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.