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 …
No Peace Treaties with Amalekites
The notion of Christendom is not just a personal pipe dream. It is not a collection of “wouldn’t it be nice” surmises. A Reformed understanding of the gospel, of worship, of education, of politics, and so on, is incoherent apart from a commitment to Christendom. Christendom is an essential part of a Reformed theology in …
On Its Last Leg, and Hopping Around
In the midst of a teetering secular society, with personal liberty rapidly eroding, to put forward the idea of a mere Christendom (as I am doing) is to invite fears of repressive regimes, religious intolerance, and so on. This is because we still love the name of liberty, but no longer understand what it is …
Tolerance as a Christian Virtue
There are two basic points to make about tolerance as a civic virtue. The first is logical and the second historical. The logical point is that tolerance cannot be a free-floating virtue. This is because no virtue (or vice either) can be found in a transitive verb. It is not a matter of whether you …
A Decorated Altar is Still a Cold One
From the very beginning the Christian faith has had to deal with imposters who gain control of the governmental mechanisms of the church, doing so in order to undermine the entire point of the Church. Think, for example, of Diotrephes, who would put out of the church anybody who had even voted in favor of …
Blood Up to the Horses’ Bridles
So what do I mean by mere Christendom exactly? I mean a public and formal recognition of the authority of Jesus Christ that repudiates the principles of secularism, and which avoids both hard sectarianism and easy latitudinarianism both. Easier said than done, but there it is. That is what we have to do, and we …
News Flash: Secularists Support Secularism
To believe in the inevitability of anything is to have a doctrine of history. To deny that one has a doctrine of history and yet to hold to the inevitability of anything is to take back with one hand what you gave with the other. Secularism, the idea that a civilization can function for an …
European Style Cancer
A common rallying cry for conservative activists, including Christians, is that we need “to take America back.” Okay, sign me up. Take America back where? Generally the point is that we need to take America back from the liberals and progressives — the secularists in the academy, the homosexuals in the streets, and the raunchy …
Look at All Those Alabaster Cities
In his most recent book, R. Emmett Tyrrell points out that the American conservative movement that grew up after the Second World War was a fusionist movement — a coalition of small government libertarians, anti-Communists, and traditionalists. As it happened, I was (and am) all three of those, and so I fit right in. But …
No Particular Axe to Grind
In the introduction to Calvin and the Anabaptist Radicals, William Balke says two important things — important, that is, to the point I would like to make here. The first is that the name anabaptist results in a classic example of misdirection. “The name ‘Anabaptist,’ or ‘rebaptizer,’ picks out what actually was only an incidental …