian notion of human sinfulness (therefore “separation of powers” and limits on government power). The problem is that liberalism has become unmoored from its Christian roots and turned on its own parentage. Since then, both the far-left and far-right have turned on liberalism, and both are demanding a more totalizing vision of society, one that does not leave room for dissent and disagreement.

Politics has penultimate value, it is not the ultimate source of our hopes, and it does not deserve our worship.

Bingo Bam! That is exactly right.

Also, he emphasizes at length how Baptists have always resisted an established state church. Whereas I’d point out that Christendom and state-sanctioned churches were merely the consequence of the success of the gospel, I take his point that the system was open to abuses of church-state cooperation, and Baptists wisely and courageously led the charge to separate the often corrupt connection between throne and altar in order to secure religious liberty and a purer church (I’d add more footnotes, but at this stage, I’ll give credit to my Baptists friends).

He wrestles with important problems. How do we resist the idea that religion is “private,” a hobby, like spoon collecting, while also resisting calls for Theocratic Autocracy by a Christian Prince? Hunter’s view is “Get on with being Baptist.” My view is that we need to recover awareness of the Christian origins of the liberal tradition and establish as fact that we therefore live in a Christianized society.

He defends too the legitimacy of religious reasoning within political debates, something I concur with, but it’d take a whole article to explain.

In the end, Hunter shows that Baptists cannot be Christian Nationalists, their ecclesiology and tradition preclude it, even if they want to resist secularism and left-wing authoritarianism, the solution is not theocracy!

By way of critique, I thought David French and Russell Moore get treated a tad unfairly as if they are capitulating to culture. As I observe things, French and Moore simply want to participate in a great modus vivendi, a peace with progressives, but which still preserves the religious conscience. Their aim is not one of cooperation with the political left, but finding the terms under which people of all faiths and none can live together in a politically and religiously pluralistic context. In contrast, he goes way to easy on Stephen Wolfe whose brand of Christian Nationalism is not “KKK” but it is kinist, ethno-nationalist to the max, plus, Baptists like Hunter would not fair well in Wolfe’s theocratic arrangement (“Hey, Hunter, nice baby you got there, maybe you ought to consider baptizing it so I don’t have to make you!”).

Although Hunter has written a previous book on secularism, he often operates with an unstated but assumed definition of secularism, as something like coercive secularization or what he labels at one point “censorious secularism” (ii). I’d point out that there are a variety of models of secularism and not all secularism have to be coercive, corrosive, or censorious.

In sum, this is a good book for American Baptists on why liberalism is failing, why Christian Nationalism is not a viable option, and how the strength of the Baptist tradition has always been to avoid confusing the heavenly with the earthly, or wisely preventing political powers from taking over the pulpit and table of the churches.

It is a short read, only 117 pp, I read it on a flight from Melbourne to Auckland, well worth the read if you are into Baptist polity or political theology.