One note on “negative world”

I’ve written twice on the minor internet dust-up over James Wood’s essay last month on the political witness of the church, an essay that contains some modest criticisms of Tim Keller. There Wood uses a framework taken from an essay published last February by Aaron Renn, which was an expanded version of a piece he originally proposed a full five years ago. Many folks have written about Renn’s framework, including (to my mind) most incisively and critically by Jake Meador a few weeks ago.

A simplified version of the framework is that there are three dominant modes of Christian experience in any given social and political context, in this case the American context. These are positive, neutral, and negative. Each concerns the public profession of Christian identity. The question is: On balance, do the nation’s elite institutions together with the persons who lead and occupy them reward, ignore, or penalize the public profession of Christian identity? If the first, then this makes for a “positive world”; if the second, then a “neutral world”; if the third, then a “negative world.”

Renn has a timeline, relatively compressed, whereby before the mid-1990s, America was—again, in the aggregate, on balance, and concerning the mainstream culture as influenced and governed by elite spheres, professions, persons, and institutions—a “positive world.” Then this ambient context shifted into a “neutral world” for a couple of decades before, sometime in the last decade, another shift occurred and we entered a “negative world” for public profession of Christian identity.

In my view, this proposal should not be controversial. The reasons why it has been taken to be controversial are numerous; here’s a guess at a few of them.

First, the focus seems overdetermined by recent history, in particular the fortunes of white evangelicals. Second, the issues that signal loss of status are culture-war fodder like gender and sexuality rather than, say, racism, poverty, and immigration. Third, the framework is liable to being interpreted as one more American-Christian decline narrative: once things we great (because “we” were on top), now they aren’t (because “we” no longer are). Fourth, some of the examples of writers and pastors held up for critique are beloved or perhaps not worthy of it, as with Keller. Fifth, the descriptive nature of the framework is taken to be normative in character, thereby implying that Renn and Wood want to argue that it is harder to be a faithful Christian today than it ever was before in America.

As I said above, I don’t take Renn’s framework to be especially controversial, because if you don’t worry about haggling over the details, it’s self-evidently true; indeed, unless I’m seriously misunderstanding and therefore misrepresenting it, something like it is taken for granted in all sociology and history of American religion published in the last century.

The framework has nothing—I repeat, nothing—to do with the challenge of living faithfully as a Christian, now or at any time in the past. Likewise it has nothing to do with the nature of the gospel or the demands of Christian discipleship. It is not and does not involve any substantive moral or theological claim whatsoever. It is a purely sociological observation about the public status of Christian identity in American life. What it says is simply this:

• Once, it was reasonable to suppose that, broadly speaking, if you claimed in America to be a Christian (or church-affiliated), then that public claim was more likely than not to enhance your reputation and/or social status and/or professional-political-familial-marital-financial prospects;

• now, it is reasonable to suppose the opposite;

• some complex set of factors led from the first situation to the second;

• doubtless a sort of intermediate period covered the time of transition.

That’s it. That’s the framework. Is it false? I confess I’m not even sure what it would mean to say that it could be false.

Note that the proposal as summarized here has nothing at all to do with the substance of Christian faith and morals—nothing to do with orthodoxy. It makes no claim to the “Christianness” of the American republic (or its antecedent colonies) at any point in its history. It’s not about anyone’s heart, mind, feelings, or sincerity. It’s not about a golden age. It’s not about a time we ought to recover or reestablish. It doesn’t even entail that those matters of traditional teaching for which one might be socially or legally disciplined today are either true or of first order importance relative to prior contested issues in American church history.

(It’s worth observing that theological liberalism a century ago would have entailed denial of creedal doctrines—bodily resurrection, virginal conception, divinity of Christ—alongside affirmation of moral doctrines regarding marriage, sexual ethics, and divorce, whereas today the reverse is the case. In other words, the transition from “positive” to “negative” world isn’t per se a transition from “conservative” or “traditional” to “liberal” or “progressive” theology. That particular fight, or dialectic, has been a live one for a full two hundred years, with no signs of abating. For that reason it doesn’t map onto the Renn framework under discussion.)

To take a concrete example, one offered by Alan Jacobs, it was damn hard to be a faithful Christian in the Jim Crow South. A lot harder by comparison to today, with far harsher penalties for following Christ (whatever one’s race) than nearly anyone faces at present. I take that as read. Nevertheless it remains true at the descriptive level, as a sociological fact that publicly professing to be a Christian in the 1950s was—on balance, no matter who you were or where you lived, with relatively minor exceptions—more likely than not to enhance your reputation and/or social status and/or professional-political-familial-marital-financial prospects.

