The last three centuries have proven that imposing an ideological vision upon any civilization is cataclysmic. So we must conclude—annoyingly—that no formula can resurrect a Christian culture, but only a Christian response to the concrete needs of real people.
Part One: The Rule of Necessity and the Rule of Love
Most diagnoses of our current cultural malaise have focused on either of two narrower causes, the ideological and idealistic, or the organizational and materialistic. On one hand, critics like Patrick Deneen, Alasdair McIntyre, and Charles Taylor condemn liberalism’s seductive individualism, arguing that Lockean ideology has bred religious indifferentism, modern moral relativism, and now post-modern psychosis. On the other hand, critics like James Burnham, Christopher Lasch, and Thomas Sowell have long decried the rise of the bureaucratic New Class, faux-experts dangerously unshackled from democratic-republican constraints.
The first sort of diagnosis, the idealistic, rightly acknowledges that that people live what they believe. Those who believe a literally idiotic anthropology live lives of lonely despair. Yet Locke’s simplistic Epicureanism has been around since, well, Epicurus, prompting the question, why now? A narrowly ideological diagnosis assumes the Enlightenment’s reification of culture, the presumption that a people’s beliefs are linguistic “raw material,” to be deposed by some better formula. History is then reduced to a rhetorical contest between philosophic elites (as with some Straussians). Yet any people’s beliefs are as much a symptom of their real living relationships, as their “cause.”
As pioneer geographer Halford Mackinder insisted, every civilization is a “Going Concern,” an unimaginably complex mare’s nest of coercive and voluntary relationships —defensive, judicial, and economic; devotional, aesthetic, and architectural (like Milton Friedman’s famous “yellow pencil,” cubed). A way of life is impossible to reduce to a formula, and certainly impossible to generate from one. So, as Tolstoy put it, “some men in France wrote about liberty, equality, and fraternity, then other men beheaded or drowned a great number of their fellows.” Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel assumed that they could replicate the myriad achievements of cultural Christianity—Christian “theory”—with alternative, abstract anthropologies. What they achieved was a Confusion of Tongues. Meanwhile, nurtured by Christian service, populations grew, and technology, urbanization and mass communications marched on. This fueled an inevitable growth of public bureaucracy, while the intellectuals blithely assumed that they led the parade.
The second sort of diagnosis, the materialistic, is grounded in the real, productive relationships of a living society and its ruling regime, but it ignores the fact that this concrete organization of life itself imports a substantive anthropology or cosmology. Natural regimes or states arise to meet the brute necessities of a particular people in their time and place: “some need we have of one another,” as Socrates’ young friend says (Rep. II). Material necessities seem non-negotiable, so natural regimes are necessarily coercive in their division of labor and in everything they do. In the absence of an enduring, visible dissenting witness (spoiler alert: Christianity), any regime’s dominion is the compelling argument for the nature of the Cosmos: the implacable heaven of theocratic mandarins, the tragic battleground of heroic warriors, or the plunder of oligarchs.
A people’s concrete organization and its “metaphysic” form a single way of life and develop in a symbiotic relationship. Considering warrior regimes, for example, pagan Apaches, Shinto samurais, and Christian knights share cultural qualities like their insatiable appetite for heroic epics; but between them, the status of women varies dramatically indeed. Christian theocracies (Byzantium), oligarchies (Venice) and republics (Switzerland) all repudiate child sacrifice, certainly contrary to Carthage’s oligarchic norm.
Realism: Uniting Body and Soul, Regime and Society
We must connect the dots between the metaphysical and structural diagnoses of the new regime and its implicit cosmology. Our current bureaucratic insurgency is akin to German warrior bands, surging over the frozen Rhine. De Tocqueville warned two hundred years ago, that a democratic republic faced the baleful prospect of a bureaucratic tyranny. And as Plato suggests, a new regime itself imports a generic cosmology, as German warriors initially overlaid the old theocratic Empire with a brutal cosmos of tragic heroism. Today, we’re being overlain by a cosmos of mechanical indifference by an inevitable—but not hopeless—bureaucratic regime.
