There are three thoughts I just can't shake, no matter how hard I try to write about something else. I'd like to share them through the lens of three books I've read over the last year.
If Christ Isn't King, Someone Else Is
I haven't fully worked out all the practical implications for this thought, but I'll share it anyway. As I alluded to in 2023 and Beyond, I think I've had an interesting intellectual/political journey. Six years ago, I would've called myself a Conservatarian, meaning a combination of conservative and libertarian. I was living under the presupposition that just because I didn't agree with what someone did didn't mean they didn't have the liberty to do it. This was largely built on my presupposition that because government ruins pretty much everything it touches, it had no place telling anyone how to act. There was another institution tasked with that, and it was the Church. My biggest assumption was that it's not right to wield too much power simply because you won't always be in power. Unfortunately, this is a naive take that too many of us have fallen for. We haven't seemed to notice that we’re the only people who actually govern that way.
To declare "Jesus is Lord" is to declare that Caesar is not. Declaring that Jesus is Lord has dangerous implications for pluralism, a god which our culture has worshipped for far too long. Consider this thought from Francis Schaeffer's book, Genesis in Space and Time.
Being created in the image of God frees us from the burden of thinking that whatever is therefore must be right. We have been given a dominion which puts a moral responsibility on us. We don’t need to succumb therefore to the ethics of the Marquis de Sade, where might, or whatever is, is right.
The moral responsibility we have (as Christians) tells us that we have the answers to right and wrong. The answers we have are not merely competing options in the marketplace of ideas that is so heavily championed by Liberalism. If it is the Truth, then it is the Truth. End of story. This means we have a moral responsibility to fight. It means a lot of things actually really do matter: apologetics, books, culture, film, podcasts, social media, YouTube, theology, worldview, & DEFINITELY politics.
Excuses like “My mind just can’t go there” or “I just think this isn’t winsome” or “The Gospel is all that matters” aren't enough. Of course the Gospel changes everything, but that's precisely the point! It CHANGES everything. You can be "Gospel-centered" all you want but perpetually avoid controversy. While you’re doing that, your kids will be discipled by someone “deconstructing” on TikTok. They'll be discipled by someone who is not afraid of controversy and isn't afraid to fight for something they actually believe, not something they just claim to believe. While you preach that "politics" is just too divisive, Pagans are winning on valuable political issues that affect more than just your tax bracket.
This is simply an extension of the argument I made in Church Online vs. Ministry Online. If Christ is Lord over all, that must mean ALL. If He is Lord over the algorithms, He is Lord over kingdoms. Governance does not happen in a vacuum. If Christians do not fill the void, that doesn't mean the void remains a void. It means that if the people of God don’t rule, someone else will. And that's what we're seeing.
Happiness and Freedom Are Not Liberation From Obligation or Duty
Late last year, I started reading Yuval Levin's The Great Debate, a book that had been on my To Be Read list forever. The subtitle reads: "Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left." Reading this book answered nearly all the "but why?" questions I had concerning political worldview stuff. Because I was very Libertarian, I recognized how influential Thomas Paine and his ideas were to the American founding. Many of my questions, and therefore my answers, about how I was intended to live as a Christian in a nation that held Liberty as its highest value were steeped in the presupposition that Thomas Paine's philosophy was unquestionably correct. If he had so heavily influenced the Founders, and the Founders were good, how could I argue with that? But I finally began to discover the need to question our founding principles from the Right, not from the Left.
Levin argues in his book that while Edmund Burke was friendly to the cause of American Independence, he took issue with the principles on which the War for Independence was laid. Though rights are important and cannot simply be trampled, they also cannot be disconnected from obligations each of us are born into without any choice. Thomas Paine, on the other hand, built his entire philosophy on the idea that man is an individual at his origin with no social relations and therefore no underlying social burden or obligation.
I'd like to pull out two points that I think give the best picture of the discussion between Burke and Paine and therefore the best picture of how we've arrived in the present.
Society is therefore a means to accomplish what each individual has the right but not the ability to accomplish. For Paine, this means it is above all a means to enable choice, or the freedom to shape our own future--a means to the radical liberation of the individual from the burdens of his circumstances, his given nature, and his fellow man... Personal liberty--the right to choose--is the end toward which we aim in politics. Societies exist to protect acts of choice, by meeting animal necessities on the one hand and by protecting individuals from coercion on the other.
It's hard to argue with the fact that this is the air we've been breathing for 200+ years. We all know this to be true, but I'm not sure we've quite connected it with its logical conclusions, which can be seen everywhere right now. If choice is all that matters, how can we argue with the excesses of our culture?
Now, consider the core of Burke's political philosophy instead.
But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint... Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Society cannot exists unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.
That sounds a lot like the law that sets you free to me... Burke's philosophy is based upon ordered liberty, not liberty for liberty's sake. Levin goes on to highlight Burke's case that a political system that has given up on educating man's natural sentiments toward good cannot help but degenerate because it has nothing of value on which to cling. Thinking about a political system designed to educate man's natural sentiments towards good begs the question: who defines what is good? That question is answered in my first point above. Someone must define what the good is.
Discipleship & Culture Building is a LONG Game
All three of these thoughts are intertwined. This last one is simply a result of the first two, and the best way to illustrate it is to reference Carl Trueman's book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
The mistake such Christians made was failing to realize the broader, underlying social and cultural conditions that made both gay marriage and then transgender ideology first plausible and then normative and that these conditions have been developing over hundreds of years. They are therefore by now very deep seated and themselves an intuitive part of life. Acceptance of gay marriage and transgenderism are simply the latest outworking, the most recent symptoms, of deep and long established cultural pathologies. The basic principle is this: no individual historical phenomenon is its own cause.
While Levin and Trueman's books are devoted to different topics, they overlap more than we realize because they are illustrative of the same point. We did not arrive here overnight. We did not arrive here in one election cycle. It's not as if things were great pre 2008 and things have fallen apart since. To use Trueman's words, our problems are deep seated, and I would argue much of them found their genesis in the worship of self and choice so prevalent in Thomas Paine's ideology, which heavily influenced many Founders. We are so troubled all the time because we are now reaching a point where all these seeds are bearing fruit.
In the conclusion of his book, Carl Trueman argues that as the Church seeks historical precedent for how to respond, we would do well to look to the Church of the second century.
It was that second century world, of course, that laid down the foundations for the later successes of the third and fourth centuries. And she did it by what means? By existing as a close knit, doctrinally bounded community that required her members to act consistently with their faith and to be good citizens of the earthly city as far as good citizenship was compatible with faithfulness to Christ.
I want you to notice the timeframes he's speaking of here.
Centuries.
Burke and Paine debated their thoughts during the French Revolution and the War for Independence, both of which took place centuries ago. It is only recently that we have truly begun to see the bad fruit of these ideas. This means these issues will quite likely take centuries to reverse. But that doesn't mean you can't start today. Discipleship of a culture does not happen over night and it won't happen over one election cycle. Instead, it is a long process to which we must stay committed.
"The Kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that *a man took and sowed in his field*. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches."
Matthew 13:31-32
Go sow the seed in your field, wherever that may be.