If there’s a bright spot in the darkness of an era marked by increased polarization, it’s the opportunity for fresh ways of thinking about contemporary challenges. Renewed imaginations can help us break through some of the stale scaffolding of thought we’ve relied upon for far too long.
Cold Civil War
Jim Belcher’s new book arises out of his passion for the American project and his desire to see the church be part of the solution for curing American ills.
In Cold Civil War: Overcoming Polarization, Discovering Unity, and Healing the Nation, he urges evangelicals to recapture the importance of “public philosophy”—to supplement special revelation with general revelation. Our lack of a unified social teaching and our unfamiliarity with the natural law tradition leaves us without the tools to faithfully respond to current challenges. If the church is to have a part in restoring the American covenant and helping the country rediscover the genius of the founders, Belcher says, we must recover the “vital center” that has kept our democratic republic together for more than 200 years.
Cold Civil War relies on a quadrant to show where different groups, on both the right and the left, move away from the center, in the categories of “freedom” or “order.” Belcher pushes back against those who advocate a religiously neutral “godless” constitution as well as those who assume the American founding was so irrevocably flawed as to demand a new grounding. He takes issue with libertarianism and the alt-right, as well as with those who push critical race theory and cheer for open borders. The enemy of American freedom, as he sees it, is the alignment of “ruling elites” who collude and conspire to establish an “oligarchic narrative” with aspirations that chip away at middle-class values.
Belcher believes the solution must come from recognizing that special revelation (the truth of Scripture) is the “grounding under—that is, supporting—the grounding of general revelation discovered through the ‘right reason’ of nature and history, culture and creed.” We not only need to recover the brilliant insights that make up the unique vision of the American project, but we also need to rebuild the culture that sustains and amplifies civic responsibility. For this reason, we need to press pause on immigration and work to assimilate those within our borders, so that the American experiment of a common heritage and common traditions can continue.
Insightful Analysis
I’m intrigued by Belcher’s proposal. At times, the work shimmers with insight. I’m sympathetic to any call for evangelicals to engage better with natural law, and I believe our churches would be stronger if interacted more regularly with Catholic social teaching. I also appreciate Belcher’s reliance on Alexis de Tocqueville.
Belcher’s willingness to interact with multiple perspectives reveals commonalities between people on opposite sides of certain issues. For example, some on the left who claim America was fatally wounded from the start because of its racism and slavery wind up resembling their opponents, like Rod Dreher and Patrick Deneen, who believe the poison pill was present in John Locke’s liberalism. In both cases, the founding is fatally flawed, and the project isn’t worth salvaging. A new foundational order is required.
Uneven Work
But Belcher, in trying to cover such a vast amount of material, doesn’t always put his best foot forward. The book interacts with hefty scholars such as Michael Sandel, Robert Bellah, Leo Strauss, and James Davison Hunter, while also relying (favorably) on analysis from Tucker Carlson and the occasional discernment blogger. I understand the desire to write for a wide audience and therefore to include the perspectives of scholars and pundits (such as Ann Coulter), even when disagreeing with them. But the result is an uneven work that frequently makes sweeping claims without evidence.
Is it true that among evangelicals the term “missional” arose to replace “postmodernism” when the latter got pushback, and that the missional conversation was why “books on justice began to appear” (88)? Or are we to simply accept, without demonstrable evidence, the anecdotal view of Bob Woodson, who claims mayors of major cities are intentionally inciting racial animosity in order to “cover their money-making schemes” and “increase their control and wealth and political power” (98)?
I do not believe that all the concerns raised in this book are the result of intentional scheming by a powerful oligarchy. Yes, it’s likely that many of the conditions decried in the book are compounded by some of the policies of the “ruling class,” but it’s another step to assume malicious intent or conspiracy to actively harm the poor so as to solidify control or remain in power. At times, the book lends itself to an assumption of motive in a way that detracts from the bigger message Belcher wants to get across: we must renew the center of American life.
Frustrating Frame
I agree with Belcher’s aim to renew the center of the American project, but his framing frustrates me. He asks:
“If we are going to get back to a new vital center, we need to return to the important place that Christianity once played for generations in reviving and sustaining the democratic project. . . . How could religion, and more particularly, historic Christianity, so important for the renewal of the external covenant (the new vital center) . . . (1) speak to universal values . . . and (2) avoid being politicized?”
Belcher does his best to answer that question, and you may (like I did) appreciate some of his suggestions.
But the framing bothers me because it seems to place Christianity in a support role, as if it plays a utilitarian purpose as an instrument for the renewal of the American project. Now, in his defense, Belcher would likely say that Christianity’s aid in renewing the American center is the way we love our neighbors and work for their flourishing. And so there’s a place for considering that question.
Still, to appeal to “religion” in general and “Christianity” in particular as instrumental in this civic renewal seems to get things backward. I’m not interested, first and foremost, in how Christianity can renew the American project, but in how the American context provides space for faithful Christians to fulfill the Great Commission as the church renews herself around the vital center of the gospel and locks arms with believers wherever they may be found. That is the project that matters most.
The word “missional” is not code for postmodernism or social justice; it’s a picture of the outward-oriented vision of a missionary God whose purposes for his people far outweigh his plans for any one nation.
Yes, Christians have a role to play as salt and light, and yes, I pray we’ll preserve what’s best in the American experiment, but our biggest influence as salt and light won’t come about by Christians reconceiving their faith along the lines of its usefulness to the national project. Rather, it will come by regaining a zeal for orthodoxy and orthopraxy that stands out among “religions” in general because of how closely tied we remain to the moral vision for the world we find in the teachings of Jesus and his atoning sacrifice for our sins.
The church’s greatest contribution to the renewal of the vital center of the American experiment will come not from allowing the faith to become instrumentalized for a national project, but by her own renewal of the vital center of the Christian faith and its Great Commission manifestation.
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