For five hundred years, Christians have been distracted by a contest of ideologies, the “treason of the intellectuals.” Epicurean propagandists as far back as Marsilius, Machiavelli and Montaigne mocked the Good News of Original Sin as priestly duplicity, to promote a “natural” happiness. They took for granted the benefits of Christian culture, the sap of the branch beneath them, while underestimating human malice and despair. Seeing only Christian docility, and blind to the Church’s prodigious cultural achievement, Hobbes and Rousseau concluded that human nature is utterly malleable. Ever since, intellectuals have competed to impose badly sketched cartoons of human destiny onto a Christian civilization. They took for granted the uniquely Christian achievement of voluntary societies with substantial autonomy from their coercive regimes.
Sometimes, a collision of interests is an opportunity for legislators to recast a regime. Like Solon’s Athens, the Glorious Revolution, or American Founding, this works only if they work within the limitations and aspirations of the broader society. Their success is measured, not by some abstract legitimacy, but by a new and enduring concord. Asked if he’d given Athenians the best law, Solon famously replied, “The best they could accept.” Where the concrete limitations of the “Going Concern” are not respected (like the French National Assembly outlawing hunger), the result is catastrophe (like the Terror). The distinction between founding legislators and revolutionary ideologues is crucial when later we consider the American founding.
Throughout history, given inevitable demographic change, peace-loving Christian societies have enjoyed an incomparable continuity (thus the reality of history itself), despite their perennially confrontations with new regimes This Western Exceptionalism—personal rights, liberal education, free association, limited government and natural science—arose only given their sacrificial service in teaching, nursing, and sheltering the poor: free services of love. Today, with the growth of population, trade and communications, the progress of bureaucracy was inevitable. As in our previous epochs, however, the practical challenge is how to evangelize it.
Christian Societies’ Challenge to New Regimes
Only the Christian Gospel nurtures an enduring, dissenting witness to the raw power of a natural regime, what Nietzsche condemned as “the overturning of all values.” Yet this confirms the counter-intuitive axiom that even natural happiness is found, not in dominion, but in sacrificial love. Perennially, the Church generates innumerable, voluntary little societies of love, founded not on “some need we have of each other” (as Socrates’ friend says), but on the need others have of us, “the art of the ruler serving the ruled” (Rep. I)
The Church has always earned an independent moral authority and witness for its loving God with familial services of teaching, sheltering, and nursing. As witnesses of love, these services must be voluntary, personal, and sacrificial. These loving societies are always in tension with the coercive States, busily implementing their core (and justifiable) necessities of defense, civil justice and public works. The States’ duties are necessarily mandatory, categorical, and monetary. Limited within a horizon of a substantive code of justice, a State cannot care sacrificially for the Imago Dei in each unique person. The perennial challenge is adapting the State to the fact that, beyond its core necessities, love liberated is simply more practical, productive and innovative, working infinitely better than public regulation for a Common Good.
Tragically, as we’ll see, over the past century, progressive Christian denominations downloaded their charitable duties—services of love—onto the public administration. By abandoning their familial responsibilities, they voided their witness of love and moral authority. As Plato said, regimes fall when their officers themselves—the religious elite—betray their visible, defining purpose. Rendered into bureaucratic protocols, and administered by anonymous bureaucrats, these personal services were necessarily corrupted. Liberal education became occupational training and now public propaganda. Nursing became medical protocols and now herd management. Shelter became welfare dependency and now tribal subsidies
The new regime can and must be moderated by representative institutions, but this is possible only with persistent Christian witness. We need prudent, sacrificial witness in the loving services of teaching, nursing and shelter, elevating the family. If that seem improbable, consider our forbearers, the Benedictines of the 10th century. Monasteries were little islands of love in a sea of brutal warriors. Yet over time, they taught reverence for women and chastity as a manly virtues to the unlettered sons of fratricidal chieftains, an unimaginable cultural achievement.
Natural Regimes and the Worship of Power
Outside the West, there’s never been the distinction of Church and State. The State has always trumpeted its Divine authority, so Classical political science stressed the unity of the regime, the visible human character of different forms of sovereignty. Warrior regimes (like the Samurais or Apaches) see the Cosmos as a glorious battleground for a glorious death. Oligarchic regimes (like Carthage) see the universe as a treasure vault for industrious larceny. Democratic regimes (like pagan Athens) see the world as a stage for salacious spectacle. Given the press of its local urgencies and opportunities, a definable human type always rises to unquestionable, coercive visibility and therefore oracular power.
