Increasingly, presidential election years hang over churches like the blade of a guillotine.
For decades, Christian activists on the right and left have baptized their candidates in Bible verses, acting as though Jesus’s agreement with their policies was obvious. A lot of us have been weary of campaign literature disguised as “voter guides” for years. In 2016 and 2020, however, the overlap between politics and faith went from feeling overheated to looking like Chernobyl.
This year, the very legitimacy of liberal society is in doubt among many Christians. Radicals on the left say liberal democracy and capitalism are criminal. Radicals on the right say any toleration of secular values is blasphemous. These seem to be our choices in 2024.
So after a long look at the guillotine, here’s my political credo.
I am for a tolerant and liberal civil society. It is exceptional. It is a fruit of Christian theology and ethics. While liberal societies do commit crimes and harbor injustices, they provide the only recourse to governance in this world that does not necessitate wars, executions, or political imprisonments. They provide freedom of conscience, elections, and the rule of law.
The principles behind this model for society arose in the 1600s, a century soaked in blood.
Beginning in 1618, central Europe endured the Thirty Years’ War, an orgy of massacres pitting Protestants against Catholics, Calvinists against Lutherans, and Anabaptists against everybody. Each group felt morally obliged to eradicate the others. Ponder the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with its ferocious mixture of religion, ethnicity, and ideology. But then drag in Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and the Balkans. Make the war last until 2052. That is the scale of what factional grievance-mongering created in the 1600s.
The Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. These two treaties established, among many principles, the right of princes to designate official religions in their domains. At the same time, princes agreed to tolerate other churches, giving their citizens significant protections against forced conversions. This was an early, tentative, but important acknowledgement that a citizen should have freedom of conscience.
The first glimmer of future liberal society emerged in that century of economic ruin, starvation, and anarchy. Leaders began to enforce norms that respected boundaries of personal conscience, civil order, and national sovereignty. Since that glimmer, the reality of liberal civil society has taken centuries to build.
But we can demolish it quickly.
Too many Americans have a thirst for conspiracy theories, for impeachments, arrests, and trials of their opponents, for speech codes, for violent demonstrations, gruesome threats by phone and social media, doxxing and swatting, and for censorship and shaming of opposing views.
Too many Americans are enthralled with foreign criminals who they see as exemplifying some virtuous cause. There are fresh dupes of old KGB tactics among the right-wing Americans fawning over Vladimir Putin, the supposed Christian prince who is really just a skilled Soviet con artist. Left-wing Americans marching for Hamas are willfully ignoring murderous anti-Semitic lies in their rush to join the latest decolonization mania.
We cannot nourish mythological grievances and defend free society at the same time.
The 1600s were also consequential in Britain.
The English monarchy had swung between Protestant and Catholic control ever since Henry VIII. Each swing kept the executioners busy. The Catholic Charles I was beheaded and Parliament declared a Protestant commonwealth in 1649. The Puritan Oliver Cromwell ruled as a near-dictator in a Protectorate that ended ten years later.
By 1688, Parliament feared that the restored monarchy would attempt to impose Catholicism again. It deposed James II in favor of his Protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. The Glorious Revolution, as it came to be known, was characterized by two important principles.
First, reformation was to be, as far as possible, without bloodshed. Parliament did not usurp the old order but affirmed it through continuity of government. It did not execute James II. It gave the crown to his daughter, reestablishing the law of succession. Disruptive, yes. But not bloody.
Second, though the Protestant Church of England would continue to be the state church, Parliament would safeguard freedom of conscience. Catholic worship would be tolerated, as would gatherings of Congregationalists and other dissenting churches.
John Locke became a prominent advocate for these and other principles. In particular, he argued for freedom of conscience in matters of religion. In his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), he framed the matter this way: “Now, I appeal to the consciences of those that persecute, torment, destroy, and kill other men upon pretense of religion, whether they do it out of friendship and kindness towards them or no?”
Violent persecution of the unconverted could not possibly proceed from love. Locke said a conversion that was coerced by law or violence was not admissible before God’s judgment seat. It might be motivated by fear or self-preservation, but not by a genuine change of conscience. That, Locke argued, was why Christ sent out his soldiers armed not with weapons but with the Gospel. Locke pointed out that Christ does not want or need human armies:
Though if infidels were to be converted by force, if those that are either blind or obstinate were to be drawn off from their errors by armed soldiers, we know very well that it was much more easy for Him to do it with armies of heavenly legions than for any son of the Church, how potent soever, with all his dragoons.
This was no mere sentimental appeal.
Locke made firm distinctions between civil and religious authority. The magistrate is simply unable to reach the human soul. Only a church, a voluntary association of people gathered for salvation and worship, can draw out the faith that God requires. When such distinctions are blurred, Locke argued, the Church invariably yields to the State, not the other way around. He said it was no use raising the example of Israel in the Old Testament. Israel was an absolute theocracy, which no human government can or should claim to be.
Taken together with Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government, published the same year, these arguments for toleration formed a decisive influence on our American founders.
When activists on the left chant that we have to end hate, as if the human heart could be reformed by structural changes in society, they are pushing us back into the violence Locke and others effectively quelled. When activists on the right intone that America was founded as a Christian nation and that we should enforce the faith through laws, they are overthrowing every single axiom of the American experiment.
I am concerned about many issues of the economy, foreign policy, and culture in this election year. But there is no way to resolve any of them if we demolish the structure of our civil society in fits of illiterate rage.
If Christians reject political radicals, we will have a say in our nation’s hard decisions long after those radicals have been decapitated by their own guillotines. But if we sell out to their utopian fantasies, the guillotines will be waiting for us too.
Very true! Thank you for giving me a new perspective on Politics!