Crime Then vs. Crime Now

Last updated on: January 18, 2025 at 4:06 pm By Gene Veith

We keep hearing about horrific crimes in New York City. An illegal immigrant set a woman on fire and calmly watched her burn to death. People getting shoved onto the rails in front of an oncoming subway. Assaults, shoplifting, and prostitution are surging. All of this despite NYC’s reputation as one of our safest cities.

Michael Alcazar is a former New York City cop, now a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has written a fascinating article for Unherd entitled Why Gotham’s bad old days are back with the deck, “I was a New York cop. I saw what went wrong.”

Crime was actually far worse in the 1970s, but good policing–including implementation of the “broken windows” theory of policing, that cracking down on minor crimes and the appearance of disorder creates a climate of lawfulness–brought law and order back to Gotham. That was when Alcazar joined the force. He writes,

Dark as Gotham could be in those gritty days memorialised in film classics like Taxi Driver, there was always a ray of light: namely, a healthy respect for the police. Any disturbance would stop as soon as an officer stepped into the train, for example. Many of these cops were Vietnam veterans, and you could see the command and experience in their eyes. . . .

It’s the crucial element missing today, as disorder grips the Big Apple once more. Law-breakers don’t respect law enforcement — and for good reason: they know that, thanks to misguided criminal-justice “reform”, they can re-offend over and over with utter impunity.

He tells about how, as a rookie cop, he was assigned to patrols that went into abandoned buildings to clear out the drug dealers and addicts. He was also assigned to “Operation Takeback,” which was engaged in “tackling minor violations — vandalism, urination, aggressive panhandling, and the like — that could foster an atmosphere of lawlessness. Little did we know then that this was the so-called broken-windows theory of policing in practice.”

This resulted in New York City’s “renaissance,” of the 1990s, in which once depressed neighborhoods thrived again, Times Square became family-friendly, and the arts scene flourished. “These and other changes were driven by a police culture of strict enforcement. These officers were no-nonsense and motivated. They took pride in their jobs and had the support of the mayor, the NYPD brass, the media, and the people they served. Then it all went downhill again.”

Alcazar does not exempt the police department from at least some of the blame. “The NYPD became a victim of its own success.” The beancounters took over, failing to adjust proven tactics to actual conditions. They required officers to use the “stop-and-frisk” tactic and quantified how many “touches” they performed, using that as a means of assessment. “The pressure at times translated into needlessly gruff, insensitive treatment.”

Citizens complained. Then came the scandals of police mistreatment nationwide, culminating in the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This resulted in the “defund the police” movement and calls for criminal justice reform. In response, the New York state legislature eliminated cash bail, the local attorney general stopped prosecutions for routine crimes, criminals were released soon after they were arrested, and crime shot up again.

Instead of taking a holistic view of what the public wanted and balancing competing demands, the [Mayor Bill] de Blasio administration folded to the loudest activists. Hizzoner permitted rioting, property destruction, and assaults on police officers. Mass police retirements occurred nationwide and in Gotham. Police morale sank — and remains low: applicants to the NYPD sank to 8,000 this year, down from 18,000 in 2017.

Crime is still down from what it was in the 1970s. But since 2019, major crimes are up 31%; the murder rate is 20% higher; and there are 29,000 more crime victims than there were then.

Moreover, the perception of disorder makes people feel unsafe, to the detriment of the entire city. This sounds to me like the converse of the broken window theory. Allowing minor crimes and the appearance of disorder creates a climate of lawlessness.

Here is another idea: Recovering and honoring the vocation of the police officer. That means, police officers should do their proper work of enforcing the law, and doing so in a spirit of love and service to their neighbors, both those they are protecting and those they are apprehending.

Photo: Police Officers in Their Uniform by Kindel Media via Pexels, Public Domain: https://www.pexels.com/photo/police-officers-in-their-uniform-7714726/

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The Duties of the Collective Magistrate

Last updated on: January 17, 2025 at 8:07 am By Gene Veith

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The soon-to-be-in-place Trump administration is gearing up to deport immigrants who are here illegally. There are some 11 million of them, many of whom have been in this country for years, so this would be a huge and disruptive undertaking. Reportedly, the goal will first be to deport immigrants who have committed crimes and have a deportation order issued by a court, but which has not been enforced, which is a travesty. But the goal ultimately is to deport everyone who is in this country illegally.

