Douglas Wilson argues for what ought to be uncontroversial: governance by wise Christians. He calls it “mere Christendom” in a recent book by that name, described as democratic politics in a constitutional regime that produces Christian-influenced laws. In other words, the not-so-long-ago culture of the West. Wilson argues that secularism takes us down a dead-end road. The future of a free society requires the restoration of divine authority—not clergy in seats of power, but rather the gospel in the hearts of the powerful. The governors must recognize that they are governed.
An influential Presbyterian pastor, teacher, and author, Wilson calls himself a “theocratic libertarian.” In Mere Christendom, he does not argue that Christian governance is merely compatible with personal liberty, including the liberty of those who don’t believe in the tenets of Christianity. That’s true enough. But more importantly, Wilson argues that recognition of divine authority is necessary for a free society: “Some sort of mere Christendom is the only place where it is possible to gain and maintain true liberty.”
Mere Christendom reads like a jazz improvisation. The book’s contents are drawn from a “smoking slag heap of words” that Wilson has generated on his blog over the years. His grandson took up the challenge and abbreviated and synthesized the material into a book-length treatment of a very First Things question: What should be the role of religion in public life? Ample, answers Wilson. We need divine authority to sustain America’s culture of freedom.
The main argument draws upon the Bible’s warnings against the perils of idolatry. We are hardwired to worship, which means that if we turn away from the true God, we will chase after false gods. There is a political analogue: “The public square cannot be neutral.” Either our civic life will harken to the authority of the true God, or we will organize our common affairs around some other, imagined supreme power, a false god. And because idols are mute, the rejection of the true God in fact clears the way for men to lord over us. Wilson puts it succinctly: “If there is no God above the state, then the state has become god—the point past which there is no appeal.”
As Wilson notes, many assume that a high view of divine authority corresponds to a high degree of control and coercion. But this assumption is mistaken. In Romans 13, St. Paul teaches that the magistrate acts under the authority of God. But note well that God has revealed his will and purpose. The magistrate is accountable. By contrast, when God is not recognized by a body politic, powerful men conjure ideologies to justify their dominion. As Wilson puts it, without mere Christendom, “I am far more likely to be governed by a swaggering bully who recognizes no authority whatsoever above him than by a swaggering bully who feels he needs to justify his behavior from Scripture. In a dispute with the latter, I at least have something to appeal to.”
Strictly speaking, the stark opposition—either Jesus is acknowledged as Lord, or men are unaccountable bullies—overstates the case. An earnest Straussian would identify “natural right” as a constraint upon government. A Catholic like me appeals to “natural law.” But abortion, same-sex marriage, the embrace of reproductive technologies, and the transgender juggernaut suggest that, having dismissed the Creator, our secular culture accords no authority to nature. Thomas Aquinas anticipated our unfortunate state of affairs. Darkened by sin, our minds fail to recognize natural truths, which is why God delivered the Ten Commandments to restore, by divine authority, the truths we ought to know by reason alone. A sociopolitical corollary follows: We need a restoration of biblical authority in public life if we’re to have any hope of recovering natural right or natural law.
Another argument for the Christian basis for America’s culture of freedom rests in the foundational role that liberty plays in God’s relations to his creatures. Wilson observes, as have many others, that religious liberty is a distinctly Christian idea, rooted in the fact that fellowship with God requires a free act of obedience. Wilson goes further, arguing that “letting other people express their errors without reprisal is a distinctly Christian ideal.” He allows that Christendom featured a great deal of persecution (what regime has not?), but he insists that the best of modern liberalism has Christian roots.
St. Paul uses martial imagery: We are to put on the full armor of God. But note well that our belt is truth, and the sword we are to wield is the Word of God. The imperative is to proclaim in word, deed, and truth. Wilson emphasizes patience and forbearance in the face of error and unbelief: “We are given the truth by the grace of God, and part of that truth includes how we are to treat those who have not embraced it yet.” The words of Jesus are our marching orders: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 3:35).
In Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Larry Siedentop makes a detailed case for Wilson’s assertion that Christianity provided the precondition for the notions that underly the First Amendment and other American guarantees of liberty. Rather than making a historical argument, Wilson relies on straightforward observations about present realities. Our increasingly anti-Christian secular elite harbors hostility to time-honored American freedoms. Recently, John Kerry expressed regret about the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. He said it is a “major block” to a purportedly necessary censorship of “disinformation.”
Wilson does not mention the role that belief in God’s governance of human affairs plays in sustaining a culture of freedom. Kerry’s remarks reflect the view that the smart and well-informed must manage and control unruly public opinion. The censorship of “disinformation” is part of the wider technocratic hubris that arises when we no longer believe in divine providence. In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln allowed that the final disposition of justice remains in God’s hands. Today, we are harried by social justice warriors who presume to wrest from God the role of final judge, monitoring our speech, even to the point of regulating pronoun use. Wilson is right. When God no longer reigns, freedom is among the first casualties.
Without doubt, our bondage to sin poses the greatest threat to our freedom. After all, isn’t freedom the ability to do what you want? Even by that thin, libertarian definition, secular America fails. People do not marry with the intention of getting divorced. Yet they fail to stay married. Young men are not setting out to die of drug overdoses, yet tens of thousands do so every year. Parents do not aim to neglect their children out of selfishness, disordered behavior, and addiction—yet they do so. In his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul bemoans: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (7:15). As Christianity recedes, a self-defeating condition of unfreedom prevails.
As I’ve observed many times in this column, even the well-placed feel constrained. The idols of health, wealth, and pleasure command endless sacrifices. I’m depressed by the way in which rich parents press their children to run the gauntlet to get into prestigious universities. The twenty-somethings I meet in New York are often anxious and fearful—not emotions congenial to freedom.
The problem is not merely personal. As the Founders recognized, democratic self-government requires a substantial body of self-governing citizens. A demoralized populace is disordered and unruly. Like children, those who fail to gain self-command must be governed, sometimes with vigilance and a heavy hand. Wilson rightly notes: “A people who are enslaved to their lusts will never be the kind of people who successfully throw off tyrants.” Indeed, they may well erect a tyranny. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, an atomized, lonely, and anxious body politic will beg for “an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate.” We should not be surprised that young people, raised in a post-Christian culture, do not endorse free speech and express high levels of support for socialism.
Count me among those sympathetic to mere Christendom. The old Christendom was imperfect, as Wilson acknowledges. Fallen men don’t construct ideal regimes. The American version of Christendom depended upon a loose-limbed alliance of Protestant denominations that often cooperated, sometimes warred with each other, and until the mid-twentieth century were hostile to Catholicism. But America’s Christian consensus undergirded a decent society, which is not a small thing, as we are discovering in our low and unhappy age—the age of secularism’s triumph. That consensus provided the metaphysical and spiritual foundations for the liberal tradition in America, again imperfect, but far from nothing.
Today, the foundations have weakened, and we’re less free. It will require the rebuilding of spiritual capital to restore a culture of freedom. Putting the Ten Commandments in school rooms is a reasonable place to start. They command, to be sure, but they do not coerce. Parents are free to catechize their children in today’s gospel of autonomy. But at least the kids will have some hint of the truth, a small step toward mere Christendom.
Theologizing Politics
In a recent essay (“The Conversion of Public Intellectuals,” Comment Magazine, Fall 2024), the newly installed Canon and Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, Luke Bretherton, succumbs to a common modern temptation. He theologizes political disagreement. His targets are those who regard Christianity as “a bulwark against the imminent collapse of the West into barbarism of one kind or another.” He takes aim at Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson, and others who credit Christianity with the moral and spiritual gravity needed to combat woke ideologies.
As I’ve written recently (“Fellow Travelers,” October 2024), Christianity is not an “asset” to deploy in political struggles, even consequential ones. We have faith in Christ because we believe him to be the Son of God incarnate, not because Christianity serves as an indispensable foundation for Western civilization. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s not a betrayal of faith for Hirsi Ali both to gaze upward to God with a spirit of devotion and to note that central truths of human nature are being violated by today’s progressive crusades, truths underscored by Christian teaching.