The Christian West’s succession of ruling offices bears an eerie resemblance to the “tragic decline” of regimes in Plato’s Republic. The improbable rule of his Philosopher King was pantomimed by Rome’s Pontifex Maximus and his imperial bureaucracy; and for Christianity’s first 500 years, sacrificial theologian-bishops fought ceaselessly to preserve their freedom from his Caesaro-papist pretensions. Over the next 500 years, Germanic warriors provided the anarchy, within which spontaneous monasteries nurtured the institutional autonomy and spontaneity of Christian social services. Then came the oligarchic nationalism of the Renaissance and Reformation, post-Enlightenment democracies, and now, “doubling-back” through the post-Woodstock “tyranny of relativism,” monolithic bureaucracy.
Thinking outside one’s regime is almost impossible. One instructive example is the attempted coup of Japanese samurais at the end of World War Two, defying the divine Emperor’s call to surrender. Glorifying death, engrossed in a cosmic battlefield, these unwavering warriors embraced collective annihilation, even after two atomic bombs. They clung to their traditional duty to “smash the gems”—destroy everything, rather than let it be taken booty by their enemies. This seems insane, yet, in the light of Christian revelation, most natural regimes seem suicidal.
To some extent, our budding bureaucratic rulers have already imported their faith in a merciless, impersonal universe. Like simmering frogs, we’ve already accept as normal, what, sixty years ago, we would have considered malicious psychosis. Historically, the ultimate terminus of a fully developed imperial economy is an Oriental Despotism, and we’re almost there.
The State that Swallows Society
The inner dynamics of a theocracy or bureaucratic regime were first dissected by the Marxist defector Karl Wittfogel in his cancelled masterpiece, Oriental Despotism (Yale, 1962). In 500 dense pages of comparative political economics, Wittfogel argues that any fully developed imperial economy and unfettered State ultimately consumes its entire Society. It absorbs all property into the public domain, mutates all private enterprise into public works, and reduces its subjects to anonymous work levies and military drafts, all under the temple guards of a deified sovereign. Barring disasters, natural or military, this is humanity’s natural political destiny.
The bureaucratic regime’s absolute power naturally and inevitably evangelizes a mechanistic, impersonal, and despotic universe, which in turn legitimates the State’s absolute power. In Archaic times, its authority was wielded by priest-scientists, Egyptian astronomers or Chinese Mandarins. At its best, Confucianism respected its peasants’ natural religion of ancestor worship, yet its cosmology was frozen, impersonal and merciless. The peasants of Babylon and Egypt were kept busy and docile between harvesting and planting, by building sacred temples. At their worst, Aztec public works greased the gears of a ravenous cosmos with the blood of tens-of-thousands of real human beings, sacrificed to their demonic butterfly god.
Contemplating the Aztec example: only rationalistic human beings, prostrate beneath a cold, merciless zodiac, could let themselves be slaughtered with such fatalistic docility. No purely instinctual animal could ever submit to such butchery. In a four-day festival, forty thousand real people are marched up Tenochtitlan Temple, to have their hearts ripped out and gaping bodies flopped down the pyramid’s four sides, thoroughly baptizing it in blood. Imagine the flies. Yet no one resisted. Pace Rousseau, such is natural humanity’s expectation of Divine Retribution.
Today, such authority is claimed by Marxist historical science, with four million Ukrainians massacred in Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, or 40 million in Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In the West, Catastrophic Scientism, scientists corrupted by State patronage, claim the same priestly wisdom, wielding the absolutist Precautionary Principle. Human nature abhors a spiritual vacuum; so they can inflict the ritual sacrifices of epidemiology, climatology and environmentalism upon a docile society, in propitiation for our common sin of being human. The promise of Progressivism—ubiquitous bureaucracy—has mutated from “maximizing Good” into “forestalling Evil.”
Such universal malice is not of course inevitable under a bureaucracy, and every sort of natural regime can provide equally malicious examples. But it gives pause to think that the British Museum recently celebrated the “beauty” of Aztec art, cartoons capable of admiration, only if one abstracts from—the sin of bureaucracy—the real human persons being slaughtered.
Bureaucratic dominion arises naturally in public works, like China’s great irrigation canals. In a work levy, we question our fate no more than ants in an anthill. When bureaucracy absorbs all enterprise, as Thomas Sowell says, “procedures are everything, and results, nothing.” People are mere numbers, as in Stalin’s quip, “One death is a tragedy; ten thousand, a mere statistic.” This dehumanizing authority is now wielded by public health administrators like Britain’s National Health Service: statistical science reducing personal care to drug protocols, and human flourishing to a biochemical bell curve. Coerced medical infanticide is accepted with a shrug. Yet the British apparently love their NHS.
