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My latest: on Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels, in Hedgehog Review
Link to and except from my latest essay: a reflection on the politics of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels in The Hedgehog Review.
I’m in the latest issue of The Hedgehog Review with an essay called “Beating Slow Horses.” It’s about Mick Herron’s spy novels, which have been adapted for TV on AppleTV+. Here’s how the essay opens:
The conceit at the heart of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels is simple. There is a house in London for misfit spies. When MI5 is unable, for one reason or another, to fire failed employees, it opts to send them there. The exile is permanent, though the losers who suffer it do their best to pretend it isn’t. It’s a win-win for the service, in any case. No one gets sued. HR is pacified. And banishment proves either so unbearably dull and humiliating that the misfit spies voluntarily quit, or they remain there forever, whiling away the hours without hope of redemption. It is said of the souls in Dante’s purgatorio that the unhappiest are happier than the happiest on earth. Conversely, the happiest in Herron’s inferno are unhappier than the unhappiest outside its walls.
After all, there is no garden atop this mount and certainly no Virgil or Beatrice. Only a hulking demon, pitchfork in hand, keeping the drudges circling beneath him. The paradiso of Regent’s Park is lost forever. Only after some time does it dawn on the damned that their perpetual expulsion means they’re in hell.
Hell’s name is Slough House.
Unfortunately, the essay is paywalled at present. I imagine it’ll unlock here in the next few weeks. All the more reason to subscribe to a wonderful magazine!
Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline
Reflections on the appeal of Catholicism rather than Protestantism to public intellectuals as well as the possibility of a new conservative Protestant mainline in America.
Why do people convert to Christianity? Why do intellectuals and other public figures convert so often to Catholicism (or Eastern Orthodoxy) and so rarely to Protestantism? And what is the fate of both Catholicism and Protestantism among American elites and their institutions, given the decimation of the liberal mainline? Could a new mainline arise to take its place, and if so, who would it be and what would it look like?
Dozens of writers have taken up these questions in recent weeks, some (not all) prompted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion and her written explanation for it. Here’s Douthat and Freddie and Tyler Cowen and Alan Jacobs (and Alan again). Here’s Justin Smith-Ruiu. Here are two reflections about why Catholicism instead of Protestantism. And here is a series of pieces by Jake Meador on both the “new mainline” question and the “why Catholicism” question—with a useful corrective by Onsi Kamel.
I’ve got some belated thoughts; in my mind they connect to all of the above.
It’s worth making clear at the outset that countless people defect annually from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, whether into unbelief or into some Protestant sect. So the question isn’t about who’s winning or which group people in general prefer or comparing overall numbers. The question is about public figures and intellectuals and their conversions, as adults, from unbelief to faith. Why does that type of person always seem to be joining “catholic” traditions (defined, for now, as Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and perhaps also the Anglican Communion)?
Summed up in a single sentence, the reason as I see it is that Catholicism is a living tradition embodied in a global institution that stretches back millennia, claims divine authority, and contains both a storehouse of intellectual resources and a panoply of powerful devotional and liturgical practices. Let’s unpack that.
Catholicism is a world. Protestantism is not. Protestantism is not anything particular at all. It’s an umbrella or genus term that encompasses numerous unconnected or at best half-related Christian traditions, the oldest of which goes back five hundred years and the newest of which is barely older than a generation. There are not “Protestants,” somewhere out there. No ordinary layperson says, “I’m Protestant.” What he or she says is, “I’m Presbyterian” or “I’m Methodist” or “I’m Pentecostal” or “I’m Evangelical” or “I’m Lutheran” or “I’m Church of Christ” or “I’m Moravian” or “I’m Calvinist” or “I’m Baptist” or some other name. And the thing about midlife conversions on the part of public intellectuals is that they aren’t looking for a sub-culture. They’re looking for a moral and spiritual universe. They don’t want a branch of the tree; they want the tree itself—the trunk, the very root. “Protestantism” makes no exclusive claims to be the trunk as such. Its trunkness is never even in view. The question, therefore, is almost always whether Catholicism East or West is, properly speaking, the Christian trunk. Folks already in the West typically, though far from always, opt for the West’s claim of primacy.
Note well that this observation isn’t per se a critique of Protestants or a presumption against them. The fundamental feature of Protestantism is an ecumenical evangelicalism in the strict sense: a Christian whole created and sustained and defined by nothing else than the gospel itself. So that second-order sub-gospel confessional identities are subsumed in and comprehended by God’s singular work in Christ, which is the sovereign word proclaimed by the good news. In this way, according to Protestants, any and all attempts to be, or searches to find, “the trunk” is a distortion of true catholicity.
Be that as it may, the catholicity of Catholicism tends to be what wayward, agnostic, restless public intellectuals are after. And so they find it elsewhere than in Protestantism.
There is a reason why so many evangelical and Protestant graduate students in theology move toward “higher church” traditions. Intellectually, they discover thinkers and writings their own “lower church” traditions either ignore or lack; liturgically, they discover practices handed down century after century that function like a lifeline in a storm. Reading Saint Ignatius or Saint Justin or Saint Irenaeus or Saint Augustine, it occurs to them that they don’t have to imagine what the church’s ancient liturgy looked and felt like; they can simply visit a church down the street.
Speaking only anecdotally, I have never known students of Christian theology to move “down” the ecclesial ladder. I have only known them (a) to move “up,” (b) to move “left,” or (c) to move “out.” That is, relative to where they started, they go catholic, they go liberal, or they go away, leaving the faith behind. This remains true even of those who do not shift from one tradition or denomination to another: Baptists start reading Aquinas, evangelicals start celebrating Ash Wednesday, non-denom-ers start reciting the Creed. Or, if the move is lateral instead of vertical, one retains inherited beliefs and practices but changes on moral and social questions. Either way, “down” is not an option in practice.
