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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.
One of the issues to first spark debate among evangelicals after our definitive split with the mainline in the early twentieth century was how to relate as evangelicals to non-evangelical communities. Originally the question was how evangelical churches should relate to the mainline churches. Another question followed about how evangelical churches’ worship should relate to evangelism, which is often addressed to those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with evangelical culture. But more pertinent here is the question of how evangelical Christians should conduct ourselves in fields like academia and politics.
Some people are able to win respect in both worlds. And that can be a very valuable role, able to accomplish things that few others can. But there is always a risk of “going native,” claiming to be more sophisticated than those rubes who hold to their evangelical convictions because you have accepted your field’s secular norms on the Bible, property, sex, abortion, other religions, etc.
There is a widespread perception within evangelicalism that David French has compromised more and more of his evangelical convictions to be seen as “one of the good ones” by the secular commentariat. I think that this explains his position on transgenderism in the public square, for example, better than principled classical liberalism does. So I don’t see French as an exemplar of classically liberal evangelicals.
Evangelical support for George W. Bush was much earlier and more heartfelt than evangelical support for Trump has been. Bush’s faith is, as far as I can tell, sincere. But while he himself may have had sympathy for the religious right, he also shared his father’s neoconservative convictions, and virtually all of his political appointments reflected the latter rather than the former. Bush didn’t move the needle much for conservative Christians during his terms: His political capital was spent on the War on Terror.
The Obama administration, by contrast, saw a flurry of progressive activity. The president did not shy away from using either the federal bureaucracy or the judiciary as a weapon against social conservatives. His administration issued a series of Dear Colleague letters threatening schools and colleges into complying with progressive norms on discipline, sexual assault accusations, and gender identity. He told the (Roman Catholic) Little Sisters of the Poor that they had to pay for contraception and the (Evangelical Protestant) owners of Hobby Lobby that it wasn’t enough to pay for several forms of contraception, they had to include those with abortifacient effects. Thankfully the Supreme Court forbade this, basing its decision on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 rather than the Constitution. At about the same time, Justice Anthony Kennedy (who had the deciding vote in such matters) wrote two decisions on same-sex marriage, imposing the socially progressive view by judicial fiat.
In 2015, Indiana passed its own version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it was signed by Governor Mike Pence. Seeing that this could protect conscientious objectors to gay rights legislation, the NCAA and a legion of big companies made a stink, threatening to withdraw economic activity from the state. In reaction, the legislature passed another law effectively gutting the RFRA.
Trump didn’t do very well among evangelical Christians in the 2016 primary, but he did win evangelical support in the general election – running, of course, against Hillary Clinton. Picking Mike Pence as his running mate didn’t hurt. Trump promised to look after our interests. We mostly didn’t believe him; I don’t think he even knew what our interests were. But he rolled back Obama’s attacks, and he appointed conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices who would later overturn Roe v. Wade.
Yes! When it becomes clear that certain institutions are only used against us, why would we want leaders who leave them lying around?
I had hoped that Pence would come out of the first Trump administration with an awareness of the threat from progressive-controlled institutions and the need to fight them. Combined with his strong evangelical convictions and his small-government conservatism, that had the potential to make him a fantastic future president. But it’s not the lesson he took from his time under Trump, and maybe January 6 would have cut off that opportunity anyway. It remains to be seen what lessons (Catholic convert) J. D. Vance will take from his term as V.P.
I am not sure what happened here. One moment, several Roman Catholic thinkers were exploring various critiques of American liberalism and alternatives to it; the next, they all fell in line behind some version or other of integralism. It’s like there was something in the water.
I would call it a semi-retreat, or maybe a fighting retreat to a more defensible position. But the question is: Is it defensible? I think the lesson of the Obama presidency is that socially progressive activists will not tolerate enclaves that do not submit to their norms. If you built such a community – and you were successful enough to be noticed – you could reasonably expect to face creative applications of the laws on land use, housing, health care, education, employment, and so on, to impose progressive values.
There is a fourth approach bandied about, but it’s almost as unlikely as Catholic integralism. When “Christian nationalism” became a vague talking point among some Democrats, a few different evangelicals decided to claim the term. One wrote a book on it, which I haven’t read. What they seem to have in common is that they want an arrangement like that the one that existed in America before the progressive movement, with evangelical Christianity in the place of mainline Christianity as normative, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy tolerated but not normative, and non-Christian religions legal but marginalized to one degree or another. (This last in particular varies by thinker.) It would take some pretty radical social shifts to make that even vaguely plausible. And while radical social shifts have happened before, that’s not the kind of thing you can accomplish with a political program.
