Labels, Gaze, and Contestulocracy
For reasons I am not privy to, evangelicals have decided that it’s time to reevaluate the term “Christian nationalism.” Now, I’ve said since November 2022 that I don’t care whether you adopt the label, only that you affirm the ideas I’ve captured with the term, because I think they’re true. Some people who affirm those ideas but reject the label don’t like “nationalism” because it has a history of centralized homogenization. I respect that choice. This is the case with my friend Cjay Engel, as I understand him. Some have shifted to “New Chrisitan Right,” or as I prefer “Christian New Right.”
But this new concern with labels, featured, for example, in a recent piece by Andrew Walker, must be situated outside of ideas and in Christian identity. My contention is that Walker and others of similar disposition are concerned ultimately with Christian identity amid modern liberalism. They are, in other words, Christian identitarians. Their political thought, which concedes the public square to liberalism, demands the crafting of a Christian public identity—an identity in relation to all other identities. As I’ve argued elsewhere, modern liberalism permits a wide range of public identities, each with its own strong claims to moral (or amoral) truth. But the fundamental principle of liberalism is that you must never treat your identity as the ultimate vision for the public square. That is, the terminus of your efforts is not to make your identity the exclusionary norm of society.
In Walker’s own words, Christians in the public square can practice “contestation” in the public square with “faith-based” arguments, but these are limited to specific moral concerns—abortion, religious liberty, gay marriage, and a few others. The end of contestation is never to win the public square itself, nor to make public institutions officially and explicitly Christian. Indeed, the central concern of “Christian politics,” as practiced since the Moral Majority formed in the 1980s, is to maintain the openness of the public square for contesting identities. Walker calls this constant state of contestation a “contestulocracy”. This ensures that Christians have the space to assert “Christian values” and perhaps succeed on specific policies preferences. But the public square is not to become exclusively Christian; it must remain open enough to permit Christian engagement. Hence, the role of power and themes of dominion are diminished, and political hope is placed in rational persuasion of fellow sinners or in some form of “winsome” political witness.
Walker believes that Christians are uniquely suited to this calling, such that we are responsible, as good Christians, to maintain this arena of contestation. So, in addition to specific moral policies, Christian politics is committed to maintaining political liberalism. But since non-Christians (except Jews) naturally war against this openness, our Christian struggle is to ward off the anti-liberal tendencies inherent to non-Christian worldviews. The result is a wild tension of Christians and Jews—who share “Judeo-Christian values”—struggling to secure a public square of open contestation, even for those identities that naturally seek public dominance or preferential treatment. Our duty, then, is to secure an open society that permits contested visions, even visions of a closed society. This is our general Christian political calling. No surprise, then, that Walker doesn’t like Christian nationalism, which argues for a Christian political order.
But to hold Walker’s view coherently means that we must contend for an open society with non-Christians. We must, then, craft a public identity that is appealing or winsome to others. Naturally, a significant portion of Christian “public engagement” will be devoted to rhetorical posturing, moralistic language, and conformity to prevailing discursive norms. Again, if maintaining liberalism is our unique calling, then we must conform our public engagement to the prevailing standards of persuasion—standards that we, according to liberalism, cannot dictate and control alone. It requires us, in other words, to conform to prevailing norms, formed either by all or some principal part of society, and conform in all rhetorical modes: logos, ethos, and pathos. Christians must shape their public identity around these norms, without abandoning orthodoxy, in order to maintain their public appeal.
For this reason, evangelical leaders have conformed their “engagement” to the prevailing rhetorical norms, and they choose their style of engagement in any given case accordingly. Hence, the world and its news cycle determine what they publicly care about. The murder of Christians in Africa, Syria, and elsewhere barely get mentioned (if at all), as they express outrage over the latest Current Thing. They proudly critique “both left and right,” shoring up their Christian public identity with abusive ad hominems against fellow Christians who are insufficiently liberal or violate the rhetorical norms. They are gentle and lowly with homosexuality, as they denounce the pocket Nazis on the right. There are limits, liberal limits, to contestulocracy, you see, even if one group manifests real policy and the other only memes.
