Competence, Awakening, and the New Right
Since the end of the Second World War, and perhaps even before that, the needle has not moved on the question of the relationship between liberalism and Christianity. The consensus has been that although liberalism emerged in the geographical domain where Protestant thinking was most vibrant and far-reaching, its continuance need not, for us, depend on Protestantism. In almost all of John Locke’s writings, theologians have found rich material for their consideration. This swayed neither liberalism’s detractors nor its defenders in political theory. Marxists like C. B. MacPherson saw in Locke a proto-capitalist. Conservatives like Leo Strauss saw in Locke a defense of natural rights. On both sides of the political aisle, there was agreement that Locke’s liberalism could be disentangled from his Christianity, such as it was.
Why this almost reflexive accord? The end of the Second War marked a new chapter in American history, and we cannot help but wonder if the trauma of the war contributed to ruling out certain pathways and opening others. John Rawls, the most famous American political theorist since the Second World War, lost his Episcopal faith because of the suffering he witnessed, and thereafter turned singularly to philosophical justifications for liberalism. Viktor Frankl, survivor of the Nazi death camps, searched not for a theological account of what had happened, but rather for a wholly human account. He searched not for God, but for meaning—the term, ironically, that Nietzsche thought appropriate for man, now that God was dead.
The trauma of the Second World War was not the only factor that contributed to a reluctance of political theorist to embrace Christianity (or Judaism), however. Post-Second World War social trends drew rural Protestants and city-dwelling ethnic Catholics and Jews to the American suburbs, who together accepted the “brutal bargain,” as Norman Podhoretz called it. To become “Americans,” they renounced much of their religious and cultural inheritance. The softening of the mainline churches about which Reinhold Niebuhr was so concerned at the mid-century mark, [1] the emergence of “social justice” Roman Catholicism, the growing dissipation of Judaism wrought by the Reformed Movement—these all were cause and consequence of the loss of theological fluency that has reached a high-water mark today in political theory and in American culture as a whole.
It would be a mistake to say that the Second World War and the social upheavals in its religious and culturally dissipating aftermath are the singular cause of the consensus that liberalism can be thought through and defended without reference to Protestant Christianity. Already in the late-nineteenth century, the Social Gospel movement had transformed the way Americans thought of their problems and promulgated an entirely new printed venue for their consideration. Until the 1870s or thereabouts, church journals had been the prominent venues to think through American problems. A decade later, the center of gravity had shifted to the nascent social sciences, whose founders sought to bring about God’s Kingdom not through the churches, but through their research and publications.[2]
I raise these two moments in American history not to dismiss the thoughtful argumentation about liberalism found from origin of the social sciences in the 1880s through the Second World War and its aftermath and up to the present moment. I do so to suggest that the effective erasure of Christian thinking within the intellectual venues concerned with the standing of liberalism has left those venues impoverished and without conceptual resources to think through the important question of the relationship between liberalism and Christianity.
What is the one? What is the other? What is their relationship? Endless debates. Dug-in fortifications. No consensus. If liberalism is Locke, which Locke? The Locke of the theologians, who situated him comfortably among the Reformers, as Jonathan Edwards did; [3] or the Locke of the political theorists, who ask that he play one or another part—repudiator of nature, inventor of individualism, developer of the doctrine of natural rights, proto-capitalist, foundation-layer for limited government—in the drama and crisis of modernity?
If liberalism is Tocqueville, which Tocqueville? The aristocrat who thought the democratic age too unstable to endure,[4] or the liberal who believed mediating institutions could save us from democratic despotism?[5] The Tocqueville who suggested that Christianity served a necessary social purpose in liberal regimes and nothing more,[6] or the Tocqueville who believed that Christianity answered the deepest longings of the soul, and gave man hope that the “incomplete joys of this world” could be endured?[7] If by Christianity, we mean a set of beliefs, which ones; and why do those beliefs, but not others, undergird liberalism? If by Christianity, we mean a set of habits, why are one set of habits, but not another, the ones that undergird liberalism? If by Christianity, we mean morality of a salutary sort, do we still need Christian religion, as Washington suggested in his Farewell Address, or can we have morality without Christian religion?