The real mystery is not the challenge of the Total State to Christian Society, but how Western Exceptionalism happened at all. Other civilizations rise and fall with their coercive regimes, yet, as Chesterton quipped, Christianity has been “not a sinking ship, but a submarine.” Somehow, free Christian societies have endured half-millennia each of theocratic Roman emperors, German warrior chiefs, oligarchic aristocrats, and nationalistic parliaments. How did Christian Society be inundated by such diverse and brutal masters, then survive and humanize? The Church witnessed to a universal, supernatural love, overshadowing any local rule of necessity, a distinction Augustine defined as the City of God versus the City of Man.
Monarchs with Theological Pretensions
At the dawn of Western Exceptionalism, the Church earned an independent moral authority. This was not in spite of its powerlessness, but because of it. When neo-pagan Emperor Julian, Constantine’s grandson, tried to revive the old paganism, he found the Church’s charity put it beyond his reach: “The impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also,” he whined. “Welcoming them into their agapae, they draw them as children are drawn by cakes.”
Yet cultural axioms die hard, especially in ruling offices. The emperor was Rome’s Pontifex Maximus, Supreme Priest. The Edict of Toleration may have ended mass persecutions, but with the Church challenged by heresies, the emperors insisted on adjudicating our disputes. Their political instinct was to force a consensus, mushy middles for public peace, thus betraying the paradoxical Gospel. Resisting the theocratic State, the Church’s sacrificial witnesses were its persecuted theologian-bishops, like heroic Athanasius and Ambrose. Their achievement was hammering out permanent (and paradoxical) teachings of the Christ’s “perfect divinity and perfect humanity,” and the Trinity as “one God of three Persons.” They were ready to die for the Gospel, and sometimes did, until the emperors gradually lost their appetite for persecuting them.
While the Western Empire fell in the late fourth century, the Byzantine East endured for another thousand years under theocratic Caesars. So, in the late fifth century West, now submerged under the brutal Ostrogoths, Rome’s bishop Gelasius wrote to Constantinople’s Emperor Anastasius that Christ himself “separated the two ministries for the following ages”—geographically, the sacred from the worldly—“so no one might be proud.” This defined the uniquely Western political theology, down to and including the American First Amendment.
In the East, Roman emperors still asserted their right to adjudicate doctrinal disputes, like the 9th century Iconoclast Controversy. Powerless Byzantine bishops, like St. John Damascene, successfully resisted the arrogance, often again to their death. Yet, even after Constantinople finally fell in 1453, that vaguely theocratic civilization endured as Orthodox Christianity, fractured into national churches and tragically submissive to autocratic monarchs.
Parenthetically, Western Christianity might have suffered the same fate with Charlemagne’s false dawn, the new “Emperor of the Romans.” After a half-century of relative peace, however, his reconstruction crumbled under a fresh onslaught of Vikings and Magyars, so by the tenth century, his organs of defense and justice were again shredded. Yet, his “schoolmaster,” Alcuin, had used that half-century to build an enduring culture—a culture that’s come down to us as Classical Education. He standardized the monastic copiers’ script as Carolingian miniscule—now Times New Roman. He baptized language instruction as the Trivium, and science as the Quadrivium. He then delivered this curriculum to thousands of scattered monasteries, independent “points of light,” undefended, but teaching, nursing, and sheltering as they might.
How did Christianity plant the axioms of a free society in the West? It was blessed with anarchy, forcing its witness into spontaneous, voluntary, self-sufficient monasteries. The Enlightenment literati had assumed that the old scriptoria were filled with block-headed peasants, ignorant of what they copied. But now, less arrogant scholars like C.H. Haskins, Christopher Dawson, (early) Lynn Whyte, Kenneth Clarke, Rodney Stark, and Tom Holland have shown that those loving monks not only read the books, but built the moral framework of Western Civilization.
