It’s hard to read much political commentary from a “Christian/New Right” perspective at present without coming across a certain phrase: the “postwar consensus.” Sometimes abbreviated “PWC,” the term is almost always used negatively, usually with an edge of contempt or derision.[1]
Where did this come from? Most notably popularized by First Things editor R.R. Reno’s 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West, the phrase refers to a cluster of social and political premises that crystallized in the Western world shortly after the conclusion of the Second World War. And what were those premises? Specifically: a set of broadly pro-democracy, pro-human rights, anti-“extremist,” and anti-metaphysical commitments that tend to define the bounds of “polite” political discourse in Western liberal democracies. These basic commitments, the argument runs, emerged largely in response to the Holocaust and the damage wrought by ultranationalist ideologies across the globe.
But the consensus seems to be cracking up. Populisms of left and right are ascendant across the globe. Ordinary people want more from their politics than free trade agreements and a corporate-funded monoculture. Perhaps the reality of God and nations and common civic identities can’t be shoved out of public life without consequences.
Conservatives, of course, tend to be fond of intellectual genealogies that trace modern ills back to some fateful misstep (Ockham! Hobbes! Machiavelli!). This is the latest iteration: maybe the postwar consensus itself was the problem, and with its eclipse, “real politics” can now come back, returning from a sad and strange exile in the hinterlands of history.[2] On this framing, the close of World War II was an occasion for a sort of grand deception, where basic truths of human nature and sociality were pushed underground in favor of a thin and sorry substitute.
This is a stark thesis. And it invites equally stark questions: if it was so fundamentally wrongheaded from the start, why has the postwar consensus been defended so vigorously? And how can the larger critique be squared with the fact that so many of the people involved with this consensus understood it as a Christian project? Was this consensus really an alien interpolation into a tradition of Western political thought, or a logical development?
Some time ago, I wrote an article on “Protestant retrieval” that suggested—but did not argue at length—that questions of Christian political theology are, in some sense, worked out in conversation with history. Many of the concepts at work in such theology are not unconditioned abstractions, certainly to a greater extent than is the case with theology proper; they carry with them substantive content, and their consequences are worked out in time. That includes across the span of the twentieth century.
What follows is not an apologetic for the “postwar consensus,” though I suspect some will read it as such. Rather, I hope simply to contextualize that consensus as a particular political settlement, like the Peace of Westphalia, that solved some problems and generated new ones. In particular, I will argue that the “postwar consensus”—for all its theological and pragmatic difficulties—gives rise to at least two genuine insights with which subsequent Christian political theology ought to seriously reckon. The first is principial; the second prudential.
- There is a form of political activity directed ostensibly towards the common good and justified within the terms of Christian speech, and that evokes an experience of unity and even sacrality, which is essentially idolatrous. It is idolatrous in that it blurs the distinction between God and created reality, and leads to the investiture of contingent social phenomena with absolute value, catalyzing violent action in their defense.
- Social, political, and material developments within early modernity make possible forms of power deployment at scale that render ethnocide a genuine possibility. This should prudentially inform how Christian theologians articulate accounts of political belonging—including belonging within particular communities and contexts of difference.
These insights complicate any out-of-hand dismissal of the “postwar consensus,” or any attempt to uncritically repristinate prewar political resources for the present day.
That concern is not a caricature. When I initially wrote on the uses and abuses of Protestant retrieval, many of my critics were quick to contest the idea that theological retrieval is simply a matter of pushing old texts back into print, or reintroducing forgotten authors into the public square. They wanted not merely insights, but applications. Well, fair enough; I agree.
But application of past ideas is almost always normative. It is generally the choosing of some particular course over another, on the basis of one’s commitments. There is no such thing as retrieval of “everything,” because in reality no one (even with current advances in AI making the process easier by the day) has the inclination or resources to do so—let alone to read, reflect, and apply it afterwards. Rather, we are the stewards of the tradition we have received, and we have choices about how to carry it forward. And if the consequences of political ideas become more clearly understood in the course of time, then it seems to me that the chosen trajectory of our Protestant retrieval ought to account for that. Which Luther should we politically retrieve: the Luther who called for treating the Jewish people “in a brotherly manner,” or the Luther who called for the burning of synagogues?
This is not an abstract question. It is the exact question that Lutherans in Germany had to confront during the 1930s. And I hope that today, we would answer it better than they did.
