Civic Republicanism and the Magisterial Reformation

We begin with a recent news report: 

OMAHA, NE—In a candid plea addressed to the entire global community, Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert gave an impassioned speech Tuesday in which she announced that her city did not have the community spirit to withstand a terrorist attack. “The proud people of Omaha cannot and will not stand strong against terrorism,” said the mayor, who stressed that if the Nebraska municipality were targeted by violence from any foreign or domestic militant organization, it would cave immediately. “Rest assured, no matter the scale of the attack, if this city’s downtown or its government buildings are hit in a terrorist strike, our residents will not come together in the face of such tragedy. In fact, the moment we feel our lives are in danger, we will likely succumb to fear and distrust, turning upon our neighbors without mercy. And Omaha will never, ever heal as a community. Thank you.” 

We laugh because of a grim recognition that there is some truth here, even if it is from The Onion. It’s a long time since the early weeks of the pandemic when we optimistically thought it might bring us back together as a people. And when you consider not just COVID, but the many other factors that seem to have driven a stake into the heart of the American republic over the past ten years, you understand the joke all the better. 

Unsurprisingly, such a time of uncertainty, fractured trust, and partisan anger has boiled over for some, such that they are now exploring alternative political visions for the future of this nation. I want to highlight three rival visions that are seemingly well-represented and well-established before suggesting a final one that has received less public support but is, I think, a far superior alternative. 

Before we get to those alternative visions, however, we should define the order that has marked recent decades in American public life. The British philosopher John Gray has spoken of “two faces” of liberalism. By that he means one iteration of liberalism which says ‘liberal rights are important because there is no one best way to live and therefore we need liberal rights to protect everyone’s right to find their own path.’ The second face of liberalism says ‘liberal rights are important because a liberal life is the best life to live and therefore we can’t actually live well without liberal rights.’ The post-war United States, what political theorist Michael Lind would see as the “third republic” of the US, stretching from the resolution of World War II through to the early 21st century, is in many ways exemplifying Gray’s first face of liberalism, for better and worse. 

It did so to the good in that it preserved liberal rights domestically through the Cold War at a time when much of the world lacked those rights which we regard as so basic. Indeed, via the Civil Rights Act, it actually was able to help strengthen and further secure those rights domestically. Yet there were also breakdowns. The particular shape that this era’s liberalism took was often one of anti interventionism in domestic affairs, which meant that government did not see its business as including the protection of the unborn, for instance, or the preservation of marriage, or the protection of American workers from predatory firms.

The result of this anti-interventionist posture was two-fold, I think. First, American common life atrophied badly—manifesting today in soaring rates of reported loneliness as well as the much discussed deaths of despair. You can also see it in falling birth rates, the decline of marriage, and the ascent of the gig economy, which further accelerates the attacks on American workers—now not only do American workers struggle to organize themselves, they often even struggle to secure the legal status of an “employee.” What is most striking, perhaps, is that the anti-interventionist posture has not actually worked to keep government from intervening in common life; it has merely worked to keep government from being a pro-active member in the commonwealth. But the various layered crises created by anti-interventionism have actually led to a dramatically expanded state because the state is forced to jump in to patch up the rips and tears in the fabric of our common life. So on both of these levels, the anti interventionist style of liberalism has failed quite dramatically, I think.

This, then, is why we are seeing alternative visions emerging. 

Option 1: Retrenched Anti-Interventionism: This vision effectively says, “Yes yes, there are problems in our nation, but if you look more closely, it’s not as bad as you think. So we need to stick to the quasi-libertarian or liberaltarian conception of the government because it’s not as bad as you think and any alternative will be worse.” It holds that the cost of a more active or ‘interventionist’ government is too high. Declining birth rates and the breakdown of the family and the loss of solidarity across society are just the price of freedom.

Option 2: The successor ideology: This is Wes Yang’s term for the social progressivism that has swept the American left in the past ten and, especially, the past five years, often to the detriment of other forms of leftist politics. One way of understanding this particular strain of progressivism would be to say that it’s a kind of development of the specific post-war strain of Gray’s Liberalism 1 into Liberalism 2. It’s a somewhat contradictory impulse, but you might render it as “the Liberal life is the best life to live because it secures for each person the right to define their own best life.” Thus the sometimes bizarre relationship of the successor ideology to liberalism—at once a seemingly far more radical form of liberalism and, simultaneously, a repudiation of wide swathes of the liberal tradition. The illiberalism of this stream is perhaps best seen in the examples of Brandon Eich, a former CEO who lost his job at Firefox over a political donation to the Proposition 8 campaign in California, or Jennifer Sey, a former executive at Levi’s who says she left the company due to internal pressures she faced over sharing her views on school shutdowns during the pandemic. There are many other examples of this we might cite, of course. 

