King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government, by James Baird. Founders Ministries, 2025, xx + 95 pages, $21.98.

The reception to James Baird’s book, King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government, suggests that the author is either a genius or an idiot savant; either he has hit upon a truth that practically everyone else has ignored, or he has combined a few Christian aspirations into a basic textbook on good government. The book itself comes (as many evangelical publications do these days) with eight pages of endorsements from pastors, professors, and even a few attorneys and public officials. The consensus among the blurb writers (twenty-six in all) is that Baird’s explanation of government’s duty to promote Christianity as part of the public good is not only timely (since the United States is in crisis) but also reiterates basic Protestant political philosophy. As one endorsement reads, in appealing to “history, Scripture, and reason, [Baird] makes a simple case for why the civil magistrate should promote the true religion.” Although Stephen Wolfe opened the debates about Christian government with his 2022 book, The Case for Christian Nationalism, Baird seems to have scratched the itch that Wolfe exposed. The fact that Baird’s book is one-fifth the size of Wolfe’s may explain some of the appeal of King of Kings.

Another attraction comes from the book’s manner. Baird is not argumentative or theoretical. He holds the reader’s hand and walks effortlessly through syllogisms that are as obvious as they are airtight. His point is that governments have a duty to promote Christianity. Baird also quotes a host of Presbyterian and Reformed sources, from the Westminster Confession to Archibald Alexander Hodge (Charles Hodge’s son), to show he stands in line with the Reformed tradition. His style is personal, even folksy at times, and he refuses polemics. In fact, he avoids all theological labels—he will let theonomists, two-kingdoms proponents, and Kuyperians decide where his book belongs. He is simply explaining the “classical American view” of government.

The problem of avoiding arguments with other views—which would have likely made the book twice as long—is that Baird’s argument, no matter how positive and winsome, is wrong. In fact, its simplicity compounds the errors, which fall into at least two categories—ones of definition or logic and others of history.

At the heart of Baird’s conception is the language of the public good. He finds it in the twenty-third chapter of the Westminster Confession, and it informs a logical syllogism that is the backbone of his argument. The confession affirms that God ordained civil magistrates to be subject to him and rule their people for God’s glory and for “the public good” (Westminster Confession of Faith 23.1). Later, Baird deduces that because government “must promote the public good,” and because Christianity, “the only true religion,” is “part of the public good,” civil magistrates “must promote Christianity as the only true religion” (22). By including Christianity in the public good, Baird has ipso facto made Christianity part of the civil magistrate’s responsibility. Public good then is essential to Baird’s argument. He defines it as synonymous with the common good, or “public welfare,” or “the people’s welfare” (5). He asserts that this idea has been “a permanent fixture in the Western legal and political tradition,” though he does not mention that before the fourth century, among the Greeks and Romans, Christianity was hardly part of the ancients’ understanding of “public good.” Baird also finds the language of “general Welfare” in the preamble to the United States Constitution. Later when discussing the American Founding and the First Amendment, Baird asserts that the Founders wanted the state governments, not the federal authorities, to promote Christianity and that few agreed with Thomas Jefferson’s separation of church and state. He avoids entirely the reasons that led all the original states to embrace Jefferson’s position and abrogate government support for established churches (the last two establishments to disestablish religion were New Hampshire in 1819 and Massachusetts in 1833). By situating the “public good” in the Western and American political and legal traditions, Baird makes it seem like promoting Christianity has been at the heart of the West’s understanding of government’s proper function since the days of Aristotle.

Baird’s sleight of hand in relying on “public good” avoids any discussion of demographics. Public is, after all, shorthand for the people in a community or society. What happens when the American public is religiously diverse? What then constitutes the general interest of a diverse public? To be sure, the United States was overwhelmingly British and Protestant at the Founding, even as the small number of Roman Catholics and Jews practiced their faiths freely in places like Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. In the demographic mix were African slaves (almost twenty percent of the population) who could not practice their indigenous faiths. But after 1850, immigration changed fundamentally the demographics of the United States at the same time that it increased the number of non-Protestant and non-British Americans. Baird’s failure to acknowledge the country’s diversity, consequently, leaves his definition of the public good either stuck in the year 1800 or implies support for a policy of deporting non-Christian (more likely non-Protestant) Americans. To be fair, Baird admits that he has no policy prescriptions and also advises prudence when considering how the government should promote Christianity today. “We must adapt to our circumstances,” he writes, and to “our fellow citizens” (79). At the level of definitions and logic, however, Baird does not adapt his basic category of “public good” to the current circumstances of the United States.