* * *
Return of the Strong Gods is an interesting book. It is not a conventional academic text, but a wide-ranging exploration of the dominant Western zeitgeist since the Second World War, canvassing intellectual luminaries as diverse as Theodor Adorno, Milan Kundera, and Augusto Del Noce. Its brevity belies its depth and force, to say nothing of its wide influence.
At the heart of Reno’s volume is, as noted, the basic concept of the “postwar consensus.” This consensus can best be characterized as a set of background beliefs and constraints on political discourse and practice, which emerged as a direct response to the specific horrors wrought by fascist Italy, nationalist Japan, and Nazi Germany. If those who said never again about the Holocaust actually meant it, then what sorts of cultural changes might be required?[3]
Substantial ones, Reno argues. The chief constraint imposed by the postwar consensus is skepticism of sources of political and social cohesion that don’t derive their binding force from individuals’ contingent consent. Put more simply: national allegiances, religious commitments, and so on—which summon individuals into positions of unchosen belonging, and impose unchosen obligations—are now dangerous. They are dangerous because they are sources of human motivation capable of inspiring individuals to do extreme, and even highly destructive, things.[4]
As a result, Reno argues, Western politics and society begin to look quite different after World War II. In his elegant metaphor: everything in human affairs becomes “lighter,” less freighted with moral import and more socially and technologically malleable.
“Lightening” and “weakening” are useful metaphors. They capture the atmosphere of the postwar consensus nicely. Our moment is not one of thoroughgoing relativism or strict renunciation of moral principles. Instead, it encourages ways of thinking and social norms that are less burdened with pressing truths, giving us more elbow room to formulate our own bespoke views of the meaning of life while draining the demanding passions out of public affairs.[5]
Few contemporary philosophers better exemplify this “lightening” than John Rawls, whose influential A Theory of Justice defined the trajectory of liberal political thought for decades to come. For Rawls, the universal meaning of justice in human affairs should be worked out, in abstracto, from a hypothetical “original position” in which one brackets out any personal religious precommitments, or any knowledge of the circumstances of one’s own life.[6] Before the cool philosophical purity of this model, the hard and messy data of lived experience as a basis for political life simply fades away.
But does anyone, except maybe a handful of academics, actually prefer this? In the end, Reno submits, the postwar consensus carried within it the seeds of its own destruction: the resurgence of what Reno calls the “strong gods” of nationality, ethnicity, religious community, and so on.[7]
“Strong gods” is an interestingly nebulous formulation, and Reno defines the term variously—in particular, by reference to Émile Durkheim’s treatment of the “sacred” as an ineluctable dimension of human sociality,[8] and by way of the Augustinian insight that human groups are ordered around particular loves or commitments that they share in common.[9] It is this dimension of human sociality, Reno argues, that is being recovered by various insurgent political movements around the world:
[I]t is perilous to ignore certain truths about our humanity. Durkheim was right. To be human is to seek transcendent warrants and sacred sources for our social existence…. The strong gods are not golden idols or characters in ancient mythologies, as Durkheim recognized. They are whatever has the power to inspire love—love of the divine, love of truth, love of country, love of family. Love need not be social, at least not in its immediate object. The strong gods are not necessarily public or political…. It is the animus against the strong gods and the poverty of love among our leadership class, an animus and poverty deliberately cultivated by the postwar open society consensus, that cause today’s populism.[10]
As I read him, what Reno is basically getting at with his “strong gods” concept is the attempted (and failed) expulsion of metaphysics from politics. Human beings aren’t content to remain merely atomized consumers, wallowing in the bounty of an industrialized age. Many long for more, for sources of allegiance and common devotion that galvanize them to their highest and best deeds. There is a limited constituency for a thin, proceduralist, technocratic politics (or society). As Reno puts it, “the sacralizing impulse in public life is fundamental. Our social consensus always reaches for transcendent legitimacy.”[11]
* * *
Return of the Strong Gods makes a powerful, and compelling, argument. And Christians ought to learn from the failures of this consensus. Rawls (to the extent we read him theologically) represents one such failure. Jacques Maritain, a Roman Catholic who helped shape the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in the postwar period, was too sanguine about the possibility of de-theologized categories as sources of transnational human solidarity. So too, in my view, Karl Barth was badly wrong to conclude from his wartime experience that natural theology, as such, was the principal problem—a move that, of course, profoundly influenced the trajectory of evangelical Protestant thought and precipitated a recent need for theological retrieval in the first place. All of this is to say that Reno’s “strong gods” argument has many vital insights to offer.
