Dispatches from an Alien World

Or, Why Would Anyone but a Christian Nationalist Want Us to Read 16th-Cent. Political Theology?

In recent weeks, there has been a Level 5 Kerfuffle among the right-wing Protestant Twitterati over the nature and purpose of “retrieval theology,” especially in the domain of political theology. Although I try to steer a wide berth around such tempests in the teapot, the topic of this one is near and dear to my heart, and to several of my current projects, and so perhaps merits a brief reflection.

For instance, just today I am wrapping up and submitting an essay for an edited volume on The Reformation and Society entitled, “Moses, Aristotle, and the Royal Supremacy: Unlikely Sources of Religious Toleration in Richard Hooker and Early Modern Political Theology.” Next term, I am co-teaching a class on Political Theology and the English Reformation (you’re welcome to sign up!) and another on Foundations of Christian Political Thought (sorry, you have to be a Regent University student to sign up). What is the point of reading such authors and texts, in a world where we’re more likely to be arguing about whether there’s a religious right to refuse transgender surgery than whether Anabaptists should be exiled or executed? Many will be apt to dismiss such study as either mere antiquarianism, or else wonder darkly whether those pursuing such retrieval actually want to reinstate sixteenth-century models of religious persecution.

Let me propose three reasons why we ignore this alien world of Christendom at our peril.

The first comes from C.S. Lewis’s classic essay, “On Reading Old Books” (originally penned as a preface to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, apropos reading for this time of year): such texts can shake us out of our dogmatic slumber, can highlight the blind spots of our own era. “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.” Now note that Lewis explicitly warns against fetishizing the past, and thus against any project of retrieval as repristination. We certainly do not go to the sixteenth century with the assumption that their politics should be our politics: “Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.”

Today, we are apt to make the mistake of imagining that politics can carry merrily along without any underlying religious creed. And thus we have been puzzled and thoroughly caught off-guard by the eruption of a “woke” ideology that seems to instill its adherents with religious devotion and apocalyptic dreams. Our characteristic blind spot is to think that theology and politics can be neatly and sustainably separated. When we read theologians like Richard Hooker, we find this assumption radically challenged at every point. We should not come away from the encounter convinced that Hooker had all the answers, and try to forget everything that society has learned about politics and the possibilities for religious toleration over the past 400 years, but we will, hopefully, come away from the encounter asking new questions about our own context, and willing to entertain new hypotheses about the causes of our current ills.

The second is captured by the old adage “you don’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you came from.” So much of modern political thought is characterized by a profound amnesia about its sources, leaving modern political institutions to float like castles in the air. Take, for instance, the issue of religious toleration, which I am currently writing on. In his 2010 book The Hebrew Republic, Eric Nelson argued—incontrovertibly to my mind—that the origins of religious toleration were in fact deeply religious. Not only that, but he demonstrated they were above all found in Hebraist Erastians—that is to say, in political thinkers who believed that ancient Israel should be a model for our own politics and that what it modeled was a strong union of church and state, generally under a Christian monarch. Wait what?

There are aspects of Nelson’s argument that need nuancing, to be sure (hence my essay), but the basic claim is sound, and turns many of our assumptions about “liberalism” and “pluralism” on their heads. Now, of course, it doesn’t necessarily follow that just because you started somewhere means you need to stay there. For instance, rubber was initially discovered as a product of the Pará rubber tree, from which it was exclusively harvested until 1909. In that year, industrial chemists in Germany succeeded in creating synthetic rubber, which now accounts for the majority of the global rubber supply. Perhaps it is the same with ideas like “human rights” and “religious liberty”—they may have originally sprung from Christian soil, but we have since learned how to transplant them, or synthesize passable duplicates. But I am doubtful, and we certainly cannot take this hypothesis for granted. Particularly, if we find that our modern synthetic political principles aren’t working so well, but seem to be cracking under the strain we are placing on them, it might behoove us to back to the sources and see if perhaps we didn’t get the formula wrong somewhere along the way.

Finally, we return to the sources not so much because of what they argue but because of how they argue. At least, this is certainly true when it comes to politics—as Hooker says: “There is no reason in the world why we should consider it necessary to always do the same things, just because it is necessary to always believe the same things, since everyone knows that the object of our faith always remains the same, whereas the objects of our action change from day to day—and actions related to … polity are especially changeable.” The particular prescriptions which our forebears proposed for their own political contexts will rarely have more than the slightest resemblance to policy proposals we are actually contemplating today. However, particularly as they wrote in an era where political science had not become a narrow specialist discipline, and brought to bear a rich humanist philosophical education, the form of their arguments is frequently instructive.