Part Two: Dancing with the One You Brought
The First Apocalypse: The Blessings of Anarchy
In the fifth century, the Western Church suffered its First Apocalypse, losing its demographic race to revive the dispirited, depopulated Western Empire. For its next 500 years, with occasional lulls, it was swamped by waves of brutal Germans, Huns, Muslims, and worst of all, Vikings. Communications and trade died. Pax Romana shrunk into crumbling cities and isolated villages. Yet, providentially, tiny Societies of Love do not require a State. They survive even where only “two or three gather together.” Floating above the chaos, a shattered Church shrank to isolated bands of “silent men…clearing forests and draining swamps” (Dawson)—models of productive, self-sustaining free association, regardless of their nasty warrior chieftains.
The Rule of St. Benedict, voluntarily embraced, united ora et labora, eight hours of work and eight of prayer. Its mandate was hospitality, with Pax carved over each rough gate. Any hungry soul, any Imago Dei, could freely enter, eat in the refectory, sleep on a cot and worship in the chapel. If sick, they were nursed in the infirmary. If healthy, they’d work the fields alongside the monks. These monasteries survived the political rule of brutal warrior chiefs, by freely offering their learned service as “clerks” to their illiterate bosses.
With loving service—voluntary, personal and sacrificial—the monasteries implanted deeply into the culture the axiom of personal human dignity, and norms of voluntary association, personal ingenuity, and subsidiarity—the proper autonomy of even peasant families and menial trades. Working their fields, learned monks modelled the nobility of manual labor, upending Antiquity’s aristocratic contempt for real work. Unlike the Ancients, they valued “matter” as such—material Creation—inspiring technological innovation like crop rotation, stock breeding, water power, and clocks. Most bizarre, they eventually taught reverence for women and chastity as a manly virtue to the sons of brutal warriors—totally mind-boggling to an Achilles or Apache warrior, and disgusting to a Nietzsche.
Starting around 1050, the socially unified Church, firmly grounded in its worship and free education, inspired an explosion of historically unprecedented free cities, guilds, universities, cathedrals, pilgrimages, music, art, and the first experimental science. This was the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Haskins), or what Kenneth Clark (Civilization) called the Great Thaw. Its moral authority and Peace of God ran from Portugal to Prussia, restraining (a little) its princes’ cheerful brutality. So the States were finally able to get their act together, princes defending borders, enforcing justice, fostering commerce and gathering taxes. Between the princes and bishops, there were constant, bitter squabbles over episcopal appointments, legal jurisdiction, and taxation—such endless quarrels, prophetic versus pragmatic, being the cost of a free society.
This was Christendom, from the First Crusade (1094) to the first imperial pope (1294). The universal call to love—tailored for warriors as Chivalry—overshadowed tribal antipathy. There was always a tension between the North and South, German mysticism versus Latin naturalism, personal inspiration versus communal consecration, and the perennial needs for both reform and authority. Yet the alliance between Northern reformers and Southern governance endured. For those two centuries—the High Gothic—Popes were weak, yet holy; Princes rowdy, yet subdued; and the People, devout and confident, with the confidence needed to build a glorious civilization.
The Second Apocalypse: The Love of One’s Folk
Emerging from the anarchy, though, Europe was a mare’s nest of haphazard loyalties (like the warrior-monk Templars), begging for rational administration. Growing prosperity inevitably tempted ambition, clerical and aristocratic. Princes, merchants and poets justly became partisans of native tongues and customs, pushing back the Latin, and the Crusading spirit waned. Bishops and abbots had become feudal lords, and lords likewise brokered clerical offices or benefices, confusing secular and sacred authority. Kings enlisted their own, ambitious civil servants, and the revenue demands of both a newly imperial Church and newly impertinent States could not be reconciled. In 1303, two-hundred years of ecclesial chaos were inaugurated by the kidnapping and death of the first imperial pope, Boniface VIII, by France’s Prime Minister Nogaret. Though an age of intense popular piety, the loving Christian Society frayed at the top—typically.
The Roman hierarchy, now hugely wealthy, sank to power politics in Italy and Germany, thus squandering its real moral authority. So in 1525, a religious and political schism tore the West, splitting the Latin Renaissance and German Reformation, tragically crippling the Church’s universal call to love. National societies asserted their real Christian freedom in discipleship, but drew their wagons into circles, refusing fellowship to other Christians, condemned as idolaters and blasphemers. Ever since, Divided Witness has crippled the Church’s universal witness with theological tribalism.
