Devoid of Self-Awareness

Progressive Christian Animus Toward Christian Nationalists

“All you Americans have filthy colons.”

Those rather startling words were uttered, in a thick German accent, by a software engineer in Germany during the early 1990’s. I must confess that, before having had this exchange, it had simply never occurred to me that anyone - anywhere - was actually sitting around mulling over the relative colonic hygiene of people from other countries.

I mean, really, who knew?

His comment that day actually felt more like an accusation than an observation. I could tell it affected me that way because I immediately sensed an instinctive surge of patriotic fervor, as if loyalty to America compelled me to come to the defense of America’s…colons(?). Or something.

The source of my interlocutor’s displeasure with America’s unsanitary colons was rooted, I eventually learned, in the American propensity for consuming red meat. In his fevered imagination, evidently, red meat was to colons as plague and pestilence are to the world at large.

But there was a deeply embedded irony in this entire conversation, because my accuser of American colons actually mouthed these words while squinting through his own cigarette smoke. He was holding his hand in a palm upward fashion, cupped as if holding water, with a cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Maybe you can picture it. Bringing the cigarette to his mouth, he took a luxurious drag of carcinogens, then he exhaled an enormous cloud of second-hand smoke into the room while self-righteously inveighing against…American digestive health. You really have to give the Germans full marks for chutzpah - it was quite the performance.

And it turned out that my German colleague wasn’t finished yet. He had even more American gastronomical failures to decry. He unburdened himself by informing me that American restaurants offered far too many choices of salad dressing. He knew this, he said, because the effort to choose between them while ordering a salad simply created too much anxiety for foreign visitors to American shores.

I tell this story about my chain-smoking friend’s strangely obsessive concern for international colonic health, because it highlights a very human tendency — that of enjoying the congenial feelings which accrue when we project our own failures onto others. Jesus himself offered commentary on this very temptation when he admonished his followers to rid their eyes of the hulking logs before insisting that their neighbor remove his own minor splinter.

Progressives have, alas, turned the business of accusing others into a veritable reason for their existence. It is now practically axiomatic that Progressives are themselves doing whatever it is they are accusing others of doing. They are so hilariously consistent in their projection that it is a wonder that anyone continues to take Progressive accusations seriously at all. But then, I remind myself, we are living in clown world, so…

Progressive Christians are in high dudgeon over the fact that there are other Christians, ones who do not share their political views, who nevertheless still harbor political opinions of their own. Quelle horreur! Not only that, but those icky conservative Christians sometimes seem inappropriately determined to do embarrassing things, like express openly their understanding of how Christian ideas can most effectively impact public policy. (Is there no end to their effrontery!?) And just to compound Progressive displeasure, some Christians are even voting for candidates who are unapproved by those very same Progressive Christians. Some of the preferred candidates have even expressed a willingness to implement policies that are informed by actual Christian understandings regarding “right” and “wrong”. They’re wild, I tell you.

Progressive Christians have therefore been busy lecturing their Christian brethren about the dangers of politics, the supposed unsavoriness of the candidates favored by conservatives, the inappropriateness of any assertive Christian influence in the government, and the general need to avoid anything that even hints at Christian influence within public policy. Progressives are busily sounding the alarm about those dangerous “Christian Nationalists” who have made so bold as to suggest that biblical ideas about justice might actually be synonymous with the very definition of justice. The nerve!

But Christian Progressives, who look askance at the political involvement of other Christians, are like my chain-smoking German accuser who was consumed with worry about the dietary choices of others, even as he filled his own lungs with cancer. Progressive Christians are actively doing everything they can to politically promote their own policies and candidates, while at the same time attempting to demoralize their Christian opposition by accusing politically-minded conservative Christians of moral compromise. Progressive Christians are themselves running the secular Progressive political playbook to a tee, all while wagging their accusatory fingers at other Christians for being open about any political affinities which might be uncongenial to Progressive concerns.

My German accuser’s chutzpah has got nothing on the political chutzpah of Russell Moore and friends.

I’ve written before about how I haven’t really had strongly formed opinions regarding Christian Nationalists. To be honest, though, I have found the dubious character and arguments of CN’s detractors to be quite a definite point in the Nationalists’ favor.

It is simply impossible to adjudicate between the competing policy agendas proposed by Progressive Christians and Christian Nationalists without first understanding the telos of government: what are its purposes and obligations? Also, we should ask whether the prerogatives and responsibilities of government, as described by the biblical text, are distinct from the responsibilities of Christians generally, and the church in particular.

For Christians, one of the most detailed biblical texts dealing with the relationship between Christians and governments, along with the actual responsibilities of the governments which have been ordained by God, is found in the epistle of Romans, in chapter 13. Reading that chapter will be left as an exercise for the reader. For my part, I want to provide a few reflections on that text. My observations would be similarly accessible to anyone else who decided to read the epistle for himself. I encourage you not to take my word for it. I write not as anything like a professional theologian or biblical scholar, but just as someone who can read, reason, and has his own opinions. Such an approach may have already run me afoul of the right-think enforcers, but that will only have the effect of overflowing my already full cup of good cheer.

