Deciding How to Vote #2: The Voter

Last updated on: October 14, 2020 at 2:37 pm By Gene Veith

Yesterday we discussed factors that we voters use to evaluate candidates (their beliefs, policies, personal qualities, and effectiveness). But often we cast our votes for reasons that have little to do with the particular candidate.

I posit five factors in the voter that can determine the way he or she votes. Again, these can be weighed and balanced–and can themselves be weighed and balanced with the candidate factors–in many different ways, all of which can be quite legitimate motives for casting a vote.

Self-Interest

In 2016, Hillary Clinton pledged to put the coal industry out of business. Whereupon she lost the normally-Democratic stronghold of West Virginia. Coal miners, quite appropriately, voted in their self-interest.

Sometimes, an election has the potential of materially impacting one’s livelihood, for better or for worse. Someone in the oil industry–not just the J. R. Ewings but the drillers, roughnecks, and refinery workers–cannot be expected to vote for a candidate supporting the Green New Deal. But owners of alternative energy companies and electric car investors would.

Peer Pressure

We tend to vote the way our friends, our immediate social circle, or our larger peer group vote. If you work at a large secular university, you would likely feel embarrassed to admit any affinity for Donald Trump, worrying that you might be ostracized in the faculty lounge. Similarly, you might feel ashamed to admit being a fan of Joe Biden to your hunting buddies. To be sure, we can still vote as we please, thanks to the secret ballot, while keeping our preference to ourselves. But we generally want the approval of the social group we belong to or aspire to, so peer pressure can definitely affect our voting.

Loyalty

I grew up in the land of “Yellow Dog Democrats,” as in, “I’d vote for a yellow dog if he’s a Democrat.” We were completely loyal to the Democratic Party, largely due to our loyalty to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, we believed, brought us through the Depression. I never even met a Republican until I went to college and one of them married into our family, a “mixed marriage” that some of us thought could never last.

Many voters have the virtue of loyalty. They are loyal to their party, or they are loyal to a particular candidate, whether an incumbent or a challenger. In the 2020 Democratic primary, black voters–known as “loyal Democrats”–mostly refused to vote for black candidates and instead rallied to Joe Biden, largely out of loyalty to Barack Obama, for whom Biden was a loyal Vice-President. Many voters feel an intense loyalty to their current president, Donald Trump. They will vote for him no matter what.

In fact, campaigners need to realize that for voters motivated by loyalty, negative ads, personal attacks, and harsh criticism of the person to whom they are loyal will only solidify their support for their candidate. Instead of making those voters change their mind, such ads make the supporters defensive and angry.

The only way to win over loyal voters is to get them to transfer their loyalty. Where I came from, Ronald Reagan–who professed to be an FDR Democrat who said he didn’t leave his party, his party left him–won the loyalty of small town rural Oklahoma, which is now populated by Yellow Dog Republicans.

Voting Against

One of those small town rural Oklahomans, Will Rogers, said, “In this country people don’t vote for, they vote against.” And research bears that out.

Lots of us vote not because we like the candidate we vote for, but because we dislike the other candidate so much. In 2016, this hurt Hillary Clinton, who inspired a visceral animosity among many voters, who voted for Trump instead. In 2020, this will hurt Donald Trump, who inspires what is probably an even greater animosity. Biden, who does not evoke such a negative reaction, will be the beneficiary of the anyone-but-Trump vote. Though some voters, while not having anything against Biden, as such, will vote for Trump as a vote against the elite leftists they expect him to bring in to govern us.

There is also the existential threat motivation, the sense that the election of one of the candidates would threaten the very existence of our nation–or our liberties, or our democracy, or our economic prosperity, or our overall way of life. Today, the Democrats are saying this of Trump, and the Republicans are saying this of Biden.

Voting for Ideals

We can also vote for higher ideals. Patriotism can be a great motivator. So can overthrowing capitalism. Citizens may not agree on the ideals or on the policies we need or the candidate who can achieve those ideals. But it is possible to cast our vote not just for our own good but for what we consider to be the good of the nation. Or, as in Christian vocation, the good of our neighbors.

Can you think of other intrinsic motivations we have overlooked? How can an individual voter weigh and balance these different concerns? How have you sorted them out for yourself?

