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Notes -
I mentioned a little while back that I meant to write a top-level post about religion, denominational tradition, and political theology. I could draft and re-draft forever but an imperfect post that spurs conversation is better than a perfect post, so here we go.
In that previous discussion I described three 'options' for conservative or small-o orthodox Christian engagement with a culture that is largely abandoning Christian faith. I can't imagine I need to do much to prove that American culture is increasingly abandoning Christianity - the abandonment is especially obvious on the left, but even on the right, the Trump/MAGA right, despite occasionally making gestures in this direction, is substantially post-Christian.
The options I described, named after conservative Christians who have discussed some of these issues in the public square, are 1) the French Option, after David French, 2) the Ahmari/Deneen/Vermeule option, after Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Adrian Vermeule, and 3) the Dreher Option, after Rod Dreher. (And of course choosing this language is riffing on Dreher's book The Benedict Option.)
What I noticed after writing that older post was that these options line up very easily with the three major branches of global Christianity - Protestantism (especially evangelical Protestantism, in the US), Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. The identification of the French Option with Protestantism needs to be nuanced somewhat; French is an evangelical specifically, and I think all these three options rise out of the collapse of the former American mainline. Mainline Protestantism constituted a kind of religious default for American society and a grounding set of institutions and values alike, but as it declines, there is competition over the void. Arguably there is a fourth option I haven't named - Progressive Christianity or Wokism or something else, call it the Bolz-Weber Option or something - but for now I am restricting myself to options for more-or-less conservative Christians.
Let's delve into these options a bit more.
Evangelical Protestantism is the youngest tradition of the three and has developed under conditions of American liberalism. It is therefore the most comfortable with liberal norms. It also tends to be very skeptical of hierarchies, institutions, and regulations - in part due to its own origins in the late 19th and early 20th century, as a kind of rebellion against theological modernists. Buried deep in the DNA of evangelicalism is a sense that one might be betrayed by one's own leadership, and I think we often find evangelicals with an in-principle hostility to higher organisation. Thus there is no one Evangelical Church, but rather scattered networks of independent churches, affiliating and disaffiliating and splitting and fusing as they feel called to do so. Enthusiastic church planting and charismatic celebrity pastors are products of this culture, as is frequent doctrinal dispute. There are loose ways for evangelicals to identify each other, from the Bebbington quadrilateral to simply asking whether a church is 'bible-believing', but there is, intentionally, no umbrella authority. Evangelicals thus also tend to be the most overtly patriotic Americans and are the most tightly wedded to the American project as such - they're the most likely to put tacky American flags up around churches! National or civic identity comes in to provide some of the structure that might otherwise come from a church hierarchy. (It's evangelicals who will sometimes talk about the US constitution being inspired by God, for instance, something very alien to other traditions.)
The French Option is the one I would summarise as "just win the argument". The gospel truth is mighty and will prevail. All you need to do is get out there, present the gospel, and let the Spirit do the rest. Virtue and moral character are important, but they cannot be compelled or produced by any coercive institution - they come from local practices and must be nurtured in local, congregational contexts, attentive to the word of God. Liberalism and viewpoint neutrality are not problems to be solved, but rather are themselves the opportunities to grow the church and create disciples.
All that said, the French or evangelical option is complicated significantly by Trump, with French himself badly out of step with most evangelicals. To an extent Trump makes sense as a result of the evangelical absence of institutional leadership and embrace of charismatic leaders - if they're going to have a political vision, it will be grounded in dynamic individual leaders hostile to traditional institutions, like Trump himself. (And scandalous as Trump is, misbehaving mega-pastors are hardly new.) The more that evangelicals continue to feel that they're doing badly, or that their fortunes are sliding, the more seductive such leaders will be for them.
To put a positive spin on it, the strength of the evangelical approach is that it has deep roots in American folkways, is easily compatible with the liberal American project, and it has a kind of confidence about itself that ought not be underrated. Its great weakness, I think, is the question of what happens if it can't 'win the argument'. What happens then? That's where we might see more of this flirting with authoritarian politics.
Of course, authoritarianism is nothing new to the second tradition, Roman Catholicism, and its integralist exponents today. I should make clear at the start that Catholicism is by far the largest individual church tradition in America (and certainly worldwide) and therefore admits of a great deal of diversity and factional strife. In this context I'm interested in the advocates of an expressly political Catholicism.
