Introduction
I want to begin by thanking Jonathan Leeman for interacting so extensively with me and with others who are seeking to challenge the current state of affairs. By “state of affairs,” I mean this great civic bender we all appear to be on.
Some of us believe that there has been a huge earthquake, and that somebody needs to pick up the rubble in the public square. But Leeman does not understand us as attempting anything so benign, and rather sees us as establishing the foundations for a new authoritarianism. He worries about this in the most recent edition of Church Matters, which I invite you to check out. There are stretches of his essay which are crammed with shrewd insights, and there are other portions that are an almost perfect jumble. The whole issue of the journal is dedicated to this general subject, and so I thought it would be worthwhile to make a few comments in return.
An Amble Ramble
Leeman’s article is a long one, and there are many things I could respond to, but I would rather focus on what I regard as the main issue. Consequently, instead of the orderly parade of sections that I usually have in a post like this, I am just going to meander a bit, pointing out objects of interest as I go.
The issue is a matter of framing. Here is the basic thing. I want to begin with his theme and title: A New Christian Authoritarianism? He says that the inflamed state of our political discourse is a bad sign, setting us up for a terrible choice—meaning authoritarianism from the left or from the right. “Creeping politicization, in other words, implies a creeping authoritarianism.” Here we are, standing at the crossroads. Whither, America?
“I have used the term ‘authoritarian,’ I said, as a matter of historical description. Yet clearly I am also using the term evaluatively. I believe my post-liberal friends in this movement give more authority to the state than the Bible does, or at least than biblical wisdom recommends. Hence, I intend the negative connotations that come with the word authoritarian. I’m not saying the Bible gives us classical liberalism.”
Leeman, A New Christian Authoritarianism?
This was one of the jumbled bits. I am saying the Bible gives us classical liberalism—Christian classical liberalism, not Enlightenment classical liberalism—but because we in our insolent swank refused to thank Him for the gift, He has delivered us over to our vain conceits. Those conceits include the idea that smoking pot and using massive amounts of porn are the way to build a free and just society.
So as for me “giving more authority to the state” than the Bible gives, I am one who wants the federal government to be one tenth its current size, and our state governments should be trying hard to match that. One of my names for this project is mere Christendom, and please note the use of the word mere. Another phrase I have used to describe it is “theocratic libertarianism.” In short, I want us to have way more freedom than we have now, but I don’t think we can have it without acknowledging the lordship of Christ. I think this way because—please follow me closely—I don’t think deliverance is possible without a Deliverer.
Now someone is going to say that he was talking about those other post-liberal guys. But no, he was talking about all of us together.
“Whether they go by the title of “general-equity theonomist,” “Christian nationalist” “magisterial Protestant,” “Roman Catholic integralist,” or, in legal circles, “common good constitutionalist,” their basic pitch is the same.”
Leeman, A New Christian Authoritarianism?
Basic pitch is the same? That would make my friends in this gaggle as suspicious of state power as I am. Right? If A has the same basic pitch as B, then B has the same basic pitch as A. And I am here to tell you that A thinks that the state is “all swoll up.” To grotesque proportions.
Now I am not pointing out what I think about this in order to cast shade on the others represented here in Leeman’s assemblage. As I develop things here, even where there are points of disagreement, I want everybody to know that I regard these other options and terms as offering far more genuine freedom than what the current regime is dishing out.
Leeman speaks of the dangers of a creeping authoritarianism, and seems genuinely unaware of the authoritarianism that has already crept in. Leeman writes as though the classical liberal order were still running along, basically intact. He recognizes that it is threatened, but he sees these threats as coming from authoritarian outsiders, coming at the classical liberal order from the left and the right. “Hope for a non-authoritarian option may vanish.” But this misreads our dilemma radically.
And this is why. We don’t live in a classical liberal order anymore. It already vanished. We live in the residue of a classical liberal order. Classical liberalism? We don’t live in that kind of country any more. We do still have the flag, which some people like to take out and fly off their front porch on Tax Relief Day, the day after which they get to keep their own money. For some reason that day keeps coming later and later in the year.
This is a point that really must be insisted upon. To live here in the residue of the classical liberal order is to live in a place of totalitolerant suffocation. Leeman does not live in a besieged and beleaguered city, desperately fighting, but somehow still free. No, the city fell some time ago. He lives under an authoritarian regime now. I don’t know why he is worried about authoritarians who might show up later, especially if a bunch of them would be a whole lot less authoritarian than the Crime Bosses we have running the show currently.
