The Apolitical Politics of Christendom

In my little corner of the Christian world, everyone’s talking about politics, especially the permutations and implications of Christian nationalism. All is political theology and punditry. My little corner isn’t unique. Christians of every stripe obsess over politics, especially in the U.S. Witness the childish instinct to locate Pope Leo XIV on the left-right political spectrum, as if climate change, gun control, immigration, and approval of Trump-Vance were new tests of orthodoxy. This fixation on politics is shortsighted, even politically. Over the centuries, the church’s most penetrating and lasting political achievements have depended less on overt political commentary or theory than on adherence to basic credal affirmations and liturgical practices. 

Early on, Christians were, by contemporary standards, nearly apolitical. Some Church Fathers boasted of the church’s freedom from pollutions of politics. Despite widespread indifference, Christians refreshed political thought and life as the church became as international as the empire, though it lacked an earthly capital, army, and visible emperor. At the center of this new way of corporate life was a new ritual, the sacrificial un-sacrifice of the Eucharist. Sacrifice was foundational to ancient political order, and the relocation and redefinition of sacrifice, and the eventual public recognition of the Eucharist as the one true sacrifice, was one of the cornerstones of Western Christendom and Byzantine order.

The community gathered at the Lord’s meal, as Chad Pecknold has written in Christianity and Politics, “crossed all ethnic borders,” and achieved a “unity that was not abstract, nor was it made by coercion or force,” yet constituted a depth of “political allegiance” never before seen. In the Eucharist, the church ritually enacted “a transcendent vision that not even the most expansive understanding of ‘empire’ could have competed with.” Martyrs who boldly defied Rome’s imperial pretenses were made at the table, as they participated in the Witness, Jesus Christ. Where your sacrifices are, there will your heart be also. 

The church’s self-conception emerged from a typological reading of Scripture. In the church’s teaching and imagination, ancient Israel came to maturity in the church, as promise and fulfillment, or as stages of the single history of the imperium of God. God’s people are as odd in their public constitution as exilic Israel, a polity-within-worldly-polities. Kings like Constantine and Charlemagne were eventually described as Davids and Solomons, but strictly speaking the antitype of David is Jesus and Jesus alone. Before emperors could become David-like, they had to become members of the body of King Jesus.

Eschatology had a prominent place in the metapolitics of Byzantium. According to Alexander Schmemann, Byzantine thought had no room for a static or spatial division of church and state, but instead emphasized the temporal-eschatological distinction of church and world. The world with all its structures and institutions is good, but becomes demonic when disconnected from its source and end in God. To treat the world as “secular,” as an end in itself, is the very definition of original sin. Yet the world is not fated to remain imprisoned within its own cramped eschatological horizon forever. The church enters the world as the presence and sacrament of the coming kingdom, and the gospel the church proclaims aims at the redemption of the world, which is to say, its reorientation toward that kingdom.

This eschatological perspective was the foundation of Byzantine political theology: “as everything else in ‘this world,”’ Schmemann writes in Church, World, Mission, “the state may be under the power of the ‘prince of this world’ . . . yet, by ‘accepting’ the Kingdom of God as its own ultimate value or ‘eschaton,’ it may fulfill a positive function.” The state becomes Christian just insofar as it recognizes “its limit”; a Christian state is Christian because it refuses to become an absolute value, an end, the end, and acquires genuine value in subordination “to the only absolute value, that of God’s Kingdom.” A Christian state is one that refuses the Babelic illusion that it can arrest history.

The church’s place in public life had come full circle. When she first appeared, she was a surd, a novelty that upended the equilibrium of the Roman Empire. After the Reformation, the splintered Western church became to the rising national states what the civic religions of the ancient polis or the Roman empire had been—religious props for a polity or king. The church was domesticated, as the holiness of the corpus mysticum slowly, often explicitly, migrated to the nation or state. Modern politics is unimaginable without the metapolitical contributions of Christian ecclesiology, eucharistic practice, and eschatology, but modern political order is defined by its rejection of Christendom. 

Western political life was gestated in the womb of the church, nurtured by the church’s Christological readings of history, her eucharistic worship and charity, and her hope for the world’s future repentance. Reviving this metapolitical outlook is far more crucial to our political future than any strictly political program or movement. Christianity won’t transform the political world by obsessing over politics, but only by obsessing over Jesus, his table, and his Bride.