The author’s abstractions also led to a faulty history of Christianity and government that also deceives readers into thinking that promoting Christianity as the public good will return the United States to its previous order and stability. (By another sleight of hand, Baird manufactures examples of good government from Old Testament kings, the pagan rulers, Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus the Great. He does not stumble once over the anachronism of using ancient, divine-right monarchies as examples for modern republican government.) Baird quotes Protestant sources freely from John Calvin and John Owen to Charles Spurgeon and John Murray with no regard to the political circumstances of sixteenth-century Geneva, seventeenth-century England, Victorian London, or 1960s Glenside, Pennsylvania. Granted, if the purpose is to apply basic definitions, attention to different forms of government and citizenship between 1545 and 1965 might seem unnecessary (and add another hundred pages to the book). Even so, Baird might have at least paid some attention to Calvin’s relationship to Geneva’s city council and compared it to Owen’s relationship to Oliver Cromwell to see how well the Protestant governments in the past adhered to the ideal governments espoused by Calvin and Owen.

An even greater historical weakness comes when Baird fails to situate American norms for government within the broader sweep of Christian history. Again, such considerations would make a much longer book. But it would also acquaint readers with the exceptionalism of the American Founding (and why Calvin and Owen were no longer relevant for Jefferson, Adams, and Madison). Protestants who consider the church as an outsider to government have little trouble finding biblical support. Unlike the Old Testament’s divine right monarchy, the New Testament presents a people, persevering and waiting for the return of their Lord. The only political instruction they receive is to honor the emperor, a Roman official who sometimes persecuted and killed Christians. Then out of the blue came Constantine’s conversion, and almost as suddenly Christianity became the established religion. Some Christians were not pleased by the worldliness that came with ties to the state. That is why some renounced the world to become monks, and it also explains why so many reform movements before the Reformation came from monastics who wanted church officials to live and minister more like apostles than Roman governors. But from the fourth century to the eighteenth century, Christianity was preeminent in European society thanks to the symbiotic relationship between throne and altar.

The Reformation obviously upset this religious and cultural establishment. Having two or more churches within one Christendom proved contentious, even if historians sometimes go overboard blaming war on religious differences. Even in England where legal and political institutions created checks and balances that Americans celebrate in the Constitution, a Civil War between Parliament and Charles I (1640s) revealed the problems of a monarch as head of the church within the Christendom model. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 finally gave Parliament standing that it may not have had previously and resulted in a constitutional, as opposed to a divine-right, monarchy. But that did not resolve the problems of an established church and what to do with dissenters (such as Puritans and Presbyterians in England).

What the American Revolution (and its later constitutional arrangement) accomplished was both a political framework that limited the power of the civil government (with three branches) and a religious settlement that removed entanglement between churches and the state. To be sure, established churches still existed at the state level, but even these proved unworkable once, for instance, Massachusetts refused to require Unitarians in a specific town to pay taxes to support the Trinitarian pastor (or vice versa).

This fifteen-hundred-year-history is almost entirely absent from Baird’s book. He simply and somewhat breezily suggests that if today’s Protestants simply followed the ideas of theologians and pastors from the period between 1540 and 1880, Americans could recover a government that promoted Christianity as the public good. That is the heart of Baird’s deception. Political change is difficult enough in a society as large, free, wealthy, and powerful as the United States. Moving a nation from its current political configuration back in time to a golden era is impossible. But positive responses to Baird’s book indicate he has touched the nerve of nostalgia. Those reactions also suggest political and historical naiveté.

For all the defects in American government over the past thirty-five years (though many readers of Baird speak often of the “postwar consensus,” a reference to the 1950s when liberalism turned secular), the simple assertion that government needs to promote Christianity is no remedy. It has no chance of being implemented and Baird (thankfully) refuses policy recommendations. What is needed is for Christians, as much as their callings allow, to support the existing institutions that secure liberties for churches (and more) and that preserve public order. For over two hundred years Americans knew how to do that without relying on governments promoting Christianity. Where the United States has erred recently has less to do with secularization than with government overreach. That Baird can call for a government powerful enough to promote the true religion, only five years after governments ignored civil liberties to enforce public health, is well-nigh amazing. And yet, the author does not appear to be bashful in calling upon government to implement the idea of the public good affirmed by a minority of the American people.

What the American Founding and subsequent history teaches is that the United States needs less government, not more. Slapping the sticker, “Christian,” on big government only adds one more voice to the cacophony of activists who propose more government rather than less.

Darryl G. Hart is distinguished associate professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, and serves as an elder at Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Hillsdale, Michigan and as a member of the Committee on Christian Education. Ordained Servant Online, March, 2026