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THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES, PART 6: THE WAY OF FAITH

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

[In the previous part of this series, Part 5, we tried to come to grips with the dreadful seriousness of the political, cultural, and spiritual choices that stand before us now in the approaching electoral decision between a continuation of the Biden-Harris administrative state, on the one hand, and a brave recovery of the basic principles of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition, upon which our country was founded, on the other. In this part and the next and final part, we shall be looking even more closely at the role of religious faith in the ACCT as this provides the critical foundation in our families, our congregations, and our communities for the kind of deep recovery that is needed if we as a nation are to navigate the embattled road ahead. Again, we turn initially to Metaxas and Bonhoeffer for clues about what went wrong in 1930s Germany.]

The Way of Faith

If it is true, and no exaggeration, that the administrative state under Joe Biden has now become—like the dictatorial Nazi state of Adolf Hitler (or the totalitarian state of the CCP with its plans to defeat the West from within)—the direct enemy of the religious and moral principles of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition, then how is it possible that the churches in America today (like those in 1930s Germany) have allowed this to happen? Why have our churches failed to stand up sooner or push back harder against the enemy who stands at the door? Why have the churches in some cases even become advocates for the state’s corrupt agenda?[i] Both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eric Metaxas have tried to answer these questions in their own contexts. Let us look briefly at their answers as we work together to bring these reflections to a proper conclusion.

Bonhoeffer gave his answer in his remarkable book, The Cost of Discipleship (1937). The problem, says Bonhoeffer, is that the churches in Germany had too often settled for a “gospel” that contained only “cheap grace” instead of following their master, Jesus, in the way of “costly grace.” They settled for a message of forgiveness without the call to discipleship. They had become comfortable with the idea of being forgiven (“justified”) without seeing the need for a full-bodied, whole-of-life response to the God who gave his Son that we might live. Luther himself was deeply committed to “the justification of the sinner in the world,” says Bonhoeffer; but the German churches had allowed this to degenerate into something completely different, “the justification of sin and the world.”[ii] When Luther spoke of grace, says Bonhoeffer, he “always implied that it cost him his own life, the life which was now subjected for the first time to the absolute obedience of Christ.”[iii] Such grace is costly because it “costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”[iv] “Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son; ‘ye were bought at a price,’ and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.”[v] Thus, according to Bonhoeffer, a cheapened idea of “grace” divorced from the call to discipleship allowed the German churches to ignore the cultural, political, and spiritual tragedy that was taking place right in front of them. They were already “saved,” so they did not need to concern themselves with these other “political” matters. 

Like Bonhoeffer in Germany, Eric Metaxas has also worked diligently to decipher what has gone wrong in many American churches today. Why have our churches failed to stand up against the atrocities of the Biden state?[vi] According to Metaxas, we have repeated the errors of the German church by making faith a matter of mental assent to a doctrine of forgiveness that does not include our Lord’s call to the way of costly, whole-hearted discipleship.[vii] This false separation of faith and discipleship is reinforced, moreover, by defining “faith” as though it were opposed to “works” of any kind.[viii] As a result, many of our churches think of their role only in terms of “evangelism,” but even that is defined to exclude the good news of moral effort and recovery in Christ, especially anything that might be construed as “political.”[ix] Of course, Metaxas objects strongly to this conclusion, as he himself cannot conceive in scriptural terms of a truly Christian Church that does not take strong public positions on matters such as abortion, racial harmony, radical gender ideology, the role of parents in our public schools, and the coercive overclaims of the administrative state.[x]

Turning Around and Looking Forward

If we are to recover the religious dimension of our Anglo-American Conservative Tradition in America today, we must somehow correct the missteps of cheap grace and passive faith that Bonhoeffer and Metaxas have identified. To this end, I want to highlight three basic principles from Scripture that can help us move faithfully in this direction. For present purposes, I will not go into these in detail. Rather, I want only to outline them in a way that suggests their relevance to the cultural and spiritual battle at hand, even for readers who are not themselves at present active Christian believers.[xi] The principles do provide, however, a solid biblical footing for avoiding the pitfalls in question. Moreover, they may also help us to discern more clearly the deep resonance that exists between biblical faith and the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition itself, as well as the necessary opposition of both to the dictatorial pretensions of the administrative state.