A Tale of Two Competences
We will not arrive at an understanding of the relationship between liberalism and Christianity by relying on the impoverished categories of belief, habit, and morality. Let us instead approach the question by considering the contemporary phenomenon of identity politics, and ask: might identity politics, in fact, be a deformation of Protestant Christianity, whose antipathy towards liberalism reveals something important about the relationship between liberalism and Christianity?
Liberalism-in-practice, rather than in theory, involves the settled constellation that includes rule of law, consent of the governed, checks and balances across the several branches of government, government instituted to protect preexisting rights rather than to invent and grant them, family as a legitimate pre-political institution, constraint on majority rule, a free press, separation between church and state, and periodic elections, among other things. We will not assay the constellation of liberalism, point by point, with a view to distinguishing it from identity politics.
Rather, the constellation of arrangements and institutions associated with liberalism-in-practice is identified here so that we might be reminded of an overarching fact, namely that together they suppose what could be called the politics of competence.[8] Without such competence, those liberal arrangements and institutions falter. To cite but one example, the relatively modest federal government proposed by the Founders would have been inconceivable had citizens not, to a considerable degree, developed competence for self-government, through experience in the mediating institutions about which Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. Strip away those institutions, he wrote, and a “vicious cycle of cause and effect” begins,[9] in which diminished citizen-competence begets greater state intervention, which in turn diminishes citizen competence, and on and on. No competent citizenry, no modest liberal politics.
Before turning to identity politics, which is predicated on something quite different than the politics of competence, we should pause to observe that Progressives responded to the Tocquevillean worry about dwindling citizen competence in the way Tocqueville himself predicted: “A very civilized society finds it hard to tolerate attempts at freedom in the local community; it is disgusted with its numerous blunders and is apt to despair of success before the experiment is finished.[10]” Dubious that citizen competence could save the modest liberal experiment in America, Progressives opted instead for expert competence.
This second phase of the American regime entailed an increase in administrative centralization, disciplined initially by the constraints imposed by a gold-linked dollar, but more recently expanding exponentially thanks to fiat currency and, perhaps just in time for the collapse of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, modern monetary theory. Is Progressivism a decisive break from the Founders vision of citizen competence? In one obvious sense, yes. Yet what holds the two together, what makes them of a kind, different from identity politics, is their respective commitment to competence. Expert competence is different than citizen competence; but to each, competence matters. Identity politics, which is now upon us, departs from both and, so, represents a new phase of the American regime. What matters to identity politics is not the politics of competence, but rather the politics of innocence and transgression.
Identity Politics
There is much confusion about identity politics, which is reflected in the various designations through which it appears. The species within the larger genus of identity politics vary considerably—CRT, cancel culture, “woke” capitalism, transgenderism, DEI, anti-Racism, TDS, micro-aggressions, unconscious bias, etc.—but they all have in common: (1) the identification of an irredeemably stained group; (2) the identification of an innocent victim group and; (3) the need for a scapegoat who must be purged in order to purify the social body. The genealogy of these three correlated attributes within identity politics can be traced to one source and to one source only, namely to Christianity, and to Protestantism in particular, about which more shortly.
Identity politics is today the effective established church of America, whose tens of millions of parishioners daily seek to demonstrate to themselves and to their neighbors that they either are, or they stand with, innocent victims everywhere; that not they, but rather those other citizens are irredeemably stained; and that the irredeemably stained must renounce their impure ideas or else be purged from the social body, in order that it be cleansed and the world may be made pure. The liturgical practice of identity politics, which we witness everywhere, and which is badly misnamed “virtue-signaling,” is better understood as innocence-signaling.
So that social death—cancelation, purgation—passes over, American citizens must indicate on their front lawn, their office door, their car’s bumper, in their faculty meetings, that they support BLM, DEI, ESG, that they believe in climate change even as they jet off to their favorite vacation spot, that they stand with Ukraine, etc. Today in America the politics of competence matters less and less, and the performative politics of innocence and transgression matters more and more. This is neither the Founder’s vision, nor the Progressive vision, both of which were predicated on competence.
