Nietzscheans in Negative World
A Response to Carl Trueman
Carl Trueman doesn’t accept that we now live in “negative world,” per Aaron Renn’s classification. In his latest piece at First Things, Trueman opines that the negative world has actually always been with us. He reminds us that Protestant orthodoxy was hardly celebrated in twentieth-century Europe, and that the Americans (as seemingly in everything) are simply a few generations behind what her big sisters across the pond have long known and experienced. Besides, Trueman assures us, this is par for the course for Christianity: “the Christian gospel has always stood in antithesis to the thinking of the surrounding world, even when the churches and that world had a broadly shared moral imagination.” For those of us raised on Sunday School sword drills, the verses begin to click through our minds. “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18); “you will be hated by all for my name’s sake” (Matthew 10:22); “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Timothy 3:12). Just how Jesus said that the poor would always be among us, so also the negative world (apparently).
American evangelicals in general, and especially a younger generation of Christians, are unhappy with this development. According to Trueman, instead of humbly accepting their place alongside the persecuted saints, some on the dissident Christian right are embracing “pop Nietzscheanism” that cloaks itself in Christian garb even while striving for “worldly forms of power.” Such political power takes the form of “crudity, verbal thuggery, and … the destruction of any given opponent’s character.” This is a subtle danger that poses a mortal threat to the character and witness of young Christians, and to make matters worse, the artificial world of the internet and social media fuels both recklessness and idealism that results in unworkable solution and imperiled souls.
Instead, Trueman counsels faithful Christian ministry of baptizing, preaching, and celebrating the Lord’s Supper; of proclaiming the gospel in season and out, not beating the drums of culture warring; of being the prophetic voice of the Church, calling all to faith and repentance regardless of their political persuasion.
Trueman isn’t the only worry wart chattering about the upsurge in “Nietzscheanism.” With the recent doxing of the internet anon L0m3z by The Guardian and its grasshopper hitman, muckraking journos have lined up to take potshots. Unsurprisingly, first out the gate is Sohrab Ahmari—that fearless Iranian immigrant, turned Catholic zealot, turned FDR New Deal sycophant—who whines about “dime-store Nietzscheans” and the “educated, urban professional classes” who feel alienated in modern America (is Ahmari writing about himself?). Never mind the fact that Ahmari gets L0m3z wrong on the facts; Ahmari uses Nietzsche as his whipping boy, viewing all discontent with our degenerate mass democracy as inspired by a yearning for aristocracy, distinction, and race-and-IQ eugenics.
Trueman and Ahmari share the same flaw: neither is imaginative nor attentive enough to discern the distinct associations, aspirations and free-spirited movements on the New Right, whether they be traditional Christians, Heritage Americans and good ‘ol Buchanan paleoconservatives, BAPists, online personality cults (Tate and Fuentes), or simply small pockets of those who dissent from the reigning and dysfunctional political disorder. Somehow, all of this is just a grasping and sordid “Nietzscheanism” in service of a new racial caste.
Few read Nietzsche today (L0m3z claims he’s only read a hundred pages); fewer still understand him. There is much truth in Nietzsche’s thought—not because he was a Nazi or anti-Semite (he was neither)—but because he was a prescient observer and interpreter of the crisis of the West; he was “noticing” things long before Steve Sailer. Not everyone who agrees with Nietzsche’s assessment of the death of the West also prescribes to his solutions; nor must they agree with his rejection of Christianity and Platonism and embrace of a self-mastered aristocracy and new aristocratic morality. Neither is it the case that everyone who rejects forced egalitarianism, feminism, and cubicle obesity are ipso facto little Nietzscheans. There have been many critics of the ills and pitfalls of democracy and the corrupting and enervating tendencies of commercialism and material abundance—most of them long before Nietzsche.
Trueman is allergic to political power. Any desire or attempt by American Christians to serve in political office in order to bring about moral and social order is met with scorn: this is just “worldly power” and “worldly ways of achieving” it; it’s nothing but the will to power to assert oneself and dominate others. Trueman’s characterization of the New Christian Right’s political interest and goals is juvenile. Was John Winthrop’s founding and four-time governorship of the Massachusetts Bay Colony a play at worldly power? Was Oliver Ellsworth’s participation in the Philadelphia Convention (1787), Senate term (1789-1796), and appointment to the Supreme Court (1796-1800) a proto-Nietzschean grasp at personal ambition and domination? Was Henry Cabot Lodge’s political appointments (Massachusetts Senator, 1893-1924) and service to his country displeasing to God? Why does Trueman reactively label any concern over the political by Christians today as fleshly and debased instead of part of the noble American tradition of genuine Christian moral and political governance? Trueman seems to reduce all of politics to baser human impulses—the uncontrollable libido dominandi that consumes fallen and unregenerate men.