I do not think Christians can adopt this strategy for a couple reasons. First, the sexual politics of the successor ideology are categorically at odds with historic Christian thinking about sexuality. A political vision that regards the design of one’s body as disclosing nothing whatsoever about one’s sexuality is not a recognizably Christian vision. Second, I worry that the entrenched liberationist posture of the successor ideology goes beyond a desire to simply liberate certain oppressed peoples and to use political means to do so—this is an utterly unremarkable thing in the Christian tradition, particularly in modern Christian thought, after all—and moves into a vision of the world that regards certain conflicts as being intrinsic to the world’s design.

To take only one recent example, an Atlantic reviewer recently flagged a new book called This American Ex-Wife by Iowa journalist Lyz Lenz. Writing about the book, reviewer Lily Meier says,

“On the page, at least, Lenz never entertains the idea that marriage could change for the better. Nor does she imagine a radical alternative—say, a society in which marriage does not exist. Instead, she turns, over and over, to individual women’s decisions to leave their marriage, which she invariably presents as a brave, necessary, and—yes—inspirational choice. Early in the book, Lenz writes archly, “I’m not arguing that you personally should get a divorce. I mean, not necessarily.” She then goes on to suggest, repeatedly, that you should.” 

Later on, Meier continues, 

Although This American Ex-Wife contains sweet cameos by male friends who encourage Lenz to put her own happiness first, its most substantial male perspective is that of the chorus of angry men who comment on and reply to Lenz’s work online. Being harassed by internet misogynists is a miserable experience, one that Lenz, whose newsletter is called Men Yell at Me, has reclaimed as a personal brand. In a recent interview, Lenz mentioned wanting to put men “on blast and on notice” with her book. Even if that’s the case, she shows remarkably little patience for divorced women who hope to get married again. Instead of making space for complexity, Lenz appears to train her eyes on the set destination of a repaired life. For her, this repair means being single. A “better thing [than marriage] did exist,” she writes, “and it was me.” 

This assumed ontological violence is inherently corrosive of common life because it can’t not be. And for Christians who believe that God made a peaceable world shaped and defined by a peaceable order and that he calls us as Christians to live peaceable lives together, at times even partly restoring the natural order of the world through his aid, any political vision that presupposes violence between people is, I think, a non-starter. 

So the third ideology: Post-Liberal Christian political visions. The two most dominant strains here are the Catholic Integralism of Adrian Vermeule and the Christian Nationalism of Stephen Wolfe, Andrew Isker, and their colleagues. (Please note that I’m using the term ‘Christian Nationalism’ in the particular way it is meant by Wolfe and Isker, authors of the two bestselling books advocating for the movement. I am not using it in the way many in the media have, which is to say ‘non-libertarian socially conservative Christians.’ I am using the term to mean what its most enthusiastic supporters mean by it and not what its often quite ignorant critics mean.) The thread that links these two quite different groups together is that they have effectively given up on the possibility of liberal democracy as a governing philosophy. 

Instead, they favor “integration from within” in Vermeule’s phrase—by which he basically means accomplishing Roman integralism via a seizing of the apparatus of the state. Or they favor a turn toward a more traditional strong man style of political engagement with relatively minimal protection for traditional liberal rights—thus Wolfe’s call for a “Christian prince.” Here is how Wolfe describes that ‘prince,’: 

“He is the first of his people—one whom the people can look upon as father or protectorate of the country. I am not calling for a monarchical regime over every civil polity, and certainly not an autocracy, though I envision a measured and theocratic Caesarism—the prince as a world-shaker for our time, who brings a Christian people to self-consciousness and who, in his rise, restores their will for their good. 'Prince' is a fitting title for a man of dignity and greatness of soul who will lead a people to liberty, virtue, and godliness—to greatness.” 

Alongside this call for a strong man figure to lead has often come a willingness to embrace old interwar European right style politics, including endorsing Francisco Franco of Spain as a model and suggesting that it may be necessary to constrain the freedoms of some ethnic groups in order to secure civic peace. 

These are the options I do not want us to pursue. So now, with that ground cleared, I hope to do two things: First, to articulate one core theme that runs through much of the Reformed tradition, dating back to its earliest sources, and then second to articulate how this theme might function within a renewed American democracy. 