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

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Identity Politics vs. Transactional Politics

Last updated on: October 3, 2020 at 8:30 am By Gene Veith

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Some people vote for a candidate because “he is one of us.” Other people vote for a candidate because “he can do something for me.”

Consider the different ways of reacting to the story in the Atlantic about how Donald Trump allegedly makes fun of evangelical Christians, who have been among his most loyal supporters. The point of the story, by Mormon journalist McKay Coppins, is given in the title and the deck: Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters: Former aides say that in private, the president has spoken with cynicism and contempt about believers.

Coppins quotes insider Michael Cohen who said that after President Trump met with a group of evangelical pastors, who prayed for him and laid hands on him, he said, ““Can you believe that bulls**t?” Coppins also reports on other aides detailing how the president mocks the TV preachers of the Prosperity Gospel who have been among his biggest supporters while expressing admiration for their “scams.”

So how should Christian supporters of Trump react to this? Some may deny the reports, seeing them as more “fake news” designed to hurt Trump’s re-election prospects. After all, this new article reads like a sequel to the Atlantic’s recent possibly-dubious report that Trump also mocks those who have served in the military, including those who gave their lives for their country.

On the other hand, Trump’s ignorance of Christianity and lack of Christian conviction is no secret, as confirmed by the president’s own words. The Atlantic article doesn’t even go into Trump’s public statements about Christianity, such as his saying that he doesn’t need to ask God for forgiveness because he is such a good person. Cobbins cites a recording of a meeting with religious leaders in which the president says that he doesn’t know the Bible very well and makes a joke about Vice President Pence asking him to pray, something, he says, that “I’m not used to.”

My sense is that Trump’s lack of Christianity and any disdain he may have for religious people will not matter to most of his Christian supporters.

In his response to the Atlantic article, National Review‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty, a Catholic, says, in the words of his title, Disdain Is a Small Price.

First of all, he points out that many conservative Christians, including evangelicals, also hold the preachers of the Prosperity Gospel in derision and consider them to be “hustlers.” More importantly, he says, Christians who support Trump do so not because he is one of them, but for “transactional” reasons. That is, he supports their issues–opposing abortion, strengthening religious liberty, etc.–and in return they will vote for him.

Dougherty’s article suggests a distinction that can be applied to politics more broadly. Today, “identity politics” is in vogue. Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate in the hopes that she will attract women voters and black voters. He tries to win back the blue collar vote by stressing his low-income Scranton roots. And yet, Biden himself won the Democratic primaries because of “transactional politics.” Black Democrats on the whole voted against the candidates of their race, including Harris, and instead voted for Biden, who has a long record of supporting their cause.

There is also an “identity politics” that is not so much about race as it is class and personality. Trump’s most zealous supporters are not evangelicals but members of the white working class, which is our least religious demographic and which feels aggrieved about their economic plight and the condescension of America’s elite. They don’t mind that Trump is rich, though the recent reports about his financial problems will probably make him even more endearing to these voters. They can relate to Trump’s rages and iconoclastic behavior. He comes across as one of them.

Others, though, support Biden for transactional reasons–because they are concerned about health care or the environment or simply want an alternative to Trump–so his “identity” as an elderly white man or personal attacks against him do not really matter. Likewise, transactional Trump voters are mainly concerned about pro-life issues, immigration, conservative judges, and the like, so that the president’s character doesn’t enter it so much, and personal attacks against him do not really register.

Evangelical Christians used to follow identity politics. The key to changing America for the better, they used to say, was putting more Christians into office and electing individuals of “Godly character.” That was the determining factor when they rallied around Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush. But while their favored candidates might have been “born again,” they did not necessarily do too much regarding abortion or other issues the evangelicals were concerned with.

So now they have a president who is not really Christian or “Godly,” and yet he has come through for them in significant, concrete ways on abortion, religious liberty, and culture war issues (except for homosexuality and same-sex marriage, which Trump supports). It makes sense for conservative Christians to be “transactional.” By that reasoning, they are not betraying their faith or their moral convictions when they vote for a non-Christian or a sinner, as long as the non-Christian sinner gives them what they want.

