For over four decades, American evangelicals have embraced the special-interest paradigm of political engagement—arguing, in effect, that the interests of Christians should take priority over conflicting claims of other interest groups.
This has been a terrible mistake.
If there is objective moral truth then there is objective truth about what people deserve and what we owe to each other—which is to say, justice.
Objective moral truth entails objective truth about justice. It’s as simple as that.
And if there is objective truth about justice, then our efforts in the political sphere should conform to that truth—which is to say, achieving justice should be our only political objective.
Any other goal would be immoral.
So when we claim to believe in objective moral truth and yet we take a special-interest approach to politics, our actions contradict what we claim to believe. We have no integrity.
That’s how we arrive at a place where many Christians claim to be pro-life, while celebrating the license to engage in conduct that will absolutely, without any doubt, lead to thousands and perhaps even tens-of-thousands of avoidable human deaths.
And that’s how evangelicals have led our nation into the political abyss: instead of pointing our countrymen toward justice, they’ve spent the last 40 years whining about their rights as Christians.
The reason that our nation is disintegrating before our eyes is that we, as a society, lack a shared conception of justice—a common understanding of what people deserve and what we owe to each other.
So although Americans share a patch of earth, we do not share a horizon: we've degenerated into a collection of special interest groups whose highest political aspiration is to secure benefits for ourselves and those like us.
But Christianity isn't a special interest group at all, except insofar as Christians are commanded to identify our interests with the pursuit of justice.
What will save our republic is a political reformation that calls our attention to the truth about justice—a reformation that the Church is uniquely positioned to lead, if only Christians would stop behaving like a special interest group in the public sphere.
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Note that this is all stuff this guy just made up.
The evangelical marketplace of ideas is resplendent with the uncultivated intuitions of theological entrepreneurs…
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promoting “biblical” perspectives on geology, political theory, developmental psychology, economics, critical race theory, psychopharmacology, gender and sexuality, media and entertainment, public health, and on and on.
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Under the guise of subjecting human reason to biblical scrutiny, American evangelicals have transformed Christian theology into a nomadic culture war
machine:
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Within authoritarian ecosystems, men in power often lie about their opponents in a way that desensitizes their audience to some unpalatable truth about themselves.
Here Joe implies that David French and Russ Moore hold liberal democratic norms on par with scripture—an obvious falsehood.
True to form, Joe doesn’t state the falsehood explicitly—he merely implies it in a way that any competent language user understands.
(French or Moore might claim that modern liberal democracy is rooted in the Christian intellectual tradition, or that liberal norms can be derived from biblical norms. Not sure exactly what their respective views are here, but:
The substantive point is not in dispute: you didn’t read the book prior to commenting on it.
Here you speculate about what arguments are likely to be presented in the book (see screenshot—same screenshot from before, with relevant portion circled).
So why did I highlight the sentence in which you claim the book isn’t meant to be read?
For the same reason I highlighted the sentence before it (which also doesn’t imply that the author hasn’t read the book): namely, that your unearned confidence is hilarious.
If you say that isn’t white Christian nationalism, the disparity in our understanding of what words mean is most likely such that it’s not worth attempting to converse on this or any subject.
If you concede that it is white Christian nationalism, what am I to believe?
Do I believe Stephen Wolfe when he explicitly, obviously, and undeniably advocates *white* Christian nationalism?
Or do I believe him when he denies that he’s advocating white Christian nationalism?
The hermeneutics of legitimization: an approach to biblical interpretation that consistently produces moral justifications for social practices and institutional arrangements that benefit oneself.
The hermeneutics of legitimization has three defining features:
1. Proof-texting; 2. Motivated literalism; 3. Theological paradigm of authority and submission.