Once again this fact, or observation, need not mean anything in itself. The populist or evangelical criticism might well be apt: Theological education places obstacles between students and the plain gospel. A student of theology “classes up,” thereby rendered unable to join “lower” classes in the purity of normal believers’ unadorned worship. Perhaps, then, this is an argument against the sort of theological education dominant today!
All this applies, mutatis mutandis, to public intellectuals. Put another way, suppose you are an atheist or agnostic exposed, over time, to the desert fathers, or to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, or to Saint Maximus Confessor or Saint John of Damascus, or to Benedictine monks, or to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, or to Julian of Norwich, or to Saint Francis or Saint Bernard or Saint Anselm. It would simply never occur to you that what you find in these authors is what you’d find in the Methodist congregation on the corner, or the Baptist church around the block, or the non-denom start-up across town. Not only do the devotional and liturgical, spiritual and theological worlds conjured by these writers and texts not exist in such spaces. The traditions themselves do not claim the figures in question. You go, therefore, to the people and the places who are bold enough to say, “Those names are our names; those saints are our saints; those books are our books. We nurture and preserve and pass them on. Come learn them from us; indeed, come learn from us what they learned themselves, in their own time.”
In sum: What intellectuals, especially agnostic intellectuals in midlife, are restlessly searching for is something not man-made, but divine; not provisional, but final; not a question, but an answer. They are looking for rest, however penultimate in this life, not more open-ended restlessness. Something that lasts. Something that can plausibly make a claim both to antiquity and to permanency. A bulwark that will not fail. Something to defer to, submit to, bow one’s head in surrender to; something to embrace and be embraced by: a teacher but also a mother. And the truth is that Rome plausibly presents itself as both mater et magistra, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Orthodoxy does as well. The plausibility explains why so many intellectuals find port of harbor with each of them. The reverse, in turn, explains why so few of those sorts of people convert from rudderless adult atheism to Protestantism with a capital-p.
As for motives, if what I’ve outlined so far is true, then it makes perfect emotional sense for restless brainy seekers whose spiritual midlife crisis is prompted by perceived civilizational decline, torpor, and decadence to turn to catholic Christianity, East or West, as a haven in a heartless, spiritless, lifeless world. They aren’t making a category error, nor are they (necessarily) joining the church in a merely instrumental sense. For all we know, their search for capital-t Truth in a culture that refuses the concept altogether may be wise rather than self-serving. As Alan remarked, “what matters is not where you start but where you end up.” Doubtless there are people who join Christianity as a cultural project; must they remain there forever? I see no reason why we must, as a matter of necessity, say yes, for all people, always, in every circumstance. No adult is baptized without a confession of faith; if a new convert makes an honest confession and receives the grace of Christ’s saving waters, then he or she is a new creation, God’s own child, whatever the mixed motives involved. To say this isn’t to worship the God-shaped hole in our hearts instead of God himself. It’s to acknowledge, from the side of faith, that the hole is real. Because the hole is real, different people will find themselves knocking on Christ’s door—which is to say, on the doors of the church—for every manner of reason in every manner of situation. What Christ promises is that, to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. He does not lay down conditions for what counts as a good reason for knocking. Nor should we.
See here the opening paragraph of Christian Wiman’s new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (from entry 1, page 5):
Thirty years ago, watching some television report about depression and religion—I forget the relationship but apparently there was one—a friend who was entirely secular asked me with genuine curiosity and concern: “Why do they believe in something that doesn’t make them happy?” I was an ambivalent atheist at that point, beset with an inchoate loneliness and endless anxieties, contemptuous of Christianity but addicted to its aspirations and art. I was also chained fast to the rock of poetry, having my liver pecked out by the bird of a harrowing and apparently absurd ambition—and thus had some sense of what to say. One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.”Now: Given this apparent movement among once-secular intellectuals toward faith, or at least a renewed openness toward the claims of faith, what about a parallel movement toward a kind of Christian establishment—and in America, a “new Protestant mainline”? Any answer here is always subject to the ironies of divine providence. Christ’s promise to Saint Peter stands, which means that the forces arrayed against Christ’s body will never finally succeed. That doesn’t mean all or even any of our local or parochial ecclesial projects will succeed. But some of them might, against the odds. That’s God’s business, though, not ours. For now, then, some earthbound comments and fallible predictions.
I can’t speak to the situation in Europe or Great Britain, though my two cents, for what little it’s worth, is that we will not be seeing anything like a renaissance of established religion among elites and their institutions in our or our children’s lifetimes. In the U.S., I likewise think anything like a renewed liberal mainline is impossible. The once-dominant mainline—mainly comprising Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists—is on life support where it isn’t already dead and buried. As a coherent civic bloc, much less a motive force among elites, it is undeniably a thing of the past. I take that as read.
So the only viable question in the American context, if there were ever to be a “new” mainline, is whether it would be Catholic, magisterial Protestant, or evangelical. There was a moment, as many others have written, when American Catholicism was in process of making a bid to function like a new mainline. That period runs basically from the birth of Richard John Neuhaus in 1936 (the height of the Great Depression, the end of FDR’s first term, with World War II imminent) to his passing in 2009 (Bush in disgrace, Obama triumphant, the Great Recession, in the sixth year of the Iraq War). Catholics were well represented in elite universities, in think tanks, in D.C., in presidential administrations, in magazines that fed and fueled all of the above. But between the priest sex abuse scandals, Iraq, the divisiveness of abortion, and rolling political losses on social issues (above all gay marriage), the dream of an American Catholic Mainline proved not to be.