But the “strong gods” formulation is also, perhaps, rather Manichaean. On the one hand there is a purported delusion of “openness,” “lightness,” and abstract rationality; on the other are “the objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”[12] This is a very stark binary, almost savoring of Nietzsche’s Apollonian-versus-Dionysian distinction. It comes close to suggesting that there is a sort of irrationality, an unjustifiability, to religious commitment (which I’m sure is not Reno’s intent).
And to be sure, Reno very clearly acknowledges that the return of metaphysics to politics is profoundly fraught. After all, “[m]en do horrible things in the service of strong gods.”[13] He himself admits that he “fear[s] the power of the sacred in public life. Anyone who reads the Bible knows that divine power can annihilate as well as uplift, destroy as well as sanctify.”[14] But it is hard to mistake the overall arc of the book: most of its pages are devoted to arguing that “[w]e are imperiled by a spiritual vacuum and the apathy it brings,”[15] and that “[t]he postwar consensus is, at root, fearful of love.”[16] Its treatment of the strong gods’ return is, if not quite laudatory, at least close to it.
And here, I think, lies the difficulty. In making his argument, it is surprising that Reno invokes Augustinian and Durkheimian ideas in the same breath, because their respective concepts of sacrality are radically distinct. Specifically, Reno’s concept of the “strong gods” conflates two quite distinct phenomena: the affirmation of transcendental authority, and the experience of “collective effervescence.”
The affirmation of transcendental authority, of course, is a historically Christian insight. For Augustine, the highest Good, and the ultimate source of sacred unity, is that One God Whose heavenly city “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.”[17] This God is radically transcendent of any particular ethnos or polis, a top-down Good within Whose light all things are ordered. It is this, for Augustine, that is truly sacred.
Durkheim’s account of sacrality is quite different: what is traditionally meant by the sacred is disclosed, for Durkheim, in the experience of communal intensity, or “collective effervescence.” This is a decidedly immanent, “bottom-up” conception of spirituality:
[I]f collective life awakens religious thought when it rises to a certain intensity, that is so because it brings about a state of effervescence that alters the conditions of psychic activity. The vital energies become hyper-excited, the passions more intense, the sensations more powerful; there are indeed some that are produced only at this moment. Man does not recognize himself; he feels somehow transformed and in consequence transforms his surroundings. To account for the very particular impressions he receives, he imputes to the things with which he is most directly in contact properties that they do not have, exceptional powers and virtues that the objects of ordinary experience do not possess. In short, upon the real world where profane life is lived, he superimposes another that, in a sense, exists only in his thought, but one to which he ascribes a higher kind of dignity than he ascribes to the real world of profane life.[18]
If Durkheim’s meaning is less than clear, an example may help. Anyone who’s attended a rock concert can recall the moment when the band plays the first few bars of their best-known single, and the crowd immediately surges like a living thing, almost organismic. Phenomenologically, one feels as if they’ve drifted “outside” of oneself, blurring into the great heaving collective. Consider the churning chaos of a mosh pit, or crowd surfers launching their bodies into the air. But it isn’t just concerts: think of the roar of a crowd at a hard-fought sporting event, or the supercharged intensity of a political rally focused on a charismatic figure. In those instants, the world feels alive, seething with power, and normal rules and constraints seem to fall away. [19]
Moments like these, for Durkheim, epitomize the religious spirit in its truest and deepest sense. (For a recent cinematic example, consider the film The Northman, in which a group of Viking berserkers join hands around a giant bonfire and howl together, letting the animal spirits flow through them in a visceral way.) It is hard to imagine a sharper deviation from Augustine’s position. On Durkheim’s account, it is this collective human experience that is constitutive of the sacred as such—not the reality of a transcendent Good. For Durkheim, sacrality requires no God at all. Sacrality is found in collective bonding.