Pope Francis says doing so would be a “grave sin,” a crime “against life” equivalent to advocating abortion. The new archbishop of Washington, D.C., Cardinal Robert McElroy says, “indiscriminate massive deportation across the country would be something that would be incompatible with Catholic doctrine.” Mainline Protestants, though supportive of abortion, also oppose deportation. Some evangelicals agree.

After all, the Bible says things like,

Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. (Deuteronomy 10:19)

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 19:34)

I was a stranger and you welcomed me. (Matthew 25:35)

Grayson Quay takes such verses seriously but comes to a different conclusion in his article for The American Mind entitled The Christian Case for Deportation. He balances them with the Bible’s teachings about civil government in Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2, which he summarizes in this way: “The civil realm exists to punish criminals, deter would-be offenders by making them fear punishment, and uphold public morality. Civil magistrates who violate or neglect these duties sin against the people God has entrusted to him.”

What interests me most in his discussion is not so much his position on deporting illegal immigrants (though feel free to comment on that topic, if you wish), but his application of what seems like Two Kingdoms theology and what he says about vocation:

In every political order depicted in the Bible, there is a sharp divide between rulers and ruled.

In a republic, those two roles coexist in every eligible voter. The authority to determine public policy devolves indirectly upon the electorate. As a private citizen, the Christian must turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, and all the rest. But when he steps into the voting booth, he participates in the duties of the collective magistrate.

This includes voting for policies that would be sinful to undertake for oneself. If my father were murdered, my duty as a Christian citizen would be to refrain from vengeance. But as a partial magistrate (that is, voter), my duty would be to see the killer imprisoned or executed. I might, with perfect consistency, forgive my father’s murderer and then vote for a DA who would seek the death penalty.

This can be a difficult balance to strike. I might stab the killer myself, thus improperly executing the vengeance that belongs to me only in my impersonal capacity as a partial magistrate. Or I might vote for a soft-on-crime DA, thus improperly allowing my moral duties qua individual to override my moral duties qua voter. To commit the latter error would be a sin against my law-abiding neighbors, for whom I (as partial magistrate) bear responsibility.

Yes, we are to submit to our lawful rulers. But who is the lawful ruler in a democratic republic? Government officials and magistrates are chosen by ordinary citizens and are answerable to them. It follows that ordinary citizens–“we the people,” as our Constitution puts it–themselves have a vocation of ruling. They still also have a vocation of being subjects. They should indeed submit to the lawful authorities. At the same time, they themselves are lawful authorities when they cast their ballots. As such, they too are responsible for restraining evil and advancing the public good.

I’ve written about this dual calling for citizens of a democratic republic, but I appreciate Quay for coining a word to describe it: the “collective magistrate.”

In practice, this means Christians in their private lives should indeed welcome strangers, treat strangers like natives, and love sojourners. But they must also obey the law as subjects and, as “collective magistrates,” insist that the law be obeyed.

Image by Wynn Pointaux from Pixabay

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The Anti-Social Society

Last updated on: January 14, 2025 at 7:53 am By Gene Veith

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When I was growing up, my parents were always having friends over for dinner, usually followed by free-wheeling games of bridge. And when their friends were not at our place, they invited us to their place for dinner and cards. Kids were always dragged along, so we socialized with our parents’ friends’ kids and usually a good time was had by all.

We went to movies as a family, sometimes with other families. My father went to Lion’s Club and sometimes brought me along. We’d go out to the lake with my parents’ church group for picnics and boat rides. On Sundays we would go both to church and to “night church,” with me complaining because that always made us miss the end of the Ed Sullivan Show or once a year The Wizard of Oz. After night church, everybody went to someone’s house for the “After Glow” party. In college, I did quite a bit of hanging out and doing things with friends. We even played bridge.

But once I grew up, got married, and we had children of our own, we never did things with other people on the scale that my parents did. Sometimes we had people over, were invited to their place for dinner, or did things with people from church or work. We enjoyed that. But mostly we were happy to just stay home.