As for conservative Protestants and evangelicals, the former lack in numbers what the latter lack in everything else. Here’s what I mean. A genuine mainline or unofficially established church has to possess the following features: (a) so many millions of adherents that they’re “just there,” since some of them are invariably “around,” no matter one’s context; (b) powerful centralized institutions; (c) an internal logic that drives its laypeople to seek and acquire powerful roles in elite institutional contexts; (d) a strong emphasis on education in law, politics, and the liberal arts and their various expressions in careers and professions; (e) an investment in and sense of responsibility for the governing order, both its status quo and its ongoing reform; (f) a suspicion of populism and a rejection of revolution; (g) a taste for prestige, a desire for excellence, and an affinity for establishment; (h) wealth; (i) the ears of cultural and political elites; (j) networks of institutions, churches, and neighborhoods filled with civic-minded laypeople who can reliably be organized as a voting bloc or interest group; (k) groups of credentialed intellectuals who participate at the highest levels of their respective disciplines, whether religious or secular; (l) a loose but real shared moral and theological orthodoxy that is relatively stable and common across class and educational lines; (m) an ecclesial and spiritual culture of thick religious identity alongside popular tacit membership, such that not only “committed believers” but mediocre Christians and even finger-crossing public figures can say, with a straight face, that they are members in good standing of said established tradition.
If even part of my (surely incomplete) list here is accurate, it should be self-evident why neither evangelicals nor conservative Protestants could possibly compose a new American mainline. It’s hard to put into words just how tiny “traditional” or “orthodox” magisterial Protestantism is in the U.S. It would be unkind but not unfair to call it a rump. Its size has been demolished by a quadruple defection over the past three generations: to secularism, to liberalism, to evangelicalism, to Rome. It’s arguable whether there ever even was any meaningful presence of magisterial Protestantism in America of the sort one could find in Europe. The four-headed monster just mentioned is a ravenous beast, and old-school Lutherans and Wesleyans and Reformed have been the victims. You need numbers to have power, not to mention institutions and prestige, and the numbers just aren’t there; nor is there a path to reaching them. It’s not in the cards.
Evangelicals still have the numbers, even if they’re waning, but as I said before, they lack just about everything else: the institutionalism, the intellectualism, the elite ethos, the prestige and excellence, the allergy to populism—nearly all of it. Evangelicalism is Protestant populism. This is why evangelicals who enter elite spaces slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, lose the identifying marks of evangelicalism. It isn’t strange to learn that Prestigious Scholar X on the law/econ/poli-sci faculty at Ivy League School Y is Roman Catholic. It is a bit of a surprise to learn that he’s an evangelical. The moment you hear it, though, you wonder (or ask) whether he’s an evangelical Anglican or some such. Consider high-rank Protestant universities with large evangelical faculties, like Wheaton or Baylor or George Fox. Ask the religion, theology, and humanities professors where they go to church. Chances are it’s an Anglican parish. Chances are that not a few of them, if they left, or if the university permits it, have transitioned from evangelical to Anglican to Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. This is just the way of things in higher-ed as well as other elite institutions.
Here’s one way to think about it. An evangelical who climbs the elite ladder is more or less required, by the nature of the case, to shed vital elements of her evangelical identity. But a Catholic is not. And a Catholic is not for the same reason that, once upon a time, a liberal Protestant was not. A high-church Episcopalian wasn’t working against the grain by earning a law degree from Princeton or Yale a century ago. That’s what Episcopalians do. It’s what Episcopalianism is. Moreover, if said Episcopalian began as a wide-eyed conservative and ended a enlightened liberal, he would remain Episcopalian the whole time. There’d be no need to leave for some other tradition; the tradition encompassed both identities, indeed encouraged passage from one to the other. Whereas an evangelical who becomes liberal becomes a self-contradiction. A liberal evangelical is an oxymoron. He lacks any reason to exist. Evangelicalism isn’t liberal, in any sense. It is axiomatically and essentially illiberal. To become liberal, therefore, is to cease to be evangelical. That’s not what evangelicalism is for. Evangelicals who become liberal remain evangelical only for a time; they eventually exit faith, or swim the Tiber, or become actual liberal Protestants, where they feel right at home. Which means, for the purposes of this discussion, that every single time evangelicals send their best and brightest to elite institutions to be “faithfully present” there, only for them to become liberal in the process, evangelicalism loses one of its own. The same goes, obviously, for a rising-star evangelical who loses faith or becomes Catholic or Orthodox.
The other thing to note is that the “moral” part of “moral and theological orthodoxy” is absolutely up for grabs right now, in every single Christian tradition and denomination in America. No church has successfully avoided being roiled and split in two by arguments over gender and sexuality. Nor is there some happy middle ground where everybody agrees to disagree. One or another normative view is going to win out, in each and every local community and global communion. We just don’t know, at this point in time, where the cards are going to fall. In that light, any ambition for conservative Protestants (or Catholics, for that matter) to form an established religious backdrop for elite cultural and political organs in America is a pipe dream, given what “conservative” means regarding sexual ethics. Whoever is still standing, Christianly speaking, at the end of this century, the wider culture is not going to welcome new overlords who oppose the legality of abortion, same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, and artificial contraception. I mean, come on. Most Protestants I know take for granted the legality (and usually the morality, too) of all but the first, and are politically ambivalent about the first as well. Protestants are in numerical decline anyway, a fact I’ve bracketed for these reflections. Put it all together, and the reasons why public intellectuals don’t convert to Protestantism are inseparable from, and sometimes identical to, the reasons why magisterial Protestantism is not poised to become a new American mainline. Do with that what you will.
Of boys and men
Four thoughts about Richard V. Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men.
I recently read Richard V. Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. The book and its many proposals have been discussed endlessly over the last year (some good essays and responses here), so I want to make just four comments.
