Russell Kirk and America’s Protestant Character

Ressourcement or Ad Fontes?

One of the best possible contributions of the Christian Nationalist movement, whatever that movement’s status is now, will be increased attention to the political ideas of the Magisterial reformers. Any such increased attention must not be used to advance ideologies or fall prey to similar political anachronisms, but the Reformers must first be considered on their own terms.  

Those recovering and reconsidering political theology from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should adopt a phrase used during the Reformation: ad fontes, or “to the sources!” The Reformers’ notion of reviving the past was preceded by the Renaissance’s return to antiquity —what is now defined in our classical schools and culture wars as “Western Civilization.” The Reformers were familiar with Greek and Roman antiquity, of course, but their ad fontes movement was intended to prove that a simpler and more robust Christian faith could be recovered from accretions added by the Roman church. The Reformers desired a church catholic, not the church Catholic. 

Too many Protestants now engaged in recovery don’t seem to share that original goal of the Reformers. They use terms from Catholic movements like: ressourcement (the second s is imperative for the pedantic) or Integralism. Ressourcement sounds cool and French, I guess, though the French “intégrisme” is anglicized. Plenty has been written to critique Integralism, and I won’t repeat those critiques here. This critique from a Catholic intellectual (not a liberal Catholic, by the way) demonstrates why Integralism is something that can’t be shoehorned into anything Protestant. But my concern in this essay is the term Ressourcement, a term originating among mid-twentieth century (the 1900s, as the kids say now) French Catholic intellectuals who invited a lot of rot, including Vatican II and prejudice against the scholastic tradition. If this was a meme, fans of a more traditional liturgy like the Tridentine Mass would ask for ressourcement but be told that they have ressourcement at home. In the next frame, ressourcement at home would be unsingable liturgies howled out by lay cantors amidst the Klingon architecture invited by post-Vatican II “wreckovations.” Ressourcement, in short, does not mean recovering meritorious ideas from the past. 

While these two Roman Catholic movements have often been parroted without reservation, it’s hard to find online reference among the based to another Twentieth Century phenomenon, the “the postwar consensus,” that doesn’t glow with unreserved contempt. The term originally referred to a political agreement, mostly advocating bad economic policy, among British political parties in the wake of World War 2. The term was since enlarged to refer to the postwar international order. Ben Crenshaw and Rusty Reno expanded the definition of the movement beyond British tax policy to Anglo-American grand strategy, for example, but others go even further to use it as a catch-all for the whole intellectual milieu of the mid-twentieth century. Some of these folks also think that the Cold War was as fake as the Cola Wars because of something they read on X, so it’s hard to take too much of that seriously.  

Nevertheless, if any criticism of the intellectual milieu between World War 2 and last month or whatever is to be more substantial than the “Everyone before me was an idiot” arsonism now popular on the Right and Left, especially if you’re serious about recovering political Protestantism, it is worth identifying some of the problems with the recent past: the political theology of the Mainline and NAPARC churches can be indistinguishable, and this problem is owed to the seminaries who followed the universities in ignoring the Magisterials. Whereas the Academy simply defaulted to liberalism (at best) or Marxism, the seminaries defaulted to advocate some combination of pietism, Baptist, or Anabaptist theology. In Reformed circles, there was a welcome revival of interest in the Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic. Banner of Truth or Evangelical Press began the good work in England. Reformed Heritage Books carries it forward in America. Unfortunately, the recovery of the first generations of Reformers is overwhelmingly lopsided towards devotional writing or some categories of theology like soteriology, for example. Relatively speaking, it has almost entirely overlooked political or social ideas. The earlier political theology remains not only largely unknown, but some prominent folks seem intent on ignoring it altogether. If you listen to this podcast, for example, only James Wood seems willing to take seriously the relevance of magisterial political theology as something other than a historical (and undesirable) oddity. His interlocutors struggle to understand it. 

Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order

But if there is to be huffing and puffing against the “postwar consensus,” its remedies should not be sought only in the 1500s. There are contrarian resources contemporary with the so-called consensus because, not surprisingly, some dissented from it. This dissent included some prominent political conservatives. This may come as some surprise to “New Right” folks intent on an iconoclastic spree like it’s Perth and John Knox just got done preaching. As Robert E. Lee said, “God’s Providence doesn’t move as quickly as our impatient desires.” Even what Ronald Reagan did in America or what Margaret Thatcher did in Britain was relative nationalistic progress compared to what came before. You might have to learn this somewhere besides X, but it’s out there. 