1. The Full Scope of Salvation. In keeping with the insights of Bonhoeffer and Metaxas, we need to recover a more biblical conception of the full scope of salvation—that is, what it means for God to save us. In Philippians 1:6, for example, the Apostle Paul encourages the struggling Philippians with the following declaration of his own faith. “Of this I am convinced: the one who began a good work in you will thoroughly complete it by the day of King Jesus.” Paul clearly has in mind the same framework for salvation that he portrays in amazing detail in Romans 8:22-30, where he speaks of how the whole creation is waiting in eager expectation for the day of resurrection when the children of God will be set free to lead all creatures in proper praise and stewardship. The full scope of salvation, thus, includes forgiveness of sins, to be sure, but it also reaches to the restoration of the image of God in human life (after the pattern of the Son of God, v. 29) and to the restoration of creation itself. What is more, as in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, this restoration is an ongoing project, for the risen Jesus continues to reign as Lord “until he has put all his enemies under his feet,” and then God the Father will become “all in all” (v. 28). The picture of the full scope of salvation is then rounded out in Revelation 21-22 with the vision of a new heaven and a new earth, where death is no more and God comes down to dwell with his people.

When we understand the scope of salvation in this full and biblical way, there can be no question of a merely private or individual experience of forgiveness as an end in itself. Nor can the sphere of religion be reduced (as the modern liberal state would prefer) to a merely private realm of individual piety that has no effect in the sphere of public life and culture. Our Lord is the Lord of human life and of all creation. His purpose is to put everything in the fallen world back in order (to “save” it) and all areas of life are subject to his Lordship. His forgiveness paves the way for his restoration (Romans 5:6-11). If we in America today are to recover our own tradition as a religious and a moral people, we will need to embrace this great vision for the full scope of salvation, and endeavor faithfully in our families, our congregations, and our communities to work it out with our Lord’s guidance in every sphere of life—including public, political, and cultural life.

Looking ahead to Part 7

In the final part of this series, we shall look at two more features of biblical faith that further embody what it means to embrace the full scope of salvation. These are: 1) the active nature of faith demonstrated by good works, and 2) the synergistic nature of faith as an ongoing journey of discipleship in response to the grace of the living God–Father, Son, and Spirit. How do these dimensions of faith echo and reinforce the principles of the AACT that our founders intentionally built into our Constitutional tradition? That is the final question that I ask you to consider as we conclude this study into the spiritual and political battle of our times.

Endnotes

[i] My own former denomination, The United Methodist Church, for example, has recently split itself apart as those who retain the UMC name have, nevertheless, turned their backs completely on the moral and biblical guidance of their own Wesleyan tradition. At least a quarter of the congregations of the former denomination have now disaffiliated to join other orthodox Methodist branches or to establish independent congregations. If the leaders of the now apostate UMC continue in the direction they have chosen, many more people and congregations will, I believe, eventually join this mass exodus as the unbiblical, anti-Christian, and anti-nature implications of the wayward denomination become more and more obvious.

[ii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: MacMillan, 1937) p. 53.

[iii] Ibid. 

[iv] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: MacMillan, 1937) p. 47.

[v] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: MacMillan, 1937) p. 48.

[vi] Metaxas, Letter, chapters 7-8, pp. 55-73, deal with matters of defining “faith.” 

[vii] Ibid, pp. 68-73.

[viii] Much of the problem in this regard arose from Martin Luther’s own confusion about the Pauline contrast between “faith” and “works” (e.g., Ephesians 2:8-10). Paul had in mind the “works” of Jewish ethnic purity (such as circumcision, kosher, sabbath, etc.) which are not a substitute for the life of faith and good works that he promotes everywhere in his letters (Ephesians 2:10). Luther, however, confused the concept of “works” with the pseudo-Pelagian notion of human effort in general and with the medieval Catholic practices of indulgences. Thus, Luther also had difficulty recognizing the complete agreement between Paul and James on the relation between faith and good works. This confusion still misleads many today, who regard themselves as orthodox or conservative Christians. 

[ix]Metaxas, Letter, pp. 75-85, 95-105. 

[x] Ibid, pp. 84, 99.

[xi] It is interesting to note, in this regard, the recent avowal of atheist Richard Dawkins that, though he is not a Christian believer himself, he recognizes the irreplaceable importance of the Christian faith as a foundation for the moral order of freedom in the West. And that order he does very much affirm and wish to preserve.  

THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES, PART 5: A CRITICAL TIME IN OUR NATION’S HISTORY

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

[In the previous part of this essay, Part 4, we concluded our brief review of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition (ACCT) as it provides ways to recover from the destructive and disintegrative results of the administrative state. We also began to inquire about the relative seriousness of the differences between the policy positions of the Biden administrative state (on matters such as climate alarmism and economic policy, or racial and gender ideology and public education), and the policy positions of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition. Are these differences just a matter of partisan and cultural opinion, or do they strike a deeper, more critical blow at moral and political principles that really and truly are non-negotiable for those on either side? In this part, we seek to answer these questions following the insights of Eric Metaxas and his mentor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.]