Here it is worth noting that Catholicism's relationship with political liberalism has always been strained. Up until the 1960s, the Catholic Church was more-or-less openly at war with liberalism, and continued to hold that the correct formation of a polity was for the secular authority to be subject to, or at least receiving direction from, the church. The history of Catholic-state relations in early 20th century Europe is illuminating in this regard; even in France, up until WWII there continued to be traditionalist hardliners condemning secularism and laicite as mistakes. America posed a problem - you may recall Catholics around 1900 explaining that the church ought to "[enjoy] the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority", and should not support separation of church and state. (Note that that was Pope Leo XIII, whom the current pope named himself after.) I was struck by a 1909 defense of forbidden books explaining plainly that it is the church's duty to watch over society and ban immoral speech. Vatican II represented, in some ways, the Catholic Church making peace with liberalism, but it has been an unsteady alliance, and I interpret the modern-day crop of integralists as looking back to an earlier model of church relationship with the state.
They use a number of different names for it - Deneen's 'aristopopulism', Vermeule's 'common-good constitutionalism', and so on - but what unites this group is the conviction that it is both possible and desirable for the United States to be governed in conformance with Catholic social teaching. Liberal democracy should be limited in its scope, fundamentally reframed, or (in the most extreme cases) abolished entirely.
In its full extent this vision is almost certainly unrealisable, at least in the United States - it's hard to imagine non-Catholics ever acceding to it, even among Catholics it is a tiny minority, and Catholic religious authorities, up to the pope himself, seem at best uninterested and at worst actively hostile to this vision. But to smaller extents it may be realisable or even influential in trying to push the United States more towards morals legislation, and Catholic politicians like J. D. Vance may be swayable to an extent. Moreover, among the three options I describe, the Catholic integralists stand out as the only ones with a clear plan to seize and utilise state power, which makes the prospect of their success - even if only a partial success - much more consequential.
The third option is one I've associated with Rod Dreher and therefore with Eastern Orthodoxy, though Dreher himself is an odd duck and not a great representative of the majority of Orthodox communities in the US. The thing about Orthodoxy is that, despite a handful of prominent converts, it primarily exists in ethnic enclaves, owing to the Orthodox churches' historical links to particular national communities. Both Protestants and Catholics have, in different ways, worked out how to evangelise to entirely new people and communities; I don't think the Orthodox have. (They have historically, looking at the spread of Orthodoxy across much of Eurasia; I just mean the modern day.) Traditionally Orthodox churches have been closely bound to political authority, and in some ways that's a pattern we still today with the Russian Orthodox Church. However, the Greek Orthodox tradition spent centuries existing within the Ottoman Empire, which I think gave a lot of Orthodox churches a habit of bunkering up and focusing on surviving and passing down the faith under conditions of being a minority, with little chance of dominating the wider society. To an extent the pattern repeats with the Russians under Soviet control, though since then the Russian Orthodox seem to have re-established the traditional alliance with the state. The point is that there is a deep well of resources, in the Orthodox tradition, for how to exist as a kind of society-within-a-society, without realistic hope of either converting the masses or obtaining power.
In practice, then, Orthodox communities in America and other Western nations tend to be expatriate or immigrant communities, relatively less interested in conversion, and more focused on internal discipline and cultivation. You can easily see the appeal for thinkers like Dreher, who believe that Christianity as a whole in America is soon going to be in the position of Orthodox in the Soviet Union, or in the Ottoman Empire.
The obvious criticism to make of this option is that it is a counsel of despair - it takes for granted that the public is lost. While Dreher himself denies that he calls for any kind of 'retreat', this denial has always been unconvincing at best. To many in the first two camps, this is abandoning the field before battle has been truly joined. If the Orthodox were to give battle, so to speak, they would need to find some way to compensate for their low numbers and their lack of institutional strength, most likely through alliance with this or that other Christian group. I find it unlikely that this will happen.