First, I want to draw your attention to the work of Martin Bucer, a 16th century reformer from the south German city of Strasbourg. Bucer is a now sadly neglected figure in the early Reformation so it is likely you have not heard of him. 

A brief history, then, to start: Bucer was a Dominican monk living in Heidelberg in the late 1510s when a renegade Augustinian monk from Wittenberg came to the city to hold a public disputation with one of Bucer’s fellow Dominicans, John Eck. Bucer attended that disputation and came away with a somewhat surprising conclusion: Luther was right. This was the debate when Eck told Luther “look, everything you’re saying about the authority of the church and its relationship to Scripture is there in Jan Hus,” and Luther shocked everyone by saying, “Yes, Hus was right.” As he rapidly became convinced of the necessity of drastic church reform, Bucer also became disenchanted with the Dominican order and secured a release from his vows only weeks before the pope stopped granting any such releases. Indeed, a letter from Bucer’s superior advising against Bucer’s release was in route to the pope only just behind Bucer’s own request to be released. In a different technological moment when information moved more quickly, Bucer might have been denied his release, given a trial, and made to recant or face coercive punishment. As it was, he was released from his vows and left the order. Not long after that, he met a runaway nun named Elisabeth Silberheisen and they were soon married. 

Now, for context: They married in the early 1520s. Martin Luther married a runaway nun as well of course, the more famous Katharine von Bora, in the late 1520s. It was an act seen as an impious blasphemy by the church, but also somewhat less shocking by then because it was so common and also much less dangerous for Luther because of the protection of Frederick the Wise, his local ruler. Bucer made this step far earlier and without the protection of a lord. And it made him positively radioactive anywhere he might go in the Holy Roman Empire. 

Anywhere, that is, except the city of Strasbourg. Strasbourg was a merchant center of the day as well as a publishing hub and it was largely self-governing, provided they didn’t push their limits too much with the Holy Roman Empire. And so the city had actually adopted quite radical laws of religious toleration. That fact combined with the fact that Bucer’s grandfather was a citizen of the city made it an obvious destination for him. And so he and Elisabeth arrived in 1523, fearing that Strasbourg was their last chance to find a quiet home together. Fortunately for us all, the city received him. I tell this history to make the point that the earliest days of the Reformation advance in the way they do partly because of what were, by the standards of the day, extremely liberal ideas about toleration in one particular German city.

Once he is established in the city, Bucer begins to work and quickly establishes himself as a leader in the city. He had an interesting blend of pietism and a deep concern with Christian love that joined up with his Dominican training as a theologian in very promising ways. He is also uniquely instructive for us here because if Luther’s chief preoccupation was how a sinner can stand justified before God, Bucer’s chief preoccupation was how Christians can live lives of love with one another and within broader society. His first great work is titled simply Instructions in Christian Love, his most well-known mid-career work is On the True Care of Souls and is a pastoral manual of sorts, and his final work, published just before his death, was De Regno Christi, which is a letter to King Edward VI of England instructing him on how to lead a Christian society as a Christian monarch, specifically on how the monarch can use his power to guide people toward godliness. For our purposes, I want to focus on his first work, however. Instructions in Christian Love is an immensely practical work that does precisely what its title suggests. I want to share one passage from it, however, that is especially important for explaining the underlying imagination of Bucer: 

“All other creatures exist, indeed, not for themselves. With all they are, possess, and can do they serve God in doing good to all other creatures according to their nature and order. The sky moves and shines not for itself but for all other creatures. Likewise the earth produces not for itself but for all other created things. Similarly all the plants and all the animals, by what they are, have, can and actually do, are directed toward usefulness and helpfulness to other creatures and especially to man.”

The natural state of things, then, is marked by care and generosity. It is important to understand this because it is a fundamentally different sort of vision for the world from that of later moderns, who tend, following Darwin, to view nature as “red in tooth and claw” and to view the natural world as being governed by the survival of the fittest. Nature is about domination for moderns, but for Bucer nature is actually marked by the ways in which creatures and even something like the Sun and weather patterns are all ordered toward the health of another. In this there is perhaps an echo of St Paul who in his attempts to explain the grace of God would himself appeal to the facts of rain and sunshine and how they support the life of the world. You might even say that for Bucer there is an anti-domination assumption at the foundation of his politics. 

