One could say that ‘conservative’ Christians are today caught between two equally dire temptations on which the faith could founder: Catholic integralism on the one hand and Protestant National Conservatism on the other.

Of course, the two often coalesce, along with the denominational divide: then one has a one-eyed Cyclopean monster.

How can the barque of the Church sail safely through? How can our true Christian cunning overcome the giant of idolatrous imposture?

These are the questions to ask in relation to the current debate. Obviously, Rogers is sane and right and offers real Biblical foundations for what he says, unlike his text-selective or distortive interlocutors. Schindler and Peterson offer wise modifications but are in essential agreement. As for their opponents of the southern Baptist persuasion and the like: what they say is of ethnographic interest, but none as regards serious theology. One pays attention, but in terms of continued social danger (admittedly one of many, including some of the dangers they oppose, but in a misguided way) not of intellectual engagement.

Nonetheless, some things may be added, in the interests of resuming our voyage safely home to Ithaca.

What is immediately striking about so much that has been said here is the quite staggering lack of historical awareness. One is reminded that the whole point of sailing to North America was often to escape from history, even though that is impossible.

Thus, it is blithely supposed that the Bible tells us things about the role of the state and even that it treats the nation state as part of the created order. But the Bible had, of course, never heard of the state, which was only invented at the end of the Sixteenth Century and is peculiar to western modernity, though it has now been exported all over the world. ‘Nations’ indeed it had heard of in terms of loose linguistic, tribal and linguistic groupings with complex overlaps. There is no easy equivalence between this and our post-Romantic sense of the ‘nation’, or our belief that ethnic and political boundaries should naturally and properly coalesce. For this reason ‘the nation state’ is merely a yet more recent modern invention, even if it had some Medieval anticipations.

Still less of course does the Bible imagine that a polity has anything much to do with protecting religious liberty, or the rights of property ownership. These things are outcomes of the Wars of Religion and the Enlightenment.

As to ‘limited government’, this has absolutely no purchase or meaning before the invention of ‘the state’. In the pre-modern world governance was fused with the social and the economic and operated at many different levels from the local to the international, and never in terms of clearly defined as opposed to very confused borders. There was no concept of ‘sovereignty’ in the sense of a centralised monopoly of power and rule. That, also, is an early modern invention, of one piece with the invention of ‘the state’.

Both concepts assume that there is a power newly over against the entire rest of society, now thought of in terms of ‘naturally’ isolated individuals (Grotius and Hobbes) or of naturally isolated groups (Bodin and Althusius – the admirable pluralist corporatism of the latter being nonetheless vitiated by his excessively modern and Protestant sovereignty theory). It is just this in principle ‘absolute’ and ‘absolutist’ state which then, according to some, should be limited or even minimised.

But unless one is totally naïve one should be able to see the paradoxes at work here: even the minimal state of the modern political ‘Right’ remains secretly absolutist just by virtue of its sustaining of rigid principles of unqualified ownership (unknown to previous Christian tradition) and of economic contract indifferent to ethical consideration (again totally novel and indeed horrifying in traditional Christian terms). Therefore, the standard modern Anglo-Saxon ‘conservative’ view of the limited state always in reality includes a secret support for the extension of the power of the bureaucratic state as supposedly indifferent mediator, and the further extirpation of the power of local government and mediating corporations.

Conversely, the ‘bigger state’ of the typical modern Left is somewhat ambivalent. Insofar as it intends to restore the concern of government with shaping virtue and promoting real human flourishing it can actually involve a weakening of the state in the absolutist sense: for example, by encouraging the greater role of social rather than merely economic actors and of public trusts at various levels.

It is true that all too often it only involves an ‘economisation’ by other, bureaucratic means, and to that extent the suspicions of the Right are correct. Yet any critic of the dominance of modern politics by the amoral economic contract, which involves always the alliance of state and market, is forced, as Karl Polanyi saw, to realise that initially the central state may be one of the main instruments by which to try to restore destroyed and distorted civil society, with its many levels of subsidiarity.

