Alastair's Adversaria - The Church And Politics (with Miles Smith IV)

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Dr Miles Smith, Assistant Professor of History at Hillsdale College, joins me to discuss the complexities of the Church's relationship with politics. Miles is the author of the recently published 'Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War': https://amzn.to/4006moM. Within our conversation, I also reference his recent Mere Orthodoxy article, 'Perdition': https://mereorthodoxy.com/perdition. Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy, at argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at 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.

Hello and welcome. I'm joined today by my friend Miles Smith, who's assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College and a vestryman in an Anglican church. It's wonderful to have you here again, Miles. Always a pleasure, Alistair. Great to talk to you. We've had conversations about politics before. Remember a few years back we had one. I do. I think it was with Susanna and Stephen Wedgworth about voting. And I imagine we're going to cover some similar grants. day, but maybe going into some different areas about the church and politics. I think so, yeah, I think we'll cover, we'll overlap a bit with things we've talked about before, but we have really different circumstances than the last time we talked. We may even have changed our mind a bit. I haven't left to the episode since then.

You've just come out with an article for mere fidelity. Can you maybe tell me a bit about that. it seems to be relevant to the subjects that we're discussing. Yeah, I, my friend, Jake Meeter, who's a public Christian intellectual, and an editor at Mirthodoxy, I've been chatting with him about just really politics is tragedy. And sort of the read, there's, there doesn't seem to be sort of an evangelical reflex to confront, confront this sort of essential fallenness. I like, I think tragic is actually more important than the idea of. have fallen us because I think people know that politics fallen, but there's a struggle to sort

of embrace the idea that might be tragic and that we might be even participating in a tragedy. My friend and colleague, Dr. Eric Hutchinson, a year or so ago wrote on sort of the classical capacity to understand politics as tragedy. He used examples from Plutarch and other classical sources. But this doesn't seem to be, this is sort of intellectual terror incognita for evangelicals. And I think it's important because there's a real tendency to sort of view every single potential political action is redemptive amongst evangelicals. And I think you see we've cycled through so many different types of evangelical candidates. Think about the moral majority, Reagan era, the Clinton era, the sort of anathemat, moral anathematations, understandable of Bill Clinton for his

failures. And now, of course, an embrace of a figure who's sort of morally analogous to Bill Clinton. They were, Bill of the Clintons were at Donald and Melania Trump's wedding, right? So I think you have to sort of ask, how can sort of the same group of people sort of arrive at so many different feelings about men who are sort of moral analogs? And there's something essentially tragic in that. I don't think that that means that there's someone you have to vote for. I actually understand the cases for people make for voting for people. I don't agree with all of them.

But I think less we just, less we get to the point where we think this is a fundamentally redemptive thing, I think we have to think that it's fundamentally tragic to the American Republic, which is an Oval Gum. I'm an American. I'm proud to be an American. I love my country. But I can't sort of sit back and say, oh, this is really good.

This will be redemptive. There's something, or prophetic. You'll hear this. There's the politics. That's prophetic. And I just am not really ready to call the potential exercise. of the franchise for either of the major candidates prophetic. So it seems to me both of those examples, prophetic and redemptive,

present a sacralized vision of politics. And there can be an almost inverse of that in the accusation that people have idolized candidates or there's a political idolatry. And in some cases there might be. But how would we distinguish between people being staunched supporters of a particular party or candidate and them having a sort of idolatry of politics. I think that when it's sort of begin, when we begin to shape the life and the moral economy of the church towards potential candidates and towards rhetoric that seems to be based on justifying a particular candidate, there does seem to be

a sort of political capture that's gone on, especially if that's done by ordained. ministers in their capacity as ministers. I think this is what's particularly problematic. I think it would be, I think, thus say it the Lord is a very powerful thing. And the scriptures, I think, admonish the church to use it very carefully. So I'm not sure that thus say it the Lord is something that should be used to justify the franchise in 2024 for either of these particular candidates. it just doesn't seem expeditious, and it seems like the churches would use something very powerful frivolously. And so I think that inasmuch as there's with the candidates before us, my tribe,

conservative people, conservative religious people, have tended to justify electing Donald Trump on not just religious, but often on biblical grounds or on sort of redemptive or prophetic grounds. And it's not that everybody thinks he's a good guy. I don't want to do a disservice. I think there's plenty of people who are willing to concede his moral failings. But what happens is there's this almost tendency to think that we couldn't possibly be participating in a mess. We conservative Christians who are well thought, who sort of think well on these things, we couldn't possibly be participating in a mess by our own participation.