In Bretherton’s account, those who regret the trajectory of contemporary society are guilty of nostalgia. They adopt a “simultaneously apocalyptic and conservative framework” that “divides history between modernity and all prior ages, a division that sacralizes the past (often an idealized modern era) and demonizes the present.”
Such a characterization ill suits Hirsi Ali. She’s been an ardent proponent of classical liberalism, a decidedly modern outlook that she believes is threatened by woke illiberalism. Christianity, in her view, holds out the promise of renewing and redeeming modernity. The same can be said of Douglas Wilson. Mere Christendom argues that we need a Christian consensus in order to sustain classical liberalism.
Although he refrains from stating his position openly, Bretherton seems concerned to characterize opposition to immigration and multiculturalism as inherently un-Christian: “Approaches that predetermine what Christianity can and should be by overidentifying it with a prior culture or historical moment refuse to discover what Christ and the Spirit are doing here and now among these people in this place.” These and other assertions seem to amount to this assessment: Faced with mass migration and globalist ideologies, conservatives are not making a good faith effort to understand the ethical duties of political leaders to the citizens of their own countries. No, they are “nostalgic and reactionary.”
Bretherton goes on: “Such a refusal [to harken to Christ and the Spirit] also denies how loss, vulnerability, and lack of control are central to the experience of acting faithfully, hopefully, and lovingly with and for others.” Like so many elites, Bretherton seems happy to volunteer low-skilled laborers for wage competition. (“Sorry, we can’t stop illegal immigration. We need to embrace our lack of control.”) Note as well that the Venezuelan gangs in Colorado who crossed the border in the present era of non-enforcement aren’t taking over apartment complexes in the wealthy neighborhoods populated by people who have signs announcing, “No human being is illegal.” Apparently, efforts to prevent wage competition and organized criminal gangs are un-Christian. “The desire to reassert control over a culture or nation is itself an expression of the lust for domination and a vainglorious pride that Augustine identifies as a defining expression of sin, one that leads to great evil.”
Like many progressive Christians, Bretherton is unwittingly a thoroughgoing integralist. “Becoming Christian is properly about discovering—with these people, in this place, in this time—communion with Christ amid and through our differences.” That is indeed true for the Church. The body of Christ transcends nations and cultures. But it’s not true for a nation or civilization. Becoming an American means entering into a distinct culture and history. Unless one is an integralist of the very strictest observance, a nation does not seek unity in Christ. Wilson’s Mere Christendom makes no such claim. Rather, a nation attains “communion” in and through its political forms and national traditions. Political leaders may recognize a nation’s duty to give comfort and succor to refugees and others. (In fact, only Christian nations recognize such a duty—another reason to support Wilson’s notion of mere Christendom.) But leaders must balance this imperative with their more fundamental duty to preserve the body politic. It’s a perversion of Christianity to say that a father must sacrifice his family’s well-being for the sake of “inclusion.” The same holds for nations and their leaders.
Jacques Maritain wins Bretherton’s approval. According to Bretherton, the French intellectual underwent a true Christian conversion “to love of neighbor manifested in a commitment to democracy, human rights, and anti-racist politics.” Bertherton goes on to endorse James Chappel’s characterization of Maritain’s 1936 work, Integral Humanism, as a “furiously antifascist, antiracist, and anticapitalist tract.” On this basis, “Maritain developed a philosophical and theological defense of a pluralistic, democratic form of politics.” Apparently, the political uses of Christianity that accord with Bretherton’s outlook are okay.
The contradictions are rife. How can one be anticapitalist without rejecting modernity, which has been profoundly shaped by capitalism? Fascism was a purely modern ideology, and rejecting it requires deep thought about the perversions of modernity that give birth to it. And so Bretherton’s framing of his criticisms collapses. Hirsi Ali, Kingsnorth, Jordan Peterson, and others seek to assess the perils of our present moment, and they sift our inheritance for lasting truths that can help us navigate in our difficult times. It’s jejune to appeal to tiresome slogans about “nostalgic and reactionary politics.” I fear that Bretherton ends up with his own simplistic dichotomy: To be progressive is to be Christian; to be a critic of progressivism shows that one is not a Christian.
