Friendship in the Good: A Retrospective of Sorts

And Jesus stood and he taught them, saying, "But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

But then his disciple Simon, who was called the Zealot, rose and spoke, saying, "But Lord, the greatest evil facing the Jewish people is their oppression at the hand of a tyrannical, idolatrous, licentious, pagan Greco-Roman culture. This regime threatens our very existence as a people. We must defeat them and destroy them. If we fail in this, nothing else will matter. All else fades in comparison. Jewish civilization hangs in the balance! Lord, is this really the time to talk about how the Pharisees are too strict about the Sabbath, are exclusionary, or are at times hypocritical? I admit their behavior is not always ideal. But must you criticize them so publicly? You say 'love your enemies.' Do you know what time it is? In teaching these things you are betraying and jeopardizing your heritage.

I think it (mostly) began in the spring of 2015. Memories Pizza in Indiana, the parallel religious liberties fight in Arkansas, then the Obergefell case where Supreme Court justices asked the Obama administration's lawyer if religious institutions could plausibly be targeted by anti-discrimination suits if our nation redefined marriage. The answer the Obama administration's Solicitor General offered: "It's going to be an issue." And it was.

Happily, in the days since the religious liberty fight has largely gone as orthodox Christians should wish it to go. It would have been better if Obergefell hadn't happened, but given that it did I think the religious liberty outcomes so far have been very good. Even so, the process that began in that summer has continued. Many Christians, and, yes, these have mostly been white Christians who might have been less shocked if they had been more conversant with American church history, found themselves (with reason) worrying about the status of their religious beliefs, practices, and institutions in a post-Obergefell America. It felt like a new problem to many, I think—and in many ways that was true.

Amidst that time, many folks were searching for a social critique that felt sufficient to the task before us. It was within this context that the post-liberalism debate caught fire in conservative and Christian media. It wasn't really a new debate—the mainline theological academy had actually been arguing about "liberalism" since the 1980s. But the post-Obergefell context forced the debate onto evangelicals and conservative Catholics in a new way. And that curiosity about illiberal politics ran all the way up to and including an essay in First Things defending the Catholic church's actions of abducting a Jewish child from his home to be raised by the Pope after it was learned that he had undergone an emergency baptism as a baby by his Catholic nurse when it appeared he was near death. This was also, of course, the context in which Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option became such a topic of conversation, in which Patrick Deneen's broadsides against "liberalism" found a mass audience, and in which my own work and the related work of some of my friends began to find an audience. We published on all of these things, commenting on the Mortara essay and engaging in lengthy interactions with Dreher and Deneen.

For my part, I was deeply sympathetic to the entire project. I was deep in 20th century traditionalist Christian anglophone writers, starting with Lewis and Tolkien, who I'd been reading virtually my entire life from my teen years onward. They then introduced me to Chesterton, Dawson, and Eliot. I became especially fond of Dawson and also found Eliot's essays, particular The Idea of a Christian Society, enormously compelling. So when I read Dreher's radical critique of our moment I saw nothing that I hadn't already encountered in them.

What I was after in my writing at that time, particularly in my close readings of Tolkien, Wendell Berry, and Eliot, was not simply "a social doctrine rich enough to confront our moment," but actually, as I said already, "the truth." I had spent enough time at L'Abri and enough time in great Christian authors to recognize that the problems before us were severe and the answers put forward by mainstream American evangelicalism were too often superficial, faddish, and infantilizing. I was trying to discern what was true, what God's revelation of himself would teach us about our moment, our responsibilities in it, and the shape of Christian fidelity.

As I did that reading and thinking, I found myself drawn into a group of friends who were preoccupied with many of the same questions and who saw many of the same things I myself did. Yet that friendship was not a friendship of political utility. We were not drawn together because we were attempting to "take America back for God" in the older vernacular or shift the Overton Window or anything else like that. What drew us together was more basic—we desired to know and speak what is true. These relationships became friendships in the good, friendships oriented to the truth. Vitally, this meant that within those bonds we were not chiefly looking for validation, safety, or even, necessarily, that much discussed idea of "community."

We were seeking the good together—and that meant that if one friend saw another entering into error, that friend had a certain obligation to speak up. We did not regard such action as a betrayal, but as a gesture of love. If I cared about truth and my friend cared about truth and my friend saw me straying into error, that friend, precisely because of our shared pursuit of truth, was obliged to warn me. That is friendship toward truth, or at least it is one part of such friendships in the good. Additionally, we recognized that the possibility of conflict was inherent in the idea of "friendship in the good." for if someone became set against the good and was not responsive to loving, fraternal correction then at the very least there was the possibility that they would have to be opposed publicly.

