America is like a secular Holy Roman Empire. Contrary to dissidents who expect a collapse of the federal government, the implosion of the fiat dollar, or a national divorce into Jesusland and the United States of Canada, America will persist. Whether as a world hegemon or regional superpower, there is no reason to suspect a collapse anytime soon. Partisanship is fierce in rhetoric, but support for Israel and Chinahawking has remained a bipartisan consensus. The culture war issue of “Woke” has already hit its zenith and is rapidly coming down, likely to hit a nadir by the end of this decade. Even if divisions ran deeper, they mostly reflect the differences between flyover America and urban archipelago America. These areas not only are mutually interdependent on one another, but they provide no means of sustained conflict in an actual division. Whether it was king vs parliament in the English Revolution, contingents of the colonial elite and government vs a monarchical parliament in the American Revolution, or the remnants of the court vs the Third Estate in the French Revolution, all of these required deep institutional divisions to pose an inner split. America, for good or ill, lacks these and the shared umbrella of the United States will continue for the foreseeable future.

However, that does not mean things will continue apace. While the United States maintains an imperial presence much like the Republic of Venice, preferring indirect soft power to maintain its trade routes, its domestic existence will resemble the fragmentary Empire of the Romans. As Henry Adams noted over a century ago, America has no modern state, no true diplomatic corps or civil servants from among the elite of society, no hereditary nobility or cultural establishment. Instead, the United States, more than ever, relies on partnerships with lesser entities, whether public or private, to accomplish its ends. In other words, it is not the United States government that is welcoming Third World immigrants into rustbelt towns, but Humanitarian NGOs, who receive a stream of money from executive departments. When I say that the United States is like the Holy Roman Empire, I do not mean feudal lords and gothic culture. Rather, I mean that the United States manifests an increasing patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions without any sense of ultimate sovereignty. Modern European jurisprudence fails when it considers America. And, increasingly, this fragmentary nature may be a boon, given the technological shifts of the internet and AI, as the United States will be better adapted to a diffusion of powers throughout a variety of different organs. The federal government (really, the unitary executive powers of the President) will remain the strongest power on the field, but states, localities, corporations, non-profits, and various other entities will fill the void, offering to do the job better or for cheaper than the federal executive can do on his own. A recent case has been SpaceX assuming more prerogatives for American space travel from what formerly belonged to NASA. Mastering the nodes of a network will become increasingly important to exercise influence, less about sovereignty and power, then authorization and legitimacy.

These initial claims will be important for Christians as they prepare to live within an increasingly post-Christian America. The last twenty years have misdiagnosed the state of affairs and offered exhausted, and bankrupt, ideas from the twentieth century for a way forward. Perhaps the most egregious has been “postliberalism” and “communitarianism,” consumed with the boogeyman of “individualism” that gripped hardheaded liberals during the 1970s. Drawing on the works of Christopher Lasch and/or Alasdair MacIntyre, with heavy borrowing from the Yale School and/or Radical Orthodoxy, the problem of secularity was placed squarely on “individualism” and “liberalism” (or, by extension, “capitalism”) as the source of Western woes. Protestantism often came under fire as a product of a revolutionary modernity that cut ties to the village, and its quaint alliance of squire and parson. But not only has this been entirely alien to the United States (which, to the chagrin of critics, has the only demographically significant number of Christians in the West), it has often been belied by the critics themselves, who prefer cosmopolitan rootless jet setting in their romanticism of Small Town, USA. But America has already had a President who stood up for these values, of the Community and the Folks on Mainstreet, who was fond of referencing both Thomas Aquinas and the Niebuhr brothers. His name is Barack Obama, the last twentieth century president.