Consider, finally, that this claim does not of itself require approbation (nostalgic, reactionary, or otherwise) of the erstwhile “positive world.” Plenty of Christians might suppose the “positive world” was, on the whole, a bad bet for Christians and/or a raw deal for Jews, Muslims, agnostics, and other non-Christians. Perhaps it created pressure for countless businessmen and politicians to voice aloud a fake faith or a merely civil religion all the while living as pagans in their personal lives. Perhaps this sullied the church’s witness. Perhaps Christians should be grateful to inhabit a “neutral” or “negative” world. Perhaps!

My only point is that it doesn’t matter what one makes of these shifts, nor how one might revise the minor details (dates, epochal events, how hostile contemporary “negative world” really is, and so on). The shifts are real. I’d go so far as to say they’re undeniable. It’s only once we agree about that that we can hold a meaningful conversation—or argument—about the significance, implications, challenges, and opportunities created by the shifts in question.

One long thought on Wood v. Keller

It seems to me that there is a single pressing issue raised by James Wood’s essay (and follow-up) on Tim Keller: namely, the social and political fortunes of evangelical churches under social and political conditions that are truly post-Christendom.

For seventeen centuries Christianity in the main has not been averse to seeking, maintaining, and deploying political power in the name of and in the service of explicitly Christian convictions, purposes, and interests. Even those offshoots of Christianity, beginning some five centuries ago, that to some degree expressed concerns or hesitancy about the Christian exercise of political power—and these have always been minority traditions in any case—have continued, broadly speaking, to operate under the conditions laid down by Christendom, and even to presuppose certain fundamental features of a Christian or semi-Christian regime. Even when, in the last two centuries or so, the overt Christian elements of “Western” political regimes have dried up, it is unquestionable that most of those elements remained, covertly, in one form or another. It is only in the last century, and in the U.S. in the last half-century, that the lineaments of a genuinely and comprehensively post-Christian political order have come into view and begun to be implemented. Whether or not that order has fully arrived in certain European nations, it has not yet here in the States. It is coming, though, and about that there should be no illusions.

Here is the point. Magisterial Protestantism was never anti–political power. It retained a vision, rooted in Christendom, for what it means for a nation (or state) to “be” Christian. That vision concerned both the character of leaders and the content of laws. As forms of populist, non-magisterial Protestantism grew, developed, and expanded—let’s just call these groups “evangelical” for lack of a better word—even where the magisterial political vision went unclaimed or repudiated, the political order created and maintained by it remained in place. In other words, evangelicalism in all its varieties knows no other regime in the West other than Christendom, semi-Christendom, or covert-Christendom. Post-Christendom is a new beast altogether.

(To be sure, evangelical churches have existed and do exist in other parts of the world, where Christendom never took root; some of these places are actively hostile to the faith. I leave to the side all the very interesting issues that attend this intersection of evangelicalism and non-Christian or anti-Christian contexts.)

The question posed by this confluence of factors is the following: How is evangelicalism supposed to operate politically in a truly post-Christian civilization? I take this to be the fundamental issue Wood is raising for us; bracket all that he says about Keller, and how you might feel about that. The heart of the matter is how both (evangelical) Christians and the (evangelical) church ought to comport themselves politically in relation to a full-bore, actually realized post-Christian culture.

Here’s the problem I think he’s putting his finger on. Historically, Christians have not had an ideal-typical, above-the-fray political program for society. Their program has been actionable, and they have acted upon it. They have commended it to the wider society; they have executed it in the courts of kings and magistrates; they have expanded on it in legal and theological texts. In no sense was the Christian vision for political order a “trans-partisan” affair. It was partisan all the way down. It could not help but be so if it would be concrete, which every political platform must be.

Roman Catholicism has not abandoned this approach to politics, though the reception of the Christendom vision is a matter of enormous debate since Vatican II. In principle, though, Rome rejects the wholesale privatization of religion and does not renounce its having a role in public affairs, even (at times, past or present or future) being established as the faith of the land.