Those are a lot of words to say that I don’t know the best path forward. But hopefully they contribute to understanding the situation.
Or file an official form stating that they objected to doing so.
However, the Federal Government would then work with the insurance providers to fill the resulting gap, and some groups wanted to be able to opt out, not only of paying for their employees' contraception, but of anyone covering the cost!
...the 'socially progressive' view being that, the arguments against equal marriage all being rooted in their proponents' metaphysical assumptions, and the imposition of metaphysical beliefs by state power having spilt rivers of blood in 17th-century Europe (more recent to the Founding Fathers than the Civil War is to today), the official elevation of opposite-gender couples over same-gender couples cannot be justified as government policy. (I wonder if 'state government issues Civil Unions for all couples, leaves marriage to whatever church/other religious organisation/other private entity the participants see fit to involve' would have been accepted.)
The reasoning behind that being that they considered it the equivalent of the installers of these water fountains claiming, per some guff about the Curse of Ham or Hex of Corned Beef or Jinx of Turkey or whatever, a Conscientious Objection to letting [hexagrammaton]s use the same water fountain as white people, or a separate but actually equal one off the same production line.
There are many secular arguments for elevating opposite sex marriages. One of the better ones defines marriage as an institute primarily aimed to form families and raise children. It is because of this social good that marriage is elevated, and it gives the couple certain benefits. Marriage is not a certificate that two people love each other and its primary function is not tax benefits or shiny paper or anything like that. This intuitive family/children connection is also behind the fact that it is not possible to marry your parent or your sibling.
To which the inevitable reply is that, okay, then where's the law banning infertile people from marrying? Because on the axis of "family formation," there's no difference between them and the gays, is there? To ban gays from marrying on the grounds they cannot produce children, but not similarly ban straight couples who cannot produce children, would clearly be anti-gay discrimination.
Now, I have my own secular, philosophical argument against this, complete with toy analogy, that I've posted here before, about teleology in an imperfect, entropic universe. (But I'll admit that sort of Aristotelian thinking is pretty far from most mainstream thought.)
As mentioned below, there are actually laws saying that some people couldn't marry unless they could show that they were infertile. Your entire frame of reference simply does not make sense, and you need a pretty significant perspective change.
Further, rather than there being "no difference", there is actually quite a huge difference, particularly in terms of intrusiveness to privacy. The government can very very simply look at the government documents which state that they're the same sex. What kind of standards, and what kind of intrusive nightmare would it be to require something like proof of fertility? @WandererintheWilderness would call it "Chinese-style authoritarian social engineering". These examples are worlds apart rather than being "no different".
It's not my perspective — as you'd note if you'd read the part I'd linked — it's just the most common counter-argument the pro-gay-marriage side presents.
What doesn't make sense about it? If you are saying the line between who can marry and who cannot, which puts gay couples on the "cannot" side, is drawn on the grounds of who can produce children and who cannot — that you're barring gay couples because they're non-reproducing rather than because they're gay — then the line has to be drawn between (straight) couples who can reproduce and couples, straight or gay, who cannot.
People made the "privacy" argument you made here, back when the debate was live. The first answer was that age is just as legible to the government "in terms of intrusiveness to privacy" as sex, and yet we let 70-year-old straight couples get married, despite being just as clearly not about producing children as in the case of gay couples.
(My reply to this is my linked argument about teleology, and "inherent" versus "accidental" characteristics in regard to such teleological orientations.)
The other is the argument (a much better one, IMO) that differences in the intrusiveness to enforce a rule between groups do not justify enforcing the rule unequally. Just because it's easier to enforce a ban against gay couples marrying than it is against infertile straight couples without massive state intrusion does not, under modern anti-discrimination law, make it acceptable or non-discriminatory to enforce it in a discriminatory matter, let alone set down such discriminatory enforcement in the law itself. If the rule is "too intrusive to enforce" against a particular group, then it can't be enforced, or a rule, at all.
This "if" is precisely what my example points out is not true. The entire premise of the argument is simply false. The entire frame of reference simply does not make sense. Basically the entire remainder of this comment is sort of pointless from the get-go because of this flaw.
Well then, if the line between who should be allowed to marry isn't about who can produce children, then what is it about? What is the difference that justifies, in purely secular, non-religious terms, treating gay couples differently than straight ones?
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