“While the parties have busied themselves with tomorrow, I have tried to see the whole of the future.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
§1. Taking the long view of the Church since its advent at Pentecost, there have been three distinct crises at which affiliated churches within the body of Christ excused themselves, went their own way, and explored their own distinct metaphysical wagers about how to best understand Creation, the Church, and membership within it. At each of these turning points, paths were taken that were never reversed, and probably never will be. The Reformation in America, a variant of the third great crisis, cannot, I think, be understood unless positioned within an account of these great divisions and the metaphysical—and therefore, civilizational—wagers that were made. What follows is a big-picture description of those great metaphysical wagers. In the conclusion, I will offer a brief assessment of the current situation in Reformation America.
§2. The first crisis occurred sixteen centuries ago, at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, when the Oriental Orthodox churches—Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Syriac Armenian, and Syriac Indian—rejected the “two natures” doctrine of Christ, in favor of Miaphysitism. These churches are least in communion with the others I consider below, all of which, despite intractable differences, have in common the “two natures” doctrine of Christ.
§3. The second crisis occurred ten centuries ago, in 1054, when Rome and Constantinople, the Roman Catholic church and the Eastern Orthodox church, parted ways, ostensibly over the Filioque but, looking back, really over which Greek—Aristotle or Plato—provided the more adequate metaphysical wager within which the mystery of the Church could be understood and its charge implemented. Rome’s regnant claim, that grace is superadded to nature, recapitulates the framing in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (335 BC), in which there is a properly human thriving in accordance with nature (Bks I-VIII), to which the divine is superadded (Bk. IX-X). Aristotle’s metaphysics of telos, Christianly modified, became the subsidiarity of Thomas, which in our own day has become Rome’s central objection to modernity. From MacIntyre to Taylor to Vermeule, the Roman Catholic answer to the crisis of modernity has been, in one guise or another, Aristotle. That in the post-modern age—the age of anti-nature and of Identity Politics—young men who have borne the brunt of this twin post-modern assault now turn to Rome for consolation and security should surprise no one. Aristotle and Thomas or post-modern nihilism? That is how they see the alternatives before them. MacIntyre said it first; young converts to Roman Catholicism believe it.
§4. Constantinople, on the other hand, remains entranced by the divine light toward which Plato’s dialogues often point. It has pursued a metaphysics of methexis rather than of telos; of image and icon rather than of subsidiarity. We speak of “the Greeks,” but this obscures the fact that for twenty-four centuries, the metaphysical division within Mediterranean Civilization has been between Aristotle on one hand and Plato on the other. Aristotle offers a mortal politics, a theory of human flourishing over which the Roman Church still aspires to preside, via subsidiarity. Plato—the Plato of the Republic (375 BC)—offers no mortal politics, properly speaking. The world is a shadow and image of Eternity. Politics, as Aristotle understood it, is not “politics” at all; it is mere faction and the semblance of justice. Aristotle proposes that political friendship can generate unity and coherence. On Plato’s account, it cannot. The only city in which we may truly participate—the only unity—is the “city set up in the heavens” (Republic, IX, 592b), whose citizens we become through the awaking of the divine element in our souls. That is why Plato writes that “only philosophy can save us” (Republic, V, 473d). For Aristotle, this would be inconceivable. The metaphysics of methexis is a wager that the world, the domain of coming-into-being-and-passing-away, is no more than an image of reality. Within the shadowy world depicted by the Allegory of the Cave (Republic, VII, 514a-517c), there is no discernible nature, properly speaking, upon which we can build, only faint images of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The Eastern Orthodox Church understands itself to be the loci through and in which Eternity breaks into time, in the visage of the icon and, anthropologically, in the persons of the Saints, whose lives participate in and recapitulate the arche of Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, who Himself is the very icon of God the Father. Little wonder that here, too, young men in America have found in the Eastern Orthodox Church solace and hope. Through saintly recapitulation, they find a heavenly home that the indictment Identity Politics levels against them cannot touch.