Of course, common effort towards a single purpose is a good thing. But Durkheim’s insight was that there are contexts in which this common effort comes to be experienced by the participants as ipso facto divine, as the very work of “God.” And from a traditionally Christian standpoint, this is both metaphysically reductionist and ethically fraught; in this experience of effervescing immanence, what is abandoned is the possibility of reference to any standard by which the actions of the collective might be judged and found wanting. And this “immanentizing” move, coupled with its critique of the possibility of transcendental judgment of the collective, was precisely the intellectual mechanism by which Nazi “theology” proceeded.
* * *
At the core of Adolf Hitler’s philosophy, as elaborated in Mein Kampf, is a metaphysical commitment that John Milbank would rightly term an “ontology of violence”:[20] the belief that the ur-principle of reality is essentially agonistic, pitting entity against entity in a steady crawl upwards from weakness to strength. There is no way around this. Indeed, Hitler insists that “Man must not fall into the error of thinking that he was ever meant to become lord and master of Nature,” chalking such an “illusion” up to “[a] lopsided education.”[21] In place of such fancies, Hitler urges that “Man must realize that a fundamental law of necessity reigns throughout the whole realm of Nature and that his existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife.”[22]
Human beings who know the world’s brutal truth must “voluntarily acknowledge that strength and power are entitled to take the lead,” an understanding which “makes them a constituent particle in that order out of which the whole universe is shaped and formed.”[23] Hitler even transposes this claim into familiar Christian language: “For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God’s Creation and God’s Will.”[24] On this view, individual human beings count for next to nothing: “the individual should be imbued with the spirit of sacrifice in favour of the common weal, and that he should not be influenced by the morbid notions of those knaves who pretend to know better than Nature and who have the impudence to criticize her decrees.”[25]
What is sacralized here is “Nature,” into which human beings are bound as “constituent particles.” They are not seen as souls in relation to God. They may not critique biopolitical hierarchies in which they find themselves. For Hitler, the Will of God—that which is holy—is strictly equivalent to blind fate, to natural processes and hierarchies.
Some churchmen were content to go along, more or less, with this worldview. In 1933, writing on behalf of the Erlangen theological faculty, German Lutheran theologians Paul Althaus and Werner Elert published their “Theological Opinion on the Admission of Christians of Jewish Origin to the Offices of the German Evangelical Church” (Theologisches Gutachen über die Zulassung von Christen jüdischer Herkunft zu den Ämtern der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche, hereinafter Erlanger Gutachten).[26] That Opinion offered a vigorous defense of ethnic particularity, casting it in decidedly deterministic (and theological) terms:
[T]he status that all Christians share as children of God does not abolish biological and societal differences, but rather binds each person into the station into which he has been called (1 Corinthians 7:20). The biological bond to a particular Volk, which is a destiny that cannot be escaped, is to be respected by Christians both in disposition and deed.[27]
This motif of an absolute “destiny” also appears elsewhere in the Erlanger Gutachten: section 3 of the document discusses “the ethnic plurality of external church ordinance” as “a necessary result of ethnic classification in general, which is to be affirmed as both a matter of destiny and as a matter of ethics.”[28] For Althaus and Elert, there seems to be no possibility of exiting the Volk or acting to weaken one’s “bond” to it. The basic bond to the Volk—to a particular, contingent modality of social cohesion—is here explicitly sacralized.
It is section 5 of the Erlanger Gutachten that draws these threads together: “Today more than ever the German Volk perceives the Jews in its midst as an alien Volkstum. It has recognised the threat to its own life posed by emancipated Jewry and has defended itself against this danger with legal exclusion clauses.”[29] Here, the underlying “ontology of violence” finally appears most clearly. The Erlanger Gutachten takes for granted that, for its own life to thrive, the German Volk must expel from itself, and defend itself against, the “alien” element of Jewishness. Peaceful mediation of difference is not possible.
