On Christian Secularism: In Conversation with Jeff Ventrella

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Introduction

I am grateful that Jeffrey Ventrella took my response to him as friendly push back. He has now responded to me, and because these issues are really important, I would really like to continue the discussion. I would also like to keep it friendly because the armies of the Lord do not need to be conducting live fire exercises in the mess hall.

But I do need to set the stage first.

That Word Secular

The word secular has come to mean something in modern times that it did not mean centuries ago. Today it means godless, or without religion, and it makes folks think of an agnostic or atheistic humanism. But it used to refer to priests who were out in the world, serving the parishioners of a particular diocese., to be distinguished from the regular clergy—those who were set apart to a monastic life (one bound by rule, the Latin for which was regulus). Thus regular clergy were not the “ordinary guy” clergy, but rather were bound to the rule laid down by Benedict, or Francis, or some other worthy. And the secular clergy were not the atheistic ones, although if we look closely at the behavior of some of the Renaissance popes, we may discover that it was possible for atheism to appear in their ranks from time to time.

Our word secular comes from the Latin saeculum, and is the basis for the word for century in Romance languages like French or Italian. It referred a period that was roughly 100 years in length, and over time it came to refer to earthly or temporal concerns. Thus a secular priest was out in the village helping people sort out the mundane pastoral implications surrounding a stolen mule, while the monks in their prayer cells had their minds fixed on things above. This is not to say that the secular clergy never prayed, or that the monks never brewed beer. But their job descriptions did differ enough to affect the language, and thus secular concerns became ordinary day-to-day concerns. A bunch of this goes back to the 12th century and earlier.

Now a lot of our contemporary confusion is the result of the fact that unbelievers managed to get Christ out of numerous settings in the secular world . . . out of the market, out of the public square, out of the workshop, out of the schools, and so on. And so, by degrees, secular came to mean godless. There is the realm of church and personal devotion over here in the sanctuary, and then there is the realm of functional atheism, everywhere else, out there.

Now the consistent Protestant answer to this incoherent dualism is the Kuyperian alternative. This is where the lordship of Christ is acknowledged in the secular realm, while insisting that it remain the secular realm. We are not trying to turn the world into the church, or to turn the kingdom into the church. What we are seeking to do is remind people that to be godless is to be “without hope in the world” (Eph. 2:12). We do not want a secular realm that is one perpetual worship service, but rather a secular realm that is not demented. We want secularism to stop eating grass like Nebuchadnezzar did when he was a cow.

And in order to have this we must acknowledge Christ. He is not an optional add-on extra. He rose from the dead, remember, and He did this in the public square, thus laying claim to that public square. The decision to bribe the guards to lie about the resurrection was a decision made by the authorities.

Why We Need to Discuss This

As already mentioned, I have been reading Virtuous Liberty, edited by Andrew Sandlin, and there are stretches of this book that are simply marvelous, and which get the relationship of virtue and civic liberty exactly right. But there are also other patches that make it sound as though political liberty is the seedbed of virtue, which is not at all the correct relationship between the black dirt and the verdant crop—it is a take that is exactly backwards, in other words. In related news, there is this ongoing exchange between Jeffrey Ventrella and me.

And Wade Stotts recently did a piece on the issue of freedom, arguing that freedom was not for everyone, which drew a sharp rebuke from Owen Strachan. But Wade was simply channeling Edmund Burke there—so that was like when you quote John Calvin and people think you are citing the Council of Trent. And Michael O’Fallon routinely confounds Anglo/Protestant political theory with Catholic integralism, thus mixing up two things that comport not well together. Like confusing an Irishman with a Scot, or believing, as the meme has it, that Australians are simply British Texans.

Getting From Here to There

We live in a time when the governing paradigm of our ruling elites is that of secularism, and by this I mean the godless kind. They are governing a population that still contains millions of Christians, many of whom have somehow taken on their assumptions about the ownership of the secular realm, as the bad guys define it, thinking it really does belong to them, or to the devil and his angels.

But in recent years, as the madness that is this unbelief has gotten increasingly more like itself, more and more Christians are thinking something like “wait a minute” to themselves. “This can’t be right.” As a consequence, they are willing to consider proposals that seemed outlandish to them just ten years ago. This is why the idea of Christian nationalism is even a thing. But how do we get from where we are now to the place where biblical norms are recognized and honored again? Among those Christians who believe this to be a desideratum there are three basic approaches.

The first emphasizes a grass roots cultural build-out. This would be, as I take it, the approach of the Center for Cultural Leadership—Andrew Sandlin, Jeffrey Ventrella, Brian Mattson, et al. Any concrete political applications or proposals would be down the road, going over a bridge that we should cross when we come to it.

The second approach believes that a lot could be done through decisive political action. If we could just get ourselves a Christian prince with some backbone, willing to knock a few heads, we could put a lot of things right around here. Some in this camp have even called for a Protestant Franco, for example. More about any possible Franco gambit in a bit.

