Darryl Hart, the Wall Street Journal, and the First Person Singular Pronoun in the Objective Case

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Introduction

So last week, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Darryl Hart on Presbyterians and Christian nationalism. The link is here if you want to check it out, and in a way it certainly lived up to its name. It was an opinion piece, and it was very clearly filled with opinions.

But alas, some of these opinions were in need of some ministrations from a 24-grit belt sander.

Not That Kind of Difference

Darryl begins (I am going to keep this amicable by calling him Darryl) by staking out one position as articulated by one Samuel Goldman, that position being a call for a renewed civil religion. That’s on one end. On the other end of things would be that skeery-scary Christian nationalism. And Darryl wants a Presbyterian middle way to wend its path in between these two options.

Now when Odysseus sailed through the strait in question, the monster Scylla was on the starboard side and the whirlpool Charybdis was on the port side. And the key to understanding why this metaphor is not an apt one for Darryl to use is found in those two terms port and starboard. Both dangers to the ship were in the here and now, to the left and to the right. They were both on the same plane, with the ship in the middle.

A civil religion as envisioned by Goldman is based on a collection of men, writings, and customs gathered up from various places under the sun, all of it vanity and shepherding wind. Everything is all down here. Washington was born in Virginia, Lincoln in Kentucky, and the Constitution was drafted in Pennsylvania.

By contrast, Christian faith make transcendent claims, meaning that the basis for all of it is from outside the world. So they are not the same thing. They are not the same kind of thing. American civil religion of the sort Goldman envisions is a religion for flatlanders. It is the cultus for a local baal, while Christian nationalists worship the one who was crowned by the Ancient of Days (Dan. 7:13-14). Treating these two options as “port and starboard” options is like asking how many miles separate a roly poly bug from the Holy Spirit. The brief answer is that a difference like that cannot be calculated in miles.

You could measure the distance between the whirlpool and Scylla’s cave.

And the only way to split the difference between the transcendent and the temporal is through the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ—through a stupefying miracle, in other words. Trying to wend your way through two temporal options is just a third temporal option, and no miracle at all.

In Which I Am Introduced to the Situation

I will restrain myself, and make only two points in response here. Okay, maybe three.

The first is to simply point out that the kultursmog is already seeping through the window sills of Darryl’s mental house, and is now fogging up the living room. What on earth does he mean by “transgender medicine?” Cutting off healthy breasts is not medicine.

The second is the obligatory connection being made between Pete Hegseth and me. To date, I have met the Secretary of War four times, three of them at church. This naturally has put me in complete control of America’s foreign policy. But in actual fact, I am being tagged here by Darryl in this way because I can be made to appear really influential, but then the positions that he goes on to attack are not positions that I, the supposedly influential one, actually hold. Which brings me to the next point.

Third, I am the one Christian nationalist that Darryl mentions by name, but he then fails to mention my dogged commitment to and arguments for religious liberty, which was the central point of his piece. That commitment is manifestly evident in both my books on Christian nationalism—here and here, not to mention in plenty of other places.

I do not say that Darryl needed to accept the force of my loud and pointed arguments for religious liberty, but I do believe that in a piece like this one, he needed to acknowledge that I make them. Here he is castigating Christian nationalists for being tepid at best on the subject, and hostile at worst, and he names me as a foremost representative of the CN position. To do this without mentioning said arguments, is a pretty shabby approach. No bueno.

But Darryl nevertheless wants to pit the PCA report against CN’s supposed distaste for religious liberty.

So my question is this. Why is the affirmation of religious liberty by the PCA visible to Darryl Hart, while my repeated affirmations of the same are invisible to him? This is a reasonable question. Why? And this is not an academic issue at all, as the next section will demonstrate.

Beliefs About What?

Well, of course we want to suppress false and erroneous beliefs. So does everybody. Every law on the law books of every nation suppresses the false and erroneous beliefs of those scofflaws who think they can go and do whatever is being forbidden by those laws. This is what laws do. This is what laws are for.

So notice the slight of hand here. Which false and erroneous beliefs? What kind of false and erroneous beliefs? The belief that triangles have four sides is an erroneous belief, and we don’t want to suppress that. Let that kid flunk geometry, and his parents can deal with it. The belief that the unborn child is just a clump of cells is also an erroneous belief, and we do want to suppress that one. The belief that the earth is a flat disk, rocking back and forth on the back of a turtle is an erroneous belief, but live and let live, sez I. The belief that two dudes can enter holy matrimony is erroneous, and someone in civic authority needs to tell them they have to stop it right now.

So the issue for Christian nationalists is not whether private citizens might entertain false and erroneous beliefs in their heads. The issue is what false and erroneous beliefs must be rejected as the foundation for our laws. What sorts of false beliefs are acceptable for our legislators to have? Use the clump of cells issue, and show your work. These are two very distinct issues.

The Prodigal Son Problem

We then run into what I call the prodigal son problem, who presumably did not run out of money on his first weekend away. He had a lot of capital to burn through, and let’s just say that it took him a while. In the middle of that orgiastic spree he was no doubt thinking that the money was just magically “his.” Wealth just is, and is always just around. He was entitled, and this is a type of person who is not exactly unknown in our day. He was born on third and thought he had hit a triple.

In the same way, the West built up an enormous reserve of moral capital. When our generation asked to have that inheritance, and left our father’s house, everything went just swell for a while. The sky was still blue, the grass was still green, and the painted ladies were continuing to say, “Hey there, tiger.”