This Second Apocalypse was sparked by Luther’s 1520 Letter to the German Princes, urging them to seize their local churches. They were delighted to obey. The blood flowed for over a century, in the Schmalkaldic War, Dutch Eighty Years War, Spanish Armada, English Civil War, Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and Thirty Years War, killing (among others) over five million Germans. Called the Wars of Religion, they were truly Wars of Nationalism. Alliances cut across any theology, Catholic-Lutheran-Calvinist-Zwinglian, each prince stoking fanaticism in his own service. The bleeding ended with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, enshrining Cuius regno, illius religio, “Whose reign, his religion.” The princes, later styled Enlightened Despots, were happily put in command of their local splinters of the universal Church.
Across Europe, the Reformation might have been a fraternal debate in a socially unified Church, but it plunged into tribal political warfare. Christians were long accustomed to balancing parallel demands from sacred and secular authorities, given duties to both. But political fealty was secured by solemn oaths, so few could imagine even trivial diversity in creed. The sole exception was the United States, founded largely by dissenting sects, given their diversity and weakness.
As the blood dried, the ascendant State attracted a new class of public intellectuals like John Locke, faux-clergy buzzing, “Religion is too fanatical to be allowed out in public.” Ordinary pastors and priests still served sacrificially in teaching, nursing, and sheltering, but their hierarchies became agents of the State, compromising the Church’s universal social authority. Humble clergy launched spectacular global missions, seeding the future abroad, but across Europe, prostrate before the local political authorities, national sects began a slow death spiral.
Within 150 years, turncoat French bishops (like vile Talleyrand) were evangelizing the French Revolution’s religion of Reason. A century later, Lutheran bishops, seduced by Hegelian nationalism, marched their flock into two world wars with Aztec docility. In contrast, given its enduring, unfashionable Dissenters, England enjoyed a brief Methodist revival, a powerless witness that shamed wealthy oligarchs into outlawing the slave trade. Embattled nations like Ireland or Netherlands clung to sacrificial churches, with an impressive though unsustainable fraternity of political and ecclesial authority. But gradually, Europe’s stormy marriage of universal charity and local patriotism, as cooperative spouses, was corrupted by domestic abuse.
The Third Apocalypse: The New Tower of Babel
The Church’s third Apocalypse is called the 20th Century. The First Apocalypse (850-950) was the Crucible of Anarchy; the Second (1520-1638) the Crucible of Nationalism; and the Third (1914-present) the Crucible of Globalism. In suicidal ambition, a Cult of the Universal State has sought to supplant the Christian mandate of a universal Society of Love with artificial ideology. Nazi racism was a mere blip in this slide toward a ubiquitous, homogenous bureaucratic culture, the ambition for a global Oriental Despotism. And globally, so far, a hundred million defenseless civilians have been slaughtered by their own governments in their lust to build Heaven on Earth.
Global progress in population, trade, and communications meant an inevitable growth of bureaucratic government, importing—to some degree—its implicit cosmology of mechanical fatalism. Some were more vulnerable, like Orthodox Russia or Confucian China. America’s constitutional federalism has proven more resilient in taming it, but ultimately, an amelioration of our current mischief depends on the voluntary, personal and sacrificial witness of Christian families, servant families, and a renewed social visibility of their faith, particularly among teachers, nurses and social workers in the bureaucratic bubble.
American Exceptionalism and the Temptation of Power
The one exception in this age of national churches was the West’s youngest shoot, the United States: American Exceptionalism within Western Exceptionalism. The American Republic was founded largely by dissenting denominations, deeply suspicious of state power (though often inflicting confessional authority on their local colonies): Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, Catholics, and especially break-away Methodists. One now-forgotten colonial grievance was the failure of the king’s Anglican Church to provide missionary bishops, inciting both Methodist and Episcopalian schisms. The confessional states soon conformed to the federal model of benign neglect, as in Washington’s 1790 Letter to the Jews of Newport. Yet it was unimaginable that the new republic might not be generically Christian (however stylish its Freemasonic fringe elite).
Our contemporary pathologists, diagnosing the etiology of our distemper, seem to have ignored the real distinction between legislators and ideologues. The Founding Fathers did not gather in Philadelphia as a debating club, arguing abstract anthropology. They were not propagandists. They were gentlemen, mostly Christian, hammering out a structure of sovereign offices, so that they might live together in peace, liberty and mutual service. Believers like Adams saw utility in Locke’s vocabulary, oblivious to his crass anthropology. Deists like Jefferson knew America’s political freedoms rests entirely on its Christian Society and education in moral self-government. Since then, Christians like Lord Acton, Cardinal Newman, and Orestes Brownson, have seen a narrowly political liberal state as friendly to Christian society, open to—and always needing— constant re-evangelization.