I realise that it can be hard for some Americans and the increasingly Americanised British to get their minds round all this, but it is crucial for Christians to be as wise as serpents and not fall into the false innocence that would take a secular division of Right versus Left at face value. Absolutely nothing in our current social, political and economic arrangements can be readily correlated with the assumptions of the Bible. From the perspective of the latter everything we have at present is a horror show. The only question to ask ourselves is how might a Biblically-compatible reality be restored? That cannot, of course, mean returning to Biblical or even pre-modern times. But it has to mean remaining in keeping with a Biblical vision that the Bible itself knows to be but vaguely prophetic and hopeful.

Where to begin here? As Rogers and his supporters rightly indicate, the main polity and ethnos of Christians is the Church itself. It is that and not the so far uninvented ‘state’ which is in continuity with Israel, and any sort of return to a kind of British Israelitism recycled in alliance with an ultra-Zionism (as opposed to the defensible kind) is to be deplored. Ancient Israel was a loose confederation of tribes united by cult not politics, and it variously existed in two kingdoms, as a city republic or a small city-empire (rather like Athens) and more usually within the scope of much larger empires which it by no means outright condemned and sometimes was prepared to serve, like the prophet Daniel. The Book of Maccabees is already admiring of Rome and it is clear that both Jesus and Paul regard the empire of the latter as legitimate and even as ambiguously admirable. As Peterson notes, both Testaments tend to insist upon the relativity and temporary character of political boundaries of all kinds – smaller and relatively national as well as imperial in character.

As Eric Voegelin brilliantly analysed, there is a complex relationship between universal truth and universal empire. Literal empire encourages universality, and pluralism mediated by a shared sense of transcendence. Yet it remains particular and oppressive. Thus, both Athens and Jerusalem invented, in the face of somewhat despotic near-oriental empires, ‘counter-empires’ that were at once more ideal and imaginary and yet also to be realised in time or eschatologically. The empire of the single Good or the empire of the One (but not ‘individual’) God: the ideal two empires that begin to converge in the New Testament, as Hegel rightly supposed.

Nothing could be clearer: the Church is a new sort of community combining the characteristics of polis, oikos, temple and initiatory mystery cult, as Peterson indicates. In all these respects it is in continuity with the strange aspirations of the Jews, including their yen to the absolutely universal, cosmic and unbounded. But it takes this much further: announcing a new and absolutely inclusive global polity that is at once only fully to come at the end of time as the reign of God on earth as in heaven, and yet is already present and fully active, demanding an allegiance prior to that to natural families or regions or polities, as Rogers emphasises.

This new polity very much involved a governance and from the outset organised a new sort of ‘economy’ that stretched from spiritual to merely material affairs. The apostles would have been as amazed as the Jean Calvin, the Pilgrim Fathers or Hester Prynne (!) to learn from very modern white Southern Baptists that their rule was purely ‘announcing’ in character. Indeed, were that the case, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms would never have arisen as polities at all. Maybe the ‘NatCons’ need to brush up on their Venerable Bede, founding document of the English historical consciousness: no order would have been kept, no laws enacted without the work of monks and clergy in the Barbarian West, far from the Byzantine legacy of pagan secular order.

The Christian Church fully assumed and sustained the call for a universal politics and law that, in the wake of Rome (another city-empire, somewhat akin to Jerusalem, and both of them curiously and uniquely western), had been made by first Philo and then the Stoics. But now the megalopolis of the former and the cosmopolis of the latter had a real viable vehicle in the shape of the Church. Any later enlightenment commitment to universalism and ‘globalisation’ is but a footnote to all this.

Moreover, this commitment always for Catholics (that is to say, Christians) extended also somewhat to an international secular politics and order, albeit oriented towards the rule of the Church. Thus prior to the early modern inversion in favour of the priority of the sovereign state and the secondariness of international order (developed first in Catholic Spain, not by Protestants) it had always been the case – as in Thomas Aquinas – that the natural law is first mediated to us by the cross-border ius gentium, before being variously interpreted in national civil codes. The international role of the Holy Roman Emperor also belongs to such an earlier Christian mind-set.

