Three Theories of How to Repair Policy Making and Government

Two recent events, seemingly disconnected, provide a cautionary tale for Christians on the dangerous intersection of confessional identity and political authority. 

The second Trump administration is currently trying to reconstitute or cripple federal bureaucracies not aligned with the White House’s vision. Because the vast majority of federal employees vote Democrat and are core Democratic constituencies, this means that Trump, via DOGE, is working to dramatically shrink the federal workforce. While the merits of this reorganization and the cuts in discretionary federal spending it accompanies are much debated, a simple heuristic is that Trump (and Elon Musk) believe the federal bureaucracy aggressively waged lawfare against them, and so now they are simply returning the favor. Reaping and sowing, temporal U.S. politics edition.

Setting aside the substance of this policy direction, one of the more interesting things this episode reveals is the dearth of qualified conservative bureaucrats-in-waiting. Ross Douthat pressed this point in a recent conversation with Chris Rufo, the apparent architect of the Department of Education’s (attempted) dismantling.

Asking why the Trump strategy ought to be the destruction of the DOE rather than staffing it with right-wing, anti-woke, classical-education-minded reformers, Douthat asks, “If you can’t find enough right-leaning or centrist people to staff a stripped-down and slimmer Department of Education to affect American education in the way you want, how are you ever going to find enough personnel to do it at the state level?” Rufo’s response provided refreshing clarity: “I think the other problem that you’re identifying is one that I take seriously and the unfortunate answer is, no. Conservatives cannot fully staff the Department of Education. Conservatives cannot fully compete for education grants, or university-level research programs. No, conservatives can’t do any of those things.” 

In other words, the Trump administration’s approach to DOE or any other number of left-leaning (if not left-captured) organs of the federal government is likely going to reprise the conservative playbook on this sort of thing: first decry, then delegitimize and destroy. Just like attempts to remove graphic LGBTQ children’s books or stop Drag Queen Story Hour in Texas, the right wing response is to eliminate the ostensibly neutral forum or institution that has been used for progressive political purposes rather than seeking to recapture or reform it.

Call it the Alfred Option: burn the commons down to prevent their abuse or capture. This is a strategy built out of a fundamental inability of conservative groups to sustainably and effectively educate, employ, and embrace large numbers of experts who could, a la Douthat, “happily partner with a right-of-center administration that presented itself as a defender of educational standards” in the DOE or serve as a Republican “counterelite” more broadly. Of course, Trump has exacerbated this problem by alienating potential allies, most strikingly through his directive for the Department of Justice to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in a blatantly political quid pro quo, which led to the stirring resignation of rising conservative legal star Danielle Sassoon.

And this is where centers of Christian education enter the picture. Amid signs that the “destroy and delegitimize” strategy may be hitting its limits, as Aaron Renn observes, many institutions of classical and faith-based higher education are overtly marketing themselves as training schools for the next generation of (tacitly conservative) American leaders. While there are few cliches more hackneyed than the educator promising to cultivate future leaders, the rising movement of homeschooling/classical education seems dedicated to doing just that—supplying a fertile harvest of conservative, Christian leaders for societal leadership in the coming decades (disclaimers notwithstanding). 

One name for this approach could be the Esther Option: maintaining piety and godliness while preparing, sometimes boldly, to be used by God to intervene in political deliberation. Wisely recognizing that Christians live in exile and must accept a degree of vulnerability that comes with being minorities in a secularizing society, Mike Cosper argues that this approach provides a method to resist “pressures to conform our doctrine to the new moral norms” and “stay in our cities, in our world, in public view, faithfully present.” For many DC-area Christians this posture is less a theoretical paradigm and more a lived practice, an iterative rebuttal to the Alfred Option.

The proliferation of classical centers of education at flagship state universities and the flourishing of Christian university programming in DC each testify, as different points of evidence, to the vitality of the Esther Option approach to placing Christians in strategic positions of leadership and access to help guide, sometimes invisibly, public policy in a more Christlike (or at least less anti-Christian) direction. While not uniformly Christian or necessarily GOP-leaning, the kind of education these institutions and programs offer is oriented toward supplying the kind of conservative expertise at scale that Rufo identifies as a constraint in any right-wing attempt to reform federal departments.

