Christian Culture Is Over: Why We Need St. Augustine, Not St. Abraham

There’s this town I know that’s got great public spirit. Boy Scouts is a big deal. The country clubs are nice. The Rotary Club owns the town, they say, and the Kiwanis runs it. The United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Cathedral, and the big Presbyterian Church are full on Christmas and Easter. The Republicans and the Democrats get along well enough, especially compared to other places. There seems to be an underlying cultural unity about the town, as if it were frozen in the heyday of mainline Protestantism. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about a town like this. One day a madman showed up. “God is dead, and we have killed him!” he cried. The people laughed. The madman is in semi-retirement now. His job is mostly done. He hasn’t made it to this town yet. But he will.

Abraham Kuyper grew up in a town like this around 1860. He wrote to counter the likes of Nietzsche, and he was successful for a while. Among orthodox Protestants, Kuyper is still the authoritative theologian for Christian culture building. After World War II, American evangelicals, enjoying the prosperity created by “the Greatest Generation,” looked to Kuyper for how to spend it. Their fundamentalist parents hadn’t much advice on what to do with so much worldly wealth. Like Kuyper, the Kuyperians were successful. Writing about the intellectual renaissance among late twentieth-century evangelicals, Catholic historian James Turner said, “From my viewpoint, the decisive influence on the revival remains [Abraham Kuyper’s] neo-Calvinism.”[1]

Kuyper was pliable, protean. He could be enlisted for any cause. Conservatives liked Kuyper because he supported local action. Progressives liked Kuyper because he also supported centralized government solutions. Kuyper wasn’t inconsistent. Rather, in a country the size of the Netherlands, local and central aren’t all that different. In any case, Kuyper’s heirs fought over his legacy in Europe and America. On December 19, after the 2020 presidential election, Wall Street Journal profiled a Christian Reformed congregation in Michigan (Kuyper’s near kin) engaged in these kinds of disputes. The congregation was split, fiercely, over Biden and Trump, each group claiming Christian warrant. Although they differed on the way, they agreed on the goal: a godly society. What if they were both wrong? What if Kuyper was wrong? Christian culture is over.

Saint Augustine found himself in a rather different situation than Kuyper. Things weren’t looking good for Rome. The barbarians had sacked the city (AD 410). It was not a setback; it was a catastrophe. It was one episode in a long, slow demise. The Romans looked for answers. Augustine chided, “You have missed the profit of your calamity.” The lesson should have been obvious: true happiness, justice, and virtue, are not found in the City of the Earth, however impressive it may be.

This is precisely the message that makes ancient Augustine so timely once again. Christian culture is over. Except for a few odd spots, the madman has come and gone. There’s more barbarism around than Christendom. Augustine offers a way of living in such a world, one that does not depend on a Christian cultural consensus. If Kuyper shows us how to build a Christian culture, then Augustine teaches us how to live in a decadent and declining one.

Abraham Kuyper, Subculture Warrior

United States Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) is a natural Kuyper enthusiast, as the New York Times recently discovered. Hawley shares Kuyper’s populist appeal as well as the reflexive outrage of the elites; and like Kuyper, Hawley is an outspoken Christian in a contested public square. It’s not surprising that Hawley or the New York Times know who Kuyper was, because Kuyper was the greatest Calvinist ever to live, after Calvin himself. Calvinism is two things: doctrine and moral reform. John Knox called Calvin’s Geneva “the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the apostles. In other places I confess Christ to be truly preached; but manners and religion so sincerely reformed, I have not yet seen in any other place.” Calvin’s heirs have made some impressive achievements in these areas, but no one succeeded in both imaginative doctrinal vision and rigorous social and moral reform like Abraham Kuyper. Like Calvin, Kuyper did so without regard for traditional structures. Where he needed them, he invented new ones. He was a thinker like Calvin, but not too much. He was a doer too. He moved fast and broke things. The various political, media, religious, and academic establishments all resented it.

