Reading this, I can't help extrapolating where the book is going. This is what it makes me think of.
Christianity needs Christendom. It can't let itself be put into a box, as something that people do on weekends, or something that provides spiritual comfort. Christianity inherently makes larger claims than that, and has a lot more to offer.
The temptation in liberal societies is to cage Christianity, to restrict it to certain limited domains of life, which in turn creates a pervasive and persistent tendency for churches to degenerate into moral therapeutic deism. The tendency is not inexorable, and on the contrary, Christianity has an inherent impetus to assert itself across a wider domain. But that's disruptive. Secular liberalism always wants to put Christianity back into a box of moral therapeutic deism.
Christendom is the name of a more robust, bold, and coherent Christianity that asserts itself in the intellectual, legal, and political domains. That is what mainstream secular liberalism resists, yet also needs. For secular liberalism is too convenient, but unconvincing and ultimately ungrounded. Christendom challenges it in important ways, but also reinforces it in ways that it needs.
Not sure whether that's where you're going with this project, exactly... But it's what my mind started reading between the lines.
This all seems right. To be clear, I don't pretend to have a fully developed solution to these problems. I think it's clear that the Westphalian principle (or Augsburg principle, however you like to think of it) of "cuius regio, eius religio" paved the way to a lot of further problems, and secular liberalism isn't an adequate substitute either for broadly the reasons you state here. It always turns on tradition sooner or later, usually sooner. Caesar doesn't like to share space with God. Only a thoroughly "gelded" Christianity is acceptable to it, and that's just Moral Therapeutic Deism, as you say. Not an acceptable compromise.
Theocracy isn't the Christian way either though. And modern attempts to instantiate it have all gone very badly. Postliberalism has no answers for us. The Christian way, frustrating and vague as this seems, is to go on wrestling with the God-and-Caesar conundrum, trying to find appropriate ways for them to balance each other.
There are some interesting political theorists who have worked those questions. We'll get to that. But, I don't want to promise too much, because I don't think anyone has "solved it," and I think the right starting point for our present moment is, "This problem is never really solved, nor is it up to the intellectuals to decide what happens, and yet this probably is a moment in which some honest theorizing may be of some use."
Good point with how the God-and-Caesar conundrum is ultimately unsettleable. Church and state relations have had several phases of tense normalcy that seemed stable to people who didn't look closely. But there will always be a certain messiness and arbitrariness, a dependency on habits of mind that are being eroded, adverse trends, accidents of personality, odd compromises... And over time, it erodes and breaks down. Sometimes efforts to systematize the equilibrium destabilize it.
It's interesting how the resurgence of democracy in the 1980s and 1990s was spearheaded by Catholic countries and to some extent by the Church itself. One way to put it is that the Catholic Church was the best friend of liberalism globally, yet it was also an implacable foe of "liberalism" in another sense, domestically. The Church squishy and compromising on many issues, and seems to shift coalitions, partly from opportunism, partly from fashion, while being internally heterogeneous, and often apparently inept... And yet, it has its principles, and is truer to them in the long run than the secular parties are.
Of course, this theme is dear to my heart at the moment because of the immigration issue. But that's another story. :)
Good point with how the God-and-Caesar conundrum is ultimately unsettleable. Church and state relations have had several phases of tense normalcy that seemed stable to people who didn't look closely. But there will always be a certain messiness and arbitrariness, a dependency on habits of mind that are being eroded, adverse trends, accidents of personality, odd compromises... And over time, it erodes and breaks down. Sometimes efforts to systematize the equilibrium destabilize it.
It's interesting how the resurgence of democracy in the 1980s and 1990s was spearheaded by Catholic countries and to some extent by the Church itself. One way to put it is that the Catholic Church was the best friend of liberalism globally, yet it was also an implacable foe of "liberalism" in another sense, domestically. The Church squishy and compromising on many issues, and seems to shift coalitions, partly from opportunism, partly from fashion, while being internally heterogeneous, and often apparently inept... And yet, it has its principles, and is truer to them in the long run than the secular parties are.
Of course, this theme is dear to my heart at the moment because of the immigration issue. But that's another story. :)
Reading this, I can't help extrapolating where the book is going. This is what it makes me think of.
