The University Bookman asked me to review D.G. Hart’s book on how evangelicals have subverted conservative politics. While I appreciate his strength of mind and his craft, I disagree with his thesis that striving for something like a biblical politics is a non-starter. Here’s a clip:
As a professor at a Christian college, I must cede to Hart and his argument in this excellent and provocative book that many of us do live and work inside a movement aimed at extending the lordship of Jesus Christ to politics and every other endeavor of human life. Certainly, I can understand how many Christian political ideas and efforts add up to a “betrayal” of conservatism as Hart sees it. But the call to evangelicals to give up this task of developing a Christian politics and attempting to bring it into being through persuasion, office-seeking, and other work is unlikely to succeed.
The first major barrier is the immense effort (specifically of the last quarter century) that has gone into encouraging Christians to “think Christianly” about every area of their lives, including politics. The second barrier is the related lack of desire that evangelicals have to return to something like the early Falwellian position that the church has no business encouraging activism with regard to matters of domestic (such as race) or international policy (such as the Cold War). That form of church-state separation looks in the rear-view mirror very much like the pitiable refuge of those who were more concerned about intra-congregation conflict than with calling for righteous action.
While Hart likely does not intend to frame exactly this message, in some ways the very civil and erudite complaint against overly ambitious Christian politics comes across as a call for Christians to subordinate their faith (or at least a prominent interpretation thereof) to conservatism. He seems to be encouraging a political secularism of the right at exactly the time when Christians have been working vigorously to do away with it as an excuse for not bringing ideas from the church into the public square.
You can read the whole thing here.
I wonder if there is a misunderstanding? It’s my understanding that Dr. Hart is a proponent of Reformed Two Kingdom theology and that problems that arise when we do not see the distinction between the kingdoms. Here is a short article by Dr. Michael Horton on the two kingdom doctrine that may be helpful:
http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/tale-two-kingdoms
I attend a church and am in close relationship with certain Christians where a degree of backlash against conservative Christian positions is rather prevalent. This has caused me to think more analytically about the conservative positions which I believe emanate from the gospel. It seems to me that if one has a relatively unbiased understanding of history and a Biblical anthropology and theology, then conservative positions in general are the surest and wisest response to the Biblical injunction to “love thy neighbor.” Liberal positions tend to be utopian, denying the fallenness of human nature, and eventuating in forms of statism which kill lots of people. The hatred and vitriol directed at even reasonable conservative programs such as crisis pregnancy centers seemed tinged with demonism and reveal an agenda which hates human-kind and desires to inflict ever greater suffering. However this is a separate issue from evangelism. Our greatest love for neighbor is to work for his salvation. In God’s providence He may permit greater suffering in order to bring more people into His kingdom, but we are not permitted to know such outcomes. It is a false love that would refrain from ameliorating suffering in order to further evangelistic fruit. For his part, Satan’s character impels him to magnify sin and suffering even if he were to suspect that doing so merely increases the rolls of heaven. The character of a Christian impells him to engage healing resources wherever he finds people like sheep without a shepherd and ravaged by evil, even if he is bedeviled by the thought that evangelistic fruit might be delayed
Rather than culling Christianity from conservatism, there are certain strains of so-called conservatism which should be culled. Social Darwinism, for instance and the libertarianism which worships the autonomy of the self.
Lily, I don’t think I misunderstood him. I read the book and heard him lecture on the topic. I also read his previous book. He basically rejects the possibility of working out the lordship of Christ for politics.