In my initial 6-week plan for Christendom Reborn, this week was scheduled for politics. I was planning to talk about “God and Caesar,” my Second Key of Christian dynamism. I was a bit distressed therefore when I noticed that the week began on Memorial Day. Memorial Day is for solidarity among Americans, appreciating our country and those who died for it. It didn’t seem fitting to open a particularly contentious topic on that day.
So I adjusted, and instead posted a short reflection on President James Garfield’s Memorial Day address, delivered at Arlington Cemetery in 1868. It’s a moving speech, which does touch on some of the themes for the week, but in ways appropriate to the occasion. “The voices of these dead will forever fill the land like holy benedictions.” A lovely sentiment, which Garfield no doubt felt keenly, as a former Union officer and fervent believer in the anti-slavery cause.
Tuesday I moved into the substance of the week with an essay on “Why I Am Not a Postliberal.” I wrote this essay after lengthy reflection on how to start talking about politics without constantly shadow-boxing postliberals. I’m aware that I look like a postliberal in some important ways. There are reasons for that, and yet, I very self-consciously chose not to align myself with that camp, and there are reasons for that too. It seemed important to clarify those lines. After musing for some time on how to approach this, it finally occurred to me that this is the beauty of a personal Substack: There’s no need to angle around other people’s editorial lines. You can just sit down and explain yourself. Which I did. I explain in this essay how I became the last lonely soul on the right to come around to a kind of Buckleyite fusionism (just after the mainstream moved on from it).
After that I needed a bit of a mental recharge, but Wednesday I did post a recent essay from Law & Liberty on “The Young Oikophobes,” a review of Antonia Senior’s book on the Cambridge 5. I read this as a harrowing example of what can happen when young people grow up hating their own country. Patriotism is undoubtedly a very complex love, but there are actually reasons why we should love our own land and people (as much as circumstance allows), and teach our children the same.
Thursday I posted my second major essay of the week, “A Template for a True Christian Politics.” This title is… a little tongue in cheek. I’ll leave it at that for now.
To finish the week, an old essay from National Review on “Confessions of a ‘Christian Nationalist’,” looking now to the left, and the secular liberals’ blind spots in the God-Caesar terrain.
Recapping the Conversation
Dan Hugger added an interesting note this week by asking about left postliberalism, a topic I’ve never gotten around to exploring in depth. He did though, and suggests that it offers “interesting historical and theological narrative that was strongly critical of state power but also took the more humanistic elements of Marx seriously.”
Blake expressed some sympathy with my “post-Christian template” (or rejection of the same) but suggested that I may not have taken seriously enough the postliberal argument that “the ideology of liberalism (at least in its modern, postwar form) is crumbling.”
All I would say to that for right now is that I’m all in favor of learning from the mistakes of the postwar era, but I also want us to learn from their insights and successes. It seems to me that the postliberals have locked themselves, to an unfortunate degree, into a “hermeneutic of rupture,” a hard, rejectionist stance towards the 20th century conservative tradition that makes reasoned discourse rather difficult. But it’s also true that liberal ideology (including in its modern, postwar form) includes some real errors. By all means, let’s correct those.
Nathan Smith raised some interesting questions about whether Jesus commanded Christians to give Caesar loyalty or just obedience. I’m still reflecting on that one, but my favorite Nathan Smith comment from the week was in response to my “Young Oikophobes” column:
Just kind of underscores the egregious contradictions within post-liberalism. They want to be for tradition, but actual traditions favor liberalism, so they tie themselves in crazy knots. They want to be for community, but the community people actually believe in and feel part of is rooted in natural rights and freedom and constitutionalism... So the post-liberals have to sacrifice actual community to some sort of imagined community projected from their ideology, and usually very clumsily imagined, too.
Oikophobes that are so mad about Americans not being neighborly enough, that they have to move to Europe to get away from it.
Indeed.
As a reminder, I have set up this Substack so that subscribers have the option to receive only this weekly digest, not the mid-week posts. Feel free to do that if the volume of email gets overwhelming! And come back next week for the Third Key of Christian dynamism: Christian personalism.
Or, we could just call it “Love Week.”
Final Quote
The American premise is that the state is not the whole of society, still less the whole of human life. The state is only a part of society... Therefore the state is a limited order of action. The Church, on the other hand, exists in the totality of human life. She is not a part of the state; she is entirely distinct from it, and she is free.
John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths