A Flipped Script

“I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles …”

This might seem a strange statement if the book of Acts did not familiarize readers with the circumstances that led to Paul’s imprisonment in Rome. Moreover, the 12 verses that follow it in Ephesians 3 might seem even stranger to Gentiles raised as supersessionists in the Reformed tradition if they were to pay them serious attention and consider their implications.

The script has most definitely flipped over the last two millennia.

Christian Nationalism on the Rise

In 2025, significant numbers of highly motivated Reformed teens and twenty-somethings are coming out as Christian nationalists. That’s fine so far as it goes: a declaration of Christian faith is always a positive thing, and folks who read here on a regular basis will know I find nothing shady about nationalistic fervor even when it tends toward ethno-nationalism.

Frankly, until the last century all nationalism was ethno-nationalism. We didn’t even need a term like “ethno-nationalist” to distinguish a generalized spirit of patriotic affection for the country one lives in from love of and preference for one’s own kindred. The word “nation” itself tells us this, deriving from the Old French nacion, meaning a large group of people with common ancestry and language.

In short, there is nothing remotely anti-biblical about a nationalistic spirit, and much to be spiritually concerned about with the alternative.

Once a Nation

The US was once a nation in this traditional sense of the word; in proportion to the growing American population base, annual immigration from non-Anglo cultures was a comparative trickle. American literature shows zero evidence of the term “proposition nation” before 1909, and it was not until the mid-1990s that the term began to spring trippingly off the tongues of every multicultural apologist in the media. Prior to 1909, Americans understood the word “American” as referring exclusively to the dissident offspring of the British Empire and other Europeans who married into and adopted the new nation’s language and culture. No explanation was necessary for the nation’s lack of diversity and inclusivity, and a relatively homogenous nation generated precisely zero concern from the vast majority of its citizens.

The literature of the era reflects this mentality. When foreign laborers from non-Anglo sources became too numerous for the public taste, they were simply excluded by law. America was happy to have cheap labor. Nobody expected it to stay, let alone stake a claim to equal citizenship.

Discipling the American Nation

To those youngsters, Reformed or otherwise, who would like to get back to something resembling that relatively homogeneous state of affairs, I say good luck and best wishes. A nation with its governance and industry substantially managed and controlled by unintegrated foreign minorities, as is the case today, let alone with almost 20% of its workforce foreign-born, is well on the way to colonization if it is not there already. A pendulum swing of that sort does not work in favor of the host nation.

So then, I have no objection to nationalistic preferences and aspirations in principle, but I suspect today’s American nationalist programs, Christian or otherwise, can hardly succeed without bloodshed given how far down the multicultural rabbit hole the US has already dug itself. I am far from purporting to be a prophet, but I do not anticipate the US surviving another decade of globalist infiltration without either civil war or a series of state secessions. The US is well past the point where all parties that stand to be affected will willingly embrace the obvious political solution to a century of counterproductive immigration policies.

Repatriation and Racism

Nobody gets involved in a nationalist project these days without expecting to hear the word “racist” from critics on a daily basis. That just comes with the territory. So when young Christian nationalists say America ought to send Indians back to India, Chinese back to China, Mexicans to Mexico, Arabs to the Middle- and Near-East and, yes, Jews to Israel, I don’t even blink. I also don’t consider it racist so much as a rejection of the mindless collective impulse toward cultural suicide. Worldwide, enforced repatriation of excessive numbers of immigrants has a history that goes back millennia. Every nation in its death throes engages in it. Whenever large groups of unintegrated foreign nationals occupy the same physical space, somebody’s going to have to go somewhere, and the pragmatic choice is always going to be the most recent arrivals. That’s not fun, and it doesn’t feel terribly Christian to most people, but if there is a viable alternative short of the imminent return of Christ, I sure don’t see it.

The Logic and the Problem

Unpleasant as the prospect of generalized mass repatriation of migrants may be, I see the logic from the perspective of nationalists of all stripes. But I find the unique supersessionist hostility toward the Jewish minority in the US interesting and hard to rationalize. Run the numbers and you’ll see. The Hispanic population in the US is at 20%, blacks are at slightly less than 13%, Asians at 5.0%, and Indians at 1.5% (with disproportionate influence in the rising tech sector). Jews are at 2.4%, well down the list, but an unambiguous #1 on every young Christian nationalist’s hit list. Don’t you find that odd? I do.