The third option is the one I hold, which is a deft combination of the first two. Start with grass roots foundations—practical Bible teaching, starting classical Christian schools, beta testing a Christian culture in a small town, writing and publishing on the subject for decades. You know., all the things. You do all of this over the course of many years, hoping to help establish an intelligent Christian populace that would provide the necessary support and platform for some decisive Christian leadership. Some of this labor involves describing what this leadership should and should not do if and when it arrives., like I am doing right now. This is basically the first option, but with the expectation that we are going to get to the bridge we need to cross a lot sooner than the first option men think we will.

The Franco Thing

When Rusty Reno once suggested that some of the challenges concerning all this could be handled by judicious men sitting on committees dedicated to ordering the common good, Robert Sirico had an apt rejoinder when he said, “you won’t be on those committees” (Virtuous Liberty, p. 103). The point is taken, and it is a good one, but I would only want to add that we are not on those committees now. And such committees are actually in operation now, ruling according to their deranged notions of the common good. Those committees are in session now, and we are already not on them.

Nobody in my neck of the woods wants a Protestant Franco. That is not my dream ending to this particular nightmare we are in. That said, I would prefer such a Franco to an atheistic Pol Pot, and our current debates over this are not actually discussing ideal political arrangements anyway. Rather, our culture is in free fall, and we are debating what we would prefer to land on or in. The parking lot? The hedge? The pond? I believe this preference of mine for the pond is a rational one, but I recognize we need also to keep in mind what David Bahnsen recently said to me—there is the possibility that the Franco option is just the opening act for the Pol Pot headliner. Perhaps the pond is just a puddle on the parking lot. Relinquished rights can be hard to get back when the oppression turns even nastier. That is a good warning.

But what some of the “take it slow” cultural engagement men don’t seem to grasp is that an awful lot of relinquished rights are already in the rear view mirror. We are not debating future prospects only—more than a few dirty deeds have gone down in recent history. It doesn’t make much sense to oppose a future Franco because he might make you stay locked up in your basement for a year. And how many cockamamie vaccines did our current authoritarians make you take in order to keep your job?

One of the problem groups identified in the book Virtuous Liberty is the movement called post-liberalism. Now I would not describe myself as post-liberal, if by that you mean a person living in a classically liberal culture, under which he chafes, wanting to take it apart and replace it with a post-liberal one. If that is a post-liberal, then I am not one. But here is a point that I believe the CCL brothers are missing. I am not a post-liberal, but the regime I am living under sure is. Lip service is still paid to some aspects of the older liberal order, but this is just the high lords of crapitalism wearing the older order around like a skin suit.

There is a difference between someone who advocates something like post-liberalism as a positive good, and someone who wants to deal realistically with the reality that we are in fact already living in a post-liberal order.

The older American order is in shambles, and there is a significant wing of the Christian Nationalism movement (that Moscow represents) that simply wants to rebuild it. We don’t want a Franco—I would be happy to get back to Calvin Coolidge. But the more industriously I try to argue for Coolidge, the more a number of Christian brothers try to tag me as yearning for some banana republic, mirrored sunglasses and all. But I am actually trying to escape from a banana republic. In case you hadn’t noticed, we are arresting and trying political opponents now. We are pretending that it isn’t happening now.

Christian Culture, Christian Government

In Jeff Ventrella’s response to me, he wrote this:

And Andrew Sandlin makes a similar point in the Facebook post where he commends Ventrella’s response, when he says “we support Christian culture, which is a different species.”

And this is the place where I believe we are talking past each other. As Jeffery recognizes, I clearly distinguish the Kingdom from the Church, devoting an entire chapter to it in Gashmu Saith It. The institutional Church was given the task of preaching the Word and administering the sacraments. The Kingdom is the realm of everything else—baking, repairing bicycles, teaching children to read, running restaurants, and making laws. If such laws reflect the lordship of Jesus Christ (as they ought to), then we are talking about some form of Christian nationalism. But this kind of Christian nationalism requires an understanding of Christian secularism, and see above.

The Church is the realm of Christian worship. The Kingdom, if I may speak this way, is the realm of Christian secularism. This is best understood if we use Kuyper’s categories of sphere sovereignty. There is a form of secularism that is not synonymous with godlessness. Jeffery sees that I acknowledge this. But he then goes on to say I make the same error (that of equating the church and the kingdom) when I equate America’s Christian Founding with Christian Nationalism.,

But this is simply a category mistake. The American Founding and Settlement was just one instance of what we are talking about. It is not the only possible arrangement of Christian Nationalism, for there have been any number of others. But it is one representative and historical example of it, and is the one closest to our own heritage. It is our heritage, in fact, and it is the one I love. The Founding is the kind of thing I want to get back to. I want to keep the Constitution (a work product of theological genius) and I want to keep the Bill of Rights—sans the strained interpretations that have been foisted on the Fourteenth Amendment. So for me to point to one instance of what I am calling Christian Nationalism is in no way comparable to smudging the distinction between church and kingdom.

