After the election, part 3

The future of American citizenship

Immigration is likely the most controversial of all the political and cultural issues that have risen to the forefront during Donald Trump’s time in politics. The President has distinguished himself as someone willing to be more hawkish on the issue and withstand criticisms that have undercut efforts to enforce border policy in the past.

During his first term, the President committed billions of federal dollars to building a wall on the southern border and enacted several policies to address the number of illegal migrants entering the country. An early hallmark of his second term has been empowering Tom Homan to authorize a mass deportation effort of migrants with violent and criminal histories.

How to manage America’s immigration crisis remains a sensitive topic among many evangelical Protestants. For years, elite evangelical institutions like the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today were intimately involved with the Evangelical Immigration Roundtable (EIR), a group that pitched itself as a “third way” approach to the issue and advocated for the controversial “Gang of Eight” bill.

Today, the EIR remains committed to a similar vision including a pathway to citizenship even though Trump’s popularity among conservative Christians suggests a real divide in popular and elite evangelical opinion.

Regardless of what one personally thinks about the Trump administration’s immigration policies, no one can deny that they raise important questions about citizenship. What does it mean to be a citizen of a nation? And is there a distinctly Christian way of thinking about earthly citizenship?

“Honor the emperor”

In his letter to the “elect exiles of the Dispersion,” the Apostle Peter reflects on the political circumstances of the early church. At first, Peter emphasizes the church’s unique identity as “sojourners and exiles” who are set apart from the world (1 Peter 2:11). With language that mirrors Israel’s calling in Exodus 19:5-6, Peter calls the church of Jesus Christ “a chosen race,” “a royal priesthood,” “a holy nation,” and “a people for [God’s] own possession” (1 Peter 2:9). Just like Israel was set apart from the other nations to serve God’s purposes of bringing salvation to the world, so too is the church set apart to proclaim the good news of the promise of heavenly life in Jesus Christ.

The church’s identity as a corporate entity, Peter says, is ordered to the kingdom of God. However, that does not mean individual Christians have been relieved of the cares and concerns of earthly life. In the meantime, Christians sojourn through the kingdom of man and participate in the daily activities of family life, the market, and political and social life.

In other words, Christians cannot escape the fact that they live with a kind of dual citizenship: they are, at the same time, citizens of a heavenly kingdom (Philippians 3:20) and an earthly one. Most modern commentary on the subject stresses the tension between these two citizenships for two reasons. The first has to do with the complete secularization of the modern West. For better or worse, most Americans, believers and unbelievers alike, have absorbed the concept of Thomas Jefferson’s “high and impregnable” wall between church and state to mean a wall between religion and public life (whether Jefferson would agree with the way we have come to apply his words is a different discussion). The second reason is the command that pluralism has on the American political imagination. As some have argued, the very basis for the modern liberal order and the absolute right to religious liberty is itself a unique contribution of Christianity to the social order.¹

Taken together, this creates a paradox for many American evangelicals who believe that Christianity is both set against culture and its very moral foundation. Indeed, a group like the EIR is a manifestation of that paradox when it excoriates movements like “Christian Nationalism” as neither Christian nor patriotic while simultaneously sacralizing its own form of political Christianity.

Paradox may, in fact, be an apt description of the Apostle Peter’s idea that we are both saved from the world and for the world. However, does the admission of a paradox necessarily mean its application lacks logic or integrity? I would argue no, and I believe the Reformed tradition agrees.

Two kingdoms: a reformed solution

Early in his Institutes, John Calvin distinguishes between “the understanding of earthly things and of heavenly things.”² Among the former, he lists government, household affairs, scientific and mechanical arts, and philosophy; the latter includes the knowledge of God and his will. Most importantly, the knowledge of both types of things correspond to related but distinct sources: the knowledge of earthly things deduced by reason through general revelation (e.g. God’s works of creation and providence) and the knowledge of heavenly things from the Holy Spirit through the special revelation of God’s word.³

However, the earthly and the heavenly are not so distinguished as to be unrelated. After all, God alone is the origin and creator of all things. Christ rules over both kingdoms, albeit in different ways. In the heavenly kingdom, Christ’s rule is unmediated; he alone is the “Head of the Church.”⁴ But Christ’s rule over the earthly kingdom is mediated; he “removes and sets up kings” who rule with a subordinate authority (Daniel 2:21; cf. Psalm 2:11, 12). Earthly authorities are not free to disobey God’s will but are set in a position of authority to maintain God’s standards of justice, punishing those who do evil and to praising those who do good (1 Peter 2:14).

