Charlie Kirk’s assassination has fired up a long-standing evangelical wrangle about “third-wayism.” Keen to avoid being boxed in by either the right or the left, third-wayists say Christians must follow a third path. Opponents claim third-wayism always drifts, or cascades, leftward.
It is not an illuminating debate. As is so often the case, the adversaries can’t come to genuine disagreement (much less agreement) because they share a common framework. Those who attack third-wayism deploy the left-right binary as a handy weapon to gain, expand, and maintain power, to rally friends and demonize enemies, to humiliate third-wayists or club them into silence. Third-wayism is a rhetorical trick that positions the speaker as the balanced, reasonable adult in the room, calmly walking the straight path, casting scornful glances at the wreckage in the ditches on either side. But “third” is a tell: One chooses a third way in a world where two and only two other ways exist.
The left-right spectrum that both sides assume no longer accurately maps our political landscape. Old-fashioned leftists like Bernie Sanders stand for things. Their politics are principled, even moralistic (which is not to say they’re right). What Tyler Robinson (alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk) encountered online wasn’t “leftist” in this old sense, but nihilist. To be sure, nihilism has affinities to the old-style left. Nihilism is, as Fr. Seraphim Rose observed, an extreme form of a liberalism that absolutizes autonomy and free choice. Once you say you’re free to kill an inconvenient fetus, you’re well down the road to the Nothing. Besides, old leftists in the Democrat party have courted nihilists (transgender ideologues, antifascists, and antiracists) to do their thug work. Still, nihilism isn’t confined to the left. There are plenty of right nihilists, more ready to destroy than to build, itching to push the accelerator to the floor to demolish what remains of public order. The fault line between Nothings and Somethings runs through both right and left, not between them. To the extent that they’ve courted them, left and right each have to own their crazies.
The left-right duality blinds political judgment. Consider what counts as leftist today: open immigration, transgenderism, antiracism, gay marriage, opposition to Israel and defense of Palestinians, unbending support for Ukraine, pro-choice, anti-Trumpism. Once these positions are grouped as “left,” anyone who holds one “left” position gets slapped with the “leftist” label. If you have reservations about Trump (as I do), question Trump’s immigration policies, believe African Americans have suffered and still suffer injustices, or express sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza, you’ll get lumped in with transgenders and homosexuals. But there’s no necessary connection between transgenderism or gay marriage and one’s position on Gaza, Ukraine, or racial politics. Up until 2015, remember, the default right-wing outlook was simultaneously anti-abortion and pro-immigration. (For clarity, I don’t advocate a return to the dead consensus of Reaganism.)
Christians should embody a different way altogether, one that’s not defined by the contingent, fluctuating contours of American politics. Catholic Social Teaching is a resource. Resolutely anti-abortion and opposed to gay marriage, Catholic teachers often support social welfare, defend the rights of immigrants, advocate for workers, and criticize aspects of capitalism. In the U.S., Catholics often sound like standard-issue Democrats, but that tilt isn’t inherent in Catholic Social Teaching. If you take your cues from Augustine and Aquinas and twentieth-century personalism, as John Paul II and Benedict XVI did, your politics won’t easily fit the American binary. At its best, Catholic political thought articulates an alternative politics whose guiding principles emerge from two millennia of political reflection.
We Protestants also have a tradition of social and political teaching, which isn’t simply a variation of American conservatism. Today, the most articulate and profound representative is Oliver O’Donovan, who sounds awfully conservative until he starts talking about conservatism. Nationalism and conservatism, he writes in one characteristic passage, share an antipathy to the universal, and thus both are in danger of turning the self, the nation, or society, into an end in itself. When that happens, “when the identity of a society is held to be sufficient justification in itself for all the abridgements of social freedom that government requires,” it becomes an idol. O’Donovan criticizes conservatism not from the left, nor from some safe spot in the political midair, but from the firm ground of the Christian political tradition, which O’Donovan knows better than anyone.
Christians have theological reasons to reject the right-left binary and the parasitic “third way.” Politicians talk more or less freely about Jesus, but the Jesus they talk about is rather a lone ranger, a bodiless head that can be stitched onto whatever national or party body comes to hand. But the living Christ is head of a body, the church. Christians shouldn’t be fooled by politicians who honor King Jesus but snub his Queen. A politics centered on Christ and his church surveys the political world from the viewpoint of a global communion. Because Christians confess the church is God’s holy nation among the nations, the city of God among the cities of men, we can’t talk about politics without talking about God’s church and his kingdom. As O’Donovan says, the basic question of Christian politics arises only from within Christian faith: “how can the defense of this common good, focused around this common identity at this time and in this way, be brought to serve that common good which belongs to the all-embracing identity, individual and collective, of God’s kingdom”? We’re not doing Christian politics at all unless we ask that question, and since no one else knows to ask that question, Christian politics by definition articulates another way.