I think there might be a case for that participation. I just think it's kind of a tragedy. And I think it's something that we have to be okay with. We have to have the moral capacity, the I think the capacity in our souls to think in tragic terms. I'm not sure that's a reflex for evangelicals. Maybe an example of this thinking in tragic terms would be Christian thought in the context of war

and the recognition that wherever you stand in a war, it is a tragic situation and there are decisions that will be made that are unavoidably destructive. And even if you're driven by the best motives, if you're involved, you are in some way complicit with, you have blood on your hands. You can think maybe of the way that David as a man of war was not allowed to build the temple. There's a sense in which there must be a divide between that activity for which. someone needs to be set apart as a person of peace and someone who's a man who's engaged in a lot of bloodshed and conflict. Is there a way to retain some sense of the urgency, maybe even moral urgency of some of the politics of our day and our need to be involved without sacralizing them,

without injecting that, thus set the Lord? I think there's something, I think about what the church is able to speak authoritatively on. My pastor can identify particular moral disorder in society. He can identify a particular social ills that come from it. He can identify the political aspects of those things. I think the church is competent to do that. What the church can't do is, I think, prescribe a particular political action to the laity. That's the job of the state. And one might broaden that out to say the job of nature, but that's not what Christ charged the church with. This doesn't mean the church is blind or ignorant or quietist. It just means that the church can't prescribe policy. And one of the things, of course,

in our own time you're you're I think British are you Irish or British Alistair by British English English and I'm an American and both of our governments the government of the United States

and His Majesty's government both allow citizens to elect their magistrates and so there's a sort of a participation in the political order that allows us a measure of what we might call power and authority vis-a-vis the franchise that's not been the norm for most of human history, certainly not the norm to the people the apostles are

writing to. There's no elections for Caesar. And so I think what we've done is we've tended to sort of think of this as almost a churchly act, that because we are Christians, therefore for our franchise, the franchise is a churchly or sort of religious act. And it's not, it's a political one. It's perhaps maybe even a natural one. We should naturally be diligent citizens. We have natural duties to our fellow man. And one of those is a responsible exercise of the franchise, but we can't Bible that. I think that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's the rub, right, where people, where pastors are getting in and saying, if you don't vote for X, I was reading a book by, I'm reading a lot of ex-Vangelical memoirs these days.

And I'm also reading right-wing sort of analogs to those. And Eric Metaxus has written a book recently sort of saying the church failed. The church hasn't acted politically enough. And that's why we're in this mess. It's very similar to language used by ex-Vendix. evangelicals on the left who are sort of saying the church is morally failed and not enacting pick, you know, your favorite, you know, sort of left political paradigm. So I think that that sort of the disposition amongst a lot of American evangelical is essentially a theocratic one, where the church is what sort of prescribes politics and sort of licenses people to go out and do political things. I think that's a, that's a dangerous misreading of what the church actually

does. So you've mentioned the way that the minister can speak to disorder within society. And presumably there are occasions where there's been some signal sin by some public official, or we might think about the ways that there might be divisions formed within the church on the basis of political divisions. And it's affecting the life of the church. It seems that just in a society like where political passions are widespread and a lot of things are politicised. If you speak on the subject of abortion, for instance, it will have a political salience.

