This article was originally published in Vol. 4 No. 4 of our print edition.

I have been asked to address the topic of the future of Christianity and politics.¹ Under the lawless, atheist Nazi and Marxist regimes in the twentieth century, the only serious political path for faithful Christians was resistance, such as that practiced by József Mindszenty and Alexandru Todea, to name only two outstanding examples.² But what about now, in the constitutional democracies that have once again become the norm in the West?

Christianity remains threatened, but not simply or even primarily through direct state action. There is greater religious freedom than in totalitarian regimes, but fewer churchgoers. We are all familiar with the statistics: in Poland, in 1992, 69 per cent of young adult Poles said they practiced their faith regularly. Now only 23 per cent do so.³ In Hungary, Christian affiliation has fallen from 92.9 per cent of the population in 1992 to 42.5 per cent in 2022.⁴ In Romania, while 90.4 per cent of Romanians consider themselves religious, only 36.1 per cent now attend religious services regularly.⁵ In the United States, the religiously unaffiliated ‘nones’ are now 28 per cent of the population.⁶ But this paradox is part of a long-standing modern phenomenon. A very brief historical/philosophic overview may help us better understand this phenomenon, which characterizes our present situation, allowing us better to understand and assess some recent responses to it and to recent state actions.

As is well known, Christianity from its beginnings has presented something new with regard to political life: a certain indifference, if I may put it that way, to the political regime. That is, it enjoins rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s, and hence obeying one’s rulers so long as they do not demand sin, especially idolatry. These injunctions are founded on the faith that the City of God rather than the City of Man is man’s ultimate destiny. This faith tends to lower the dignity and esteem of political life and to make Christians potentially at home in any political regime. It invites Christians, in the words of St Peter, to be ‘sojourners and exiles’ (I Peter 2:11), or to remember, as St Paul says, that ‘our citizenship is in heaven’ (Philippians 3:20). The second-century ‘Epistle to Diognetus’ accordingly observes that Christians live as ordinary citizens; they ‘dwell in the world, but they are not part and parcel of the world’ (Ch. 6.3); and ‘Every foreign land is their home, and every home is a foreign land’ (Ch. 5.5).

‘Christianity remains threatened, but not simply or even primarily through direct state action’

Yet this relative indifference to the political regime in pre-modern times must be properly understood. Christian theologians like St Augustine, who fully developed this argument, continued to enjoin the practice of those virtues that (pre-modern) political regimes enjoined. And here it is important to recall that pre-modern regimes did indeed enjoin, through law, the practice of virtue. Pre-modern, pre-liberal politics were not permissive. As Aristotle famously put it, what the law does not command, it forbids;⁷ the law was understood to command citizens in almost all things, directing their lives toward a certain understanding of virtue and the human good. Thomas Aquinas, similarly, in The Treatise on Law, stated that ‘the intention of the lawgiver…in the first place, is to lead men to something by the precepts of the law, and this is virtue’.⁸ Morals, he contended, can and must be legislated, and that is even the main point of human laws.⁹ Aquinas further argued that the greatest moral virtue is religion, or the habitual worship of and reflection on God.¹⁰ And the single most important business of human laws or of government is to habituate the citizens to be religious, to direct their minds and hearts to the ultimate issues and concerns of the human spirit, to serious reflection on the nature of things, the universe, and the divinity who is the source and highest part of the universe. To this outstanding pre-modern Christian theologian, theological reflection is the greatest fulfilment of human rationality and the highest purpose of government.

All of this changed radically (if in practice only gradually) with modernity and its depoliticization—with the doctrine, articulated by modern political philosophers, of individual rights and of the state, formed by a social contract of free individuals, to secure those rights. In this new kind of regime, as Hobbes puts it, what the law does not forbid, it allows.¹¹ It is permissive. As a result, a new distinction sprang up between the state and society, with the state protecting sovereign individuals, in their diverse pursuits of happiness, from physical harm, but being out of the business of soul craft. Most important to see is that the proponents of the modern liberal, commercial, technological state took aim at both the old goals of politics, virtue, and Christianity and indeed at all revealed religion. I can here only assert that this is visible in the thoughts of Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Constant, and was recognized by Marx and Nietzsche.

