[This is Part 1 of “A Third Testament,” a two-part series on Christian nationalism and the doctrines it borrows. Part 2, “What the Counterfeit Was Copying,” follows.]
In 1975, a Christian publishing house put these words into print: “the Constitution of the United States existed before time began”. It was there, the book says, when Christ and God created the heavens and the earth and man.[1] Four pages later, the same book explains what Christ died to accomplish: “to set people free from the savagery of demagogues and the tyranny of kings.”[2]
Those two sentences are two specific, nameable errors about who Christ is and what His death was for — errors serious enough that Scripture has a word for them. That word is heresy, and this piece means to earn the right to use it before it uses it.
One thing this piece is not: a complaint about patriotism, or an attack on one political party dressed up as theology. What follows touches a press built by a famous evangelical, a sitting congressman, and, much later, a sitting president. None of that is the point for us. The point is two doctrines, and whether they are true.
We are not neutral observers of this question either. Most of us grew up singing songs that quietly blurred the line Walton crosses outright, which is part of why this sentence deserves a closer look rather than a laugh.
What Walton Actually Claims
The book is Rus Walton’s One Nation Under God. It was published by Third Century Publishers, a press Bill Bright — founder of Campus Crusade for Christ — started in 1974 with Arizona Congressman John Conlan.[3] The two men built Third Century for a specific purpose: to fuse conservative political organizing with evangelical identity, at a moment when American evangelicals were only beginning to think of themselves as a coherent political bloc rather than a scattered religious minority with no particular stake in national elections.
Conlan pushed the press further than Bright had bargained for, using it to endorse specific Republican candidates and rate members of Congress on a conservative scorecard. That was too much even for Bright, who scaled back his own involvement after the evangelical-left magazine Sojourners ran an expose on the operation.[4]
Is that fair to Bright? Probably — he had a limit, and Conlan exceeded it. But Walton’s book landed somewhere between the two men, and it outlived their argument entirely. The press that publishes an idea rarely controls where that idea ends up fifty years later.
None of that history excuses Walton’s own words, which is the real reason we are here. But it matters before we read him directly, because the ideas did not arrive out of nowhere. They had sponsors, a budget, and a strategy — a different kind of origin than a lone writer self-publishing a tract out of his garage.
Walton himself is identified elsewhere as part of the Christian Reconstructionist stream — the theological tradition, associated with R.J. Rushdoony, that seeks to govern civil society directly by Old Testament law.[5] Reconstructionists in Rushdoony’s circle argued that the civil penalties of Mosaic law still bind modern nations, not just ancient Israel, a position few evangelicals today would defend outright, but one that quietly shapes how some of their intellectual descendants talk about the American founding.
That lineage matters here, because it explains how a sincere Christian writer could arrive at a sentence like the one above without feeling he had crossed any line at all. Once you are already committed to collapsing the distinction between divine order and civil order, “the Constitution existed before time began” does not sound like a slogan. It sounds like a conclusion your theology has already prepared you to reach, the way a math error three steps back can make a wrong final answer feel perfectly logical if you never go back and check the second step.
Here is the sentence again, in full: “The constitution existed even before time began. It was there when Christ with God created the heavens and the earth and man.”[6] And four pages later: “Christ died to set people free from the savagery of demagogues and the tyranny of kings.”[7]
A False Doctrine of Creation
Scripture is not vague about who existed before time and who made everything that exists. John opens his Gospel with it: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1:1-3).
Paul says the same thing to the Colossians, more specifically still: For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Col. 1:16-17).
Notice what that passage actually claims: Not just that Christ made things, but that He made the categories of power themselves — thrones, dominions, rulers, and authorities. Every government that has ever existed, including the one Walton is defending, was made through Christ and for Christ, not alongside Him as some kind of co-eternal partner.
Think of it the way you’d think of a building and its architect. A well-designed building can honor its architect’s vision beautifully. It cannot also have been standing in the empty lot before the architect ever drew the plans. A constitution is a thing Christ made, through human hands, at a specific moment in history. It cannot also be a thing that was already there when He made it.
Someone might object that Walton is simply saying something conservative theologians have long said: that the moral truths behind the American founding are grounded in God’s eternal character, not invented by the founders out of nothing. That claim, stated carefully, isn’t the error here — God’s moral order is eternal, and governments answer to a justice they didn’t invent. Plenty of careful theologians have made exactly that argument about natural law and general revelation, and nothing here disputes it.
But that is a claim about truths a document may reflect, not a claim about the document itself. Walton didn’t write that the Constitution’s principles echo something eternal in God’s character. Walton wrote that the Constitution existed before time began, and that is a different claim, stretched past where careful theology stops. His book is not in the company of careful theologians.
