Alastair's Adversaria - Desacralizing And Evangelizing Politics

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

The following was first published over on The Anchored Argosy Substack: https://argosy.substack.com/. Keeping Faith In and Out of Politics: https://argosy.substack.com/p/38-keeping-faith-in-and-out-of-politics Understanding the Boundaries Between Church and Politics: https://argosy.substack.com/p/40-desacralizing-and-evangelizing Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy at https://argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at https://adversariapodcast.com/. If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (bit.ly/2RLaUcB), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/3…3O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035.

The following is a combination of two separate reflections, previously published on the anchoredogacy, keeping faith in and out of politics and understanding the boundaries between church and politics. Few things can be more fraught and complicated than questions relating to the appropriate involvement of pastors, theologians, apologists and other Christian scholars, journalists and commentators in political action and discourse.

Much of the complexity arises from the fact that so many applaud, or are at the very least highly indulgent of, strong appeals to the authority of scripture and Christian principle on politically controverted issues, claims of ethical duty to specific political actions, policies and voting decisions, condemnation of the evils of particular parties, politicians and policies, and explicit or implicit party alignment or support for specific political candidates, provided that these come from pastors, theologians, and other Christian commentators who share their political priors and advance their political agendas. Reliable principles are hard to come by in such a context, where most people have some interest

in gerrymandering principles that legitimate their own political stances, policies, involvement, and associations, while delegitimating those of their opponents. Indeed, to many minds, such principles are distractions and deflections from what really matters. The true issue is which side is advantaged. Appeals to principles can provide a convenient mask of supposed objectivity and neutrality upon highly partial approaches. Deployed inconsistently, or with a lot of complicated qualifications, the smart casuist can use them to justify any approach they desire. Consequently, some can regard supposed principled people with greater suspicion, preferring to deal with the open partisan who is at least open in their prejudices and interests.

Principles can seem much less important than the question of the side in whose favour they are being wielded. Where such mistrust exists, a more consistent hermeneutic of suspicion may soon emerge, something to which the immediacy of online social media lends itself. Rather than expressing principle with candour, all speech impinging upon the realm of politics is judged and measured purely as political speech act,

with the decisive criterion being quibono, which party and society benefits most from the speech acts in question? In such a context, appeals to supposedly arbitrating principles are presumed to be cynical and dishonest. The actual, though typically dissembled, interests of the speaker, are revealed as we strip away claims to objectivity, neutrality, impartiality, and truth, focusing upon where they are punching and where they are coddling, left or right. whether is such an assumption that people are speaking and acting in bad faith, discourse will break down and mutual suspicion will take over. Importantly, the possibility that there might be motives beyond or exceeding merely partisan political ones is not truly accounted for.

The following are some initial and non-comprehensive considerations concerning the relationship between pastors and, to a lesser extent, Christians in other vocations, and political speech. At the outset, there are many senses in which we may speak of some action or statement being political. If we do not make some distinctions, over-extension and equivocation in our use of the term may mean that we obscure more than we reveal. The failure to draw such distinctions flattens out forms of political action and engagement, causing problems in different directions.

For instance, on the one hand, it can suggest that all political speech is similarly invested and entangled in messy world of partisan politics, and that any appeals to principles that supposedly stand over this are cynical, deceptive, or naive. This can produce an impatience with and resistance to moral criticism. On the other hand, where it insists on the existence of higher principles to which politics is accountable, it can leave little room for the difficult prudential deliberations and decisions of practical politics, reducing it to a sort of screen for sanctimonious morality in which opposing attempts to signal the virtue of our own sides, beliefs and motives, and to demonize our rivals, overwhelm everything else.

Peter Lightheart and other self-styled ecclesiocentrists have argued that the church is the true polis, the archetypal political community, a model of how things really ought to be, a vision of how things really are, and a foretaste of how things are going to be. Churches and the church more generally are a form of social organizations. that, in their very nature, cannot merely be consigned to the realm of private voluntary associations.