The effect is that the regular evangelical has come to embody these discursive norms. Evangelicals might not like the rainbow flag at that coffee shop or bookshop, but it doesn’t incite a visceral reaction, nor cause them to storm out. They want to be “good neighbors”. You must “love your enemies.” Of course, were it a confederate battle flag, the reaction—arising spontaneously from their souls—would be far different. It would strike them emotionally, causing them to flee. They might even storm out, have a word with the manager, and leave a nasty review. That’s the cost of being winsome in a liberal age. That’s what the liberal gaze requires. Christians are willing to express indignation; they are not weak. But society determines for them their objects of ire.
This asymmetric posturing is necessary, given the political thought described above. Since the 1980s, evangelicals have sought to restore “Christian values” in policy, but these have always been mere isolated moral issues. There never was a vision for Christianity to be the norm-setter of the public square, directing the standards of credibility and establishing the objects of indignation. We thought that “strong families” and “strong churches”—conceived in quasi-separatist terms — was enough to shape Christian public engagement. But that has proven to be false. Social norms remain dominant, and evangelical leaders merely Christianize them for public consumption. Even the role of “Christian education” is now a matter of shaping the Christian identity for winsomeness before the gaze of modern liberalism. In the attempt to be “in the world but not of it,” we have come to adopt the rhetorical patterns of the world.
The common reply is “but I opposed transgenderism and I’ve faced the ire of the left.” But liberalism is not merely a leftwing ideology. The liberal gaze is also strong with the likes of Jordan Peterson, Bari Weiss, Tom Holland, James Lindsay, and Ben Shapiro. They speak highly of Christianity, each in their own way—some even calling themselves “culturally Christian”. But why? Because for them it is vehicle for shoring up liberalism, and their other pet-interests. By their lights, good Christians are good liberals. The liberal gaze is not merely that of the blue-haired crazy lady. Mainstream conservatives cast a liberal gaze as well.
The evangelical intelligentsia are, therefore, Christian identitarians. Their job is to craft a “public theology” of moral witness, centered on shaping a Christian identity that engages other identities under the conditions of modern liberals with the goal of maintaining liberalism. But since Christianity is not (and, to their minds, cannot be) the norm-setter of public ethos or pathos, Christian identity must conform—largely in rhetorical posture and directed ire—to the prevailing discursive norms of society. This explains what we find in evangelical engagement today.
It explains, for example, the evangelical anxiety around the label “Christian nationalism”, and why they denounce (typically without argument) the ideas that they want to associate with it. They must do this, since the liberal gaze shapes their styles of engagement; and the liberal gaze matters because there cannot be a distinctively “Christian gaze” that norms society. Evangelicals must craft a public identity in relation to the gaze to fulfill their general calling: to maintain an open society, which frees them to advocate for a specific set of moral policy preferences.
I myself have little concern with labels, because I don’t exist under the liberal gaze. I don’t care that it “scares” people like Bari Weiss. I’m not here to mollify her fears. People like her are right about Christian nationalism, in a way: In a Christian public order, someone like her would have very little power and influence. But, according to respectable “public theologians”, the very job of a Christian in public life is to ensure that she does have a voice, perhaps even a significant one. If she isn’t free, then I can’t be free.
What we find, then, is an impasse between the Christian New Right and the evangelical (liberal) conservatives. The former want a nation in which being Christian is the norm and Christians as such are the norm-setters, that is, those to whom the rest conform, while the evangelical intelligentsia want, in principle, an egalitarian-liberal or “common” society, which in practice requires Christians to conform and shape their public identity around the norms of others.
It is evident, however, that principled debate over these two visions is nearly impossible. Liberalism will not allow it. Instead, we get guilt-by-association, undistributed middles, exaggerations, moral denunciation, careless labeling, and anathematizing—all performed for their societal superiors. The best we on the Right can do, and we do it well, is appeal to the mentally unshackled, dust off our feet, and press forward.
Image: The market at the district Les Halles in Paris, Léon Augustin Lhermitte, 1895.
