American Christians Have Some Questions that Need Answers
It’s commonplace to point out—at least among a certain breed of traditional Roman Catholic—that evangelicals remember nothing before 1950. It has not, however, been fully appreciated how this historical myopia is compounded by a failure of prospection: the evangelical can also anticipate nothing beyond 2050. This is true in two senses. Evangelicals are more inclined to believe that the eschaton is imminent: in 2022 some 63% affirmed the statement that “we are living in the end times,” against 31% of mainline believers and 27% of Catholics. But even those who believe in a deep future—in generations and generations still to come—don’t plan for it. The state is the primary, if not the only, means of providing for future generations—and evangelicals suffer from a horror of the state.
The separation of Church and State is the closest thing to a doctrine that you will find in many an American church. Anti-credal non-denominationalists—the sort who regard Constantine as the great corrupter of the church—are the most obvious and most intuitive example of this phenomenon. In general, the state is just another distraction so far as the modern evangelical is concerned. The Church is distracted from her mission by temporal power and focused on temporal persecution; therefore, the worst sin an emperor can commit is to believe in Jesus. The martyr’s death is a shortcut to victory in the drama of the individual Christian, no matter that it constitutes a disaster for the Christian community. That there are fewer Christians during times of persecution—as, say, in East Germany—is irrelevant because, under persecution, only the “good” and “strong” Christians are left over. God, we assume, would not want to save weak people.
It is tempting to lay the blame exclusively at the foot of the low churches. After all, the heirs of the Radical Reformation, such as the Anabaptists, have long combined a suspicion of state power with a vulnerability to apocalyptic visions. But the conservative ‘liturgical’ churches have their own ways of absolving themselves from the burden of thinking about politics.
Much has been made of the dubious adjective “Judeo-Christian,” generally appended to an abstraction vague enough to disguise its incoherence, such as “values” or “tradition.” A better term for the Christian ethos of our time might be “Christo-Lockean,” which I define as the attempt to “discover” that Christianity prescribes exactly the American Founding, exactly as the American Founding has been interpreted in the late 20th century. It turns out that the New Testament prescriptions for the “emperor” are exhaustive: not only is he delegated to punish the evildoer, but he can only punish the evildoer, and to the extent that he applies the teachings of Christian revelation to his rule, he has exceeded his brief. In other words, the emperor has, exclusively, the power to protect the public peace, and so he also must ensure strict freedom of religion, peaceful speech, private sexual conduct, non-abortifacient contraceptives etc. etc. etc. Conveniently, this means that a Christian has no political duty, except perhaps to vote for the occasional bow-tied Republican, who, by word and deed, will express both his voters’ moral indignation and their total disinclination to change anything meaningful.
Together, the two attitudes promote an almost total suspension of political thought. Surmount the theoretical wall set up by the Christo-Lockean, and you must confront the psychological wall of the Anabaptist martyr complex. After that, you will probably be told that protecting the church using politics is proof that you don’t trust God—as though God could not delegate Christians to protect Christians.
It is depressing to find that we have to begin our response to the Church’s present humiliation not by fighting for her, not by explaining why we ought to fight for her, but by explaining why we are allowed to think about why we should fight for her. We can simplify our search for the answer to this question by recognizing the obvious: the tools of 21st-century American piety cannot address the political questions posed by our time. All too often, such piety is expressly the refusal to entertain them. Whoever wants answers to a question—theological, historical, practical—will eventually be told, especially in evangelical circles, that the question is a distraction. Discontent, schism, brain drain, bad faith, demoralization, and despair are the inevitable consequences.
We should resort to whatever theological and historical resources are necessary—to whatever treasures of Christian thought and models of Christian action, to whatever precedents in our history, or to whatever inspirations for a new and more practical vision—to address the fatal flaws of American Christendom. We should do so, however, as American Christians, loyal both to our nation and to the Church and desiring the best for both—everything noble, everything rich, everything profound from the whole history of our national tradition and of our faith. Above all, we should be concerned with answering the challenges of our time squarely, not shrinking from our public responsibility by pleading the fragility of our private faith and securing a future for our nation under God.
The Christian discursive class has exactly three contributions to make to this effort, after which its members may retire to the countryside and curl up with a copy of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra while plotting a new podcast. Until then, they must explain:
- How the errors of the American Church have until now contributed to its desolation.
- Why Christian theology not only permits but requires Christian men to confront the challenges of our age with expedience.
- How the project of the Christian Church relates to the history, identity, and future of the American nation.
Whatever does nothing to address these questions is nothing more than salon chatter. In what follows, our only desire should be to face the realities of our time without deceiving ourselves. We are confident that, however severe our fall has been, God is able to grant us both healing and strength to renew our struggle in His Name.
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John Locke is not responsible for the mythopoetic embrace of the Civil Rights movement, globalism, the NGO-complex, AIPAC or any other modern ills. Anabaptists did not impose braindead color-blind race relations or liberal socialism. There is no more need for fake genealogies with incompetent handling of historical development of ideas. Please, for the love of God, learn to play a new tune.