The new theological politics

Christianity as 'social glue' — and other fallacies

Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.”

—Matthew 4:8

It is a strange moment for Christianity in politics. We find the Church in one of its weakest moments in history: declining attendance; crises of leadership; and a world on an ever-quickening path towards secularisation. As I discussed in a previous article, in such an environment there is — understandably — a great reluctance among many serious Christians to do politics at all. Some will call for us to leave society behind, and flee to the hills; others, trying to protect the Church from the authorities, will want us to genuflect towards whatever left-wing causes we can theologically get away with. In short, there is a lot of appetite for political quietism in one form or another.

For it is not the frequent church attendees who are the loudest in calling for us to do more politics. Nor is it the left-wing ideologues who we always seem to want to woo by emphasising the Church’s environmentalism and concern for the poor. In fact, the call for the Church to do more politics (or at least more culture) has primarily come from outside of the Church — for instance, from figures like Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson, neither of whom are Christian.

As most readers will be aware, there is an increasingly mainstream political argument, often drawing (mostly unknowingly) upon Eric Voegelin and (more consciously) upon Curtis Yarvin, but now found in even the most milquetoast of anti-Woke ‘thinkpieces’ and ‘longreads’; namely, that leftism is itself a kind of strange pseudo-religion (or, in Yarvin’s case, simply a religion). And while some — not having moved on from the heady days of Quillette circa 2017 — will leave the analysis there, or argue that the antidote is even more secularisation, those who are more attuned to current political fashions will conclude that the best way to counter leftism, a pseudo-religion, is to bring Christianity, a real religion, back in. This is not necessarily because they themselves are believers in God — that is entirely optional, not least because many of these authors personally profess to be agnostics or atheists — but rather because we need Christianity, whether it is true or not, to act as a bulwark; to protect us from even worse things than Christianity.

The general response to this in the evangelical world is one of hope, but also of concern. Increasingly, I am having conversations with apolitical people — who have no idea where I am politically — about what impact this is going to have on the Church. While it is great to see people who would never have considered Christianity without listening to Peterson, and to see Christians more politically engaged, it is always worrying to come across people who are excessively preoccupied with ‘aesthetics’. Equally, almost everyone I have met who becomes interested in Christianity via post-liberalism — including myself at one time — ends up drifting away from their faith (although they might not readily admit to this). Worse still, you also sometimes see solid evangelicals get interested in some thinker like Scruton, and sure enough, they become less and less interested in Christ, and more and more interested in attacking things they perceive as ‘ugly’. Slowly, they become alienated from their churches because they are (supposedly) not doing enough to fight the Woke and save Western civilisation; eventually, instead of serving their local church, they decide their political activism suffices as their work for the gospel.

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What do I mean when I talk about the ‘new theological politics’? In my view, there are three main categories: the traditionalists, the post-liberals, and the civilisationists.

Let us start with the first, the traditionalists. At Pimlico Journal, I am probably preaching to the choir, but I am not sure even they believe the things they say; often, it seems as though their proposals are delivered with a kind of sly smirk, as if to say, ‘Look how far I am willing to go.’ But when asked to justify their position, we are often left with nothing more than the vaguest of references to scripture and tradition, along with some (entirely predictable) snide remarks about the current state of affairs. While I do not like to call into question someone’s faith — a deeply personal matter — it seems difficult to deny that often, the result is a faith that is shaped almost entirely by contemporary political concerns. See how they will almost without exception run to the most reactionary devotions and liturgies that are available. While they will usually provide a Christian fig-leaf in order to justify their preferences, it seems clear that their real motivation is often an attempt to somehow cleanse what remains of the contemporary within them; exchanging the glory of God for the ashes of a naïve rejection of modernity.

As much as there can be useful debate about what the ideal society looks like, what cannot be denied is that this approach leaves much to be desired when it comes to guiding practical political action. In the more unsophisticated variants of this traditionalism, the traditionalist resorts to theology, which almost always ends up revolving around doing things that the traditionalist wanted to do anyway. For example, if we all have twenty children, women will quickly realise how much actually they liked being in the kitchen.

