The New Political Christianity
Western civilisation has not succeeded because its liberal and secular principles are Christian; it has succeeded because Western Christians have accepted its liberal and secular values.
If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.
~C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis is the best-known Christian apologist of the twentieth century. He devoted decades to producing books, articles, speeches, and radio addresses that aim to persuade readers and listeners that Christianity is true. However, he never tried to prove that the religion is pleasant, beneficial, or useful. In fact, he had no qualms acknowledging the contrary. “No half-measures are any good,” he writes of Christ’s message in Mere Christianity, explaining how Christians must give their whole selves over to faith, whatever challenges they may face in doing so. He knew that people had understandable problems accepting claims of miracles and supernatural beings, and reconciling Biblical inconsistencies, and that he needed to tackle these objections head-on.
Despite the best efforts of Lewis and his successors, Christianity has continued to decline in the Western world. The US is the most Christian country in the developed West—and even there, the number of Americans professing no religion has doubled in the last twenty years. The Christian apologists have largely lost the battle for hearts and minds against New Atheist heavyweights like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.
But Christianity has recently gained some new defenders. And in direct contrast to C.S. Lewis’s approach, their defences of the religion are largely based on the argument that Christianity is socially useful or even essential.
In July 2023, Konstantin Kisin, co-host of the popular Triggernometry podcast, published a blog post entitled “The Atheism Delusion” (a play on the title of Dawkins’s 2006 book The God Delusion). “The absence of old religion seems to produce only a vacuum into which a new religion rushes in,” he writes, arguing that this new religion offers no protection against Islamic extremism, nor a foundation for human rights. “The reason new atheism has lost its mojo is that it has no answers to the lack of meaning and purpose that our post-Christian societies are suffering from,” he concludes. “What will fill that void? Religious people have their answer. Do the rest of us?”
In November 2023, ex-Muslim writer and campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced that she had converted to Christianity. Western civilisation, she argues, is menaced by expansionist authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Beijing, globalism, Islamism, and “woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.” Only “our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition” can unite us in the face of these threats, according to Ali. But as several of her critics have pointed out, Ali’s article makes no reference to the death and resurrection of Christ, the forgiveness of sins, or other points of doctrine. Nor does she describe any personal connection with the Christian god. “Ayaan, you are no more a Christian than I am,” concludes Richard Dawkins in an open letter responding to her article. Pressed on her views by Dawkins in a recent debate, Ali said that she accepted the central tenets of the Christian faith, such as Christ’s sacrifice to redeem the sins of Man, and told him that her conversion was the result of a long and difficult personal struggle. But the pitch she has made to non-believers is political, not theological.
Then there is Jordan Peterson, who has become one of Christianity’s most forceful defenders, even though he does not appear to be a Christian in the conventional sense. In his Message to the Christian Churches of July 2022, he calls on these churches to proselytise to demoralised young men, urging them to do their “duty to the past and the community” by joining the ranks of believers. He is dismissive of those who don’t believe Christianity’s supernatural claims, asking bluntly: “Who cares what you believe?” and “Why is this about you?”
Ali is a Christian. Kisin does not claim to be one. It’s still unclear whether Peterson is—in a recent lengthy and probing interview on the subject, Alex O’Connor was unable to receive a firm answer from Peterson on this. “If I went back in time with a Panasonic video camera and put that camera in front of the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, would the little LCD screen show a man walk out of that tomb?,” O’Connor asked, trying to narrow Peterson down to a question with an unambiguous yes-no answer. “I would suspect yes,” Peterson responded, but he added that, “I have no idea what that means, and neither did the people who saw it.” But despite the differences in their relationships to the Church, all three commentators adopt a broadly similar line of argument: that Christianity is the cure for the societal ills caused by the excesses of progressive politics.
Unsurprisingly, few atheists have been persuaded by these arguments. “I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible,” argued Matt Dillahunty in a discussion with Douglas Murray. Like Lewis, Dillahunty is interested in whether Christianity is factually true, not whether it is useful. These arguments are also unsatisfactory to many Christians, who dislike the idea that their deeply held faith could be donned like a cloak. Criticising Peterson in an article for Australia’s Gospel Coalition in 2022, Dani Trewek writes that the Gospels are “not ultimately concerned with the earthly ‘optimisation’ of created man, but the eternal glorification of the Son of Man.”
But the truth or falsity of Christianity is a separate question from its historical and social impact. The advocates of political Christianity argue that Western civilisation has Christian foundations, and returning to those Christian roots can help protect Western values today. “As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms—of the market, of conscience, and of the press—find their roots in Christianity,” writes Ali. So, how well do these claims stack up?
It is true that the Scientific Revolution, liberalism, constitutional democracy, and modern market economics all first arose in the Christian states of northwestern Europe. But were those secular liberal institutions founded on Christian values? It seems telling that over the preceding twelve hundred years, the Church tolerated or condoned staggering levels of egregious oppression and violence, including slavery, the massacre of civilian populations, and the torture and execution of blasphemers, apostates, and heretics. The Bible says that God created man in his own image, but it also endorses killing religious dissidents, sacking and plundering cities, and taking women as sex slaves. Holland’s own book Dominion is filled with accounts of Christians leading the struggle against ignorance, tyranny, and brutality—yet it was other Christians who were often responsible for the ignorance, tyranny, and brutality in the first place. It is true that liberation and emancipation movements were often led by Christians, but so were the oppressive systems they were fighting against.