So would there be any way for a transactional voter to turn against a candidate who seems to be on their side? If the candidate turned against their issues or pursued them ineffectively, certainly. Conservative pundit Ann Coulter, author of In Trump We Trust, turned against Trump largely because he is not anti-immigration enough. Ronald Reagan probably changed the mind of some transactional voters by raising the question, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Is the church–or the conservative movement or civil liberties or the family or the stature of America or the pro-life movement or whatever transaction you want to make–better off today than it was four years ago? Opinions may vary. But the answer to those kinds of questions will determine how transactional voters, including evangelicals and other conservative Christians, will cast their votes.

UPDATE: Though there is nothing wrong with voting to advance your interests, I should stress that one of those interests for a Christian with the vocation of citizenship is to love and serve one’s neighbor. Thus transactional voting should consider what is good for the country, fellow citizens, and the “least of these” (Matthew 25:31-46). Opinions will sometimes vary about what this entails. But love of neighbor should be a motivation in our citizenship, as in all of our vocations.

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

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Count von Zinzendorf Did Not Lead a Vampire Sex Cult

Last updated on: September 25, 2020 at 9:23 am By Gene Veith

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As secularism and religious illiteracy increases, Christianity will be seen as more and more exotic. And weird.

Christians have a ritualistic meal in which they think they are eating Christ’s body and drinking Christ’s blood–that’s cannibalism! (So charged the Roman Empire when persecuting Christians.) Christians say Jesus rose from the dead–so he’s like, a zombie! (So said a commenter on this blog.)

An almost comical example of getting a Christian teacher all wrong is the second episode of Van Der Valk, a British mystery about a Dutch detective airing on Masterpiece on PBS. (You can watch it for free here.) The Amsterdam police are investigating a sadomasochistic “vampiric” murder. Their leads take them to a research library that specializes in “spirituality,” including a collection of “medieval religious erotica” that somehow seems to be involved.

A scholar named Lionel VEITH is giving a lecture on a book he has written about Count von Zinzendorf. (“Veith”! That’s the first time I have come across my uncommon name in a work of fiction since my childhood when I found it as the name of the villain in a Batman comic book!) This Dr. Veith (pronounced and spelled the same, according to the closed captions) was saying how von Zinzendorf “worshiped the wounds of Christ.” He later said that his followers engaged in some bizarre “sexual practices.” Detective Van der Valk and his team used all of this as clues for unravelling the mystery.

Despite this portrayal of Zinzendorf, the erotic illuminated illuminated manuscripts, and the character of a prurient nun, the show did not cast Christianity in a bad light. In fact, this little known underside of the Christian tradition was presented as kind of cool. Dr. Veith concluded his lecture by saying that Count von Zinzendorf “has lessons for us all.” At the end. . . .Well, I shouldn’t give spoilers, especially in a murder mystery. Still, the ignorance and misinterpretation exhibited on this show are staggering.

Since the name of Zinzendorf was traduced and since my own name was dragged into it, I feel called upon to offer some corrections and explanations.

Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1760) was a Lutheran Pietist. An important figure in 18th century Christianity, Zinzendorf was a founder of the Mission Movement, which would become so important especially in Scandinavian Lutheranism, an anti-slavery activist, and a missionary to the slaves of the West Indies and to Native American tribes in the United States. His followers became known as Moravians, which is now a distinct denomination.

Now we Missouri-Synod Lutherans hold more to the Lutheran orthodoxy of the 17th century and are often critical of Pietism as being overly subjective and promoting a legalistic lifestyle. The early Pietists promoted a deeply personal faith and an intense, emotional devotional life that was a reaction against what was perceived as an overly-intellectualized religion. But some of the Pietists were quite orthodox as Lutherans, though others would drift into anti-sacramentalism and opposition to the institutional church. Zinzendorf affirmed the Augsburg Confession, but he drifted away from Lutheranism as such and, again, his Moravians became a separate church body.

But, to return to the PBS mystery, Zinzendorf did NOT “worship the wounds of Christ.” He did have a high view of the Atonement and wrote much about Christ’s suffering and its relevance for Christians. For example, he would exhort sinners to hide themselves in the wounds of Christ. Two of his hymns are in the Lutheran Service Book, the LCMS hymnal, and are quite beloved: “Jesus, Lead Thou On” (#718) and “Jesus, Thy Blood and Righteousness” (#563), which goes on to say that His blood and righteousness “My beauty are, my glorious dress” (#563). Some of his vivid, bloody imagery may seem over the top to today’s sensibility, but it was a commonplace of Baroque devotions and can also be found in the Catholic meditations of the time, for example in the poetry of Richard Crashaw and in popular devotions such as those to the Five Holy Wounds of Christ Crucified.

