The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

God’s Word warns against “the wisdom of this world” (1 Corinthians 1:20-25) and “things that are seen” (2 Corinthians 4:18):  In other words, the dominant ideas and commitments of a world in rebellion against God.  As Christians we often struggle with the best way to organize human society according to human nature.  What is our vision of human nature and what is the best government to adapt to that nature?  In trying to answer those questions, Western Civilization has been shaped by three primary characteristics that have characterized the last 400 years:

1.   Western civilization has rejected the medieval vision of a world in which kings and priests are divinely ordained rulers.  We seek to liberate humans from arbitrary rule. Based on the work of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Western Civilization has reached a consensus that defines humans as self-interested, autonomous individuals whose liberty is the freedom to determine one’s own life.
2. The Western, liberated self-interested human therefore seeks fulfillment and purpose in economic achievement, the building of material goods (i.e., mammon).  The West almost assigns a religious passion to finance and mammon as the path to freedom and happiness.
3. Since, in the view of the West, political and economic progress is inevitable, what happens when many in society do not achieve the inevitable?  The result is a growing anger and bitterness among those who believe the promise of progress but do not realize it.  Our self-interest and our self-defined future are not being achieved.  Bitterness ad anger replace contentment, peace and faith.  Many, if not most, take on the demeanor of a victim.

As Joel D. Lawrence of the Center for Pastor Theologians has argued,  the church has conformed in many ways to these three patterns—the pursuit of personal autonomy, mammon as the key to personal happiness and embracing the demeanor of anger.  “That the church looks little different from the world, that the church is divided along partisan political lines and that the anger of the age has infected the church, reveal our conformity to the pattern of the age . . . But the gospel declares that we are created to be a self-surrendered, dependent community who lives under the rule of YHWH, and that human freedom lies in being radically dependent on YHWH as he reigns as Lord of our lives.”

Furthermore, to show how serious this conformity is for the church, Lawrence draws heavily on an important book by Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed:  “. . . liberalism, founded on the self-interest of humans, will inevitably lead to a factionalized, disintegrating, self-protective society in which the overarching goals of society that transcend individuals are lost as each person is trained by the liberal anthropology to be an autonomous individual—not connected in any way to a larger community.  Liberalism, positing the self-actualization and self-definition of individuals, is a tradition-dissolving philosophy that views tradition as a barrier to the achievement of the self and so leads to ever-deepening factions of self-interested autonomy.  Such a traditionless society cannot long endure.”

Following the recent book by James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, Hunter “reminds us that a nation’s political life rests upon cultural foundations. Each society has its own way of seeing the world, its own basic assumptions about what is right and wrong, its own vision of a better world that gives national life direction and purpose. Culture is the ocean of symbols and stories in which we swim.  American culture, Hunter argues, was formed within the tension between Enlightenment values and religious faith. America was founded at the high point of the Enlightenment and according to Enlightenment ideas: a belief in individual reason, that social differences should be settled through deliberation and democracy, and that a free society depends on neutral institutions like the electoral system and the courts, which will be fair to all involved.  But over the centuries many Americans have also believed that America has a covenantal relationship with God—from Puritan leaders like John Winthrop on down. The Bible gave generations of Americans a bedrock set of moral values, the conviction that we live within an objective moral order, the faith that the arc of history bends toward justice. Religious fervor drove many of our social movements, like abolitionism. Religious fervor explains why America has always had big arguments over things like Prohibition and abortion, which don’t seem to rile other nations as much. As late as 1958, according to a Gallup poll, only 18 percent of Americans said they would be willing to vote for an atheist for president.”

David Brooks further summarizes and applies Hunter’s analysis:

