A Mirror for the Princes of Today

Michael Wear, The Spirit of Our Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2024). 256 pp. $18.99 paperback.  

For much of the classical and medieval period a type of writing called “mirrors for princes,” was an essential form of political philosophy. These texts were metaphorical mirrors which presented the ethical and political ideal that the ruler was supposed to live up to. Princes, in reading them, were meant to see if they measured up to what the text presented. Was their approach to ruling reflected there or were they themselves a distortion of it? What most mattered was the kind of person the ruler was. There are a wide variety of reasons that these mirrors fell out of favor, but there are good reasons to recover them. Reading Michael Wear’s The Spirit of our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life, I was struck that Wear had managed to write a mirror for princes for our time. 

In a democratic republic, government is, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” The work of democratic self-governance makes us all rulers and thus the character of all of us matters. As Wear puts it “we cannot separate out the politics we have… from the kind of people we are.” The medieval monk writing a mirror for a prince held that if a prince’s moral character matched the principles presented in the text, then the political life of the community would be transformed. Wear holds likewise: “if we were a different kind of people, our politics would be different.” Our politics is based in sectarianism, partisan negativity, and showmanship detached from statesmanship. If we want that to change, we’re going to need to change. 

This might sound a bit like the platitude, “be the change you want to see in the world,” but Wear is developing a more comprehensive vision. It is not just that the specific change you might want needs to first be lived out by you (want more recycling, start by recycling). Rather, “the aim of spiritual formation—is not behavior modification. Our principal aim is not what we do but who we become.” What Wear offers is more of a comprehensive matter, which is why he does not offer policy proposals. He offers the spiritual formation of persons, a kind of virtue theory applied to political life.

This is why I think Wear has written a mirror for princes for our times. These were not generally about specific policy proposals, but about character formation. The genre fell out of use, in part, because modern political thought ceased being a moral matter. Wear is trying to return that sense of politics as a matter of morality and character formation. 

This return is no easy matter. A specific challenge to re-moralize our politics is the disappearance of moral knowledge. Quoting Dallas Willard (whom Wear often cites), he writes that “‘What characterizes life in so-called Western societies today’” is the absence of moral knowledge which is the kind of knowledge that can serve “‘as a rational basis for moral decisions, for policy enactments and for rational critique of established patterns of response to moral issues.’” Lacking this form of knowledge means we struggle to engage in the essential political task: a determination of what is good on a communal level. This task is still there but neglected: “the disappearance of moral knowledge has not led to the disappearance of moral questions or the need to make decisions that implicate morality and judgements about what is good and what is not good.” Rather, we lack the habits, knowledge, and discursive practices that make such discussion fruitful, and we ignore the importance of using moral means to advance our vision of life. 

This problem afflicts Christians in a unique way. First, we too often leave our Christianity outside of our political life, in part because our secular society claims we cannot bring faith into the public square. But for Wear “citizens must be able to be themselves in politics, to bring their full selves to it.” A democratic republic cannot require people to bracket off deeply held convictions. For Christians, this is particularly important because Christianity is a whole-of-life endeavor. “For Christians to be Christian, there must not be any area of life, including politics, that we cordon off from God, thinking God to be too pure or too inept to have anything to offer here.” In a democratic republic, people bring their whole selves to public discourse. To require or expect people to leave the central motivating factors in their lives out of those discussions is a profound denial of the practice of citizenship. For Christians to do this denies not only the right practice of citizenship but also the right practices of our faith. 

The bigger problem for Christians is not that secularism tries to keep Christianity out, it is that Christians keep Christ out of their politics. We do this because we do not follow His example in our politics. Any mirror of princes needs examples for the reader to imitate. A truly Christian mirror for princes must have Christ as its central example. We are meant in all things to be Christlike. Christian politics must have the imitatio Christi at its heart. For Wear, what a Christians wants—or should want—“is to be like Jesus.” Being like Jesus is not, and should not be, something that I seek in parts of my life. Being Christlike at home but a jerk at work means that I am failing to be Christlike. Likewise, we cannot leave the imitatio Christi at home when we enter the public square; instead, we should see politics as a place to live out our being like Jesus. 

The How and Whom of a Christian Politics 

A Christian politics is a matter of how and whom: how we comport ourselves and of whom we aim to serve. When someone describes how we act, they should be able to say, ‘like Jesus.” This will sometimes lead to political success (advancing our policy proposals) but if it does not then it is still worth doing. Wear calls for a politics of kindness, gentleness, friendship, and love not because it is guaranteed to be successful, but it is guaranteed to be Christlike. 

He rightly notes that we should not let society call the tune on what’s loving, “our political actions, even those genuinely rooted in love, may not always be received by the public as loving.” Opposing abortion, supporting marriage, welcoming poor migrants are actions of love even if it is not thought to be so by the right, left, or center. And yet, this does not absolve us for the harshness of our rhetoric, the duplicity of our tactics, or the moral compromises we make when we choose certain leaders. “Love is gentle, love is kind” (1 Corinthians 13:4) is not Paul writing a Hallmark card; it is demand that we live, feel, and act in specifically Christlike ways. This definitive teaching wholly and fully applies to our political lives. Alas, we are too rarely living this out. 

