Why we hope for more

Christians are fond of saying that politics is downstream from culture. But in a mass media environment, the causation is never that clean (and perhaps never was). The truth is that culture includes politics as one of its core elements. In fact, according to some researchers, there is a raft of social scientific evidence that religion (and religiosity) is downstream from politics. According to Ryan Burge, “People pick what church they attend (or if they attend at all) based on their political affiliation.” In other words, political liberals choose to attend theologically liberal churches (or cease to attend at all), whereas political conservatives attend conservative churches.

And with Trump’s return to office, we are seeing a resurgence of a kind of cultural Christianity, the kind that opens cabinet meetings with prayer, that signs executive orders eradicating anti-Christian bias, and that establishes a White House Faith Office (staffed by prosperity preacher Paula White-Cain). So how should we view the resurgence of cultural Christianity? Is this simply the return of superficial God-and-Country religion? Or might we hope for something more?

In his day, C.S. Lewis recognized the opportunities posed by a resurgence of certain forms of religiosity.

When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, ‘Would that she were.’ For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin. The Christian and the Pagan have much more in common with one another than either has with [modern subjectivists].

Lewis is speaking here of pagans (in the classical sense), even as we might speak of cultural Christians. Like the pagans, cultural Christians are eminently convertible in a way that modern progressives are not. Modern progressivism embraces a plausibility structure that regards many aspects of Christian teaching (especially Christian ethical teaching) as bigoted and wrong—restricting sex to marriage, restricting marriage to one man and one woman, and so forth. Progressives are catechized into seeing many goods as evil and many evils as good (think of abortion and sodomy). Put another way, progressives are at war with nature and nature’s God. From absolute truth to transgenderism, they reject the moral order of the universe that God has established (what C.S. Lewis called the Tao).

Cultural Christians and conservatives, on the other hand, generally have a regard for the Tao; they are, in that sense, “reality-respecters” (even if their respect for reality and the Tao is selective, such as those in the Trump coalition who reject the trans-sanity but embrace feminism and LGB, or who oppose late-term abortion while defending abortion in the early stages and reproductive technologies like IVF). Nevertheless, to embrace conservatism is, in some degree, to come under the Tao, embracing the moral order of the universe. It is, at some level, to submit oneself to the law of God.

And this is a key point. Protestant Christians have long argued that there are three uses of the moral law—pedagogical, civil, and normative. As to the first, the law teaches us what is good and right (and what is evil and wrong). Thus, laws and customs that accord with the moral order of the universe reinforce the pressure already present on the conscience by nature. In this way, cultural Christianity (and conservatism more broadly) is a kind of pre-evangelism. As an expression of the Tao (however dim), it tills the soil to prepare it for the seed of the gospel. It creates a plausibility structure within which the gospel makes sense. As Lewis said, it gives the evangelist something to work on and work with.

Of course, it matters which evangelist is doing the work. If the only relief to a troubled conscience is a false prosperity gospel from a false teacher like Paula White-Cain, then cultural Christianity is just as liable to damn as not. And it’s clear that in the present moment, cultural Christianity is just one option among many (as Kash Patel swearing his oath on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita demonstrates).

Nevertheless, Christians can be somewhat encouraged by signs of a resurgent cultural Christianity. Because while cultural Christianity never saved anyone, it does offer a touchstone of reality, and with it a renewed sense of sin and guilt. And in a nation like ours, there are still 7,000 that have not bowed the knee to Baal, and are ready to point our nation and its officials to the hope that is only found in the Lord Jesus Christ.

—The C. S. Lewis citation is found here: (C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (ed. Walter Hooper; HarperOne, 1994), 186.