§5. Rome is Aristotle. Constantinople is Plato. Strauss famously argued that the West is a battleground between Athens and Jerusalem. This underspecifies the alternatives. “The West” is that portion of Mediterranean Christian civilization that was severed from its vast Eastern mission field, first by Islamic conquest and, after 1054, by the Great Schism. From the vantage point of the pre-Islamic conquest (and after the Oriental Orthodox churches went their own way in 451), the two metaphysical wagers of Christendom—the Western church of Rome and the Eastern church of Constantinople—reveal that Athens is not one, but rather two: Aristotle and Plato. To complete the picture, the Oriental Orthodox churches, which remain largely invisible to us in the West, trace their lineage to thinkers (notably Cyril) from the School of Alexandria, whose several-century history is said to have ended with the controversies that could not be resolved by the Counsel of Chalcedon in 451. That school is, for us, but a footnote and a curiosity. Christianly speaking, the two guises of Athens, Aristotle and Plato, not Alexandria, are still with us today. Rome and Constantinople are two of our living metaphysical wagers about what the Church is and what it must do within the cosmos; their metaphysics illuminates. As such, they are, more broadly, civilizational wagers, which show no sign of exhausting themselves. Or rather, when periodically exhausted, they rediscover the metaphysical wager to which they are wedded, and are reborn.
§6. We come now to the third great crisis within Christendom, and the third great metaphysical wager, which is conventionally dated to the publication, in 1517, of Luther’s 95 Theses. In contrast to Rome and Constantinople, each of which owes a different debt to Athens, the Protestant Reformation owes a debt to Jerusalem. Luther and, later, Calvin, who arrived on the scene with the publication of The Institutes of Christian Religion in 1536, are often lumped together. Indeed, the term “Protestant Reformation” brings together two interwoven yet distinguishable Christian understandings of Jerusalem. Luther the Protestant took one path, and Calvin the Reformer took another. For both, as Pelikan famously wrote, the Jews are a foreshadow. That is, for both, the New Testament announces the fulfillment (Matt. 5:17) of the promise found in the Hebrew Bible. On this reading, Judaism is not the mere shadow of Christianity, as Rome has been tempted to assume after its embrace of Aristotle. Luther and Calvin’s most significant departure from Rome was their joint rejection of Rome’s metaphysical wager. Biblical history, not telos, they declared, was the basis for understanding the relationship between the different orders of reality. This break with Rome has never been repaired. Augustine might have provided a framework to heal it, but Rome has placed its bet on Aristotle and Aquinas, and will not turn back.
§7. In Luther’s case, “Jew” and “Christian” are more than individual persons or gatherings of persons into a synagogue or ecclesia. They are ideal-type categories that correspond to two distinct historical moments within providential history, each of which specifies a distinct relationship between God and man. “Jew” is carnal, Law, exteriority, childhood-of-the-soul, etc., while “Christian” is spiritual, Gospel, interiority, adulthood-of-the-soul, etc. There is more. The relationship between these two moments is dialectical. The former prefigures and promises the latter. The former is the already-and-the-not-yet of the latter. The “Jew” is already-and-not-yet of the “Christian.” Luther’s answer to Rome’s Aristotle is this historico-dialectical relationship between Judaism and Christianity. That is why 30 of his 55-volume collected works concern the Old Testament.
