The Time is Now for Christians to Get in the Game
This post was originally given as a talk at Biola University.
The starting point for any discussion of Christianity and politics is to understand the centrality of truth in Christianity. Jesus, in the gospels, says he is the truth. And that is only the most striking of the truth claims Christianity makes, a comprehensive list of which would be far beyond the scope of this short talk. The average Christian is, hopefully, aware that the central and immovable truth of Christianity is around the question of salvation: who can be saved? And how can salvation come to the individual soul? But of course, the Christian truth moves far beyond that to explain the nature of the God who saves us, and also to talk not just about our individual bodies but also to talk about the salvation of our body politic. What, if any, is the solution to our political problem–to the problems that beset us not as individuals but as vast teaming nations of peoples? In both cases one of the key features of Christianity is that it teaches us not to expect our personal deeds to bring about the resolution to our cosmic problems. Your salvation will be brought about by a work of God in history in the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection and return of Jesus and it will come to bear in your life by the act of God’s grace coming to you from God Himself. The salvation of the nations will, similarly, come about by the act of God at the end of history in the eschaton.
This is a strangely liberating doctrine. It means we are freed from anxious worry and overconfident action. We will not bring about our salvation but also we will not bring about our destruction! We will not by our acting, bring about an irresolvable end to the world. What are we to do then? Well the Christian truth tells us more than just these ultimate things, it also offers us a wealth of wisdom about moral and political behavior, how to live with joy and humility, and how to structure a more or less just society. However we are called to live out this truth through our limited vocations.
Christians have a vocation to live out truth in their lives right where they find themselves, and our vocations often shift. One day you are not a father, but suddenly as you live your life and vocation in marriage you may, blessedly, find yourself with such a vocation! Similarly you will have a vocation as an employee and perhaps also someday as an employer. If you have a garden you have a vocation to care for it or see that it is cared for. And some people have a vocation to rule, to order the community and aid others in living their vocation. At the apex of the social situation there is a ruler. A Christian ruler must always consider rule from the perspective of how to benefit the ruled (this is the concept of a common good), unjust rule is a ruler who tries to benefit themselves or their own.
Historically Christianity has been highly flexible in how it understands its political expression. While this may not be unique historically it does stand out from other forms of government that understand a divine mandate to require a particular form of politics. Consider the ancient Egyptians who believed in a divine mandate which required there to be an absolute, god-king over all. Christianity has never been like that. There may be a Christian monarch–we cannot deny the reality of Constantine or his descendants as legitimate expressions of Christian civilization–but there may be some other form of governance be it aristocratic (rule by the few) or democratic (rule by the majority of citizens), or a mixture of several forms. All are acceptable to the Christian, we are, in this way, cosmopolitan.
At the heart of the Christian life is vocation, and vocation means being flexible. The Church is called to witness in different contexts, across different times and places, and in relation to different political regimes. We are not locked into any one political order, but we do bring to bear timeless principles—rooted in Scripture and natural law—that inform how we ought to engage in political life.
In every era, Christians are tempted by the idolatry of political engineering—by the notion that some system, party, or ideology is the ultimate answer to human flourishing. But Scripture teaches us that only God’s kingdom will last. The New Right, as I argue here, represents a turn not just toward new policies or programs, but a recovery of practical wisdom—what the Greeks called phronēsis (φρόνησις). Practical wisdom in governance does not merely apply abstract principles; it takes context seriously.
Given our context inside a democratic republic we must start by admitting that all Christians have a vocation to participate in the process of rule. We have a holy obligation to vote and to vote in as informed a manner as possible and to do so with an eye to the common good. But we must also do so with an awareness that we will not bring about the end to political problems let alone an end to sin. Remember: it is God’s job to wipe away every tear and heal every wound, and that is only at the end of all things. Considering our political situation requires us to understand today’s context. In the words of our current vice president we must understand that we live in the context of all that is and all that came before. Surprisingly sage advice, that.
Consider where we stand in history. In 1991, the USSR dissolved, and the old Cold War consensus began to crumble. By 1992, the signing of NAFTA ushered in the age of globalization, and by 1997, protests in Seattle marked the first significant public backlash against that global order as labor organizers rallied against the World Trade Organization. China entered the World Trade Organization, over the heads of such protests, in 2001, and on September 11 of that same year, the twin towers fell—an event that shook the world and led to the unjust invasion of Iraq in 2003.