Moreover, hostility toward Jewish influence in America is now metastasizing into hostility toward the nation of Israel. That should not make sense to any student of the Bible. Jews have to live somewhere, and nationalists should respect the concept of nationhood in the alternative to endless diaspora. Unless you plan to kill them all (or sit back and watch the Muslims do it), Jews need a defensible homeland. If you don’t want them in the US, where exactly do you suggest they go?

With all that baggage in mind, back to Ephesians.

Know Your Audience

Picture if you can standing on the pulpit in your local church in 2026 tasked with introducing a group of ethno-nationalist Reformed American teens to Paul’s third chapter of Ephesians. Where do you start? Raised on twenty-first century public school curriculum, they know almost nothing about American history and even less about Bible history. They are Gentiles whose theology teaches them their Romans 11 “grafting in” to the olive tree of God’s blessing and testimony at the expense of its original Jewish branches was actually God’s real purpose in history all along, the church as we know it today being pretty much the goal of everything God was ever doing in this world. The Lord worked historically through Jews, goes the line of thought, until Israel proved itself fatally flawed and God rejected them as a nation forever. Yes, say the young Reformers, we will accept a few straggling Jews into our little postmillennial ethnic enclave, but only insofar as they reject their Jewishness utterly, and concede the historic national hope of Israel an abandoned bywater in the plans and purposes of God.

I kid you not. If you don’t believe me, start engaging with young Reformers and Christian nationalists online. Man, has the script flipped over the last two millennia! How are these young folks to enter into the spirit of what Paul has written in Ephesians 3?

The Racists Back Then

When Paul wrote Ephesians, the Jews were the hard-core racists and the Gentiles the poor foreign miscreants whose status in the body of Christ as anything more than exceptions and oddities was far from certain. Here I am talking about so-called Christian Jews! Consider the apostle Peter’s reaction when members of the “circumcision party” came from James (one of the pillars of the church in Jerusalem) to Antioch. Paul writes in Galatians, “he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself”.

That, my friends, was Jewish racism at its finest, reducing a pillar of the early church to a gelatinous hypocrite whom Paul was obliged to call out in front of everyone. This same apostle had earlier received a vision from God instructing him to receive Cornelius and his household into the body of Christ as equals. He had witnessed the Lord validate his new order with the gift of the Holy Spirit manifest in foreign tongues. Peter knew right from wrong if anyone did, but racist peer pressure and cultural baggage cowed him. He plain chickened out.

A Prisoner on Behalf

Paul did no such thing, and the racist Jewish community thought him outrageous. When he calls himself a prisoner “on behalf of you Gentiles”, he is not exaggerating. He stood alone, a Hebrew of Hebrews aligning himself with the “uncircumcised Gentile” believers in the early church for whom even Peter feared to stand up.

In fact, the proximate cause for Paul’s Roman imprisonment was this description to a crowd of Jews of his own mission from Jesus Christ recorded in Acts: “Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.” Up until that point, Luke writes, the Jews listened to Paul quietly. However, the moment he mentioned God blessing Gentiles with the gospel, they foamed at the mouth. “Away with such a fellow from the earth!” they shrieked, “for he should not be allowed to live.” So Paul became a Roman prisoner for identifying with believing Gentiles as brothers and sisters in Christ and unbelieving Gentiles as legitimate potential beneficiaries of the grace of Israel’s God. He did it on their behalf, and he made his point, albeit at his own expense.

Who are the Racists Now?

So then, when Paul writes to the Ephesians of the “stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you”, we need to understand how outrageous and offensive the average Jew in Ephesus may have found this “mystery hidden for ages in God” made known to him by revelation.

As Gentiles, you and I take this mystery for granted. Of course God accepts Gentiles on equal terms to Jews. How could anyone possibly think otherwise? A fundamentally Gentile church is all most of us have ever known. Sure, we pay lip service to the fact that initially the church was almost entirely Jewish; that at one time being a Gentile made you very much second-class in your Christian faith. Still, many of us secretly think the Lord kinda prefers us Gentiles. One check on this impulse constant Bible reading. Older readers have been through the Bible cover to cover long enough to base our systematic theology on the text and not the other way around. That, or we have learned not to display our sense of superiority too obviously. That would be gauche.

On the other hand, younger Christians of the supersessionist persuasion have yet to put in the hours of personal Bible study that might set off the right alarm bells in their heads. These can be forgiven for entirely failing to see the irony of their unabashed and ever-increasing hostility toward Jews as Jews. Nevertheless, that position poses a major problem for dispensationalists and older postmill Reformers alike.

I mean, who are the racists now? The script has definitely flipped.