§8. What is often obscured or ignored is the morphological similarity between Luther’s theological manner of historico-dialectical thinking and German Idealism. In “Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent” (1784), Kant gives us the historical movement from heteronomous servitude to autonomous reason; in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel gives us the historical movement from being-in-itself (an sich) to being-for-itself (für sich), the former being the compact, undifferentiated and unselfconscious prelude to the latter. In his “Early Philosophical Manuscripts” (1844), Marx gives us the historical movement from alienated man to man-come-home-to-himself after the problem of scarcity has been solved in late capitalism. Kant and Hegel died in the Lutheran confession. Marx was raised Lutheran and, of course, later rejected it. All three thinkers follow Luther in believing that history is the dialectical movement in which man, first finding himself lost (heteronomy, an sich, alienation), then discovers himself through long travail and blood sacrifice (autonomy, für sich, man’s communist homecoming). Finally, in Genealogy of Morals (1887), Nietzsche, whose father was a Lutheran minister, nails shut the coffin of German Idealism. German Idealism was, he noted, no more than disguised Christian morality without Christian religion. And because, as Strauss pointed out later, you cannot have the former without the latter, the entire edifice—the grand hope that you can retain a metanarrative of man’s redemption without the need for God—collapses. “God is Dead,” Nietzsche declared in Zarathustra (1883). Christianity provided man with a metanarrative of redemption. German Idealism retained the metanarrative of redemption but did so without God. Honest atheism, as Nietzsche called it, now demands an end to all metanarratives. All that we have available now are narratives, values, and the will to power. Kant, Hegel, and Marx were modern thinkers who claimed that coherence in all domains of life could be achieved without reference to God. With Nietzsche’s destruction of that delusion, we enter the post-modern age.
§9. Did it have to end this way? Is there a necessary connecting thread between Luther and Nietzsche, via German Idealism? I doubt it. All three moments rest on the metaphysical wager that history tells the tale of the redemption—or of the devolution, in Nietzsche’s case—of man, in which the category, “Jew,” plays a pivotal role. There were other roads not taken, more consonant with Luther’s original breakthrough that man’s relationship to God is mediated through His Son, not through the Roman Church, which perhaps may be retrieved. Did Luther’s rendition of “Jew”—along with the whole of German Idealism and Nietzsche—flirt with and too-frequently reach malignant conclusions to which history bears painful witness? Yes, it did. As a consequence, we live today in a post-Holocaust world, in which Germany and Israel are at “safe space” distances from one another. Perhaps it must remain that way. There are wounds that God alone can heal. The intellectual fate of Luther-derived German Idealism is another matter. Many theologians, both Christian and Jewish, continue to be entranced by the audacious claim at the heart of German Idealism, namely, that theology culminates in humanism. Unable to abide in Pauline patience—“For now we see through glass, darkly; but then face to face; but then shall I be known even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13:12)—German Idealism sought the transparency denied to man until the End Times. As such, German Idealism lies within the genus of revolutionary projects of the modern age that plague us still today. In Germany, the waning energies of this revolutionary movement have been directed into the project of the European Union, which has largely meant dismantling Europe’s armies and borders in a vain quest to attain perpetual peace. Habermas, the most prominent (and recently deceased) late twentieth-century German thinker, most known for his “theory of communicative action,” provided post-national Europe with a framework in which the binding claims of nation and of religion are ruled out of bounds. Whether anything will survive this last gasp of German Idealism is anyone’s guess.
§10. Meanwhile, on the Jewish side of the ledger, an extraordinary battle has unfolded over more than two centuries, pitting Jewish acolytes of German Idealism against powerful Jewish Biblicist traditions that have refused to surrender the field. As Hazony laid out so well in his book The Jewish State (2000), Jewish thinkers of the left, such as Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Buber, represent a German-Idealist impulse opposed to both Jewish Orthodoxy and the Jewish nationalist movement that created the State of Israel. Resisting the encroachment of German ideas and advocating a “return to Judaism” and a return to an independent national life in Israel, have been a range of figures from Alkalai and Hess to Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, and Kook, among others. This internal Jewish battle for and against German Idealism has been transplanted in Israel, where it is alive and well, pitting the German ideas still at large in Israeli academia against a revived commitment to Hebrew Scripture that has infused the country with a spiritual vitality with few parallels in other Western nations.