As for his followers engaging in bizarre sexual practices, perhaps the TV-writers were thinking of chastity and reserving sex for marriage. Such an approach to sex evidently seems perverse and transgressive in today’s sex-obsessed climate. The Moravians did have congregations that lived in commune-like arrangements. They shared child-raising responsibilities, but not each other’s spouses! Zinzendorf had a high view of marriage, considering it a sacrament (contrary to Lutheran orthodoxy), which the Moravians took to heart.

John Wesley was converted to Christianity when he met with Moravians and heard them read from Luther’s Preface to the Book of Romans. This would lead to Methodism and, later, the evangelistic revivals in America. Scholars today are seeing the connection between the Pietist awakenings in Europe and the two “Great Awakenings” in the United States. In fact, many scholars are saying that the origins of American evangelicalism are to be found not so much with the Puritans as with European Pietists such as Zinzendorf.

So no, Dr. Veith, Count von Zinzendorf did not “worship the wounds of Christ,” nor did he start a sex cult, and when he referred to drinking the blood of Christ, he was not being a vampire. But he does “have lessons for us today.”

One more fun fact about Count von Zinzendorf: He was converted by a work of art, a painting of Christ after his torture by Pilate with the caption “”This have I suffered for you” (faith comes by the Word); “now what will you do for me?” (vocation). The painting was “Ecce Homo” by Domenica Feti. Read about the painting and what happened here. Here is the painting:

So evidently, art can have an evangelistic effect. Just don’t count on it in PBS mystery stories.

Illustrations: Portrait of Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf by Balthasar Denner (1685-1749), public domain. “Ecce Homo” by Domenica Feti (1589 – 1623), public domain.

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The Spirituality of Everyday Life

Last updated on: September 5, 2020 at 11:23 am By Gene Veith

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In our efforts to Christianize “Labor Day” by turning it into a feast day celebrating the Doctrine of Vocation, I would like to offer you some recent reflections on why vocation is so important, how it can solve so many of the problems Christians are currently struggling with, and how it has the potential to revitalize contemporary Christianity.

This is from the introduction to the chapter on vocation that I wrote with Trevor Sutton in our book Authentic Christianity: How Lutheran Theology Speaks to a Post-Modern World:

The Reformation contributed three major teachings that would characterize Protestantism in all its diversity: justification by faith, the authority of Scripture, and the doctrine of vocation. The first two still have currency, despite recent criticisms. But the concept of vocation has been gradually lost. First it was turned into a “work ethic.” Then it turned into a pious attitude empty of specific content. Eventually it was reduced to just another synonym for “a job.”

Vocation was never meant to be just another word for “occupation.” Rather, it was originally about the Christian life that is fully integrated, meaningful, and teeming with purpose. Vocation was the locus for other important teachings, such as the priesthood of all believers, good works, and sanctification. It was not merely a theoretical teaching; rather, as taught in the early Reformation catechisms and sermons, the doctrine of vocation gave practical guidance to Christians in their marriages, parenthood, economic activity, and their role as citizens.

The doctrine of vocation shows Christians how to live out their faith in the world. It is about God’s presence in the world and how He works through human beings for His purposes. For Christians, vocation discloses the spirituality of everyday life.

Today Christians are greatly confused about how they should relate to the world. This is evident in the controversies about political involvement and cultural engagement. On the personal scale, champions of “family values” have a soaring divorce rate. Many Christians compartmentalize their lives, conforming to a consumerist and materialistic culture, while pursuing transcendent spiritual experiences that have little to do with their everyday lives. Christians today are variously—and sometimes simultaneously—waging culture wars, withdrawing from the world, and conforming to it.

The time is right to recover the doctrine of vocation. Doing so would revitalize contemporary Christianity and show Christians how once again they can be the world’s salt and light.

The chapter goes on with sections on “Vocation and the Bible,” “Luther on Vocation,” “The Christian’s Multiple Vocations” (including Luther’s important but oft-neglected doctrine of the Estates [the church, the household, the state, and the common order of Christian love], “The Importance of Vocation in the Christian Life,” “The Purpose of Vocation,” “The Priesthood and Its Sacrifices,” and “Vocation and Transfiguration.”