It will suggest what way you should vote for some people, at least. And then there's also the question of, let's say, you had a public official who was a congregant within your church and they were engaged in some votes of the government, and they voted, for instance, in favor of a bill for, let's say, M-A-I-D or something along those lines. How do you deal with those sorts of issues within the life of the church without embroiling yourself or entangling yourself within partisan politics? I think some of it's taking the institutional life of the church,

seriously. I mean, one of the things that it seems to me, you mentioned like the idea of a potential officer having to deal with a candidate who's in their in their church. I mean, historically, the church was taken seriously enough as a social and civil institution, whereby people kind of respected its rules. I think one of the sins of evangelicalism is the destruction of the institutional life of the church. And faith has become this sort of commodified thing, wherein there's not really an institution to respect. There's sometimes maybe there's a cleric who preaches at you you're supposed to respect, and you're supposed to be nice to your fellow congregants,

but there's not an institutional life that can bind you, that can sort of move you. And so I think that the essential problem in our day is the church has been emasculated as an institution. It's become so political. It's basically become a sort of partisan. In many ways, it's become partisan. It's sort of another place to get out the vote and not something, you know,

that we can really move people with. And so, yeah. I think that the annihilation of the church and the institution has a lot to do with that. I can imagine someone responding to this by saying that the loss of the church as an institution has a lot to do with the disentanglement of the church from politics. It becomes subsumed within this realm that is so politicized just within culture at large. Whereas formerly, when you did have some sort of establishment, whether that was within the leading class,

or whether it was within a fairly monolithic culture or whether it was just by the government recognizing and establishing the church in a more official capacity, that was what gave the church the sort of heft as a public voice, not just a voice for a marketplace of religious consumers. Yeah, I think that changes, is particularly pronounced in the United States.

we've always been a little bit less institutional in our religiosity. And of course, the rise of social media, I think, has made this probably even more problematic. I'd be curious to your thoughts. I tend to think that obviously I like social media. I enjoy the intellectual connections that you can make. I think one thing that might be worth thinking about is the way social media has shaped the minds of people, I'm 40, so maybe my age and a bit younger. What we've sort of created is a space in which a lot of, particularly men, are looking to something for forms of self-actualization that other institutions historically gave them. the church, for example, you know, intermediary institutions.

And politics was sort of an outgrowth of all those other things. It was just one of those other things. And with the loss of those other institutions, politics is one of the really, and the only thing that matters now. And so you've got basically politics and church and nothing else. I do think there's also a tendency simply because of the, the abstract, the context weak character of social media, that it gets abstracted from particular context.

And what thrives in that is a sort of context-free discourse about ideology, politics being one instance of that. And so people will symbolize, within these grand floppy symbols, people will project their own experience. And that can be ideologies such as feminism, thinking about the patriarchy, and people factoring into that, all these different experiences that they're having

and it becomes this many-headed beast that beneath the water of the discourse occasionally breaches its head above the surface, and you attack that because it represents this great evil. And I think also just the way social media works, it tends to have a polarizing, it pushes people to work. extremes and it's a constant performance of positioning within and four groups and so I

think that dynamic makes it a fairly unhealthy context within which to be forming your politics if you have politics formed elsewhere and you're bringing them to that for a certain degree of exchange that's different and also to form your churchmanship which is the other side of this I mean you think about so many there's so many internet conversions and, you know, think about the sort of evangelical who memes himself into being a sort of traditionist Catholic or, you know, into being a sort of, you know, devotee of the Russian Orthodox Church or something like this. So I think that the Internet, particularly people younger than me, the way they've interacted with it, the way they're formed in it, is not that it's sort of something that I think is, is, is.

is an auxiliary to other institutions. It's a world into itself. And so I think that changes how people will interact with politics, with religion, with a little bit of everything. So for sure, I mean, we're living in a very different world than the one I grew up in in, you know, ex-urban, North Carolina. And church is very different. It seems that 10 years is an age now.

Yeah, that's right. The generational difference between later, millennials and Gen Z is huge. And Gen Alpha, again, it's just a gulf. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I'm 40, and I think that my students who are, you know, in their 20s or, you know, or late 18 to 22, they live in a world that's so different than one than even the students when I started teaching, who are, you know, in their early 30s now.

