The goal of Christian cultural engagement is not to anger the left or “own the libs” or “drink liberal tears.” The goal is to be faithful to Scripture in all of life. Yes, a by-product of faithfulness will be transgressing progressive dogmas. And when that happens, the attitude of the New Right to the left’s accusations, “I really don’t care, Margaret,” is the proper and fitting response. But if we make that kind of transgression the goal, we are ironically still operating within a progressive frame instead of a biblical one. We are debating on the left’s terms instead of our own. There is no reason to let the left determine the playing field or its rules or how to keep score.
Young men today will say, “Everything I was taught growing up turned out to be a lie.” That’s probably the case – but it does not follow that the *opposite* of everything you were taught is therefore automatically the truth. Reality is more complicated than that. You cannot get the truth by simply inverting what you were taught. Getting to the truth is going to require real work, real study, real wisdom.
Nor can the goal simply to be to see who can be the most “based” or “trad.” The left has its own version of this race to the bottom in its “I can be woker than thou” dynamic. But for us, it should not be about who can be the most “based” but who can be the most holistically biblical. We are Christians, after all, so we should seek to live like it.
Bottom line: The problem with the alt right at the moment is that it all too often makes being transgressive against the left the standard rather than biblical fidelity. In reality the goal is not merely to be “based” but to be “biblical,” the goal is not to be anti-woke but to obey Christ as Lord. Making progressives angry is not identical with pleasing God. The New Right could hold all the “right” positions on the issues of the day, but unless the New Right is right with God, it is all for naught.
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As of this moment, the so-called New Right (or alt right) is a mixed bag. It has great energy and many good insights, but it’s still hindered by a lot of immaturity and unrighteous anger.
One sign of this immaturity is the constant quest to look for a singular scapegoat on which to blame the bulk of our social ills. Over the last few years, we have seen the preferred scapegoat shift from China, to the deep state, to Boomers, to illegal immigrants, to the target du jour, the Jews. The reality is that sinners are always going to sin. The world is going to do worldly things. Trying to find some subgroup of sinners to pin the blame on is not particularly useful. It’s far better for us to develop a forward-reaching vision of the true, the good, and the beautiful than to play whack-a-mole with different scapegoats. Pinpointing women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, the postwar consensus, Obergefell, DEI, or some other fatal turning point is not a very helpful exercise unless we know positively what we are for and how to get busy building it. Rear-guard defensive measures are not the need of the moment; creating, innovating, and building in wise and faithful ways are the need of the moment.
Examine the view that the Jews are behind all our social ills for moment. The Jews run the po*n industry, you say? Ok, but you still can’t blame the Jews for your po*n addiction. You’re the one who chose to click that link. Jews pull the strings in DC, you say? Well, why are so many (mostly white) Americans so gullible to fall for their lies, or so greedy that they accept their money? What does that say about us? It seems white are just as evil and a lot dumber. You wonder: Why do Jews dominate in so many fields? Well, anyone who has observed them will tell you they work hard. Don’t scapegoat them just because they expose your own laziness.
Again: evil people do evil things. Those who belong to the darkness will try to extinguish the light. None of this should come as a surprise. Scripture tells us about it and shows us what to do about it. And Scripture also reminds us that this kind of evil is not concentrated in one race or ethnicity, one age group, or one gender. Apart from grace, humanity has a universal hatred for God and for all that is good. Bottom line: tearing down enemies on social media is not as important positively building a better culture in the real world. Finding scapegoats is not the same as pursuing righteousness. Those who want to blame others need to start by dealing with their own sin.
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Christians should recognize the church’s central complicity in our society’s degeneration into the messy clown world we now inhabit. Most social analyses from the right (and the left) pretend as if the church doesn’t exist. The church is socially and culturally invisible in most discussions of what went wrong and how we can fix it.
