Thank you for the honor of participating in this exchange with distinguished thinkers on nationalism, imperialism and integralism. I hope my response is equal to the task. This conversation seems especially urgent after January 6, when a particular nativist form of folk religion often called “Christian Nationalism,” aligned with neo-pagans, some revealingly wearing horns and furs, directly attacked America’s constitutional democracy with lethal consequences.
Liberal democracy is under assault by both left and right, religious and secular. American Christians have been across three centuries its chief boosters and stewards. Will they continue to be?
Putting all my own cards on the table, I am an American Mainline Protestant who is Wesleyan and evangelical in theology and Whig in historical identification. I am an American Exceptionalist tempered by Christian Realism. I appreciate Yoram Hazony’s affirmation of nation states as a biblical concept that bore fruition especially in Protestant Europe. I do not support his rejection of all classical “liberalism,” which to me is a contradiction, as the Anglo-American understanding of nation and liberty are ultimately inseparable from classical liberalism. America in its essence cannot be divorced from Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration, or from John Locke, or his Protestant/Puritan antecedents.
Unusual for many American Protestants today, I do affirm “Christendom” as an unparalleled historical and cultural legacy for which America and the whole world are beneficiaries. Unlike Pater Edmund Waldstein, my understanding of Christendom does not lean chiefly on Roman Catholicism or papal authority, although obviously a great debt of historical gratitude is owed to both. For the Protestant believer, or at least for me, Christendom is primarily a spiritual, political and cultural reality characterized by Gospel affirmation of human dignity rooted in each person as divine image bearer. Unlike many American Protestants, who would denounce Constantinianism, and with thanks to Peter Leithart’s Defending Constantine, I would affirm the Emperor’s conversion and the gradual Christianization of the empire as providential and meriting appreciation, given the alternatives.
Subsequent empires within Christendom have been providential and beneficial if also, in sync with the ways of fallen humanity, cruel and often depraved. The rule of the Hapsburgs, as Waldstein, recalls, was often more benevolent than other options. The Spanish Empire brought the Gospel into the Western Hemisphere, and even at its most tyrannical was probably preferable to the barbarities of the Aztecs, Mayans and other indigenous empires it conquered. Americans owe a great debt to the British Empire for planting the seeds of our own republic on these shores, which Bismarck hailed a perhaps the most significant event in temporal history.
Needless to say, I cannot offer my Protestant enthusiasm when Waldstein recalls that “Pope Leo XIII taught that it is a sin for the state not to order subordinate itself to the true religion,” if political subordination to any particular ecclesial structure is required. I can affirm his recall of Pope Benedict XVI’s call for “a universal brotherhood of nations” unachievable by “human effort alone” but “a transcendent vocation from God the Father, who loved us first, teaching us through the Son what fraternal charity is.”
To my Protestant mind, God the Father does not need or require a confessional Roman Catholic polity to promote His desire for justice on earth. So naturally I would reject the integralist agenda of a society in which the Roman Catholic Church is restored to some form of political paramountcy. Waldstein admits integralism currently seems “wildly impractical” because of its narrow if nonexistent electoral appeal in Western democracies. But he asserts it’s the “only program that is unequivocally committed to the true common good of human beings.” And its time may come again. After all, “the Kingship of Christ did not seem a very practical program at the time of the persecution of Diocletian, and yet soon the Roman emperors were to submit themselves to it.”
The post-Constantine settlement was a net improvement over totalitarian pagan Rome, but it’s neither practical nor desirable for today or tomorrow. A world with over 2 billion Christians where Christian beliefs about human dignity have in many ways been universalized should not need or desire theocracy or ostensibly more benign forms of integralism. We have seen the bloody and tyrannical downside of civil power for ecclesial authorities and their proxies. The old Christendom’s death was self-inflicted. It bled to death in the wars of religion and in the torture chambers of its most devoted guardians. We can benefit from its more positive legacy without romanticizing or overlooking its darker history.
Perhaps the most profound insight of Christian political theology is to trust nobody with absolute or great authority, neither bishops nor presbyters or anybody else. Human depravity is universal, and too much power should never be ceded to anyone, even if professing the right creeds or offering sincere homage to genuine faith. The most religiously zealous and sincere, if empowered and weaponized, can be decent civilization’s most dangerous adversaries. An authentic Christendom for today must reject any legislated privilege for the “true faith” and its ostensible saints, whether through direct theocracy or more indirectly through integralism.