But liberal political orders did nothing of the kind. They did not secure religious liberty, they inherited religious liberty. They were certainly on third base, but they did not hit that triple. Christians secured religious liberty on account of what they had to work out between rival Christian factions. And Christians limited political power because they believed in the depravity of man instead of the perfectability of man. They recognized human dignity because they believed in Adam and Eve, created in the image of God, and not in some lightning strike over the primordial goo, resulting in a complicated mash-up of amino acids. Amino acids, incidentally, have no meaning, no purpose, no point, and certainly no dignity. Darwinian sacks of protoplasm don’t have a Maker, and hence were never endowed by any Creator—”what’s that?” said the liberal political order—with these falsely so-called inalienable rights.

If you want to have a free society, it is absolutely essential that you maintain an intelligent basis for making any moral judgments whatever, and for distinguishing sins from crimes. Not every error should be a crime, and some errors most certainly should be crimes. Now—follow me closely here—different religious and different worldviews generate different answers to this question.

The nature and extent of religious liberty is itself a religious question. Where and how we distinguish sins from crimes is also a religious question. Islam answers it differently than would Spinoza, and Spinoza answers it differently than would Althusius, and Althusius differently than would Samuel Adams.

Let me be blunt for a moment. May I be blunt?

You can, if you wish, import millions of people into your country whose worldview is way closer to that of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, than their worldview is to the ideals of Patrick Henry. You can certainly advocate for something like that. But if you do it in the name of religious liberty then I will reserve the right to think that you are being about as sharp as a bowling ball.

The American Westminster

We must, in the name of all that is sensible, learn to distinguish views that may be held by private citizens and views that are received by us as the foundation of our constitutional order and our laws. Do I want a nihilist to be legally free to sit in his basement, smoking cigarettes and thinking dark thoughts? Of course I do. Do I want nihilism to be the basis of our laws? Of course I do not.

The religious expression of individuals is quite different from the religious foundation of our social order.

And yes, they did do this. So would I. But in that same section, they did some other stuff as well.

I am going to quote the American Westminster in a moment (has it come to that?), but I want to remind you of a couple of things going into it. The American Westminster simply assumes a denominational pluralism—Baptists, Presbyterian, Episcopalians, etc.—and that the magistrate is to be a support to all such Christian denominations. With regard to other religious convictions—say, to Muslims or atheists—the Confession says that they are not to be hassled. They are not to be persecuted on account of their opinions.

Got that? The magistrate is to exhibit denominational neutrality as regards Christians, along with genuine support for them all, and he is to refrain from persecuting non-Christians. And here is where it says that.

Again I say, got that? The magistrate is to be a nursing father to all the churches of our common Lord. That’s one thing. With regard to non-Christians or “any other person whatsoever,” such persons are to be spared indignity, violence, abuse, or injury, and they are to be allowed to meet without molestation or disturbance. Leave the non-Christians alone, and support all the Christians equally.

However you slice it, it is not persecution for a Christian society to refuse to include unbelieving errors as part of the foundation for our laws.

So the upshot of all this is that I can cheerfully subscribe to the American Westminster 23.3, as is, and Darryl Hart, champion of middle way American Presbyterianism, cannot do so. I am on Darryl’s middle way, standing on the yellow line, and find it curious that Darryl is not anywhere in sight.

Limited Government

Of course it harmonizes. But what were the theological preconditions for believing in limited government? This was not a case of the Presbyterians deciding to fit in with “the American way.” It was the American Founders who revealed their indebtedness to centuries of Protestant political theory. Going back to the parable of the prodigal son, Hart’s comment is like the wastrel son saying, as he was just hitting the road, that he was glad to see that the father’s wealth harmonized so well with the jingling of his coin purse.

Darryl gets this exactly backwards when he says “we might look to the deeply American religion of Presbyterianism.” But I am afraid that is not our job. Our job is to be deeply biblical and Presbyterian in an American context. And it is consequently okay if America’s republican forms of government formed because they were deeply Presbyterian. That doesn’t chafe me at all. What we must not go for is an arrangement where various civic pieties are allowed to trump what Scripture requires of us, and plain reason tells us. I don’t want my faith to be deeply American. I want America to be deeply Christian.

Think For a Minute

I want to ask you to compare two verbs in this passage. In the face of the anarchy brought into our public life by the sexual revolution, the Presbyterians remain “concerned.” Good to know. But when it comes to what they are to do or not do, Darryl says they are not to “abandon” liberal politics—even if the way those liberal politics are being applied by the secularists is the basic reason why all the “concerning” things are happening. This is the kind of anemic liberalism that will only preserve liberalism only so long as the anti-liberals let them.

Secularism cannot preserve religious liberty. All the religious liberty cases that are crowding our court system are not going on because of the Christian nationalists. They area happening because limited government is a specifically Christian political concept, and the secularists aren’t Christians. They are animated by their spirit of secular totalitolerance.

Proximity to the American Westminster

The first part of the PCA report on Christian nationalism dropped this last June, and I wrote about it here. If you recall, I gave it some qualified praise, and objected to some inconsistencies, as you can easily verify. Now when it comes to the various players in this small drama, Darryl is farthest away from the American Westminster, the PCA report is closer, and I am standing right next to it. Okay, it’s a free country, and people can stand where they want.

But it is a bit thick when the person who is farthest away uses the report that is closer than he is to criticize the person who is actually an American Westminsterian. I can tell you what the American Westminster actually says, and I can tell you who agrees with it. The American Westminster and the present writer are great pals, remember?

In this broad discussion, who echoes the position of the American Westminster? You know, support for the churches of our common Lord along with denominational neutrality? No persecution of non-Christians? But keep non-Christians away from the foundation of our laws? Who argues like this? Who uses phrases like mere Christendom? Who wouldn’t?

No. It actually turns out that the alleged scrutiny has received scrutiny, and it has been determined that the scrutiny was clearly not expecting to be scrutinized.

But here we are.