‘Modern, commercial, technologically-driven, rights-centred liberal democracy does not answer our deepest longings, to which only religion holds out a serious hope’

I will cite but a few revealing passages. Montesquieu argues that commerce, manufacture, and coming to be guided by the pursuit of wealth and luxury, move us toward homogeneity,¹² and ‘to be but a single State, of which all societies are members’.¹³ For commerce destroys the ‘pure morals’ or virtue at which classical republicanism aimed.¹⁴ It corrodes moral virtue, commodifying and setting a cash price on all goods and services formerly done out of grace, generosity, hospitality, or attachment to high-mindedness.¹⁵ This corroding of moral virtue is not an unfortunate side-effect of commerce but is the very end sought by Montesquieu’s promotion of commerce. For he holds such moral virtues to be at odds with genuine human freedom and prospering. The commercial liberal regime is also intended to bring about the atrophy of faith in revealed religion. Montesquieu even makes the extraordinary statement that ‘religion can be most successfully attacked’ not by persecution but ‘by favor, by the conveniences of life, by hope of fortune…by that which makes one forget [and] throws one into lukewarmness, when other passions act on our souls, and those which religion inspires are in silence’.¹⁶ Economic cooperation for satisfying the material wants and needs of pacified individuals could, he suggests, replace principled stands taken on the basis of stern virtue or religious devotion.

The disenchantment of the world is the intended goal of the modern commercial republic. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, already in 1764, observed that ‘Religion, discredited everywhere [in Europe] by philosophy, had lost its ascendancy even over the people’.¹⁷ Thomas Jefferson, who argued that ‘the way to silence religious disputes, is to take no notice of them’, hoped that the Declaration of Independence he had penned would help the light of science to dispel ‘monkish ignorance and superstition’.¹⁸ The discrediting of religion continued apace in liberal, commercial regimes in subsequent centuries. In his praise of the revolutionary role played by the bourgeoisie in 1848, Karl Marx noted it. He argued that the bourgeoisie’s competition had moved everyone to hold that there is nothing to look up to or revere, nothing but selfish economic competition: ‘The bourgeoisie…has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm…in the icy water of egotistical calculation…In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe…All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned.’¹⁹ Marx warmly welcomed this development as setting the stage for atheistic communism, in which the ‘snakeskin’ of religious faith had been shed.²⁰ Ernst Jünger, inviting German youth in the 1920s to adopt fascism, told them that they knew they were ‘the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of godless men’.²¹ (Significantly, he also, or rather nonetheless, called for resolute self-sacrifice in military battles.)

Today, with Marxism and Nazism defeated, nations in the West have reverted to their antecedent political regime: liberal democracy. But this means a reversion to the political regime whose philosophic founders conceived of it—and the commerce and technology that go with it—as a path toward the elimination of revealed religion and its life of serious moral virtue and purposeful devotion. Joseph Ratzinger referred to this path in an interview soon after assuming the papacy as Benedict XVI: ‘[I]n the Western world today we are experiencing a wave of new and drastic enlightenment or secularization, whatever you like to call it. It has become more difficult to believe because the world in which we find ourselves is completely made up of ourselves, and God, so to speak, does not appear directly anymore. We do not drink from the source anymore, but from the vessel which is offered to us already full, and so on. Humanity has rebuilt the world by itself, and finding God inside this world has become more difficult.’²²

Yet in this situation—our situation—the longing behind and informing religious belief, the longing for a more morally meaningful life than modern liberalism alone offers, abides. So David Brooks, writing recently in The New York Times, remarked with concern on the ‘absence of meaning’ that late liberalism confronts, especially since the end of the Second World War and the 1960s: ‘The great liberal societies…expanded and celebrated individual choice and individual freedom. But when liberalism thrived, that personal freedom lay upon a foundation of commitments and moral obligations that precede choice: our obligations to our families, to our communities and nations, to our ancestors and descendants, to God or some set of transcendent truths.’²³