And so it's a very different world. And so what that means for politics and for religion, I think we're still finding out. I don't even know how long this moment will last. I think we're still in a very sort of embryonic stage of development for how all of this will sort of work out and look. So it is a brave new world and we're all trying to adjust. I find, for instance, talking about pastoral speech,

the presence of pastors online is always fascinating because pastoral authority just doesn't function online. No. We are all peers online. There's no sense of hierarchy or anything like that. And so what you have is a sort of sapping of the authority of the pulpit when pastors are very vocal online. On the other hand, if they're not vocal online, that is the realm where a lot of authority

and so-called shepherding is playing out. And so it's almost damned if you do, damned if you don't. There are people trying to form groups online. And there are also ways in which what happens online will detract from the meaningful authority that is exercised within the church in its proper mode. I think that when I think of like the necessity, like first of all, the internet is influential. I think there's a tendency for some people to say it doesn't matter. I think it probably does. I think that it matters in a different way than people who think it matters, matters,

if that makes sense. It always is sort of leading people to, you can be very inquisitive online. It's hard to join an institution online, hard to meaningfully be formed in it. I do find it fascinating looking at people's profiles and the degree to way. which, I mean, it would be akin to my identifying myself as a Republican online. It doesn't really matter. I'm within a monarchy. And so I have to live within a monarchy, whether I like it or not, I am a subject of His Majesty. And it seems to me that there's something akin to that.

People have identifications in social media that are more ideological rather than contextual belonging. And that, I think, is a significant shift. and it changes the way that we relate to many of these sorts of questions that we're getting into now. Absolutely. I mean, the one thing I think I'm most uncomfortable with online is the growth of, is the growth of sort of shock factor churchmanship. This seems very new to me because it's hard to do in a church.

you can have these sort of sound bites and say, oh, you've never known this before. It's essentially sort of shock jock pastoring. And I think you need the sort of, you need the accruciments of modernity to do that. It doesn't really work. It doesn't really work if you just walk into a church the same way. I was thinking recently about the way that, and in response to some thoughts that you had, the way that evangelicalism has tended to collapse a distinction between the quotidian and the life of the church. And so it tries to be accessible.

It tries to speak as much as possible in the vernacular. It tends to avoid liturgical forms, clerical dress vestments. It tends to avoid churchiness. It tends to want to be folksy, to be accessible. and appealing and all these sorts of things that reduce the gulf, well, not the gulf, but the difference between inside and outside the church. And as a result, it seems to me there is a loss of the wider life of society in its integrity over against the life of the church and vice versa, the integrity of the church over against

the wider society. the two become blurred in ways that lead to a sort of hybrid Christian culture that has a lot of horizontal pressures maintained by the politics, the cultural preferences and values of the community. I was thinking about this. Earlier today, some clip was going around of a person talking about the way that men should not have beards. And very strongly from the pulpit, this was a matter of great concern. Now, at a certain point in the past, it may have been

prudential for Christian ministers to distinguish themselves from hippies or to be seen as clean-shaven within a culture where it mattered to be seen that way. But to make that a matter of conscience-binding teaching from the pulpit is clearly overstepping bounds. And we recognize that. But within a certain type of evangelicalism, maybe more than that, fundamentalism in that case, there is a blurring of the boundaries between church and culture, it seems to me. Yeah, and I think that some of that is because evangelical church, I was at a conference and I made this statement. I want to lean into it. I don't think evangelicalism exist as a religious identity. I think it's social. And it's almost entire. Garrow Hart's book

deconstructing evangelicalism is right. helpful on that. Yeah, my colleague, Darrell Hartz, talked a lot about this. And I think the fact that the matter is these communities don't work as in the sort of ecclesiastical ways that their protest, that their Protestant predecessors

did. So I think that one of the things that you kind of realize, and this is not an internet thing, this is happening on the ground, is the sociological. narrowing of Christianity that's happening quite a bit. It's typically conservative Christianity has become

much more sort of sunbelt family sort of oriented. There's nothing wrong with families or marriage or anything like that, but what it's become is it seems sort of a vehicle to maintain a certain sort of socio-religious identity that creates downstream from a moral majority

evangelicalism rather than a transcendent understanding of why Protestant churchmanship is. And I think you see that in who the heroes of these movements are. And some of them are impressive people and likable people. But I think the problem is, I mean, I work in rural Michigan. Most of my town does not look like my conservative college community. For example, it's working class and has the social virtues and vices of working class populations. And you might say the same thing about someone lives in a blue city or someone lives in a space. So I think that the problem is that conservative churches increasingly look like one type of place.