The book is superb. I almost didn’t read it because I assumed the public conversation, along with the excerpts and Reeves’ own Substack, made the book itself redundant. I was wrong. It’s a model of public policy analysis and prescription made accessible to the general public. And Reeves’ willingness to step out and say things he knows he will be censured for is admirable. There’s also a quiet moral engine humming beneath the book’s hood that propels the more wonkish bits along, forming a single continuous analytical argument that’s equal parts lucid, provocative, and commonsensical.
Reeves constantly adverts to the old nostrum that “we can’t turn back the clock.” He trots out this maxim whenever he turns to his right (he’s constantly turning to his metaphorical right and left in order to stake out ground in the center), from which direction he hears the suggestion that if only we went back in time—say, to the 1950s—then the challenges facing the family today would be resolved. The first thing to say here is that there just aren’t that many people seriously suggesting this. The second thing to say is what Chesterton and Lewis said almost a century ago. And the third thing to say is this. It is a very odd thing, in a book about one of the most rapid, comprehensive, and unexpected social and political transformations in human history—namely, the entrance of women “out” of the home and “into” the workforce, as well as the various ways that men, once dominant, are now sliding into isolated, lonely, meandering, and unproductive lives—to insist that another transformation along those lines is quite literally impossible. Wouldn’t the same sort of author have said that in 1780 or 1870 or 1960? But then the impossible happened, and retrospectively it’s seen to have been possible all along. What one needs, instead of declarations of metaphysical impossibility, is a moral case for why “turning back the clock” ought not to occur, even if it were feasible. There are no laws of nature here. It’s not at all hard to conceive of conditions in the near, middle, or distant future that would conduce to a sort of revival of the Leave It To Beaver household. Reeves and others need to stop relying on the crutch of its supposed inconceivability and make the case instead for its undesirability (and not exclusively from their political vantage point, I might add).
On one hand, Reeves allows that, given real differences between the sexes, there will inevitably be reflections of those differences in the real world, for example in choice of professions, and that these differences are morally neutral. On the other hand, Reeves argues quite forcefully for public policy that would funnel boys and men into professions in which girls and women predominate, such as preschool daycare, early elementary teaching, nursing, and so on. My question here is not about his policy preferences or whether it would be good, say, for boys’ flourishing to have more Kindergarten teachers be men. My question is second-order. By what principle or criterion does Reeves decide which highly sex-differentiated professions ought to be leveled out by government and which ought not to be? How does one know, that is, when gender parity is desirable and when it is not? I’m stipulating that, given a particular profession, we have ruled out any injustice or coercion. Again, Reeves admits this; I’m not arguing against him here. My worry is that his honest answer is this: “just those professions that I, Reeves, believe should approximate greater gender parity (as opposed to those that I do not).” But what about people—women, men, or both—who don’t share Reeves’ view? It seems to me that he needs additional reasons to justify his interventions beyond the ones he gives (at most, that soft pressure to get men into “HEAL” professions would provide jobs for jobless men and/or benefit young boys without thereby disadvantaging young girls). If he doesn’t have such reasons, or a more general and widely shared principle of discrimination, then it becomes little more than personal preference, or perhaps a sort of intuitive Goldilocks rule.
This point leads to me to my last comment. Reading Reeves’ book solidified for me the truth of postliberal critiques of liberalism as a political philosophy. Namely, there is always a vision of the good operative in a given society, including liberal ones. What’s more, this liberal vision of the good takes precedence over democratic preferences. As evidence, consider that Reeves simply takes for granted that the vision of gender he is promoting is one that the liberal state exists to protect, promote, and advance via law and public policy. He does not believe this vision requires consent or advocacy on the part of voters; their views are quite beside the point. The government ought right now to be enacting policy that will lead to the world envisioned by Reeves’ book, which is to say, will employ both the soft and the hard power of the state to nudge society’s common life ever closer toward a particular normative vision of the common good. This is just what any state and its government exists to do, after all. It is not and could never be neutral, or feign to be. Yet the question never arises for Reeves whether the populace as a whole wants to live in his world. His argument doesn’t take democratic citizens into account. What he does is argue, morally and concretely, for what counts as the objective common good, and proposes what policy levers would create conditions for achieving it. In this he’s acting like every statesman, politician, minister, president, and monarch who has ever lived, at least those who took their duties seriously. In doing so, however, he gives the lie both to liberalism’s neutrality and to liberalism’s deference to democracy. That’s quite a thing. I don’t fault him for it. I appreciate his honesty. I wish everyone were so forthright. But I wish, too, that we could stop having conversations in which we pretend this isn’t the case—for everyone, for every society, of every kind, always, everywhere, and without exception.
I’m in Mere O on church and culture
My latest essay, “Once More, Church and Culture,” is in the new issue of Mere Orthodoxy.
I’ve got an essay in the latest issue of the print edition of Mere Orthodoxy, and Jake has just posted it online this morning. It’s titled “Once More, Church and Culture.” Here’s the opening paragraph:
Christendom is the name we give to Christian civilization, when society, culture, law, art, family, politics, and worship are saturated by the church’s influence and informed by its authority. Christendom traces its beginnings to the fourth century after Christ; it began to ebb, in fits and starts, sometime during the transition from the late middle ages to the early modern period. It is tempting to plot its demise with the American and French revolutions, though in truth it outlasted both in many places. It came to a more or less definitive end with the world wars (in Europe) and the Cold War (in America). Even those who lament Christendom’s passing and hope for its reestablishment have no doubt that the West is post-Christian in this sense. The West will always carry within it its Christian past — whether as a living wellspring, a lingering shadow, a haunting ghost, or an exorcised demon — but it is indisputable that whatever the West has become, it is not what it once was. Christendom is no more.