§11. What of Germany without the Jews? Has it exhausted itself? Biblically speaking, is Germany not now Judas, haunted by the unspeakable magnitude of what it has done, seemingly incapable of being forgiven for its crime, and driven by guilt, unto national suicide? With breathtaking trepidation, two impossibly dangerous questions present themselves: can German Protestantism be revived without Orthodox Jewish interlocutors, and can the Jews of Israel survive if the battle between Orthodoxy and German Idealism remains unresolved? The German Protestant wager that Luther gave us five centuries ago was that Christians can never understand themselves or God without Jerusalem as their referent. Not the Athens of Aristotle or of Plato. Jerusalem. On this, Luther took his stand, for better and for worse. The civilizational implications of that wager will redound for centuries.
§12. In America, the pale afterglow of this German-Jewish engagement plays itself out today, sociologically and intellectually, in the ongoing effort among Straussians (many of whom are Roman Catholics) to repudiate the historico-dialectical wager that is the cornerstone of Luther’s Protestantism. In America, they aver, German ideas are a foreign contagion that infected the body politic and subverted the Founders’ vision. Might the proper antidote—a recovery of the idea of nature, or perhaps a return to the Ancients, by which they really mean Aristotle—yet revive that vision, they ask? Luther declared that history, not teleology and the natural order that it presumes man can discern, reveals the relationship between the orders of reality and, by extension, what a Christian is and must do. Strauss’s Natural Right and History (1953), which takes on German Idealism and Nietzsche rather than Luther directly, offers a rejoinder: the historical turn made by the Germans set the stage for the crisis of modernity in Europe, and for the slide into nihilism in America. Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) takes up the battle where Strauss leaves off. Once taken seriously within the academic discipline of political theory, these ideas now live almost exclusively in the realm that public intellectuals occupy. Thiel’s framing of the contemporary crisis, above all others, owes more than a modest debt to Strauss. We shall see what role these ideas play as the post-WWII order collapses around us and we witness, as Reno has aptly put it, The Return of the Strong Gods (2019).
§13. We come now to the second, Reformation rather than Protestant, variant of the metaphysical wager that Jerusalem, not Athens, is the proper frame of reference for Christianity. We might call this variant “Hebraic Christianity.” Here, the Jews are not a preamble to be converted, but an older brother to be learned from. Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion is clearly at the epicenter of this expansive bottom-up rather than top-down development, which moved east from Switzerland to Hungary, West to France, and north to the Netherlands, England, and Scotland (Knox’s 1561 tract, The First Book of Discipline, deserves special mention here), before crossing the Atlantic to America. There, as Tocqueville argued in the early passages of Democracy in America (1835), Hebraic Christianity became the basis of a distinct civilizational wager, which Tocqueville thought could be modified, but not erased or replaced. The general features are delineated in §§14-20 below.
§14. God is sovereign over the whole of His creation. Because no domain of life is exempt from His governance, religion cannot be reduced to private conscience. The self-satisfied Christian who “believes,” who thinks he finds God in the garden solitude that his heart alone tends, worships an idol, strong enough only to fortify the walls that he has erected to protect himself from an hostile external world. This is the contemporary Evangelical temptation about which Renn writes with such clarity.