Born in the Netherlands in 1837, Kuyper lived in the twilight of Christendom. He was nurtured in the national church, which had largely decided like all establishment churches do that the best way to get along in the world was simply to accommodate it. That suited Kuyper fine, until he met Pietje Baltus. Kuyper was a young pastor and a newly minted, award-winning PhD. Well-educated, successful, and credentialed, he quickly began setting the town straight. He had the off-putting pretense of every social reformer. His self-assurance was tested, however, by the parishioners in the little village of Beesd. They had read Calvin too. One, Pietje Baltus, refused even to attend Kuyper’s sermons. Why on earth?! Because he was a damn liberal—her words, not mine.

This hit Kuyper like a lightning bolt. It forced him to read Calvin again, only this time with sympathy rather than suspicion. The result was a conversion to doctrinal, biblical Calvinism. He realized that modernism, with its roots in the French Revolution, was something entirely different from Christianity. Modernism was a competing life system, a comprehensive way of thinking and living in the world, one grounded in human sovereignty and opposed to the divine. Modernism couldn’t be accommodated.

If not, then how should Christians live? After all, wasn’t the Netherlands a Christian nation? The question has a familiar ring. Kuyper was always combative, but he wasn’t a culture warrior. He didn’t aim for a unified Christian culture the way Calvin did in Geneva. Kuyper wanted a Calvinist subculture. He rallied the kleine luyden (or “little people”), like Pietje Baltus, who were a potent, if neglected, group where orthodox Protestantism was still venerated. They built schools, newspapers, churches, and other institutions by which they could wield Christian influence in a waning Christian society.

Sphere Sociology

Although Protestants, especially Reformed ones, like to skip immediately to ethics and action (it’s our work ethic, not our contemplative practices or aesthetic sensibilities, that we Calvinists are known for), a comparison of Kuyper and Augustine should start with sociology. The word sociology has two obvious parts: “social” and “logic.” Logic regards the order of things; social refers to life together. Thus sociology is the order of our life together. Ethics is about what is good, the good life. Social ethics is about living well together; and deep down, social ethics always assumes sociology. (Ethics always assumes and depends on logic and metaphysics. Scratch a moralist, even a therapeutic moralist, and he bleeds theology.) The deepest difference between Saint Abraham and Saint Augustine is the way they imagine society to be. Once we’ve plowed that socio-logical soil, then we can see why different ethics might grow out of it.

Kuyper’s sociology of subculture is called “Sphere Sovereignty,” taken from the title of his 1880 inaugural address at the Free University of Amsterdam (hereafter referenced as SS).[2] The idea is distilled in Kuyper’s most famous saying: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” (SS, 488). These sentiments have had a powerful, imaginative purchase for many Christians.

The sociology of spheres has two parts. First, a sphere refers to a sociological subgroup or subculture defined by its religious or ideological commitments. Kuyper understood that all people are essentially religious. Everyone has a metaphysical bearing. Writing for the Atlantic Monthly, Shadi Hamid compares Kuyper’s principle to political theorist Samuel Goldman’s notion of “‘the law of the conservation of religion’: In any given society, there is a relatively constant and finite supply of religious conviction. What varies is how and where it is expressed.”[3] Kuyper argued that the expression ought to occur in relatively discreet social spheres, one for the Calvinists, one for the Catholics, one for the liberals, and so on. A comprehensive Christian social sphere was needed within which Christians might live in a larger plural society. The Free University, the Netherlands’ first private university, was a major step forward in building a Christian cultural sphere.

“Sphere” also referred to the various areas of cultural activity. Each of these cultural “spheres” had its own laws or principles of order such as science, politics, art, and religion. By virtue of Christ’s sovereignty over all creation, not just the church, the Christian cultural mandate likewise extended to all areas of cultural endeavor: science, politics, art, and religion, and so on. In his Lectures on Calvinism (hereafter referenced as LOC), Kuyper insists: “Instead of monastic flight from the world the duty is now emphasized of serving God in the world, in every position in life.”[4] This was a reassertion of the traditional Protestant work ethic, with a twist. Sphere sovereignty preserved the comprehensiveness of the Protestant work ethic and the division of modern social arrangements, for the sake of orthodox Protestantism. The separation of church, state, and academy was critical to Kuyper’s plan because the traditional institutions were no longer hospitable to confessional Protestantism. In order to found a Christian university, for example, the academy would have to become disentangled from the church and the state. Kuyper’s separation of the spheres accomplished that.