And that's not an internet phenomenon, but it seems to be that church has become almost merely social rather than being sacramental. And even the pursuit of that which is sacramental is often done the sort of ape, a certain sort of sociocultural paradigm. Think about the sort of internet trad phenomenon you have. And so we're living in a world where one has a hard time imagining a C.S. Lewis. in a conservative evangelical church these days. I wonder also whether, again, getting back to the internet, there have always been these distinct contexts and subcultures, but the internet maybe brings us more into collision nowadays.

And so there's a certain Tim Keller type culture within many New York churches. And if you press too much into that within other contexts, it's going to cause problems because it's not really fitted for, a different type of society to the same degree. And so it's maybe a certain inculturation of Christianity within New York and certain other urban contexts. But likewise with other positions, but evangelicalism is maybe not good at having that diversity within itself.

And certainly with a more populist inclined movement, there will be collisions along those fault lines when we start to come into far more close interaction. The question, you mean, the question becomes like, what's the essential cultus? You know, I think about Joseph Peeper's language of Colton Coltis. Like, what's the essential cultus of quote-unquote evangelicalism? I think it's overwhelming. If you were to press down, it's going to be overwhelmingly social. I don't think it's ecclesiastical.

I don't think it's sacramental. I think it's going to be social. And maybe there's a good reason for that, but I'm just not sure that's what church has been historically. I mean, evangelicalism, I think, is a real thing. And maybe I'd push a bit against heart on this front. I think it's a paraeclesial identity that has tended to subvert and supplant ecclesial ones. And within that identity, the key movers and shakers will be publishers, Christian music, institutions of learning, like Wheaton and things like that.

and also lots of celebrities, names, and pastors sometimes and sometimes just big conference circuit people. And that becomes very much a substitute for the church. One thing I wanted to get into, and this goes back to something you said near the beginning, about the shift to a society where there is universal suffrage, there's a sense of our agency as political agents. I do think there's been a shift with social media

that that sense of political responsibility has been extended. It's not just the vote. It's speaking out on issues in this realm which is not clearly public or private. It's some in-between thing. And we all feel a responsibility to be vocal because we now have the means of publication to open to us. And so we feel in our own myriad little pulpits that we need to be speaking out.

We need to be pushing people in particular directions. And that, it seems to me, is a problem not so much of the culture, but a problem of the media that creates a certain culture almost unavoidably as a tendency of the media itself. Yeah, I mean, I agree completely. I mean, I think that you mentioned earlier, you mentioned earlier on about evangelicalism. Like there's just sort of this innate pure principle.

There's this eight sort of celebrity drive. And there's an eight sort of need for media exposure. I mean, like think about evangelical conference culture. Like, like the, you have to sort of get your name out there. There's this sort of need to be up front. And so I think in that sense, I mean, it's hard to see evangelicalism as anything other than that. And so, yeah, I mean, isn't that how it began with Billy Graham got famous? I mean, if it is a thing, isn't it just Billy Graham got some coverage?

And so he was kind of fit the sociological bill for a certain group of, you know, so post-mainline people. So, yeah, I'm not meaning to make fun of it. But I also, like, I just, it, it seems sociolid, it doesn't seem to be anything real there. And by real, I mean, like, there's, there's nothing churchy enough there for me to see it. And, you know, I'm a relatively churchy guy. And so, I mean, in my real life, I do churchy. So I don't even always like it. Like, I think that's, that's one of the interesting things.