In other words, the Reformed understanding of the two kingdoms is not one of paradox or tension but order. Christ isn’t set against culture; instead, the latter is ordered to the former. They are distinct in such a way that the State cannot do churchly things like decide doctrine or administer the sacraments, and the Church cannot do stately things like enforce corporal punishments or pass civil laws. But they are related such that the state maintains the temporal conditions in which the gospel can flourish and the church prepares citizens worthy of citizenship in a free republic. The two exist together “as planets moving in concentric orbits.”⁵

Application

So how would we apply this Reformed vision of the two kingdoms to the specific question of immigration and citizenship?

First of all, Christians must understand that the state has a natural duty and right to decide and enforce immigration law.⁶ Being among what Calvin called earthly things, decisions about immigration and assimilation are the purview of temporal authorities and guided by natural principles deduced by reason. Since grace does not destroy nature but restores and perfects it, there isn’t some biblical prescription about immigration, or citizenship for that matter, that transgresses natural principles rightly understood. Rather, the Bible confirms those things which nature also reveals like natural and inalienable rights, integrity of nations, and the rule of law.⁷

Lamentably, ideology often infects the debate about these issues. Wisdom, on the other hand, admits that circumstances change and so can our policies so long as they remain fixed on first principles. For example, America, in principle, may remain a place where people of all colors and creeds can prosper even if the nation decides through its elected officials that it would be best to temporarily limit the number of immigrants for various prudential reasons.

That being the case, the Christian imperative to care for the sojourner is not a license to violate or disregard justly administered immigration laws. Christians must decide how to do one without doing the other. A great example is ESL Ministries which equips churches to serve immigrants, refugees, and international students through English-language classes that simultaneously share the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Still, the tragedy of living in a sin-fallen world means there may be particular tactics of enforcement that could justify peaceful resistance even while the church broadly affirms the just authority of the state to decide immigration law. One such example is the question of permitting ICE agents to use the corporate worship of God’s people as an opportunity to track potential suspects. It strikes me that sharing membership roles or using Lord’s Day worship as a vehicle for empowering state actors is a poor precedent and likely violates a principled commitment to two kingdoms doctrine.

Finally, Christians must recognize that liberty of conscience grants differences in opinion over these issues. Christians may be hawkish or dovish on immigration and remain within the kingdom of God. However, the freedom of the gospel should never be used as an excuse for lazy reasoning or unthinking ideology. A good place to start, at least as it relates to the question of citizenship, is not to settle for paradox but think coherently about our earthly and heavenly citizenships such that we rightly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.

1. The reader can find such arguments in books like Tom Holland’s, Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade The World (New York, NY: Basic Books: 2021) and Glen Scrivener’s The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality (The Good Book Company, 2022).

2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Robert White (Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth, 2014), 53.

3. For more on Calvin’s two kingdom theology see Robert Hasler, “The Knowledge of Man and Free Will (Part 2),” The New Vivarium, April 9, 2025, link.

4. The Book of Church Order of the Presbyterian Church in America (BCO), Preface.

5. BCO 3-4.

6. I will assume for now that most people reading this blog do not contend with the virtue of distinct nation-states or, at the very least least, that borders are an unchanging part of reality in our present life. Still, the question is an interesting one and perhaps deserves its own post in the future.

7. Indeed, I believe this to be the position of the American Founders who appealed to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in asserting the first principles of the American Founding. In that sense, it is perfectly reasonable to say the Founders conceived of their new republic as being distinctly ‘Christian’ while simultaneously rejecting theocracy.