By 2004, the world had changed. The debates between Bush and Kerry reflected a deep unease—an inability of the old political establishment to address the new challenges we faced–but a strangely deeper unity as neither could simply admit we’d gone the wrong way in both economics and foreign policy. Not only did they not face these challenges, looking back, it is unclear they were even aware of them. The symmetry of the two opponents on issues ranging from fiscal to foreign to social policy is, in retrospect, shocking. This was further underlined as things progressed to the Romney vs. Obama contest in 2012, where the old lines between Democrat and Republican, left and right, began to blur, and thereby lose significance altogether. And for the purposes of highlighting the importance of the New Right it is worth remembering that in the wake of the 2012 electoral defeat the GOP offered up a post-election autopsy report called the “Growth and Opportunity Project” which concluded that to win future elections the GOP had to become a more inclusive, moderate and diverse party. Many on the right claimed that the policy proposals in this document amounted to making the Republican party more like the Democratic party. This is the logical endpoint of what the GOP had been doing for decades. It never occurred to the old GOP that they were losing elections precisely because they had nothing to offer to the distinctively American people of the USA.
Many Christians, historically aligned with the GOP, found themselves increasingly disillusioned by the party’s failure to conserve anything of moral substance. On key issues—life, marriage, religious freedom—the GOP fought hard to win elections but failed to stem the tide of cultural decay. It is worth remembering that Mike Pence caved and reversed his position on an innocuous Religious Freedom and Restoration Act for the deep red state of Indiana under a mere one month of pressure from activists in 2015. Society was drifting toward what many now call “woke” ideology, and many Christians who found themselves politically homeless, wondered if this wokeness with its morally righteous overtones might offer a solution to that homelessness. The current exvangelicals deconstructed their faith in such a way as to conveniently lead them to those predetermined conclusions.
What is “wokeness”? It is not merely a collection of economic or foreign policy positions, nor even a list of social issues. It is, in fact, a competing truth claim—a secularized religion that redefines truth, goodness, justice, and repentance. It offers an inversion of Biblical morality, rooted in neo-Marxist theory, and masquerading as compassion. Not marxism, nor the son of marxism, but perhaps its cousin. Its focus is not on individual sin but on systemic oppression, calling for radical societal transformation in ways that undermine Christian anthropology and doctrine. Most essentially, we can see the heretical nature of it by simply noting its claim that human action can bring about resolution to the problems of human social life.
Into this maelstrom, entered Donald Trump—a figure as divisive as he was consequential. Trump launched his campaign for high office in 2015 as he came down a golden escalator, at first to mockery by political pundits from both parties, but as the campaign drew on, the mockery turned to horror and hysteria. On the campaign trail he was not only denounced as a threat to democracy but as a bigot and a racist. Indeed, it is hard to think of a horrible slander that has not been leveled at him. Trump–the life-long New York democrat who once flirted with a third party run–despite his many personal failings, tapped into a deep well of dissatisfaction with both political parties. For many, his surprising victory in the election in 2016 was a rejection not just of Hillary Clinton but of the entire post-Cold War political consensus. Trump’s presidency was a rupture, a shock to the system, and it exposed a central reality: both parties had failed to deliver on their promises, especially to working-class Americans of all races, colors, and creeds. The era of global disruption of labor markets and individual disruptions of family life had resulted in chaos on a level that would have been hard to imagine had it been described to the average American in the 1980s. The most basic job of the vocation of the ruling class, to secure the common good for citizens first and then our neighbors and allies (through peace and trade) had been so poorly handled and the effects of this mismanagement were crystal clear.
For Christians, Trump presented a challenge and an opportunity. On the one hand, his policies were often aligned with Christian concerns—pro-life advocacy, the appointment of conservative judges, and an unapologetic defense of religious liberty. On the other hand, his character was, at times, a stumbling block. Nevertheless, Trump’s rise marked a critical turning point: the emergence of the New Right, a movement that seeks to conserve the common good, even if it means upsetting the status quo. The American people deserve a military that pursues their own ends, a school system and academy that teaches them their history, a media that tells them the truth, a health care system that doesn’t poison them in order to heal them, and most importantly an economy that allows them to own their home, marry, and provide for their own children.
