Protestants Must Recover Their Political Traditions
I’m loath to critique evangelicals, because it’s become socially acceptable to trash them, even on the Right. Online apologists, British theologians, right-wing influencers, and some former Trump administration officials regularly lambaste American evangelicals (and Protestantism more broadly), even though they are perhaps the most important voting bloc in saving America. Despite this, however, evangelicals do need guidance when it comes to thinking systematically about politics, as Daniel Strand repeatedly pointed out last week.
There is no question that most white evangelicals have good political instincts. Their heavy backing of Donald Trump in the past three elections—over 80% of them voted for Trump each time—clearly demonstrates that truth. But they’re not being well served by many of the top evangelical parachurch ministries, speakers, authors, and pastors who wade into the political arena.
In fact, the overarching problem is that many Big Eva voices and ministries tend to use politics as a vehicle for another project altogether, as Stephen Wolfe’s recent critique of Gavin Ortlund’s support for Third Wayism shows. Though in his video, Ortlund issued some needed corrections on how Third Way rhetoric and focus can go wrong—for example, that moderation is not always righteousness—his presentation helps highlight a series of problems that show that Third Wayism is ultimately a futile endeavor.
Using Ortlund as an example, Wolfe argues that Third Wayers have a reactive posture, responding to whatever is said on the Left and Right (though in different ways and with different emphases) rather than systematically defining their own political project. They talk as if there’s a wholly other way to do politics that’s currently unknown, but they don’t sufficiently explain how that could work, which is especially important for citizens of America, given the two-way nature of the U.S. political system. This is in sharp contrast to the Reformed tradition, which supplies a systematic account of politics that uses precise definitions and categories from classical political philosophy.
How would a Third Way movement not lead to continuous losses in elections and endless marginalization? And if a Third Wayer joined one of the two major American political parties, how would he not be eventually kicked out for breaking with it over and over again? Pitting the individual conscience over building a political coalition that can affect state- or federal-level politics for the long term indicates that politics is not what this movement is fundamentally about.
The underlying problem, as Wolfe makes clear, is that Ortlund is attempting to instrumentalize politics to achieve the ends of evangelism. The way of Jesus—which sounds far more like a plan of sanctification than a political program—is elevated, subsuming the political into various methods of evangelism, an error that showed up again in a chart that was recently shared by Patrick Schriener.
A healthy Third Way movement, according to the chart, means “[b]earing faithful Christian witness in the public square.” But this is a modern evangelistic strategy, not a specifically political one. Discussions of politics in the Reformed tradition generally include securing the good of the civil realm and guiding it toward the eternal good. Direct evangelism, however, is a job for the church and its congregants—it’s not a political goal, which is ironic considering the warnings from Third Wayers about the danger of Christian nationalists conflating church and state.
The chart pits the “lordship of Christ” against “all political loyalties.” As Tyler Cox rightly points out, however, this “allows the writer to sound faithful while refusing to articulate what Christ’s rule means for concrete law or governance.” Ultimately, the chart is yet another framework that cannot hope to bear the load that Third Wayers want to place on it, providing very little insight as to how evangelicals should navigate our current political moment.
This doesn’t mean that moral principles as taught and deduced from Scripture should be alien to political life or that Jesus is not the model for Christians. Rather, it means that an eschatological foundation for politics is problematic. Rather than basing politics on the principles of nature as the Reformers did, Third Wayers seem to want to base it squarely on heavenly principles. In other words, it’s an attempt to immanentize the eschaton.
Another prevalent aspect of Third Wayism is a confusion of ethics and politics, another point that Wolfe regularly makes. It seems that some evangelicals would rather choose a man who outwardly wears Christianity on his sleeve but is a political lightweight at best than someone who is well-versed in the political arts but may be rough around the edges. The administration of George W. Bush should quickly disabuse us of this way of thinking.
Though a ruler should be both “wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” in modern politics, that’s unfortunately rare these days. Making choices amid conditions that are not optimal—which is exactly what evangelicals have done—is a distinctly political act. And they did this mainly despite their own leaders. When they were looking for practical wisdom on politics, their leaders tended to retreat into abstractions, back third parties that will never make a dent in American political life, or openly shun their political choices in media organs that are fundamentally opposed to Christianity.
Overall, Third Wayism is not an antidote to our political problems but another manifestation of those very issues. Third Way proponents actually work to preserve the existing order, because threats to it are rejected a priori (Ortlund’s focus on dialoguing only with “good faith” interlocutors has this effect). Since the Third Way project will never succeed at scale because it attempts to bring otherworldly principles to bear on politics in a post-lapsarian world, such strategies result in keeping us locked in our current political disorder.
Returning to the Sources
As an antidote to the lack of genuinely political advice from the upper echelon of the evangelical world, I’d advise congregants and pastors to buy James Baird’s new book from Founders Press, King of Kings: A Reformed Guide to Christian Government. Baird’s short, simple book is unquestionably the best accessible introduction to the basics of Reformed politics on the market. Or, if you want to go a bit deeper, dive into the Reformed tradition yourself.
Theologians such as Fransiscus Junius, Johannes Althusius, Bartholomäus Keckermann, Lambert Daneau, Samuel Rutherford, Francis Turretin, John Davenant, and Richard Hooker, among many others, used a common political language and marshaled precise definitions in mapping out a coherent political theology. They sketched out a detailed, systematic theory—the two kingdoms, or the two swords—for how Christians are to think about the civil realm.
Simply compare the above musings from Third Wayers on “politics” with Althusius, who defined politics as
the art of associating men for the purpose of establishing, cultivating, and conserving social life among them. Whence it is called “symbiotics.” The subject matter of politics is therefore association, in which the symbiotes pledge themselves each to the other, by explicit or tacit agreement, to mutual communication of whatever is useful and necessary for the harmonious exercise of social life.
There’s much that could be said about this definition of politics—a whole course could be taught on this single paragraph alone. But there’s no comparison with how most modern evangelical authors and speakers approach the topic of politics. Althusius actually engages in political categories in a systematic way, while evangelical elites tend to make basic category errors and can never quite get to discussing political things in a coherent fashion.
Last week at American Reformer, Professor Clifford Bates noted Althusius’s towering achievement in the realm of politics, pointing out his debt to “Aristotelian notions of koinonia” and “Reformed theology’s emphasis on covenant (foedus).” Bates wrote that Althusius saw “society as a nested hierarchy of symbiotic units,” being composed of “the family as the primordial ‘seedbed’ of virtues like justice and piety,” and then with “guilds and colleges” and “municipalities and provinces” forming the outer rings of sociality. “[C]rowning this edifice, the universal commonwealth as a federation of provinces united by mutual pacts for defense and welfare,” he argued.
Althusius wrote a fully fleshed-out political theology, which means that it can be debated and even further refined. And this is the norm in the Reformed tradition. Reformed theologians were familiar with the philosophic tradition of politics and interacted with great political philosophers, Machiavelli included (whom they sometimes cited favorably because of his attacks on the papacy), when their works were available to read. Whether it’s a particular Anglican-tinged political thought or a more Presbyterian style of two kingdoms, the Reformed tradition is a vast storehouse of riches that needs to be continuously mined.
It’s unlikely that most of the current crop of evangelical leaders will change course, which means that we need to prepare new leaders to step into these roles who are steeped in Reformed political theory and have the courage and prudence to act, given the challenges of our day.