A Critical Time in Our Nation’s History

In his small but compelling book, Letter to the American Church, Eric Metaxas helps us face these questions, and begin to answer them. Metaxas’s Letter is a plea to our American churches, but also to American citizens in general, to wake up to the awful and calamitous moment in which we are living. He thinks, and I agree with him, that this moment in our history is ominously similar to the period of the 1930s in Germany, when the German people and their churches closed their eyes and sat quietly by (no doubt in concern for their own comfort, safety, and security) while Hitler and his Nazi party turned their country into a totalitarian state that would eventually decimate other nations and destroy its own soul by its demonic genocide of the Jews. Perhaps one who has not studied this period closely, or looked in our own time beyond the thin virtuous veneer of the Biden state (constantly patched and polished by the corporate media) might doubt this comparison. Isn’t this talk of Germany, Hitler, and America just a lot of hyperbole? Except, perhaps, when Biden applies it to Trump and his supporters?   

If we are to take seriously Metaxas’s comparison between America under the Biden state and Germany under the Hitler regime, we need to revisit some of the “false crises” mentioned earlier in Part 2, only now to see them in sharper detail and to grasp why they cannot be regarded merely as “policy” choices. For example, let us try to form a concrete picture in our minds of the desperate plight of inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, or New York, where no one is safe, not even children, because young black men have been told that they are the victims of systemic racism and therefore have a right to snatch life and property from anyone who gets in the way of their “freedom.” Picture, if you will, the bodies lying in the street as life and possibility drain away? This is happening now in Democrat-led cities across our nation, as rogue prosecutors push their agenda on unsuspecting voters under the guise of legal reform. This is what Kamala Harris herself has promoted on public video during the BLM, defund-the-police riots of 2020. This is what the administrative state produces when “pure reason” and politicized “science” are applied to social problems without the moral guardrails of religion and the family, the Constitution, and the rule of law.

Or, we might look more closely at the devastation caused to thousands of people and small businesses by Biden’s COVID lockdown policies and vaccine mandates. Thousands are still waiting for our government to take responsibility for the terrible harm it has done. Can you see those who are still shaking with neurological tremors caused by adverse reactions to the experimental COVID shots, not to mention those who are already dead? They are invisible to the Biden state. Or, yet again, we might look at the explosion of fentanyl deaths, human trafficking, and sex trafficking caused by the criminally-open Biden-Harris border policies. Neither Biden nor Harris, nor their DHS staff, nor their cooperant media ever speak of these deaths and depravities. And then, looking to the future, God help us, we should try to picture soberly what will happen to our economy if the miscalculations of the Biden-Harris Green-New-Deal policies ever take full effect. The outcome could literally rival the atrocities and degradations of Mao’s infamous “bird famine” as supply chains falter and food supplies stop. Ideological, politicized science is not real science. 

All of these and more could be depicted in graphic and ruinous detail; but my goal is to awaken our consciences and to stimulate courage and conviction that leads to active resistance and change; not to overwhelm with shocking images, however realistic the images are in fact. Nonetheless, in the interest of conscience and conviction, let me give one more example in greater detail, one that may be the most compelling of all for many of us. 

If we need to face with full seriousness the resident evil of the Biden state (just as German citizens had eventually to face the death camps in 1945) then let us picture without turning away the scarred and mutilated bodies of children and minors who have been subjected under Biden’s Public Health Service to the lucrative medical experiments of so-called “gender affirming care.”[i] These are minors and children as young as 11 years old (with younger children in public schools across the nation being indoctrinated as we speak) who have followed the advice of “experts,” teachers and counselors, and some psychologists and doctors. They have taken experimental drugs (puberty blockers) for which no long-term studies of safety or effectiveness are as yet even possible, much less available.[ii] They have submitted to radical experimental surgeries that leave them with ghoulish scars and monstrous appendages that require ongoing medical care and attention, often for the rest of their lives. They face a life with permanent disfigurement, often combined with the loss of any ability to have children of their own. And yet, the promoters of this defacement of human life in the Biden state (and in groups like WPATH, whose junk science provides the so-called “standards of care”) do not want us to see or hear from the growing number of “de-transitioners,” children who have come of age, changed their minds, and are now being left to face all of this damage, much of it irreversible, on their own.[iii]

How much further would radical gender surgery have to go before people of common sense and sensitive conscience, and a measure of good faith, stand up and cry out, “Enough! Cease! Desist! Stop in the name of God and of all that is decent!”? We ourselves may not want to hear these stories. They are hard to imagine, nearly at times imponderable in their devastation. But then, Hitler did not want the German people to know what was going on in the camps under the direction of Joseph Mengele. And the German people did not want to hear or believe what they were forced by Eisenhower to see and smell when the camps were thrown open after the war. Metaxas warns us, in the spirit of his mentor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that if we refuse to face what is happening now, then we, like the German people in the 1930s, are at least tacitly accepting and supporting it.