In today’s culture, though, doing things with other people has become rarer and rarer. People are spending more and more time home alone, by choice. Americans are increasingly anti-social, to the point that it’s becoming harder and harder to have a sense of society.

These reflections came to me while reading Derek Thompson’s article in The Atlantic entitled The Anti-Social Century with the deck, “Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.” (That article is behind a paywall, but it’s available from MSN here.)

Thompson points out that as of 2023, 74% of restaurant traffic was either takeout or delivery. And when people do dine in, they often eat by themselves. In just the last two years, dining solo has increased by 29%. He quotes a restaurateur: “There’s an isolationist dynamic that’s taking place in the restaurant business. . . I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today. They’ve decided that their home is their sanctuary. It’s not easy to get them to leave.”

Thompson cites other data points: In the 1930s, Americans went out to the movies several times per month. Today, the average American goes to three movies per year, but watches the equivalent of eight movies per week on home screens. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data,” he writes. That rate has been declining since 1965, but between 2002 and 2023, it has dropped by over 20%. For people younger than 25 and unmarried men, the amount of time spent with others has dropped 35%. “The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species.”

Thompson quotes an array of experts who refer to “the privatization of American leisure” and our “century of solitude.” He quotes Andrew Taggart in First Things about the phenomenon of “secular monks”; that is, men who say “no” to marriage and fatherhood (like religious monks), and embracing the asceticism not of prayer, fasting, and spiritual disciplines but the subjugation of the body by means of working out, dieting, and self-improvement exercises.

Thompson concludes, “Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America.”

Why is this? The COVID shutdowns no doubt played a role, as some people realized they liked staying at home. But the anti-social trend started long before that. Is this part of the plague of loneliness we keep hearing so much about? To a degree, but many solitary people say they do not feel lonely. They like being by themselves.

Is it our technology? Certainly, that has been enabling. “Americans are more likely to take meetings from home, to shop from home, to be entertained at home, to eat at home, and even to worship at home.”

I wonder if this phenomenon accounts for other things we are seeing in the culture, such as the decline of marriage, the decline of parenthood, and the decline of church attendance. An increasing number of people just want to be by themselves.

I also wonder if this “self-imposed solitude” is the whole story. Thompson quotes researcher Enghin Atalay: “He categorized a person as “alone,” as I will throughout this article, if they are “the only person in the room, even if they are on the phone” or in front of a computer.”

Well, interacting with other people on a computer is a type of socializing. Even though you might not have ever met some of your Facebook “friends,” you are still conversing with them using language, still sharing your thoughts and feelings with another human being. That is not as good as knowing someone in the flesh, to be sure, but there is a reason it is called “social media.” And even just watching TV, though a solitary escape, engages us with human characters and their problems.

Thompson brings up the paradox that in some ways, our social bonds are getting stronger. Parents spend more time with their children than they used to, and married couples are spending more time with each other. Technology is even helping with that, as cell phones and texts allow us to stay in closer contact.

He says that while all this time alone is “making society weaker, meaner, and more delusional,”

Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of tribe (linked by shared affinities). But it’s wreaking havoc on the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live around us, which Dunkelman calls the village. “These are your neighbors, the people in your town,” he said. We used to know them well; now we don’t. The middle ring is key to social cohesion.

Maybe so, but the inner ring and the outer ring are arguably the most important relationships that we have.

I can relate to all of this. I like to spend time by myself, by which I mean with my wife, children, and grandchildren. And when they are not around, I can still enjoy my solitude. Part of me sees this new trend as the triumph of the introverts. And as I’ve said before, we can use more introversion. Yet, I am well aware that cultivating too much solitude is like being pulled into a black hole, from which not even light can escape. I need not only people outside myself but the world outside myself. That includes most importantly the God outside myself, who, in turn, pulls me outside of myself by giving me multiple vocations and thus multiple neighbors to love and serve.

Photo: “Solitude at Sea,” AI generated not by me but by Stockcake. Public domain.

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Luther Classical College & Other New Schools

Last updated on: January 5, 2025 at 4:36 pm By Gene Veith

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Yesterday we discussed the prospects of reform in higher education, concluding that founding a new college on better principles may be easier and quicker than reforming an existing college. Today, new colleges are coming into existence, including one where I am going to teach part-time.

