1 I use the term nomos to acknowledge my lifelong debt to the work of Robert Cover. See Cover, Robert M., “Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97, no. 4 (1983): 4–68Google Scholar. Cover defines a nomos as “a normative universe.” Cover, 4. Cover explains that a “nomos is as much ‘our world’ as is the physical universe of mass, energy, and momentum. Indeed, our apprehension of the structure of the normative world is no less fundamental than our appreciation of the structure of the physical world.” Cover, 5.

2 I take the term institutional matrix from recent social scientific work on institutional and social change. The classic source is North, Douglass C., Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 115CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 136.

3 Hertzke, Allen D., Representing God in Washington: The Role of Religious Lobbies in the American Polity (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 87Google Scholar (quoting a statement Falwell made on his show, the Old-Time Gospel Hour, March 11, 1984).

4 Hertzke, Representing God in Washington, 87.

5 Maimonides, for example, famously assumes that, when the Messiah arrives, surprisingly little will change, except that the nations of the world will live at peace and Israel will be left undisturbed to thrive. (Of course, that means that everything will change, but I leave that paradox to another day.) Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Book of Judges, Laws of Kings and Wars, chapter 12. Millenarianism of various sorts also imagines some role in the last days for human communities, however radically transformed. And some Christian visions posit that even now, Jesus is already “king” of the world in a way radically different from, but in meaningful dialogue with, the government of Caesar. See N. T. Wright, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels (New York: HarperOne, 2012).

6 The most prominent expositor of the notion of “separate spheres” and “sphere sovereignty” was Abraham Kuyper. See, for example, his famous essay, originally delivered as an inaugural address at the Free University in 1880: Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” in Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 463–90.

7 Other contributors to this symposium discuss VanDrunen's “polycentric” theory in more detail. See, especially, Jonathan Chaplin, “Is a ‘Noahic Government’ up to the Task?,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 2 (2021) (this issue). See also, Nicholas Aroney, “Civil Government and the Nations,” and Jennifer A. Herdt, “Practicing the Political after Christendom,” Journal of Law and Religion 36, no. 2 (2021) (this issue).

8 Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” 13–14. For Cover, the paideic and the imperial are “two corresponding ideal-typical patterns for combining corpus, discourse, and interpersonal commitment to form a nomos.” Cover, 12. The paideic is marked by (1) a common body of precept and narrative, (2) a common and personal way of being educated into this corpus, and (3) a sense of direction or growth that is constituted as the individual and his community work out the implications of their law. In the imperial, by contrast, “norms are universal and enforced by institutions.” Cover, 12–13.

9 See Perry Dane, “Establishment and Encounter,” in Research Handbook on Law and Religion, ed. Rex Ahdar (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018), 125–53, esp. 137–43.

10 See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

11 See Steven B. Smith, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 15, 32–33, 47, 159, 164–65, 200–01. Smith distinguishes between a healthy patriotism and dangerous chauvinistic nationalism. Smith, 9, 30–31, 115–22, 186–89.

12 For an illuminating discussion of the importance of the intersubjective register of public discourse, see William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

13 Stanley Hauerwas, “September 11, 2001: A Pacifist Response,” in Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 181–94, at 181, 183.

14 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), chaps. 11–17.

15 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice in Love (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015), chaps. 6–8, 14. For a fascinating effort drawing on the thought of the fourteenth–century Islamic philosopher Ibn Khaldun to ground broader ideas about social solidarity and political order in a concept of love, see Siniša Maleševiƈ, “Where Does Group Solidarity Come From? Gellner and Ibn Khaldun Revisited,” Thesis Eleven 128, no. 1 (2015): 85–99.

16 VanDrunen borrows the phrase “faithful presence” from James Davison Hunter, “Toward a New City Commons: Reflections on a Theology of Faithful Presence,” in To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 197–286.

17 Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, expanded 25th anniversary ed. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014).

18 Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 5.

19 Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, 85.

20 Masao Abe, “On John Paul II's View of Buddhism,” in John Paul II and Interreligious Dialogue, ed. Byron L. Sherwin and Harold Kasimov (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1999), 108–12, at 108, 109.

21 Miroslav Volf, A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2011), xv.

22 James M. Gustafson, “Varieties of Moral Discourse: Prophetic, Narrative, Ethical, and Policy,” in Seeking Understanding: The Stob Lectures, 1986–1998 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001), 43–76, at 43.

23 Martin Luther King., Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can't Wait (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 85–110, at 92.

24 King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 97.

25 Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), 99.

26 This concern inspired the title of this essay, taken from Malachi 1:11. See Perry Dane, “My Name Is Great among the Nations: A D'Var Torah on Parshat Toldot” (unpublished manuscript), posted December 27, 2016, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2890283.

27 For examples, see the essays by Cambria Janae Kaltwasser, Dirk van Keulen, Emily Dumler–Winkler, Andrew M. Harmon, and Robert Covolo in John Bowlin, ed., The Kuyper Center Review, vol. 2, Revelation and Common Grace (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2011).

28 See Polder, Kristianna, Matrimony in the True Church: The Seventeenth-Century Quaker Marriage Approbation Discipline (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015)Google Scholar.

29 But see Cai Hun's ethnographic study of a matrilineal society that apparently generally did without the institution of marriage: Hua, Cai, A Society without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China, trans. Hustvedt, Asti (New York: Zone Books, 2001)Google Scholar.

30 For a fascinating case study, see Bradley, Ian, Believing in Britain: The Spiritual Identity of Britishness (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Volf, A Public Faith, 79.

32 Volf, 137.

33 But compare Stone, Suzanne Last, “Sinaitic and Noahide Law: Legal Pluralism in Jewish Law,” Cardozo Law Review 12, nos. 3–4 (1991): 1157–1214Google Scholar.

34 Bockmuehl, Markus, Jewish Law in Gentile Churches: Halakhah and the Beginning of Christian Public Ethics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 162–74Google Scholar.

35 See Joshua Golding, “Noahide Commandments and Natural Law,” VoeglinView (website), April 19, 2019, https://voegelinview.com/noahide-commandments-and-natural-law/.

36 See Stone, “Sinaitic and Noahide Law,” 1168–70.