In hindsight I think something else was happening in this movement, something which has curdled over time. Precisely because the moment was so rife with the superficial, faddish, and infantilizing, there was an equally strong desire that often operated in parallel to that longing after truth—a longing for belonging or solidarity. It was important to find the truth, obviously. But also Christian faithfulness was hard and exhausting and complicated and so it was also important to find people who were safe, people you could trust to be in your corner, to have your back.

While I'm going to say some very severe things against this tendency, it's important to understand it sympathetically:

Imagine that you're a strongly missional, pro-city pastor in a deep blue county just trying to love your place and faithfully preach the Bible. Then your church gets vandalized repeatedly.

You're serving in a campus ministry where your fellow campus missionaries are suddenly wobbly on LGBT+ questions and even wondering if evangelism itself—ostensibly the entire purpose of their position in the ministry—is a form of white supremacy.

You're a pastor trying to explain biblical teachings around marriage and find your church being slandered in the most grotesque and vile ways on local social media.

Imagine you're in one of those situations. You're now feeling disoriented, maybe scared or hurt as well. So you seek help from your denominational or ministry leaders. But when you come to them with these challenges, you get pablum, indecisiveness, and mixed messaging. Your day to day experience feels like a constant exercise in the phrase "this isn't working," and yet no one in leadership seems to be listening, no one even seems interested in understanding what you're encountering and why you are beginning to rethink some of your basic assumptions about ministry. When you are in such a situation, it is entirely predictable that you would develop a deep desire for a safe community of shared belonging where you can speak more freely and know that people will listen and support you rather than being triggered by your doubts or alarmed by some of your emerging thoughts. (The desire here is, somewhat ironically, not unlike the desire one can find in pockets of the hard left who desire "safe spaces." This is perhaps illustrative of the problem.)

This longing that I am trying, sympathetically, to depict is not hard to understand, but it is also dangerous. Here is what happens: Once you find your community of belonging, you feel a palpable sense of relief you've not had in ages. You have people you can text when something hard comes up at church. You have people you actually trust to be serious and real who you can come to with challenging issues in your work. Crucially, I think you also have people you can joke with, people who won't be offended by a bit of dark humor in response to a hard situation. This is all deeply human; it is human beings doing for one another what we ought to do for one another. And yet this good, vital as it is, is not an ultimate good, but a penultimate one whose claims are finally answerable to higher goods.

What are those higher goods? This comes to mind:

And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

This teaching is like that one:

Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.

Obviously the point Jesus is making is not that gaining the world is inherently bad or that having two hands is inherently dangerous. The world is good. Our bodies are good. They are just not our highest good. Jesus's point is that there is no higher good than knowing God, and that we can love good things so much that they cause us to lose sight of that highest good. It is better to go into Heaven poor and blind than to die rich, acclaimed, and powerful and find yourself separated from God.

This, then, is the problem with the longing for solidarity: It has a way of becoming detached from the longing for truth. This is how Carl Schmitt gets followers on the right—you find ordinary Christian leaders, often bearing the wounds of past times in ministry (many of whom could be accurately described as "Kellerites with a grudge"), who came to desire solidarity so deeply that the good was lost. "Friendship in the good," became "friendship in the good" became "friendship."

The outcome is that what has remained is merely a politically contrived faux-solidarity built only on winning and losing, without any inherent reference to the good. Which is to say we are left only with what Lewis called "the hideous strength"—power and the will to use it.

So here we are: Most on the new Christian right have become convinced that the danger posed by the left is so pronounced and extreme that any attempt to also monitor one's right flank is, at best, a self-sabotaging waste of time. At worst, it is a betrayal of the cause and an act that marked one as an enemy, and as a traitor.

The claims of what is good and right have been made alongside the claims of an absolutized group solidarity—and the latter has won out for many. This absolutized solidarity has the effect of shrinking the moral horizons of Christian believers to be no broader than those horizons of the materialist, Marxist left in which the only fields in which we act are the material and the imminent. It tacitly declares the vocation to martyrdom—a licit calling for Christians, though one to be accepted out of necessity rather than pursued—to be inherently invalid. For them martyrdom is not a divine calling given to many saints, including their much loved St Boniface, but rather an act of moral weakness, something which renders one unfit for membership in their new society.

Christians should know better, for our moral horizons are not constrained to the material and temporal, but stretch into eternity. The choices we make today shape us. When we choose to sear our consciences by ignoring what is plainly sin, we are choosing to not only ignore the harm done to others, but also to harm ourselves. If we do not repent, these choices will go on shaping us, transforming us into "a horror and corruption" that we today meet "only in nightmares." Yet for those who remain devoted to the good, toward the pursuit of the good together, for these there is hope, even when all else seems lost.