So what sets humanity apart? For Bucer it is that we possess the capacity to understand choose to give of ourselves to others rather than merely doing so without thought: 

Only man is created after the image of God in order that he may understand and also choose spiritual things, and thereby grasp, follow, and fulfill the will of God. He requires us to desire to further the profit and salvation of all. Hence, before all creation, man must so direct his being that in all his doings he seeks not his own, but only the welfare of his neighbors and brethren for the honor of God. Thereby man will also use well and rightly all other creatures and blessedly rule them for their own welfare and proper honor. 

The rest of Bucer’s thought all flows naturally from this foundation. Reality itself is marked not by battles for domination between primordial enemies locked in a world defined by ontological violence. Rather, reality itself, being made by a God of love, is defined by the ways in which one created thing gives of itself to another with all of reality being woven together into a complex web of giving and receiving. (It is perhaps noting how the modern study of complex ecosystems lends some strong support to Bucer’s vision of the created order.) 

I want to suggest briefly here that you might find in this thought of Bucer’s a foreshadowing of later developments in reformed thought. Writing in his Politica, about 70 years after Bucer’s death, the great reformed theorist Johannes Althusius argues that politics is essentially the art of structuring our necessary social relationships so that they are mutually beneficial and delightful. 

If we were to link him up to Bucer, you might even say that politics is a way of making our relationships with one another more natural, provided we understand nature correctly. In a world where many of our peers act is if the world is fundamentally violent and unsafe, human relationships are fundamentally dangerous, and life together comes with inherent limitations to your sacred rights, the core conviction at the heart of the Calvinist tradition is a badly needed idea for our day: We are not made for ourselves, but for others. This is not dangerous because it is how the entire creation is made. And the gift God gives each of us is the ability to choose this path of care and self-giving whereas the rest of creation simply enacts it unthinkingly. This, incidentally, is why Bucer thinks, contra the Anabaptist tradition, that a Christian society necessarily follows from the call to practice Christian love, for what is Christian society but simply the broad acting out of this natural call to self-giving that God gives to all people?  

Now, you likely are wondering how some of this maps onto our context today. We do not have Christian monarchs presiding over Christian societies seeking out the advice of theologians as to how they would execute their office. Rather, we have a world drenched in difference to a degree that even a son of Strasbourg could never have imagined. So what then? In closing I want to turn to the vision of liberal democracy put forward by the Princeton religion scholar Jeffrey Stout, who is himself both a leftist and an atheist, but has deep regard for the place of religion in democratic life. Writing in his book Democracy and Tradition Stout protests against the anti-interventionist vision of post-war liberalism, arguing that it defined the terms of public debate in ways inherently alienating to religious believers and, therefore, corrosive of public trust between people of faith and secular people.  

In particular, Stout takes aim at the assumption that valid public arguments are only those arguments built on presuppositions shared by everyone in a society. Indeed, he presses the point harder by noting that such a rule for publicly admissible speech regarding public life would actually render both Lincoln’s second inaugural and Martin Luther King Jr.’s many orations as invalid, since both made arguments about the shaping of public life on specifically theistic and even specifically Christian grounds. A definition of democratic speech that excludes both Lincoln and King is, Stout argues, not a definition we should want any part of. What’s more, defining the ‘rules’ of public life in such a way that religious believers are not allowed to bring all of themselves into public life will, he warns, lead to many religious believers abandoning liberal democracy altogether. If the rulebook is defined in a way that excludes them, he suggests, they will listen and soon begin opting out themselves. It is in this sense that I think Stout’s 2004 book actually predicts the coming of both Integralism and Christian nationalism over a decade before either movement had the least bit of traction or broad recognition. 

What is the alternative for Stout, then?  

There are two particular strands to his argument I want to highlight. 

First, we will consider his theory of secularization, which is quite different from how “the secular” is usually discussed. For Stout, the chief thing that has changed between the time of Bucer or even Althusius and now with regards to religion in public life is not chiefly about the popularity of religious belief or the establishment of “secular” nations. It is, rather, the way that religious belief operates in public debate. Secularism, for Stout, has almost nothing to do with the percentage of people in a society who identify as “nones.” Rather, it has to do with what makes for effective, persuasive public speech. So he begins his treatment of ‘the secular’ in a seemingly unlikely place: 17th century England.

But even there, Stout argues, you see his version of secularism emerge for a very simple reason: As the Bible became more accessible to the masses, as more people began to read, and as opportunities for liberal forms of self-government emerged, it quickly became apparent that even if everyone agreed that the Bible was the chief authority in their lives, they did not all agree about what the Bible taught about, say, economics or the role of government. For this simple reason it became expedient to find other forms of public argument and speech simply because one wanted to be actually effective and actually persuasive. It’s perfectly fine to express religious ideas in public, according to Stout, but it is often not terribly effective in a society shaped by modern communications technology and educational norms and practices. So “the secular” emerges, for Stout, within ubiquitously Christian 17th century Britain simply as a means for people to speak persuasively to people who shared their commitment to the Bible but not necessarily their beliefs about what the Bible taught regarding public life. 