As Brooks then puts it (quoting Fareed Zacharia), ‘[t]he greatest challenge remains to infuse that [liberal] journey with moral meaning, to imbue it with the sense of pride and purpose that religion once did—to fill that hole in the heart.’²⁴ Having more or less admitted, that is, that liberalism has been able to ‘thrive’ only on the basis of a religious understanding that it seeks to negate, Brooks nonetheless appears to argue that humans can, on their own, repair the ‘hole’ in the human heart that liberalism has itself brought about. He is of course not the first to do so; one of the most powerful attempts to take up this task was made under the banner of romanticism, with predictable failure. Romanticism continued, manifestly, to embody religious longings, but it sought the answer to them in a human re-creation of a lost past—in a past when those answers were not understood to be human creations. Romanticism envied and longed for what it considered in truth to be an irretrievable naiveté belonging to the past. And we do not bow to what we consider our own creations. Perhaps unaware of this failure, but certainly unwilling to let go of the sovereign creative self, Brooks simply turns, in his conclusion, to shilling for the liberal, technological, commercial society: ‘There’s glory in striving to add another chapter to the great liberal story—building a society that is technologically innovative, commercially daring, with expanding opportunities for all; building a society in which culture is celebrated, families thrive, a society in which the great diversity of individuals can experience a sense of common purpose and have the space and energy to pursue their own adventures in living.’²⁵

Glorious ‘adventures in living’ may work as a Madison Avenue slogan for a credit card; it can hardly make us forget the profound need Brooks has identified—to forget, that is, that for all of its material offerings, modern, commercial, technologically-driven, rights-centred liberal democracy does not answer our deepest longings, to which only religion holds out a serious hope.

What is to be done in this situation? Three recent possibilities have been proposed, and I would like in conclusion briefly to address them.

The first is Adrian Vermule’s ‘integralism’, which entails a restoration of the confessional state. It is a proposal made in defiance of, or perhaps in ignorance of, the fundamental transformation of the politics of the modern world, and in defiance of the mass effect on faith caused by the world’s material and commercial transformation. It fails to heed Ratzinger’s repeated explication of the situation of believers in the wake of this transformation. To help divine the likely result of Vermule’s proposal, one needs to look only at lands that have had confessional states. One will find that professions of faith there become hollow, and the state that wishes to sustain faith becomes an object of contempt. To take but one example, the Canadian province of Quebec saw the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s easily overthrow Duplessis’s confessional state, with increasing criminalization of those who stood in that revolution’s way.

‘For all of its material offerings, modern liberalism has been able to “thrive” only on the basis of a religious understanding that it seeks to negate’

The second possibility is inspired by Ratzinger’s prediction of a smaller, ‘more spiritual church, not presuming upon a political mandate’—a church characterized by ‘small, vital circles of really convinced believers who live their faith’.²⁶ I refer to Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. Often mistakenly, though perhaps understandably, said to entail a complete ‘withdrawal’ from a post-Christian world, including political life, it is in fact a call to build, at the societal level, through schools, churches, neighbourhoods, and municipalities, a countercultural shield from late modernity’s high-tech glitter and gutter, keeping out especially the baleful influence of the internet on its members and their children. It has encouraged healthy life in American towns like Hyattsville (Maryland), Front Royal (Virginia), and Steubenville (Pennsylvania). But its success has, as Dreher well knows, at least two political requirements: the protection of what in the US are called first amendment rights, and the renewal of federalism in the US (or in the EU, the protection of national and local governance) to sustain the freedom needed for self-government. Activist courts threaten it, as does FBI surveillance of parents who oppose laws demanding respect for an ever-increasing diversity of ‘lifestyles’, and even of those who attend the Latin mass. Dreher’s project can succeed, then, only with vigilant and strict political control of the administrative state. In Europe, this will require reigning in the EU. But in both the US and Europe, the political requirements can be met only with sufficient numbers of sympathetic political leaders.

This leads to the third, complementary proposal: Pierre Manent’s ‘Christian mark’,²⁷ that is, acting now on Europe’s fading but still present awareness of its Christian spiritual heritage. A Tocquevillian, Manent recognizes that liberal practice has often been better than liberal theory, and hence that we are not simply prisoners of our modern origins. He does see clearly, though, the link between modern, liberal depoliticization and the de-Christianization of contemporary Europe. This is most striking in his critique of the relentlessly pursued project of ‘identity’ construction, be it of individuals, of ‘groups’, or of ‘cultures’. ‘Identity’, Manent reminds us, results from the exercise of subjective freedom by selves who are conceived of as fully autonomous. To speak of identity is to imply that no way of life is better than another. Proponents of ‘identity’ must therefore sooner or later label as blameworthy what in the past was called metanoia, ‘conversion’, or reorientation of one’s soul by dint of a calling from one’s sacred nation or church. For to convert is to say: ‘I abandon my former, mistaken path and return to a better way, the right way.’ By enjoining absolute respect for constructed ‘identities’ the latest proponents of liberalism join hands, Manent points out, with religious fundamentalists who punish apostasy with death: ‘There is no longer any legitimate transformation or change of mind, because no one preference is more legitimate than any other. Under a flashing neon sign proclaiming ‘human unity’, contemporary Europeans would have humanity arrest all intellectual or spiritual movement in order to conduct a continual, interminable liturgy of self-adoration.’²⁸