Age of Abandonment
Beneath what looks like the age of entitlement, below the culture of narcissism, this is the age of abandonment.” So writes Freya India in her Substack, “Girls.” She says that her Gen-Z cohort has come of age in a time when traditional institutions of support and belonging have collapsed. The liquefaction of norms, institutions, and traditions triggers a pervasive fear that one is doomed to be alone in the world—abandoned.
India observes that neighborhoods are no longer thick networks of connection. Social bonds are weak: “Forget loving our neighbors, we can’t even make eye contact with them.” The very word “community” has been debased, referring to “abstract concepts like the LGBT community or mental health communities.” Such notions lack reality and solidity—“which is why whenever someone says something like online communities are a lifeline for young people! I feel like screaming because it’s just so bleak. What have we done?”
India focuses on homelife, which is in tatters. “Our parents are strangers to one another; our childhood a series of exchanges from one house to the next. No real home, no place to belong.” Her experience is not unique. “By age 14, nearly half of first-born children in the UK no longer live with both their mother and father.” Similar rates of single-parent households obtain in the United States. More than one-third of children grow up in homes from which their fathers are absent.
These are difficult circumstances for children. They are made worse by the fact that we are not permitted to offer consolation or speak openly about the suffering.
Ours is a culture choking on its own compassion yet offering next to none for children of divorce. We are the first generation to grow up without stigma around family breakdown, but near total normalisation of it. And when you normalise something, you stigmatise the reaction. So many marriages end; what did you expect? Your friends’ families are the same; what’s wrong with you. It’s just a contract anyway. Kids are resilient. All this tells us that abandonment is trivial. That if you feel deeply affected by it you might be the problem. And anyone who does try to articulate the pain is treated with suspicion, accused of having some political agenda, rather than just being overcome with this feeling. This feeling of absolute abandonment.
I’ll note that for children of gay couples, the omertà is even stronger. In the present ideological climate, it’s impossible to express sympathy for the difficulty of growing up without a mother or without a father. Saying so out loud risks detonating cultural and emotional explosives.
Fear of abandonment debilitates Gen Z in many ways. “Fear of abandonment explains much of Gen Z’s lack of resilience” and overwrought concerns for safety. “If you fear abandonment, you won’t risk romance. Words will feel traumatic.” The snowflake phenomenon is to be expected. “How can we stand on our own two feet when the ground keeps crumbling beneath us?”
India urges cultural conservatives to avoid summary dismissals of young people as selfish and shallow—or mindlessly woke. “When young women rage against marriage and motherhood so viscerally what I’m really hearing is it’s not safe to marry. It’s not safe to have kids.” Just look at what’s going on in contemporary society. “Why would you risk that?” The parents of Gen-Z youth couldn’t tough it out. “We simply don’t believe anyone will stay.”
The Gen-Z motive for downplaying marriage and championing nontraditional families does not rest in a sunny progressive confidence in the so-called arc of history. Only Baby Boomers can sustain that conceit. Instead, fear of abandonment encourages young people “to take family less seriously, to put less of ourselves into relationships, do it all half-heartedly so it hurts less in the end.” Having children? It’s not that Gen-Z women are brainwashed by radical feminists; they’ve been disabled by a culture long ago transformed by the sexual revolution. “We haven’t lost sight of what’s important, we were never shown what was important. And no wonder we don’t want kids. We were kids when we got left.”
The imperative of “self-care” is often emphasized as the solution for Gen-Z unhappiness. India sees this as a perverse response to abandonment. “There are young women whose families fell apart and who their whole lives dreamed of nothing but a stable, lasting love to depend on, and are now being told that’s pathological, that’s needy, they should love themselves more . . . I see in so much of therapy culture young people desperate to be loved and trying to train themselves out of it.” Stop! Stop! Stop! “Please will someone step in and say to this generation that maybe they don’t need more self-love, more belief in themselves, but something to belong to.” I would add, something to serve and give themselves to.
