Introduction

Civil society needs Christianity and Christians need to be the first to recognize why. There is a tide rising against historic Christianity and Christians are feeling the collywobbles about the direction of American culture. The ruling class now says in open daylight, “Do we need historic Christianity in the United States? Wouldn’t we be better off if biblical Christianity ceased to exist?”[1]

Christ is Lord

Christianity is a religion that starts with God rather than man. This doesn’t mean that God is important and man is not. It means that man could never be important without God. Not the amorphous God of changing definition, but the immutable God who creates man and is therefore distinct from and sovereign over the creation. Since society is a partnership between men, God is Lord over it too. And since nations are large groups of people, God is Lord over them. Thomas Aquinas said, “As one man is part of the household, so a household is a part of the polis: and the polis is the perfect community.”[2]

To say that God is Lord over man, society, and nations is to say that each has a moral obligation to God. This is why Western Civilization, rooted in Christendom, insists upon a strong cultural place for churches and preachers. It is this compact that has historically created civil society.[3] How else will the people learn their God-given obligations? When obligations are named, people learn that they live in a certain type of world, one where each person’s thoughts and actions will be judged by God.

Civil Society Needs God-Ordained Institutions

Civil society starts with a polis. Harry Jaffa explained that the polis originated as a collection of families who came together for the sake of safety and survival.[4] This requires holding the community together. Thomas Aquinas said it best, “The well-being of one household is ordered to the well-being of one polis.”[5] So the polis must pursue the comprehensive human good of happiness, namely, the good life as defined by God in his Word and personified in Jesus Christ. This is why societies must organize around a moral vision, as Aristotle understood, “The end and purpose of a polis is the good life.” How do people get the good life? “The institutions of social life are means to that end.” Speaking further, Aristotle said, “Any polis which is truly so called, and is not merely one in name, must devote itself to the end of encouraging goodness.”[6] 

The compact of civil society is fulfilled when fixed institutions thrive, such as the nuclear family and the church. Johannes Althusius, the seventeenth-century French-Calvinist political philosopher, wrote a book called Politica.  By tracing the constituent parts of society such as the family, guilds, clubs, schools, and the city, he argued that a healthy civilization is one in which the various forms of human association exercise as much self-rule as possible.[7]

Institutions serve two functions: binding and forming. The way healthy churches (and families) preserve the gospel is by binding people to Christ (and his body) and forming them in the image of Christ. This means preparing people to find joy in the life of sacrificial love. Meaning and identity are conferred by durable institutions, which are the framework and structure not only of what people do but of what they are. When people create their meaning and identity independent of God, family, and the church, the outcome is that everyone lives in the universe of their own definition.[8]

So we’ve arrived at the conflict of modernity: that the institutions of the church stand against the project of human autonomy. The ruling class defines progress as steamrolling the church, which is the same thing as reinforcing autonomy. Moral revolutionaries wish for what ought to be, irrespective of what is. It’s not that morality has disappeared. It’s been changed. It’s a morality of self. It is a morality that starts with self rather than God. It’s a culture of me where human choice is the ultimate standard of morality. The fruit of me-hilism[9] is to avoid work while endlessly consuming. Compromise will not solve this conflict, but Christ will.

Compromise is Not Enough

It's not enough to say, as Brook Manville and Josiah Ober do in their new book, The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives, that the United States will be rescued when citizens renew their commitment to compromise. Compromise may be necessary for democracy to persist, but compromise is not an omni-panacea for the current desecration. Compromise has no answer for kakistocracy. Compromise means that the two sides meet somewhere in the middle. This simply can’t work when one side operates in pestiferous rebellion against their God-assigned obligations. There is no meeting in the middle when an entire block of people operates outside the sphere of moral reality. The constant flux is by design. As Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air.” That is, old certainties must turn into chaos. Ancient prejudices must be swept away. As Marx also prescribed, “All that is holy is profaned.”[10] So if it feels like things are, as William Yeats said, constantly “falling apart,”[11] that is because the point of flux is to abolish, in Marx’s words, “eternal truths.”[12]

Compromise isn’t a legitimate point of integration for the simple reason that Christ, not compromise, holds all things together (Col. 1:17f). You can’t make harmony from a discordant symphony. You can’t tame a storm with a gentle breeze. You can’t reason with shadows in pitch dark. There are virtually no ways to strike a truthful bargain with someone who thinks boys can become girls; who thinks two dudes can marry each other; and who thinks mothers should be allowed to abort their baby.

There is a difference between those who believe in human nature and those who don’t. Compromise cannot work without a cultural consensus about the meaning of human beings.[13] For example, if a human being is a creature made in the image of the Living and Personal God, then at least two implications follow. First, it implies that human beings are made with purpose and for purpose; with love and for love. Second, it implies that humans receive limits and boundaries. This second implication is the theme of Thomas Sowell’s 1987 book, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. Sowell points to the fact that there is a fundamentally different vision of humanity and reality that underpins societal division. Why are there so many people standing opposite one another on so many economic, political, cultural, and theological issues? The reason is that there is a conflict of visions between the constrained part of humanity and an unconstrained part of humanity.