This reference to secular international order reminds us that the ultimate rule of the Christian Church was nonetheless qualified. It was not, at least initially, ‘integralist’ or clerically theocratic. Instead, as Schindler rightly insists, a certain role of the coercive natural civil order was to be sustained in a fallen world, exactly as the ‘elder’ Jewish ethical law and exemplary political arrangements remained fully in force. But this ‘power’ was to be newly guided by the more ultimate ‘authority’ of the Church and no natural order of justice was ever taken to be valid even within that order without the orientation under grace to charity and away from ‘politics’ towards the purely ‘social’, voluntary and reciprocal.

In this sense a ‘left integralism’ was espoused, but this is nothing like the ‘right integralism’ of the current integralists who ironically espouse a pure nature, but under the coercive rule or veto of the clergy. In such a conception grace is obviously and ironically naturalised.

The same all too modern duality of ends as between nature and the supernatural distorts the Protestant outlook of the national conservatives. They reject all the many and better Protestant models (the thought of Hooker for example — but often the Reformed and the Lutherans have veered more to the ‘Anglican’ than we suppose) that sustained or recovered a more Catholic and so more Christian outlook on the political: insisting on the Church as a self-governing polity of ultimate human belonging, or on the need for a State paideia or Bildung to promote an ultimately Christian flourishing, as in much of Lutheran pietism. The NatCons instead appeal back to the most obviously heterodox and totally unacceptable notions of the magisterial reformation which were as much falsely guided by emergent nationalism as Henry VIII’s politics of many wives.

I refer respectively to the false and unChristian Calvinist view that the Old Covenant moral and political law remains fully in force, unqualifed by the law of the gospel, and the still more unChristian Lutheran view that the state administers all ‘external’ aspects of the Church, or that Christians are initially citizens of the State as part of their very Christian allegiance.

The endorsing of all this by the Southern Baptists and other sectaries is but rank idolatry and neo-paganism of a henotheistic variety, renewing a chthonic cult of the primal will, whether of the individual on the plains or of the American Nation as it looks outward – when Washington DC becomes abruptly adulated by the plainsmen, rather than domestically deplored.  

None of what I am saying amounts to any endorsement of liberal globalisation and whatever degree of perfidy may indeed attach (as now becomes ever clearer) to ‘great resets’, global medicalisation, crypto-currencies and techno-tyrannous versions of the ecological. All that has to be carefully sifted, just as the way through the strait of Messina is narrow and perilous.

The point is rather that liberal globalisation is only a parody of Classical, Jewish, Christian and even of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. The latter requires some horizon of shared human value, grounded in transcendence, and assuming the reality of soul and free spirit, as only the world religions can provide and the Church most of all and most feasibly.

This probably involves the development of more collaborative and equitable modes of ‘commonwealth empires’, inevitably pivoted around Europe and the USA. For this reason, I cannot agree with even Rogers if he thinks that the US should be wary of international political organisation: isolationism also is simply not Christian. Of course, I nonetheless agree that economic protection and immigration are complex matters: we need a kind of international mutualist protectionism and such an improvement of local circumstances everywhere as would restrict the instance of immigration, so much of which is desperate, damaging and exploitative of both incomers and the indigenous.

Both NatCons and ultra-woke liberals are wrong about borders: they are needed for local self-governance and psychologically-secure identity, but they are also the preconditions for communication and cooperation with genuine, precisely because somewhat bounded, others. Every border opens out just because and to the degree that it also confines. Christians need to think at this level of metaphysics, not at the secular level of inappropriate human ‘physics’ which tends to engender the sterile rival absolutes of total autonomy or total fluidity. From Augustine to Coleridge, the Christian view has instead advocated ‘expanding circles’: the ordo amoris requires us first to love the neighbour as the nearest, but then infinitely to expand this sense of neighbourliness, both at the level of individuals and of other neighbourhood groups.