For instance, in my essay I sum up Hooker’s political theology in two syllogisms, with the conclusion to the first supplying the major premise to the second.

Major premise 1: it is the duty of rulers to cultivate a virtuous society.

Minor premise 1: religion is an essential constituent of a virtuous society.

Conclusion 1: it is the duty of rulers to cultivate religion in their commonwealths, and as much as possible, right religion.

Major premise 2: it is the duty of rulers to cultivate right religion in their commonwealths.

Minor premise 2: the currently established structure of church polity and liturgy is the best means of promoting right religion in England.

Conclusion 2: it is the duty of Christian people to conform to the currently established structure of church polity and liturgy.

If you’re simply looking at Conclusion 2, you will quickly dismiss Hooker as having anything to say to us today. But what about Major premise 1? Some today would reject that, but many would not. Minor premise 1, while more controversial, used to be commonplace, and still is in some quarters. Certainly we would part ways on Minor premise 2, but this is, notably, an empirical hypothesis, which could change without affecting the upstream premises.

Regardless of what one makes of these particular syllogisms, though, the larger pattern of thinking is instructive. Too rarely do we approach our own politics with such a clear-headed distinction of facts and principles, hypotheses and convictions. We know we disagree bitterly, but we do not know why. Hooker is a master at mapping out and making sense of disagreement, of explaining where disagreements at the level of practice do and don’t reflect disagreements at the level of principle. Whatever blind spots we might happily leave in the sixteenth century where they belong, that is wisdom worth retrieving.

Retractationes

One faithful reader who’s also a software programmer texted me after last week’s post, “The Counter-signal and the Noise.” While I was definitely onto something, he said, the whole reference to binary code was poppycock. “No real programmer thinks in those terms.” I had suspected there was something sloppy about the line of argument at the time I was writing, but the Barba-Kay quote seduced me into keeping it. But just because the most basic units of computer code are ones and zeros doesn’t mean that software as we experience it is crudely reductionistic (that’s like saying that since we write with only 26 letters we can only express 26 thoughts). And yet there obviously is something crudely reductionistic about so much digital discourse, as I noted. The real culprit here, however, may be more cultural than technological. Consider: right now, the algorithms on X are designed to reward binary thinking, crude affirmations or negations. Could they, instead, be designed to reward nuance and quality of thought? Well yes, actually, the AI is plenty sophisticated for that now. So why don’t they? Well because we would be immediately suspicious of any attempt to “privilege” certain viewpoints over others; we simply no longer trust anyone’s criteria of truth or rationality enough anymore to allow those criteria a role in shaping digital conversation. When tech barons did take some steps in that direction, they encountered ferocious opposition, above all from conservatives. To be a “conservative” now, it seems, is to be a free speech absolutist—that is, to most favor and promote those forms of utterance that least approximate genuine speech.

Newly Published

• “The Clock is Ticking on TikTok” (WORLD Opinions): With just 36 days left until the TikTok ban, passed by Congress last April by huge margins, takes effect, the courts are not buying ByteDance’s argument that a Chinese-owned entity has unlimited free speech rights in America. A last-ditch legal appeal will determine in the next few days whether TikTok gets an extension till the early days of the Trump administration, which may attempt to save it. (Yep, that’s right, the same President who originally tried to ban TikTok in 2020 now promises to save it.) Let us hope the rule of law will prevail.

• “The Rightful Understanding of Freedom” (Anchoring Truths): I was honored to appear on the Anchoring Truths podcast with Garrett Snedeker of the James Wilson Institute this week to talk about my forthcoming book, Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. I’ll be going on something of a podcast book tour over the next couple of months, and this was the first stop. Given the James Wilson Institute’s interests, this podcast particularly focused on issues such as religious liberty and the intersection of law and liberty. Garrett was also good enough to ask me about the connections between what I argue in the book and the arguments I’ve been making about pornography with reference to the Paxton case. Hope you’ll check it out!

Coming down the Pipe

• “The Misleading Nihilism of Digital Discourse” (Mere Orthodoxy): Following on from my review of James Davison Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity this summer in the University Bookman, I was invited to participate in a little symposium on the book for Mere Orthodoxy. My contribution weaves in thoughts from Anton Barba-Kay as well as reflections from my own recent experience on the front lines of political coalition work. My basic thesis: the “nihilism” that Hunter diagnoses as infecting our politics is in part just performative, a product of the ephemerality of the digital medium on which most political conflict is now played out. “Where real political action is still happening in this country,” I conclude, “the sources of solidarity remain robust, and resilient hope still holds nihilism at bay.”