However, the risks of this approach are apparent as well. For one, it can be difficult to know when to stop participating in systems of governance when those systems have gone too far, when to speak up and risk professional ostracism (or worse), and when statecraft veers so far into soulcraft that it amounts to assembling idols at scale. And when a regime becomes so unjust that its very nature is oppressively totalitarian, what might start out as a godly intention to witness in positions of influence or to help steer the political process in a more Christ-honoring direction can start to look uncomfortably like collaboration with evil.

For an example of this dynamic, look no further than the other event unfolding now on the other side of the globe in Syria. As a refresher, the five-decade dictatorship of the Assad family suddenly ended in December at the hands of a shocking military blitzkrieg led by Ahmed al Sharaa, the commander of the largest rebel group (Tahrir al Sham). In the aftermath of regime’s downfall, the long-privileged Alawite minority from which the Assad clan originated and upon which it relied to staff its extensive system of repression, torture, and execution has found itself in a desperate situation.

The Alawites, who are Shia and make up about 10 percent of the population, now must navigate a stark reversal of Syria’s sectarian order that had long disenfranchised the roughly 74 percent of citizens who are Sunni. And so, once the backbone of the Assad regime, the Alawites face not only political marginalization but also the looming specter of retribution, as Sharaa’s government has set out to dismantle Alawite networks of influence and disarm their communities even as it officially tries to slow down the jihadi-inspired violent reprisals taking place. The Economist reports that a nascent insurgency has begun in Alawite territories on the Mediterranean coast, as the Alawites face a clear reckoning: a future teetering on the edges of exile, assimilation, or possible extermination at the hands of the rebels their leader brutally suppressed. One prays that the murders do not presage a wide-scale reopening of the civil war. 

Obviously, no Christian in the United States today is in a position that fully resembles the Alawites over the past decade. Yet their model of confessional political engagement—support the rule of their ethnoreligious community’s leader at any price—provides a harsh portrayal of the costs that come with we might call the “Alawite Option.” I believe American Christians would do well to remember this example as they (hopefully) recognize the limits of political advocacy, especially given the perpetual temptations to displace discomfort by pinning hopes on a “Christian Prince” to solve all problems once and forever. 

The point of this taxonomy is less prescriptive than descriptive. We are all, by virtue of our occupation, location, denomination, or associations predisposed to embrace one of these orientations or perhaps one outside the “options” described. Yet it is worthwhile to note the unique temptations and blind spots that each one carries.

To be clear, the Alfred Option—destroying captured or hostile institutions to prevent misuse—is sometimes the right call. It is my hope, alongside Brad Littlejohn, that certain sectors of the internet will soon be effectively taken offline. There is an argument that this is the right call with the Department of Education as well, as weaker federal accreditation agencies could theoretically open up space for much-needed innovation in American higher education, including the creation of collegiate curriculum more amenable to the holistic formation of students and faculty in Christ. There are thousands of colleges and universities in the country, so the freedom for greater innovation and diversity in education may prove a long-term blessing if its promise can be realized.

Likewise, the Esther Option—seeking to maintain faith in an oppositional environment while strategically influencing policy from within—aligns with the educational mission of some Christian and classical institutions, which seek to address the shortfall of grounded leaders who are qualified to engage with bureaucratic governance. It also better reflects the lived reality for many Christians who presently inhabit positions of public influence in DC and elsewhere. However, this approach carries moral risks, such as knowing when participation becomes complicity in injustice or having one’s witness endlessly rationalized away in the service of a greater, perpetually displaced good in the future.

The Alawite Option stands as cautionary example from present-day Syria that illustrates how unwavering political loyalty to an ethnoreligious leader can ultimately lead to tragic downfall. To be fair, not all Alawites participated in the Assad regime’s horrors. Their treatment of the Sunni majority could be rationalized as a predictable response to their experience of centuries of persecution under the Ottomans. All the same, the reckoning they now face stands as a warning against uncritical political alliances and a lesson for American Christians on the limits of political advocacy and governance. I’m sure many of us, if we were given the chance to secure 50-odd years of rule by a coreligionist, would jump at the chance. The Alawites’ experience is a reminder that our God deals not in such probabilities. As the words of Ecclesiastes 9:11 remind us, “The race is not the to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.”

That’s a good thing to remember, I think, right about now.