Category: Politics
Matthew 18 and the Public Square
We’ve heard this story dozens of times this year, the year before that one, going on for what feels like a generation: a schoolteacher is in the public discourse for apparently radicalizing students behind the backs of parents. Blast the...
Tolkien Was Right: Notes on the Respect for Marriage Act and the Post-Boomer Church
Some time after his death, an editor was going through the papers and books in J. R. R. Tolkien’s library when he came across an old copy of C. S. Lewis’s pamphlet “Christian Behavior,” which would later be re-published as...
The Withering of Persuasion
What are any of us doing when we take up our avatars and handles to enter into fights on Facebook and Twitter? When we post links and frame them with incendiary remarks as though sharing the link was itself a...
Rich Christians in an Age of Competing Obligations
Christianity is a religion of seemingly impossible paradoxes, and the Christian life is a series of decisions made within a set of difficult, often excruciating tensions. The simplest paradoxes are the purely theological ones: Jesus is fully God and man;...
How Should Christians Speak in Public?
Watching David Koch skewer evangelical pastor Guy Mason on Australia’s morning show Sunrise was an excruciating experience.[1] Andrew Thorburn had been dismissed for his association with the City on a Hill church just a couple of days after being appointed...
The Case for Voting Third Party
These days, it’s hard to be a Christian who cares about politics—and public ethics, character, and the mission of God. On the one hand, our political system is a mess, with platforms pushing toward the extremes, and constituencies nursing rising...
Fight Progressivism. Be Liberal.
In 2017 and 2018, Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen argued that classical liberalism and progressivism are indistinguishable. Pick your metaphor: Progressivism is the fruit of liberalism’s poisoned tree. The liberal seed led inexorably to the progressive flowering. Or, liberalism...
Negative World Arrives in Australia
It didn’t take long, but we can now say that Aaron Renn and James Wood have been vindicated. Their recent analyses of our cultural moment and strategies for Christian cultural engagement have been proven right by recent events in Australia....
Biblical Nationalism
Several months after the shocking naval victory at Salamis in the fall of 480 BC and Xerxes’ hasty retreat to Asia with his navy, a delegation arrived in Athens. Leading this embassy was Alexander I of Macedon, a longtime friend...
John Quincy Adams: Christian Nationalist?
In the February of 1824, politically active Calvinists across the northern United States finally got their wish for a godly devout president who made the American republic a more explicitly Christian and righteous nation. The House of Representatives chose John...