Many of Trump’s critics accuse him of being a threat to democracy, and in some ways, they are right. But his supporters are, quite rightly, apoplectic: how could democratically electing a president be a threat to democracy?! Eric Weinstein has laid out how this can be so quite well, but let me summarize. Democracy is being used to mean two things. On the one hand there are institutions which we have inherited that were formed by previously democratically elected officials. The election of Donald Trump represents a threat to many of those institutions, because it is a democratic referendum on those institutions and a statement that, in our era and for our people, we need new and reformed institutions to meet the challenges we are facing. But the real question is not whether democracy itself is in peril, but whether our current form of democracy—one that prioritizes global markets over local American communities, individual rights over the common good, and cultural revolution over moral order—can continue to sustain itself. The New Right, in its best moments, seeks to recover a vision of governance that is not merely about procedural democracy but about the pursuit of this common good for all Americans. It asks the critical question: what kind of people are we becoming, and what kind of society are we building?
And, thankfully, after his 2016 victory as a leader he delivered on some of his core promises related to bringing the economy back to a focus on the real wages of American workers, as well as ensuring that our federal courts had judges who recognized the rule of law and its role in securing the common good in ways which were fully in line with our constitution. But the power of the woke movement was growing and in the wake of the pandemic, with a consequential election at hand it gained significant traction. In 2020 the incantation about systemic racism reached new heights and Trump was made the central figure in a morality play about the character of our nation. Never mind that he won more votes by people of color in almost every demographic than Mitt Romney did in 2012. Then, in 2020, while winning a stunning 12 million more votes than he had in 2016, he did it again, increasing his share of the electorate from nearly all minority groups. He is set to do it again, win or lose, this November as observers are tracking the racial depolarization of the electorate for the first time in living memory. If Donald Trump is a racist, please explain that to his large and growing constituency inside the black, Latino, and Asian American communities. If Trump is a threat to democracy we must admit, with Eric Weinstein, that the name of that threat to democracy is democracy. Elon Musk’s purchase of twitter has enabled the truth about Trump and his coalition to finally get out to the American people and the stakes of the election are becoming ever clearer. Christians must see clearly the signs of the times, discern the truth, and exercise their vocation to vote. Christians committed to the common good should vote for Donald Trump. Those who are not so committed are encouraged to join the bloodthirsty Dick Cheney and usurious Goldman Sachs in caucusing with Kamala Harris, but beware the company you keep!
There are some socially conservative voters who claim that Trump has at last shown his true colors in abandoning his positions as a pro-life stalwart. This is not so. Rather the pro life position has failed to coalesce as a movement around a new goal following its incredible win in the wake of Trump’s appointments. It is still clear that Trump and the GOP are the pro-life party (between the two) and to abandon him now would be the end of that voting block’s involvement in any relevant political discussion. While I cannot agree with Matthew Lee Anderson that “Pro-lifer’s Political Irrelevance May Be Good for the Movement,” I do think he correctly diagnoses what they are dealing with a shift in the electorate after an electoral victory they did not anticipate and that a reset of their goals is needed. The sooner they sort this out the better it is for everyone. In the meantime, dance with the one who brung you–vote Trump and organize so that in the next national election you can flex your relevance again at the national level. Truly, given that the other side has pushed their candidate to call for a constitutional amendment to codify abortion as a right into law, we need an organized response and there’s good reason to expect there might be some stomach for it. Things are shifting.
In recent years, we have witnessed a cultural “vibeshift,” a shift in the mood and tone of political discourse. It is easy to get caught up in the noise of social media or to retreat into cynicism. But as Christians, we are called to raise our flag higher, to be clear about where we stand. We stand for truth, for the dignity of the human person, for the goodness of creation, and for the justice of common good of our fellow citizens. We vote not only for greatness but for health, wealth, and human flourishing in our land and in our time!
This is not a time for retreat. It is a time for action. The New Right offers a vision for political engagement that is rooted in reality, not ideology; in truth, not sentimentality. It is a movement that recognizes the limits of government but also its responsibility to protect the good, the true, and, yes, even the beautiful as Trump tried to do when he was last in office. As Christians, we must engage this moment with wisdom (*phronēsis*), knowing that we exist in context—our actions have consequences for generations to come.
The call to Christians today is clear: get on the field. Engage in the political process. Cast your vote. Speak truth in the public square, even when it is unpopular. Our hope is not in any party or politician but in the eternal kingdom of Christ. Yet, we are called to bear witness to that kingdom here and now, to fight for a society that reflects God’s justice and mercy to the best of our abilities and in sphere of action we have available to us.
The New Right is not perfect, nor is it the final answer to the challenges we face. But it is a step toward a political order that recognizes the truths Christianity has long proclaimed: that man is made in the image of God, that the family is the cornerstone of society, and that governments exist to protect, not destroy, the conditions for human flourishing for their citizens.
Image Credit: Unsplash