Trueman might counter that it’s not Christian governance or political Protestantism itself that concerns him, but the particular manner and character of the current crop of politically-motivated and culturally insurgent Christian personalities. Yet the kind of political decorum Trueman prefers and believes is universally fitting for Christians is precisely that which is created by “positive world” conditions—a predominantly Christian population in a nation with social and political institutions that are both formally and materially Christian. In this world, a kind of gentleman’s politics arises among friends: general agreement about the existence of God and our duties before him, the nature of man, the importance of the traditional family, a shared moral universe, and the resulting commitment to the rule of law and basic juridical presuppositions that allow for procedural justice and political compromise. The irony is that while Trueman insists that the negative world is always and everywhere, his very conception of acceptable Christian involvement in politics is entirely predicated upon the positive world. In other words, Trueman has never experienced the negative world—that is, until now.
Trueman is wrong in his assessment, and badly so. He is wrong, not just in the case of America, but in the larger Protestant tradition and even Western civilization itself. While our current political state of things might convince someone that politics is always nasty, requiring immoral behavior and vile compromises and thus a life given over to the flesh’s libido dominandi, such is not necessary. Augustine’s description of this “lust for domination” in the City of God was that it predominantly characterizes fallen man in the City of Man, such as pagan Rome. In contrast, the City of God was characterized by the love of God and one’s neighbor. Thus, for Augustine, the distinction between the City of God and the City of Man was not external and geographical but the inner ordering (or disordering) of loves. This meant, among other things, that the City of God and the City of Man could, and often did, exist together simultaneously, intermingled among a people under a common king or constitution.
Augustine’s two cities, however, are not the same thing as the “two kingdoms” doctrine developed by the Protestant Reformers, or Martin Luther’s “Three Estates.” The Reformer’s notion of the two kingdoms—an earthly kingdom administered by visible, temporal political power, and an invisible heavenly kingdom ruled by Christ with the church as Christ’s visible, temporal ambassadors—was the Protestant variant of the ancient “Gelasian dyarchy.” The Gelasian dyarchy was the result of Pope Gelasius I’s letter to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I in 494, in which the Pope declared that “there are two” (duo sunt) powers: the “sacred authority of priests” (auctoritas sacrata pontificum) and the “royal power” (regalis potestas) of the emperor. Yet between these two authorities, that of the Church was “more weighty” since the Church is the ambassador of the Divine Lawgiver under whom the emperor must submit and so one day face divine judgment like all men. Thus, the earthly political powers were made “subordinate rather than superior to the religious order,” leading to the dominance of the medieval Catholic Church over all of life in matters both temporal and heavenly.
The Protestant version of these two powers restored balance, mutual dependence, and cooperation. The two kingdoms were both divine institutions, but entrusted to distinct persons, equipped for different tasks and ends. To the Church was entrusted the proclamation of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments toward Christ’s heavenly kingdom—the transformation of sinners to adopted sons of God and the future reign of Christ. To the Civil Magistrate was entrusted political rule over a temporal realm for the security and prosperity of its subjects. Luther went further in describing the institutions of the earthly kingdom as the “three estates”: the family (ordo economicus), civil government (ordo politicus), and the Church (ordo ecclesiasticus). Luther represented the relationship between the family and civil government as “embrac[ing] everything—children, property, money, animals,” and that “the home must produce, whereas the city must guard, protect, and defend.” The Church, Luther proclaimed, was “God’s own home and city,” yet it was still dependent upon the other two, for it must “obtain people from the home and protection and defense from the state.” Per John Witte, all three together were part of the earthly kingdom and formed a harmonious yet ordered whole: “These are the three hierarchies ordained by God, the three high divine governments, the three divine, natural, and temporal laws of God.”
In this case, for the Reformers, the Church spanned both kingdoms: her task was oriented toward heaven, yet her material life was situated in this world, making her dependent upon the family and the civitas. More importantly for our discussion is that both kingdoms and all three estates were part of the City of God: its familial, political, and spiritual citizens were those Christians who, by the grace of God and blood of Christ, had been transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. In the history of England and America, the establishment of Protestant Christendom was accomplished as the City of God permeating the two kingdoms and three estates (often with the conversion of high-ranking political officials and the elevation of the clergy to positions of leadership acting as beacons for the conversion of the masses). This, in turn, created the “positive world” conditions that held sway in America from the first colonial settlements in the early seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth century.