Ben Bassett
Christian authorities have had a troubled and antagonistic relationship with freedom of thought and speech, including in science. The leaders of the Scientific Revolution were declared Christians, but at the time, it was illegal to profess to be an atheist. And while political Christians today are usually also enthusiastic defenders of capitalism, the growth of market economics was as much hindered by Christian doctrine and Church authorities as political freedom and science were. Like most ethical systems designed to maintain social order in societies in which people were overwhelmingly poor, Christianity traditionally encourages its adherents to give up hope of wealth in this world in exchange for riches in the next. Do not covet your neighbour’s ox, and be willing to give away your possessions and follow Jesus. Hence, the long-running prohibition against usury. Our economy could not function without the practice of lending at interest, but until the past few hundred years, this practice was considered a grave sin. It’s no accident that Dante put usurers and sodomites in the same circle of hell, as both were guilty of cheating natural law to gain unearned benefits: wealth without labour and sexual pleasure without procreation.
In its defence, Christianity is no worse than many other premodern moral systems. In some ways, it is better. For example, the separation of religious and secular authority—critical to the success of the modern West—has a basis in scripture. Jesus tells his followers to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Matthew 22:15–22) and assures Roman governor Pontius Pilate that his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).
During the Middle Ages, these verses didn’t have much practical impact, as secular authorities recognised the Catholic Church as the ultimate source of spiritual authority. If the Emperor waged war against the Pope, it was for political rather than doctrinal reasons. But once religious authority fractured during the Protestant Reformation, it became possible for different countries, provinces, and cities to adopt different worldviews.
The Protestant reformers were often as fanatical, intolerant, and violent as the worst heretic-burning Catholic inquisitors, but they did demolish the moribund system of Aristotelian philosophy, help shift learning from the monasteries into the secular world, promote literacy, discourage lavish spending on monuments and temples, and relax restrictions on usury. These changes brought quick and long-lasting benefits, and it is no coincidence that constitutional government, liberalism, and the scientific method all developed in Protestant states. But the changes that allowed these innovations to flourish were not related to any of the core principles of Christian theology.
Ultimately, Western civilisation has not succeeded because its liberal and secular principles are Christian; it has succeeded because Western Christians have accepted its liberal and secular values. In the modern West, Christianity has changed for the better. This is good. However, it weakens its claim to be the source of absolute, unchanging morality.
Today, the advocates of political Christianity are confronted with two problems. One is that some of the threats they have identified are not incompatible with Christianity. The other is that, on some of these issues, political Christianity is either silent or has been a hindrance rather than a help.
Islamic fundamentalism and Communism are explicitly anti-Christian. But the authoritarian regime in Moscow, which Ali names as one of the threats against which we need the shield of Christianity, is itself explicitly Christian. Vladimir Putin has donned the mantle of defender of the West and of Christian values. His government has passed laws banning “LGBT propaganda” in the name of protecting the traditional Russian family, and the Russian Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has claimed that Russian soldiers who die in Ukraine have sacrificed themselves like Jesus and will have their sins washed away. Putin’s assertion that he is a stalwart of the Christian faith has been accepted by some of his Western defenders, including Tucker Carlson, who claims that US elites hate Russia because it is a “Christian country.”
In addition, there are progressive Christians too. Pope Francis has a long history of taking progressive positions on issues such as the environment, poverty, and refugees, and has denounced conservatives who do not share them. Ultimately, a person can be a Christian and believe almost any political ideology. Christian conservatism, liberalism, and socialism all have long histories.
While the defenders of political Christianity inevitably praise Western liberal, secular, and Enlightenment values, the Christian right remains a threat to those values, particularly in the United States. There are continued efforts to introduce the teaching of Creationism in schools—and no one would countenance this idea if the Book of Genesis did not claim that God created the world in a week. Old-fashioned conversion therapy, the kind that aims to change the sexual orientation of gay and lesbian people, is a practice without any evidence to support it—but it continues to exist because the Bible condemns same-sex relations as sinful. The champions of political Christianity might also be tempted to gloss over inconvenient facts. Despite his blatant amorality, Donald Trump enjoys widespread support from evangelical Christians. Advocates of secular Enlightenment values who overlook such issues in the interest of forming an alliance against nebulous enemies are misguided.
Then there are challenges like climate change that can only be tackled by those with a good understanding of science. Some Christians are scientifically informed, and there is a robust Christian movement promoting stewardship of the natural world. But when Christian leaders adopt pseudoscientific positions for scriptural reasons, it’s often impossible to shift them. Take, for example, Republican politician John Shimkus’s claim that we don’t need to worry about climate change because of God’s promise to Noah or American televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s boast that he could call on God to defeat COVID-19.
Christianity is broad enough to accommodate people with a vast array of views. This is part of its strength. But the success of our civilisation rests on the pillars of Enlightenment thought: constitutional government, secularism, science, the rule of law, and human rights—not on belief in the supernatural or in any specific set of ancient myths. In calling for a faithless Christian revival to protect our civilisation, the advocates of political Christianity seem to misunderstand both the nature of that civilisation and of religious belief itself.