Instead of trying to rebuild a world that never much existed in America, we should embrace what many postliberals dread: the voluntary society. Even worse, we should embrace corporatism and the puritanism. The Massachusetts Bay Company may have indeed been a city on a hill, but it was also an incorporated trade company with a royal charter. The Puritans who settled America saw no contradiction between their vision for a godly England on new shores and an incorporate trading company. With a rich and earthy sacramental practice, shorn of excessive enchantment and pomp, the New Englanders built church-towns, legitimated through a covenant, on a forward march into the wilderness. The New Englanders were still subject to the crown, but they often manage their lives semi-autonomously through their charter. New England was not simply a Puritan haven, others came to make money by trading and fishing. New England even had libertine wreckers, such as Thomas Morton’s Merrymount, which reveled in pagan maypole celebrations and orgiastic community with the native tribes. The government of Massachusetts Bay was theocratic and corporate, with church membership as bound up in shareholding, with a right to vote and hold property from within the chartered corporation. This self-government not only regulated law and custom (both derived from Scripture), but even monetary policy, with New England banks providing means to weather downturns in the Atlantic world economy. New England puritans, unlike their Virginian cousins, never struggled so much with bondage to London bankers.

It has been to common among American Christians to run somewhere else than to turn to their own native resources. One does not need to imagine oneself as Benedict of Nursia (who was only ever surrounded by Christian barbarians and still neighbors with the eastern Roman Empire). One also should not turn to the supposedly conservative nations of the former Soviet Union, who still struggle with severe societal rot. One should also not put naïve trust in simply winning elections, as if the government of today works according to School House Rock civics. Despite the Moral Majority launching Reagan into the White House, he did little to help them (and much to hurt them). Conversely, Donald Trump promised little and delivered (even if by accident) the greatest gain against abortion, throwing the battle to state and local levels. There is a lesson to learn in this case alone about the use or purpose of the unitary executive.

What is the solution going forward then? What is a Christian politics in a diffusive, fragmentary yet unified, America (and world)? What do Christian politics look like in the twenty-first century? First, there must be a wider sense of Church as for mundane life as much as worship. Early bishops were not only accountable for good teaching, but prudent use of the common treasury. The appeal of the early Church (especially among the “middling” of artisans, small land holders, and minor merchants) was as a collegia, a guild, a voluntary association for mutual support. Unlike other guilds (which also had fraternity and sacred meals in honor of patron gods), the Church was free, not requiring steep membership fees. The money of the common pool was primarily for burial and care of widows, which non-elites struggled to fulfill. The Church combined this mundane need with the rigor and thought of a philosophical school, where shared standards of belief went hand in hand with a shared ethical life. The Church as guild and school could live in the world, but not of the world. The Church must not only provide spiritual needs through exemplar living and philosophical integrity (i.e. giving meaningful answers to questions like “What is real?” or “How should we live?”), but also the mundane existence of its members as members, as participants in a corporate enterprise as much as the New Jerusalem.

Again, Christianity in Europe (especially Great Britain) has collapsed, with only a sporadic few left. In Eastern Europe and the Southern Hemisphere, Christianity is still weak, juvenile, and struggling not only to resist persecution, but not collapse under syncretism, corruption, and the vulgar witchcraft in aspects of the prosperity gospel. The future task of Christian politics will be Christians, as Christians, to operate private corporations, as churches or beneath churches (with a heavy emphasis on lay participation and governance). There will be risk of worldliness, but the early church of martyrs was also the early church of the common treasury. As the federal government, even states, will look for help in carrying out their functions from private, corporate or non-profit, entities, Christians should be there. Not to gain power so much as to provide direction to life, to not only feed and heal, but rebuild and maintain. Christians should be able to offer other Christians, as Christians, access to housing, energy, clean water, and a sense of security, cooperative with, not hostile to, elected state agencies. Christians need to understand that the brotherhood preceded care for the widow, alien, and stranger, in fact the latter depended on the health and unity of the former. Churches should not be cloaked in mystery, but provide clear benefits, rights and responsibilities, to members. In the future America, when governments will require help in carrying out the tasks of stability, repair, organization, on transparent and accountable grounds (in finance as much as conduct), churches should be among those picking up the pieces. This is not to abandon elected politics, as a friendly (even if not Christian) president or governor may provide greater means of cooperation. It is, however, focused on Christians going forth and making disciples of all nations, a shining city on the hill that is not hidden under a bowl. But the only way to do that is to be able to provide tangible alternatives, whether it be through healthcare, insurance, affordable rented housing, and even sold goods or services, for the purposes of bringing the gospel to the whole world. Love the brotherhood, honor the king.