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. God will not hold us guiltless.”[iv]

And if we do hear and begin to speak out, will we then follow up this outcry with campaigns to elect leaders who represent a genuinely religious and moral people, leaders who will dismantle the authoritarian administrative state, and require again that our country’s laws and its character be subject to a truly representative process? According to Metaxas what we need most is a recovery of genuine faith.

Looking ahead to Part 6

In the next two parts of this study, Parts 6 and 7, we shall look more closely at what went wrong among the German churches and the German people in the 1930s that allowed Hitler and his Nazi Party to come to power without greater opposition. According to both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his biographer, Eric Metaxas, what went wrong had to do with a fundamental misunderstanding of the biblical meaning and practice of “faith” and “discipleship.” As you prepare for the next part, consider the following questions: Does our faith in Jesus and his Spirit prepare us to engage in matters of cultural and political consequence? If so, why and how does our faith in him have this result? And, if not, why not?

Endnotes

[i] The head of Biden’s Public Health Service is, of course, Admiral Rachel Levine, who has been aggressive in promoting radical gender ideology in our public health services and in our public schools, even when this involves hiding the school-based “counseling” process from parents. For up to date tracking of state sponsored rules and mandates for radical gender ideology in public schools across the nation see the online data and research of Parents Defending Education, and consider becoming a supporter of their important work.

[ii] See Dr. Jay Richards, Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War (Salem Books, 2024), and Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Regnery, 2020).

[iii] For firsthand accounts of the suppression of information about de-transitioners by WPATH and other medical groups (who now have a great deal to lose, given the rising number of malpractice cases) see the stories of Chloe Cole and the ongoing research of groups such as Genspect. A recent Genspect webinar compared the current craze for radical gender surgery on minors with the infamous fad for lobotomies that captured the medical profession for a brief time during the 1930s and 40s.

[iv] Eric Metaxas, Letter to the American Church (Salem Books, 2022) p. 51.

THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES, PART 3: THE ANGLO-AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE TRADITION

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

[In the last part, we looked at a number of abuses of power that have characterized the Biden administrative state. We have, perhaps, already begun to suggest how and why the administrative state operates in a way that is inherently antithetical to the principles of our founding, such as separation of powers and checks and balances. In the next two parts we shall look at five of those original principles and try to discern why and how their recovery will necessarily require a large scale reconfiguration of the administrative state itself.]

The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition

I am borrowing the title for this section from Yorum Hazony’s recent and very important book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery. In this book, Hazony explores the history, philosophy, and the ongoing struggle for what he calls the “Anglo-American Conservative Tradition” (AACT). The AACT reaches back, according to Hazony, at least to the sixteenth century in England, to writers such as John Fortesque, John Selden, and Edmund Burke. It was later deployed (along with its clear precedents for our Bill of Rights, our three branches of government, and our checks and balances) as a model for the US Constitution by our founding leaders such as George Washington and John Adams. This is the tradition of political order that Woodrow Wilson disavowed, and that the Biden state with its manifold “crises” has consistently found ways to violate. What would it mean to recover this tradition today? How might such a recovery redefine the issues of our time, over against the chaotic and destructive results of the Biden state? Hazony describes five basic principles that define the AACT in its long historical development. Let us look at each of these in turn and consider just a few examples of the benefits such a recovery might produce.[i] 

1.  Historical Empiricism

2.  Nationalism

3.  Religion

4.  Limited Executive Power

5.  Freedom

1. Historical Empiricism. The AACT is historical and empirical because its conception of political order is grounded in the most basic and concrete relationships of human life—in families, clans, tribes, congregations, and larger groups that overcome conflicts, clarify justice, and ban together to work for common interests and to defend themselves against common enemies. From this empirical foundation (hard won through the ancient and early medieval history of warring clans and petty kings in Britain) arose the English historical tradition of common law (e.g., the Magna Carta) which led eventually to a national system of parliamentary checks and balances, limited monarchy, petition of rights, and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1685. This is the tradition that our American founders (such as Washington, Adams, and Madison) embraced as the archetype for our US Constitution. This is the tradition conserved by the AACT.