However, Christians neither relate to the polities of this present age as revolutionaries, nor as quietists who withdraw from engagement in their societies and governments. The message of the gospel is a message that is political in character, Jesus is Lord, and calls for recognition and obedience from the rulers of this age, even though this definitely does not entail rule by the Church. nor clerics exercising a meddlesome role in practical government, nor the kind of theocracy that some might imagine or fear. Understood in this sense, the Christian message is inescapably political,

even if this politics is not politics as we typically know it, which is not to say that it is apolitical as we know that. While the church and its message are not in direct competition with the rulers of this age, they present an unavoidable challenge and proclamation to which the rulers must respond. The preaching of the gospel must be political, and not merely by virtue of secondary application. Such political speech from the pulpit, however,

is not going to be as objectionable as straightforwardly partisan political speech, speech that aligns with a particular party against another on controverted questions of government and policy will be. The equation of politics with oppositional partisan politics, especially in polities like America where politics is overwhelmingly partisan in form, might also obscure several of the ways that churches and ministers of the gospel might have a non-partisan involvement or investment in wider affairs of society

and the ordering of its common life. Practically speaking, such non-partisan involvement and investment might include hosting public or national events, civic occasions, and activities relating to the common life of the polity, such as serving as a polling station, operating as a national church for occasions such as a coronation, hosting civic celebrations or functioning as chaplains for political agencies. In many contexts, both local and national, churches are deep and important elements

and recognise trustees of aspects of the social fabric, perhaps expected to speak and act in a less partisan manner for the common good, for those most vulnerable in the case of its loss, such as the poor or homeless, and as voices of moral conscience in the society's wider political deliberations. In rare cases, churches and their leaders may even have established representation in political bodies, as the Lord's spiritual do in the House of Lords. The latter is an instance of another sense political involvement might have in some contexts, as direct speech to questions of government,

even if not from a position aligned with any specific political party. For instance, the Lord's spiritual have previously spoken against and helped to defeat bills on assisted dying. We could consider the possibility that the more complicated political agency of the church might in certain limited respects be analogised to that of the king in British constitutional monarchy. The king is expected to be both politically neutral, neither publicly taking any partisan political stance nor voting, and politically active, not least in being consulted and providing counsel in a private weekly audience with the Prime Minister.

Beyond the question of such activity, the King also serves as the symbol of British sovereignty, the elected government serving in his name, the currency bearing his image, the judiciary swearing allegiance to him, etc. Nevertheless, the exercise of government is the preserve of elected officials, not the monarch. The King also cannot merely represent one constituency of people within the nation, but must represent everyone and the nation to them. As an analogy for the role of ministers of the gospel, for instance, this might be a limited one, yet it does illustrate the existence of more complex forms of political agency, and even more so when one considers the role that the church plays relative to the monarch and his authority. It also might serve to illustrate the way

in which certain forms of authority can be jeopardized by partisan alignment, excessive attempts to influence government or meddlesome involvement in questions of policy, where the authority of the gospel gets aligned with the sectional interests that predominate among Christians in some context, treating ministers of the gospel as if they were chiefly representatives of some religious constituency or lobby, or with the interests of a specific party, or where ministers routinely weighed into prudential policy questions, or telling congregants how to vote, the proper authority of the church can easily be compromised. There are several other senses in which people might speak of churches or ministers being political.

Pastors might highlight the vices and sins of prominent political figures, parties or voters, in ways that seem more heavily to censure the behaviour of one side, leading them to be accused of being partisans of an opposing side, especially by those who do not recognise concerns that exceed the prevailing partisan politics. Typically, people are far more sensitive when it is their own. side being challenged, and ministers who routinely flatter the political prejudices of their congregants may face little criticism. As people might feel that things

only really get political when views that challenge the prevailing beliefs of their group are pressed, or a position on a highly controverted question is taken, ministers are much more likely to be accused of being inappropriately political when countervailing some social or political consensus shared by their congregants, then when reinforcing them? It should be noted that I am chiefly speaking about Christian ministers here, although theirs is but one of several Christian vocations

about which questions of appropriate political involvement might be asked, and to which differing answers ought to be given. Similar questions could be asked about theologians, Christian ethicists, Christian journalists and commentators, those involved in Christian charities, among others. From another angle, we can ask questions about the bearing of their faith and church membership upon the political activity of Christians involved in politics, from regular voters to political theorists to politicians, etc.