We have entered a new phase of American history, and we should identify it has such. Progressivism on the left has collapsed; our left-leaning elites, once trained to be experts, are now trained in our universities to discern the victim and the stained. The crisis of higher education cannot be understood without reference to this transfiguration. Free speech, perhaps the central pillar of a regime based on competence, now has conscience against it, and we now know why: in regimes based on the politics of innocence and transgression, free speech is an irksome archaism the real effect of which is not to reveal the bruising facts of life, but is rather damage the feelings of victims, whose porcelain fragility must never be shattered.
Why have the several factions of the conservative movement—libertarian and traditionalist—failed to rightly understand and effectively address identity politics? The near-unanimous account of both factions has been that identity politics is a further development of cultural Marxism, that long march through our institutions. This is not the case. Identity politics has required no long march through our institutions. It has been met with no resistance—indeed, it has been eagerly welcomed—as Marxism never was. Why has the success of the one been so rapid, while the other has never really taken hold in America?
Tocqueville provides the overarching framework we need to understand what is really occurring here. In his last great work, he noted that the French Revolution was an “incomplete religion,” by which he meant that it less destroyed Christianity than replaced it with fragments of Christianity, notably the universal brotherhood of man, and the idea of a post-lapsarian new age. In the mid-nineteenth century, Marxists, no less contemptuous of Christianity than the French Revolutionaries, also promulgated an incomplete religion. On their account, man was cast out of the Edenic splendor of primitive communism, but stands now on the threshold of ending his long labor amidst the thorns of creation, thanks to the productivity unleashed by cruel capitalism. When Christianity falters, one or another incomplete religion will step in to fill the vacuum. You do not get so-called secularism after Christianity falters. In fact, you get distorted, fragmentary, remnants of Christianity, which purport to have transcended Christianity itself, and which indeed are hostile to Christianity. You get the French Revolution and its aftermath, and you get Marxism and its aftermath, neither of which incomplete religions is wholly behind us.
The Conservative movement in America, intent by and large to defend the liberal order established through the American Constitution, has focused a great deal of its attention on these two incomplete religions. Indeed, from its beginning in the 1950s to the present day, these have been targets of Conservatism. On the one hand, its members have offered a strident defense of “tradition” against the equalizing tendencies of French Revolution and of Progressivism, which were similarly dedicated to the destruction of mediating institutions. On the other hand, there has been a counter-balancing contingent, especially strong before 1989, hostile to Marx’s vision and thoroughly modern, which hallowed Smith and Hayek and the free markets, ostensible supports for liberty.
A contemporary development worth noting is the reconfiguration that is happening within the conservative movement, which takes the form of the rise of the traditionalists and the fall of the libertarians. Which is to say, the rise of those whose fight is with the first incomplete religion, and the fall of those whose fight is with the second incomplete religion. Those in the former camp have found renewed confidence, after decades in which the free-market veto has prevailed. This shift may satisfy a long-suppressed contingent of the conservative movement, but it will not help conservatives understand the third incomplete religion that is now upon us, the incomplete religion of identity politics.
Today, America faces a far greater challenge, its gravest to date. Conservatives who have battled the first two incomplete religions of the French Revolution and Marxism have little understanding of what is now upon them. A new enemy has captivated one portion of America by its promise of a spiritually purified world. The penetration of the identity politics into our institutions and into our minds has been extraordinarily rapid. The reason why this has happened should be clear: Marxism’s fundamental category was class, which as Louis Hartz understood long ago, Americans were never going to accept. By contrast, the fundamental category of identity politics is guilt, by which residually Christian Americans today are continually haunted.
Again, the currency of identity politics is guilt; its transactional system of payments between debtors and creditors—this person “owes” because he is a transgressor; another person “receives” because she is an innocent victim—cannot run without it. So, too, is guilt the currency of Christianity, which reminds mortal transgressors of the unpayable debt they owe God. Once that guilt was contained within the Christian churches of America, gave them coherence and vitality, and the liberal politics of competence thrived outside of those churches. Today, the churches no longer have anything to say about guilt. Identity politics provides what the churches no longer do, namely, provide a way to understand and atone for guilt, now within politics itself, which has made the politics of competence well-nigh impossible.
We are dealing, then, not with cultural Marxism, which sought to destroy bourgeoise false consciousness, but rather with identity politics, which calls out those with irredeemable stain, tells them they must now atone for their transgressions by empowering the heretofore voiceless innocent victims, and which seeks to purge them from the social body entirely, irrespective of their competencies. Bearing in mind the question before us, namely, what is the relationship between liberalism and Christianity, let us explore the nature of identity politics, that deformation of Christianity, a bit further.