Perhaps more relevant to America as a whole are non-Orthodox churches or communities who nonetheless take the Orthodox, Dreher option. The Benedict Option itself is primarily a plea for evangelical Protestants and Catholics to try this. You can indeed find people in those traditions taking an option like this, though so far it's too early to see how generative their efforts are. I don't predict entire evangelical or Catholic communities taking this approach, though, until it's clear that they have no other choice.
Where does this leave conservative Christians in the US overall?
I think they're caught between several bad options. Both the "just win the argument" and the "seize state power" approaches seem very unlikely to succeed in the near or even medium term; and "retreat inwards, focus on community formation" is good as far as it goes, but represents a cession of huge amounts of cultural territory that Christians are rightly reluctant to cede.
I don't mean any of this as a counsel of despair myself - these are all judgements predicated on a cultural situation that itself may not last. At any rate, Christians are called to follow Jesus without counting the cost, so in a sense stressing over tactics like this is beside the point, or at the very least, a second-order consideration.
In terms of my own bias, it should be clear that I have the least affinity for the Catholic, Ahmari/Deneen/Vermeule approach - I believe I called them 'bootlickers' last time. I admire the optimism and confidence of the evangelical approach even if I think it is often wide open to heretical teachings or pseudo-idolatry (which is how I think of most of MAGA), and I respect the Orthodox approach even if I think it is fundamentally limited. Personally what I hope for is a combination of the evangelical view of the world as mission space and its non-hierarchical, liberal approach to conversion with the focus on interior cultivation and community practice of Orthodox communities, but it is very rare that I get what I hope for in any field. So it goes.
I do not think that there is such a stark difference between these options and specific denominations. You can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can move yourself and your family into religious enclave, creating space for the community to flourish. You can vote for laws in accordance with Christian ethics inside your local community and promote for these laws to go state or even nation-wide. And you can also go into enemy territory and "win the argument".
The same goes for going backwards in time for similar analysis. Yes, protestants were always fractured and individualistic. But they were political power of their own and Christians were able to push for things that David French would now maybe see as unimaginable. For instance, it was absolutely common to have prayers and bible readings in public schools up until 1960s. It was not until 1952 supreme court ruling that stroke down blasphemy laws in favor of supposedly neutral and secular reading of first amendment, the same goes for porn and other things. Christians held bottom up political power, and politicians they voted in had to reflect their moral preferences and uphold their worldview. It does not have to be anything coming top-down from a pope or archbishop.
I think this is exactly what is going on now. For instance if Muslims can create their own communities and then pass laws in line with their preferences like anti-LGBT laws in Dearborn, Michigan - all in line with supposedly "neutral" and pluralistic views, then why cannot Christians do the same? The supposed neutral "French" position does not even make sense in many instances as they are quite binary - you either allow children to tansition or you don't. You either have progress flag displayed during July in your school or you don't. You either allow or disallow crosses or prayers in public schools. In the end, there is no "neutral" position. If you have population of progressives in a city, then they will remove religious symbols from the school and replace them with their own things. What many people start to realize is that they can utilize their political power and implement their ideas in the same way as all these other ideologues do.
I've always balked at most Protestant notions of belief and conviction in the US. Their doctrinal and interpretive anarchy across tens of thousands of different sects perfectly exemplifies what's wrong with their thinking. Not too long ago this debate was pointed out to me by a relative that I found funny as fuck. Watching the Catholic (Gordon) and Dyer (Orthodox) bully the Protestant (some random dude) I couldn't help but laugh at, while he kept trying to insert himself in the discussion to remain relevant to the debate. And then later this debate by Gordon and Dyer again I could tell was largely unintelligible to most people. It took me a couple days to get through but I enjoyed it solely for the bloodsports.
Theologians like WLC think as far as separation between church and state go that Christianity should always and forever remain independent of the state and that the strength of our belief should stand on its own merits. I think he's wrong about this. Several states in the world if you go back in time were massively Christian save for the later influence and spread of Islam which came to president and dominate over a majority Christian culture and way of life. Turkey has always been one of my favorite examples of this. And Christianity historically (in addition to Islam) didn't largely become influential through Jesus' preachments in the NT. It spread through war, military and economic might; and force. For better or worse, I think any honest person has to admit the state has a relevant role to play in promoting religion, lest you end up getting dominated by the religion of those who think opposite to you. My historical/biological lineage is rooted with the Nordics in Scandinavia, although individually I'm a born and raised American. Maybe that’s why I’ve always intensely loved the cold weather, even before I could speak. I still have relatives over there who my extended family maintains ties with and when I see what's been going on with Muslim migration, I can feel my adrenaline pumping. I've got a few grenades of my own I'd like to let off if harm comes to their doorstep. You're living in our home. The men need to put their Viking helmets back on and reintroduce the Blood Eagle to a few people.