Merely abstract international bodies are either ineffective, or else start to act on behalf of international oligarchies in the dangerous way that is now inviting populist resistance. But the answer is not to return to the nation state: this is neither feasible nor theologically justifiable. Back in reality nation states are but the liberal individual will writ large and it is these states themselves that have been and even continue to be the primary architects of a liberal and capitalist international order.

Accordingly, anarchistic financiers may alternately seek to escape regulation by operating under international economic bodies, but they also seek so to escape by encouraging nation states to go rogue and act somewhat like giant offshore islands. Thus the City of London was divided over Brexit; thus Rishi Sunak, hedge fund manager, was once a Brexiteer (though as PM he may now have been disabused); thus both Trump and Orban are only different brands of globalisers, goading and deceiving the populace whilst encouraging fiscal dumping and the operation of the most ruthless and irresponsible economic forces.

And almost inevitably the adulation of the nation state takes on a racist drift – especially in the case of the USA where the only possible candidate for a shared ethnicity tends to be ‘whiteness’.  As soon as one starts talking about the need to defend ethnic (as opposed to cultural) purity, one quickly starts to defend the pagan as superior to the entire classical and Christian legacy. So Stephen Wolfe astoundingly suggests that the racialism more prevalent in the far East is something natural that the West should return to. But it isn’t natural but fallen, and needs to be redeemed. If the West returned to such a pagan outlook the entire Pentecostal enterprise of mingling and reconciliation would be over.

Christians ought to be able to see all this, not be sucked into secular illusions and divisions. They have the intellectual and practical resources to do so, and they do not need to choose a stupidity that is far from dovelike innocence.

The international and eschatologically oriented, though locally rooted Church, is our primary community. Familial and political orders, though natural and older, are valid only insofar as they encourage its upbuilding. And that requires an inculcation of pluralised and subsidiarised sovereignty within and across borders, combined with the re-fusing of political, economic and social functions in a new, more equitable and material-life respecting way than was ever achieved in the past.

To return to the Bible is to return to this prophetic vision. Let’s have done with the worship of Urizen and resume the true mental fight.


John Milbank is Emeritus Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at The University of Nottingham. 

Next Conversation

One could say that ‘conservative’ Christians are today caught between two equally dire temptations on which the faith could founder: Catholic integralism on the one hand and Protestant National Conservatism on the other.

Of course, the two often coalesce, along with the denominational divide: then one has a one-eyed Cyclopean monster.

How can the barque of the Church sail safely through? How can our true Christian cunning overcome the giant of idolatrous imposture?

These are the questions to ask in relation to the current debate. Obviously, Rogers is sane and right and offers real Biblical foundations for what he says, unlike his text-selective or distortive interlocutors. Schindler and Peterson offer wise modifications but are in essential agreement. As for their opponents of the southern Baptist persuasion and the like: what they say is of ethnographic interest, but none as regards serious theology. One pays attention, but in terms of continued social danger (admittedly one of many, including some of the dangers they oppose, but in a misguided way) not of intellectual engagement.

Nonetheless, some things may be added, in the interests of resuming our voyage safely home to Ithaca.

What is immediately striking about so much that has been said here is the quite staggering lack of historical awareness. One is reminded that the whole point of sailing to North America was often to escape from history, even though that is impossible.

Thus, it is blithely supposed that the Bible tells us things about the role of the state and even that it treats the nation state as part of the created order. But the Bible had, of course, never heard of the state, which was only invented at the end of the Sixteenth Century and is peculiar to western modernity, though it has now been exported all over the world. ‘Nations’ indeed it had heard of in terms of loose linguistic, tribal and linguistic groupings with complex overlaps. There is no easy equivalence between this and our post-Romantic sense of the ‘nation’, or our belief that ethnic and political boundaries should naturally and properly coalesce. For this reason ‘the nation state’ is merely a yet more recent modern invention, even if it had some Medieval anticipations.

Still less of course does the Bible imagine that a polity has anything much to do with protecting religious liberty, or the rights of property ownership. These things are outcomes of the Wars of Religion and the Enlightenment.