“Liberalism is a contested term, but to avoid the weeds for now and get our head around what liberalism is in short order, just think liberty. Liberalism foregrounds liberty.”
Leeman, A New Christian Authoritarianism?
The problem here is that Leeman is believing the secular liberals when they say they foreground liberty. Yes, they say that. They talk that way. But do they provide that? And the secular liberals also worry about what we would do if we somehow got political power. Their vision of that is Handmaid’s Tale stuff.
What? If the general equity theonomists took over, would we make millions of people live in their basement for a year? No. Would we wreck anybody’s career for saying that Dylan Mulvaney wasn’t a girl? No, we would not. Would we force anybody to take a risky and untested vaccine, taking away their livelihood if they dared to refuse? Well, no again. Would we gag medical professionals and not allow them to dissent from a diagnostic orthodoxy that formed and hardened in a matter of weeks? No, we wouldn’t. Would we send someone to prison for ten years because they made a political meme? Actually, no again. Would we allow the nation’s intelligence agencies to try to jigger a presidential election without any consequences? For some reason, I keep coming up with no. I could make this list a whole lot longer if I wanted to, and a whole lot stinkier.
Put another way, the current regime is not vulnerable to authoritarianism from the right and from the left. That misstates the situation significantly. The current regime is already authoritarian, and in massively intrusive ways. If you want to know how that happened, you can read Philip Hamburger’s cogent treatment of how our current government is the kind of government that our Revolution was fought to get rid of, and our Constitution was drafted to prevent. The problem with many evangelical political analysts is that they don’t have a map with an x on it that says “you are here.”
But Leeman doesn’t want people to listen to the advocates of theocratic libertarianism (check here and here) because he suspects something about it is going to go wrong, and that then the citizens will lose their liberties somewhere down the road. But what a bunch of us are saying is that we have already lost our liberties. We are fighting to get them back, and we don’t believe that a secular liberal state has the wherewithal to keep all this from happening again. And what the secular cannot do (because it doesn’t really want to), a Christian political order can do.
We are not saying that slavery to Christ is a better-grade slavery than slavery to the secular state. We are not saying we want our chains to have Bible verses on them. Rather, we are saying that slavery to Christ liberates us from our sins (Rom. 6:17-23), and thereby equips us to live as free men and women in relationship to one another. Autonomous men are slaves down to the bone, and large collections of slaves to sin do not build free societies. Slaves of Christ are the ones who built the freest and most prosperous society in the history of the world. That actually happened. But that society, like the younger son in the parable, decided to take their father’s inheritance and spend it all on hookers and booze. That is the problem.
I think it fair to say that all these different post-liberal positions would largely agree that the classical liberal order has got the staggers. I think that all of us are looking at the same problem. But the solutions that are being suggested are not the same “basic pitch.”
Let me finish my amble ramble with a section where Leeman was making really good sense, after which I will scratch my head for a few minutes and then be done.
In my mind, the fundamentally religious nature of all our politics is beyond dispute, whether your name is Franklin Graham or Nancy Pelosi, Antonin Scalia or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Republican or Democrat Party. Name one political or policy position you hold that’s not backed up by a moral perspective that itself is not backed up by a theological perspective. I don’t think you can, including a law that says we should drive on one side of the road or the other.
Yet here’s where my path (and I assume most American Christians) diverges with the post-liberals. I would also endorse the U.S. Constitution’s injunction against Congress making a law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Like most American Christians (I assume), I’d say these First Amendment words are at least wise, if not fundamentally biblical. These writers would count them at least as unbiblical, if not also unwise.
Leeman
On the strength of these two paragraphs, I would make a modest suggestion. I think Leeman needs to lump himself in together with all of us post-liberals. He has tagged me as a post-liberal, and I too approve of the First Amendment. I don’t want a Church of the United States. I want the United States to acknowledge the truth of the Christian faith, which it has done before. It wouldn’t kill us to do it again. In fact, it will kill us if we don’t do it again. The events of the last few years are making everything exceedingly plain, and you don’t have to believe in church establishment to see what a mess we are in. It really is Christ or chaos. It really is Christian nationalism or demonic nationalism. Leeman plainly does not want demonic nationalism, and so where can he go? As time progresses, his options really are going to narrow. In fact, they already have.
If you haven’t heard by now, I have a book coming out in just a few weeks called Mere Christendom. You may have gathered it already, but there is a lot of confusion out there on this topic. Do you want to read a book about it that is full of bracing common sense, with a touch of citrus? Then this book is for you. You should also get one for your confused cousin.