Recall Eric Voegelin’s famous formulation that “Marxism immanentizes the eschaton.”[11] By this he meant that Marxism offered modern man, who had religious longings even if his religious tastes had soured, a redemptive narrative of history, as did Christianity. Identity politics does something different: it immanentizes the scapegoat—a Christianity heresy—while at the same time affirming that a scapegoat is necessary to take away the sins of the world—an article of Christian faith. How can we best understand this?
Consider, for contrast, the 1741 Jonathan Edwards sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Man, tainted by sin, can only be saved by Christ, “the [sacrificial] lamb who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). Moral cleanliness and purity are unachievable by mortal effort alone. Everything on this side of heaven is impure. Because uncleanliness cannot cleanse itself, only Christ, the divine irruption who is “without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:19) can atone for man’s uncleanliness and save him from the eternal fires of hell to which his uncleanliness condemns him. Identity politics offers a variant of this understanding, at once unthinkable without Christianity, at once a defection from it. In Edwards’ day as now, man’s stain is the consuming issue. In the contemporary apostatic version of Edwards’ sermon, moral cleanliness and purity are not purchased by the scapegoating of Christ at Calvary, but rather by scapegoating another person or human group said to be responsible for the sins of the world.
“Not all of mankind is unclean,” declare the New Elect, “just the white race.” All the others gathered under the categories of People-of-Color, non-heteronormative, etc. are, in fact, clean. The one must pay; the other is to receive just compensation. “Let us purge the unclean ones from our midst.” If you are white, you must convince yourself and everyone else that not you, but rather those other white people, are filthy and irredeemably stained. They must pay, eternally, so that your white ledger balance carries no debt. That is why you put BLM signs on your front lawn. That is the way social death passes you over, but not your neighbor who, by virtue of having no sign, must be a racist. If you are not anti-racist, you must be racist. In the New Awakening that is identity politics, cathartic rage is directed toward whiteness and all that it has wrought in human history—politics, economics, family arrangements, religion, even science. Cast one group and all that it has wrought into the eternal fires of hell so that other groups can be saved. This scapegoating and Passover ritual is the inner logic of identity politics.
Debt and Payment
How do the two Awakenings differ with respect to how they understand debt and payment? In the first Great Awakening, God’s grace and forgiveness heal man, cover over his filth, and cancel the debt owed to God that man could not pay. A divine gift alone cleanses the world and pays off man’s debt, so that tomorrow might be lived with a clean ledger. The relationship of debt and payment is, so to speak, vertical. The audacious wager of the New American Awakening is that the gift of Christ’s blood sacrifice is meaningless, indeed, an embarrassment no one in good company need talk about. There are no gifts for which we should be thankful, no payment made on our behalf, no mercy that we must extend to others because it has been divinely extended to us. Hope, faith, and charity are foolishness; “equity,” by which is really meant retribution, is the order of the day. Equity is the never-ending reminder to the irredeemables that their tomorrow will never be lived with a clean ledger. Equity is the never-ending reminder that the relationship of debt and payment is, so to speak, horizontal. In the New American Awakening, “justice” involves the calculation of what one group permanently owes another, not the thankfulness man should show God every minute of every day that he has life and breath, which is beyond price.
We must understand clearly where culpability lies in these two strangely related frameworks. For the Christian, for Jonathan Edwards, the convenient lie man tells himself is that he is innocent. The first words uttered by Adam in Genesis (Gen. 3:12) reveal a creature who hides from his culpability. In the beginning, we might say, was the narcissist. “Look not to me, I am innocent; fault lies elsewhere. Do not disturb my good image of myself.” Catastrophe then follows upon catastrophe. The Bible is its chronicle. God brings the Law (for Jews) and the Gospel (for Christians) to rescue the heirs of Adam from the death-spiraling narcissism evident in the very first words Adam utters. The Law and the Gospel are irrelevant in the New American Awakening that is identity politics, however, and we must understand why.