As to ‘limited government’, this has absolutely no purchase or meaning before the invention of ‘the state’. In the pre-modern world governance was fused with the social and the economic and operated at many different levels from the local to the international, and never in terms of clearly defined as opposed to very confused borders. There was no concept of ‘sovereignty’ in the sense of a centralised monopoly of power and rule. That, also, is an early modern invention, of one piece with the invention of ‘the state’.

Both concepts assume that there is a power newly over against the entire rest of society, now thought of in terms of ‘naturally’ isolated individuals (Grotius and Hobbes) or of naturally isolated groups (Bodin and Althusius – the admirable pluralist corporatism of the latter being nonetheless vitiated by his excessively modern and Protestant sovereignty theory). It is just this in principle ‘absolute’ and ‘absolutist’ state which then, according to some, should be limited or even minimised.

But unless one is totally naïve one should be able to see the paradoxes at work here: even the minimal state of the modern political ‘Right’ remains secretly absolutist just by virtue of its sustaining of rigid principles of unqualified ownership (unknown to previous Christian tradition) and of economic contract indifferent to ethical consideration (again totally novel and indeed horrifying in traditional Christian terms). Therefore, the standard modern Anglo-Saxon ‘conservative’ view of the limited state always in reality includes a secret support for the extension of the power of the bureaucratic state as supposedly indifferent mediator, and the further extirpation of the power of local government and mediating corporations.

Conversely, the ‘bigger state’ of the typical modern Left is somewhat ambivalent. Insofar as it intends to restore the concern of government with shaping virtue and promoting real human flourishing it can actually involve a weakening of the state in the absolutist sense: for example, by encouraging the greater role of social rather than merely economic actors and of public trusts at various levels.

It is true that all too often it only involves an ‘economisation’ by other, bureaucratic means, and to that extent the suspicions of the Right are correct. Yet any critic of the dominance of modern politics by the amoral economic contract, which involves always the alliance of state and market, is forced, as Karl Polanyi saw, to realise that initially the central state may be one of the main instruments by which to try to restore destroyed and distorted civil society, with its many levels of subsidiarity.

I realise that it can be hard for some Americans and the increasingly Americanised British to get their minds round all this, but it is crucial for Christians to be as wise as serpents and not fall into the false innocence that would take a secular division of Right versus Left at face value. Absolutely nothing in our current social, political and economic arrangements can be readily correlated with the assumptions of the Bible. From the perspective of the latter everything we have at present is a horror show. The only question to ask ourselves is how might a Biblically-compatible reality be restored? That cannot, of course, mean returning to Biblical or even pre-modern times. But it has to mean remaining in keeping with a Biblical vision that the Bible itself knows to be but vaguely prophetic and hopeful.

Where to begin here? As Rogers and his supporters rightly indicate, the main polity and ethnos of Christians is the Church itself. It is that and not the so far uninvented ‘state’ which is in continuity with Israel, and any sort of return to a kind of British Israelitism recycled in alliance with an ultra-Zionism (as opposed to the defensible kind) is to be deplored. Ancient Israel was a loose confederation of tribes united by cult not politics, and it variously existed in two kingdoms, as a city republic or a small city-empire (rather like Athens) and more usually within the scope of much larger empires which it by no means outright condemned and sometimes was prepared to serve, like the prophet Daniel. The Book of Maccabees is already admiring of Rome and it is clear that both Jesus and Paul regard the empire of the latter as legitimate and even as ambiguously admirable. As Peterson notes, both Testaments tend to insist upon the relativity and temporary character of political boundaries of all kinds – smaller and relatively national as well as imperial in character.

As Eric Voegelin brilliantly analysed, there is a complex relationship between universal truth and universal empire. Literal empire encourages universality, and pluralism mediated by a shared sense of transcendence. Yet it remains particular and oppressive. Thus, both Athens and Jerusalem invented, in the face of somewhat despotic near-oriental empires, ‘counter-empires’ that were at once more ideal and imaginary and yet also to be realised in time or eschatologically. The empire of the single Good or the empire of the One (but not ‘individual’) God: the ideal two empires that begin to converge in the New Testament, as Hegel rightly supposed.