§15. Upon the occasion of his rebellion against God, man was cast out of the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:8), and thereafter labored “by the sweat of his brow” (Gen. 3:19). Scarcity did not precede human pride, as Marx proposed, but rather followed it. That is why the tyranny of men is a greater threat than the tyranny of need, and why governments require checks and balances if the citizens who authorize it are to be protected from tyranny. Although creation does not freely offer man its bounty or its secrets, God’s prelapsarian charge that man be steward to the whole of creation remains intact (Gen. 1:28). All of creation is God’s; man’s calling is to tend it. As a rebellious sinner, man attempts to substitute himself for God. Here are man’s Tower of Babel dreams, the contemporary version of which is the trans-humanist aspiration to render analog human competence into digital algorithms, so that the former, which confirms our creaturely limits, may be superseded, and we may become “as gods” (Gen. 3:5). As redeemed, man is the supplement to God, imaging God (Gen. 1:26-27) in creation, always attentive, in every domain of mortal life, that supplements cannot turned into substitutes without violating the very order of things. Man is called not to abuse creation for his own prideful purposes, but to consecrate it to the glory of God. Hence, in America, the always an ambivalent assessment of machines and of industry, and a prominent disposition to “save” vast swaths of our Edenic territory, lest it be polluted by prideful ambition. America’s most prominent environmentalists—March, Muir, and Carson—were all raised in Calvinist homes, where they learned that human pride would “undo the foundations of the earth” (Job 38:4) if given the opportunity.
§16. In man’s wounded, sinful condition, his proper relationship to God, and to what He promised us, has been revealed through the Old and New Testament covenants He established, by being bound to which, man attains unto federal liberty. The whole of the Bible, containing those covenants and more, is sufficient to the life of man in God’s creation. Rebellious man, always running from God, is a truant who resists “salutary bondage,” as Tocqueville called it. Ever in search of an unlimited horizon before him, his quest ends, as it did for the prodigal son, by “feasting on the husks of corn” (Luke 15:11-32). Man’s liberty consists of trusting in the covenantal framework of marriage, civil governance, and ecclesiastical governance given to us in the Two Testaments. The key categories of the American self-understanding—wound, promise, covenant, federalism, trust—originate in Jerusalem, not Athens. Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural” (1865), inscribed in his temple overlooking the (Red Sea) Reflecting Pool, calls for binding the wounds of our nation. For better and for worse, did not the blood-sacrifice that was the Civil War become the basis for establishing a national covenant—a sacrifice stripped almost entirely of its Hebraic overtones by those who claim that Lincoln’s earlier “Gettysburg Address” (1863) is the fulfillment of the idea, exposited first by Jefferson in the form of “The Declaration of Independence,” that America is a Propositional Nation?
§17. America is the New Israel, the City on the Hill, the light to enlighten the nations, a battleground on which Satan and his legion tirelessly seek to undermine the promise of God’s New Israel. Did not King’s speech on the steps of Lincoln’s temple in 1963 call on America to live up to that promise? And a half century earlier, did not Croly’s The Promise of American Life (1909) seek to lead stiff-necked Americans (Exod. 32:9), still fixed on the Founders’ constitution, out of their Sinai desert wanderings, along a path marked out by Progressivism—that last great undertaking of WASP America? Errancy and return: this is the New Israel’s perennially erratic path through providential history. America is not Aristotle’s polis, nor is it the faint glimmer of Plato’s iridescent City set up in the Heavens. America is the 40-year wandering of Exodus, searching for the American Dream-land of milk and honey (Exod. 33:3). Is not the frontier—from its “Westward” iteration in the nineteenth century to Musk’s expansive vision for Mars in the twenty-first century—an American recapitulation of Exodus for the New World, and for other Worlds, without end?
§18. America is neither the hierarchy of Rome nor that great deformation, the French Revolution, from which comes the idea of the equality of all, tout court. Between hierarchy and equality, Hebraic-Christianity affirms the equality of all, not in their dignity, but in their sinfulness, modified in light of the gifts and competencies mysteriously bestowed by God under the heading of “calling,” which each Christian must claim and act out in history. This both/and paradox, whose ground of coherence is theological, is approximated in the slogan, “equality of opportunity,” and is as far removed from the Jacobin call for “equality of outcome” as it is from Buckley’s anti-Jacobin conservatism, whose antidote is social hierarchy. Jacobinism and social hierarchy—the political left and right—are the paired alternatives that emerge in the aftermath of the French Revolution, that first great “incomplete religion,” as Tocqueville called it in The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856). Hebraic Christianity in America gave us pilgrims with callings, not French gentlemen and destitute peasants driven to erase every last vestige of aristocratic privilege. Consider Tocqueville’s assessment in Democracy in America of the religious significance of Plymouth Rock:
This rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen fragments of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not that sufficiently show how entirely the power and greatness of man is in his soul? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it attracts the attention of a great nation; its very dust is shared and carried away to distant places. What has become of the thresholds of a thousand palaces? Who cares about them?