Anybody who's been an officer or done something like, probably doesn't always like it. I don't. but I still think that's real in a way I don't think of as evangelicalism as being real. So you've spoken about the dangers of clericalism within evangelicalism. And it seems to me that a lot of the pressures of clericalism within evangelicalism are supported more by horizontal pressures of cultural and a sort of pressure towards cultural consensus and homogeneity. rather than actually being a very much top-down, authoritarian, hierarchical thing. It's almost as if people are attracted to someone who will sustain a social consensus for them

or to displace it onto that. And maybe pushing partly in favour of evangelicalism, evangelicalism, I mean, we can say it's a populist movement. it's very much related to the dynamics of the market in various ways. But it has been a movement that's been deeply concerned with empowering and mobilizing the laity. And so whether that's personal devotions, getting Christians to read, getting Christians to attend conferences and go out and evangelize, or getting them involved in missions,

it has in that respect, maybe for all its tendencies towards that sort of clericalism being an anti-clerical movement, a movement that's designed often with a certain suspicion of corrupt clericalism, we might think back to some of the groups that evangelicals will look to as inspiration

that their class is evangelical, but maybe not of the same kind. Things like the Methodist movement, which is operating within a very churchly environment and the early Methodists were very churchly people, incredibly churchly people. But yet there's also a recognition. We get people out there in these different group meetings, and we send out lay preachers, and we cross boundaries,

and there is a sense of empowering the laity within a churchly structure. And is there a place for maybe at least one or two hurrahs for a sort of devastating? democratic Christianity that evangelicalism can represent? I think that that's definitely the case in the United Kingdom. In the United States, especially since by the time the United States forms as sort of an independent republic, it doesn't have that sort of clericalist history, it doesn't have the churchy history. And so I think the American sin is never been sort of overweening churchiness. So in as much as if you want to understand it as a broad Anglo-American movement, I don't disagree with you.

I don't think that's been the case of American evangelical life. There's always been a sort of feudal principle, celebrity sort of drive. In fact, there's a book by a fellow named Dickie that sort of proposed, hey, is the first great awakening where you actually have the roots of populism for the first time? time. And I think I look at a figure like a George Whitfield who does, you know, cross-line, who does a lot of the things you're talking about. And yet will also sort of downplay the importance of things that evangelicals might call sectarian, but for some of the other meaningful, I think about the sacrament of baptism. For example, baptism's enormously important. It's how God grows the church. It's the normative way that he brings people to himself.

and a figure like a George Whitfield sort of views it almost as Adiafra. It's like, oh, well, you know, maybe you're baptized, maybe you're not. And so in the United States, in Britain there's never been, at least up until the 20th, the latter part of the 20th century, sort of the mass indifference to baptize. I mean, even you will have people who aren't religious who are baptized in Britain. Perhaps that's another sin in another direction, but that's not the case in the United States. So our American sin is always, I think particularly, a democratized one. We have so many voices in that sort of democratization. It does what the ancients

sort of say will happen. I mean, Plato talks about out this. The democratic soul sort of always, Heratis mentions this too. It always ends up leading to sort of some sort of authoritarianism. And I think that sort of the democratized evangelical soul lends itself to a specific form of clerical authoritarianism quite easy. I mean, look at, look at how a pastor can run a church, right? Without, and these aren't these sort of independent type churches. They don't have any ruling elders. They don't have bishops. So there's no, there's no really sort of controlling authority on mere, almost popular authority. So I agree with you. And if, if the world's evangelical were largely in the United Kingdom, I think it would be a different...

We have our own problems here. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So we won't label, we won't sort of lift our American problems on you. But I do think in the American context, it's not been the struggle with churchiness or overweening clerical, sort of episcopal or authority in those sense. One thing that reading some of your comments and interacting with you have often wondered about is the place for the church to be political in itself. Now, there's a number of ways we might talk about that, might think about the way Hooker, Richard, someone like Richard Hooker,

recognises the church itself is a polity, it has to run its affairs, and to a certain extent, there should be a recognition of it has been like any other human and governed institution. And like a university or some other institution, there need to be decisions made about meeting times, about buildings, about all sorts of other matters that will be binding upon and regulating the church's behavior, but not necessarily binding the conscience. And so there's the church as a visible institution

that has to run its affairs. But then there's also the fact that the church is speaking, in the name of the risen Christ who's on the throne. And there's he's the king of kings. He's the one who represents, as it were, the tell us of all sovereignty and authority. How can we represent the force of that within the realm of politics or within a politicized society without getting entangled or subjecting the church to the rule of our very petty partisan politics. I think that in the United States, at least among reform circles, you're often hear the term spirituality of church used.