Against this liberal authoritarianism, Manent calls for a turn away from human autonomy and back to human freedom directed by solemn duties that are understood as the path to a deserved happiness, a happiness worthy of the name. He grasps that for healthy, Christian politics to be revived, the moral life of self-sacrificial virtue prescribed by the biblical ‘Covenant’ must be revived, and this means a renewed gratitude for the ‘givenness of things’ or trust in divine providence. (In this, he echoes Ratzinger’s call away from technology and from ‘absolute freedom’ or ‘total autonomy’, which seeks ‘to prescind from the limits inherent in things.’²⁹) Is this possible in the modern world?

Manent clearly thinks so, arguing that it would go hand-in-glove with a renewed attention to the nation and its customs, shared inheritances, traditions, and shared memory: ‘It is up to Christians to renew the meaning and the credibility of the political community ennobled by the Covenant…We will [do so] only by renewing the meaning and credibility of the distinctively European association that bore the Covenant until only recently—that is, the nation.’³⁰

Manent presents such renewal, finally, as the means for European national leaders to address the problem of Islamization in Europe. The Islamic citizen is not just an ‘other’ whom those leaders should expect to incorporate into an anti-colonialist, secular multi-culture, but a religious person, whose longings Europe’s leaders will be able to understand and address only if they themselves first return to their Christian, covenantal calling—a calling, I may add, that has its deepest roots in Judaism. A renewal of the Christian mark in European nations may not stop the arson and vandalization of churches in France,³¹ the beatings of Christians in Germany for wearing crosses and of Jews for wearing a Magen David or a kippa,³² to say nothing of the ongoing Christian genocide in Nigeria.³³ But late-stage liberalism has failed to stop such things. And whether Manent’s counsel provides a more fruitful approach to Islamic citizens or not, his appeal to the Christian mark provides welcome recognition of the need for European leaders, if they genuinely wish to make room for the small bands of faithful Christians among their countrymen to live their faith, to ascend out of the centuries-long straightjacket of modern liberalism and its allegedly sovereign self.

NOTES

1 The original version of this article was prepared as a talk to be delivered at the Bálványos Summer University and Student Camp, Băile Tuşnad, Transylvania, on 25 July 2024. The author wishes to thank Daniel J. Mahoney for his comments on an earlier draft of the piece.

2 On Mindszenty, see his republished Memoirs, Foreword by Joseph Pearce, Introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2023).

3 ‘Poland Records Drop in Catholicism; “Nones” Nearly Triple’, Aleteia (10 March 2023), https://aleteia.org/2023/10/03/poland-records-drop-in-catholicism-nones-nearly-triple.

4 ‘Religion in Hungary’, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Hungary, accessed 3 October 2024.

5 Irina Marica, ‘Over 90% of Romanians Believe in God but Only a Third Go to Church Every Week, Survey Shows’, Romania-Insider.com (16 December 2020), www.romania-insider.com/romania-religious-life-barometer-2020.

6 ‘Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe’, Pew Research Center (24 January 2024), www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/.

7 Aristotle, Politica, edited by W. D. Ross (Clarendon Press, 1957), Book 5, chapter 11, 1138a7.

8 Summa Theologicae (ST) (Marietti Editori, 1962), I.II Q 100 art. 9 ad 2; cf. Q 100 art. 2.

9 ST I.II Q 95 art. 1 and art. 2.

10 ST II.II Q 104 art. 3.

11 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Edwin Curley, editor (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), XIII.10

12 Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois, Denis de Casabianca, editor (Ellipses, 2015), XX, 2.

13 Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois, XX, 23.

14 Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois XX, 1; cf. III, 3.

15 Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des loiss, XX, 2.

16 Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois, XXV, 12.

17 Letters Written from the Mountain, in Collected Writings of Rousseau, edited by Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly (University Press of New England, 1990–2010), IX, 227.