Rusty Reno, believing Waldstein’s proposal for imperial integralism verges on utopian, seems to tout a softer more pragmatic form of integralism, although he does not elaborate. He prefers nation sides over empire, noting nations like Poland and Hungary are currently friendlier to Christendom than is the current “empire.” That imperium is “an American-sponsored empire of global capitalism, human rights, and ever-greater personal liberation. It is an empire that hungers for world domination.” Reno sounds negative about this American “empire!” As an American Protestant who believes in legal equality for all regardless of religion, I prefer this American regime to the available alternatives.
Reno urges a pragmatic integralism in dialogue with nation states and the church. This version of integralism presumably moves forward with baby steps in public opinion through legislation especially in increasingly illiberal democracies. Reno is more politically realistic than Walstein but his ultimate goal is unclear and, if fully integralist, is distressing to all who do not share a particular illiberal political brand of Roman Catholicism.
I appreciate Alastair Robert’s skepticism about the “Catholic ideal of empire” and his reluctance fully to sacralize nation states. Nationalism and imperial order both offer particular goods and evils. As Roberts notes, “good nations and empires are forged, not through the imposition of such a hubristic ideal (as if either imperialism or nationalism were the universal desideratum), but through the patient and attentive establishment and development of the bonds of communication in terms of which persons will effectively imaginatively recognize themselves in a sustainable people, subject to the critical judgment of a higher good.”
In other words, there should be wariness of any idealized polity. Our political arrangements emerge from particular historical experiences adapted to time, place and people. As an American and Christian in the Protestant tradition, I am very partial to our own republic that emerged from Anglo-America’s mostly Reformation-shaped political trajectory, which of course also owes debt to pre-Reformation Christendom. What has largely worked for Americans likely will not be wholly applicable to other nations, peoples and cultures.
Perhaps other peoples prefer integralist or imperialist alternatives. It’s a profoundly Christian insight that peoples corporately and individually should choose for themselves, without coercion, the regimes under which they prefer to live. I respect the choices of other peoples, but I remain an enthusiast for the political arrangement of my own nation. And I believe America’s successes, although not at their brightest after the travesty of January 6, are instructive for others.
Mark Tooley is the President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and editor of Providence.
Thank you for the honor of participating in this exchange with distinguished thinkers on nationalism, imperialism and integralism. I hope my response is equal to the task. This conversation seems especially urgent after January 6, when a particular nativist form of folk religion often called “Christian Nationalism,” aligned with neo-pagans, some revealingly wearing horns and furs, directly attacked America’s constitutional democracy with lethal consequences.
Liberal democracy is under assault by both left and right, religious and secular. American Christians have been across three centuries its chief boosters and stewards. Will they continue to be?
Putting all my own cards on the table, I am an American Mainline Protestant who is Wesleyan and evangelical in theology and Whig in historical identification. I am an American Exceptionalist tempered by Christian Realism. I appreciate Yoram Hazony’s affirmation of nation states as a biblical concept that bore fruition especially in Protestant Europe. I do not support his rejection of all classical “liberalism,” which to me is a contradiction, as the Anglo-American understanding of nation and liberty are ultimately inseparable from classical liberalism. America in its essence cannot be divorced from Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration, or from John Locke, or his Protestant/Puritan antecedents.
Unusual for many American Protestants today, I do affirm “Christendom” as an unparalleled historical and cultural legacy for which America and the whole world are beneficiaries. Unlike Pater Edmund Waldstein, my understanding of Christendom does not lean chiefly on Roman Catholicism or papal authority, although obviously a great debt of historical gratitude is owed to both. For the Protestant believer, or at least for me, Christendom is primarily a spiritual, political and cultural reality characterized by Gospel affirmation of human dignity rooted in each person as divine image bearer. Unlike many American Protestants, who would denounce Constantinianism, and with thanks to Peter Leithart’s Defending Constantine, I would affirm the Emperor’s conversion and the gradual Christianization of the empire as providential and meriting appreciation, given the alternatives.
Subsequent empires within Christendom have been providential and beneficial if also, in sync with the ways of fallen humanity, cruel and often depraved. The rule of the Hapsburgs, as Waldstein, recalls, was often more benevolent than other options. The Spanish Empire brought the Gospel into the Western Hemisphere, and even at its most tyrannical was probably preferable to the barbarities of the Aztecs, Mayans and other indigenous empires it conquered. Americans owe a great debt to the British Empire for planting the seeds of our own republic on these shores, which Bismarck hailed a perhaps the most significant event in temporal history.