India might have added reflections on the hypercompetitive, college-or-bust educational culture. Or the winner-take-all economic system. Or the dark horizon of war, about which Baby Boomer and Millennial political leaders seem so nonchalant. But she’s right to focus on matters of the heart—mom, dad, wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend. From time immemorial, the domestic hearth has offered comfort and consolation in an often cold, cruel world. We have deprived the rising generation of that comfort and consolation, in large part because our society has embraced the Rainbow Reich. India: “No amount of material progress has helped this generation so far. The fear is still there. It does not matter what comfort and convenience we have if we think love is dead.”
WHILE WE'RE AT IT
♦ For some commentators, it’s always 1939. The title of a recent essay in The Atlantic by Anne Appelbaum says it all: “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.” Applebaum makes much of Trump’s penchant for hyperbolic slander: “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin”; illegal immigrants who are “poisoning the blood of our country”; “sick people, radical-left lunatics.” No doubt these and other characterizations coarsen civic discourse. Unfortunately, Appelbaum and others ignore the fact that “fascist” is likewise a term of character assassination, and just as hyperbolic. Incontinent in their denunciations, which draw on the Manichean mythology of the twentieth century, they, too, increase the rancor in our society. Applebaum accuses Trump of “the cultivation of hatred.” She responds in kind.
♦ Anthony Trollope’s characterization in Barchester Towers of an Anglican divine, Francis Arabin: “a high churchman at all points; so high indeed that at one period of his career he had all but toppled over into the cesspool of Rome.”
♦ Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas: “Catholicism will be nihilism’s last competitor on the dance floor of history, and Catholicism will see it drop from exhaustion as the orchestra plays on. The music itself will testify.”
♦ Kamala Harris released a five-part Opportunity Agenda for Black Men. The fifth item promised to legalize marijuana. Apparently, her campaign wishes to increase opportunities for black men to be stupefied.
♦ Massimo Faggioli writing in Commonweal:
Francis doesn’t seem to have been influenced by the synodal vision that he is advocating for when it comes to his own manner of exercising papal primacy. This has created a sort of journalistic ultramontanism, augmented by Francis’s direct and frequent interactions with the press, where the only voice that ends up mattering is his. This problem was especially apparent most recently on the in-flight press conference of September 13, when Francis addressed the upcoming presidential election and suggested a moral equivalence between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Whatever happens on November 5 and after, Catholic voices must find a way to speak again to the public—but maybe also to the pope.
♦ Krumme 13 is a group in Germany that lobbies for lowering the age of consent and legalizing child pornography. Don’t imagine that this effort is doomed to fail. If progressives are eager to allow thirteen-year-olds to choose to take life-altering hormones and undergo sex-change surgery, it’s hard to see why they shouldn’t let them choose to have sex with whomever they want.
♦ Results of a survey conducted by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University:
In 2022, slightly more than 36% of U.S. journalists say they identify with the Democrat Party, up about eight percentage points from 2013. The number of those who identified with the Republican party decreased about six percentage points to 3.4% during the same period. The number of journalists identifying as Independents increased by about two percentage points to 52% in 2022.
♦ Mass immigration continues to roil European politics, and mainstream parties are beginning to adjust. In October, the German center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, called for the European Union to build and reinforce border fences separating EU member states from sources of asylum seekers such as Belarus and Turkey. French interior minister Bruno Retailleau announced his support for a referendum on immigration, a measure long called for by Marine Le Pen’s party, Rassemblement National. In my estimation, these are signs of sanity. Determined to remain in power, the center aims to usurp the political advantages of the right. Democracy in action.
♦ Seventeenth-century Anglican cleric Jeremy Taylor: “Men are apt to prefer prosperous error to an afflicted truth.” In this matter, times have not changed.
♦ Writing in his First Things “Synod Diary,” Larry Chapp notes the striking over-representation of Jesuits at October’s Synod on Synodality. Of the 310 clergy and religious who participated in official capacities, twenty-five are members of the Society of Jesus. And they played prominent roles. The special secretary to the Synod, Fr. Giacomo Costa, is a Jesuit, as is the relator general, Jean-Claude Cardinal Hollerich. Eight of the thirty-seven Synod facilitators are Jesuits. Jesuits are also over-represented among theological experts and observers. Chapp notes the irony:
Though the promoters of this Synod and of the synodality concept emphasize hearing a wide range of voices, it is striking how many of those voices come from a very particular location within the contemporary Church. We’ve been told repeatedly that the three-year-long synodal process has been a genuine exercise in listening to “the People of God” and, indeed, to the Holy Spirit. But it seems that the Spirit has made a preferential option for listening to Jesuit voices above all others, and that the Jesuits represent the People of God in a strikingly outsized way.