• “Each generation, Hunter continues, works out its own balance in the tension between Enlightenment liberty and moral authority. In the 20th century, for example, the philosopher John Dewey emerged as the great champion of Enlightenment values. He believed that religion had been discredited but that a public ethic could be built by human reason, on the basis of individual dignity and human rights. He had great faith in the power of education to train people to become moral citizens . . . The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr thought this was naïve. He believed that Dewey underestimated the human capacity for sin. He believed that you can’t use science to answer questions about life’s ultimate purpose and meaning. He dismissed the idea that with just a little more schooling, we would be able to educate people out of their racism and selfishness or that secularism could address life’s deepest problems . . . over the decades, most Americans lived with one ear attuned to the doctrine of Dewey and the other ear attuned to the doctrine of Niebuhr. If you want to see these two traditions within one person, look at Martin Luther King Jr. He used a Christian metaphysics to show how American democracy could live up to both Enlightenment and divine ideals.  Unfortunately, Hunter notes, this fruitful cultural tension died with King. Starting in the 1960s, America grew less religious. Those who remained religious were told to keep their faith to the private sphere. American public life became largely secular, especially among the highly educated classes, producing what the First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus called “the naked public square.” By 2020, 60 percent of Americans said “they would vote for an atheist for president.”
• “At the same time, science and reason failed to produce a substitute moral order that could hold the nation together. By 1981, in the famous first passage of his book After Virtue, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued that we had inherited fragments of moral ideas, not a coherent moral system to give form to a communal life, not a solid set of moral foundations to use to settle disputes. Moral reasoning, he wrote, had been reduced to ‘emotivism.’ If it feels right, do it. In 1987, Allan Bloom released his mega selling The Closing of the American Mind, arguing that moral relativism had become the dominant ethos of the era.  In other words, Americans lost faith in both sides of the great historical tension and, with it, the culture that had long held a diverse nation together. By the 21st century, it became clear that Americans were no longer just disagreeing with one another; they didn’t even perceive the same reality. You began to hear commencement speakers declare that each person has to live according to his or her own truth. Critics talked about living in a post-truth society. Hunter talks about cultural exhaustion, a loss of faith, a rising nihilism — the belief in nothing. As he puts it, ‘If there is little or no common political ground today, it is because there are few if any common assumptions about the nature of a good society that underwrite a shared political life.’”
• “Was there anything that would fill this void of meaning? Was there anything that could give people a shared sense of right and wrong, a sense of purpose?  It turns out there was: identity politics. People on the right and the left began to identify themselves within a particular kind of moral story. This is the story in which my political group is the victim of oppression and other groups are the oppressors. For people who feel they are floating in a moral and social vacuum, this story provides a moral landscape—there are those bad guys over there and us good guys over here. The story provides a sense of belonging. It provides social recognition. By expressing my rage, I will earn your attention and respect . . . The problem with this form of all-explaining identity politics is that it undermines democracy. If others are evil and out to get us, then persuasion is for suckers. If our beliefs are defined by our identities and not individual reason and personal experience, then different Americans are living in different universes, and there is no point in trying to engage in deliberative democracy. You just have to crush them. You have to grab power and control of the institutions and shove your answers down everybody else’s throats.”

In this climate, Hunter argues, “the authoritarian impulse becomes impossible to restrain.” Authoritarianism imposes a social vision by force. “If you can’t have social solidarity organically from the ground up, then you can impose it from top down using the power of the state. But in this world . . . politics is seen as a form of total war.”

Two concluding thoughts:

1. Some Christians think that by marshaling a Christian voting bloc they can establish Christ’s kingdom on earth.  We dare not confuse the external and limited good that political power can achieve with the internal and infinite good that God’s grace produces.  Further, we cannot buy into what the late Chuck Colson called the “political illusion,” the notion that all human problems can be solved by political institutions.  It is idolatrous to believe that, for the Bible declares that the root problem of society is spiritual.  What the Christian seeks through government is justice, not power.  The task of spiritual transformation is for the church, not the state.
2. The church is the agent of God’s power in the world.  The church is inextricably linked with the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, through which evil was defeated.  Robert Webber writes: “This new view of life belongs to the church because Christ, the head of the church, is inseparably linked with it.  His power over sin, death, and the dominion of the Devil now belongs to the church . . . The church acts in the name of Christ to witness through prayer, preaching, baptism, communion, lifestyle, and other means proclaiming that Satan is now doomed.  The church is a corporate body of people who know Satan as a deceiver and liar.  He has no ultimate power over them and their lives.  Consequently, the church is a threat to Satan.” Satan truly hates the church and seeks to destroy it.  Satan seeks to produce heresy in the church, discord in the church, to re-order the church’s priorities and to get the church to cultivate faith in power, in wealth and in human authorities, not in Christ.  Anything that seeks to get the church off focus becomes a tool of Satan.  For that reason, the church must be vigilant, on guard and dressed with the whole armor of God.   The witness of the church in this age is to expose evil and to be the agent of reconciliation to God.  That is the nature of the Gospel.  That is the nature of being salt and light.

See Joel D. Lawrence in Bibliotheca Sacra (January-March 2023), pp. 3-15, (April June 2023), pp. 131-143, and (July-September 2023), pp. 259-270; David Brooks, “Recipe for a Striving America” in the New York Times (5 October 2024); and David Brooks in the New York Times (12 July 2024).