So I have been using the phrase mere Christendom. What does the mere mean?
First we need to address what it does not mean. It does not mean Christendom Lite. It does not mean “faith-based” civilization, the same way you might have faith-based soup kitchens, with the content of the faith being diluted enough to not bother those who are providing the secularist tax monies. If Christ is Lord, and He is, then those who believe that He is Lord should also think that it follows that He is the Lord of these United States and, going beyond our shores, that He is the Lord of every other place as well. Once this is accepted in multiple nations, in a formal and public way, you have the beginnings of the next Christendom.
So I do not mean a civilization is grounded on the Christian faith, but in such a way that keeps us from taking it “too seriously” — because we all know what happens when religiotards start taking their faith seriously. Hands get chopped off, the woman caught in adultery that Christ forgave is condemned at the appellate level, baptistic pastors are flogged for their incorrect exegesis of Col. 2:11, and so forth. That’s what will happen, right? Wrong. Or, to be more accurate, mostly wrong.
But why do we think that, and why is it (mostly) wrong? Often our baptistic brethren will lead the way in asking these questions, and it has to be said they have historical reasons for being jumpy.
We have to remember several things. First, history is messy and when Christians have thrown other Christians into the slammer, sometimes the jailing Christians were at fault, other times the jailed ones were, and sometimes both. Sometimes the persecution was provoked by the one with the guns and keys, and other times it was provoked by the ones with nothing more than a talent for brinksmanship. For example, take Servetus coming to Geneva, with a double-dog-dare-ya attitude. And, speaking of Servetus, it should be mentioned that his execution was a brief ecumenical moment for a troubled Europe — Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed all threw their hats in the air. And that means that the people we really have to watch out for today are those who really, deeply care what everybody else thinks. But that is another subject for another time.
I need to look like I am changing the subject for a moment, but this appearance is illusory. When I made my peace with infant baptism almost twenty years ago, one of the things I knew I had to account for was the presence of baptized infidelty, and kicking it up a notch, baptized wickedness. You sometimes get those things, and you have to have a theological framework for it beforehand, one that takes biblical discipline seriously. But for the paedobaptist, that is not the real pastoral problem. You sometimes get baptized wickedness, but you always get baptized immaturity. Baptized immaturity is built right into the system, by definition. Peter Leithart points out that this is Yoder’s problem with Constantine — he has no theological room to allow for such immaturity. File that away for a moment.
When the modern era was forming, we have to remember that there was a battle for the soul of that modern era. It was not the case that “religion” fought itself to the point of exhaustion in the Thirty Years War, decided to privitize itself in order to let the secularists run things, since the secularists had invented all these cool, modern gadgets. That would be a tad simplistic. The modern era was actually birthed by the Reformation, and the Enlightenment highjacked it, claiming credit for a whole bunch of things they didn’t really do. Anachronistic and self-serving claim-jumping is what they do best. Had the Enlightenment not happened, we would still have a recognizable modern era — just the same, only different.
This means that a return to Christendom does not entail a return to Geneva, circa 1590 A.D. It means that we are allowed to remember some of the things we have learned in the interim. I am just insisting that we place the lessons we have learned in an explicitly Christ-honoring context, and that we reject, throw away, and otherwise dispose of those bogus things we just thought we learned. An example of the former would be a political space for true liberty of conscience — a development demonstrably grounded in Christian theology. An example of the latter would be the Darwinian idea that we are all nothing more than a raggle taggle collection of protoplasm, with no more rights than what the ruling classes decide we should have this coming week.
Now, one of the basic lessons we should have learned in the interim is this. The leaven works through the loaf slowly. The mustard seed grows slowly. The living water from Ezekiel’s temple get gradually deeper. But when doctrinaire Christians get power, one of their temptations is that they want to impose their whole system, down to the jots and tittles. We must refrain from doing this, not because truth is relative, because it isn’t, not because truth is a matter of community-perspective and there are multiple communities, for that is incoherent, but we must refrain from doing this because Jesus Christ demands that we refrain.
I said above that the fear of Christians mistreating Christians was mostly wrong. It has been, and it will be, regretfully, sometimes right. The temptation mentioned in the previous paragraph is not universally resisted. But it ought to be — Christian maturity demands it. But if I grant that it will not be universally resisted, then why do I want to run the risk? The answer is that we are not registering our wishes from some neutral zone. I am wishing for a civilization where, my critics would say, a baptist might be fined for failing to understand the covenant with Abraham. Right, but I am not wishing for this civilization from the balconies of Heaven. Rather I am wishing for it in a civilization where baptists are fined for not separating their garbage, fined for having the wrong kind of light bulb, fined for providing a baptist education to their homeschooled kids, and fined for holding Bible studies in residential neighborhoods that aren’t zoned for that. In large part, I want out of this secularist paradise we are in because I think it is high time that we laid off the baptists.
I want to live in a baptized civilization. That is what I mean by mere Christendom. But this means, if I understand what I want, that I also want to live in the midst of baptized immaturity. If we are the Dufflepuds, and a glance at the national debt indicates that we most certainly are, then we have a long way to go. But if that is the raw material, what should you prefer? Wicked, infidel Dufflepuds or baptized and thoroughly exasperating Dufflepuds. I go with the latter.