Nothing could be clearer: the Church is a new sort of community combining the characteristics of polis, oikos, temple and initiatory mystery cult, as Peterson indicates. In all these respects it is in continuity with the strange aspirations of the Jews, including their yen to the absolutely universal, cosmic and unbounded. But it takes this much further: announcing a new and absolutely inclusive global polity that is at once only fully to come at the end of time as the reign of God on earth as in heaven, and yet is already present and fully active, demanding an allegiance prior to that to natural families or regions or polities, as Rogers emphasises.

This new polity very much involved a governance and from the outset organised a new sort of ‘economy’ that stretched from spiritual to merely material affairs. The apostles would have been as amazed as the Jean Calvin, the Pilgrim Fathers or Hester Prynne (!) to learn from very modern white Southern Baptists that their rule was purely ‘announcing’ in character. Indeed, were that the case, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms would never have arisen as polities at all. Maybe the ‘NatCons’ need to brush up on their Venerable Bede, founding document of the English historical consciousness: no order would have been kept, no laws enacted without the work of monks and clergy in the Barbarian West, far from the Byzantine legacy of pagan secular order.

The Christian Church fully assumed and sustained the call for a universal politics and law that, in the wake of Rome (another city-empire, somewhat akin to Jerusalem, and both of them curiously and uniquely western), had been made by first Philo and then the Stoics. But now the megalopolis of the former and the cosmopolis of the latter had a real viable vehicle in the shape of the Church. Any later enlightenment commitment to universalism and ‘globalisation’ is but a footnote to all this.

Moreover, this commitment always for Catholics (that is to say, Christians) extended also somewhat to an international secular politics and order, albeit oriented towards the rule of the Church. Thus prior to the early modern inversion in favour of the priority of the sovereign state and the secondariness of international order (developed first in Catholic Spain, not by Protestants) it had always been the case – as in Thomas Aquinas – that the natural law is first mediated to us by the cross-border ius gentium, before being variously interpreted in national civil codes. The international role of the Holy Roman Emperor also belongs to such an earlier Christian mind-set.

This reference to secular international order reminds us that the ultimate rule of the Christian Church was nonetheless qualified. It was not, at least initially, ‘integralist’ or clerically theocratic. Instead, as Schindler rightly insists, a certain role of the coercive natural civil order was to be sustained in a fallen world, exactly as the ‘elder’ Jewish ethical law and exemplary political arrangements remained fully in force. But this ‘power’ was to be newly guided by the more ultimate ‘authority’ of the Church and no natural order of justice was ever taken to be valid even within that order without the orientation under grace to charity and away from ‘politics’ towards the purely ‘social’, voluntary and reciprocal.

In this sense a ‘left integralism’ was espoused, but this is nothing like the ‘right integralism’ of the current integralists who ironically espouse a pure nature, but under the coercive rule or veto of the clergy. In such a conception grace is obviously and ironically naturalised.

The same all too modern duality of ends as between nature and the supernatural distorts the Protestant outlook of the national conservatives. They reject all the many and better Protestant models (the thought of Hooker for example -- but often the Reformed and the Lutherans have veered more to the ‘Anglican’ than we suppose) that sustained or recovered a more Catholic and so more Christian outlook on the political: insisting on the Church as a self-governing polity of ultimate human belonging, or on the need for a State paideia or Bildung to promote an ultimately Christian flourishing, as in much of Lutheran pietism. The NatCons instead appeal back to the most obviously heterodox and totally unacceptable notions of the magisterial reformation which were as much falsely guided by emergent nationalism as Henry VIII’s politics of many wives.

I refer respectively to the false and unChristian Calvinist view that the Old Covenant moral and political law remains fully in force, unqualifed by the law of the gospel, and the still more unChristian Lutheran view that the state administers all ‘external’ aspects of the Church, or that Christians are initially citizens of the State as part of their very Christian allegiance.

The endorsing of all this by the Southern Baptists and other sectaries is but rank idolatry and neo-paganism of a henotheistic variety, renewing a chthonic cult of the primal will, whether of the individual on the plains or of the American Nation as it looks outward – when Washington DC becomes abruptly adulated by the plainsmen, rather than domestically deplored.  

