1. Does not Paul recognize the legitimacy of the sword and government. Do you believe Christians should never lay hands on said sword?
Your quite right that the Apostle Paul recognized the legitimacy of government to bear the sword, but that's a far cry from advocating civil conflict between competing factions living side by side within the same nation. If Christians in the U.S. want to "lay hands" on the sword, they need to become officers of the peace, or join the military for the defense of the nation. Those are the two civic options. The third might be to use a gun in one's own home against an intruder.
Other than these three possibilities, and with all of the scholarly sources at my disposal, I can't really see any legitimacy for Christians to use the sword in order to take over their own nation, and I think Paul the Apostle would agree with me. Peter likely would too.
2. So you're not against advocating for a more Christian political order? Why then be opposed to Christian Nationalism? Pure pragmatism that secularism has won and cannot be challenged?
I'm not advocating Christian Nationalism because in the U.S. we have so many competing factions that I think history would repeat itself here, and I don't want to see that sort of thing happen.
3. So given that this is your eschatology and you believe power is to be taken away from Christians, is to challenge that thinking to go against God's designs?
.................. to "challenge that thinking," even my own thinking? By asking this, you may be underestimating my ability to apply Critical Thinking to my own interpretive position on eschatology, as well as to that of everyone else. Moreover, you might also not be up to speed on exactly how U.S. politics work.
By the way, I am not advocating for Christian Nationalism as I am not a Christian Nationalist. I just don't see why American Christians in particular have any legitimate reason to be against it, except that it challenges total secularism and says Christians don't have to conform their political ideology to the dominant secular liberal ideology of the USA. If one believes the USA is a democracy and that all people can participate, how Christian Nationalism not a legitimate participant? If they work hard enough and get a democratic mandate to put their policies into action, isn't that how democracy is supposed to work?
It's an odd thing to state that you're not advocating for Christian Nationalism and that you actually "aren't one" in one breath, but then go on to say that you're entertaining the idea that Christians shouldn't be against it. Be that as it may, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm not against a minimal form of it if it could be managed to combine the solidarity which we might have among Trinitarian Christians. The problem is that so-called Christian Nationalism won't ever gain the ascendancy in the U.S. unless Christianity becomes a majority outlook on life among its citizens---and it'd have to comprise a big majority. As it is, it doesn't look like that sort of demographic shift will be happening any time soon, if ever.
As but one instance of the hurdle Christians have here, we have a few [only a few] states in which there are attempts by certain conservative Christian leaders to install either the Bible, or the Ten Commandments, or even prayer in public schools or in many other public facilities. Those attempts are being met by a heavy secular push to keep to those sorts of installations from happening. What's more, because of the civic mindset that is instilled here and the dominant presence of a liberal social narrative over and against a more 'biblical' social narrative, Christian political leadership has always more or less been, and will likely continue to be, riding in the back seat of the constitutional operatus. And since the time of Madison, that's just the way it is among a land filled with a diversity of perspectives, even Christian ones.
One more thing: it has to be remembered that the U.S. is a republic, not a bona-fide democracy in the fullest sense of the word. Rather, it is a nation that values generally democratic ideals, but that only goes just so far.
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