How Conservatives Disabled the Churches

Politicos of the Right gave the kiss of death to civically outspoken churchmen.

In my previous post, I described one important precondition for the current coup: Americans’ citizenship has been commandeered not only by politicians, political parties, and corporate lobbyists, but even more by the “public interest” lobbies that claim to be our voices in Washington but in fact usurp our role as active citizens and turn us into passive donors.

It does not stop there. The professional politicos also supplanted the organizations that throughout American history traditionally did provide moral leadership and a forum for citizens to combine their voices and participate actively in politics.  The most striking feature of the professional political firms is their stark contrast with the civic institutions that stable societies once relied on to oppose the abuse of government power: churches.  In fact, churches are precisely what they have replaced. 

Professional conservatives complain endlessly that the Left hates religion and seeks to have it “banished from the public square”.  But it is the professional conservatives themselves that have done the most to displace the churches from their traditional role in our civic life.  It is their lobbies and law firms (ostensibly “Christian” or not) that drove churches from active public engagement (or gave them the excuse to run away).

Making America Great the First Time

Since long before the American Revolution and Constitution, ever since the settlement of New England and during the revolutionary upheavals in Old England that drove that settlement, churches were making themselves into the principal vehicles for political dissent and checks on government power. It is no exaggeration to say that this proliferation of churches as voices of oppositional politics (not “religious freedom” as such) was the driving force behind both the English Revolution of the 17th century and the exodus to America. Similar congregations then agitated for the next revolution in 18th-century America, led the abolition of slavery, furnished the organizational structure for the early working-class and trade-union movements, mobilized for civil rights in the 1950s-1960s, and much more. This dynamic was almost unique to the English-speaking world, and it provided unparallelled moral leverage to citizens seeking to limit government power.

Churches represented values and inculcated virtues for which today’s lawyers and lobbying firms have no substitute: self-sacrifice, self-discipline, sobriety (in multiple senses), delayed gratification, a work ethic (applicable to politics as much as to business), perseverance, fidelity (in secular as well as religious matters), courage. And they supplied the essential ingredient for political success: organization. Individuals may exhibit these virtues, but it is much less effective in isolation.

Unlike today’s law firms, these values and virtues compelled us to action. The churches that descended from Puritanism consisted of us. Clergy provided intellectual leadership, but they were not surrogates acting on our behalf.

That did not mean that citizens could divert churches to whatever purposes they chose; everything was circumscribed by Christian doctrine. It did mean that churches first shaped and articulated citizens’ voices into some coherence, so that people had more than changeable opinions; they had fixed beliefs. Churches allowed citizens to combine their voices, enabling them to be more effectively heard. Finally, the churches demanded that we act, even when action might cost us something, and even when government officials were too weak or corrupt.

Unredeemed?

Today, churches have almost zero civic role except when they tow the party line of the ideological Left.

The silence of churches and churchmen as voices of dissent is the most debilitating development in Amerian civic life. This is not to say that clergymen should become political activists seeking to transform society ideologically; quite the opposite, their political involvement should be exceptional and sacrificial, and they should not allow their calling to become one of professionalized activists.  But defining moments throughout western history itself have been marked by dissident churchmen who have stood up in the face of egregious tyranny, pointed the boney finger in the face of the civil authorities, and told them in no uncertain terms that they were abusing their power, encroaching on God’s turf and violating his laws: Ambrose of Milan, Thomas Becket, Stanislaus of Szczepanow, John Fisher, Jozsef Mindszenty, Richard Wurmbrand, Martin Luther King, John Paul II.  

Such churchmen are conspicuously absent today.  This is especially striking, given that some of today’s most contentious policy issues involve the churches’ core mission and matter enormously for our social and political stability.  Supplanting churches with law firms as voices of opposition and checks on government power has had especially severe consequences in critical areas of government policy that at one time were universally recognized as firmly within the legitimate purview of churches and that have now been decisive in allowing the Left to take power: marriage, family, and sexual morality are the most glaring, but there are others.  Among the consequences is to further deprive us of a multiplicity of voices and to allow a clique of professionals to monopolize opposition, dictate its terms, and silence competitition.

Why should churches take a public stand on issues like marriage, the family, sexual morality — or anything else for that matter? Why should they alert us when government abuses its power, speak out as the consciences of the nation, and then prepare and compel the rest of us to do our civic duty, even when it involves hardship, sacrifice and danger? Nowadays we have the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, American Center for Law and Justice, and other groups of paid lawyers to do it all for us (without incurring the slightest hardship, sacrifice, or danger). Nowadays we even have media gurus to think and speak for us and get rich on social media doing so. We are reduced to spectators; all we have to do is click “Like”.

Should we now expect churches to mobilize us and millions of others to stand up to destructive madness of the Biden administration? The lawyers and lobbies will surely handle it instead, and if they do not, then it does not get done. That is why we all sit by helpless as the Biden junta continues wreaking its havoc on the world.

Unredeemable?

We all complain that churches today are useless as voices of opposition and checks on government power. But we must understand why they are useless. They stand in dire need of resurrection and redemption from the apathy, cowardice, and emasculation to which they have been consigned — less by their enemies on the Left than by their ostensible friends on the Right.

Christianity has repeatedly shown itself capable of revitalization and “revival” when it has become moribund. Resurrection is after all its basic principle. So I am not sure we should write off the churches quite yet. It seems Sisyphean to be creating new political organizations when we already have them ready-made in the form of churches.

How to resuscitate them is a difficult question. I believe it is possible, and I will suggest some ways in a future post. The point here is simply that the decline of the churches as moral authorities — and with it, the decline of religious faith itself — is inseparable from the way they were pushed out of (or abdicated) their role in our public life.

As a good preacher might remind us, dwelling on the sins of our leftist opponents will not rectify this. We all let it happen, and we all must repent and repair the damage.