Forming Future Christian Political Witness

(Here’s my report to the October 2016 IRD board meeting.)

Too often IRD is described as focused on Mainline Protestant reform. That was true in 1996. It hasn’t been true in many years. Arguably we have no ongoing reform program in Mainline Protestantism if United Methodism is now considered global and not Mainline. We occasionally report the latest decline stats for mainline denominations and occasionally notable outrageous statements or actions. Doubtless faithful people remain in mainline denominations, and hopefully our ministry nourishes some of them, but there are no major reform movements in the Mainline.

IRD’s stated purpose is reforming the political and social witness of America’s churches. We do carry with us the memory of once formidable mainline Protestantism, with all of its former majesty, before its collapse into absurdity and cultural irrelevance. Of late there’s been the argument that the Mainline was so successful in shifting the culture left that its own death was a final vindication. It seems apt that church death should be a celebrated goal for liberal Christianity.

The tragic mistakes in theology, ecclesiology and political witness that killed the Mainline must be a permanent warning to all Christians everywhere of the consequences when churches betray their own core beliefs. IRD is uniquely placed, by virtue of our own history, especially to warn left-leaning evangelicals of their inevitable fate.

But our role is not just to recall the failures of the mainline but also its successes: which include American democracy, one of Christianity’s greatest social accomplishments, liberating and prospering hundreds of millions across centuries, and creating a culture where Christian Faith operated freely and influentially through a non theocratic republic, in what is often called and even now commonly disparaged as civil religion.

The Mainline among its other gifts transmitted the political theology of magisterial Protestantism into the bloodstream of the United States and from here to the world. The Mainline at its best was stately, dignified, outward focused, confident, hopeful, not necessarily beholden to every passing cultural or religious fad. When others overreacted or veered into extremism, the mainline acted as ecclesial and cultural ballast, helping the nation correct course and sail ahead. It called the nation to judgement, reform and accountability without sneering, despising, or succumbing to apocalyptic rhetoric.

Would that we had a mainline today to provide ecclesial and cultural leadership. Sadly it left no successor. Christianity in America is as numerous as ever but is increasingly bifurcated among nondenominational congregations and large personalities. Denominations and traditions are increasingly passé at least in popular religion. There is less and less connection to the great church traditions and their moral traditions including most impotently for our purposes political theology.

It used to be at least for my generation that conservative Protestants read the Calvinist Francis Schaefer for counsel on political theology and cultural reform. Almost nobody reads him anymore, and there is no successor, except a thousand different evangelical bloggers, few of whom take any major Christian tradition very seriously. Instead, they with good intentions superimpose their own individualistic political and cultural preferences onto Jesus, apparently not realizing the collective church’s counsel across centuries and many cultures might be helpful.

Liberal Christianity among evangelicals is somewhat moribund. But conservative Christianity is perhaps more confused than ever politically. In its older organized institutional forms it relies on the increasingly exhausted vapors of the old Religious Right, assuming that evangelicals can and should remain engaged with the political right just from force of habit, without need of deep theological rationale.

That model has decreasing widespread appeal and almost none among young even conservative Christians. Most evangelicals likely will go on voting conservative for a while with less and less understanding of why they should do so. Meanwhile a growing segment of conservative Christian elites especially among the young are increasingly detached politically, tempted by Anabaptism, some version of the Benedict Option, or simply cynicism, justified by declinist, fatalistic rhetoric about the irreversible demise of our nation, Western Civilization and Christendom. Some even try to argue that cultural and civilizational collapse will be liberating and should be eagerly embraced. Likely very few are prepared to abandon the creature comforts and security provided by our civilization.

Part of the recovery from this sad time in Christian social witness depends on rediscovering first principles about God’s purposes for government as the universal church has traditionally understood through accumulated experience and wisdom. It should be and will be good news for many to learn there is an accumulated treasury of Christian thought that exceeds in wisdom the typical evangelical blogger who knows what Jesus wants us to do.

Our foreign policy journal Providence is aimed at schooling at least a subset of Christian thought leaders in historic Christian ways of looking at global statecraft and national security. The reception has been favorable. But we need to expand our scope, explaining why government is in all times and places called to protect us from crime and foreign enemies but is not similarly called to protect our self esteem, affirm our perceived sexual orientation, govern our diet, feed our pets, or divvy out our daily vitamins.

Christian social and political witness has become a grab bag of unsystematic individualistic wants and personal desires. Typical social justice jamborees for young evangelicals portray every perceived political, social and economic aspiration as a state responsibility achieved through larger government and the further retreat of civil society. Meanwhile traditional Religious Right appeals, not typically successful with young people, depend on reflexive conservatism without need of theological framework.

Maybe IRD’s contribution beyond Providence is to host a Christian political theology event targeting young Christians, starting with a small audience and annually expanding, hopefully generating a new generation of astute Christian thinkers and actors who will in turn create new circles of expanding influence.

These initiatives will not of course transform our culture with the immediate results demanded by the contemporary expectation of quick gratification. They will seek to align with God’s more patient, long term program of redeeming the world.

May IRD always seek to participate in God’s redemption of always troubled humanity.