To be clear, the positive world in America was no utopia. The libido dominandi of human flesh still lived on, even in Christians who were simul iustus et peccator and so who continually had to put to death the “old man” of the sin nature (Romans 6:6; Romans 7). Even a Christian gentleman’s politics can become quite spirited and rough. Asking the man who enters the political arena to be meek, mild, and effeminate, allowing his opponents to trample over him, is akin to objecting to rugby because of its physical contact. Some do not have the disposition or will to withstand the daily grind and demands of political life. They should pursue other vocations but not disparage those Christians who seek to govern according to the divine, natural, and temporal laws of God.
Trueman reveals that he’s still operating according to positive world criteria when he insists that life will go on, even in our tumultuous times: “The sun also rises and life continues for ordinary people at the local level, with all of its joys and its sorrows. People are born, marry, grow old, and die.” But of course, even the briefest acquaintance with history teaches that for many people in various times and places, life went on like normal until suddenly it didn’t. That is, until conquest, enslavement, economic collapse, forced famine, mass murder, legal inquisition, political instability, and midnight raids by secret police turned normal people’s lives upside down—or ended them forever. While no one knows what is in store for America’s future, such a fate is not unimaginable today. For some people, it has already become reality.
The reason it is a reality for folks like Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Bakery in Colorado (who’s tied up in yet another round of legal persecution) or the hundreds of January 6 protestors being politically witch hunted and punished on spurious charges, is that the three estates have been severely weakened and perverted. No one needs reminding of how the American family lies in tatters: fatherless households, rampant no-fault divorce, sexual promiscuity, pornography, and now new hideous sexual perversions and relationship arrangements. While the path to recovering the family is daunting, it is possible. How did this happen? Did stable and healthy families from the mid-twentieth century suddenly fall apart on their own? Of course not. Everyone knows that the destruction of the American family is the direct consequence of foolish, experimental, and intentionally disruptive social policies at the state and national levels implemented for the purpose of satisfying the demands of various ideological revolutions two generations ago (third wave feminism, civil rights movement, sexual and countercultural revolution, Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty, etc.).
Likewise, the weakening of American Church and its accelerating compromise with a degenerate culture is also directly downstream of systemic and intentional political changes. While some of the problems facing the church are perennial (temptations to wealth, abuse of spiritual authority, fragmentation due to the disruptions of urban, mobile, and digital transformations), many of the specific issues today are directly tied to the ideologies and movements just mentioned. The church’s complicity in “same-sex marriage,” the rise of gay and lesbian ministers, women elders and pastors and the feminization of church leadership, and, as Megan Basham shows in her new book Shepherds for Sale, the funneling of dark money from explicitly anti-Christian big business and wealthy tycoons to sway and corrupt evangelical leaders and so dilute the cultural and political clout of the evangelical base, are all contemporary developments that would be unimaginable without prior political and social changes.
The point in all this is that corruption of the civil magistrate—when the libido dominandi of our political leaders runs unchecked or when the magistrate fails to restrain the lusts and passions of the people—necessarily leads to the corruption of all society. Even someone as heterodox as James Madison understood this point: “The sum of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first, to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous, whilst they continue to hold their public trust.” That American political transformations during the Progressive Era and the twentieth century that have led to a “total state” dominating the halls of Washington has resulted in the corruption of the family and the Church would not be surprising to the Protestant Reformers. Why American Christian intellectuals and church leaders continue to wallow in political confusion and obscurantism is a mystery. The priority of the political means that despite the emphasis by certain prominent church leaders upon a “bottom-up” revival that will re-evangelize the American citizen and so work a leavening effect throughout the whole of society, the origin and continual strength of our current malaise is political, and so there must and will be a political solution to our morass.
We thus see that the emergence of the negative world in America is a recent development, despite Trueman’s objections. The only question that remains is whether Christians will take these political changes seriously and seek to overcome evil with good in and through political engagement, and the manner in which that engagement must occur. Trueman bristles at the friend-enemy distinction or the use of crude language to win political battles. What Trueman fails to grasp is that in a negative world setting, the tangible human goods for which political Christians are striving take priority over the procedural means necessary to achieve those goods (unlike in the positive world of a gentleman’s politics in which shared political ends but disagreement over means elevates procedure and decorum as the lynchpin for resolving differences). Rahab understood what Trueman doesn’t, and she was commended for her faith (Hebrews 11:31)—not for some kind of wily pragmatism or will to survive. Politically-active American Christians who defy the enemies of God and wage war against evil, and who necessarily employ crude memes, subterfuge, and even deception toward these ends, will likewise be commended for their faith. Trueman’s faith is too small and anemic for the political, but that does not make us Nietzscheans.
Image Credit: Unsplash.