In the Catholic corner as a counterpart to what's going on in Dearborn, St. Mary's in Kansas has become something of the Mecca for traditional Catholics (SSPX), in an interesting way almost similar to what the Jews also have with places like Kiryas Joel. Novus Ordo Catholics are continuing to decline as one should expect, but the traditional corners of our faith are booming with huge families that I hope in the future will come to dominate and overturn the crisis of what's been happening in the church. A restoration of a real commitment to Mere Christianity in the US would be a wonderful thing to have as it would rebuild communities and bring people together. I continue to hope and pray for better days in the future ahead.
I think that there is a huge equivocation when it comes to what the separation of church and state actually means. In my notion the separation means, that the state is sovereign in a sense that all the power comes from voters through legislature, executive and judiciary. In other words it is not possible for a Pope in Vatican to create some order which will be automatically valid law for people in such a sovereign state. But it is absolutely possible for such an order to be brought through standard political process and pass as a binding law.
What secularists and progressives achieved, is that they expanded this definition of separation over to untenable proposal, that no religious ideas can be part of the state. They somehow convinced Christians that their ideas have no place in political process and that they cannot influence the laws. This is obvious stupidity, as first it is impossible to judge. E.g. if a state adopts laws against murder because all the MPs are Christians and murder goes against sixth commandment - does it mean it is now somehow religion inside a state? Is it possible to pass such a law only if one has "neutral" stance such as adopting utilitarian moral reasoning for passing such a law? It does not make sense and it is incredible that supposed Christians like French are just going with this explanation as a reason why to just lie down and let everybody else - be it communists, progressives and atheists or even Muslims - to use political power to entrench their own version of non-Christian ethics and ideas into state structures. To me it seems insane.
Right. I agree with you here. I'd argue for religious requirements for political participation, much in the same way you can't be a member of the Communist Party in China without being an avowed atheist. There's actually not much disagreement I have with either the politics or theology of the twin paradigm that ruled the European continent back when it was the church/monarchy power duopoly that ran the show. The only real problem with it that I see is that it came at a bad point in history. You take a look at high tech feudal societies today like Saudi Arabia that are religiously very cohesive and absent the consanguinity in the population, what's your problem? Not that there aren't any of course but they're problems I'd gladly trade for the ones we have in the west. Or take an elective monarchy like Malaysia. Much the same thing can be said for a lot of the ways they benefit from their style of governance. Church and monarchy is better than democracy and capitalism IMO. (Come at me bros, I'm feeling bold today). You could perhaps argue industrialization wouldn't have happened under the former, but I see no reason to think that.
It is as you say the secularists have definitely succeeded in muddying the waters that don't even blur but rather draw up a distinction that religion has no place in politics. Laws against murder specifically can be morally justified without recourse to divine commandments. You can justify them by natural law. You can justify them by moral sentiment. You can justify them by social consensus. You can justify them almost any way you want to. I suppose if you tried to anchor that law through religious justification that's where you'd piss off the non-religious segment of the population. Then again our mere existence is enough to piss them off in the first place. I'm all for disregarding their opinion. If they want to argue in basis of facts and evidence then let us come to the table. Until then, "butthurt," is not a defense. I'm passing legislation whether they like it or not. They have no problem requiring me to tolerate degenerate influences, they in turn can tolerate the 'horror' of Christian hospitality and charity and the Stalinist demand that they observe common decency in the community.
The only "religious requirement" should be "the voters won't vote for you if they don't like your religion (or lack thereof)" and even that can be a big problem.
And anything you hope to accomplish by this requirement could be worked around by sufficiently dishonest politicians simply by choosing a Unitarian Universalist or some other mostly secular, politically liberal, religion.
This is happening all the time anyway. People vote for their identities not the abstract contents of the legislative policies of their representatives.
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