Here it is important to consider diverse forms and contexts of speech and capacities in which people can speak. Not all pastoral speech, for instance, occurs from the pulpit, nor should it, while pastors should be extremely wary of venturing into prudential questions of government and policy, telling their hearers how to vote, aligning more broadly with one partisan camp, or speaking and acting in ways calculated to underwrite some class, ethnic or tribal interests. Such deliberative matters are important ones for which Christians need to be equipped.

The principles typically will not be abstract, nor directly prescriptive, but are values, norms, and processes that enable and inform thoughtful, faithful, and imaginative concrete exercise of our political agency. ideally ministers should be able to teach congregants something about what responsible Christian deliberation about such matters looks like and some of the principles that have bearing upon it while making clear that their teaching in such prudential matters is much more limited fallible and advisory in character subject to many considerations beyond their competence and certainly does not come with the force of a thus saith the lord

The teaching more especially entrusted to ministers also has considerable bearing upon the political action of their congregants and pastors really need to provide guidance for congregants in societies where politics and its passions are so pervasive and powerful with many being poisoned by them. However, such guidance will mostly be driving home basics that should ground and shape everything we do, pray for, honour and submit to authorities,

love our neighbours, guard our hearts, seek peace, etc, etc. Pastors also need to teach congregants to put politics in its proper place, recognising a peoplehood, solidarity, kingdom and authority that exceeds and relativises all temporal ones. Pastors are ministers of Jesus Christ, charged to present his rule and truth. They must beware of aligning with partisans of left or right.

They have a particular responsibility to, to address inconvenient realities to their audience. They are not there to underwrite the political and socio-cultural prejudices and identities of their hearers and fulminate against the evils of their adversaries, bolstering their audiences and self-righteousness, but to call them to the humility of repentance and faith. They must love and humbly minister to their congregations, but they are not mere servants of and advocates for those congregations,

but servants of Christ to them. Christ is their master, not their congregants. They are not there loyally to represent a congregation's perceived interests, but as guardians of their soul. There is a kind of prophetic character to such ministry, chiefly challenging rather than flattering its primary hearers, neither aligning with them nor presenting God as a partisan for their causes and sides, nor as an opposing partisan,

but graciously exhorting them to align with God in His Word. such ministry does not speak into a meta-context of society at large, but to define and bounded congregations. If a congregation is largely politically right-leaning, for instance, the ministry may need to focus more on the sins of the right. It preaches to those in its pews. This said, the concerns of a faithful pastor really cannot be adequately understood within a left-right framing,

and in tackling the sins characteristic of a particular person, political leaning, a faithful pastor should seldom merely be pressing the interests and concerns of the opposing side. Such a pastor is not responsible to advance the interests of the political left or right, nor to establish some supposed balance or mediating path between them, but to establish and maintain the spiritual integrity of a congregation firmly grounded in God's truth. Faced with the crosswinds of partisan and politics, the appropriate response is not reactive or corrective movements to right or left against prevailing pressures, but the deeper rootedness in God's truth that will enable people to resist them. For instance, pastors must protect their congregations from evils on both right

and left, and so no enemies on the right or no enemies on the left approaches must be resisted. In some respects, the most important political message pastors might bring to many of their congregants concerns the existence of realities of ultimate concern beyond and above the frame of temporal politics with which they are so often excessively preoccupied. Such an apophatic message concerning the realm of politics should not deny the value or importance of political activity, nor overstretched the authority proper to ministers, but keep politics in its proper place.