Kuyper was remarkably successful at bringing this plan to bear on Dutch society at large. Protestants, Catholics, and liberals were allowed their own segregated communities, with their own educational, religious, and political organizations. The ideological or religious spheres of society were called “pillars” (zuil) and the social arrangement was called “pillarization” (verzuiling). There was even a Catholic goat breeders association. It wasn’t perfect, but it was practical and prudent for its time.

In the Netherlands, Kuyper was accused of being an Anabaptist due to his withdrawal from the establishment institutions. In America, a nation disestablished in its very charter, he was a champion of Christian cultural renewal. Richard Mouw, former president of Fuller Seminary and Kuyperian Calvinist, describes the appeal of Kuyper for one coming of age in the 1960s. Social activism was in the air. This was the era of Walter Reuther’s labor unions, Sharon Jeffries’ Students for a Democratic Society, the civil rights movement, and Sargent Shriver’s unprecedented billion-dollar spending on poverty (partly inspired by Shriver’s Catholic upbringing). Mouw was eager to be involved. But unlike Shriver’s he had grown up evangelical, singing “This world is not my home. . . . My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.”[5] This parochial Protestantism had no answer to contemporary social problems.

In Kuyper’s robust Calvinism I discovered what I had been looking for: a vision of active in public life that would allow me to steer my way between a privatized evangelicalism on the one hand and the liberal Protestant or Catholic approaches to public discipleship on the other.[6]

Kuyper opened up the spheres of cultural activity and provided a sacred obligation to engage them.

One City or Two?

Kuyper’s sociology of the spheres is a blueprint for human civilization, an ordering of the cultural house. According to this blueprint there are numerous rooms, or spheres, that must be built out. That is the task of Christians on earth. The big difference between Kuyper and Augustine does not have to do with the details of this blueprint. It is not a difference in the trim work of this or that room. The big difference is that Augustine is working from two blueprints, two sets of plans. According to Augustine, there is not one civilizational house being built; there are two. There are two cities in the world, not one. Working from two sets of plans makes a radical difference in how the house or, rather, houses are built and what role Christians play in these respective houses.

Augustine calls these two houses “cities,” by which he means civilizations. Nowadays, we commonly use the word city to mean an urban center. That is not what Augustine meant. This is not a matter of urban versus rural or suburban. It is more comprehensive than that. It is a matter of order and chaos, city versus wilderness. Augustine’s masterpiece, The City of God (De civitate Dei; hereafter referenced as Civ Dei), is the history of these two competing cities: the City of the Earth and the City of God.[7] “Because some live according to the flesh and others according to the spirit, there have arisen two diverse and conflicting cities” (Civ Dei, XIV.4). These cities are distinguished by their loves and their destinies. One city is motivated by the love of man, the other by the love of God. One city is destined for eternal misery, the other for peace with God. These differences do not merely make for different individuals or even different subcultural spheres; they make different civilizations.

The City of God is not about a personal relationship with Jesus, if by “personal” we mean individual. Kuyper argued that all religion is fundamentally between the individual, and God. Of course, both Augustine and Kuyper taught that religion is personal, between persons not things. For Augustine, however, persons are part of cities, ordered social realities. Kuyper’s Calvinist sociology is democratic. It starts with the individual, not the polis. The City of God does not. There is no social contract, no rule-by-consent-of-the-governed, no separation of powers or spheres. All glory, honor, dominion, and power in the City of God belong to God. Quite undemocratic in fact.

These contrasting sociologies are guided by different founding myths. The Kuyperian story begins with creation. In this way, Kuyper shared more with modern revolutionaries than he admitted. He thought in revolutionary, Rousseau-like terms of a pristine state of nature, and his cultural project was guided by a vision of unspoiled creation. One popular Kuyperian manual is titled Creation Regained.[8] Augustine thought differently. Sin permanently altered the world. There is no return to creation. Sin is the reason why there are two cities in the world, not one.

