A friend of Catholics for Catholics, Shane Schaetzel, just published his book, Pine Tree Politics: A Christian Guide to Reclaiming a Godless Nation.
Schaetzel is an Evangelical convert to the Catholic Church and is a trained catechist. He is the founder of Real Clear Catholic and his articles have been featured on LifeSiteNews, The Remnant Newspaper, Forward in Christ, and Catholic Online. Schaetzel uses his social media platform to speak in layman’s terms about the Catholic faith.
Here’s what the book is all about:
Pine Tree Politics: A Call to Christian Patriotism
In A.D. 700, St. Boniface swung his axe against the pagan Thunder Oak. When the great tree fell, a young fir stood unharmed in its place — the first Christmas tree, a living sign that Christ had conquered the old gods of the North. More than a thousand years later, in 1775, General George Washington ordered a different pine raised as a battle standard. On it were the words “An Appeal to Heaven.” That flag still flies today, not as a museum piece, but as a quiet declaration outside homes, at rallies, and in the hands of ordinary Christians who refuse to surrender the public square.
Pine Tree Politics is the first book to draw a straight line between those two trees and the cultural moment we now inhabit. It does not apologize for the label the media throws at faithful believers. It simply rejects the caricature and offers something better: Christian Patriotism. The vision is neither theocracy nor retreat. It is the steady application of the Great Commission to every sphere of life — family, education, commerce, and government — while upholding subsidiarity and the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ.
The book begins by recovering the true meaning of Christian Patriotism. It stands against the media’s distorted image of “Christian Nationalism” and restores a historically grounded alternative centered on the Pine Tree Flag and its continuous witness from the founding era to the present. Christians are not called to privatize their faith or accept a two-kingdoms separatism that leaves the public square to secular ideologies. Politics is downstream of religion. A people who forget that will eventually lose both.
From there it turns to the Social Kingship of Jesus Christ. Drawing on Catholic integralist tradition and compatible Protestant insights, Schaetzel affirms that society has a duty to acknowledge the true faith while rejecting both coercive theocracy and the false neutrality of secularism. The goal is not forced conversion but the rightful ordering of public life under Christ’s lordship, where truth, justice, and moral order can flourish for the common good.
A central practical concern is the alliance between Catholics and Evangelicals. The book calls for a durable political partnership focused on shared domestic priorities — life, family, ordered liberty, and the common good — while allowing honest disagreement on foreign policy, particularly regarding modern Israel and Middle East conflicts. Neither side is asked to compromise core beliefs. The alliance is possible precisely because the stakes at home are too high to remain divided.
Subsidiarity receives sustained attention. Power must be pushed downward and outward. Families, local communities, states, small businesses, and intermediate institutions are the natural buffers against centralized bureaucracy, corporate monopolies, and globalist pressures. A healthy republic strengthens these layers rather than eroding them. Christian economics and the raising of children are treated not as private hobbies but as essential acts of cultural resistance and renewal.
The Great Commission is applied without apology to government, culture, education, and commerce. Christians are called to disciple the nation rather than withdraw into private piety. The strategies offered are practical and non-coercive: influence law and culture through persuasion, example, and institutional engagement, never by forcing belief. Ideological obstacles — secular liberalism, progressive ideology, and the lingering hold of neoconservative and globalist priorities — are identified and answered with clarity.
Finally, the book turns to the Republican Party itself. Schaetzel argues that traditional Catholics and like-minded Evangelicals must reform the party from within, redirecting it toward genuine Christian and middle-class priorities and away from neoconservative, Zionist, and globalist dominance. The work is political, but it is first spiritual and cultural. A return to some form of Christendom is not only possible; signs of it are already underway.
Written in accessible prose for both Evangelicals and Catholics, Pine Tree Politics sits between more academic treatments of Christian nationalism and broader calls to Christian patriotism. It is historical without being nostalgic, theological without being abstract, and practical without becoming a mere political handbook. The pine still stands. The appeal still rises. The only question left is whether we will answer it.
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