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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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It doesn't matter if you think nations should exist or not. You are not getting away from help thy neighbor, your choices are one world order or letting everyone who wants in. You quote Acts 17:26, I raise you Acts 17:27: "God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us"

I don't follow? What are my choices meant to be?

I think you can make a Christian argument for the existence of nations and national cultures being a positive good, and in fact I would make an argument like that. I'd say also that there is a universal moral law to which nations no less than individuals must conform, and that this implies particular moral obligations about how nations relate to each other. I think that means I can robustly support the existence of a community of nations. I am not obligated to endorse some sort of one world government, and I am certainly not obligated to endorse open borders.

What does Acts 17:27 have to do with that? That is indeed a justification for why God would set many nations and many peoples upon the Earth - that we would each seek him and reach out for him and perhaps find him. That is good and entirely compatible with the continued existence of nations.

I am not obligated to endorse some sort of one world government, and I am certainly not obligated to endorse open borders.

The early church endorsed one world government when they were living under it. Were they wrong?

Had any early church father called to dissolve the Roman Empire into separate provinces (and to split Latin language into dozens of mutually incomprehensible dialects) as something more pleasing to God?

In what way was the Roman empire a one world government? There existed plenty of peoples outside of the Roman empire, whom Christians went to and converted. St. Thomas famously went east, even (some say) as far as India. In the Bible itself, Philip converts the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8), who is on the way back to his home country. Ethiopia (or Kush, probably) was not in the Roman Empire. Or are we discounting Christians in Persia?

If we take Pentecost as our example, the list of peoples (in Acts 2:9-11) includes many from outside the Roman empire, including Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, and Arabs.

I think that much of the early church existed inside the Roman empire, and did not advocate the overthrow or destruction of the Roman empire, but firstly the Roman empire was not a world government, and secondly Christianity was never coterminous with the Roman empire.

If I were making a case for Christian one world government I might instead frame that in terms of Catholic claims about the papacy's universal jurisdiction. Fortunately I'm not Catholic and I consider those claims to be in error. I think that visible signs of church unity would be good and I'm broadly in favour of ecumenism, but I don't think that requires some sort of global secular government.

And of course Revelations 13:7 is popular with the anti-NWO crowd at pointing precisely against this kind of thing. And depending on your reading of the Tower of Babel story, either God punishes hubris by scattering the nations, or God intervenes benevolently to scatter the nations for our long term health.

It can be both, of course. Babel is the divine frustration of a human-willed plan, which is therefore experienced as tragic, even if the scattering was intended all along.

One is tempted also to compare it to Pentecost, partly because the gathering of the nations is the obviously necessary corollary to the scattering of the nations, but also because Pentecost shows us the Holy Spirit speaking to all people in their own tongues. The gathering does not remove the diversity of languages, but includes and accommodates it.

It can be both, of course. Babel is the divine frustration of a human-willed plan, which is therefore experienced as tragic, even if the scattering was intended all along.

In this story, creation of different languages is explicitly described as divine punishment, not blessing (as was famine and plague in other biblical stories).

This does not stop mainstream Christianity from embracing and encouraging fighting against hunger and plague.

Why should be language diversity any different. Had any notable theologian ever condemned learning and teaching foreign languages as sinful attempt to thwart God's will?