And that's not an uncommon polemic. I was raised Presbyterians, so I tend to hear that. Anglicans, I think, have a little bit of a better way of doing. Anglicans will often talk about the independence of the church instead of the spirituality of the church. And I think this distinction is important because this Anglican language leaves a big space for the church to understand. It's not merely spiritual, right? We aren't merely spiritual. But likewise, we exist within but independent of the temporal kingdom.

So we're a spiritual society that exists within can speak to. but are independent of in specific ways the temporal kingdom. And so I think that that's a different language of two kingdoms than, say, evangelicals have. Where there's a lot of blurring and or a certain type of Presbyterian, which views almost the church as annihilated in a temporal context altogether. And so Anglicans have understood that there's something like independence, that we have have to keep our independence. We will talk to you. We will have a conversation with politics. We will have a conversation with charity. We will have a conversation about natural disaster.

We can speak to all those things, but what we can't do is lose our independence. The church can't lose this independence. So I've always liked that language of the independence of the church rather than the spirituality of the church. And I think that distinction is important because it says, look, of course we are here in the temporal order. We observe things. We observe vice and how that, you know, messes with not merely nature, but politics and can even mess with the church itself at time. So the church isn't just some sort of blind, you know, agent that can't speak. It's also not something that doesn't exist in the temporal world. I think that's what some excessive spirituality of the church readings, Lenned off too. I like this idea of we're independent, but it can also speak to things in society. The British tendency is, and I think it's a good one, is to call the Church of England the chaplain of the nation. The chaplains aren't out there fighting in the same way that other soldiers are, but they're still with them, and they speak to them. But a soldier never is supposed to sort of turn the chaplain into himself.

There's always a difference there. I wonder whether part of what we need is an expansion of our sense of what is political, in the broader sense of speaking to the life of the polity, and might think about the way that I often think about the way that the king is at the same time supposed to be not political and also political. He's not to be partisan and to just represent one particular side of the political aisle. He's supposed to be a he's supposed to represent the unity of the nation

in a way that upholds the peace and the common good. There's a sense in which he's supposed to be actively involved as a counsellor and as someone consulted by the government. He's the one who owns the government in one sense. It's his government and his faces on all the coins and the stamps, etc. There's a sense in which there's an authority and a sovereignty that's represented, but at the same time,

does not become meddlesome and does not exceed its competence. And there's something I think of the church's representation of Christ's authority that should be similar to that. Now, I think the analogy breaks down at many points. But it also, for me, it shows just the complicated character of the political. There's some ways in which, the king can be more powerfully political because he's not representing partisan politics. He's representing something deeper about sovereignty and the common good.

But that requires, I think, again, great prudence and wisdom on the part of pastors if they're going to do something similar. And to recognize that in taking that position, there is actually a lot of power in not being involved in partisan politics. Well, I think you brought up a really important point. here. I mean, politics is hard to do, or church is hard to do in a democracy. Because what democracy's meant to do, it's meant to politicize every aspect of society. It's Hocqueville talks about this, right? Americans are the most political society. He had ever encountered Fannie Trollope, the mother of Anthony Trallup famously writes a similar travel log of her time in the United States in 1828. I'll be fascinated to read that. Oh yeah, it's very good. And she has a lot to say about

revivalist Christianity, as you can imagine. Although, The Trollops were not sort of ritualist high churchmen. They're sort of broad church evangelicals. But both of them- I suspect Trollope attended the church that I attended as a child in Clomel for a short time. Yeah, very likely, very likely. And so, I mean, what's completely fascinating is like democracy is meant to politicize everything.