Second, we will consider his approach to liberal rights. One of Stout’s concerns is with what one defines as the “rules” for how public speech works. In the post-war era, the rulebook as it were says you can’t really bring religion into public life at all because the only arguments we allow in the public square are arguments that proceed from presuppositions we all share. Since not everyone is religious, no religion allowed. Stout warned in 2004 that this would lead to a backlash as religious people give up on democracy by being convinced that the rules of democracy are stacked against them. 

We are about to reap the social consequences of a traditionalist backlash against contractarian liberalism. The more thoroughly Rawlsian our law schools and ethic centers become, the more radically Hauerwasian the theological schools become…. One message being preached nowadays in many of the institutions where future preachers are being trained is that liberal democracy is essentially hypocritical when it purports to value free religious expression. Liberalism, according to Hauerwas, is a secularist ideology that masks a discriminatory program for policing what religious people can say in public. The appropriate response, he sometimes implies, is to condemn freedom and the democratic struggle for justice as ‘bad ideas for the church. 

Obviously when Stout wrote these words in 2004, his main concern was the influence of Stanley Hauerwas. But I think if you take the same basic response as that of Hauerwas and transpose it onto something other than a pacifist Anabaptist-influenced Methodist, and instead have it come from traditionalist Catholics or Christian nationalists, the same critique works quite well and to much more dangerous effect. What is needed, Stout says, is an understanding from secular people that they have Christian neighbors, those neighbors have the same rights to freedom of religion and free expression as they do, and therefore to tell them “no, you aren’t allowed to bring that religious doctrine into public life,” is to violate their freedom of expression and their freedom of religion. Indeed, Stout even goes so far as to push back quite a lot against critical theory, which he fears practices a sort of Bulverism against religious believers, further alienating them from our common life together:

This, in the end, is the irony of critical theory as an across-the board approach to modern democratic discourse. Critical theorists begin by embracing the hope that genuinely democratic discourse will flourish among us. They set out to serve this hope by stematically diagnosing the sources of distortion that arise within our discourse as it is. But they end by explaining away, instead of entering into real conversation with, nearly everything that real people think, say, and feel. When (critical theory) employs the notion of “rationality deficit” as it does it addresses those selves as something more like patients than as fellow citizens. 

In short, via his reading from Emerson, Whitman, and Dewey and the pragmatic democratic tradition of American life, Stout effectively proposes a set of rules that can include religious people in public life in far more capacious ways than what one might hear from a Christian libertarian such as David French or a Christian new natural law theorist. The core of Stout’s vision, then, is not anti-intervention (he easily grants that some social interventions are good and desirable), but anti-domination. And within his anti-domination vision of democracy, there is space for a people that looks very much like what America has often looked like down through the ages. 

What are we left with? And how does it relate to Reformational public theology? Simply this: We are left with how America has always actually worked when she has worked her best. One friend of mine remarked to me that he has never felt more patriotic than he has while reading Professor Stout. That is a sentiment I share. I felt grateful that I was able to tour the Capitol only days after finishing a close reading of Stout, for it changed the way I experienced the place. But I also think the kind of gatherings common amongst American Christians today are themselves a vindication of that project. I recently attended a conference held in an Anglican church and jointly sponsored by a Presbyterian ministry and a broadly Christian ministry directed by a Methodist. Multiple speakers at the event were educated at a Catholic university. 

Such a blending of Christian traditions within the bonds of peace and Christian love was largely unimaginable prior to the birth of America. And that brings me to the second thing we are left with, I think:

We children of the Reformation, we heirs of Bucer and Calvin and Althusius and Westminster and Heidelberg and Princeton, we are perhaps uniquely equipped to live as virtuous, self-giving people who call our neighbors to a still better life, for it is native to our tradition to believe that peaceableness and liberality are the ordinary marks of Christian political life. As Calvin once wrote,

“As God bestoweth his benefits upon us, let us beware that we acknowledge it towards him by doing good to our neighbors whom he offers to us, so as we neither exempt ourselves from their want, nor seclude them from our abundance, but gently make them partakers with us, as folk that are linked together in an inseparable bond.”