The Founders owed their inventions more to the realist Montesquieu, drawing his lessons from the evolution of the British constitution. Many saw their offices as an echo of Aristotle’s “mixed regime.” However, they leavened this classical intention with the Good News of Original Sin, which they implemented with their enduring system of “checks and balances.” This did not reduce the Common Good to a bourgeois “cage match” (as some allege), but recognized that no one can be trusted with unchecked coercion—that the real Common Good resides in the Society, and not the State’s coercive offices. And in fact, historically, Aristotle’s practical ideal, however attractive, had no traction whatsoever in the culture of Antiquity. Only a Christian culture, subordinating local, coercive political necessity to universal, divine love, could bring it to life.
Blaming the American State for the eventual apostasy of American Society is idealistic impatience. The American Founding endowed upon the Body of Christ, not only the duty to evangelize Society, generation after generation, but more important, the duty to resist the temptation to enact its own moral imperatives with State coercion. By any practical measure, its political offices themselves stayed behind the lines of religious repression and opportunism, and their resilience was manifest within fourscore years. A sacrificial Abolition crusade prophesized the Imago Dei in black slaves, but its political appeal was the Declaration. And its more important cultural appeal was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So ultimately, the war was fought to preserve the Union, a union incidentally abolitionist—and this a healthy ambiguity.
In stark contrast, forty years later, elite mainline Protestant churches backed a coercive Prohibition movement. They were so powerful, they eventually imposed a constitutional amendment on the entire country, criminalizing not merely drunkenness, but alcohol. This violated the Christian principle that not all sins should be proscribed as crimes (assuming alcohol is a sin). Wielding such power, they squandered their moral authority, and succeeded only in supplanting relatively benign beer halls and backyard vineyards with bootleg gin, speakeasies, the Mafia, and Roaring Twenties. By 1933, the popular culture was dead drunk. Scan the “classic cinema” of the ‘30s and ‘40s, awash in cocktails.
Since Christian Society has humanized so many diverse, coercive States—theocratic, warrior, oligarchic, or parliamentary—why now are we challenged by a bureaucratic regime? Plato teaches that regimes fall only when their own officers betray their faith. America’s Christian society was betrayed by Progressive clerics of the mainline denominations, downloading their charitable duty, first and fatally in education (1900), onto the public administration, in the name of the State’s greater expertise and revenue. State-ruled schools were the camel’s nose of the bureaucratic culture into Christian Society.
Faced with massive Irish, Mediterranean and Slavic migration, by the late-1800s, mainline Protestant clergy-politicians turned to government to solve the problem of educating the benighted Orthodox, Catholics and Anabaptists. Through the lens of Reformation tribalism, they saw the newcomers, not as fellow Christians with diverse devotions, but as pagan aliens, an unwashed urban mass, unequipped for citizenship and industrial labor.
They might have respected the autonomy of Christian families, by empowering parent-ruled schools. Instead, they argued, “Citizens have a right to education,” so schools are “crucial public works.” In that ambition, they boosted Progressive pedagogues like Horace Mann, Egerton Ryerson, and John Dewey, and then rode the wave of progressive President Woodrow Wilson, son of the founder of the segregationist Presbyterian Church USA, and former president of Presbyterian Princeton. The Founding’s Christian dissenting sects became the elite Apostles of oxymoronic State Social Services.
Proving its resilience, Christian culture endured four generations of bureaucratic schools, even while cities, industries, cinemas and taxes burgeoned (proving that parents remain the primary educators of their own children, even in their neglect). But progressive State pedagogy could never rest content with Abraham Lincoln’s poetic education in civic virtue—Aesop’s Fables, Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare and Bible. Dewey’s goal was never educating self-governing citizens, but skill-training a docile levy for the industrial economy. Public schools gave no thought to the Imago Dei—though, as homeschoolers always rediscover, youth nurtured in Christian self-government can easily pick up any needed skills themselves.
The Depression’s welfare revolution arguably kicked a momentary market crash into decade-long stagnation. Having argued, “People have a right to education,” Progressive clerics now argued, “People have a right to food and shelter.” In the 1960s, an ever more ambitious medical industry argued that a healthy labor market was really a “public work,” and by the way, “People have a right to health care.”
