Christians in the public square

Reader Rob Grano found this in the Touchstone magazine files, from 1999. Touchstone, in case you don't know, is an ecumenical Christian magazine whose orientation is orthodox and traditional. Father Patrick Reardon wrote it in the name of the editors. This excerpt below follows a sober reflection on the fact that most Americans approved of President Clinton, despite his extramarital sexual affair and his perjury. This bears special reflection in light of events in this administration. Emphases below are mine:

This melancholy appraisal, nevertheless, hardly justifies a general retreat of Christians from the public square, nor, as far as I know, have any responsible believers drawn such an inference. On the contrary, our evangelical obligation to leaven the social lump is in no way diminished by the increasing magnitude of the task, nor does the growing darkness lessen our duty to hold high the discernible light delivered to our stewardship.

That said, one may suggest three further biblical truths of which the political events of this past year may serve to remind us:

First, the pursuit of wealth is never without risk, and the danger grows as that pursuit itself casts off godly and humane restraints. Whereas limitless economic growth is an idolatrous ideal that Christians should employ every effort to repudiate, it is a rare thing to hear conservative Christians do so nowadays. To the contrary, for too long a goodly number have fashioned dubious political alliances with those elements in political life devoted only to individual freedoms and the limitless pursuit of material prosperity, forgetting the deep gulf that divides those who deny that “man lives by bread alone” from those who assume that he does.

If conservative Christians would actually sit down and study the atheistic economics of such darlings of the political Right as Ludwig von Mises in the light of what they already know from their reading of, say, the prophet Amos, they would quickly discern how little they have in common with the former. (Maybe they will want to do what I did several years ago: spend Lent reading the whole of Human Action to its last disgusting and indigestible page; it was a penance more severe than flagellation.)

Second, war is a very evil thing that God hates, and constant preparations for war will eat away at a nation’s moral heart. This must especially be the case when such preparations include weapons designed to destroy civilian populations. If conservative Christians in the public forum have been excessively disposed to align themselves with purely wealth-driven forces, some of them have likewise failed to put sufficient distance between themselves and those who favor our nation’s growing indulgence in geopolitical military adventures. Simply put, politically conservative Christian voices in this country have been too muted with respect to world peace and the danger of trying to solve each international problem by recourse to armed force. Christians will, on the contrary, instinctively abhor violence and go to sacrificial lengths to prevent it, knowing that if God resists the purely wealth-driven, he reserves a yet more special wrath for the warmonger.

Finally, minds and hearts are converted one by one. In recent years a number of conservative Christian activists have succumbed, in some measure, to the modern urge to replace repentance by program. That is to say, they have channeled their necessarily limited resources toward gaining political results instead of gaining souls for Christ by the spiritual transformation of minds and hearts. One is not here describing an entirely either-or thing, of course, but it is a plain fact that certain sorts of activity require curtailing other sorts; I cannot run and swim simultaneously.