Those of you who have been interested in my writings on vocation–especially my books God at Work, Family Vocation (with Mary Moerbe), and Working for Our Neighbor–might also appreciate this new overview that can be found in Authentic Christianity.

You can buy the book–which also includes similar treatments of God, justification, the cross, the sacraments, the two kingdoms, and sanctification– here.

Illustration: “Happy Labor Day Cross Drawing,” Creative Commons, CC0 via Pixy.org

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Lawlessness, Power, & Authority

Last updated on: August 28, 2020 at 8:43 am By Gene Veith

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I commend to you two posts from my fellow Patheos bloggers.

To learn what it feels like when law and order completely breaks down around you, read this post by Grayson Gilbert, who lives in Kenosha, Wisconsin, writing as his neighborhood is being looted and his community is going up in flames. In Kenosha, population 100,000, a police officer shot a black man, Jacob Blake, in the back–in front of his children, no less–paralyzing him. Of course this has sparked protests, and rightly so. But it has also become a pretext for visitors from Chicago and Milwaukee to pour into Kenosha, forming mobs that roam the streets, smashing windows, looting businesses, setting buildings on fire (including a church), and assaulting people on the streets. A white 17-year-old killed two protesters. In this climate of anarchy and social breakdown, Grayson recounts what it’s like to live in a community where all of this happening. He describes the smell of the burning city, evoking the fear of the citizens who live there, including his black neighbors, whose homes and livelihoods are being destroyed. His post defies summary and excerpting, so read it yourself.

Unjust police violence and racism are terrible and must be addressed. My question, though, is how does it advance the cause of Jacob Blake to commit violence against people who had nothing to do with his mistreatment? Black Lives Matter. So why should people supposedly committed to that cause–many of them white–loot black-owned businesses and set fire to black people’s neighborhoods?

For an answer to that question, read Timon Cline’s post, Chaos Creates Conservatives. It is mainly a tribute to the British conservative thinker Roger Scruton, who died this year. The essay is worth reading in its entirety, but let me just quote a few of its passages from Scruton.

As a young intellectual, Scruton was in Paris during the student riots of 1968. The violence and destruction he witnessed–similar to that in Kenosha, Portland, and other cities today–turned him into a conservative. He recounted his experience in an article published in 2003 in the New Criterion entitled Why I Became a Conservative.

He tells about a friend of his who was exhilarated by participating in the rioting.“She was very excited by the events… Great victories had been scored: policemen injured, cars set alight, slogans chanted, graffiti daubed. The bourgeoisie were on the run and soon the Old Fascist [de Gaulle] and his régime would be begging for mercy.”

So he asked her a question. “What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades?”

She replied with a book: Foucault’s [The Order of Things], the bible of the soixante-huitards [the student protestors], the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the “episteme,” imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.

I can also attest that the French post-modernist Michel Foucault is venerated on university campuses, and his reduction of all truth-claims, moral values, and cultural institutions to power and his insistence that all power is oppressive are foundational to today’s critical theory.

Cline says that Scruton found two answers to Foucault:

For the young Scruton, the antidote to Foucault was the Anglo-American common law tradition, a love for which he cultivated whilst studying for the bar. “Law,” he said, “is constrained at every point by reality, and utopian visions have no place in it.”

Moreover, the common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.

The second answer Scruton found in the 18th-century Edmund Burke, the seminal conservative thinker who critiqued the lawlessness of the French Revolution. From Scruton’s essay, as quoted by Timon Cline:

Far from being the evil and obnoxious thing that my contemporaries held it to be, authority was, for Burke, the root of political order. Society, he argued, is not held together by the abstract rights of the citizen, as the French Revolutionaries supposed. It is held together by authority—by which is meant the right to obedience, rather than the mere power to compel it. And obedience, in its turn, is the prime virtue of political beings, the disposition which makes it possible to govern them, and without which societies crumble into ‘the dust and powder of individuality’… In effect Burke was upholding the old view of man in society, as subject of a sovereign, against the new view of him, as citizen of a state… Real freedom, concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.

Here I think we can see where Christianity comes in: There is legitimate authority. Strictly speaking, God holds all authority, but His authority is masked in human vocations (such as that of parents, lawful rulers, etc.). Thus, as St. Paul says, “There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Romans 13:1). And, yes, obedience–to God, to parents, to lawful rulers, etc.–is a virtue. Furthermore, power is not innately oppressive. God’s power is righteous, as is His power exercised through human vocations.