Needless to say, I cannot offer my Protestant enthusiasm when Waldstein recalls that “Pope Leo XIII taught that it is a sin for the state not to order subordinate itself to the true religion,” if political subordination to any particular ecclesial structure is required. I can affirm his recall of Pope Benedict XVI’s call for “a universal brotherhood of nations” unachievable by “human effort alone” but “a transcendent vocation from God the Father, who loved us first, teaching us through the Son what fraternal charity is.”
To my Protestant mind, God the Father does not need or require a confessional Roman Catholic polity to promote His desire for justice on earth. So naturally I would reject the integralist agenda of a society in which the Roman Catholic Church is restored to some form of political paramountcy. Waldstein admits integralism currently seems “wildly impractical” because of its narrow if nonexistent electoral appeal in Western democracies. But he asserts it’s the “only program that is unequivocally committed to the true common good of human beings.” And its time may come again. After all, “the Kingship of Christ did not seem a very practical program at the time of the persecution of Diocletian, and yet soon the Roman emperors were to submit themselves to it.”
The post-Constantine settlement was a net improvement over totalitarian pagan Rome, but it’s neither practical nor desirable for today or tomorrow. A world with over 2 billion Christians where Christian beliefs about human dignity have in many ways been universalized should not need or desire theocracy or ostensibly more benign forms of integralism. We have seen the bloody and tyrannical downside of civil power for ecclesial authorities and their proxies. The old Christendom’s death was self-inflicted. It bled to death in the wars of religion and in the torture chambers of its most devoted guardians. We can benefit from its more positive legacy without romanticizing or overlooking its darker history.
Perhaps the most profound insight of Christian political theology is to trust nobody with absolute or great authority, neither bishops nor presbyters or anybody else. Human depravity is universal, and too much power should never be ceded to anyone, even if professing the right creeds or offering sincere homage to genuine faith. The most religiously zealous and sincere, if empowered and weaponized, can be decent civilization’s most dangerous adversaries. An authentic Christendom for today must reject any legislated privilege for the “true faith” and its ostensible saints, whether through direct theocracy or more indirectly through integralism.
Rusty Reno, believing Waldstein’s proposal for imperial integralism verges on utopian, seems to tout a softer more pragmatic form of integralism, although he does not elaborate. He prefers nation sides over empire, noting nations like Poland and Hungary are currently friendlier to Christendom than is the current “empire.” That imperium is “an American-sponsored empire of global capitalism, human rights, and ever-greater personal liberation. It is an empire that hungers for world domination.” Reno sounds negative about this American “empire!” As an American Protestant who believes in legal equality for all regardless of religion, I prefer this American regime to the available alternatives.
Reno urges a pragmatic integralism in dialogue with nation states and the church. This version of integralism presumably moves forward with baby steps in public opinion through legislation especially in increasingly illiberal democracies. Reno is more politically realistic than Walstein but his ultimate goal is unclear and, if fully integralist, is distressing to all who do not share a particular illiberal political brand of Roman Catholicism.
I appreciate Alastair Robert’s skepticism about the “Catholic ideal of empire” and his reluctance fully to sacralize nation states. Nationalism and imperial order both offer particular goods and evils. As Roberts notes, “good nations and empires are forged, not through the imposition of such a hubristic ideal (as if either imperialism or nationalism were the universal desideratum), but through the patient and attentive establishment and development of the bonds of communication in terms of which persons will effectively imaginatively recognize themselves in a sustainable people, subject to the critical judgment of a higher good.”
In other words, there should be wariness of any idealized polity. Our political arrangements emerge from particular historical experiences adapted to time, place and people. As an American and Christian in the Protestant tradition, I am very partial to our own republic that emerged from Anglo-America’s mostly Reformation-shaped political trajectory, which of course also owes debt to pre-Reformation Christendom. What has largely worked for Americans likely will not be wholly applicable to other nations, peoples and cultures.
Perhaps other peoples prefer integralist or imperialist alternatives. It’s a profoundly Christian insight that peoples corporately and individually should choose for themselves, without coercion, the regimes under which they prefer to live. I respect the choices of other peoples, but I remain an enthusiast for the political arrangement of my own nation. And I believe America’s successes, although not at their brightest after the travesty of January 6, are instructive for others.
Mark Tooley is the President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and editor of Providence.
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