Can nations be baptized? Jesus thought so. His last words in Matthew’s Gospel are, “Go therefore and disciple the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all that I commanded you.” So did Paul, for whom the exodus was the baptism of Israel: Our fathers “were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Cor. 10:2).
For the first millennium of the church’s history, national baptisms were a matter of course. When Chlodovech (Clovis), the first king of the Franks, was baptized in a.d. 508, his realm became Catholic. Many Franks followed their chief to the font, bishops became his de facto administration, and paganism was suppressed. When Charlemagne conquered Saxony in the ninth century and absorbed it into his Frankish kingdom, he required Saxons to be baptized. Prince Vladimir was accompanied in baptism by many of his subjects, in an event known as the “baptism of the Rus.” Rulers determined the religion of their people, so that the conversion of the head included the conversion of the body.
Today, our democratic instincts make many recoil at the notion that nations might be baptized and converted as nations. Given the political order of early medieval Europe, the explicit national baptisms were entirely appropriate. But in 2024, even Christians whose political imaginations are narrowly democratic have to reckon with the stubborn words of Jesus: “Go therefore and disciple the nations, baptizing them. . .” What are we to make of that?
Think of a nation where a majority or significant majority of the citizens are baptized, where law, custom, and culture have been infused by the gospel and Christian norms. Think, say, of nineteenth-century America. We might call it a Christian nation. What’s the point of saying it’s “baptized”?
As the Presbyterian missionary Wes Baker has argued, baptism has to do with both identity and vocation. When Jesus is baptized, the Father’s voice confirms his identity as beloved Son, and Jesus is simultaneously commissioned to his Messianic work, initially by combatting Satan in the wilderness. Because baptism incorporates the baptized into the one baptism of Jesus, our baptisms have the same double significance as Jesus’s own. We are sons in the Son, beloved in the Beloved, and also sent in the Sent One.
These facets of baptism are inseparable. Vocation is inherent in identity. To be in Christ is to be sent by Christ. Our vocations set the contours of the unique human beings we are, lend purpose to our lives, and so thrust us forward into the future. Through baptism, that future is folded into the future of the kingdom of God. Baptism clashes with secular modernity, which is founded on the separation between identity and purpose. Modern science removes purpose from the natural world. Modern philosophy removes purpose from human nature and relocates it to the realm of will. The only purposes that define me are the ones I choose. This seems liberating, but it’s the opposite. Detached from a given vocation, identity collapses. We don’t know who we are unless we know where we’re going and why, and we know the way forward only when we’re called by an unchosen future. By conferring identity and direction, baptism heals the rift in secular modernity, reintegrating who I am with what I do.
A baptized nation shares these dimensions of the baptism of Christ. Israel was Yahweh’s firstborn but not his only son. As Psalm 87 prophesies, Israel hoped that Rahab, Babylon, Philistia, Tyre, and Ethiopia would one day join them in Yahweh’s house as home-born children of Zion: “This one and that one were born in her.” Mother church fulfills this hope by giving new birth to the nations at the font. In baptizing nations, the church also confers new purpose on them, incorporating them into Jesus’s Messianic mission. A baptized nation is called to devote its unique gifts and capabilities to the service of God. A baptized nation is no longer its own, can no longer seek only its own interests. A baptized nation says both “We belong to God” and “We exist to witness to and advance the kingdom of Jesus the Christ.” The church’s mission is to incorporate nations into the mission of Jesus by baptizing them into the body of Christ.
Baptism isn’t a simple endorsement of national identity. On the contrary. Baptism is death (Rom. 6:1–7). Like the flood and the Red Sea, baptism wipes out old selves and old worlds. It may feel like total loss, but in fact what we inherit from Adam is what keeps us from being fully ourselves. The new man who emerges from the font is more perfectly his unique self than the old man who entered. The same is true of nations. Baptized nations die to old forms and identities, orders and interests, but this is only so they may realize their particular vocations. The Franks became more luminously Frankish after Clovis plunged into the water. The Rus grew into the dazzling civilization that is Russia only after passing through the death and resurrection of national baptism.
Few churches believe this today. Few believe it’s possible for nations to be baptized, to become children of Zion, or to serve the mission of Jesus. To put it more prosaically, few churches believe it’s the church’s business to shape national purpose and vocation. Is it any wonder the nations rage and wander?
Peter J. Leithart is president of Theopolis Institute.
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Image by Klavdy Lebedev, provided by Wikimedia Commons, via the public domain. Image cropped.