If a living organism was belched out by the witlessness of nature; and if human beings evolved from that living organism due to random, impersonal processes,[14] then at least two implications follow. First, it implies there exist no natural or moral constraints on behavior. Second, it implies that human beings are anything their will can achieve.[15] In the book, Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche argued for an alternative morality where everything is permissible. This is the case because, as he argues in The Twilight of the Idols, God is dead, by which he means that nobody believes in God anymore. Given his premise, Nietzsche is correct. If God is dead (as he presumes), then there is no objective truth. The human soul, with all its reason, love, and purpose, is not real if God does not exist. How then shall we live? This is the question Nietzsche answers in Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Eternal Return. He argues that most people are weaklings. It is those who live by the supreme virtue of “master morality” that become the Superman by affirming the meaninglessness of life. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of life is the will to power, which is naked self-affirmation and egotism.

Behind the dedication to Darwinism, scientism, and utopianism, is a reductionistic assessment of human beings as low, debased, and inchoate. In contrast, the Christian view is that humanity is joyfully constrained by the Heavenly Father. Humans are not autonomous individuals, unrestrained and without constraints. They are defined; they don’t get to define. Christians understand not only that they are tied to a constrained vision of humanity, but that constraint is not self-selected. It is something that has been placed upon them by a loving Creator, who created and constrains human beings for their good.

These Christian convictions, combined with the greater body of Christian doctrine, produce a cultural Christianity without which there wouldn’t be the freedom of religion or the multiplication of hospitals. There wouldn’t be Christmas, manners, “women and children first,” dignity for all persons, cathedrals, public servants, or a moral code that despises bullies and respects humility.[16] Some may wish for a cultural Christianity without the doctrine of Christianity. But this is like wanting a symphony without any musicians. The blessings of cultural Christianity only happen when the church is free to flourish and when the church uses that freedom for faithful fidelity to the Word of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Conclusion

What will happen to a nation that has annihilated the church? When a nation is ashamed of Christ, Christ is ashamed of that nation (Mk. 8:38). Yet, when certain powerful interests wish to silence or eliminate the church, the faithful must not neglect[17] “to meet together, as is the habit of some” (Heb. 10:25). God’s people must still gather, still believe, still pray, still build, still think God’s thoughts after him, and joyfully teach their children to do the same. The power of the powerless, as Vaclav Havel argues, is to live within the truth even when the society is living within lies.[18] The enemy’s disapproval doesn’t destroy the church. Christianity has never depended on the zeitgeist’s approval.

The lifelong thesis of Christopher Dawson, the English historian in the mid-twentieth century, was that each great culture in the history of mankind depended on a shared moral order and religious ideal. A Christian might refine Dawson’s thesis to this: Christianity is good for the world. Therefore, the one who resists the moral revolution is more valuable than the one who proposes it. It is a sign of a healthy culture when new ideas are heard, even if only a few should be implemented. And that is why new ideas should run the gauntlet of the church’s objection, the church’s theology, and the church’s history. This is the scrutiny which novelty must survive.

[1] Ryszard Legutko’s book The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, talks about how those who embody the liberal-democratic spirit tolerate traditional conservatives only when they think the conservatives will die out. Why will they die out? Because they are on the wrong side of history. But at some point, the conservatives persist. Conservatives don’t go away and this is intolerable to the leftist notion of democracy. The presence of conservatives calls into question the character of everything else, so it is inconceivable that conservatives can remain with dissenting voices. Differences from “progress” are not tolerated by the liberal-democratic spirit, which praises otherness while crushing difference.

[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II, Q. 90, Art. 2.

[3] Glenn Sunshine defines civil society as that “range of mediating institutions that stand between the individual and the state. These range from the natural institution of the family, … to guilds, confraternities and other charitable agencies, business consortia, schools, etc.” The theory behind civil society is that “government is not and should not be all powerful and there are segments of society that should not be under direct government control.” Glenn Sunshine, Slaying Leviathan: Limited Government and Resistance in the Christian Tradition (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2020), 15-16.

[4] Ephraim Radner goes so far as to argue that politics springs from parenting. Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty (Baker, 2024), 1-19.

[5] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II, Q. 90, Art. 3.

[6] Aristotle, Politics, Book I: Chapter 2

[7] Protestant Social Teaching: An Introduction (The Davenant Press, 20220, 43.

[8] As Anthony Kennedy explained in the 1992 Casey decision, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

[9] https://trinityreformedkirk.podbean.com/e/me-hilism-mark-831-91-jason-cherry-sermon/

[10] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Classics, 1967; orig. 1848), 223.

[11] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

[12] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Classics, 1967; orig. 1848), 242.

[13] Helmut Thielicke, Nihilism: Its Origin and Nature, With a Christian Answer (Tel Aviv: Schocken Books, 1969).

[14] G.K. Chesterton said, “It is not natural to see man as a natural product.” In other words, you can’t account for the uniqueness of human beings as a product of chance. It is common sense that man is different from all other nature. Human nature cannot be explained through natural, godless forces. The Everlasting Man (Watchmaker Publishing), 22.

[15] In the book The Crisis of Modernity, Augusto del Noce puts forth the metaphysical principle that freedom requires self-creation, and thus the radical rejection of all possible forms of dependence, including reliance on God.

[16] Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019).

[17] https://trinityreformedkirk.com/2021/02/16/why-havent-we-canceled-worship-services/

[18] Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (London: Vintage Classics, 2018, orig. 1978).