Like the First Great Awakening, the point of departure for the New American Awakening is Adam’s declaration, “I am innocent.” Instead of seeing through this ruse, and attributing culpability to everyone, without exception, its parishioners divide the world along racial and sexual lines, into those who are innocent and those who are not. For the Christian, the systemic problem of man was not “systemic racism,” but rather man’s universal uncleanliness and culpability, for which the Gospel Good News was the only antidote, and without which “all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). The Adam and Eve of today’s New Great Awakening believe otherwise. They claim that they are innocent and without spot, that they are righteous, that the poisonous serpents all around them are culpable, and that the oppressive world created by whiteness is the source of the anxiousness that assaults them like a hostile force they cannot appease. If whiteness can be purged, then The Elect can look forward to life in an Edenic, innocent, world. Identity politics does not abide by a legal system committed to the rule of law, however imperfect, to make determinations of guilt and innocence, because guilt has only one source, namely whiteness. Every injustice has that as its cause. Legal justice is not enough, because legal justice is white justice. The New American Awakening demands a higher form of atonement than the rule of law can provide. If you have any doubt that this happening, peruse the websites of the top twenty law schools in America. The next generation of lawyers and judges is being taught the Law of Tribes. Destroy the idea that we are all descendants of Adam, and you do not get a secular world of equality, you get the claim that we are all descendants of different tribes, each of whose justice is legitimate—except white justice, which has superimposed itself on all the others. Identity politics reveals what has been long concealed and so liberates the innocent victim from the hidden source of oppression that masquerades as neutral rule of law.
The horizontal scapegoating of identity politics, I have suggested, is both a grave threat to the liberal politics of competence, and an important entre into the question of the relationship of liberalism and Christianity. The vertical scapegoating of Christ involved His humiliation and purgation from the community. The horizontal scapegoating of identity politics also involves humiliation and purgation, Exhibit A of which has been whimsically called TDS, or Trump Derangement Syndrome. Normal politics, of course, involves strong dislikes or disagreements over Presidents and presidential candidates. TDS is not incidental to identity politics; it is a central feature. At the mention of his name, rational conversation ceases, and purge words spew forth. We do not need to be penetrating social critics to notice that there are two conversations happening in America today: one that can include Trump, and another one that cannot. The geographic regions where MAGA hats can and cannot be worn confirms the chasm. We say America is “politically polarized,” but that only scratches the surface. Something much more fundamental than politics is being worked out here, and we need to get to the heart of it.
Derangement
The phenomenon of TDS helps us pose an important question: what is the relationship between rational conversation and cathartic rage? Pressing the question further, might the precondition for rational conversation be the successful discharge of cathartic rage toward a sacrificial offering? This idea is discomforting to the modern mind, for which sacrifice is a barbarous relic of pre-modernity. Christianity, we must never forget, is pre-modern. Or rather, it is the fulcrum that separates pre-modern from modern. The interminable blood sacrifice in which the rage of the community was discharged on a victim in the pre-modern world was brought to a close by the Christian affirmation that Christ is the one sufficient sacrifice (Heb. 10:10-14), after which no further blood sacrifice was necessary. The very success of Christianity, in a word, was the cause of the modern incredulity and unease about sacrificial offering. Man could be reasonable because the need for ongoing irrational cathartic rage toward a victim had come to an end. This insight allows us to make sense of Augustine’s remark in The City of God that Christ “freed man from the oppressive domination of demonic powers.”[12]
In tenth century Europe, the redirection of the indiscriminate violence of knights took the form of chivalry, which Burke later attributed to the spirit of religion.[13] Before Burke, but after the age of chivalry, Locke, in The Reasonableness of Christianity, made a kindred claim: the precondition of enlightenment was Christ’s sacrificial offering.[14] Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration” too cannot be understood without paying close attention to the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection.[15] Who among the theorists of liberalism today take him seriously? Later still, it might be said that because the Passion of Christ had accomplished its agonizing task of putting an end to sacrificial offering once and for all, Hegel could write, without giving the matter a second thought, that Christianity was the necessary and penultimate expression of philosophical reason.” The Enlightenment does not mark a break from Christianity; it marks the victory of Christianity. Both Kant and Hegel took Lutheran communion on their deathbed. So, it appears, at any rate, if we start from the position that sacrificial offering for sin is the problem no human society can for long ignore if it wishes to be “reasonable.”