Over against this, and consciously opposed by the framers in 1787, was the very different model of the French Revolution based on the rationalistic ideals of natural equality, universal reason, and individual freedom as these were defined by John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau.[ii] These ideals are exalted today in the liberal tradition of the administrative state, including the Biden state, where political order is attributed to the role of reason (“experts”), equity, and individual consent, not to the traditional values and obligations of family, congregation, community, and nation. We see this model at work in the contempt of the Biden state for our national borders, for parental authority, for principles of traditional moral conscience and religious freedom, not to mention the other basic First Amendment rights that his agencies have trampled. The eventual blood bath of the French Revolution, like the riotous breakdown today of our national borders and of our large crime-ridden urban centers, all demonstrate the terrible disconnection that separates the rationalism of the liberal model from the empirical realities of concrete human life and experience. 

To recover the historical and empirical character of the AACT today will involve embracing again the foundations of our national identity in the family, the congregation, the religious and moral tradition, the rule of law, and the separation of powers, all of which have been trampled by the actions of the Biden state. It will also require recovering again the voice of the people in representative government to debate and decide in Congress important social questions of race, gender, and public health policy, rather than cancelling or censoring that voice by an overreaching and imperial executive branch with its attending administrative state, media, and other institutions.   

2. Nationalism. What does it mean to be a nation state in the AACT—that is, to practice the virtue of nationalism? The answer to this question is not at all self-evident today since the concept of nationalism itself is regularly skewered and condemned by the advocates of the Biden state.[iii] According to them, nationalism leads to racism and xenophobia (hatred of strangers or other nations). Moreover, Hitler’s “National” Socialist (NAZI) Party is offered as a prototype for the racism and aggression that nationalism is supposed to produce. But the meaning and practice of nationalism in the AACT runs in direct opposition to all of this. Indeed, for anyone acquainted with the AACT, Hitler could never represent the political order of nationalism, despite his use of a cognate term. Rather, he embodied the imperial order of the German state, the political desire to absorb and dominate other nations (not to live in peaceful coexistence with them).[iv] This was in keeping with the long and aggressive history of the German Empire dating back to Roman times. In this regard, ironically, the Biden administrative state, with its dictatorial style at home and its globalist aspirations abroad, has much more in common with Hitler’s mentality (and with the imperial objectives of cultural Marxism and the CCP today) than with the political order of the independent nation state as envisioned by our founders.[v]  

A recovery of nationalism in America today, on the other hand, will require turning away from the racist and imperial policies of the Biden state. We shall need to recover, for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s emphasis on individual character, merit, and equal opportunity as the foundation for our multi-ethnic national identity while, at the same time, boldly rejecting the racially divisive polices of the Biden administrative state such as DEI, which judge people as collectives and set them against each other as rival tribes and clans. Likewise, we will need to rebuild and restore our national borders while opposing the terrible effects on our nation’s life and character by the unvetted, open-border immigration policies of Joe Biden. Unlike Biden, we should care about the readiness of legal immigrants to speak our language, understand our history, respect our laws, and embrace our values. As a nation in the AACT we will continue to make room for different ethnic groups, clans, and tribes within our borders so long as they are loyal to the basic legal, religious, and moral values that bind us together. Moreover, we respect the same process at work in other nations as they work out the beliefs, values, and laws that embody their own history and traditions. Racial and international cooperation are both strengthened, not weakened, by the political order of the nation state in the AACT. 

3. Religion. When our founders had completed the framing of our Constitution in 1787, they made a point of emphasis to declare that this form of government would require “a religious and a moral people” to make it work.[vi] They had in mind, of course, the Christian religion of the Bible, for that was empirically the religion both of the American colonies and of their English predecessors in the AACT.[vii] They did not, however, try to establish a particular denomination as an official national church. Indeed, they forbade this in the First Amendment of the Constitution itself. This was due in part to the fact that most of the newly formed states already had officially recognized churches. But it was also due to the principle of government “of, by, and for the people.” The founders knew that the formation of strong religious and moral convictions depends above all on the living practice of individuals in families, clans, and congregations. The strength of religious and moral conscience arises not from a government office, nor from a declared statement, but from the living practices of faith, prayer, and a history of shared stories and experiences (working out the meaning of justice, correcting and improving faults, and defending the nation against its enemies) among the people themselves. This is the natural soil of “a religious and a moral people” from which alone can spring the moral reasoning, the informed voting, and the public service of good government.[viii]

To recover the religious dimension of the AACT in America today will require nothing short of a religious and moral re-awakening among the families, clans, tribes, congregations, and communities that make up our nation. This national fabric has been unwound and unwoven since at least the post World War II era by what Hazony calls “liberal democracy,” before which a former “Christian democracy” had still been at work in the nation and its institutions. As Hazony writes, “The Supreme Court’s decisions in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) . . . overturned centuries of common practice by abolishing organized prayer and Bible reading in public schools across the country.”[ix] This trend has now been aggressively expanded by the Biden administrative state with its policies that separate children from the moral and religious guidance of both their parents and their religious heritage. 