If the how of our politics is acting gently and kindly and living out our “apprenticeship to Jesus—by learning from Jesus how to live your life as he would lead your life if he were you”, we should not forget the whom of politics. The question of our political actions is for whom do we perform them? Do we aim to benefit ourselves, our factions, or the rich and powerful?

Our politics too often serves us; it should serve others. We will not act gently or lovingly if we do not realize that we are meant to act on behalf of others or if we see our politics as individualized rather than communalized. As Wear writes, “politics is an area of life explicitly charged with duties of service to others and stewardship—an area of life with significant influence over the well-being of our neighbors, particularly the poor.” The whom of our politics is the whole community in serving our shared common good. More specifically, Christian politics should serve those whom Bartolome de las Casas calls “the smallest and the most forgotten.” In our times, this means the unborn, the migrant, the underpaid worker, the heroin addict. 

This reminds us that our politics should also serve those whom we hate. Carl Schmitt—a political theorist sadly too popular among Christians—wrote that the essential political distinction is between friends and enemies. There is some truth to this but for Christians the essential political task is loving your enemy. This is no easy task but it is the Christian task precisely because Christ taught it in the Sermon on the Mount. It is uniquely political task because politics breeds opposition but it is with the opposition that we must work not out of animosity but love. Wear quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer “‘Because spiritual love does not desire, but rather serves, it loves an enemy as a brother.” Christian politics transcends—should transcend—the friend-enemy distinction because “‘It originates neither in the brother nor in the enemy but in Christ and his Word.’” This transcending is not imaginary (we still know them as enemies) nor is it surrendering. 

This non-surrender that shapes practical realities is exemplified in Martin Luther King. King—who emphasized the necessity of spiritual formation for political life–did not just serve the Black community; he did not even just serve the American community; he served the racist white community. He loved his enemies so much that he challenged them to give up their endless injustice. Few of us will act politically quite like King but we can work for the political good of all, including fellow Americans we do not like or who do like us. When we face our enemies in the political sphere, we should love them by telling them the truth lovingly, working with them where we can, opposing them where we must, while aiming to transform our relationship into friendship. That is the work of politics. 

How are we going to do this anyway?

“Gentleness is viable in our public life. So are joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, self-control, goodness, and love.” When I read Michael Wear’s list of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, I find myself praying ‘Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief.” We should though remember what we are aiming for when we aim to be Christlike and to serve those whom Christ served. In aiming for those things, we aim for heaven and, as CS Lewis held, when we aim for heaven, we might get the earth thrown in. For Wear, “if our vision only extends as far as a better politics, an improved society, a flourishing world, we will be aiming too low.” But this does not mean he doesn’t think we can get a better politics for “it does not take many people acting differently to make a difference in our politics and our political lives.” Civic renewal is possible because spiritual renewal is. Aim for the latter and you might get the former. 

Wear’s proposal for this center on individual practices. Each of us needs to pray more, spend more time in solitude and silence, and listen to different views without constantly consuming news. When we encounter different views, we should make room for them in our lives and communities even as we argue against them. In the face of political sectarianism living out service is “the appropriate counteracting discipline.” We should not use spiritual formation as a bludgeon against our enemies but as a confessional practice considering our own myriad failures. Wear writes “confession can teach us to take sin seriously enough that we wield accusations of sin with humility and care when it comes to the complicated, contingent realm of politics.” Moral politics are not moralizing politics. It aims not for the condemnation of others but for the confession of sin and the shared life of conversion. 

Alas I worry that Wear’s concluding proposals end up too individualized. He is right to highlight the roles of pastors and parents but what other kind of communal endeavors might we undertake? Certainly this would include endeavors like Wear’ Center of Christianity and Public Life. I would contend it also requires refocusing our education around character and citizenship formation. Here I would point to Wake Forest’s Program for Leadership and Character or the Villanova Honors Program with its Shaping Initiatives. Beyond this, structural changes need to be made to our political and media incentive system. Yes, to personal formation, but systematic changes need to be made too. This also means policy changes. A throw-away culture malforms us creating structural problems that stymie our spiritual formation. In this, I anticipate more political failures and weaknesses than successes and strengths. And yet, I am with Wear on this. If we are going to salvage our political life, we are going to need spiritual formation on personal, communal, educational, and political levels. 

Conclusion 

You look into a mirror to see if this is the way you want to look. When we look into the mirror, do we see what we want to see? If the mirror is the one that Michael Wear presents, the answer is mostly no. For Christians, the mirror is fundamentally Christ who as the image of the Father is the image which we images of God must live up to. Resembling Christ is a grace that gives us a task. It is a task that none of us can completely fulfill in this life and one which we do only because of grace. And yet it is our task, and that task is all encompassing. Sin is when I carve out a part of my life as an area where I don’t have to imitate Christ. Wear is right to call us to task for treating politics as a domain outside of the imitatio Christi. His books are a prophetic summons back from a politics that imitates the world to one that aims in all things to be Christlike. We should be looking into the mirror he offers us in part for the merits of his arguments and recommendations but most importantly because it directs us towards Christ. But we cannot just look, we must enact the vision we see there. And that is the task of a Christian politics.