Likewise, magisterial Protestantism has not abandoned a modified version of the Christendom project. Yet—and I don’t mean this to be as harsh as it sounds—magisterial Protestantism is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Those Protestants who seek to maintain or to recover the magisterial and confessional traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may well be performing admirable and good work; but as a living institution with either ecclesial or political power, it’s a thing of the past. Whether they like it or not, they’re all evangelicals now.

Which brings us back to where we started. I understand the ecclesio-political program criticized by Wood to be one that keeps the (evangelical ) church qua church apolitical, while encouraging individual Christians to be faithfully engaged in democratic politics, where “faithful engagement” means (a) keeping political activity penultimate by (b) permitting Christians to be on both sides of most/all political questions, which in turn requires (c) avoiding partisanship, because (d) the gospel stands above and in judgment upon all political endeavors, inasmuch as (e) neither the gospel nor the church is fully aligned with any political party, platform, or policy. The upshot is a modest, even ambivalent, investment in political activity, characterized by gentleness, civility, and the self-critical admission of a general fallibility.

Many of us may find this picture of Christian participation in politics to be an attractive one. What Wood wants us to see, however, is three things.

First, it has little precedent in Christian history. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But we should realize just how new it is. Its newness should caution our sense that it’s self-evidently “the” “Christian” approach to politics; it is certainly a such approach. Prima facie we can’t say much more than that. In historical perspective, it’s something of a novelty.

In part that’s because, second, our circumstances are radically new—and, again, without precedent in the church’s past. The church once found itself in a pagan world that judged it worthy, at best, of benign neglect and, at worst, of legal and social punishment. But the church has never faced a post-Christian legal-cultural regime. So even those politics-reticent ecclesial traditions that have arisen since the mid–sixteenth century have no previous experience of what we are (currently or imminently) facing.

Third, Wood believes this picture of winsome, faithful presence is bound to fail—that is, as a social and political program. That doesn’t prejudge whether it’s what Christ demands of us. Nor does it amount to a suggestion that the tasks of Christian discipleship are measured by (likelihood of) sociopolitical success. Instead, it’s meant to draw attention to the fact that “faithful discipleship” and “faithful political engagement as outlined in this particular proposal” are not synonymous. The latter is a contingent suggestion that may or may not be (a) good in the merits and/or (b) apt to specific material conditions. I take Wood’s bedrock claim to be that, as a concrete but intrinsically contestable proposal, this vision of political engagement is good on the merits and was apt to the conditions of its time and place when it was proposed. But, given a change in social and political conditions on the ground—being an at least partly empirical question subject to all manner of analysis—the practical question of what faithful discipleship requires of American Christians today, in terms of active political engagement, calls for a rethinking of said proposal in favor of a revised or even altogether new vision. Not, I repeat, because the former was or is ineffective, but because, given certain cultural mutations, it is inapt (unfitting, unresponsive) to the needs and demands of Christian life and witness in this moment, in our context as it stands.

If this is granted, then the question is not whether (what Wood takes to be) Keller’s project is “good” or “faithful” or “worth defending.” The question is whether, as a contingent proposal for how Christians in a particular time and place ought to comport themselves politically, it continues to be properly responsive to the social, political, and missional challenges facing the American church today. Perhaps it does; perhaps it doesn’t. Much of one’s answer will turn on the logically prior question regarding the state of those challenges and whether, across the last four decades, they have changed, or are currently in process of changing, as substantially as Wood believes.

This is where the historical backdrop I offered above is meant to give some credence to Wood’s argument—which is, recall, about Protestant evangelicalism in America. There is no one-size-fits-all “Christian relation to politics.” (And if there were, it would be of the Christendom variety, not the belated liberal-democratic variety.) Christians have always adjusted, with impressive flexibility, to countless regimes and types thereof. In our case, this means (on one hand) that what has “worked” in the recent past will not necessarily be what works in the present or the future; and (on the other) that we ought to hold before us a far greater variety of Christian approaches to politics than what we are lately used to. If we are truly entering a post-Christian period, we’re going to need all the help we can get. Some of that help, therefore, may turn out to come from the distant rather than the recent past. Some of it may look wholly unfamiliar to us. We cannot know in advance what may prove useful or apt to the moment. Everyone is agreed that no proposal is licit that contradicts the teaching or authority of Christ. Granting that criterion, the floor is wide open. The moment is unprecedented, the terrain uncertain. Only by hearing from everyone and taking into consideration what surprises or even confounds us can we move forward, together, into the unknown.