The resulting situation in our culture today finds those in power seeking to replace the moral foundations of the AACT with pseudo-scientific claims about gender fluidity, systemic racism, climate alarmism, and Bidenomics, based on the flimsy and unreliable notions of “pure reason” and “natural equality.” And those who resist this ideology stand to be accused of anti-democratic “extremism.” This is precisely the cultural situation described in C. S. Lewis’s prescient 1945 book, The Abolition of Man. Having turned away from the moral and religious foundations of our country (in faith, family, and congregation) our culture and its institutions (including a politicized “science”) now flounders in a moral morass of ideological and biological nonsense that is forced upon us by the coercive power and control of a liberal “elite” in the administrative state.

The solution will require what some may regard as an impossibility at this time in American history: a great repentance and reawakening to our need for God, his guidance, judgement, and deliverance in our lives as families, congregations, communities, and individuals.[x] Even for those who are not religious or who embrace another religious tradition, the moral foundations of this recovery should be recognized and embraced. We shall have to learn again to live as a people of faith and moral conviction if our national experiment in representative democracy is going to recover and thrive. So thought Washington and Adams. And history itself shows us that this kind of awakening can in fact occur.[xi]

Looking ahead to Part 4

In Part 4, we shall continue these brief reflections on the principles of the AACT, focusing on the last two: Limited Executive, and Freedom. As you think about today’s post, and look forward to the next, consider the following additional questions: 1) Why is it that the administrative state seems to run by default toward the dangers of authoritarian power? and 2) How is the concept of “freedom” related to or connected with the principles of moral order?

Endnotes

[i] Yoram Hazony, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery, 2022), pages 336-337. 

[ii] See Hazony’s discussion of John Locke and Edmund Burke in Conservatism: A Rediscovery, pp. 21-29. Among the founders, Thomas Jefferson alone was seduced for a short time by the idealistic claims of the French Revolution. But then he was also absent in France while the others were writing our Constitution, and he returned to America when the failure in France became undeniable. See endnote 23 for further discussion of the “fantasy” status of the Enlightenment principles of “pure reason,” “natural equality,” and “individual freedom.” 

[iii] The repeated attacks by Joe Biden himself on MAGA Republicans as “extremists” who threaten “democracy” are a case in point. With this encouragement from their figurehead, many others have followed suit, such as members of the “squad” who accuse Donald Trump of racism for opposing illegal immigration. And in the wider culture the mantra has been taken up by Hollywood celebrities such as Rob Reiner (known appropriately as “Meathead” on the Archie Bunker TV series) who has been particularly outspoken, though poorly informed, in his attacks on what he calls “Christian Nationalism.”

[iv] See Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (Basic Books, 2018) for a full discussion of the three major distinctions of political order that we see at work and at odds in the world and in our own country today: 1. Tribalism, 2. Imperialism, and 3. Nationalism. Tribalism is characterized by the constant warfare of independent tribes. Imperialism is characterized by the imposition of coercive power by one tribe or a strong man over all other tribes. And Nationalism is characterized by a coming together of tribes for mutual benefit and defense around shared principles of language, religion, morality, and law.

[v] We should note very strongly, in this regard, that the Biden state has shown a willingness to cede national sovereignty to a variety of global organizations and geo-political bodies including the WHO (on public health policy), the WEF (on economic policy), the UN (on climate and gender policy), and even the CCP (with Biden’s soft foreign policies in relation to China and Iran). Meanwhile, the “unrestricted warfare” ideology of the CCP has captured many of the elites who currently lead the agencies of the Biden state. This points to a whole second level of geo-political activity that hides within the political structure of the Biden state. See Frank Gaffney and Dede Laugesen, The Indictment: Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party and Friends for Crimes Against America, China, and the World (Skyhorse Publishing, 2023).  

[vi] In his “Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, 11 October 1798,” John Adams wrote that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Likewise, in his farewell address of September 1796, Washington spoke of “religion and morality” as the “indispensable supports of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity.”    

[vii] They could not have been thinking of other religious traditions such as Hinduism, Islam, or even Judaism, in this context, for that would have been to disengage from the actual people who made up the nation; but they were also aware, in keeping with the AACT itself, that there is a central core of moral order that is evident in all religions, and that each nation should be free to work out the meaning of this order in keeping with its own religious history and traditions. See Hazony, Conservatism, p. 18. See also, C. S. Lewis’s discussion of the Tao (his name for this shared moral order) in The Abolition of Man (Macmillan, 1947).  