To be sure, human sin distorts both authority and power. But that authority and power can be exercised in a morally good way frees people from Foucault’s vicious circle: If power is always oppressive, overthrowing the oppressor by seizing power means becoming an oppressor oneself.

Whereas if authority and power can be exercised in a good way, there is a political way forward and justice–including for black people–becomes possible.

Photo: “Unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after Jacob Blake Shooting,” YouTube screenshot. Credit: Andrew Mercado via Storyful

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Protestant Integralism

Last updated on: August 22, 2020 at 6:36 pm By Gene Veith

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In the discussions about the nature of conservatism and the role of Christianity in society, an old idea has come to the fore: Integralism, the Catholic theory about how the church should exercise political authority over earthly rulers.

This political theory rejects “liberalism”–that is, the notions of freedom and democracy that gave us the U.S. Constitution–in favor of bringing back some version of the pre-liberal medieval order, in which the Pope supervised the multi-national Holy Roman Emperor, who supervised the national Kings and the local aristocracy.

This is clearly a Catholic project, one which Luther and the Reformation strongly denounced as a distortion of both church and state. See my post Integralism, the Pope, and the Emperor.

But can there be a Protestant Integralism? And should there be such a thing?

R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has written a book entitled A Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church. He argues that liberalism has failed, that it has brought on a caustic secularism that is destroying our culture, and that Christians must fight to restore its Biblical foundations.

In a review of this book for Law & Liberty, Greg Forster says that Mohler is arguing for, in the words of the review’s title, Protestant Integralism. Forster defends “liberalism,” pointing out that its key ideas themselves derive from Christianity, including teachings about universal human rights and natural law from medieval theologians in the 12th century. Instead, according to Forster, Mohler calls for Christians to engage in a culture war that would, in the unlikely event that it is successful, result in an evangelical Christian nationalism. Read the review for yourself.

Mohler wrote an answer to Forster entitled ‘s answer entitled Secularism Cannot Sustain Liberty, a Response to Greg Forster. Here he denies that he is an Integralist because he is a Baptist, not a Catholic. But if he were a Catholic, he says, he would be tempted by Integralism. His point, though, is that the very tenets of liberalism–such as freedom–cannot be sustained by secularism. So that if we want liberalism, we need to give them a better foundation.

I have had dealings with both Dr. Mohler and Dr. Forster and respect them both. As a Lutheran, I have problems with Integralism, both in the Catholic and in any Reformed manifestation it might take. I’ll be writing about a Lutheran alternative. In the meantime, if you are interested in secularism, you might read my new book Post-Christian: A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture.

Dr. Forster has drawn on my own writings on vocation, and I was struck by how he applied that teaching to these issues:

If political liberals are looking for a strategy to reinforce the social conditions liberalism presupposes, or if evangelicals are looking for a way to resist the dechristianization of culture without rechristianizing the civil law, I know where I think they should start.

You can defeat things you hate, but you can only change things you love. The deep structures of culture can only be changed by people who go out into their workplaces and communities every day on a mission to love their neighbors. If you want to stop an injustice, your model may be William Wilberforce; if you want to reverse the dechristianization of culture that threatens to collapse political liberalism, a better model is Josiah Wedgwood. Seeing his “secular” work as a calling from God, he reinvented the 18th-century factory by introducing humane and dignified working conditions, which catalyzed explosive growth in economic productivity—and brought a huge influx of factory workers into the churches of the Wesleyan movement.

To achieve a social vision like that, the first step is religious leaders who know how to orient social witness in a constructive way. While prophetic resistance is vital, we need pastors who inspire and equip people to go out on a life-giving mission throughout all the tasks in their daily work.

Where will we get such pastors? From Mohler.

You would never guess this from his prolific political commentary, but Mohler punches his timecard every Monday morning as the president of one of America’s biggest and best seminaries. His school trains thousands of church leaders whose tireless and unglamorous work holds back the collapse of the liberal social order—not by prosecuting a culture war, but by shoring up the social conditions of individual moral virtue, institutional integrity, and community solidarity as shepherds of their congregations. That never-ending rearguard action of holding back the tides of decay needs to become a constructive mission of building a new culture of neighbor-love.

Photo: Albert Mohler by james.thompson / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

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