  It’s true that in the newspaper columns, magazines, and books, Protestant resources in the wake of the postwar consensus are thin. Billy Graham provided some pietistic backbone and Jerry Falwell got evangelicals to mobilize politically, but neither provided much in the way of ideas. Francis Schaeffer or Reinhold Niebuhr didn’t have much political relevance, however large they loomed in their relatively small intellectual circles. RJ Rushdoony and his son-in-law Gary North confused enlightenment with the glow of all the bridges they burnt. Both read conservative authors in malicious ways. The enduring broader influence of the period therefore fell to Roman Catholics, however much WASP elites managed the schools and other social institutions through most of the twentieth century. 

Among the intellectual giants navigating the postwar landscape was Russell Kirk. Kirk defined and defended conservatism in over sixty books and thousands of essays, articles, and columns, beginning with The Conservative Mind in 1953 and ending with his death in 1994. In 1988, he eviscerated neoconservative foreign policy. In 1992, he served as Michigan chair of the Pat Buchanan campaign. Kirk became a Roman Catholic in the 1960s after his marriage to Annette, but he was raised by spiritualists and then considered himself a Stoical humanist before converting. As his work progressed, he treated the Christian faith and the Church militant as an essential part of a humane polity. 

Christianity plays a vital role in one of Kirk’s landmark works, The Roots of American Order (1974). Patrick Henry College still uses Roots as a foundation of its core curriculum. The thesis of Roots is that the greatness of America is owed to four traditions represented by four iconic cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome and London. Roots takes up Protestantism in Chapter 7 “The Reformers’ Drum,” a reference to the drum made from the skin of Hussite general Jan Žižka. It is sandwiched between chapters on the genius of the Middle Ages and the constitutionalism that grew out of the seventeenth century, including the Puritan Revolution. 

Kirk’s treatment of the Reformation, though not without faults, is excellent and demonstrates the need to also revisit worthy Twentieth Century resources. Kirk situates the Reformation in the wake of medieval decline and foreshadows it in Chapter Six when he describes how John Wycliffe and John Huss formulated contrarian ideas about the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical authority. When Wycliffe and Huss were writing, faith in the authority of the Roman Church and its institutions was waning, among both laypeople and elites. Social decadence, ecclesiastical corruption, and the decline of the feudal structure undermined medieval order and coherence. New ideas were proposed and advanced as alternatives to the fading coherence of medieval society, but the universities that some hoped would partner with the papacy to shore up imperial power instead became incubators for dissent. 

Part of their dissent, Kirk argues, was manifest in a new humanist learning contributing to both the Renaissance and the Reformation that he chronicles in Chapter Seven. As any parent will attest, the same parents may conceive two very different children, and so it was with movements conceived by humanism. The Renaissance was very optimistic about the nature of man and mankind’s future and gifted us with arts and letters. But its celebration of human achievement lacked the humility of its medieval predecessors. It celebrated the virtues of the ancient pagan civilizations without hesitation or caveat, something that our own classical education movement today must be wary of. Medieval politics likewise celebrated human potential, advancing stratagems and conniving in the hope of overcoming Fortune. 

Kirk uses Pico della Mirandola as a case study in this optimism. Pico challenged the (intellectual) doctors of the schools to dispute with him on a series of theses. Pico’s most famous work Oration on the Dignity of Man acknowledges the potential for degrading ourselves into beasts, but he also asserts that we are able to, by intellect and judgment, be reborn into what he calls the higher forms, the divine. We are called to have a holy ambition, not to overcome sin but to overcome mediocrity and not be second to the angels in anything. Of course, most of Christendom, at least in the Augustinian tradition claimed by both Catholics and Protestants, would remind Pico of what the psalmist said: man was made a little lower than the angels. [Psalm 8:5] The Epistles later say that the angels desire to know more about man’s salvation. [1 Peter 1:12] Christ came to redeem man from sin in the Gospel, not angels. One struggles to find the Gospel in Pico, an emphasis on sin and redemption. This is Christianity for an artists’ collective or a scholars’ retreat, and Pico is much more Aristotle than Augustine. Against this Kirk presents the Christian conservatism of the Reformation: recasting art as a means of drawing man to God in the spirit, imbuing learning with humility, and emphasizing moral reform without trusting human authority to accomplish it.

Kirk on Protestantism 

Kirk then turns to characterize Protestantism by contrasting it with the Renaissance. He emphasizes similarities between Protestant and Catholic understandings of human nature, and their differences with the Renaissance humanists, but also notes Rome’s collusion with the latter: papal sponsorships of Renaissance excesses. Such excesses gave Luther an ideal environment to advocate reform. Whereas medieval Catholicism had gradually abandoned the Augustinian pessimism on the human will, the Protestants revived it. Protestants likewise denounced all schemes of salvific indulgences or meritorious good works. 