For those who think in terms of total and pervasive conflict between right and left, criticising or cramping the style of either side is apt to get one accused of siding with the other. Yet to uphold the well-being of the church and to declare God's truth with candor will frequently make its ministers inconvenient and unwelcome to partisans who would far prefer ministers restrict themselves to exposing the many faults of their political opponents. The task of speaking with candor about spiritual dangers for the sake of the well-being of the church, the integrity of its message and the protection of the souls of its members,

is, however, one easily undermined or waylaid if pastors become overly preoccupied with speaking to matters of their society's politics. There are huge spiritual dangers in politics, yet is also an important area where Christians should be active as Christians, With few exceptions, pastors are not equipped to speak authoritatively to broader political questions, and in almost all cases such speech falls outside the remit of their ministerial vocation. This does not mean their voices are not necessary. The dismissal of the voices of pastors by some has allowed for vicious and divisive political movements

to develop in various Christian contexts. However, where pastors have spoken beyond their expertise, competence and calling, they have weakened or squandered an authority that is much needed. James Eglinton recently remarked upon the dangers that scholarship faces when it adopts the partisanship of activism. He argues that we need to move beyond the binary of every single thing an academic does as politics, versus scholarship is neutral and apolitical. Something similar needs to be said about Christian ministry.

It must be able to avoid both being assimilated or submerged into politics or being utterly abstracted and detached from it. To return to a point made earlier in this discussion, Christian ministry must not allow itself to be narrowly framed by politics, its sides and its concerns, but must be able to bring concerns to bear upon our political endeavours that will often exceed and frustrate them. Of course, Egglington's points about scholarship and activism

very much applied to the task of theologians and Christian ethicists. For instance, it is even, easy to make idols of our causes, sides, parties and tribes. A task of faithful ministers is to ensure that this does not happen, always bringing us and our causes back before the bar of God's truth. Our highest loyalty and service belongs to him alone. A good indication that a cause has become an idol is when loyalty to, alignment with, service of, and advocacy for it becomes a principal test of faithfulness.

mark a membership and ground of unity and when no questioning, challenging or counteracting of it is tolerated. There are various ways in which the authority of Christian teaching might be brought to bear upon politics. Sometimes the authority of the Word of God itself is being more directly ministered, binding and loosing, or that thus saith the Lord has clear and manifest bearing upon matters of the day. On other occasions in the work of theologians or ethicists, for instance, the authoritative bearing of the Word of God on some matter is being elucidated, even if the theologian is not speaking with ministerial authority, and the bearing is less immediately apparent.

Often theologians and ethicists must exercise an advisory role, bringing theological and moral concerns to bear upon political questions and deliberations, without those concerns being sufficient to settle the issues under debate. The authority involved in such cases might also include the recognising, expertise, rigor, and knowledge of scholars. An important situation for us to consider relates to the task of Christian ministers as those who often exercise a leading role in administrating practical matters of their congregation's lives.

This became especially challenging during COVID when government bodies made often unpopular policies and church leaders needed to decide whether and how to implement these in their churches, especially when many of their congregants were fiercely opposed. In many cases, pastors had little choice but to take positions on these divisive matters, even when their prudential decisions on such matters, which ultimately depended on epidemiological and policy judgments well beyond their competence, were being treated as shibbolets by many people in their churches. In these circumstances, several important Christian commitments and values

started to be placed in various degrees of tension, among them the maintenance of the ordinary ministry of the Word and Sacrances, pastors proper commitment to and concerned for their congregants, Christian honouring of and submission to civil authorities, the prerogative of civil and church authorities to rule on Adiafra, and the duty of people to submit, the honouring of conscience and persuasion over coercion, the duty of Christians to honour their church leaders,

the importance of pastors trying to remain within their area of competence, our duty to love and seek peace with our neighbours within and without the church, the importance of seeking to preserve and practice unity in the church and a very high threshold of proof for placing the church in the political position of acting and advocating against the authorities in their policies and even more so for gainsaining medical experts informing government policy. Many pastors might have considered upholding government guidelines and requirements and encouraging congruence to observe them as appropriate submission to authorities,