On an Augustinian reading, the great risk of Kuyperian social thought is the melding of the two cities into one. According to Kuyper, the state would adjudicate claims between the subcultural spheres and the operational ones, even the religious sphere, the church. It does so, not as Hegel’s immanent god, but as a minister of the Trinitarian God (SS, 466–68). This is dubious. All political regimes claim religious legitimacy. They all vie for metaphysical rights, even late-Protestant, nineteenth-century liberalism. In Europe and America, this quickly led to culture-Protestantism. Augustine would caution us. The City of the Earth may minister on behalf of Baal, Beelzebub, or the sovereign, expressive self, but it does not minister on behalf of God (cf. Westminster Confession of Faith 23.3).

Pilgrim Ethics

Kuyper and Augustine have very different Christian sociologies, which issue in different social ethics. Kuyper’s creational ideal calls for a certain way of being in the world, guided by the so-called cultural mandate. Christians are supposed to be culture builders, world builders, kingdom builders, reformers, renewers, and so on. They are supposed to build Christian schools, Christian newspapers, and Christian goat-breeding associations. “Instead of monastic flight from the world the duty is now emphasized of serving God in the world, in every position in life” (LOC, 30). This is what Max Weber called “worldly asceticism.” The ascetic call to Christian world building is a call for all Christians, everywhere, all the time, not just monks and monasteries. Every job takes on religious weight. Culture-Protestantism is just around the corner.

In Augustine’s two-city scheme, Christians are not chiefly builders; they are viators, pilgrims. “Accordingly, it is recorded of Cain that he built a city, but Abel, being a sojourner, built none. For the city of the saints is above” (Civ Dei, XV.1). The Christian way-of-being is to be on-the-way.

The pilgrim ethic is not nearly as straightforward as the Kuyperian one. Kuyper pursued a simple compatibility between Calvinism and the world. Calvinism, he claimed, was the true source of liberal democratic values, as he titled one of his most famous lectures, “Calvinism: Source and Stronghold of Our Constitutional Liberties.”[9] The pilgrim life, on the other hand, is not necessarily compatible with life in the world. A pilgrim lives in one place but belongs to another. The pilgrim’s position in the world depends. He may be a builder in one place and an insurgent in the next. It depends.

According to “Sphere Sovereignty,” the cultural spheres operate according to a law-like regularity. “There is a domain of nature in which the Sovereign exerts power over matter according to fixed laws” (SS, 467). Likewise natural science, the personal, the family, and the church, says Kuyper. It is easy to see how this mindset abets the cultural imperialism that still characterizes the institutions of the West in academia, media, and politics, and that has only become more vicious. Once these laws have been discovered, the technocrat proceeds with scientific, laboratory-like confidence. The pilgrim operates quite differently.

This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace. (Civ Dei, 413)

The pilgrim city lives by God’s laws and knows that the earthly city does not. The earthly city operates differently in different times and places. The City of God works for peace and does not scruple much over cultural differences as long as they don’t inhibit the worship of God.

As a matter of fact, the pilgrim’s evaluation of the world is weirdly akin to Nietzsche’s: “Let us articulate this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must be called into question.”[10] The death of God requires the reevaluation of all values, said Nietzsche. Not only his death but his resurrection also, says the pilgrim. Worldly values must be inverted, called into question, transvalued. (Yes, I am taking Nietzsche out of context, but that is the best way to take him.) The City of God is a masterpiece of transvaluation. It is a critique (not reconciliation or accommodation) of all moral values. It is what Christians used to call “heavenlymindedness.”

This reevaluation of values is the theme of book nineteen of the City of God, wherein Augustine asks, what is true happiness? Epicureans like the Roman poet Lucretius emphasized material existence and therefore pleasure as the source of true happiness (we live in an epicurean moment today, albeit a prosaic one, for Lucretius thought intellectual pleasure the highest pleasure). Stoics like Cicero, who elevated humanity’s reasonable nature, believed that virtue was the way to happiness (the American founding was our stoic moment). Augustine critiqued both. The miseries of life, the constant war against vice within us and suffering without, the inequitable distribution of goods among the just and the unjust, prove that ultimate happiness is not to be found in this life. Rather, “If, then, we be asked what the City of God has to say upon these points, and, in the first place, what its opinion regarding the supreme good and evil is, it will reply that life eternal is the supreme good, death eternal the supreme evil.” As for those who pursue either pleasure or virtue as the supreme good, “all these have with a marvelous shallowness, sought to find their blessedness in this life and in themselves” (Civ Dei, XIX.4).