Identity politics walks back this historical achievement. Here, the clearing of reason, to coin a phrase, shrinks and is intermittently entangled and overwhelmed by cathartic rage toward a mortal sacrificial offering. When the one sufficient offering of Christianity is replaced by a mortal scapegoat who must again and again be offered up as the object of cathartic rage, we witness a strange but predictable oscillation in those who suffer from TDS between moments of exemplary lucidity and moments of venomous irrationality.[16] Nothing more characterizes TDS than this entanglement and oscillation. For those who suffer from TDS, the clearing of reason, like a sunny clearing in a dense, ever-encroaching jungle, must be carved out anew each day—hence both the revulsion toward and pathological 24/7 need to track and register everything President Trump said or did, so that rage may discharged. TDS may wane when former President Trump withdraws from public life. What will not wane is the entanglement of reason and cathartic rage so characteristic of identity politics. That is what happens when the Christian vertical relationship of un-dischargeable debt and payment that takes the form of Divine humiliation and purgation is replaced by a horizontal one, of the sort identity politics offers. It is difficult to imagine how a political consensus, so necessary if we are to find workable domestic policies and face foreign foes abroad, can be forged under these circumstances.
A Not-So-Secular Age
In light of what I have said about identity politics, the bastard offspring of Reformation Christianity, the outline of the relationship between Liberalism and Christianity can now be sketched out. First, if identity politics amounts to a third “incomplete religion,” which now follows on the heels of the French Revolution and Marxism, then we have reason to doubt that secularism has succeeded or—the stronger claim—reason to doubt that it can succeed in the way its defenders imagine it can. Tocqueville saw the problem the defenders of secularism did not or could not foresee: “eighteenth century thinkers believed that religion would die out as freedom and enlightenment spread. It is tiresome that the facts do not fit the theory.”[17] Second, and following from this first claim, we may ask, “if religion is eternal to man, what would count as religion?”
Might the secular age be better characterized not as an age that breaks with Christianity, but as an age in which one incomplete religion follows another, so that the West neither goes back to Christianity nor wholly breaks with it—as Nietzsche’s observation, “it is the church and not its poison that offends us”[18] suggests? In this case, we may wonder if having survived the first two incomplete religions, does liberalism have the strength to survive another one, and another after this one? And if so, on what basis? Third, we should not forget that the first two incomplete religions emerged in a still nominally Christian era. Christianity was, to a not insignificant extent, an antidote to those incomplete religions, as conservatives since Burke have argued.
We live in a different time, however, in which, for now, Christianity may be less an antidote to the third incomplete religion of identity politics than itself caught up in and contributing to it—as woke church “communities” on both sides of the Roman Catholic-Protestant divide today attest. This third incomplete religion, which immanentizes the scapegoat in a horizontal relation between debtor and creditor, daily incapacitates the liberal politics of competence, as earlier incomplete religions never did, and perhaps never could. Whatever the differences between Locke and Tocqueville may be, the liberal regimes they each envisioned were ones in which citizens labored to build a world together. No such enterprise is remotely possible if what matters first and foremost is the need to establish, in your own heart and in the hearts of others, whether you are irredeemably stained or an innocent victim.
Fourth and finally, and as a way of providing an answer to the question of the relationship between liberalism and Christianity, we must wonder on what silent foundation liberalism rested—and perhaps secretly rests today—such that it could have avoided the peril of tribal politics—of horizontal relations between debtor and creditor—that hobbles so many societies around the globe and that has intermittently hobbled the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, society we call our own. It is not farfetched to wonder if it was not precisely the one sufficient Divine scapegoat of Christianity whose sacrifice took the pre- and non-Christian alternative of group scapegoating off the table just enough so that the liberal politics of competence became thinkable at all. The clearing of reason, as I have called it, is an accomplishment, made possible once cathartic rage towards the scapegoat has been discharged. Christianity ruled out such rage towards groups, notwithstanding innumerable violations of this deepest of breakthroughs.
