IN THE FIRST DECADE of the new millennium, elites were fond of using mockery to take down their opponents, a tactic President Trump also used. Whether it was President Obama in 2008 mocking rural working class voters or Hillary Clinton in 2016 calling Trump supporters the “basket of deplorables,” the goal was always the same—mock and humiliate the working and middle classes, many of them religious, calling them uneducated, uncultured, and stupid, susceptible to the authoritarian personality, followers of cult leaders and conspiracy theories.
But at some point this mockery has turned into something more sinister and dangerous—a deep disgust, says Ilya Feoktistov, writing in the The Federalist. This disgust, according to George Orwell, author of 1984, can be summed up in four words: “The lower classes smell.”1 As Orwell wrote, while “race-hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect . . . can be got over . . .physical repulsion cannot.”2 And Feoktistov says, “It is when members of the in-group are ‘brought up to believe that [members of the out-group] are dirty that harm is done,’ Orwell wrote. Disgust, perhaps more so than fear or greed, appears to be the primary source of most of human conflict.”3
This disgust has begun to creep into the elite’s disdain for religious conservatives. Consider a recent column by erstwhile conservative Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, writing in response to vaccine hesitancy. While she begins describing vaccine-hesitant voters as “self-destructive, selfish, and potentially deceitful people,” “the ornery holdouts,” and “imperious to reason and facts,” all ways of saying the same thing—they are stupid rubes—she then argues, maybe not even aware she is doing it, that they “remain a breeding ground for dangerous coronavirus.”4 Or consider Governor Andrew Cuomo, who, when the orthodox Jewish community in New York City refused to stop meeting in community worship, called a press conference to single them out and then presented a “redlined” map of the Jewish neighborhood, not only targeting them for more severe restrictions but making it clear that other residents should avoid these areas, as if they were a breeding ground for disease.5 As Josh Blackman wrote, Governor Cuomo “demonstrated a hostility to Jews, without even recognizing it.” “Regrettably,” contends Blackman, Cuomo “played on [an] old, deeply rooted, and painful anti-Semitic trope: that Jews spread disease.”6
About a decade ago, writing in The Week, Damon Linker tried to warn his progressive friends that their dislike of religion had morphed into an “irrational animus against religion in general and traditional forms of Christianity in particular.” He told them that their desire “to eliminate Christianity’s influence on and legacy within our world” demonstrates this animus. While he says his liberal friends are just defending a certain version of liberalism (the godless-constitution view, freedom left 2), it is this animus that leads them to “increasingly think and talk like a class of self-satisfied commissars enforcing a comprehensive, uniformly secular vision of the human good.”7
But his warning went unheeded. And, it seems, with this shift to disgust we have crossed a Rubicon in the cold civil war. The question is whether the church, armed with the confidence of its convictions, the new vital center, and prophetic religion, can stand up to this disgust—not wither, not compromise, not succumb—and continue to fight for the new vital center for all people. Can the church rise to a new heroic role? And if so, does it even matter? Is it too late?
THE HEROIC ROLE FOR THE CHURCH
Conservative Christian podcaster Matt Walsh thinks it is too late. In his “It Is Time to Face the Facts: We Cannot Be United,” Walsh says the divide is so great that there is “almost no common ground” and that “we are speaking different languages, both literally and metaphorically. We are a people divided by gaps that cannot be closed. There is no bridge that can connect the Left and the Right.”8 And, truth be told, there are those on the left who have come to the same conclusion; what other message are they sending when they tear down George Washington’s statue? Everything that came before must be destroyed. There is no common bridge with those who honor the past, whether that past is historic Christianity or America’s historic founding; there is no room to talk.
When we look at our present political climate, it is hard not to despair, to throw up our hands, and give up, to admit that secession or civil war are our only options—many have.9 But I cannot abandon hope. I cannot throw in the towel for no other reason than I believe in the providence of God and the natural law foundation this country was built on. It is never too late to wake up from our national nightmare. It has happened before, and it can happen again.
Matt Walsh concludes his essay, “I don’t know where we go from here, or how to fix it, or if it can be fixed at all, but I know that any path forward must begin with an honest assessment of the situation.”10 He is right. As I come to the end of this book, having provided an honest assessment (parts one and two), I still believe there is a solution (part three). And it is found in our grounding, our original founding documents, the new vital center, and our second constitution. Clearly, our democratic institutions are fraying, but they are not gone, not yet anyway. Until then we can fight to the very last minute. The church and Christianity, the best and maybe only sources of renewal, must be at the heart of this fight for the new vital center—the only foundation that can pull our republican democratic project back from the brink.