This isn’t a small imprecision a good editor quietly fixes. Pre-existence at creation is a specific, exclusive claim Scripture makes about the Son of God — never about Israel, the temple, the Torah, or a legal document ratified in Philadelphia. When Walton writes that the Constitution existed even before time began, he isn’t saying America has old and honorable roots. He is assigning a legal document the one attribute Scripture reserves for Christ alone. That is a false doctrine of creation.
A False Doctrine of Atonement
The second claim is worse, because it doesn’t just misplace an attribute. It relocates the purpose of the cross itself.
Paul tells the Galatians plainly what Christ’s death was for: Christ gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father (Gal. 1:4). Paul tells the Colossians the same thing from a different angle: He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Col. 1:13-14). That is the tyranny Christ came to break — sin, the present evil age, the domain of darkness — and it is a far worse tyrant than any king who ever sat on any throne.
Someone might say there’s a real thread of truth in Walton’s instinct — that Christ is Lord over kings, that His kingdom outlasts every earthly tyranny. True enough. But notice what Christ said when Pilate asked whether He was a king: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Christ’s lordship over kings isn’t the same claim as Christ dying to overthrow kings. His kingdom stands over every throne without needing to unseat any particular one, and His death addressed something no revolution has ever touched: the sin inside the people ruling and the people being ruled alike.
Walton has Christ dying to free people from the savagery of demagogues and the tyranny of kings — language of eighteenth-century political grievance, not the New Testament’s own account of the cross.[8] This isn’t a footnote quietly added to the gospel. It’s a different gospel, doing different work, aimed at a different problem than the one the cross actually solved. Paul has already told us what to call a teacher who does that, however sincerely: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel . . . But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed” (Gal. 1:6-9).
That word — accursed, anathema — isn’t rhetorical heat. It’s Paul’s own standard for heresy: not confusion at the margins of the gospel, but a substitution at its center. Walton’s book meets that standard twice: once in what it claims about creation, and again in what it claims the cross accomplished.
Not Fringe, Not Contained
It would be easy to file this away as a fifty-year-old curiosity if it had stayed on one shelf. It hasn’t. What began as a Reconstructionist claim about a single document has become something closer to a genre — a recognizable strand of what pastors and historians now call Christian nationalism, the fusion of national and religious identity into a single loyalty. That strand keeps finding new, more physical ways to say what Walton said in prose.
In 2009, Thomas Nelson published The American Patriot’s Bible, edited by Richard Lee, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Pastors’ Conference. It doesn’t bind the founding documents into the Bible itself — instead, it intersperses roughly eighty articles throughout the biblical text, arguing that America’s founding was divinely inspired.[9] The effect is different from Walton’s, but the direction is the same: every page of Scripture arrives pre-narrated as being, in some sense, about America.
That eighty-article structure is a different mechanism than Walton’s single claim, but it trains the same habit: reading Scripture as commentary on the nation rather than the nation as a subject under Scripture’s authority. A reader can skip an article. Skipping the habit it builds over three hundred pages is harder.
The next step went further. In December 2022, Donald Trump Jr. began promoting the We The People Bible — a King James Version with the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Pledge of Allegiance bound directly into the same cover, marketed as being for the patriots who believe it is time to give America back to God.[10] In 2024, the sitting president launched a similar volume, the God Bless the USA Bible, which includes the Declaration of Independence, an incomplete Constitution missing Amendments 11 through 27, the Bill of Rights, and the handwritten lyrics to a country song.[11] A second edition followed for the 2025 inauguration.
The U.S. Constitution never once mentions God.[12] Binding it into the same cover as Scripture doesn’t honor that silence. It overwrites it.
Notice what changed between Walton’s book and these two patriotic Bibles. Walton had to argue his claim in prose — a reader had to actually read the sentence and decide whether to accept it. These Bibles don’t argue anything. A reader opens the cover, and the founding documents are already there, under the same leather, next to the same ribbon marker as the book of Romans.
The claim stopped being something a person could examine and agree or disagree with. It became something absorbed without anyone noticing there was ever a claim to examine. That’s a more dangerous kind of error than Walton’s plain sentence on page eighteen — not because it’s more extreme, but because it no longer looks like a claim being made at all. It looks like furniture.
Looking Ahead
This comes down to what happens when a church loses the ability to tell its own gospel apart from its own nation’s story. A church that can’t make that distinction has also lost something Scripture asks of it: the capacity to speak a true and prophetic word to the nation it loves. You can’t correct what you can no longer see as separate from yourself.