• “Moses, Aristotle, and the Royal Supremacy: Unlikely Sources of Religious Toleration in Richard Hooker and Early Modern Political Theology”: As mentioned above. This is a contribution to a multi-author volume of conference proceedings for a conference at Hillsdale College this summer on “Reformation and Society.” Sadly, I was unable to attend the conference, but they still invited me to contribute this essay. It’s been a good while since I’ve done much sixteenth-century primary source scholarship, so it was fun to dip my toes back in those waters again. This book should publish late next year, I’m told.

On the Bookshelf

• Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993): A wonderful read—and about far more than technology. Postman’s classic is as much a book about the nature of authority in an age of expertise and a book about education, both topics near and dear to my heart. It offers a fascinating theory of the distinctive malaise of the modern world and some particularly intriguing remarks about “information overload”—while most of us now recognize it as a problem, we may still be taken off guard by Postman’s observation that it is the task of all institutions to limit the amount of information we’re exposed to. Expect an essay or two from me on this in the coming months. For now, I laughed out loud at these lines from his concluding chapter:

  “Anyone who practices the art of cultural criticism must endure being asked, ‘What is the solution to the problems you describe?’ Critics almost never appreciate this question, since, in most cases, they are entirely satisfied with themselves for having posed the problems and, in any event, are rarely skilled in formulating practical suggestions about anything. This is why they became cultural critics.”

• William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1961)

• A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods

• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Recommended Reads

• “The End of Protestant Retrieval” (John Ehrett, Ad Fontes/Commonwealth): If you’re interested in more on the debate about Protestant retrieval, I encourage you to read this fantastic contribution to the conversation by the always thought-provoking John Ehrett. I don’t 100% agree with how he frames everything in here—in particular, I think there is both a sound and an unsound way to make the principle/prudence distinction he talks about there—but this is by and large a very salutary rejoinder to a lot of the sloppier modes of political theology retrieval that have proliferated in the past few years.

• “To Hell with Good Intentions, Silicon Valley Edition” (L.M. Sacasas, The Convivial Society): L.M. Sacasas is back with another banger this week, this time applying Ivan Illich’s famous speech, “To Hell With Good Intentions,” to critique AI-utopianism: “There is a vision of the good life, a vision of what it means to be human implicated in all of our tools, devices, apps, programs, systems, etc. There is a way of being in the world that they encourage. There is a perspective on the world that they subtly encourage their users to adopt. There is a form of life that they are designed to empower and support.”

• “On These Apps, the Dark Promise of Mothers Sexually Abusing Children” (New York Times): As the title suggests, don’t read this one unless you have a strong stomach. Yes, there exists an ecosystem of readily-available video-streaming smartphone apps “where men search for women, typically in Southeast Asia, who charge to sexually abuse children on camera.” Yes, this is the world we live in. Just two thoughts for now: (1) Yes, this is part of what globalization means. Its naive cheerleaders who ignored its possible dark sides were idiots: “Let’s create a free global trade in goods and services, where decadent and depraved First World consumers can effortlessly access whatever desperately deprived and also depraved Third World “producers” are willing to supply. What could possibly go wrong?” (2) Of course the apps insist they had no intention to host such content and that they do their best to remove it. On the first claim, we can probably take them at their word in such an extreme case. On the latter, ha. ha. ha. Why do you think these apps are so profitable to create and operate? Because they keep their labor costs to an absolute minimum. This is possible only because we’ve perpetuated a legal regime that allows them to externalize costs and avoid liability. This is true, on a larger scale, for platforms like X and Meta. The real reason these platforms care so much about “free speech” is because it’s a heckuva lot cheaper than content moderation.

Help Me Do More

It’s that time of year again—when families gather around laden tables with steaming aromas, when the holiday music starts blaring through every speaker, and when anyone and everyone with any affiliation to a non-profit starts asking for money.

In all seriousness, though, everything I do here at EPPC is donor-supported, as is the work of our few dozen scholars, who continue to have an impact on renewing culture and shaping public policy far out of proportion to the size of our institution. If you’ve appreciated what you’ve seen from me on this Substack and elsewhere this year, I’d like to invite and encourage you to consider supporting my work going forward, so I can continue to build my scholarship, writing, and policy work, as well as developing programs to magnify these efforts. If you’d like to talk more about financial support, just shoot me an email (w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com), or if you’d like to go ahead and make a gift, click the button below and put my name in the Comments field!