The Federalist‘s executive editor Joy Pullman has written an article about some of these alternative new institutions entitled Cowboys, Billionaires, And Pastors Break Tough Ground To Build Great Books Colleges.

Some of these are secular, such as the University of Austin, Ralston College, and New College of Florida. These are committed specifically to free speech and academic freedom, ideals that were once universal in the academy but that lately have given way to cancel culture and campus speech codes.

Pullman also cites a number of new conservative Catholic schools, such as the College of Saint Joseph the Worker, Wyoming Catholic College, and Catholic Polytechnic University. She also mentions conservative Protestant schools, such as New St. Andrews and Patrick Henry College, where I used to be a literature professor and Provost. (She notes that PHC students going into the legal profession outscore the Ivy League on the LSAT, the test required for getting into law schools. PHC’s emphasis on academic excellence is something I’m particularly proud of.)

Pullman devotes the most space to Luther Classical College in Casper, Wyoming, which will welcome its first class this Fall. I’ll be on its faculty–that is to say, I’ll be an adjunct faculty member, a part-timer. I’m not coming out of retirement or moving to Wyoming. We worked it out so that I’ll be in residence for several weeks each semester. It will be good for me to do some teaching again, and my wife and I are looking forward to spending time in the wild West once again.

Luther Classical College, as well as most of these other new institutions that Pullman discusses, is a classical school. It offers “liberal education,” not in the sense of political progressivism nor in the sense of “the humanities,” as in most universities today, which have turned the West’s most enduring approach to education into just another disembodied academic specialty. Rather, “liberal” in the sense of freedom, an education designed for “liberty” and for equipping free citizens.

The curriculum of these schools is built around the Great Books, the key thinkers and creators who have formed our civilization, the legacy we must hand down if that civilization is to continue. A liberal education is also integrated, with every subject tied to all the rest, as opposed to the hyper-specialization of contemporary universities, in which a student might learn much about one subject while remaining ignorant of the others.

Luther Classical will also be distinctly Lutheran, with faculty, staff, and students all committed to the Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions. There is a place for Christian schools that are open to the whole range of Christians; for Christian schools with a missional goal that welcome non-Christians in the hope of evangelizing them; for denominational schools that have a “critical mass” from that particular tradition along with some students outside that tradition. There is also a place for secular schools. But there are also advantages in everyone being united in theology, and that’s the route Luther Classical has chosen to follow. The Lutheran educational tradition has been defined as the classical liberal arts, plus Lutheran catechesis, so Luther Classical will do a lot with theology.

Let me clear up some misconceptions that I have been hearing. Some people in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod are indignant that we are starting a new college at a time when the colleges in the Concordia University System need the church’s support, with some of them shutting down. The Concordia University schools are full-service institutions, offering scores of majors and vocational tracks. Luther Classical occupies a niche quite different from that of the CUS schools.

The kind of education offered by Luther Classical will be excellent preparation for teachers in the burgeoning number of classical Lutheran day schools. LCC will also offer the ancient languages, so it will be good for pre-seminary students and I realize that the Concordias compete for those. But by far the most students go to college for vocational majors, such as Business and Computer Science, so for those the Concordias are the place to go.

Though “liberal education” is often contrasted with “vocational education,” LCC’s commitment to Lutheran theology means a strong emphasis on vocation, which means most importantly our callings in the family, the state, and the church. A liberal education, which has the effect of sharpening the mind on many levels, can lead to a range of occupations and professions. LCC is even partnering with a vo-tech school in Casper, so that students can spend two years with the liberal arts and then pursue a technical trade.

Besides, LCC is designed to never have more than 300 students. It will always be intentionally small, so as to hold costs down and to ensure the kind of intimate community that works best for this kind of learning.

Not only will LCC refuse money from the federal government, it will not take money from Synod. It operates under the auspices of Mt. Hope Lutheran Church in Casper, not the LCMS.

So I think its impact on the Concordia University System will be minimal.

For more information, go to the LCC website. See also these talks by Rev. Christian Preus, the pastor of Mt. Hope and a board member of LCC, here and here.

Maybe some day you or your children will show up in one of my classes!