From the right, solutions tend to range from rebuilding marriage and family life to a renewal of patriotic zeal. There is no question these are good things. The family needs fixing and we cannot get far down the road to social renewal without healthy marriages producing happy children. Likewise, it is true that we must restore a love for our nation’s heroes and heritage in the civil sphere. If no one loves America enough to defend her, our continued demise is inevitable.
The one thing that most liberals today, of both the Christian and non-Christian variety, of both the conservative and progressive variety, is that the church is irrelevant. The distinguishing mark of the liberal order is a privatized view of the church. A low ecclesiology has been the Achilles heel of American culture and politics. We treat the church an irrelevant afterthought.
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But what if the church is not irrelevant to the culture?
Frankly, the simplest explanation for what has gone wrong in the West in general and America in particular is given by Jesus in Matthew 5: the salt has lost its saltiness and so is now being trampled underfoot. Again and again in Scripture we find several principles taught that must govern our interpretation of history and our vision for cultural renewal in the future. I have developed the exegetical and theological bases for these principles elsewhere so I only summarize them here:
1. As the pastors, so the people; as the church, so the culture.
2. Ecclesiastical reformation drives cultural transformation.
3. The heavenly city (the church) bears responsibility for the earthly city.
4. The Great Commission requires and will produce transformed nations (Christendom).
5. Judgment and repentance both begin with the house of the Lord.
Before we got clown world, we had clown church. The collapse of public virtue, family formation, and love of homeland can all be traced back to a progressive failure of the church to be the church, especially from the early 19th century onwards, when revivalism and rationalism began to eat away at orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The decline of the West should be interpreted in theological categories. The West’s fall is a Spiritual fall – it must be viewed as apostasy, as a turning away from the worship of the living God to serve idols.
The secularization of the West was not inevitable; it’s the product of ecclesiastical failure more than any other factor. Our culture has come unraveled because the church has failed to be the church. Thatnis to say, the salt has lost its saltiness. The city of light on a hill has failed to shine into the darkness. I identify revivalism and rationalism as the twin evils that subverted the faithful church in America. Revivalism replaced confessional fidelity with emotionalism; rationalism replaced the authority of Scripture with reason and science. There were other factors, not limited to, but including: the failure of Protestants to reunify after the Reformation, resulting in a divided and therefore weak church; the cowardly failure of the church to stand up to the rise of feminism and Darwinism; the church ceding oversight of the university (and education in general), the hospital, and the care of the poor to the secular state; the refusal of pastors to carry out the “teaching them all that I have commanded you” (= the whole counsel of God) part of the Great Commission; the loss of reverent liturgy, especially Psalm-singing, since the psalms are super-charged, world-changing prayers the church has strangely decided to ignore; etc. If we are going to point the finger, it should be at ourselves. We had Christendom and we had squandered. The biggest problem in the world today is worldliness in the church. We cannot look at the culture around us through the lens provided by mainstream media or (most) social media; we have to look at it through the lens of Scripture. To evaluate culture as God does is to start with the people of God.
Bottom line: If the drift of the church got us into this mess, the reformation of the church is the way out. This is not a pietistic substituting of prayer and worship for political activism or culture warring. Rather, it is recasting the ministries of the church in properly political terms. Preaching, prayer, and psalm-singing all have public, political dimensions; they are not merely private acts of devotion done in the secrecy of the sanctuary; they are acts of homage before the King of kings and Lord of lords in the midst of his heavenly throne room. We do not worship as an alternative to other forms of cultural and political activity; rather, we make the church’s liturgy the foundation and anchor of these other forms of cultural and political activity. To say “worship is warfare” is not to say it’s the only way in which we fight, but it is to admit that unless the Lord makes our cultural and political efforts in the public square effective, all our labor is in vain. Ora et labora – pray and work – is the motto of the faithful church. If we want to recover our power as world changers, the salt must get its saltiness back. The New Right will end up just as ineffective as other conservative movements of the last 50 years unless it develops an explicitly Christian/biblical and ecclesiocentric foundation. The only post-liberal project worth pursuing is an explicitly Christian and ecclesiocentric post-liberalism.
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