not usurping the task of government or getting political. However, to many in the pews, such behaviour was perceived as a betrayal of their interests, getting political, precisely in pushing a divisive issue. Feelings ran high among many supporters of COVID policies, from lockdowns to social distancing measures to vaccination, and they made grossly immoderate claims, rather than merely handling the issue in terms of appropriate honouring of

and submission to fallible, yet lawful authorities in Adiafra, with clear recognition of the importance of freedom to differ an opinion, to voice such opinions, and to seek to change policies. Some idolatrously raised COVID policies to the level of conscience-binding chivaleths, and rather than working to preserve what unity of spirit and of fellowship could be preserved across differences of opinion, weaponised them in ways that could practically excommunicate others. Yes, opponents of COVID policies had far-reaching faults, but their faults were more typically expressed in divisive and uncharitable rejections of authority than in wrongful exercises of it, which is the issue under consideration here. In navigating such issues, churches need to avoid unnecessary division.

Secondary issues, such as support for or opposition to COVID measures, should not be made primary nor treated as shibilis or tests of fellowship. Tribal or partisan matters should not be elevated. In its practical effectiveness, much pastoral authority operates not as a coercive or punitive authority, but through appeal and persuasion. Consequently, pastors will rightly seek to minimize unnecessary division and polarization, and to maintain trust and goodwill with their congregants. For their part, lay people have a responsibility of being tractable to and honouring their leaders. Healthy authority is collaborative in ways that people seldom consider. pastors and Christian leaders need to be clear, in their own minds and with their hearers,

about the forms of authority that they are exercising. In speaking to their congregations from the pulpit, they may often be speaking with the force of a conscience binding, thus saith the Lord, declaring God's authoritative word as his ministers. In other cases they may speak with the authority of the scholar, who has expertise they have devoted to the exploration of a matter. On some occasions they may be bringing general moral principles to bear upon specific prudential circumstances, hopefully mediating through wise, yet non-binding counsel, insight into what a person ought to do.

In yet others, they are figures with some prerogative to determine church policies to which others must submit. In less common situations, they might be advocates for recognition of and submission to other fallible yet lawful authorities. Differencing between these different forms is essential. Pastors can inappropriately bind consciences on issues beyond their competence, such as how people ought to vote. While it is not inappropriate for them to give counsel or to express opinions on such prudential matters,

making stronger claims than this for their speech in such matters is likely an abuse of their proper authority. Nevertheless, without binding consciences, pastors do need to excite and inform people's consciences on prudential questions, including that of how they ought to vote. Such questions may be matters of wisdom, but this does not mean that there are not ethical duties pertaining to them, nor scriptural teaching that has bearing upon them. In some situations, overreaching of pastoral authority may be appreciated, sometimes because it underwrites people's existing beliefs, but sometimes because people have a desire for the false certainty and the social consensus such claims can offer. Yet it is also the case that where people perceive their pastors to be speaking regularly with an unwarranted authority to matters beyond their competence, they may soon find that even the authority that is proper to them is dismissed. Showing due honour to the authority, government and expertise of others can strengthen people's regard for one's own.

This also applies to our relation with rulers in our wider contexts. Even where appropriate distinctions are drawn, pastors and others need to be good stewards of the authority entrusted to them. They should beware of squandering authority for matters of lesser importance. They should pick their battles. They should seek to establish and maintain a good reputation with people, so that when they need to speak with some authority to them, their words may be more heeded and heard in the right way. They should be very alert to the danger of excessive participation in discourse

in places like the internet, where the field is flattened out and authority is ineffective and corroded. Likewise, persisting and speaking to non-receptive hearers can devalue one's words. Churches, ministers and other Christian teachers engaging in political speech have great reason for care and caution. There is a political character to the essential Christian message, yet this political character is often more apathetically related to the political structures of the present age. Christian ethics and teaching can have weighty bearing upon many political questions and upon our relationship to politics more broadly,

even when they may not be dispositive. And even in cases where they might be, the deliberative processes by which what is entailed by such bearing could be determined with clarity are complex and those engaging in the deliberation, quite fallible. In considering what it means to keep the church and its leaders both in and out of politics, there is a delicate negotiation that needs to occur,

yet firm claims that need to be maintained on both sides. The integrity of both the Church and the realm of secular politics, i.e. the politics of this present age, needs to be upheld. We cannot permit either the sacralization of secular politics, nor the politicization of the sacred. Likewise, the agencies of Church and State both need to observe appropriate boundaries. The Church should not ecclesialize or sacriarches. secular politics, nor should the state subordinate the church to its ends and its order.