Instead of “going to the peripheries,” as a slogan of this pontificate urges, we are asked to follow leading figures of the progressive Catholic establishment in the West. Chapp again: “In a global Church that is, indisputably, the most multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilinguistic, and multinational institution on the planet, the claim that a Synod, dominated in its leadership positions by Jesuits from the global north, is representative of the world Church is prima facie implausible.”
♦ The synod underway in Rome as I write is Seinfeldian, a synod about nothing. So argues Kevin Tierney in his Substack column, “Kevin’s Substack.” The Francis pontificate has encouraged open warfare among factions: progressives, conservatives, rad-trads, African eminences, American bishops, and so on. The effect has been incoherence and herky-jerky, stop-start measures such as Fiducia Supplicans, which allowed (sort of) the blessing of same-sex couples, just as an earlier measure allowed (sort of) the reception of Communion by divorced and remarried Catholics. The give-then-take-away dance was repeated when Pope Francis removed all progressive ambitions from the synod’s agenda, doing so after having promised that the synodal process would represent a new and transformative way of “doing church.” In effect, everything cancels everything else. “This will result in an eventual apostolic exhortation that nobody will read, and even fewer will implement. We’ve come a long way from ‘the culmination of the Second Vatican Council’”—the initial marketing of the synodal process—“to a discussion about nothing, leading to a document about nothing, to be read by nobody.”
♦ Tierney is right. Yes, there will be uses of canonical power. The Vatican recently ordered an apostolic visitation of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, a traditionalist movement devoted to the Latin Mass. No doubt the visitation is being orchestrated by those who hope that Francis will suppress the society. But whatever the outcome, no minds will be changed. Latin Mass attendance will continue to increase, along with bitterness toward the arrogant and authoritarian Baby Boomers who preach “inclusion” while persecuting those who hold different views. Instead of uniting the Church, this pontificate has promoted its fragmentation. The Holy Spirit may be smiling. Catholicism seems to be heading toward a more federal structure, in spirit if not in law. Perhaps this development will be a fitting corrective to the undue “Romanization” of the Church after the pontificate of Pius IX.
♦ Simone Weil: “If children are accustomed to not thinking of God, they will become fascists or Communists out of a need to give themselves to something.” Perhaps, but as Dan Mahoney observes in “Simone Weil’s Conversion” (Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2024), “listless nihilism” and “spiritual indifference” are also possibilities.
♦ We are racing to complete work on a new website. Our ambition is to provide readers with an online experience as delightful as our beautiful print edition. We’re proud of what we publish. We want to be proud of the way in which we publish. The new website will have a few new features. Subscribers will be able to download a PDF of the new issues as they appear, allowing for leisurely reading on an iPad or laptop in places with spotty Wi-Fi coverage. (Regulars on Amtrak will appreciate this feature.)
The new website will also employ a comprehensive paywall. (At present, web-exclusive content is free to everyone at all times.) The experts we consulted counseled us to maintain a tight paywall, permitting just one or two free articles before requiring a subscription. But increased subscription revenue is not our sole motive. We have a mission, and we want our content to be read by as many people as possible. The new website will impose limits on free content in the hope that devoted readers who are not subscribers will join our community of supporters. Our prices will remain low, lower than many Substack subscriptions and other online magazines.
As a rule, readers rarely like change. I’m among them. But as St. John Henry Newman observed: “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” We won’t be perfect, but our aim is to have a living publication—hence, our new website.
♦ I’m pleased to announce the launch of an annual First Things lecture in Florida, named in honor of our founder, Richard John Neuhaus. Political philosopher Patrick Deneen will deliver the inaugural Neuhaus Lecture at New College of Florida on Thursday, February 13. Visit firstthings.com for details.