Illustration: Projected campus plans for Luther Classical College [not yet built out] via LCC website.

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“They Will Say, ‘Blessed Are the Barren'”

Last updated on: December 18, 2024 at 6:46 am By Gene Veith

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Advent is about Christ’s second coming as well as His first, a time to reflect on what the Bible says about the end times. Jesus gives a number of signs that signify that the end is near. We blogged about “Wars and Rumors of War,” a sign that keeps re-occuring, reminding us that the end is always near.

Today I want to consider a sign that is more unusual, a baffling phenomenon that has emerged quite recently: that people will consider barrenness–or by extension, not having children–to be a blessing.

As Jesus is being led away to Golgotha for His crucifixion, this happens:

And as they led him away, they seized one Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, and laid on him the cross, to carry it behind Jesus. And there followed him a great multitude of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting for him. But turning to them Jesus said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:26-31)

I know this is generally interpreted, including by the Lutheran Study Bible, as a prediction of the impending destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D., the point being that women will wish they didn’t have children to encumber them while fleeing for their lives. That may be, but the fall of Jerusalem is itself a foretaste of the last days, and the bit about asking the mountains to “fall on us” connects to the Sixth Seal and the “wrath of the Lamb” described in the book of Revelations (6:16-17).

Here Jesus is not condemning these women, who are on His side, weeping for His suffering. He is saying they should weep for themselves and their descendants. What is coming is just sad. And He doesn’t say the barren are blessed, but that “they,” their children, “will say” that the barren are blessed.

That anyone would think not having children is a good thing is a strange prediction. Certainly, in the ancient world of the Bible, having children was considered a blessing (Psalm 127:3-5), and barrenness was seen as a lamentable condition (as with Sarai, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, Samson’s mother, and Elizabeth, though God answered their prayers by giving them a child). Not that being a parent is necessary or that every woman is called to this vocation, as St. Paul makes clear (1 Corinthians 7). But the consecrated virgins of the early church or the nuns of Catholicism with their vows of celibacy would never say that barrenness is a blessing, as such. Nor would we be likely to hear this from women or men in previous centuries.

But today we hear it all the time. Not from everyone, of course. Today, 1 in 6 couples have fertility problems, and many of them would do nearly anything to have a child. But among American adults under 50, nearly half, 47%, do not plan on having a child.

The exaltation of barrenness permeates our culture. Our technology has separated sex from procreation, so we have even made sex barren, as in our embrace of homosexuality and pornography. And when the womb is not barren, but conceives a child, we have recourse to abortion. And many people, including much of the medical profession, advocate the sterilization of children if they say they want to change their gender.

Men too want to take away their ability to conceive children. At the Democratic National Convention, mobile clinics offered both free abortions and free vasectomies. Now that Trump was elected, according to Newsweek, many women are lining up to get sterilized.

The desire to have children is not just a religious feeling. Even materialists, even atheists have always recognized the biological imperative of reproduction. It is ironic that “progressives” today seem especially in favor of not having children because the philosophy of “progressivism,” that humanity is evolving to ever higher levels of goodness, owes much to Darwin, who taught that evolution happens when natural selection causes the best-adapted organisms to have more offspring. Reproduction is the goal of survival.

Today we have “anti-natalists,” who believe it is unethical for anyone to have children. After all, life entails suffering, and it’s cruel to bring a child into the world knowing that he or she is going to suffer. We have gone from the heroic struggle to survive to not wanting to survive because it takes a struggle. Some environmentalists are saying that the human race, to save the planet, should go extinct.

To say “blessed are the barren” is to give up. It is an expression of despair, of nihilism. Behind it is a death wish. “Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’”

Come, Lord Jesus. Come quickly.

Illustration: Vision in cartoon form by Nina Paley in collaboration with Les U. Knight. Cartoon colorized by Aaron Hackmann., CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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How Christianity Invented the “Secular”

Last updated on: November 15, 2024 at 1:17 pm By Gene Veith

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Scholars, ordinary folks, and even New Atheists have been discovering the profound influence that Christianity has had on Western civilization. Christianity has given us values (compassion, mercy, forgiveness), ideas (equality, freedom, human rights), and institutions (hospitals, universities, science) that just did not exist in classical paganism or cultures untouched by the church. (See Tom Holland’s Dominion and Alvin Schmidt’s How Christianity Changed the World.)

