The Hope of Ethno-Christocracy
13 October 2025
By Dr Adi Schlebusch
Across the Western world, confusion reigns. Our nations — once Christian — have become adrift in a sea of heretical ideologies. The modern West is searching desperately for meaning, for something capable of offering both continuity and transformation.
Liberalism promised freedom, but delivered atomization. Socialism promised justice, but only multiplied dependence and decay. And amid this ideological exhaustion, there remains a living tradition that has weathered centuries of crisis — one that sees God, not man, as the center of all history.
That tradition is Calvinism, and from it arises a hopeful and distinctly Christian vision of national life: a vision we might rightly call Protestant ethno-nationalism or my preferred term Ethno-Christocracy.
True hope for the nations cannot ever be found in the exaltation of man but only in the recognition of God as Lord over every sphere of life—including national life. Where modern ideologies begin with man — his will, his pleasure, his self-assertion — Calvinism begins with God: His sovereignty, His law, His glory. It is not merely a doctrine but a complete worldview, offering the only truly theocentric alternative to the chaos of secular politics.
In Calvinism, history has direction and meaning because it is from God, through God, and to God (Romans 11:36). This vision provides coherence not only to individual salvation, but to the destiny of peoples.
Ethno-Christocracy therefore rightly understands humanity not as autonomous but as called. Every dimension of life — family, vocation, culture, and nation — stands under the divine command of 1 Corinthians 10:31:
“Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
And it precisely herein that true freedom lies: not in doing as one pleases, but in doing what one is called to do.
The anti-Christian ideologies of modernity—Liberalism, Communism, Globalism, Socialism—all make the same error. As the Reformed Afrikaner philosopher H. G. Stoker observed back in 1941:
“The Liberalist, the Communist, the Fascist, and the National Socialist all make man the center of everything. Man and his interests become the measure of all human action. Man is absolutized — even deified. From man, through man, and to man are all things.”1
Over against this, biblical nationalism restores the true order: man exists not for himself, but for God. Every sphere of life — art, science, law, economy, state, and nation — must maintain its integrity under the sovereignty of God. It recognizes that nations are not arbitrary political constructs, but covenantal structures — each with its own divine calling. Scripture does not envision a rootless globalism, but a world of distinct peoples, each ordered under God’s providence.
As the great Reformed princeton theologian Geerhardus Vos, a contemporary of Stoker wrote:
“Nationalism, within its proper limits, has divine sanction; but an imperialism that obliterates all distinctions among peoples is condemned as contrary to the divine will. Under the providence of God, each race or nation has a positive purpose to serve, fulfillment of which depends on relative seclusion from others.”2
A Christian, Protestant ethno-nationalism, when rooted in the theology of the Reformation, is the purest expression of the idea that grace restores nature—that peoples and cultures, like individuals, are called to live their out their unique creational calling in obedience to God.
This was the vision of Calvinist statesmen across centuries — from Geneva to the Netherlands, from Scotland to the Puritan colonies of New England. The great Reformed republics of the past were not secular democracies; they were covenanted nations whose unity and freedom derived from faithfulness to God’s law. As H. G. Stoker righlty notes:
“Calvinism is not supra-national; it intertwines a people's earthly calling with their heavenly destiny. Therefore Calvinism in every land assumes a distinctly national form, even though its principles are everywhere the same. Only so long as the Church maintains a purely Calvinistic voice can it serve as a force for national cohesion and for the fulfillment of a people’s distinct calling.”3
Whereas liberalism defines freedom as self-will — the right to choose one’s own truth, Calvinism exposes this as a lie by pointing to the fact that freedom without obedience always ends in slavery to sin and chaos. True freedom lies in doing what God commands — in the context of the family, vocation, and in national life. Liberalism exalts man as the measure of all things, but the result is always fragmentation, despair, and meaninglessness. Only when God is again recognized as the Alpha and the Omega can human life — individual and collective — regain coherence.
For this reason, if the West is to be revived, national repentance is not optional. The call to ora et labora — to “pray and work” — must again become the motto of the New Christendom. We must confess our collective national sins, reject materialism and egalitarianism, and rebuild our nations under God’s authority and in obedience to his Law. National repentance is not simply holding a single day of prayer and then returning to apathy. It is to labor daily in humility — reforming our families, our institutions, and our laws according to the Word of God.
At the end of the day every unbiblical, man-made ideology carries within itself the seed of destruction. Liberalism dissolves community; Communism erases individuality; Fascism idolizes the state. But Reformed Protestantism endures because it is anchored not in human strength but in divine sovereignty.
In Calvinism, God stands at the center of all existence, and this constitutes the hope of Ethno-Christocracy: a vision of restoration—nations renewed in righteousness, cultures ordered under divine law, and ethno-linguistic peoples bound together by covenantal loyalty to Christ their King.
Only through this theocentric vision can Western civilization rediscover meaning that transcends the pitfalls of materialism and hedonism. And so even our present suffering — our confusion, division, and decline — must be seen as God’s refining work, preparing the nations for what the nations are predestined to be: "his peoples" (Revelation 21:3).
1. Stoker, HG. 1941. Stryd om die Ordes, p. 192.
2. Vos, G. 1948. Biblical Theology, p. 71.
3. Stoker, Ibid. p. 62.