So, a few observations from Romans 13 that bear on this discussion:

• Governments are intended and ordained by God. This implies that God is over, and superintends, the purposes and ends of government. This seems like a very big deal and is consistent with the American founding concepts that governments are instituted to secure natural rights as established by God. Governments, accordingly, are themselves subservient to God. As we shall see, it is the protection of citizens who do right, against the predations of those who do wrong, that is the primary obligation of government (verse 1)

• As a general matter, Christians should live in submission to the governing authorities. Whether or not this is actually an unbounded obligation is, as we will see, problematic. (vs 2)

• There is a presumption, in the text, that government authorities are only a source of fear for someone who does wrong. Not only that, but that God intends for government authorities to actively commend those who do right. This implies that the saying “the law is a teacher” may be correct in regard to civil governments. Whether we currently have a government that makes proper distinctions between those who do good and and those who do evil, I will also leave as an exercise for the reader. What a Christian should do, if he finds that the government he has is not acting in ways consistent with its God-ordained obligations, is unclear. Though to me it seems irrational to conclude from this passage that the Christian obligation to submit is untethered from the government’s obligation to make right distinctions between good and evil. After all, in their context, the relative obligations of Christians and those of governments are described in tandem and in relation to one another. (vs 3)
  I raise the question about the limits of Christian submission to the authorities, because beginning with Covid at least, I have encountered any number of Progressive Christians who have wielded Romans 13 like some kind of talisman against critical thinking. In particular, no usurpation by the government, no matter how egregious, has been deemed by Progressives to be sufficient to call into question the government’s out-and-out supremacy over the church. Indeed, during the pandemic, Progressives made a habit of elevating policy edicts from public health authorities into novel new forms of moral imperatives (e.g. vaccines + masks = love for your neighbor). So the question of whether Christians have an unbounded obligation to hop whenever the government says “jump”, is not academic. We should consider that the apostles themselves were known to bust out of prison, challenge the authorities to their faces, and weren’t too fastidious to strike someone blind who was interfering with the preaching of the gospel. None of this paints a picture in my untutored mind similar to the kind of craven posture so often advocated for by Progressive Christians during the pandemic.

• Government functions as an agent of coercion and force - it is tasked with exercising retributive justice on “wrongdoers”. (vs 4)

• Taxes are justifiably owed in order to pay the salaries of government authorities who are working full-time at their jobs rather than pursuing their own interests elsewhere. (vs 6-7) Whether taxes are morally justified to fund all the other things currently being funded is, of course, an open question.

The government inhabits the realm of coercion and force, its primary role being to enforce temporal justice. Its legitimate prerogative to engage in violence makes it something very different than a charitable organization. One might even argue that the church and the government have polar-opposite modes of being. The church has an obligation of, say, concern for the poor via the cultivation and expression of love. Love-motivated charity not only provides for the poor but it multiplies love in the lives of the givers. When the government usurps the church’s proper role in regard to something like the poor, it has transitioned proper concern for the poor from the realm of love, which the church inhabits, into the realm of coercion and retribution, which the government inhabits. The government is thus engaged in a task for which it is unsuited and for which it was never ordained. At the same time, the church has been deprived of an obligation which the Lord Jesus himself explicitly instructed it to undertake. Thus, helping the poor has been transformed into something that is coerced under threat of retribution by the government (e.g. people go to jail for not paying all of their taxes) rather than a voluntary act which has been motivated by love and growth in fidelity toward God.

There are at least two implications I want to close with which seem to me inescapable from reading the text of Romans 13. First, the distinctions made by the government between right and wrong must inevitably be based on some moral foundation for what constitutes right and wrong. Where should such an understanding come from? More specifically, where do Progressive Christians think those distinctions should come from in matters of public policy? Especially for Christians, who believe that what constitutes the good is grounded in transcendent truth, should we be interested in having the government’s understanding of the good reflect that truth? For those Progressives who find the energetic pursuits of Christian Nationalists so offensive: where then should a government, one which currently flies the rainbow flag over its embassies around the world, derive its understanding of the true and legitimate distinctions between good and evil?

Second, when Progressives promote government policies which involve the government usurping responsibility for tasks it was not ordained to do, such as the prerogatives and obligations given to the church, Progressives make themselves complicit in damaging both the church and the government.

Progressive Christians, in their zeal for seeing the government operate as a de facto Christian charity, are no less “christian nationalist” than the most ardent large-C Christian Nationalist. The only apparent difference is that Progressives seem far more starry-eyed and confused about the ends for which governments were actually established by God. And, much like my German friend, they routinely lack even a smidgen of self-awareness.