Re-reading what I’ve written there (drafted last summer, I think), I’m inclined to say the opening seven paragraphs make for some of my better writing. It’s a potted history of Christendom before and in America, and how it continues to haunt Protestant reflection about “church and culture.” Part two of the essay takes up H. Richard Niebuhr’s typology and James Davison Hunter’s “faithful presence.” Part three takes a stab at an alternative framework—but not one more single-label option that captures all contexts and circumstances. Read on to see more.
And once you’ve read it, go subscribe to the Mere O print magazine. It’s great!
Two further thoughts. First, some version of this essay has been rattling around in the back of my mind since January 2017, when I first taught a week-long intensive course called “Christianity and Culture.” I’ve taught it now every single January since. That’s seven total! Didn’t even miss for Covid. The texts have varied, but I’ve consistently had students read Hauerwas, Jenson, JDH (excerpts), JKAS (You Are What You Love), THW (Liturgy of the Ordinary), TIB (Strange Rites), Douthat (Bad Religion), Dreher (the old pre-book FAQ), Wilkinson/Joustra, Tisby, Cone, and Crouch. It always goes so well. And every Friday of the course, I conclude with, basically, what I’ve written in this essay: a set of typologies; a critique of them; and my own proposal. I’m grateful to Jake for letting me finally put it down in black and white.
Second, this essay has brought home to me how much this topic has dominated my thoughts, and therefore my writing, since I finished my dissertation six years ago. Specifically, the topic of the church in relation to society, which brings in its wake questions about Christendom, America, liberalism, and integralism, not to mention missiology, culture, technology, liturgy, and even anti-Judaism. Everything, in other words! For those who may be interested, here is an incomplete list of publications that bear on these matters and thus supplement this particular essay:
Theologians Were Arguing About the Benedict Options 35 Years Ago” Mere Orthodoxy | 13 March 2017
Public Theology in Retreat Los Angeles Review of Books | 20 September 2017
Holy Ambivalence Los Angeles Review of Books | 1 March 2018
The Church and the Common Good Comment | 17 January 2019
The Specter of Marcion Commonweal | 13 February 2019
A Better Country Plough | 4 August 2019
Sacraments, Technology, and Streaming Worship in a Pandemic Mere Orthodoxy | 2 April 2020
The Circumcision of Abraham’s God First Things | 1 January 2021
When Losing Is Likely The Point | 18 June 2021
Market Apocalypse Mere Orthodoxy | 25 August 2021
Statistics as Storytelling The New Atlantis | 1 October 2021
Still Supersessionist? Commonweal | 29 October 2021
Jewish Jesus, Black Christ The Christian Century | 25 January 2022
Unlearning Machines Comment | 24 March 2022
Can We Be Human in Meatspace? The New Atlantis | 2 May 2022
Another Option for Christian Politics, Front Porch Republic | 4 July 2022
The Ruins of Christendom, Los Angeles Review of Books | 10 July 2022
The Church in the Immanent Frame First Things | 14 July 2022
The Bible in America (forthcoming in The Christian Century)
Beliefs of the post-Christian West
Early on in Mark Sayers’ 2016 book Disappearing Church he outlines, in the form of propositions, the social imaginary or set of presuppositions that suffuse and animate the contemporary post-Christian context in the West.
Early on in Mark Sayers’ 2016 book Disappearing Church he outlines, in the form of propositions, the social imaginary or set of presuppositions that suffuse and animate the contemporary post-Christian context in the West. Sayers is sophisticated; he doesn’t suppose that millions of people wake up in the morning, sign a form with these beliefs outlined in black and white, then go through their day consciously attempting to put them into practice. Rather, they form the tacit backdrop of our common life, the largely (though far from entirely) unquestioned and presumed fabric of society. It’s the water we swim in, the are we breathe. We are certainly able to recognize, articulate, revise, and/or reject them. But they’re there, in us, whether we like it or not.
Here they are:
1. The highest good is individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression.
2. Traditions, religions, received wisdom, regulations, and social ties that restrict individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression must be reshaped, deconstructed, or destroyed.
3. The world will inevitably improve as the scope of individual freedom grows. Technology—in particular the Internet—will motor this progression toward utopia.
4. The primary social ethic is tolerance of everyone’s self-defined quest for individual freedom and self-expression. Any deviation from this ethic of tolerance is dangerous and must not be tolerated. Therefore social justice is less about economic or class inequality, and more about issues of equality relating to individual identity, self-expression, and personal autonomy.
5. Humans are inherently good.
6. Large-scale structures and institutions are suspicious at best and evil at worst.
7. Forms of external authority are rejected and personal authenticity is lauded.
This seems basically right to me, with three amendments: (a) I would make the comment about technology its own separate thesis; (b) I would nix the faith in the internet and leave it more broadly as a comment about technology as such; (c) I would rewrite #6. The pervading spirit of the age is suspicion about structures and institutions, yet a sizable percentage of the population hopes not to abolish their sheer existence, but to seize, conquer, colonize, and control them from within. That’s violent language, to be sure, but the vision underlying the aim is sincere and, for its adherents, benign: if the institutions that guide and govern society are doing so poorly, then we ought to reform them (whether modestly or radically) so as to administer justice rather than injustice, righteousness rather than corruption, flourishing rather than oppression.
With those minor changes, I’d readily sign off on this list as a reliable description of the Zeitgeist. Nor are spheres of life defined by the contrary of this list immune to the beliefs it comprises. Churches imbibe and embody these views as much as and sometimes more than other institutions. This list’s name is Legion, and the exorcisms it calls forth are never a completed task but a daily necessity.