Christianity needs Christendom. It can't let itself be put into a box, as something that people do on weekends, or something that provides spiritual comfort. Christianity inherently makes larger claims than that, and has a lot more to offer.
The temptation in liberal societies is to cage Christianity, to restrict it to certain limited domains of life, which in turn creates a pervasive and persistent tendency for churches to degenerate into moral therapeutic deism. The tendency is not inexorable, and on the contrary, Christianity has an inherent impetus to assert itself across a wider domain. But that's disruptive. Secular liberalism always wants to put Christianity back into a box of moral therapeutic deism.
Christendom is the name of a more robust, bold, and coherent Christianity that asserts itself in the intellectual, legal, and political domains. That is what mainstream secular liberalism resists, yet also needs. For secular liberalism is too convenient, but unconvincing and ultimately ungrounded. Christendom challenges it in important ways, but also reinforces it in ways that it needs.
Not sure whether that's where you're going with this project, exactly... But it's what my mind started reading between the lines.
This all seems right. To be clear, I don't pretend to have a fully developed solution to these problems. I think it's clear that the Westphalian principle (or Augsburg principle, however you like to think of it) of "cuius regio, eius religio" paved the way to a lot of further problems, and secular liberalism isn't an adequate substitute either for broadly the reasons you state here. It always turns on tradition sooner or later, usually sooner. Caesar doesn't like to share space with God. Only a thoroughly "gelded" Christianity is acceptable to it, and that's just Moral Therapeutic Deism, as you say. Not an acceptable compromise.
Theocracy isn't the Christian way either though. And modern attempts to instantiate it have all gone very badly. Postliberalism has no answers for us. The Christian way, frustrating and vague as this seems, is to go on wrestling with the God-and-Caesar conundrum, trying to find appropriate ways for them to balance each other.
There are some interesting political theorists who have worked those questions. We'll get to that. But, I don't want to promise too much, because I don't think anyone has "solved it," and I think the right starting point for our present moment is, "This problem is never really solved, nor is it up to the intellectuals to decide what happens, and yet this probably is a moment in which some honest theorizing may be of some use."
Good point with how the God-and-Caesar conundrum is ultimately unsettleable. Church and state relations have had several phases of tense normalcy that seemed stable to people who didn't look closely. But there will always be a certain messiness and arbitrariness, a dependency on habits of mind that are being eroded, adverse trends, accidents of personality, odd compromises... And over time, it erodes and breaks down. Sometimes efforts to systematize the equilibrium destabilize it.
It's interesting how the resurgence of democracy in the 1980s and 1990s was spearheaded by Catholic countries and to some extent by the Church itself. One way to put it is that the Catholic Church was the best friend of liberalism globally, yet it was also an implacable foe of "liberalism" in another sense, domestically. The Church squishy and compromising on many issues, and seems to shift coalitions, partly from opportunism, partly from fashion, while being internally heterogeneous, and often apparently inept... And yet, it has its principles, and is truer to them in the long run than the secular parties are.
Of course, this theme is dear to my heart at the moment because of the immigration issue. But that's another story. :)
Good point with how the God-and-Caesar conundrum is ultimately unsettleable. Church and state relations have had several phases of tense normalcy that seemed stable to people who didn't look closely. But there will always be a certain messiness and arbitrariness, a dependency on habits of mind that are being eroded, adverse trends, accidents of personality, odd compromises... And over time, it erodes and breaks down. Sometimes efforts to systematize the equilibrium destabilize it.
It's interesting how the resurgence of democracy in the 1980s and 1990s was spearheaded by Catholic countries and to some extent by the Church itself. One way to put it is that the Catholic Church was the best friend of liberalism globally, yet it was also an implacable foe of "liberalism" in another sense, domestically. The Church squishy and compromising on many issues, and seems to shift coalitions, partly from opportunism, partly from fashion, while being internally heterogeneous, and often apparently inept... And yet, it has its principles, and is truer to them in the long run than the secular parties are.
Of course, this theme is dear to my heart at the moment because of the immigration issue. But that's another story. :)