But some of the more sophisticated programmes are in fact even more pernicious from the Christian perspective. This is especially true when the political programme is about evangelising, or about restoring old liturgies. This seems acceptable until we realise that this makes evangelism the mere means of achieving a greater political end, and reduces the liturgy to a magical act that makes the crops grow. Let me be clear: I do not want to attack anyone whose faith is blessed and strengthened by traditional expressions of Christianity; I merely want to draw attention to how faith can actually be destroyed by politicisation.

The second in our list are the explicitly Christian (or at least religious) variants of post-liberalism. Now, as we all know, ‘post-liberalism’ is ill-defined, encompassing such a broad group of people that it seems to make the term almost meaningless. Much like with the traditionalists, theology is typically used by Christian post-liberals to legitimise a political project that they wanted to pursue anyway: namely, a port-sodden, overemotional communitarianism, justified by vague references to scripture, and held together by using Christianity as ‘social glue’. Obviously, the argument for communitarianism could be made without Christianity — but then you would just sound stupid, like any other left-winger. I am fairly sure that no environmentalist is in dire need of Green Thomism to think about how we should approach environmental policy, and nor would many people pretend that they are. So why do we pretend that communitarianism requires us to talk about Christianity?

Once we ignore this theologising, all we are left with is a repugnant romanticisation of parish life. These people imagine themselves to be the successors to The Inklings, fantasising about going to church and following it up with a pint of real ale. However pleasant such a Sunday might be, this is a vision of church life which reduces it to an extension of the local pub. Anglicanism is absorbed into the village, and lost within it. Christianity becomes about living a comfortable life within your means — because, as we all know, Jesus Christ eventually settled down and had a family. The retort will be that they aren’t just absorbing Anglicanism into village life; rather, they are trying to re-enchant that life. But I find that all this is really saying is, ‘I will commit to living a comfortable life, and when bored or frustrated will amuse myself with fantasies that I am living in an enchanted world.’ With Christianity in a difficult place, this tells people that instead of going to the frontlines, we should go and hide in our room, imagining we are Cranmer’s successor.

This explains why, despite their superficial radicalism, we have seen few serious policy proposals from the post-liberals. They are quite happy to be provocative in their academic work, but this is applied in the most milquetoast and dull way possible. You would expect something a bit more interesting from people arguing root-and-branch against secularism, but it never gets translated into actual action because that would just be too uncomfortable for them personally.

But the most prominent and mainstream example of the new theological politics could be described as the demand to restore not Christian faith, but Christian civilisation; let us call them ‘civilisationists’. Tom Holland has argued that because Christianity is ultimately the wellspring of all our values, it must be defended. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, after years of militant atheism, has had what (at least outwardly) seems to be a sincere conversion to Christianity; however, her initial article on the subject of Christianity contained very little about truth, and much about how we need God as a tool to defeat Putin, Islam, and the Woke. Christians will often find themselves very frustrated with Jordan Peterson: Peterson, while well-informed about the text of scripture (leaving aside for now just how esoteric, if not downright bizarre, some of his readings of it are), does not seem to understand the very basic statement of Christ that, ‘You are either for us or against us, whoever denies me on Earth I will deny before my Father in Heaven.’

From the Christian perspective, the kindest possible reading of this ‘civilisationalist’ approach would be that the (real or perceived) practical utility of Christianity, whether political or cultural, points to its probable truth. A less kind — but probably more accurate — reading would be that the truth of Christianity is of little importance to these people; all that matters is that Christianity, regardless of whether it is true or untrue, could be a useful tool for achieving certain secular ends. Obviously, this should be unacceptable to any serious Christian.

One example of this attitude in action was when Peterson attempted to befriend Muslims in order to establish some kind of Abrahamic alliance. This fell apart when the Muslims — to their credit — actually stood up for their belief in the truth of their faith. All that remains, therefore, is a strange alliance of Christians and Jews; ‘Judeo-Christians’. Even more dubiously, Vivek Ramaswamy has argued that he could also be grafted onto this alliance, on the basis that his Hinduism was somehow inherently ‘monotheistic’.

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In all of the different approaches to theological politics outlined above, we can see similar problems emerging.