Having said all that, I do wonder to what extent the smoothness with which this list goes down as a diagnosis of our social context is a sign of living in an echo chamber—or at least, reading and writing among like-minded folks, especially Christians of a certain sort. Yet it seems to me that even secular (classical) liberals, non-religious folks, and members of the Left could and, in many cases, would and do agree with this list, granting that they might use different words or strike a different tone than Sayers (or, as the case may be, offer different solutions to the problems it presents). That’s the appeal, I think, of the work of scholars like Bellah, Berger, Lasch, MacIntyre, Taylor, Milbank, Stout, Casanova, Asad, Mahmood, Žižek, and so many others. Sayers is attempting to summarize, synthesize, and render in plain English, for a lay Christian audience, an account of what the church is facing in the West that is not merely, and preferably not at all, a defensive reaction from a newly embattled minority. (He’s writing from Australia, it’s worth noting.) Yet how would others respond to this list? What would they add? The book has me curious to know.
UPDATE: A friend writes to add a fourth amendment: Strike through “tolerance” in #4 and substitute “recognition.” Checks out.
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.
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.
The uses of conservatism
In the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks back Barton Swaim wrote a thoughtful review of two new books on political conservatism, one by Yoram Hazony and one by Matthew Continetti. The first is an argument for recovering what conservatism ought to be; the second, a history of what American conservatism has in fact been across the last century.
In the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks back Barton Swaim wrote a thoughtful review of two new books on political conservatism, one by Yoram Hazony and one by Matthew Continetti. The first is an argument for recovering what conservatism ought to be; the second, a history of what American conservatism has in fact been across the last century.
Swaim is appreciative of Hazony’s manifesto but is far more sympathetic to Continetti’s more pragmatic approach. Here are the two money paragraphs:
The essential thing to understand about American conservatism is that it is a minority persuasion, and always has been. Hence the term “the conservative movement”; nobody talks of a “liberal movement” in American politics, for the excellent reason that liberals dominated the universities, the media and the entertainment industry long before Bill Buckley thought to start a magazine. Mr. Continetti captures beautifully the ad hoc, rearguard nature of American conservatism. Not until the end of the book does he make explicit what becomes clearer as the narrative moves forward: “Over the course of the past century, conservatism has risen up to defend the essential moderation of the American political system against liberal excess. Conservatism has been there to save liberalism from weakness, woolly-headedness, and radicalism.”
American conservatism exists, if I could put it in my own words, to clean up the messes created by the country’s dominant class of liberal elites. The Reagan Revolution wasn’t a proper “revolution” at all but a series of conservative repairs, chief among them reforming a crippling tax code and revivifying the American economy. The great triumph of neoconservatism in the 1970s and ’80s was not the formulation of some original philosophy but the demonstration that liberal policies had ruined our cities. Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 and again in 1972 not by vowing to remake the world but by vowing to clean up the havoc created by Lyndon Johnson when he tried to remake Southeast Asia. George W. Bush would draw on a form of liberal idealism when he incorporated the democracy agenda into an otherwise defensible foreign policy—a rare instance of conservatives experimenting with big ideas, and look where it got them.
The three sentences in bold are, I think, the heart of Swaim’s point. Here’s my comment on his claim there.
At the descriptive level, I don’t doubt that it’s correct, if incomplete. At the normative level, however, it seems to me to prove, rather than confound, Hazony’s argument. For Hazony represents the conservative post-liberal critique of American conservatism, and that critique is this: American conservatism is a losing bet. It has no positive governing philosophy. It knows only what it stands against. Which is to say, the only word in its political vocabulary is “STOP!” (Along with, to be sure, Trilling’s “irritable mental gestures.”) Yet the truth is that it never stops anything. It merely delays the inevitable. In which case, American conservatism is good for nothing. For if progressives have a vision for what makes society good and that vision is irresistible, then it doesn’t matter whether that vision becomes reality today versus tomorrow. If all the conservative movement can do is make “tomorrow” more likely than “today,” might as well quit all the organizing and activism. Minor deferral isn’t much to write home about if you’re always going to lose eventually.
Besides, in the name of what exactly should such delay tactics be deployed? Surely there must be a positive vision grounding and informing such energetic protest? And if so, shouldn’t that be the philosophy—positive, not only negative; constructive, not only critical; explicit, not only implicit—the conservative movement rallies around, articulates, celebrates, and commends to the electorate?
Swaim is a prolific and insightful writer on these issues; not only does he have an answer to these questions, I’m sure he’s on the record somewhere. Nevertheless in this review there’s an odd mismatch between critique (of Hazony) and affirmation (of Continetti). If all the American conservative movement has got to offer is the pragmatism of the latter, then the philosophical reshuffling of the former is warranted—at least as a promissory note, in service of an ongoing intellectual project. That project is an imperfect and an unfinished one, but it’s far more interesting than the alternative. Whether we’re talking politics or ideas, we should always prefer the living to the walking dead.
Lightspeed politics
I’m just about finished listening to the audiobook version of Charles C. W. Cooke’s 2015 book The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future. Cooke is a writer and editor for National Review who leans libertarian. Like all his writing, the book is lucid, witty, substantive, and focused in earnest on what matters most. I’m not a libertarian, and I think Cooke is wrong in significant respects, but I regularly read him both for instruction and for pleasure—and, occasionally, to listen to the most eloquent representative of views I oppose.
I’m just about finished listening to the audiobook version of Charles C. W. Cooke’s 2015 book The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future. Cooke is a writer and editor for National Review who leans libertarian. Like all his writing, the book is lucid, witty, substantive, and focused in earnest on what matters most. I’m not a libertarian, and I think Cooke is wrong in significant respects, but I regularly read him both for instruction and for pleasure—and, occasionally, to listen to the most eloquent representative of views I oppose.