[viii] In The Abolition of Man, Lewis writes at some length about this process of education in the family, a process that conveys to children, even prior to the age of reason, the habits of the heart, the values of human life that Lewis calls the Tao, and for which he finds evidence in all of the world’s great religions. Lewis also writes about how this sense of moral order and tradition has been undercut by modern educational notions of individual freedom, reason, and “applied” science which reject the traditional, familial, and religious foundations of the Tao. Over the course of three chapters, Lewis traces the modern educational process to its consequences in a society led by elites who are driven by their own individualistic impulses because they are no longer shaped by the honorable values of religious and literary tradition. This seems a rather precise description of our society in the Biden administrative state today. 

[ix] Hazony, Conservatism, p. 266-67.

[x] This does not mean that everyone must join a particular denomination, nor even that everyone must become full-fledged believers and practitioners of biblical faith. It does mean, however, that even unbelievers, and those of other religious traditions, should understand how the rule of law and our constitutional rights in America, as well as the practice of reliable scientific research, arise from and are strengthened by the religious worldview of the Bible. Even Richard Dawkins, the well-known atheist, has recently made confession of this creed.

[xi] I am thinking in this instance of the Wesleyan Awakening in eighteenth century England and the Great Awakening that took place in nineteenth century America. Both of these made significant contributions to the spiritual capital of American culture and political order that are still unfolding in the battle to recover the AACT today. 

THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES, PART 1: THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen-year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

Most of us would agree, I think, that the people of the United States in 2024 are engaged in a major cultural battle, and that this battle has to do with both our political order and with our most deeply held spiritual values. The battle is often so fierce and complicated, however, that we have difficulty defining it or even describing it in a way that makes broad sense to everyone concerned. And perhaps we should expect this to be the case, since those most visibly engaged are now aligned into two political camps that directly oppose each other, both in how they define key terms (such as “democracy,” “nationalism,” and “freedom”) and even in how they define themselves—with terms such as Democrat and Republican or Liberal and Conservative. Is “nationalism” a good thing or a bad thing? What conception of “freedom” is assumed in our Constitution? Which of the major parties is truly the protector of “democracy”? We are at war even about these basic concepts.

What follows is my attempt to clarify what I think is going on in this conflict. How are the political parties now defining themselves, and why have they drawn the lines of battle where they have? What is the basic problem at work in it all? And what constitutes at least the direction of a solution? I will begin with a description of what has widely been called the “administrative state” as this currently exists in the administration of President Joe Biden, though this state has been expanding in every administration for at least a century. Thus, we begin with a major matrix of what I consider to be the problem.

The Administrative State

The roots of the administrative state in America can be traced rather clearly back at least to the early twentieth century and the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson believed that the founding principles of the US Constitution—such as having three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial), each of which affords checks and balances on the others so that no faction can rise to absolute power—had become too slow and ponderous to manage the affairs of an increasingly complex society with large urban centers in a post-industrial world.[i] Therefore, with help from other so-called “Progressives,” such as John Dewey in education and Frank Goodnow in political philosophy, he promoted a scheme to deploy “experts” who were not “politicians” to administer and manage the business of the country. This is, in fact, the main theme of Goodnow’s book, Politics and Administration first published in 1900.

Today, the administrative state in the US has grown to a massive array of 430 different agencies—such as the IRS, the EPA, the FDA and CDC, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, the Department of Interior, and the SEC, etc. These agencies have a total of 2.95 million federal employees, with an annual budget in 2023 (that grows and expands every year) of about 1.7 trillion dollars just to run the agencies. (This does not include another 4+ trillion in the federal budget to pay for benefits such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.) And these agencies have taken to heart Wilson’s original vision that they (not our elected officials in the legislative branch of government) should be in charge of making the laws by which the whole country, its businesses and citizens, should be governed. Some of the agencies, such as the EPA, have even created their own “judicial” officers to settle disputes with citizens and businesses as these arise. So much for checks and balances between the branches of government!

The problem with all of this, besides the sheer impossibility of trying to keep track of or hold accountable such a massive bureaucracy, is that the administrative state now operates independently of the wise form of governance which our founders bequeathed to us. This has made it possible today for the administrative state to function as an unelected faction whose ideology serves special interests. As such, the state now routinely sponsors policies and issues mandates that a majority of US citizens have never voted for and do not support (such as DEI, CRT, radical gender ideology, climate crisis, COVID lockdowns, open borders, student loan “forgiveness,” and the Green New Deal). The recent (July 1, 2024) Supreme Court decision to overturn the so-called “Chevron” doctrine (1984) demonstrates a growing awareness that the laws and policies of our country, especially those that affect major questions where billions of dollars are at stake, should be decided by our elected representatives, who are, after all, accountable to voters in each state for the decisions they make, not by the unelected career bureaucrats of the administrative state whose job security is independent of their policy decisions and their results. 