Therefore, I have one final courageous plea: the church has to become the church again for it to regain the public philosophy that can renew our republic. The church and its leaders must stand up and be heard, for the sake of all people.
FIRST STEP: RENEWAL WITHIN
For the church and Christianity to be part of the solution, they must first renew themselves in order to overcome the present accommodation to the reigning culture and to regain their true essence. How? First, the church must recover its gospel, its teaching on salvation, and its robust exhortations to live out the faith in all areas of life. It must resist (if it is not already too late) the fate of the liberal mainline church of the twentieth century, which has gone the way of accommodation, aping the reigning culture. Second, along with reclaiming its supernatural message, the church must also gain a public philosophy, one rooted in the new vital center. Through the gospel and its public philosophy, through special revelation and general revelation, its understanding that the “spirit of liberty” and the “spirit of religion” must go hand in hand, we can revive our republic.
In our present crisis the church, though a small remnant, is almost alone in holding to a transcendent grounding that maintains the link between natural rights and natural law/divine revelation. The church has the resources to stand against the prevailing culture, the non-establishment establishment that now reigns, and push back against its dehumanizing teachings. When it is living up to its potential, the church can truly model the best association, the best community, the best shaper of mores, because only the church has the source of transcendent hope, the message to satisfy human beings’ deepest longings and to form an identity that frees up people to serve others.
Therefore, the church is best able to inculcate citizenship, inspire both the “resident alien” and the “alienated resident,” teaching them how to hold together freedom and responsibility, liberty and civic responsibility, and a love of country without idolatrous nationalism.
A THIRD GREAT AWAKENING
None of this will happen if the church itself doesn’t experience a revival, giving the church the confidence to see that its internal covenant, built on divine law, is necessary to renew the external covenant, built on general revelation. Only these two held together—the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion—can keep our nation from sliding into despotism, authoritarianism, and the false strong gods. As Robert Bellah said four decades ago, “No one has changed a great nation without appealing to its soul, without stimulating a national idealism.”11 Because “religion is the key to culture,” he contends,
We certainly need a new “Great Awakening.” The inward reform of conversion, the renewal of an inward covenant among the remnant that remains faithful to the hope for rebirth, is more necessary than it has ever been in America. The great experiment may fail utterly, and such failure will have dark consequences not only for Americans but for all the world. We do not know what the future holds and we must give up the illusion that we control it, for we know that it depends not only on our action but on grace. While recognizing the reality of death, we may return finally to Winthrop’s biblical injunction: Let us choose life.12
While I may disagree with Bellah on exactly what this “great awakening” looks like and the society it will produce, I agree with him that without a revival in the church, without the church regaining its life-giving gospel and embracing the public philosophy of the new vital center, rooted as it is in general revelation, there is little chance to renew the external covenant that holds our democratic republic together.13
Notre Dame University’s Vincent Phillip Muñoz agrees: “Politics affects culture, of course, but culture shapes, limits, and sometimes directs politics. Cultural renewal, including a revival of traditional religion, is an essential facet of political renewal.”14
AN EXCITING ROLE FOR THE CHURCH
The history of revival teaches us that even though God is the author of these great awakenings, the church doesn’t simply sit around awaiting the breath of the Spirit to revive the church; the church must actively pray, prepare, and work for revival.15
Thus, in the midst of cultural decay and our hopeful waiting for a better day, there still remains an important role for the church to play. As I laid out in my book Deep Church, it starts with rediscovering the twofold nature of the church: institution and organism. First, the church as institution is called to be a distinct association, a community marked by Word and sacrament, a fellowship that weekly models a new reality, that shapes people through its communal practices, and that constantly reminds individuals of their sin, need for salvation, and the necessity for grace to inspire lives of virtue, character, and faithful presence. The church is an association of both checks and balances. The church and its message check the idols in our lives and culture, pushing back, taking “every thought captive” (2 Corinthians 10:5), and exposing the darkness, whether coming from the far right or far left. But along with the checking function (being light) of the church, it also balances (being salt). By being salt, the church adds flavor to our culture and our politics—by creating truth, beauty, and goodness in all areas of our culture, by training citizens of virtue, by educating the population, by extolling Christians to serve the common good, and by upholding the new vital center. As Tocqueville writes, religion is one of the main supports of democracy, teaching the habits of the heart needed in each individual for our democratic republic to thrive. Edmund Burke likened the church to a “little platoon,” a model of associational life that profoundly affects the individual, protecting them against the encroachment of the ever-growing administrative state, but also shaping the individual to be a contributor to the common good of society.16 And to destroy these little platoons, these mediating institutions, is to destroy the foundation needed to sustain constitutional republics.