The first is the use of Christianity to reject any serious engagement with the most immediate and pressing of political issues. What underlies this is the true, but often misapplied idea that the theological underlies the ultimate reality. What many people will assume from this is that by becoming masters of the theological, they will also become masters of things far outside of the immediate realm of theology, including politics, and even rather technical, practical aspects of politics. From here, the theological takes on a role of gnostic hidden knowledge, where the true world is now a lie and governed by secret forces outside of it.

The result of such a logic is delightful for theologians: all we need to do if we want to engage with the world properly is to become great theologians; in this view, theology becomes the only thing worth studying. Of course, the irony is that any great theologian is forced into a position of humility by the mysteries of the faith. Yet more and more, we are seeing amateurish theologians with a cursory knowledge of some systematic theology jump straight to doing political theology. Further, once disabused of the world, we can argue for basically any position, provided that we are clever enough theologians; we can then dismiss any disagreement as coming from nothing more than theological ineptitude.

What results is a politics that excessively values a personal conception of the good, but with this — in fact personal — conception masquerading as a deep understanding of the Christian tradition. But this clearly goes against Christian tradition: St Thomas Aquinas had great respect for the use of reason in moral thought, and consequently also in political thought. Martin Luther is also very clear on this issue, using the two greatest commandments — to love God, and to love one’s neighbour — to define two types of righteousness: before God, and before one another. While Paul the Apostle was indeed correct when he writes that the Gospel is foolishness to the unbeliever, in Luther’s thought this pertains to our righteousness before God, and not towards our neighbour. Thus, we should not allow the incomprehensibility of God and the mystery of the Gospel to allow for lacklustre moral and political thought. Such reflections ought to disabuse ourselves from thinking in overly theological terms about politics, as theology does not govern and override the on-the-ground reality of politics. Or, to put it bluntly, we cannot wield theology like a magic spell that makes our politics functional.

However, there is a deeper issue at play. At its root, it is often idolatrous, crushing the mysteries of the faith into a theology textbook, or — worse still — a personal hunch. God shapes the good, to understand goodness is to understand God, and to assert our own personal conceptions of goodness is to exchange the truth of God for a lie. Consider the traditionalist whose ideal is for everyone to have twenty children and work on a farm with his ever-loving wife looking after him and home-schooling his children: does he worship God, or his wife? Or the man who wants to recover Christian civilisation: does he love Christ, or Christendom?

The second problem is that, by coming to Christianity from the perspective of the political, we treat the Church as something that is judged from the outside. Now, of course, this is somewhat unavoidable: whenever someone makes the decision to become Christian or to join a specific church, we are using our own judgement, which by necessity comes from outside the Church. However, there is a more specific, and more fundamental problem that arises: the idea that a church can only be understood with reference to the current political situation. This may seem contradictory, given some of what I have said above, but in fact what the new theological politics promotes is politicisation, but without any serious involvement in actual politics.

We see this again and again in the ways that church is described by various political actors: for example, cosy communitarians argue that the decline of the church is destroying communities, as with the church goes their focal point. Here, the church is understood to be a social club for old ladies to share baked goods, or something that exists so that pensioners don’t get lonely in the winter. Or consider how for many left-wing Christians, the church is merely a base of operations with a group of volunteers to go and serve local homeless people. Or, to give a right-wing example, the church becomes a hive of ‘tradition’ where strange rites can be performed. The problem is that the church is treated as a means, rather than an end; a mere tool in something bigger. One of G.K. Chesterton’s great metaphors is that of a man who only ever sees a church from the outside. From this perspective, it looks like a building much like any other. However, once inside the church, with the stained glass illuminated, everything makes sense. When we judge the church from the outside, we lose the mysteries within and allow it to become just another building; just another institution in a wider political project.

Consider, for instance, what will happen to the church if Woke is totally defeated. Perhaps there will be an initial pat on the back from everyone for the part we played — but then, back to normal? We have beaten the threat to Western civilisation — now what? When the political situation changes, people will once again feel like Christianity is not necessary. This is what happens when we forget the mission of the Church: the care for souls.