But I’m not here to talk about that. Rather, I want to share why listening to the book has caused me a fair bit of political whiplash. It was written around 2013 or so, at the height of Obama’s national unpopularity and the Tea Party’s ascendancy. Cooke adroitly saw a window for the proposal of a new vision for the GOP: fiscally conservative and socially liberal, with an emphasis on limited government and classical liberalism. And listening to him read the book, you can understand why that proposal appeared plausible at the time. And yet, in hindsight, nothing could have been less likely either for the GOP’s rank and file to get behind or for the GOP’s electoral prospects at the national level. Trump comes along just a few months after the book’s publication and torpedoes the whole project. More than that, the proverbial “quadrant” of fiscally conservative and socially liberal is the polar opposite of the most nationally popular but under-served voting bloc in America: socially conservative but fiscally liberal. Bracketing the merits of the proposal, at the level of strategy it is dead on arrival.
Elements of the book also capture, as though in amber, a moment in political time that seemed, then and there, to be perennial, even eternal, but was finished within mere months—or, at most, by the next election. One reference in particular, to Glenn Beck, reminded me of a similar moment in Ross Douthat’s otherwise outstanding book Bad Religion, published in 2012. There Douthat uses Beck to open the book’s eighth and final chapter, framing the argument that follows. Now, neither Douthat nor Cooke is especially enamored of Beck; they aren’t enlisting him in a joint cause. But they permit themselves somewhat spellbound rhetoric to describe the “phenomenon” of Beck and his “extraordinary” popularity “outside” the media “mainstream.”
That’s all fine and good. But does a serious (however popular) work of intellectual history really need central casting to call in a shock jock conspiracy theorist for the concluding discussion of (in this case) American nationalism? Both authors write about Beck the way all journalists did at the time: with a mixture of repulsion, admiration, and envy.
And yet, just as the libertarian moment vanished in a puff of smoke, so Beck’s ubiquity died away without anyone really noticing. He’s still out there—I checked so you don’t have to—but he’s no longer Part Of The Discourse. His time has passed. His presence in these two books, however, written around the same time, testifies to an important feature of our politics as well as how it is observed and chronicled by our journalists in real time.
That feature is this: Politics moves at the speed of light. But while you’re watching it, it seems somehow unchanging, even atemporal. The result of this combination is that nothing is so dated as the verities and common sense of a particular slice of political time, especially when it is caught and put into words immediately, illic et tunc.
For us today, who have lived through this radical, perhaps epochal, set of changes in only half a decade, this is a worthy reminder of two things. First: What seems fixed and permanent in politics in the moment is far more likely to be the opposite: wholly malleable and subject to rapid and profound variation. Second: Politically speaking, what appears impossible is probably anything but.
That said, it takes imagination to cast the truly transformative vision and to find the means of making it a reality. Preferably, though, the right imagination.
New essay: “Market Apocalypse” in Mere Orthodoxy
My latest is up at Mere Orthodoxy this morning. Titled “Market Apocalypse,” it’s a review essay of Rodney Clapp’s new book, Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. Here’s a taste:
My latest is up at Mere Orthodoxy this morning. Titled “Market Apocalypse,” it’s a review essay of Rodney Clapp’s new book, Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. Here’s a taste:
Clapp’s book is titled Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. But you might imagine it renamed, à la Patrick Deneen’s bestseller, Why Neoliberalism Failed. Like Deneen, Clapp wants to draw critical attention to what is hiding in plain sight. “What goes unnamed” in such circumstances “is the neoliberal framework that entraps us all.” Entrapment is the proper image for Clapp’s view: we are seduced and deceived by neoliberalism’s lure, but once we fall for the trick, we’re stuck. And the consequences are comprehensive: “Neoliberalism has transformed us — heart, body, and soul.”
Clapp is uninterested, however, in merely naming neoliberalism: many writers and scholars have already done that. He wants to name it as a Christian. That is, he wants to reveal neoliberalism for what it is in theological perspective, and to propose a specifically theological alternative. He thinks this task crucial because neoliberalism can be neither fully understood nor adequately opposed without reference to God, specifically the gospel of the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, and his people, the church.
Sorting nationalism and patriotism with John Lukacs
Now "nationalism" is back, not just as a historical-political force but as a terminological boundary marker. Unfortunately, though, its political associations as well as its function as a football in ideological disputes have contributed to something less than clarity. So that, e.g., to be nationalist is to be for "America first," or in less loaded terms, to be committed to one's fellow citizens and immediate neighbors in lieu of foreign adventurism and nation-building abroad. Or, e.g., to affirm that Christians can be nationalists means little more than that Christians can affirm the modern project of the nation-state, the regional boundaries within which such a state exists, and the groups and goods and cultural endeavors internal to that state. Or, e.g., even just to be happy in one's given national context and to be proud of its accomplishments and civic life.
That's quite the range. It seems to me that "patriotism" is a perfectly fine term for the last example. And the second-to-last example does not make one a nationalist in the prescriptive sense; it merely means that one accepts and/or approves of there being nations (of this sort) at all. It seems to me that "nationalism" should retain the stronger—not to say (yet) the inherently pejorative—terminological definition and concomitant evocations and allusions. Or else we're just going to be loose in our language and keep talking past one another.
There is no better thinker from whom to learn about nationalism defined in strict terms than John Lukacs, the Jewish-Catholic Hungarian-American immigrant and historian who died earlier this year at the age of 95. His 2005 book Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred is one of the crucial texts for understanding our moment. A helpful byproduct is lucidity regarding terms, their histories, and their political uses and connotations.