A marvelous shallowness indeed.

Augustine demonstrates how a number of worldly values are transcended in the heavenly city. Freedom is a good example. We modern people above all prize freedom from external constraints, be it God, rulers, family, community, or nowadays, even our own bodies. Modernity has provided a dose of freedom, but it has come at the cost of great despair. Why? Because, says Augustine, all the means of the City of the Earth cannot save us from the master and enslaver that follows most closely: our own sin, addiction, and concupiscence. The dominion of one person over another is a great evil, but not the worst one. Not only our bodies but also our eternal souls are enslaved, and no earthly utopia can save us from ourselves.

This is not pessimism. As a matter of fact, hope is the virtue of the heavenly city. As therefore we are saved, so we are made happy by hope. And as we do not as yet possess a present but look for a future salvation, so is it with our happiness, and this “with patience”; for we are encompassed with evils, which we ought patiently to endure, until we come to the ineffable enjoyment of unmixed good; for there shall be no longer anything to endure. And this happiness these philosophers refuse to believe in, because they do not see it, and attempt to fabricate for themselves a happiness in this life, based upon a virtue which is as deceitful as it is proud. (Civ Dei, XIX.4)

Hope is the way-of-doing that follows from the viator’s way-of-being (Civ Dei, XIX.20). Hope, not pleasure or virtue, is the source of Christian happiness. This is different from the cloying substitute called “hope” in the City of the Earth. Heavenly hope responds to the desire for happiness, but it is a virtue of the “not yet.” It is neither certainty nor despair. It is not undermined but proved in suffering, and suffering cannot be avoided in this life. It is both given by grace and cultivated on the way. Hope is cautious about all promises of happiness by the City of the Earth, whether from its therapists, influencers, or online algorithms.

Theologian of Decadence

Finally, although more distant in time, Augustine is much nearer our own predicament. Kuyper assumed a dominant Christian ethical framework that still characterized Europe in his own day. Even as Europe waned, he remained optimistic.

Here, on American ground [the lawns of Princeton] for the first time, he [the European] realizes how so many divine potencies, which were hidden away in the bosom of man from our very creation, but which our old world was incapable of developing, are now beginning to disclose their inward splendor, thus promising a still richer store of surprises for the future. (LOC, 9)

No one could foresee the catastrophe that fell on the West in the twenty-first century, least of all a romantic like Kuyper. Living on the other side of history, the “right side of history” as it was doubtless once called, the decline of the West seems obvious. “Make America great again!” “Build Back Better!” Even opposing politicians agree that something good has been lost.

Cultural decline is not unique. It does not negate the real achievements of a civilization, and it does not mean that apocalypse is immanent. All people live and die; all cultures rise and fall. What we share with Augustine is not decline but a specific sort of cultural decline, the decline of decadence. Decadence is not decline from without; it’s not invasion, natural disaster, or plague. It is decline from within. Decadence is decline brought by success, not failure. Augustine wrote for Christians living through the decline of decadence. The barbarians had sacked Rome, and some people blamed the Christians. The problem, as Augustine saw it, was not the barbarians or the Christians. Augustine appealed to the great Roman general Scipio. He “sought to preserve you from [this ‘plague’] when he prohibited the construction of theaters . . . seeing how easily prosperity would corrupt and destroy you. He did not consider that republic flourishing whose walls stand, but whose morals are evil” (Civ Dei, I.33). The “plague” Scipio predicted was not a virus. It was a pandemic of the soul. A malignant entertainment culture, internal divisions, sexual dysphoria, the loss of traditional virtues, scapegoating Christians—the cultural symptoms of this psycho-spiritual epidemic were familiar to Augustine.