Buckley—indeed, the conservative movement he and Kirk founded—never quite grasped this about America. Conservatism’s frame of reference is the European canon, not the American greats—Mather, Edwards, Emerson, Hawthorne, Lincoln, Melville, and Coolidge, to name only a few. Failing to understand the soul of America, it can never capture its heart.
§19. Buckley and Kirk’s conservatism has played an outsized role since the 1960s, notably in its unwavering and principled objection, grounded on Rome’s claims about human nature, to the sexual revolution and the downstream social consequences by which we are plagued today. Hebraic Christianity orders the world in accordance with God’s covenants, not on the basis of a doctrine of nature of the sort Rome has long defended. With the deformation of Hebraic Christianity, those covenants were abandoned or forgotten, leaving American heirs to the Reformation without an answer to the sexual revolution. Colson is said to have remarked in the early 1990s, “Roman Catholics provide the ideas and Evangelicals provide the votes.” That was true then, and it remains more or less the state of things today. Resistance to the sexual revolution is one thing; however, providing a viable and comprehensive civilizational alternative either to the Reformation civilizational wager or to its deformations is another. I will say more about this in §§24-26, below.
§20. Because “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23), no effort to offset man’s unpayable debt to God can rebalance the books. Man’s rebellion against God has earned him eternal punishment; the Gospel “good news” is that the God-Man Jesus Christ, the lamb of God, has taken upon himself “the sins of the whole world” (John 1:29), so that through His scapegoat sacrifice, man’s debt may be paid in full. Prideful man, made in the image of God and yet in rebellion against Him, knows the sting of sin but, since Adam and Eve’s original transgression, pretends that the source of their sting is outside themselves (Gen. 3:12-13) and, so, identifies an immanent scapegoat about whom he can say, “their sins are as scarlet, but I am white as snow” (cf. Isaiah 1:18). Redeemed man knows that Christ alone is the scapegoat who cures the uncleanliness that goes all the way down. Rebellious man opines that uncleanliness is out there, in a person or group of people who must be purged so that the world may be made new.
§21. The radical uncleanliness of man and the covenantal arrangements necessary to glorify God: this is the central problem that Hebraic Christianity seeks to solve. We look around today and wonder whether this Reformation wager is alive, dying, or already dead. On the surface, Hebraic Christianity seems to be dying or already dead. Its central question, however, remains the question that young men and women seek to answer today in America: how might we be cleansed of our uncleanliness, the wounds of our nation be healed, and our national covenant fulfilled? These young men and women have, in a word, turned away from the answer Hebraic Christianity gives, but not from its question. In this strange intermediate moment, which Bottum called An Anxious Age (2014), Hebraic Christianity is at once the invisible framework for national self-understanding, and at the same time the overt object of opprobrium on the political left, and the covert object of opprobrium on some portions of the political right. Identity politics on the left and Roman Catholic Integralism on the right agree on very little—except that Hebraic Christianity is a spent civilizational force. Of the other Christian groups that still have a substantial voice in America, contemporary Evangelicals attentive to the sting of sin find solace in their “personal relationship with Jesus” and leave the world alone, while liberal Christians—Protestant, Reformed, and even Roman Catholic—attentive to God’s love but not to His severe judgment against sin, think God asks only that man be empathetic and “nice.” Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism (1923) remains the definitive statement on this latter deformation, followed by Niebuhr’s pithy assessment, in The Kingdom of God in America (1937), that the vision of liberal Christianity amounts only to this: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