The basic problem, therefore, in our current cultural battles, as I (and many others) see it, can be traced to the matrix of the administrative state, which has expanded and imposed its powers more than ever before in our history during the first three years of the Biden administration.[ii] It is important to note in this regard, that it is Biden himself and his agencies that have been behaving in a unilateral, authoritarian, and dictatorial fashion, though they keep warning us that Donald Trump will be a Hitlerian style dictator if he is re-elected later this year.

Thus, it is Joe Biden who refuses to stop his attempt to buy votes by cancelling billions of dollars’ worth of student loans, even though the Supreme Court has already declared that he does not have the authority to do this without congressional approval. And it is Biden, or his agencies, that demonstrates contempt for our legislative process by using mandates and executive orders to coerce “green” energy, to mandate harmful public health policies and vaccines, to restrict what kinds of household appliances or automobiles our citizens will be allowed to purchase, to leave our borders open to invasion, and to enforce gender and racial ideologies in public schools that separate children from the moral guidance of their parents. This is, quite simply, the behavior of an authoritarian state, not that of a government of, by, and for the people.

Looking ahead to Part 2

In the next post, “Part 2: The Expansion of the Administrative State Under Joe Biden,” we will look at a number of recent Biden policies (for example: public health, climate, race, gender) along with some of the opposing political and cultural voices (often censored by the pro-Biden press) who warn of grave consequences already occurring as the Biden mandates are followed. As you think about today’s post, and anticipate the next, consider the following two questions: 1) To what extent, in real terms, have the results of Biden’s policies been either helpful or harmful for our people and in our society (for example, at the border, in the economy, or in dealing with inner city crime)? and 2) To what extent has the Biden administration pushed its policies without due regard for the legislative process of checks and balances?

Endnotes

[i] Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics. This book was based on Wilson’s 1885 PhD thesis at Johns Hopkins University and argued for a more limited discursive role for Congress, while the executive branch became more powerful in the actual administration of society. See also, R. J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).

[ii] See, for example, Larry P. Arnn, “The Way Out,” Imprimis (November 2021, Vol. 50, No. 11); and “Education as a Battleground,” Imprimis (November 2022, Vol. 51, No. 11). In addition to these two short articles (available online), the dozens of other sources cited in the endnotes for this seven-part series will reveal numerous overlapping problems of major consequence now piling up in our society and in our economy as a result of the policies unilaterally imposed by the Biden administrative state.

THE SPIRITUAL AND POLITICAL BATTLE OF OUR TIMES: AN OVERVIEW IN SEVEN PARTS

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Title: Glen Cove, watercolor by Craig Gallaway, copyright 1970. After getting lost as an eighteen-year-old in the free-wheeling idealism of the late 1960s in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, I returned to my family in Texas and began to try to “re-member” what had been the deeper soil of my life, my upbringing, and my faltering faith. This painting was an attempt to remember and to honor the first fruits of that legacy from my grandparents little farm in West Texas. Remembering and honoring that legacy was a crucial step in my own recovery of our national heritage, and a preparation for the battle now at hand.

What follows is an outline in seven parts for an overview of the battle mentioned in the title above. I plan to post the first part, “The Administrative State,” on July 4th, commemorating The Declaration of Independence, and thus ringing our founders’s own clarion call against all such states. And then I will post a new part about once a week into the month of August. My sense is that many of us are in need of clarification about the many issues that beset our country at this time in our history, particularly as we approach the presidential election in November. This is my attempt to contribute to such clarification. I know there are those on the opposite side of this battle who will regard my views as misguided (to put it mildly) as I already regard many of their views. Having the perspective set forth in one place, however, with many details included, may help both sides, and those in the middle (or on the outside) to see more clearly all that is at stake in the outcome. That is, at any rate, my hope.   

1. The Administrative State. A brief review of the history of the administrative state from Woodrow Wilson to Joe Biden, 1900-2024.

2. The Expansion of the Administrative State Under Joe Biden. An overview of how the Biden state has expanded its power, based on the analysis of Thomas Sowell in his book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Public Policy.

3. The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition. What it would mean to recover our cultural and constitutional heritage based on the principles of the Anglo-American Conservative Tradition (AACT) as shown in Yoram Hazony’s book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery.  

4. The Anglo-American Conservative Tradition (continued).

5. A Critical Time in Our Nation’s History. An assessment of the seriousness of our current cultural calamity based on a comparison with Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, as shown in Eric Metaxas’s Letter to the American Church.

6. The Way of Faith. Reflections on the recovery of the AACT by means of three biblical principles of faith that will help us: a) restore the religious foundations of our culture, b) correct course both in the church and in the state, and c) avoid the disaster of the authoritarian state into which we are presently careening.

7. The Way of Faith (continued).