When you hear the phrase “Christian society,” your mind likely turns to Christendom. In his book The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2007), historian Hugh McLeod described Christendom as a place where Christian leaders have close ties to civil authorities, where laws originate from Christian convictions, everyone is assumed to be a Christian, and “Christianity provides a common language” (18). For Protestants, Christendom, with the papacy as the spiritual head, is not the most congenial model society. For those Protestants who are Presbyterian, their idea of a Christian society might conjure up sixteenth-century Scotland when the crown, Parliament, and the people all covenanted to promote and defend the true faith and oppose the false one, Roman Catholicism. Then some may remember twentieth-century writers such as the Roman Catholic historian Christopher Dawson or the modernist poet T. S. Eliot, both of whom inspired Protestants and Romanists alike with the idea of a Christian society. As Benjamin Lockerd wrote of both Eliot and Dawson, their “central claim… based on their wide-ranging knowledge of anthropology and history, was that every culture has a cult, some religious system that serves as an ultimate source of value and meaning” (“Beyond Politics: T.S. Eliot and Christopher Dawson on Religion and Culture,” in T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition, ed. Benjamin Lockerd [Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014], 233). Both contended that European civilization was rooted in Christianity. They added that secularization had robbed the West of its glory.
Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, invokes Eliot (but not Dawson) in his new case for “the idea” of a Christian society. He agrees with Eliot that the West continues to face a choice between Christianity and paganism. The consequences of this choice are not as stark as those that Eliot confronted in the 1930s when Communism and Fascism divided Europe and sowed the seeds of world war. Even so, Reno believes the United States (at least) confronts a set of circumstances that require a reexamination of the case for a Christian society. The nation has lost a sense of “civic solidarity,” the necessary ingredient for democracy. The cult of freedom in the United States also threatens to justify every “injustice, suffering, and social dysfunction” as mere “choices.” What the United States needs, and Christianity arguably supplies, is a path toward recovering “solidarity, limited government, and a sense of the transcendent.” Christianity especially proposes an idea of freedom (positive as opposed to negative) that recognizes true liberty as obedience to Christ. “A society encourages human flourishing to the degree that the supernatural authority of God’s revelation is proclaimed and the natural authority of his creation sustained.”
In the chapters that follow, Reno has more to say about social order, economics, and political structures than about theology or ecclesiology. He insists that his argument is not theocratic. His idea for a Christian society is a “national culture not dominated by Christians but leavened by them.” Such yeast will “defend the weak,” “raise up the poor,” “promote solidarity,” put limits on government, and “seek higher things” (all chapter titles). In his chapter on poverty in the United States, he relies on a number of social scientific analyses that document the moral and cultural effects of the increasing gap between the wealthiest and poorest Americans. Reno’s descriptions are worth considering, especially for readers who do not follow the social scientific literature. But his audience will be frustrated by the concession that he is not a policy analyst, and his determination to leave “Christians committed to the poor, and other men and women of good will, to apply themselves to the difficult task of rebuilding a decent public culture that encourages ordinary people to live dignified lives.” Reno’s reluctance to wade into the tall weeds of public policy is understandable, especially for a man trained in philosophical theology. But does the book’s lack of recommendations mean that Christian society remains only an “idea”? Without suggestions for remedies, the book sometimes reads like an excuse for Reno to complain about America’s woes.
An equally odd feature of this book is its silence about the church or Christian institutions. Reno ends the book with a sense that a Christian society is impossible, while a Christian influence is the best believers can do. Christian aims are “not to become the next establishment but to influence, directly and indirectly, the moral and spiritual outlook” of the existing regime. Reno is fairly confident that Americans want what Christians have: “a culture of hospitality and freedom,” rather than one of “denunciation and servitude.” Still, Reno says nothing about the institutional church (which is odd for a convert to Roman Catholicism) except in his afterword. There he asserts that in a thousand years the United States will likely no longer exist but “synagogues and churches” will. “The future is God’s.” That is true, but the effect of such a concluding sentiment is to turn the idea of a Christian society into mere inspiration. That may be what contemporary Christian readers need in times when cultural developments offer little reinforcement. At the same time, it is implicitly a rejection of a Christian society this side of glory, since believers who know the future belongs to God also confess with the Epistle to the Hebrews, “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (13:14).
D. G. Hart is the author most recently of Damning Words: The Life and Religious Times of H. L. Mencken (Eerdmans, 2016).