§22. Where else might we look to find those who live and breathe within the invisible framework that Hebraic Christianity still provides? Above, in §18, I invoked Tocqueville’s term, “incomplete religion.” His breakthrough insight was that the French Revolution was not, strictly speaking, a political revolution; it was, rather, a plan to redeem the world, without God’s help, by identifying a group scapegoat to be purged, and then eradicating it. The divine scapegoat, Jesus Christ, was no longer needed. The revolutionary, who wished to replace God rather than kneel before Him, had found a better scapegoat to crucify. The French Revolution purged the Roman Catholic church and the landed aristocracy. To this, we may add the subsequent incomplete religion of Feminism, which began with Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and was brought to fruition in Millett’s attack on “the patriarchy” in Sexual Politics (1970). In its effort to distinguish the pure and the damned, Marxism, another incomplete religion, provides us with the categories of “the oppressor” and “the oppressed.” Post-colonial theory, a mid-twentieth-century incomplete religion, currently weaponized against Israel, draws its categories from the title of Memmi’s book, The Colonizer and the Colonized (1965). The young men I mentioned earlier (see §§3-4) who have found solace in America by joining the Roman Catholic church and the Eastern Orthodox church, well know the latest incomplete religion to haunt America, for they have been its main object of cathartic rage. Here is Identity Politics, which, in its recent ten-year reign of terror, has solved not one problem and exacerbated all of them. The Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Matt. 13:24-30) informs us that there are no simple solutions to the woes of mortal life. The saint and the sinner are not as distinguishable from one another as any of these incomplete religions admit. The world we live in is mixed, and every effort to cleanse it by mortal means only adds to our suffering, as history since the French Revolution has amply demonstrated.
§23. Within this deeply distorted framework of Identity Politics, we discover the living, breathing deformation of Hebraic Christianity in America today. It has penetrated every one of our institutions, not because it is a sinister plot by cultural Marxists, as many on the right claim, but because it is literally the operating system of Hebraic Christianity, now in its incomplete religious form. The preeminent Universities of America, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, were once the seminaries that educated the priestly caste for Hebraic Christianity. For the last several decades, they have been the epicenter for the education of the Identity Politics priestly caste. Almost every other university and college in America now does the same. Even prominent Catholic Universities—Georgetown, for more than a decade; Notre Dame, now past the point of no return—have fallen into line. Original sin? Identity politics has it—in the form of the irredeemable stain of “whiteness,” of toxic masculinity, and of the “homophobic” church. A binding covenant through which America’s wounds can be healed, that it may shine its beacon into the darkness of the world from a City on a Hill? Identity politics has it—in the form of The 1619 Project, a faux-prophetic narrative informing our nation that it must repent of its racism so that it may be pure in God’s sight; and in the form of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) penance, which, until the Trump Administration stepped in, was not only binding on all Americans, upon pain of cancellation, but was actively exported abroad through the State Department and the legion of NGOs it funded.
§24. Whither, then, the Reformation in America? Its mantle will not be carried by Evangelicals, who grasp the depth of sin but who now tend only to the walled garden inside their hearts. Nor will it be carried by liberal Christians who live out their empathetic faith in the world, but who eschew any talk of the sinfulness of man. The mantel is being carried forward by the Identity Politics left, which is to say, in the form of an incomplete religion that now seduces and terrorizes America. Man’s sinfulness and the need for a covenant of national redemption? However twisted its rendition of these may be, of all the “religious” communities in America today, only Identity Politics spreads its gospel-good-news on the basis of these two foundations of Hebraic Christianity. Repentance for its sins, and the need for a national covenant that fulfills the promise of this New Israel that is America? That is what the Identity Politics left wants in America today. Its vision is of blacks liberated from “systemic racism,” of woman liberated from “the patriarchy,” of gays and lesbians liberated from “homophobia,” of Muslims liberated from “Islamophobia,” of trans-children and adults liberated from the “cis” oppression they now endure, and, finally, of the Palestinians liberated from their “Jewish oppressors.” All this must be done so that America may be worthy of entering the Promised Land, worthy of being a City on a Hill shining its light out onto the unregenerate nations of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America who live, still, in spiritual darkness that only Identity Politics missionary work can cure. Moving beyond the Tocquevillean framework that gives us the term “incomplete religions,” and thinking theologically, Reformation America in its Identity Politics deformation is today an anti-Christ Hebraic Christianity—which is to say, the same yet different, the ghastly apparition of the real thing that is Hebraic Christianity, hell-bent on the destruction of that very real thing.