Let me close with a sample set of quotations on the topic of nationalism. I commend the book along with Lukacs's voluminous output to any and all who find themselves interested by this (pp. 35-36, 71-73; my bold print, for emphasis):
"Soon after 1870 there appeared something else: a phenomenon whose evidences, here and there, were there earlier, but the breadth and the substance and the character of which began to change. This was modern and populist nationalism. Yet 'nationalisme' and 'nationaliste' became French words only after 1880; in Britain, too, they had appeared not much earlier. The reason for this relatively late gestation of the nationalist word was that 'patriot' and 'patriotism' already existed; and, at least for a while, it seemed that the meaning of the latter was sufficient. When, a century earlier, Samuel Johnson uttered his famous (and perhaps forever valid) dictum that Patriotism Is The Last Refuge Of A Scoundrel, he meant nationalism, even though that word did not yet exist. One of the reasons why there exists no first-rate book about the history of nationalism is that it is not easy to separate it from old-fashioned patriotism. And these two inclinations, patriotism and nationalism, divergent as they may be, still often overlap in people's minds. (When, for example, Americans criticize a 'superpatriot,' what they really mean is an extreme nationalist.) Nonetheless, the very appearance of a new word is always evidence that some people sense the need to distinguish it from the older word's meaning: that a nationalist is someone different from a patriot.
"Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a 'people,' justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. Patriotism is old-fashioned (and, at times and in some places, aristocratic); nationalism is modern and populist. In one sense patriotic and national consciousness may be similar; but in another sense, more and more apparent after 1870, national consciousness began to affect more and more people who, generally, had been immune to that before—as, for example, many people within the multinational empire of Austria-Hungary. It went deeper than class consciousness. Here and there it superseded religious affiliations, too.
"After 1870 nationalism, almost always, turned antiliberal, especially where liberalism was no longer principally nationalist. ...
"The state was one of the creations of the Modern Age. Its powers grew; here and there, sooner or later, it became monstrously bureaucratic. Yet—and few people see this, very much including those who prattle about 'totalitarianism'—the power of the state has been weakening, at the same time the attraction of nationalism has not.
"Hitler knew that: I have, more than once, cited his sentence from Mein Kampf recalling his youth: 'I was a nationalist; but I was not a patriot.' Again it is telling that in Austria 'national' and 'nationalist' meant pro-German, and not only during the multinational Habsburg monarchy and state. Well before the Second World War an Austrian 'nationalist' wanted some kind of union with Germany, at the expense of an independent Austrian state. This was also true in such diverse places as Norway or Hungary or other states during the Second World War: 'national' and 'nationalist' often meant pro-German.
"Nationalism, rather than patriotism; the nation rather than the state; populism rather than liberal democracy, to be sure. We have examples of that even among the extremist groups in the United States, too, with their hatred of 'government'—that is, of the state. We have seen that while true patriotism is defensive, nationalism is aggressive; patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a 'people,' justifying everything, a political and ideological substitute for religion; both modern and populist. An aristocratic nationalism is an oxymoron, since at least after the late seventeenth century most European aristocracies were cosmopolitan as well as national. Democratic nationalism is a later phenomenon. For a while there was nothing very wrong with that. It won great revolutions and battles, it produced some fine examples of national cohesion. One hundred and fifty years ago a distinction between nationalism and patriotism would have been labored, it would have not made much sense. Even now nationalism and patriotism often overlap within the minds and hearts of many people. Yet we must be aware of their differences—because of the phenomenon of populism which, unlike old-fashioned patriotism, is inseparable from the myth of a people. Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and cosmopolitan (certainly culturally so). But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism is less racist than is populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from a community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years; but a populist will always be suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe.
"A patriot is not necessarily a conservative; he may even be a liberal—of sorts, though not an abstract one. In the twentieth century a nationalist could hardly be a liberal. The nineteenth century was full of liberal nationalists, some of them inspiring and noble figures. The accepted view is that liberalism faded and declined because of the appearance of socialism, that the liberals who originally had reservations about exaggerated democracy became democrats and then socialists, accepting the progressive ideas of state intervention in the economy, education, welfare. This is true but not true enough. It is nationalism, not socialism, that killed the liberal appeal. The ground slipped out from under the liberals not because they were not sufficiently socialist but because they were (or at least seemed to be) insufficiently nationalist.
"Since it appeals to tribal and racial bonds, nationalism seems to be deeply and atavistically natural and human. Yet the trouble with it is not only that nationalism can be antihumanist and often inhuman but that it also proceeds from one abstract assumption about human nature itself. The love for one's people is natural, but it is also categorical; it is less charitable and less deeply human than the love for one's country, a love that flows from traditions, at least akin to a love of one's family. Nationalism is both self-centered and selfish—because human love is not the love of oneself; it is the love of another. (A convinced nationalist is suspicious not only of people he sees as aliens; he may be even more suspicious of people of his own ilk and ready to denounce them as 'traitors'—that is, people who disagree with his nationalist beliefs.) Patriotism is always more than merely biological—because charitable love is human and not merely 'natural.' Nature has, and shows, no charity."
Just published: a review essay of Patrick Deneen and James K. A. Smith in the LA Review of Books
Rowan Williams on Jewish identity and religious freedom in liberal modernity
The real problem with political liberalism
"Rather, they claim that such a formal, procedural description masks the basic thrust of liberalism. Liberalism’s stated aim is to construct a society without substantive commitments, leaving everyone free to choose whatever his or her . . . own may be. Liberalism’s common good is to protect society from adopting any single vision of the common good. That’s a deviation from classical and traditional Christian politics (including Calvin’s), which sought to orchestrate common life toward a common end—the cultivation of virtue or the glory of God. In fact—and this is the other side of the critique—liberal societies do have substantive commitments. The liberal state pretends to be a referee, but beneath the striped shirt it wears the jersey of the home team. Under the cover of neutrality, liberal order embodies, encourages, and sometimes enforces an anthropology, ecclesiology, and vision of the good society that is often starkly at odds with Christian faith."
—Peter Leithart. Apart from whether his treatment of Tuininga's book is accurate or fair—seeing the name, I recall that he was a T.A. for one of my classes at Emory, working on the dissertation that became this book—Leithart's articulation of the actual substantive issues operative in a Christian critique of political liberalism is as succinct and clear as it gets.