Moreover, the church creates leaders who take seriously their role as statesmen, but not as politicians. Statesmen trained in and through the teaching ministry of the church, animated by principle and not party, fight for the separation of church and state (to protect the church from the state and the state from the church), but at the same time they never see the separation of the state and religion.17 These leaders see the church as vital in shaping the character of its people, to think and live differently, to push back, to be countercultural. The church inculcates new vital center people, citizens of both heaven and earth, shaped by both divine revelation and general revelation, divine grace and common grace. As Jason Willock says, in the past the church was “a mediating institution that both conditioned men for ethical participation in the public affairs and provided an outlet for yearning that politics of the liberal sort [order left 3) could never satisfy.”18
CHURCH AS ORGANISM
But along with being a unique institution, the church is also an organism, that is, the church is also dispersed.19 Along with transforming individuals through Word and sacrament, shaping them into a unique community of the new vital center, it also supports, exhorts, and trains them in their individual callings.20 Along with sending its members into the world to be salt and light, it also teaches them about “self-interest well understood” (freedom right 1), covenantal reciprocity (freedom left 1), the need to see our new freedom in Christ as also a call to obligation (order left 1), and to speak boldly yet humbly into our culture as a statesman (order right 1).
The church as organism trains its members in the new vital center. On the one hand the church teaches and trains members when to say stop to our culture (check). On the other hand it trains them when to say go (balance). In political life, knowing when to say go means affirming America, protecting its best and improving its worst; standing with the union narrative and continuing to call America to live up to its highest ideals. The church as balance is the church that supports healthy, godly patriotism.
Faithful Americans can and should be patriotic citizens and champions of the American principles that animated the American founding, what I call the new vital center. While there is still a long way to go before we live up to our founding ideals, counsels Muñoz, “our founding principles, rightly understood, remain the surest available means to help us restore a decent and just political order.”21
Because we embrace the renewing function of the church, that the church’s internal covenant can help renew the outer covenant of the new vital center, we can humbly but confidently agree with Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa that America, despite all its faults, still remains the best regime.22
It means we can affirm with David F. Forte that our founders were “noble sinners” who somehow, by the grace of God, formed a more perfect union.23
We can affirm with Leo Strauss that not all modernity is bad and that far from rejecting America, we can affirm that America, despite its flaws, is still good. This is patriotism. This is our civic faith. This is the public philosophy we must embrace.
JUST ANOTHER CIVIC RELIGION?
Some religious critics will push back: Isn’t this just another civil religion, another form of national idolatry?24 Secular progressives will say it’s just another call to theocracy. Libertarians will contend it endangers our political freedom; it’s too perfectionist. Even those in the theonomy camp will condemn the new vital center as not being biblical enough.
Do these critiques hit the mark? Does new vital center patriotism, its civic faith, mean I am presenting just another form of religious nationalism or theocracy, or a watered-down civil religion, no more helpful than a myth?
All of this criticism would be true if I didn’t have the inner circle, the second constitution. Having the inner circle protects the boundary between church and state, eliminating the theocratic temptation. The second constitution guards against making the nation the final source of authority, instead basing natural rights not on the general will but on the grounding of natural law backed by divine revelation. Finally, the “spirit of religion” is not a watered-down useful myth but a living, breathing faith tradition with the power to renew individuals and the external covenant. It can ground the new vital center. And it protects us from the use of inflationary tactics, the very thing that leads to the polarization of religion and its abuse in the first place, a tactic of both the religious Left and religious Right.
The only way to prevent these inflationary stances is to hold both divine revelation and general revelation—the new vital center (general revelation and common grace) combined with revelation (Christianity as a second constitution). When we do this, we are meeting Budziszewski’s challenge of a full-orbed political philosophy or what Ceaser calls the public philosophy. Holding to both constitutions, special revelation and general revelation, we can reject inflationary tactics whether on the Christian right or left. We can instead choose the new vital center, which protects our constitutional republic and fights against the polarization in the four quadrants.
THE FATHER OF OUR NATION
In June 2020, rioters in Portland tore down the statue of George Washington, once recognized as the father of our country by the majority of those on the right and the left. Around that time, I picked up Michael Novak’s Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of our Country, and was reminded of Washington’s “Thanksgiving Prayer of 1789.” Reading it again, I couldn’t believe how different his views on America were from those of the rioters, bringing in stark relief the two completely different narratives, two utterly different views on what America is. Washington’s prayer was meant for all Americans, but as I read it I also saw it as an appeal to Christians and the church to take our calling of citizenship and civic friendship seriously.25 I read it as a call to Christians to resist polarization, to push back on the destruction of our founding and our country, and to see again that it is the best possible regime.
For Christians, Washington’s prayer is a call to remember what our founders established in the four souls and to remember the genius behind our long-lasting union that has persisted for over two hundred years and has been a beacon and magnet for lonely and freedom-loving souls from around the world. It is a call to unity, to friendship, to mutual citizenship, to the support of middle class values, so “that we may then unite,” implores Washington,
in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions—to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually—to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed—to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord—To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us—and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.26
It is a stirring prayer, a true prayer, one grounded on both the first constitution and the second constitution. It is a prayer by the father of our nation, the very one whose statue the rioters tore down. It is a prayer about the very best of America, what America was and what America can be. It is a prayer of blessing.
As I read the prayer on a warm spring afternoon and thought of our present cold civil war, I was deeply saddened. But at the same time, I was once again inspired; inspired to get back to work, inspired to fight, to not give up, to not lose hope. Indeed the hour is late. But not too late to affirm the words of the Declaration of Independence, “with a firm reliance on the protection of Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
Let us pray it is not too late. Let us pray, in God’s good governance, that we can rescue our republic. And as we “raise a glass to freedom,” may God help us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM GRATEFUL TO A MYRIAD OF PEOPLE who have helped me formulate a public philosophy, that is, the New Vital Center. Thirty years ago after spending a weekend at the ancestral home of Russel Kirk, studying Edmund Burke with other graduate students and scholars, listening to Russell tell late-night ghost stories, he was kind enough to introduce me, a seminary student at the time, to George Carey at Georgetown, which turned out to be providential. To this day, tucked inside my copy of Kirk’s The Conservative Mind is his letter to me undoubtedly typed on his Remington electric typewriter, encouraging me to reach out to Professor Carey. After meeting with Professor Carey on a wintery December day at Georgetown, he invited me to study with him. Not only was Professor Carey instrumental in getting me into Georgetown but he inspired me to love The Federalist Papers, which was his expertise, and eventually became my dissertation advisor. I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Carey, and I will forever be grateful to Russell for the introduction.
I am also grateful for Georgetown professor Father James Schall, who taught me Plato and Aristotle and who allowed me to write papers comparing classical philosophy with reformational thinkers like John Calvin and Martin Luther. Even back then, I was in search for the right grounding for public philosophy. I am grateful to Walter Berns, whose class on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America set me on the path to study, ponder, and teach this classic work on America, which I have been doing for the past thirty years.
Ever since I began this project three years ago, the scholars who write for the Claremont Review of Books have been a steady and helpful influence, as I have attempted to understand the academic landscape and correctly place authors in the distinct quadrants. For decades this small publication has been doing its part in defending constitutional republicanism, and I am grateful for their labors.
The discovery of J. Budziszewski’s chapter, “Evangelicals in the Public Square,” proved formative, helping me see clearly why evangelicals have never been able to develop a coherent public philosophy.1 His numerous books on Natural Law have been invaluable in filling the gap, demonstrating so clearly how reason and revelation must go together.2
I am grateful to the work of James Ceaser for helping me understand the Founders’ synthesis, and his view that the founders saw Christianity as a second constitution helped me further clarify the new vital center.
I want to thank Al Hsu, who has been my editor at IVP on all three of my books. He is a true professional and always a joy to work with.
Finally, I want to thank my wife, Michelle, who stayed up most school nights helping our girls, Lindsay and Meghan, with their homework, allowing me to be asleep by 9:30 p.m. so I could be up at 4 a.m. to write. Without her sacrifice every night (after her own long day of work) I couldn’t have completed this project. Michelle also served as a sounding board for all the ideas in this book and was a constant encouragement on days that I got discouraged. I am deeply thankful for her unwavering support of my vocation as a writer.