Concluding Augustinian Thoughts

Abraham Kuyper constantly guarded against accusations that his Calvinist subculture was really an Anabaptist retreat. Similarly, Richard Mouw worried over the cultural disengagement of American fundamentalists. Is this where Augustine leads us? Augustine’s counsel is neither withdrawal from nor accommodation to the City of the Earth. He counsels peace. Even in an unjust city like Rome, Christians should seek its peace (Civ Dei, XIX.26); but the way to peace—engagement, accommodation, antagonism, or otherwise—he leaves to Christians in their varying contexts to decide. As for Christian artists, teachers, and immunologists? Suffice it to say that beauty, truth, and life-saving vaccines are conducive to peace, and Augustine is down with that.

Our engagement in the City of the Earth, however, is qualified. The City of the Earth traffics in a number of metaphysical fictions. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul discussed these kinds of fictions when he dealt with the matter of food offered to idols. Should Christians eat? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, idols are nothing and of no consequence. On the other, if eating misleads other pilgrims, then why not buy your food somewhere else? Although there aren’t many wooden idols in the West nowadays, a number of our social forms imply suspicious metaphysical falsehoods: the “methodological atheism” of the sciences, the putative neutrality of the marketplace, the “right side of history,” and the so-called separation of church and state. These fictions lead to ambiguities, conflicts, and cross pressures for Christian ethics. As with food sacrificed to idols, the food is good, the idols are bad, and the way is often difficult.

A false metaphysic produces a false church. Kuyper recognized that humans are irreducibly religious, the “law of the conservation of religion.” Humans make and live by certain ultimate, religious, metaphysical claims. It is part of the image of God. Augustine made the further claim that religion is irreducibly civilizational, even ecclesial. Our ultimate commitments inevitably issue in social forms. Call it the law of the conservation of church.

Cities, civilizations, are built on love. Love is about our beliefs, hopes, and dreams of what is real. We love the real, and we believe that we will be happy if we live at peace with what is real and true. If, for example, we believe that the sovereign, expressive self is most real, then we will build our cities around the love of self. We will celebrate its holidays and ordain its mediators. Moreover, love inspires a dream or imagination about what the world should be like. Thus our ethics, what we believe should be, follow from what we believe is, our metaphysics; and then, our politics embody this ethical-metaphysical dream. It is a dream about a metaphysical, moral order based on these shared loves. If this sounds like a fusing of religion and politics, it should. That is the conclusion to which Augustine leads us. The City of the Earth is not just about politics; it is about what we really love. In theological terms, that makes the City of the Earth a church, or very nearly one.

The terrestrial church looks different at different times and places. For Augustine, it looked like empire. For Kuyper it was the nation-state, but it could be otherwise. Imagine a corporation with revenues larger than many small nations that dictated terms to the largest ones. What if a corporation did not provide what we want but aimed to tell us what we should want, what we should love? Besides goods and services, what if it enforced a moral code, boosting the saints and de-platforming sinners? What if its brand signed, sealed, and united a global stakeholder community? Such a company would be a comprehensive, moral community. One holy catholic . . . corporation?

That is not to deny that the City of the Earth has made important accomplishments. God has not removed all reason, order, and pity from it. Nevertheless when Christ was offered all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, the grandest achievements in every sphere, he turned them down. Perhaps prosperity deceives us. The “deceitfulness of riches,” Christ called it. John Steinbeck was blunter: “Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.”[11] Sound familiar?

What practical steps follow from Augustine’s pilgrim sociology? The most important answer is deceptively simple: Let the church be the church. The power and prosperity of the City of the Earth is attractive. Yet, it cannot save even itself. If you want to save the world, then pilgrims must do these things: preach the gospel, minister the sacraments, and pray. Thereby the earthly city is exposed and the world is invited, even allured to another.

It is natural that we want our great cities to last forever. We are eternal beings, and we are social beings. But there will always be plagues, wars, and rumors of wars. Don’t miss the lesson of these calamities: The Romans thought Rome was the eternal city; the barbarians proved it was not. The City of the Earth never is.

John Halsey Wood Jr. is an advisory board member for Beeson Divinity School and the director of purchasing for Wood Fruitticher Grocery Co. Dr. Wood studied theology at Westminster Seminary and Saint Louis University, and was a Fulbright scholar to the Netherlands in 2006. He is the author of Going Dutch in the Modern Age: Abraham Kuyper’s Struggle for a Free Church in the Netherlands, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford University Press, 2013).