None of the people involved in this fifty-year arc set out to replace Christ with a country. Each step felt, to the people taking it, like honoring Him more fully.
Walton’s One Nation Under God was an early, unusually honest version of that confusion — stated plainly enough to be checked against the text. The patriotic Bibles that followed are the same confusion, made quieter and harder to see, because no one has to say it out loud anymore. Fifty years separate the handwritten sentence from the stitched-in document, but the underlying logic never changed. Only the method got quieter. These Bibles still make an argument — a tagline, a marketing hook, the implicit claim stamped on the cover. The difference is that no one has to evaluate it. A claim bound into Scripture gets read with Scripture’s own authority, not weighed against it.
That raises a harder question than whether Walton was wrong. He was, on both counts, and Scripture’s own standard says so. The harder question is why a claim this false would ever sound like devotion to people who genuinely love Jesus — people no less sincere in their faith than the readers of this piece. Part 2 takes up that question.
Questions for Reflection
- Have you ever encountered language — in a book, a sermon, or a Bible like the ones described here — that quietly blurred the line between God’s authority and the nation’s? What made it easy to miss at the time?
- Walton’s error borrowed language that belongs to Christ’s pre-existence and gave it to a legal document. Where else have you seen Christ’s unique attributes get borrowed and reassigned to something else?
- Galatians 1 sets a high bar for the word “heresy.” Why does it matter that the word be earned rather than used loosely, even when what it names is genuinely serious?
- What is the difference between honoring a nation’s founding and treating that founding as though it shares in Christ’s own authority?
- If a physical object — a Bible with founding documents bound inside it — can teach a false doctrine without a single argument being made, what does that suggest about how error actually spreads in the church?
Prayer Points
- For discernment: Ask God to give His church eyes to see when love of country has quietly become a rival to love of Christ.
- For teachers and publishers: Pray for those who write and produce Christian materials, that they would guard the uniqueness of Christ’s person and work even when it costs them a popular angle.
- For the church’s witness: Pray that Christians would recover the ability to speak a true and prophetic word to their nation, rather than merely reflecting it back to itself.
- For humility in correction: Pray for a spirit that names error clearly without contempt for those who have believed it.
[1]Rus Walton, One Nation Under God (Third Century Publishers, 1993 ed.), 18, as cited in Chris Staron, “S6:E38 Bill Bright, Campus Crusade, and Cru,” Truce Podcast, December 16, 2025, https://trucepodcast.com/s6e38-bill-bright-campus-crusade-and-cru/. One clarification: in the sense that God is omniscient and exists in what theologians call the eternal now, nothing about history, including the Constitution’s eventual drafting, was ever unknown to Him (Isa. 46:9-10). In that narrow sense the statement is not false. But that is not the claim Walton is making. He asserts that the Constitution itself existed and was present at creation, not merely that God foreknew it. God’s timeless knowledge of a future event is a different claim entirely from that event’s actual occurrence prior to its own history — and that distinction is the whole difference between orthodox theology and Walton’s sentence.
[2]Walton, One Nation Under God, 19, as cited in Staron, “S6:E38 Bill Bright, Campus Crusade, and Cru.”
[3]Daniel Hummel, “Revivalist Nationalism since World War II: From ‘Wake up, America!’ to ‘Make America Great Again,’” Religions 7, no. 11 (2016): 128, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7110128.
[4]Hummel, “Revivalist Nationalism since World War II.”
[5]Walton is identified as part of the Christian Reconstructionist stream in Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne (Liveright, 2020), and in “Reconstruction Theology and Home Education,” a document circulated in home-school policy debates that lists Walton alongside R.J. Rushdoony, Gary North, David Chilton, and Gary DeMar.
[6]Walton, One Nation Under God, 18.
[7]Walton, One Nation Under God, 19.
[8]Walton, One Nation Under God, 19.
[9]The American Patriot’s Bible, ed. Richard G. Lee (Thomas Nelson, 2009); described in Religion Unplugged and MinistryWatch reporting on the 2021 God Bless the USA Bible controversy.
[10]“‘Ideal for the Patriots’ — Donald Trump Jr. Promotes ‘We the People Bible,’” ChurchLeaders.com; John Fea, “Donald Trump Jr. is hawking a Bible,” Current, January 4, 2023, https://currentpub.com/2023/01/04/donald-trump-jr-is-hawking-a-bible/.
[11]“Cash-strapped Trump is now selling $60 Bibles, U.S. Constitution included,” NPR/WUSF, March 27, 2024; Yahoo News coverage of the 2025 Inauguration Day Edition; WFTV.
[12]Peter W. Marty, “A Nation under God?,” Christian Century, 2021.
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