And so one of the tensions of, for example, at least the Presbyterian order and some of the Baptist order, Baptists and Presbyterians are still quite different on how they sort of render church and state. But you can't sort of have it both ways. You can't sort of say we want a world in which politics and religion are completely disconnected while also saying the American Democratic order is exactly what God wants. And so I don't think that you can sort of Bible either of those things and have a consistent plummet. Monarchy is better in some ways for churches because it's someone who the church can directly talk to. There's a famous quote, of course,

when King James I first says, no king, no bishop, no king. And so what that's tended to sort of be read as is James supporting the Episcopal establishment in order to support the monarchy. The other side of that, though, is he was saying, look, the king can go deal with your bishops when they get out of hand in a particular way. And so this is good for the people.

So even that relationship, it's just something very different. And it's hard for Americans to understand. We like our disestablished stuff, and I like it. I'm an American. I'm a disestablishmentarian. I'm a convinced disestablishmentarian. But I don't want to Bible it. I'm just not ready to say it, thus say it the Lord on any of this.

So in an American context, it can maybe, be a situation where you wish things might be otherwise in certain respects, but things are the way that they are. And you're coming up to an election and, I mean, election seasons in America, seem to be interminable. But how do you, as a Christian, relate to the political sentiments and debates and conversations going on? How do you participate in those without overstepping boundaries? And likewise, for pastors. And what would be? some of the rules of thumb that you would suggest. I think some of its understanding that my churchly office, which is a lay office,

is such that I can do things that a minister can. So I can actually write something and say something that being in holy orders probably precludes you from. I think some of it's the laity having a better understanding of what their rights are vis-a-vis their ministers. And some of its ministers understand what you said earlier that they actually have tremendous amounts of power if they steward their declarations. Well, I mean, think about if a pastor who never says anything political says something for the first time in like five or six years that sounds kind of, you're probably going to listen. You're like, wait a minute, he doesn't do that a lot.

What's he doing? If the whole MO of a pastor is to be political, you're probably doing, you probably want to be a politician and not a pastor. And I think that's what's going on here. A lot of these guys are using clerical authority as a vehicle for de facto political authority. They want power. They want to be able to tell people what to do. And maybe they have a good reason for doing that. but there's only so many things that a pastor can tell the laity what to do on. And so I think that's the fundamental thing. Everybody understanding where the lines are understanding what the church is. Americans aren't great at that. But yeah, lots of things to figure out.

I don't think we'll get it worked out necessarily before the next election. But yeah, yeah, we live on this side of eternity. and these are sort of tensions that every generation deals with. I think we should be very careful on the right and the left to sort of say, well, it's never been this way before, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, because usually something has been bad before. And I think some of the sensationalism that we see can sometimes lead people to confusion. I do wonder whether the sort of clericalism that you mentioned,

the temptation to overstep those boundaries and speak into areas beyond not just your competence, but your vocation, whether that's a more general thing. Pastors speaking into areas of health and the mental health and all sorts of issues of the day beyond even politics. And maybe there's also an appetite for that sort of leadership, particularly as there's a breakdown of trust in a range of institutions within American society, there's a tendency to want to consolidate authority and trust in one or a few parties that represent a far more clustered and condensed authority and objective trust.

And that, it seems to me, is more a product of those horizontal pressures. And I think we all experience those in various ways. And it's not necessarily something exclusive to the church either. But that, do you have any thoughts on how to avoid that more social tendency, not just the pressure from the front? I think a lot of it is to recommit to the life of institutions. I wrote a book this year, and basically that's the point, you know, recommitting to the life of institutions and just sort of taking that seriously instead of being constantly sort of, you know, thrown around by the whims of populations, maybe your own population. too. Social media obviously makes this a lot harder, but it's just sort of being committed to the life of institutions. It's not something we do well, but I think it's really essential as a stabilizing force.

Miles Smith, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Alastrow. Have a great afternoon. If you would like to hear more of Miles's work, I highly recommend his recent book that he just mentioned published by the Davenant Institute, Religion and Republic. It's one I'd love to discuss with him at some point, and I would suggest that you pick up a copy as soon as possible. Thank you very much for joining me. Thank you, Alastair. God bless you all. Thank you for listening.