Such “rights” now mean standing in long lines at government wickets or waiting “on hold,” because nobody wanted to ask whether the Christian familial duties of education, nursing and shelter could translate into coerced administration. The propaganda is so pervasive, it’s hard to realize today that such political rights are inherently self-defeating, mutating spontaneous self-government into docile, careless public dependency. Like Renaissance popes and Reformation bishops, the mainline denominations squandered both their creed and moral authority in politics.
The coercive State cannot enact a Christian Society’s loving, familial services of teaching, nursing and sheltering. To repeat, civic education becomes mechanical training and now propaganda; personal nursing becomes medical protocols and now herd management. Shelter becomes welfare dependency and now tribal patronage. Services once voluntary, personal, and sacrificial—crucially, education—came under public management, mandatory, categorical, and monetary. And the Bubble is insulated from the real human costs of its bloating protocols.
In the Sixties, with dozens of administrative and cultural devices, the Bureaucratic dominion of justice began to filter most tragically into the family. This End Game supplanted the happy Christian expectation of loving mutual service with the discontents of a contractual exchange. No-fault divorce was enacted for the convenience of the elite, confident of their stock portfolios. Spouses became increasingly isolated as contracting parties in categorical and monetary relationships, further obscuring the Imago Dei through a lens of justice and cosmic indifference. The marriage covenant became the first contract where the State sided with the defaulter.
The Constitution may well survive this culture war. England’s morally questionable Glorious Revolution, preserving some sort of monarchy, arguably defused the potential for a London Terror. And given this marvelous Constitution, righteous legislators may get their leashes back on the public servants. One challenge is the Bureaucracy’s capture of scientific research with unaccountable public funding. Bureacracy’s totalitarian Precautionary Principle—any possible catastrophe justifies the real costs of any hypothetical prevention—corrupts real science into religious Scientism. So our politics is fractured by the rhetoric of “pro-science and anti-science.” Still, Western science itself shows a remarkable knack for reform—but that is another discussion.
Prescription and Prognosis: Sanctifying the Family
The last three centuries have proven that imposing an ideological vision upon any civilization is cataclysmic. So we must conclude—annoyingly—that no formula can resurrect a Christian culture, but only a Christian response to the concrete needs of real people. St. Benedict penned his millennia-old Rule in response to the immediate needs of his brothers. Today, we see a return to a faux-theocracy, the religion of Scientism. Its priests are bureaucrats. Their instinctive ambition is to regulate families, simply because families are unregulated. Thus the challenge.
Yet Christian families are already sacrificing loving service: teaching, nursing, and sheltering across denominational divides, with homeschool co-ops, parent-run schools, apprenticeship programs, crisis pregnancy centers, midwiferies, hospices and addiction recovery centers. There’s great potential in the under-the-radar Christian Halls (q.v.) network for post-secondary education. Yet, so many kids today suffer from broken homes, the most urgent witness may be an open dinner table—what most annoyed apostate Emperor Julian.
There’s surely a place for political action in this: pushing back an almost despotic bureaucracy, while a new Christian society grows within. For this humble service, that amazing Constitution and “demographic federalism” are an enormous help. Meanwhile, given urbanization, the complexity of modern finances, industry, and technology, some influence of a regulatory culture will remain a fact of life, across all institutions. Every corporate “human resources” department must run on protocols. Every City Hall zoning office must run on protocols. Every college admissions office must run on protocols. The alternative is graft and nepotism.
In the end, the administrative categories of the bureaucracy will arise from the culture of the society itself, as the Christian reverence for mothers turned rape-loving German warriors into chivalrous knights. This past century would have looked very different, had progressive “social services” been defined in terms of autonomous families, rather than isolated Lockean individuals, with education vouchers, health savings plans, and family subsidies for shirt-tail relatives. In ages past, the Christian responses to our masters were identified, in retrospect, as the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque Ages. Optimistically, in the next generations, we may anticipate a Domestic Age, marked by welcoming public architecture, home-made music, front porches, mother-friendly playgrounds, gardens and home canning, sourdough bread, and the decline of fast-food outlets.
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Republished here with gracious permission of the author from Catholic World Report, April 12 and 17, 2026.
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The featured image is “Charlemagne, empereur d’Occident” (1837 or 1839), by Louis-Félix Amiel, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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