Kirk’s treatment of the Reformation has some shortcomings, but they can be overlooked in the context of his contemporaries. Prejudiced and inaccurate accounts of the Reformation are legion in the Twentieth Century, among intellectuals generally and Roman Catholics in particular. Hillaire Belloc launched criticisms of the Reformers continued by Jacques Maritain, then Alasdair MacIntyre, and now Patrick Deneen or Brad Gregory. For example, Protestants traded authority for private judgment (a misreading of conscience, something on which Protestants and Catholics have fundamentally disagreed from the beginning) and a close-knit society for social individualism. 

Strangely enough, this Catholic history is a kind of anti-Whig history. In the Whig history influencing Kirk, the Americans to some degree cribbed from their British ancestors to further improve social and political ordered liberty; in the Catholic anti-Whig history, Protestants birth modernity to usher in autonomous, relativistic, secular misery in the wake of Christendom’s destruction. See, for example, Deneen’s post-liberal polemic placing the blame for liberalism on the Reformation. Of course, this means that American Catholics must decide whether to celebrate America as a modernist liberal hell or not. Of course, if one reads Protestants on everything from marriage, vocation, social rank, religious freedom, or even antiquity, the Reformation-as-revolution reading falls apart. Kirk does remarkably well navigating the two poles of praising or blaming the Reformation for the last few centuries, even though that praise or blame was practically de rigueur at the time he was writing, 

Kirk also gets the Protestant character of the English church wrong. This is another common reading for Kirk’s time, especially among Catholics reading history in the wake of the Anglo-Catholic movement. Thankfully, that view is long since corrected by research into the influence of the continental reformers on Cranmer and others, Puritan opposition to the Book of Common Prayer, to Laudianism, or to the ceremonialism and adiaphorism of Lancelot Andrews or some elements of Stuart toleration notwithstanding. Canterbury was not a middle way between Rome and Geneva. Part of that misunderstanding is owed not only to not knowing how adamantly the Book of Homilies rejected Romish practices, for example, but also how much even the more Calvinist wing of Protestantism deployed reason and natural law. The “Geneva men” (as Kirk calls them) did not believe that law was to be found only in the Bible. Thankfully, Kirk does not claim that reason, tradition, and scripture were all equal sources flowing into Anglican practice (as some have), and he is correct to characterize Anglicanism as tradition being respected so long as it does not conflict with scripture. 

America as Via Media

Despite these forgivable errors, Kirk is spot-on in describing the Protestant character as a middle way between two Protestant poles: the desire of Richard Hooker to retain and the desire of John Knox to reform. Hooker relied on a medieval understanding of law moderating reason and the application of faith or conscience with experience. In other words, he was slow to advocate reforms simply based on the claim of faith or conscience – even if justified from scripture – without putting such claims at the bar of reason and experience. He acknowledged that trade-offs present in any reforming proposal, as we should, too. Hooker also articulated the interaction of levels of law reminding one of Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law. God’s Eternal Law informs all law, including the “Law Rational.” But we must also moderate our application of reason with the circumstances of each polity, and this application to circumstance is found in the Law Positive. 

Laws are understood and applied through the lenses of both reason and experience, such that there is no universal pattern for politics. Hooker reflects the Anglo-American strain of legal thinking, conscious of precedent and experience; slow to innovate and prepared to tolerate variety and diversity so long as there is sufficient unity. This is reflected in what is called common law. Hooker feared the impulses of popular dissent, particularly the populist strains of Puritanism in which all of the existing institutions and institutional leaders could be brushed aside by a reformist impulse that would have one size fit all. 

Kirk cites Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity approvingly, and a few examples (Ad Fontes!) from it will show why we should approve it as well. Though the English Church and State were joined closely, Hooker’s Laws addressed ecclesiastical politics and specifically opponents who insisted that the Church of England’s polity (episcopacy) did not conform to Scripture. In Chapter 3 of his Preface, Hooker agrees with his opponents that the things of salvation must be certain and known from scripture. There must be no reliance on others to discern the basics of salvation. But he also says that other ecclesiastical questions require more study to discern what God has appointed, and that the wisest should direct the rest. That makes sense and is reflected in our own experience, populist vibes now notwithstanding. 