However, the relationship between politics and faith and between state and church is greatly complicated by the fact that although we must retain the integrity and distinction of each, neither is autonomous nor without its constitutive relationship to the other. For instance, secular politics operates within an age and a realm that is framed and bounded by the gospel proclamation. Jesus is Lord and cannot operate as if it were an amoral enterprise. Such politics must be evangelised. Nor for its part is the church and its message a political.

At its very core the Christian message concerns sovereignty and the establishment of a new political reality. The church must resist both pietistic withdrawal and the sort of containment that would restrict its life to a privatized and depoliticized realm and its message to one of mere spirituality. Yet the church also operates as a human and secular polity under the oversight and governance of the rulers of this present age.

Much of what churches do is not a matter of the authority proper to the gospel, but of the management of a temporary and temporal organization of this present age, concerning the manifold externals that might be discussed in a church business meeting, for instance. In most of these affairs, the church is, in some manner and to some degree or other under the authority of secular political authorities. The church cannot arrogate to itself political prerogatives that it has not been granted.

Likewise, Christians are citizens and subjects in secular polities and must submit to and honour their rulers. The church must maintain something of a balance within itself while any given church is situated in a particular locality, speaks a particular language, is composed of a particular people, and adheres to particular customs, it must also operate as a symbol of the universal and invisible church.

There are a variety of dangers here. The church could be tribalized, nationalized, or otherwise subordinated to some temporal identity that it exists to underwrite and or sacralize. The church might also impose its own identity upon its context, eminentizing the eschaton and destroying temporal order. For instance, while the church is a new family, it does not replace or efface our natural families.

Christians may constitute a new holy nation, but we are also members of various earthly nations. The boundaries of membership of the church must not be allowed to undermine the boundaries of membership of our earthly societies and polities. The integrity of both sides must be maintained, as must a genuine interplay between the two. This is not a compartmentalisation.

The existence of a new holy nation formed a people from all peoples and nations is a reality that must transform the way that we relate to our own nations and to others. Although our earthly politics may appropriately focus on the proximate interests of our own people and governance of our own policies, the fact of the church prevents us from absolutizing such a focus.

The realm of secular politics is also not purely autonomous and detached, The very age of the secular itself is bounded by the Lordship of Christ. The ruling authorities rule as ministers of Christ established by his providence. Their authority ultimately derives from his and will one day be surrendered to him. The supposedly neutral and autonomous space of secularism that claims to establish the terms of public life is a falsehood, nor is politics an amoral task to which Christian moral judgments and ethical insights have nothing authorised. to say. Furthermore, as the gospel is received in a society, it cannot but transform the manner and the ends of its politics. The gospel message, the values it presents, the people it renovates,

and the forms of life it produces will flow out like refreshing streams from the church into the wider society. It was such a Pentecostal renewal of politics that I explored in my recent Theopolis video series. In my discussion with him, Miles Smith stressed the danger of meddlesome clericalism, where Christian ministers bind consciences or speak beyond both their calling and their competence on matters of political prudence. This is a persistent danger in some quarters, yet the pressure is not always coming from the top down. In many evangelical circles, perhaps largely on account of their more congregational form of polity, members of congregations will often be those who are most pushing for pastors to be explicitly political, to the point of treating

this as a shibboleth of faithful ministry. This has been increasingly common over the past months, as many have been insisting, for instance, that their pastors come out more firmly for or against their preferred presidential candidate or political party. Looking at the current state of Christian political discourse, especially in the US in the run-up to the election, one can see several different forms of failure to negotiate these tensions and relationships well. In most cases, people are recognizing certain aspects of the relationship that must be maintained, while neglecting others. There are various forms of Christian nationalism. In some forms such as Stephen Wolff's, there is a strong insistence upon the grounding of politics in a nature that,