Perhaps most perniciously, when we investigate the work of Jordan Peterson (and indeed, many other scholars of comparative religion), we can see the way in which he uses evolution to justify the study of the Bible: that is to say, for Peterson, the Bible is worth studying because it is a text that has not only survived, but has remained in widespread use for centuries; therefore, the lessons within it must somehow correlate with evolutionary fitness. This was a sentiment that was clearly not held by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: the call of Christ is a call to die. There can be no Christianity without resurrection, and it is not obvious to say the least how a belief in resurrection (at least of the Christian type) is good for building a great civilisation. Further, consider that Peterson’s criteria could easily be fulfilled by other religious traditions — most obviously Judaism. It should be clear enough to any Christian that you cannot just take Christ out of the faith. But consider what a purely politically-orientated Christianity requires: maybe there is a point to having some believers, some rituals, and some mechanism for instilling certain moral values; but there is no actual need for Christ, salvation, or redemption.

At its heart, Christianity is about the transformation of each and every individual; that by growing in faith and virtue, we are able to comprehend the mysteries of the faith; that the Holy Spirit joins with our spirits so that we can comprehend spiritual truths. I think it is telling that much of this movement is either coming from outside of the Church or from people who are not in good standing in their church. Those of us who go to church can think of many saintly people whom we aspire to be like: were any of these people spending most of their time shouting about ‘Woke moralists’? Or, dare I say, look to Christ himself.

Of course, I think it would be wrong to completely depoliticise the Gospels. And yet, I think it is obvious that few of those closest to our Lord would have expected Christianity to have any need for a deep engagement in politics, let alone to have expected Christianity to become inextricably linked to it. The devil offered Christ the greatest political victory that could ever be imagined, and yet it was denied — for what does it profit a man, or indeed a civilisation, if he gains the world but loses his soul?

The third and final problem is the appropriation of the mission of the church. I am sometimes asked by people on the Right why there are no evangelicals fighting the culture wars in this country. This, of course, is somewhat nonsensical: equally, I could ask why there are no right-wingers preaching the gospel on the streets of London. These are separate missions: the church does not exist to serve your political ends. That I agree with most of your political ends does not change this basic fact.

Even the rituals of the church are being taken over and used for a different mission to the one intended. The purpose of the church service is to receive the word of God and to receive the sacraments. It isn’t to signal your distance from secularists and liberals. For example, consider the classic attack on evangelicals: that we have a rock concert and a TED Talk, and besides the personal faith of church members, little else. While this is not a wholly unmerited critique, the real metric to judge a church is not aesthetics, or whether it makes us feel ‘trad’ and ‘based’ for ‘revolting against the modern world’, but rather whether people’s hearts are being lifted to the Lord; whether people are being strengthened and growing in their faith. Let me be clear: I am not personally a fan of many evangelical worship practices, and there is room for legitimate disagreement on the theological level. However, when thinking politically, often the only way a Church service is judged is aesthetically — whether or not it helps change the culture, not whether or not it changes hearts.

The net result of all of this is just poor catechesis. Rather than being formed by the Church, political Christians are instructed in every aspect of their faith by politics. And yet, paradoxically, they are simultaneously pushed away from engagement in the most immediate, practical level, instead vaguely hoping for some total transformation of our culture in their favour; all other political activities are rendered pointless. In some sense, it is the worst of both worlds: it is bad Christianity, but is also bad politics.

However, I recognise that behind a lot of this is a genuine desire to both be good Christians and to help change the Western world for the better. To avoid being purely critical, and not constructive, I have two main suggestions for these people. Firstly, go to church and participate. The very least we should be expecting from Christian leaders in the sphere of the political is that they go to church and are in good standing there. From this, we will be able to have a Christian politics that is not simply politics with Christian branding, but a Christian politics that is Christian because it is full of genuine, informed, and thinking Christians, catechised by the Church and continually informed by the grace of God. Not a politics that is Christian because we have kneaded theology into it, but because of the Christians who are in it. Secondly, stop being theologians. Obviously, I say this somewhat in jest, but half of us spend most our time thinking about theology and philosophy. However, in reality, we are in need of Christians who can understand the problems around immigration, or the Civil Service, or any of the other pathologies of modern British society, and can seriously engage with them.

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Image credits: Elekes Andor, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

This article was written by an anonymous Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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