Can liberalism survive without the reemergence of a Christianity that grasps anew its central insight, namely, that Christ, the one sufficient scapegoat, takes away the sins of the world? I am doubtful. There will always be a scapegoat. Liberal politics—the politics of competence—is possible with a transcendent scapegoat, but not with an immanent one of the sort identity politics now give us. Identity politics is pernicious; but it shows us clearly the fragility of liberal politics of competence, and points in the direction of the foundation that makes it possible at all.
New Guard?
Where does this leave us today? We live at a moment in which liberalism is assaulted on the left by identity politics, and undermined on the right by those who believe liberalism has failed, and who wish to begin anew with one or another version of anti-liberal politics. The brunt of my criticism here has been directed towards identity politics, whose fixation on innocence and transgression makes the liberal politics of competence impossible. Anti-liberal politics on the right I believe to be a mistake of a different sort, though the animus behind the critique is quite understandable.
A changing of the guard is underway. A new generation on the right, which had heretofore stood with the liberal project insofar as it pressed back against the catastrophes of the first and second incomplete religions of the French Revolution and Marxism, has had enough. Seeing “their fathers” incapable of facing of the third incomplete religion of identity politics, and having been its objects of cathartic rage, “the sons” now wish to construct an anti-liberal politics. Responding to perceived impotence, a growing chorus of young conservatives, too many of whom are unable to secure positions within the academy because of identity politics hiring practices, now ponder and plot a new path, toward an anti-liberal order, in which a pre-liberal form of Christianity arrests our civilizational decay, guiding and informing it at every level, assisted by the enforcing power of the state. Roman Catholic integralism is currently the leading contender. The liberal politics of competence, I have suggested, develops organically from the bottom-up, and through our mediating institutions. Top-down political arrangements of the sort imagined by integralism do not in principle preclude the development of competence; they may, in fact, provide a more hospitable environment for its nourishment. But, in my view, the promise of a well-ordered world orchestrated from above invariably gives rise to tyranny, not least because the revolutionary habits of mind necessary to dismantle a regime do not yield to the more beneficent habits needed to build one once victory has been achieved. This fact alone should make us skeptical of the plan.
Integralism, nevertheless, offers a serious critique of liberalism, which must be addressed, namely, that secular liberalism is unable to push back against identity politics, and may, in fact, be the source of it. There is truth in this claim, but it is not what is currently imagined. Liberalism is secular because it was able to solve the problem of cathartic rage in such a way that was not perennially directed toward one mortal group or another. If it had not, then the “clearing of reason” would have been episodic at best, and citizens would have attended first and foremost to scapegoating or being scapegoated—the very prospect that now haunts Americans as they fall into identity politics. Roman Catholicism and Protestantism both make the claim that Christ, the one sufficient scapegoat, takes away the sins of the world, though it is within the Protestant Churches that the formulation achieves its strongest articulation. That is why secularism has gone with Protestantism far more than it has with Roman Catholicism, a fact long observed.
Secularism and the liberal politics of competence do, indeed, go hand in hand; but they do so, not on the condition of the ostracism of Christianity, but on the condition of the prevalence of a Christ-centered, divine-scapegoat-centered Protestantism that directs its practitioners away from the disposition, natural to natural man, to scapegoat others. The tragic fact is that most defenders of liberalism today insist that its great success—that it is a secular project oriented toward citizen competence—is attributable to a deliberate departure from Christianity. They do not or are unwilling to understand that a secular liberal society is, in fact, precisely a society in which the Christian understanding of the scapegoat has won and has receded into the background of public life without wholly disappearing. These defenders, who today are assaulted on the left by identity politics and on the right by those who wish to inaugurate anti-liberal politics, do not understand that the secular politics of competence they wish to defend can only stand with the assistance of the Christian understanding that the problem of sin is so deep that only a divine scapegoat and solve it. Embarrassed by this claim, and by the very category of sin, they hand the matter of sin over to the identity politics left, which daily assaults them and their project with accusations of guilt from which the cower.