practically speaking, is left largely unaddressed by grace. The after-repeated slogan, grace does not destroy nature, arguably functions to assert the immunity of natural politics to the transformation of grace and has the effect of putting a sort of natural politics into overdrive. Within such a version of Christian nationalism, a form of two kingdoms theology functions beyond mere resistance to clericalism, largely to neutralise the gospel and the destabilizing presence of the church in the actual work of politics. This version of Christian nationalism tends to be hostile, not merely to conscience-binding in prudential political matters, but to the voice of the clergy, theologians, and ethicists in the realm of politics more generally.

It chafes at the moral concerns that they raise, their theological challenge to the prominence granted to enmity in such politics, and their relativising of the natural political frame. As such natural politics secures extensive autonomy for itself and operates largely under its own lights, it is at considerable risk of shrugging off Christian moral norms. Practically speaking, however, the theological warrant that such a Christian nationalism claims for its natural politics, and the ostensibly Christian ends for which it is

wielded, can have an effect tantamount to sacralising, rather than desacralising it. It is a politics in many respects made safe from Christianity, yet which claims Christianity is a warrant for itself. Such an approach rightly recognises the importance of natural law for politics, along with some of the dangers of both clericalism and retreatist pietism. Nevertheless, its politics are deeply un-evangelized. In other cases, such as Doug Wilson's version of Christian nationalism, the clergy enjoy a privileged role, yet the church tends to be politicized and politics sacralized. Where someone like Wolf draws an extra sharp line between the church and politics, Wilson tends to collapse distinct realms into each other. An aspect of this is the involvement

of churches and their leaders in partisan political speech, and the alignment of the church with particular constituencies, sacralising their identity politics. Such an approach recognises the value of Christian political involvement, dimensions of the inherently political character of the church's existence, and the need for some sort of evangelisation of political life, yet in ways that sacralise politics and wrongfully politicise the church. Another widespread way of dealing with the relationship is through pietistic withdrawal. In some cases it seems that people operate in,

terms of the conviction that the Christian message is purely about spiritual matters. My kingdom is not of this world. Has little or nothing to say to public and political life, and that Christians should largely be unconcerned with and uninvolved in political affairs. On occasions the corrupt and sinful character of politics and political candidates is appealed to in order to discourage Christians from political activity. Politics in this way of thinking is profane, so must be avoided. It is true that Christians should be profoundly alert to the sinfulness of much actual politics and politicians

and the corrupting effect that this can have when we put our trust in princes, yet determined political activity need not entail such trust, nor a supposed idolatry of power. While this approach is alert to the corrupting effects of a sacralised politics and the necessity of maintaining our integrity, in many cases its faults actually result from its own form of sacralized politics. politics, which does not adequately recognise that politics is both secular and fallen, and engage in it accordingly. Although it appreciates the compromising effects of politics for many Christians, it fails to grant political activity its own integrity and to admit the possibility

of determined political activity with no idolatry of power, and so approaches it with unreasonable expectations and demands. Another less common danger might result from some form of ecclesiocentrism, which, privileging the Church, undermines natural order in various ways. The Church is truly the family of God, and we are brothers and sisters. But this must not be permitted to undermine natural families and their boundaries, the same holds for our polities, that other Christians and members of a new international body with us does not mean that differences of earthly nationality should cease to apply.

However, ecclesiocentrics rightly appreciate that our political practice cannot operate as if the reality of the church does not exist, and that the church is a new polity and people in the midst of the nations, the reality of the international body of the church will relativise without destroying national identity, and will frustrate many forms of nationalism. Upholding both the distinction and the relationship between politics and the church is of immense importance.

So many key errors of our day result from problems in this area. Thank you very much for listening. If you'd like to read this and other reflections, take a look on the anchored Argosy. The link to that substack will be in the show notes below. God bless and talk to you again soon.