A new book shows how Christianity even invented what seems to be its nemesis today: the concept of the secular. That is, a realm that is distinct from the explicitly religious.

Classical scholar Nadya Williams reviews a book in Providence by intellectual historian David Lloyd Dusenbury entitled The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: How the Roman Trial of Jesus Shaped History. The book is about different theologians’ understandings of Pilate, but Dusenbury sees in that discourse the working out of the relationship between the spiritual and the earthly realms. Williams quotes him:

“The thesis of this book is that what we now call the ‘secular’ is not a Roman (pre-Christian) inheritance, or a late modern (post-Christian) innovation. On the contrary, the ‘secular’ is constituted by Christian philosopher-bishops, legal theorists, and polemicists… I am inclined to think that the term-concept of the ‘secular’ owes incalculably much (1) to a single utterance in the Roman trial of Jesus as it is narrated in the fourth gospel: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18:36); and (2) to a singular interpretation of this utterance in the early fifth century by a formidable African bishop, Augustine of Hippo, in his Homilies on the Gospel of John.”

Williams delves into the origins of the word itself. “Secular” derives from the Latin saeculum, which originally meant the span of a human life, or what we call a “generation.” Later, it developed into the French word siècle, meaning “century.” Saeculum was a term for a measure of time, an “age.” It had nothing to do with a lack of religion. Indeed, the “Secular Games,” which the Romans held every 110 years to celebrate the transition from one era to another, were shot through with religious observances.

But then the word was used in the Latin translation of the Bible to render the Greek αἰῶν, or “age” (cf. the derivative eon). Williams explains:

In the Latin Vulgate, whenever Jesus refers to “this age,” the term used is saeculum. Likewise in the Vulgate, Paul uses saeculum to describe “this age” and its antipathy to Christ—e.g., in 1 Corinthians 2:6-8. The key to understand—and Dusenbury returns to this in his conclusion—is that in antiquity, again, there was no separation of religion and state, or sacred and secular (in the modern sense). But Jesus, with his brief statement about the nature of his kingdom at his trial before Pilate, made that very separation, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the saeculum.

I would add that there is also no separation of religion and culture in the other major world religions. Not in Islam. Not in Judaism. Not in Hinduism. Although some have tried to turn Christianity into another cultural religion, Christians come “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9). And Christianity is for every age, every saeculum, because Christ is “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age [saeculo] but also in the one to come” (Ephesians 1:21).

The original Greek in Jesus’s confession before Pilate uses the word κόσμοs (“cosmos”) or “world,” so that the English correctly renders the passage as “my kingdom is not of this world.” The Latin Vulgate also renders κόσμοs as mundus, “world,” but Augustine, in discussing the passage, interprets it in the sense of saeculum. For him, “this world” and “this age” constitute the non-spiritual realm, which often opposes the faith and offers temptations to lead us away from the faith. And yet this “secular” world is still part of God’s creation and exists under His sovereignty.

Some Christians, such as the monastics and Protestant anabaptists, would seek to separate themselves from this “secular” world, though the church would also establish orders of what were called “secular priests” who would serve parishes in the world.

I would add that Luther with his doctrine of the Two Kingdoms is especially helpful in sorting out both the distinctions and the relationships between the “temporal” and the “eternal” kingdoms. He also shows the value of what we would call the “secular” realm, explaining how God is present there too, though in a “hidden” way. His doctrine of vocation teaches that Christians are to love and serve their neighbors in their “secular” callings and relationships.

We might do well to bring back the element of time in the word “secular.” The age we are currently in may be oblivious to Christian truth, just as the ancient Greco-Roman age was actively hostile to it, but “the age to come,” in the sense of future generations or future time periods might be more open to Christianity.

Whereas Christianity can embrace both the spiritual and the secular, today’s secularism rejects the spiritual, assuming that this physical world is all that exists and that this present time is normative for all of history. Christianity is much more open-minded and offers a much larger and more comprehensive perspective.

Illustration: Jesus Before Pilate, First Interview by James Tissot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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