Almost all conservative defenders of liberalism in the academic world proceed on the basis of the claim that liberalism is secular, and that religion is but a private preference or, perhaps more strongly, a private value. Holding fast to this impoverished view, and unable to understand that, like Christianity, identity politics is also concerned with irredeemable stain and the scapegoat who takes away the sins of the world, these defenders can defend neither liberalism nor themselves against the indictments that identity politics levels. The integralist critique is partly correct: a secular liberalism without Christianity cannot withstand the onslaught of identity politics. Put another way, secular liberalism without Christianity devolves into the deformation of Christianity that is identity politics. If there is a Christian way forward, it will either take the form of a reinvigorated Protestantism, by which I mean the recovery within the Protestant Churches of the central insight about the gravity of original sin and the divine scapegoat who takes away the sins of the world, or a reinvigorated and deliberately political Roman Catholicism that integralists have in mind. Those with an historical sense among us will rightly see this as a moment of re-adjudication of the Reformation itself, disguised as a gentlemanly disagreement about liberalism.
There is more. In our now remarkably unstable world, another quite different path is also being explored, within and without the academy, namely the one cleared by Nietzsche. By this, I mean the path of forgetting.[19] Can we really be surprised by this development? When young white men are told they are irredeemably stained, that they have a debt they cannot pay, sooner or later they will stumble upon Nietzsche, who declared that we can have a tomorrow only through forgetting. Slavery in America; colonialism in Africa, two World Wars and the Holocaust in Europe—these young men have had enough of bearing these weights that can never, in principle, be lifted from their shoulders. Having determined that there is still too much sin and guilt in Roman Catholicism for them to tolerate, they opt not for pre-modern Roman Catholic integralism but rather for post-modern Nietzscheanism, which will finally dispense with Christianity and the universe of resentful innocent victims it displays for all to see. At least then young men will be free.
The one alternative rejects the radical notion of sin that inheres in identity politics, and adopts, instead, the semi-Pelagianism of the Roman Catholic Church. The other alternative rejects the radical notion of sin that inheres in Reformation theology and in identity politics and casts off the idea of sin altogether. Alasdair MacIntyre was, in a way, correct to note that Aquinas and Nietzsche are two alternatives that lie ahead, though for a different reason than the one offered here. He thought about the problem of modern man in terms of reason and relativism; I suggest that those two prominent paths have emerged as plausible responses to identity politics and the problem of stain to which it has alerted us.
No one can predict how the current confusion will be resolved or further jumbled, or how many rounds this brawl will go. As I see it, three groups of contenders for the soul of the West are in the ring: Roman Catholic integralists; “secular” liberal heirs of the Reformation and the latter’s religiously deformed children, the identity politics New Elect; and Nietzscheans, who are sickened by guilt in all of its forms and wish to start over. We will see whether a fourth group—Protestant thinkers who understand and can defend the theological precondition for American liberalism, as WASPs once did—make an appearance.
Image: Riot in Philadelphia, June [i.e. July] 7th 1844 / H. Bucholzer. lithograph. Wikimedia Commons.
[1] Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 121 (“The final sin of man, said Luther truly, is his unwillingness to concede that he is a sinner. The significant contribution of modern culture to this perennial human inclination lies in the number of plausible reasons which it was able to adduce in support of man’s good opinion of himself.”).
[2] Eldon Eisenach, “Liberal Religion and Liberal Politics,” in Sacred Discourse and American Nationality (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 21-58.
[3] Jonathan Edwards, “The Freedom of the Will,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Publications, 1979). Edwards disagrees with Locke on a number of points, but takes him seriously as a Reformation thinker.
[4] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), II, 692.
[5] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 517 (“If men are to remain civilized or become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among then at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.”).
[6] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 442-49.
[7] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I, 296.
[8] Joshua Mitchell, American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time (New York: Encounter Books, 2020).
[9] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 515.
[10] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I, 62.
[11] Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 120.
[12] Augustine, City of God, Henry Bettenson trans. (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 43.
[13] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Select Works of Edmund Burke, II, 169-73.
[14] A word search of the entire tract reveals twelve uses of the word, “enlighten,” all of which pertain to the work of Christ or the Holy Ghost.
[15] Joshua Mitchell, “John Locke and the Theological Foundation of Liberal Toleration: A Christian Dialectic of History,” in Review of Politics, 52:1 (1990), 64-83.
[16] John McWhorter, Woke Racism (New York: Penguin Books, 2021), 21.
[17] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I, 95.
[18] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufman trans. (New York: Random House, 1967) First Essay, §9, 36.
[19] Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, §1, 57-58.