None of what I am saying amounts to any endorsement of liberal globalisation and whatever degree of perfidy may indeed attach (as now becomes ever clearer) to ‘great resets’, global medicalisation, crypto-currencies and techno-tyrannous versions of the ecological. All that has to be carefully sifted, just as the way through the strait of Messina is narrow and perilous.

The point is rather that liberal globalisation is only a parody of Classical, Jewish, Christian and even of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. The latter requires some horizon of shared human value, grounded in transcendence, and assuming the reality of soul and free spirit, as only the world religions can provide and the Church most of all and most feasibly.

This probably involves the development of more collaborative and equitable modes of ‘commonwealth empires’, inevitably pivoted around Europe and the USA. For this reason, I cannot agree with even Rogers if he thinks that the US should be wary of international political organisation: isolationism also is simply not Christian. Of course, I nonetheless agree that economic protection and immigration are complex matters: we need a kind of international mutualist protectionism and such an improvement of local circumstances everywhere as would restrict the instance of immigration, so much of which is desperate, damaging and exploitative of both incomers and the indigenous.

Both NatCons and ultra-woke liberals are wrong about borders: they are needed for local self-governance and psychologically-secure identity, but they are also the preconditions for communication and cooperation with genuine, precisely because somewhat bounded, others. Every border opens out just because and to the degree that it also confines. Christians need to think at this level of metaphysics, not at the secular level of inappropriate human ‘physics’ which tends to engender the sterile rival absolutes of total autonomy or total fluidity. From Augustine to Coleridge, the Christian view has instead advocated ‘expanding circles’: the ordo amoris requires us first to love the neighbour as the nearest, but then infinitely to expand this sense of neighbourliness, both at the level of individuals and of other neighbourhood groups.

Merely abstract international bodies are either ineffective, or else start to act on behalf of international oligarchies in the dangerous way that is now inviting populist resistance. But the answer is not to return to the nation state: this is neither feasible nor theologically justifiable. Back in reality nation states are but the liberal individual will writ large and it is these states themselves that have been and even continue to be the primary architects of a liberal and capitalist international order.

Accordingly, anarchistic financiers may alternately seek to escape regulation by operating under international economic bodies, but they also seek so to escape by encouraging nation states to go rogue and act somewhat like giant offshore islands. Thus the City of London was divided over Brexit; thus Rishi Sunak, hedge fund manager, was once a Brexiteer (though as PM he may now have been disabused); thus both Trump and Orban are only different brands of globalisers, goading and deceiving the populace whilst encouraging fiscal dumping and the operation of the most ruthless and irresponsible economic forces.

And almost inevitably the adulation of the nation state takes on a racist drift – especially in the case of the USA where the only possible candidate for a shared ethnicity tends to be ‘whiteness’.  As soon as one starts talking about the need to defend ethnic (as opposed to cultural) purity, one quickly starts to defend the pagan as superior to the entire classical and Christian legacy. So Stephen Wolfe astoundingly suggests that the racialism more prevalent in the far East is something natural that the West should return to. But it isn’t natural but fallen, and needs to be redeemed. If the West returned to such a pagan outlook the entire Pentecostal enterprise of mingling and reconciliation would be over.

Christians ought to be able to see all this, not be sucked into secular illusions and divisions. They have the intellectual and practical resources to do so, and they do not need to choose a stupidity that is far from dovelike innocence.

The international and eschatologically oriented, though locally rooted Church, is our primary community. Familial and political orders, though natural and older, are valid only insofar as they encourage its upbuilding. And that requires an inculcation of pluralised and subsidiarised sovereignty within and across borders, combined with the re-fusing of political, economic and social functions in a new, more equitable and material-life respecting way than was ever achieved in the past.

To return to the Bible is to return to this prophetic vision. Let’s have done with the worship of Urizen and resume the true mental fight.


John Milbank is Emeritus Professor of Religion, Politics and Ethics at The University of Nottingham. 

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