But, Hooker says, his opponents have rigged the game by asserting their own righteous leadership as a kind of anti-wisdom. It is they who are righteous, and it is their righteousness that makes the supposedly wisest suspect. To enhance their credibility, Hooker says that they pull a maneuver that is all-too-familiar in our own time: 1) impute all problems to the status quo; 2) find fault with any defenders of any elements of the status quo as bona fides of their own righteousness; and 3) propose their solution as the only remedy to all existing ills, however untested that solution may be. In fact, the more radical and untested, the greater its soundness. Those who acknowledge this solution become the in-crowd and everyone else is the enemy. And lest the fence sitters be accused of not knowing what time it is, or being on the wrong side of history, they must act now lest they quench the Spirit. 

The solution to such endless and nonsensical contentions, Hooker argues, is to acknowledge the need for authorities whose judgment can decide controversies. God knew that such judges would err, Hooker acknowledges, but He believed them to be a better alternative to endless strife. While Hooker’s opponents had a retort to this, Hooker’s measured solution is both wise and helpful. Next time you are in a dispute, ask your opponent or interlocutor who they would recognize as an authority to settle the matter, or what acceptable common standards for judgment would be. What you will discover in most cases is that they will not agree to one. They will assert that they alone are able to judge, demonstrating how leadership “always” fails and is corrupt, and that the current state of things justifies an all-or-nothing approach to reform. If C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape were riffing on this, he would advise Wormwood to “Never let him ask himself why anyone should trust him to be in charge.” Outrage is the bona fides. 

Hooker’s kind of conservatism is evident in Early America, especially insofar as many essential areas and persons were Anglican, including Virginia. The Anglican temperament formed statesmen such as George Washington and most of the men who signed the Declaration, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution. However, there were also men of the more Puritan temperament of John Knox forming America primarily through the Congregationalist and Presbyterian colonies in New England and the Middle Colonies such as New York or New Jersey.  

Knox’s reformer sensibilities were formed in the violent crucible of the Scottish Reformation. Scotland, like England, had its Protestant martyrs but experienced its own revolution a century before England did. Scotland’s Protestants, especially Knox, violently pressed for overthrow of their French ruler, Mary of Guise. (Hooker, by contrast, wrote decades after the bloodiest time for English Protestants — the time of exile that sent Knox to Geneva.) Not surprisingly, Knox reads God’s Providence into the Scottish Reformation to reflect his confidence that the Providence of God can be directly discerned and called upon to aid civil and ecclesiastical reform. Through His Word, Knox believed, God would reform the church of its “Papist” elements and through direct support of His (Protestant) people. 

Knox also found support for Providentialism in the Reformed belief that civil and ecclesiastical polities should be built on covenants similar to those found in the Old Testament. These covenants were like contracts or constitutions spelling out the terms of government for ruler and ruled. Breaking a covenant was like breaking a contract, and God was a party to the covenant. Hence, to be on guard against encroachments of one’s rights and liberties under the law was a way of not only negating the power of tyrants, but also asserting divine authority and God’s justice in the covenant. 

An appropriate primary source of Knox’s to contrast with Hooker’s Laws would be his Letter to the Commonality of Scotland (1558).  Knox appeals to conscience as discerned from one’s interpretation of the scriptures. Knox is not persuaded that a long practice should necessarily be revered, and instead suggests that a lack of objections in recent memory, coupled with ignorance, may in fact confirm superstitions masquerading as longstanding respectable customs. Knox writes, for example, “Neither the long process of time, neither yet the multitude of men, is a sufficient approbation which God will allow for our religion.” Knox goes so far as to compare his opponents in the Roman Church to Islam: neither is willing to indulge dissent and controversy. 

But the real egalitarian turn is when Knox uses the example of the head tax supporting the tabernacle [Exodus 30] to enable an argument that the responsibility for sound preaching is on everyone, not simply those in authority. The tabernacle, Knox argues, serves as a metaphor for the visible church and its purity. If the responsibility of maintenance is universal, Knox argues, then the judgment presumed to fall on those evading their duty falls on all – not simply on the rulers to whom Knox has also appealed for reform. God therefore justly punishes both the offenders and those who consent to their offense. It must be noted that Knox appealed to both the nobles and to the people. He also appealed to continental Protestant leaders who were not as encouraging as Knox would have liked. In the end, Knox used the existing levers of power rather than mobs. 

Kirk’s deft handling of these two poles of Protestant tradition demonstrate that even when we return to the sources, if we are returning to them to solve our current political ills, it is helpful to have sound guides in their application. If we instead ignore the sources, or sound guides to interpreting them, we demonstrate neither the responsibility that Knox advocated nor the prudence that Hooker articulated. 


Image Credit: Unsplash

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Glenn A. Moots

Glenn A. Moots is Professor and McNair Center Fellow at Northwood University and author of "Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology" and co-editor of "Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American War of Independence"

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