§25. What has the right had to say about this? President Trump, of Scottish Presbyterian stock, the deeply flawed King David who, in spite of himself, wishes to save the New Israel, thinks the irredeemable guilt that Identity Politics proffers is for losers. Much of his appeal lies in his visceral contempt for any system of thought in which man cannot turn failure into success—theologically, for any system of thought that cannot turn sin into redemption. Trump is, as I have written elsewhere, “the wrong kind of white man.” He refuses to play the part of the self-loathing, always equivocating, guilty, armor-less (Eph. 6:10-18) white beta-male that Identity Politics narrowly allows. Trump Derangement Syndrome is the blowback. Meanwhile, the New Right that rides along gleefully in the backdraft of our fierce Jacksonian President has not yet fully figured out what Identity Politics is, much less how to fight it, or what the political project of the future must be. Many think Identity Politics has been vanquished. That is not true. Some have declared that the age of liberalism has passed, and that our now post-liberal age calls for a re-enchanted world, in which not Hebraic Christianity, but rather Roman Catholic Integralism guides America away from her 400-year philosophical error of betting on Jerusalem rather than on Aristotle. The first political test will come in 2028, when Vice President Vance, a convert to the Roman Church who is attentive to public intellectuals who advocate this line of thinking, succeeds or fails to make his case to the American electorate. I do not doubt that certain countries in Europe’s Southern flank—notably France, Spain, and Italy, whose swelling Muslim populations will soon force upon them a religious choice between Christianity or Islam—must return to Rome’s Aristotle if they wish to live; but in and for America, this is fanciful and wishful thinking. In its two-thousand-year history, a number of different metaphysical wagers within Christendom have emerged, and once a divergent path was chosen, a return has never occurred. The Oriental Orthodox churches have believed in Miaphysitism for sixteen centuries, and show no evidence of changing course. The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches embraced Aristotle and Plato, respectively, ten centuries ago, and show no evidence of changing course. Protestants and Reformers chose Jerusalem five centuries ago. Of the two, as I indicated in §§7-9 above, Protestantism seems most at risk of fully dissipating, as Germany commits national suicide for its irredeemable sin.
§26. America is another story. I doubt it can change course. Path dependency matters. It remains a vibrant civilizational wager, not yet exhausted. Even where Hebraic Christianity has been overtly rejected, as Identity politics has done, the form of its rejection has itself been Hebraic Christian. I suspect that means, first, that the Roman Catholic Integralist project will never captivate the American imagination and, second, that neither Evangelicals nor Liberal Christians will have a hand in the renewal that America so desperately needs. The real and unexpected missionary field is the one-hundred-million Identity Politics parishioners on the left, who are wracked by the problem of uncleanliness, who know that our wounded body-politic must be healed, but who are yet too prideful to receive Christ’s imputed cleanliness (2 Cor. 5:21). America will not be healed by replacing Hebraic Christianity with a different metaphysical and civilizational wager. It will be healed when the prodigal sons and daughters of our Hebraic Christian civilization return home, with gratitude and with joy. At the broader institutional level, we might say that when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton repent and repudiate their anti-Christ Hebraic Christianity, the real work will have been done. By any measure, that repentance and repudiation are far off and, mortally speaking, impossible. Let us pray.