18 Thomas Jefferson, ‘Notes on the State of Virginia’, CONTAINER, Query 17, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/notes-on- the-state-of-virginia/, accessed 3 October 2024; ‘Thomas Jefferson to Roger Chew Weightman, 24 June 1826’, CONTAINER, https://founders.archives. gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-6179. I note that, unlike Query 17 in ‘Notes on the State of Virginia,’ the Declaration of Independence does not simply express Jefferson’s thoughts, but is rather ‘an expression of the American mind, [whose] authority rests on the harmonizing sentiments of the day’ (‘Letter to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825’). It is particularly noteworthy that Jefferson includes as expressions of those sentiments of the day ‘the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c.’ For in a letter to Isaac Tiffany (26 August 1816), commenting on a recent translation of Aristotle’s Politics, Jefferson had argued that the modern principle of representation had rendered ‘useless almost everything written before on the structure of government: and in a great measure relieves our regret if the political writings of Aristotle, or of any other ancient, have been lost, or are unfaithfully rendered or explained to us.’ Whether the Declaration of Independence’s references to our ‘Creator,’ ‘Divine Providence,’ and ‘sacred Honor’ are similarly not properly Jefferson’s thoughts but rather those of others is a matter of scholarly dispute.

19 Richard Tuck, ed., The Marx–Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 475–476.

20 See Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question,’ in Richard Tuck, ed., 26–52; on page 28 Marx writes: ‘As soon as Jew and Christian come to see in their respective religions nothing more than stages in the development of the human mind—snakeskins which have been cast off by history, and man as the snake who clothed himself in them, they will no longer find themselves in religious opposition.’

21 Quoted by Leo Strauss, in ‘German Nihilism’, Interpretation, 26/3 (Spring 1999), 360. (Emphasis added.)

22 ‘Interview of the Holy Father Benedict XVI in Preparation for the Upcoming Journey to Bavaria (9–14 September 2006)’, Vatican.va, accessed 3 October 2024. (Emphasis added.), www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/august/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060805_intervista.html.

23 David Brooks, ‘The Great Struggle for Liberalism’, The New York Times (28 March 2024), www.nytimes. com/2024/03/28/opinion/liberalism-authoritarianism- trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.gU0.AFv2.krErCoKKk-Mf&smid=em-share).

24 Brooks, ‘The Great Struggle for Liberalism’.

25 Brooks, ‘The Great Struggle for Liberalism’.

26 1969 radio broadcast of Josef Ratzinger, excerpts found at Aleteia (13 June 2016), https://aleteia. org/2016/06/13/when-cardinal-joseph-ratzinger- predicted-the-future-of-the-church; and Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium: An Interview with Peter Seewald (Ignatius Press, 1997), 16, 222.

27 Pierre Manent, ‘Repurposing Europe’, First Things (April 2016), www.firstthings.com/article/2016/04/repurposing-europe.

28 Pierre Manent, Democracy Without Nations? The Fate of Self-Government in Europe. Transl. Paul Seton (ISI Books, 2007), 8–9.

29 Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (29 June 2009), paragraph 70.

30 Manent, ‘Repurposing Europe’.

31 ‘Map of French Churches that Have Been Set on Fire, Vandalized or Attacked in Recent Years’, Power Line Blog, www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2024/07/French-church-fires.png.

32 Recently, in Minden, Germany, twenty-year-old Phillipos Tsanis was beaten to death by an eighteen-year-old Syrian national and his gang of ten for wearing a cross. See Greek City Times (29 June 2024), https://greekcitytimes.com/2024/06/29/greek-german-man-beaten-to-death-in-suspected-hate-crime/. Similarly, a Jewish man was assaulted in Berlin by Syrians and Germans for wearing a Star of David, and an Israeli was assaulted for wearing a kippah (see Forward.com, https://forward.com/fast-forward/404978/jewish-man-assaulted-in-berlin-for-wearing-star-of-david). The examples could be multiplied.

33 ‘5,068 Citizens Massacred for Being Christians in Nigeria in 2022, 1,041 Slaughtered in First 100 Days of 2023’, Intersociety-ng.org, https://intersociety-ng.org/5068-citizens-massacred-for-being-christians-in-nigeria-in-2022-1041-slaughtered-in-first-100-days-of-2023/.

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