America’s class divide presents a great challenge. Fashion points our churches and seminaries away from “our people,” but America’s working class is a huge mission field. Members of the working class object to our corrupt and corrupting current ruling elite. But they lash out with what are often vague notions of American patriotism or simple cussedness against the elite.
Christianity and the Working Class
The Danger of a Good Reputation
Everyone loves a good reformation until some rash soul takes a notion to actually reform something. The sons of the prophets much prefer it when their prophets are deceased. Perhaps when they have been dead for a generation or more will they cease to be objects of criticism and attack. Two generations and it is possible to buy a floor buffer for the marble rotunda. Thus it is that later generations build tombs and memorials for the prophets—prophets they would not tolerate for one skinny-minute walking around at ninety-eight point six.
The Ghost of Christian Past
Although both were consigned to insane asylums, it was Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, contends Holland, who were the true prophets of reason. They, unlike so many of their contemporaries and so many self-satisfied Westerners today, actually grasped the essential difference between paganism and Christianity. As Christianity fades into the twilight, Holland tacitly warns, we should not be surprised to find monsters that we thought long since slain again stalking the darkness that lies behind the death of God.
Critical Theory and the Gospel
We should not be surprised that Critical Theory can be understood as a kind of religion—a kind of idolatrous endeavor which cannot but help think about ultimate realities in a way which both borrows from traditional biblical themes and categories, while simultaneously corrupting, marginalizing, and even mocking them.
Church
America’s class divide presents a great challenge. Fashion points our churches and seminaries away from “our people,” but America’s working class is a huge mission field. Members of the working class object to our corrupt and corrupting current ruling elite. But they lash out with what are often vague notions of American patriotism or simple cussedness against the elite.
Abraham Kuyper offers one non-liberal route for the state to organize itself in a way that is supportive of the basic truths of the divinely ordained natural law within a system that is more tolerant of diversity than the Constantinian settlement. Kuyper is certainly not infallible, but I would argue that such an approach is more likely to gain traction in America today than a call for a return to older forms of religious establishmentarianism.
Charles Hughes was right: religious liberty is indeed the “glory of the Baptist heritage.” But how that heritage was applied and how it has changed over time is the topic of important debate. And, given the state of our American public square, it’s a discussion that will only continue to intensify in its significance.
Christian political engagement must return to a sometimes adversarial posture with society at large. The key is that for the first time in nearly a century conservative Protestant political thought is not hemmed in by the cartoonish biblicism inherited from the Fundamentalists, but has a robust intellectual ecosystem based in Protestant ressourcement and the reclamation of Protestant natural law theory.
Culture
Everyone loves a good reformation until some rash soul takes a notion to actually reform something. The sons of the prophets much prefer it when their prophets are deceased. Perhaps when they have been dead for a generation or more will they cease to be objects of criticism and attack. Two generations and it is possible to buy a floor buffer for the marble rotunda. Thus it is that later generations build tombs and memorials for the prophets—prophets they would not tolerate for one skinny-minute walking around at ninety-eight point six.
Although both were consigned to insane asylums, it was Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche, contends Holland, who were the true prophets of reason. They, unlike so many of their contemporaries and so many self-satisfied Westerners today, actually grasped the essential difference between paganism and Christianity. As Christianity fades into the twilight, Holland tacitly warns, we should not be surprised to find monsters that we thought long since slain again stalking the darkness that lies behind the death of God.
In this world, we are warned, we will have trouble. As “trouble” goes, a seven-day Twitter suspension is a truly light and temporary affliction. Still, it is one more small reminder that as long as we are truthful, we will not be welcome. All the more imperative, in these times, to know who one’s friends truly are—and who one’s God truly is.
I think that we would do well to reclaim this Nehemian vision of Eliot’s—rebuilding our culture through rebuilding our families. Perhaps we find ourselves reading about the means for restoring order in our chaotic time precisely because we have not heeded the importance of our homes.
Family
When I began my academic career, traditional Christian teachings on sexuality were embraced by the majority of my evangelical students even if they often struggled, as I did, to live up to them. That no longer appears to be the case.
Marriage and family life may be the arenas of human life where the ongoing work of sanctification plays out most vividly. They cannot make human beings holy, but they open the human heart to accept God’s grace and to understand it.
One of the core insights of From Tolerance to Equality is the way in which the homosexual acceptance movement presented itself as a struggle by an oppressed underdog against social injustice even though the core of its support came from corporations, government bureaucracies, the wealthy, and the powerful in society rather than the working classes and politically marginalized.
Many Christians, rightly concerned about the state of society, fail to begin in the very place where they can actually have a significant impact: their own homes. If we cannot get our homes in order what makes us think we will ever be able to get our communities, states, and nations in order? Even more importantly, of course, the eternal well-being of our children is at stake.
Society
We should not be surprised that Critical Theory can be understood as a kind of religion—a kind of idolatrous endeavor which cannot but help think about ultimate realities in a way which both borrows from traditional biblical themes and categories, while simultaneously corrupting, marginalizing, and even mocking them.
There are frightening sexual trends among females that deserve our attention. Nowhere is this clearer—at least for conservative Christian believers concerned with transmitting a sound, biblical sexual ethic to the next generation—than in matters related to beliefs about sexuality and sexual practice.
There are basically two ways for a people to maintain social order: law backed by coercion, and convention or custom backed by social sanctions. To be sure, the two are intertwined, and every society employs a mixture. But establishing and maintaining an enduring order depends on a fairly low coercion-to-convention ratio.
The real battle is just beginning, for it is clear that the militantly pro-abortion forces in our country will stop at nothing to restore their constitutional “right to abortion” by packing the Court, passing federal legislation of fraudulent constitutionality, or, failing those goals, to liberalize abortion legislation throughout the fifty states by winning elections in the states and localities.
State
The religious context to the Revolution that Seward documents helps to illuminate the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the rationale for so many ordinary Americans to take up arms against King and Parliament. Understood in the long heritage of resistance thought developed by Protestant political theologians, the basic claims of the Declaration of Independence sound not Lockean, but Protestant.
The demise of Roe and Casey opens new possibilities for America’s future. The sheer range of these new possibilities can be disorienting. The issue that animated the religious right for 49 years at the federal level has fundamentally shifted. Now what?
Only God can change the heart to perfectly love justice and to act on the basis of it. He does so primarily by means of the Word read, preached, and the sacraments administered. But God has ordained politics as a means of restraining evil as well as of teaching justice and virtue. We must not depend solely on politics. But we must never neglect its necessity and usefulness.
John Witherspoon provides a realistic vision of Protestant political engagement which is beholden neither to a belief in national election nor to Enlightenment anthropocentrism with its claim of a neutral public square. In this biography of Witherspoon readers will encounter a model Protestant statesman who embodies both our theological convictions and the principles of government which shaped our nation’s political character.