It is like this. I have defined mammal in a certain way, and I have pointed to a dog as one instance of what I am talking about. That is all. The confusion that blurs the distinction between church and kingdom is misconstruing the difference between a dog and a cat. So these two scenarios are not the same thing at all.

Now the Center for Cultural Leadership may want to argue for their slow motion form of Christian nationalism (giving them sufficient time to pick their own preferred name for it), and across the way some of the Based Bros. maybe a little impatient to get a strongman in here so that he might start knocking heads, trusting that this will bring about the desired shaping of culture. In a Facebook thread talking about this, David Bahnsen recently said, “The laws being affected following the shaped culture may be the right chicken/egg understanding here, whereas the strongman affecting laws and hoping a shaped culture follows may be the heart of the disagreement.” I agree with that completely, but in a way that calls for my third option, the combination of one and two.

A Thought Experiment Litmus Test

So there is a significant challenge in all of this. If we truly get to a Christian culture, how on earth are we going to keep it out of the laws? And if it gets into the laws, how is that not Christian nationalism? One advantage of slow-motion cultural engagement is that the point where it makes its way into the laws is still far enough away that you don’t have to call it anything.

But in the meantime, many conservatives are still trying to work with Frank Meyer’s fusionist proposal, in which the actual fusion winds up being between private virtue (and piety) and very public liberty. But under these terms, any advocacy of public virtue (or religion) is then assumed to be part of a slide into authoritarianism or even worse, totalitarianism. Private virtue is the secret sauce for the whole enterprise. But how long can widespread private virtue stay private? Given the nature of people and culture, it simply cannot. At some point the president is going to give thanks to the Lord Jesus in one of his speeches, and his poll numbers go up. Then what?

Here is my thought experiment for everyone in this debate. Suppose for a moment that your political outlook suddenly had, through a great miracle, a super-majority in both houses of Congress, your man in the White House, and a clear majority on the Supreme Court. In such a scenario, how long does Obergefell remain the law of the land? Pretend for a moment that you and your guys had the power, would you consider it a legitimate or illegitimate use of that power to reverse Obergefell?

When Christian Nationalists in my neck of the woods talk about not being afraid to use political power to enact good and righteous policy, it is this kind of thing they are talking about. They are not talking about making Murphy read his Bible more, or getting him to tithe a bit more strictly, or to be a little less bad-tempered with the dog.

If you are not willing to use political power to outlaw same sex mirage, then this is what CNs are targeting when they chastise Christian skittishness about using political power. And if you are willing—under the above scenario—to outlaw same sex mirage, then for all intents and purposes, you would be a Christian nationalist.

Imagine a nominee to the Supreme Court, put forward by Trump in his second term, a man who happened to be a diehard board member of Andrew Sandlin’s Center for Cultural Leadership. In his confirmation hearing before the Senate, imagine also that he is asked if Obergefell should be considered to be the settled law of the land—stare decisis, you know—and he responded, in a moment of candor, “By no means. Outrageous decision. Makes my forehead hot just thinking about it.” Is there any conceivable way that this man would not have the epithet of “Christian nationalist” wrapped tightly around his neck two or three times by sundown?

It really doesn’t matter if he had in the past fulminated against CN, the same way Jeffery Ventrella has done. He would still be one. Any man willing in any way to admit that Jesus rising from the dead has any relevance for our marriage laws, then as far as MSNBC would be concerned—and they are the arbiter of all such things—then he would be just one more denominational variant in the gaudy world of Christian Nationalism.

And the progressives could care less about Christian Nationalism’s denominational variants. Imagine trying to explain the differences between Hard Shell Baptists and Missionary Baptists to a monsignor who lived at the Vatican. This is like that. All of us who are opposed to the permanent establishment of the sexual revolution into law are Christian nationalists. Anyone who would countenance a reversal of Obergefell would be a CN also.

When John Adams said, pointedly and correctly, that our Constitution presupposes a moral and a religious people, and was wholly unfit for any other, he was not talking about an unfit situation that we could make do with if we had to. Rather, he was talking about the impossibility of making water run uphill. A people who are enslaved to their lusts and passions are not free. Water cannot rise above its own level, and slaves to sin cannot rise up into freedom. This is where we are now. They are slaves to sin, and any external liberties they might be privileged to enjoy (for a time) are an optical illusion and a grand parade of misnomers. I hope to write more about this on Wednesday.

A slave who is permitted to walk to the edge of the plantation and back is not a free man. He might have a bit more latitude than a slave who is chained to a dungeon wall, but he is still not genuinely free. Free men know that we are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights, and we are willing to utter His name in public. And slaves always settle for calling them privileges, and are willing to get along with whatever scraps are thrown to them.

As I said, more later.