In 1934, Althaus, Elert, and other Erlangen faculty members published the “Ansbach Memorandum” (hereinafter Ansbacher Ratschlag) in direct response to the “Barmen Declaration” that had been produced several months earlier by Karl Barth and other leaders of the German “Confessing Church” (Bekennende Kirche).[30] The Barmen Declaration had explicitly repudiated Nazi regime attempts to synthesize church and state, arguing for the church’s autonomy over against the temporal sovereign.[31] In their Ansbacher Ratschlag, Althaus and Elert sought to stake out a mediating position between the Barth/Barmen position and that of the explicitly anti-doctrinal, hypernationalistic “German Christian” (Deutsch Christen) movement.[32] Early on in the document, Althaus and Elert argue that
[t]he Law, “namely the unchangeable will of God” (Formula of Concord, Article VI:6), confronts us in the total reality of our life as it is brought to light through the revelation of God. It binds each person to the station into which he has been called by God, and obligates us to the natural orders to which we are subject, such as family, Volk, and race (that is, blood relationship). And indeed we have been assigned to a particular family, a particular Volk, and a particular race.[33]
These “natural orders” (natürliche Ordnungen) are construed biologically, and implicitly hierarchically (“race” is semantically broader than Volk, as Volk is broader than family). And towards the close of the Ansbacher Ratschlag, Althaus and Elert go on to offer a number of prescriptive recommendations for the Lutheran church in Germany, declaring that “the church’s members are themselves subject to the natural orders. As they are always assigned to a particular Volk and to a specific moment, their duty to the Volk receives its concrete content through the peoples’ present national system of government.”[34]
To connect the dots: on this account, God’s will becomes coterminous with the will of the political collective, with the collective’s striving toward a common end. That is a theological problem. It is a problem which follows from confusing, tacitly, two different conceptions of that which is divine: transcendent authority, and the bond by which the collective coheres.
The deep theological ambivalence of this latter—the-sacred-as-collective-effervescence—is something which the “postwar consensus” rightly reacted against at the level of principle. In Christian terms, absolutizing the latter sacred can (and did) lead to idolatry: divinizing, as the “Will of God,” a particular constellation of historically contingent Völker, and denying any possibility of exit or critique. This was not the faith for all once delivered to the saints.
Construing Nazism (and the German Christian movement, and its sympathizers) as a specifically theological problem can help explain why, in the postwar period, so many players understood the emergence of the postwar consensus in specifically Christian theological terms—as a theological correction of deficient theology. It may come as a surprise to those highly invested in denouncing the “postwar consensus” today, but as legal historian Samuel Moyn has recently argued in great detail, the regime of “human rights” so basic to this postwar consensus was, in fact, elaborated as an integrally Christian project—as a response to the way in which Nazi “theology” went awry.
[I]t is equally if not more viable to regard human rights as a project of the Christian right, not the secular left. Their creation brought about a break with the revolutionary tradition and its droits de l’homme, or—better put—a successful capture of that language by forces reformulating their conservatism…. “Human rights” came to figure because, in the crucible of reaction before and during World War II when they flirted with authoritarian states (or built their own), Christians learned that the cultivation of moral constraint depended on keeping the spiritual communities that offered their vision of ethical life a home partly free from the state.[35]
From this perspective, the formation of the postwar consensus was not really an act of theological subversion from the outside, but rather the attempted development of a (broadly Western) tradition in response to a novel challenge. The alternative “strong gods” framing, by blurring the line between Augustinian and Durkheimian conceptions of the sacred and their outworkings, risks confusing this point.
Indeed, even the “lightness” of postwar secular society can be read as grasping after a sort of ersatz transcendence—as trying to get after something more properly “Augustinian” in this sense. For instance: Rawls’s bloodless, post-Kantian universalism entails a rejection of any politics derived from the “collective effervescence” generated around particularized sources of belonging, such as creed and nation. For him, morality requires abstraction from such contingent features of reality. But crucially, in positing an “original position” from which political morality is derived, Rawls aims to provide the warrant for any particular polity’s “transcendent legitimacy”—the very thing Reno’s book claims the postwar period has denied. Rawls, that is, attempts to defend a secularized sort of transcendence.[36] Or, in other words: Rawls wants the virtues of Augustinian Christianity, but without surrendering himself to it.
Again: I am not arguing that today’s contemporary status quo is optimal, or successful, or that the particular postwar settlement was intellectually bulletproof. Obviously not. My argument is simply that the problem of the “postwar consensus” is an “in-house problem” within the tradition of Christian thought. In the postwar debates, we find Christians debating about the appropriate response to sins committed by other professing Christians. That is very different from a conspiratorial view of history, such as the thought that if we could rid ourselves of ill-defined “subversives,” we could get back to basics. And looking to the future, I would argue that Christian political theology, to the extent it wishes to be Christian, must heed the risk of idolatry that the Second World War so starkly foregrounded.
* * *
So much for the principial argument. Turning now to the prudential question: in my view, where questions of transcendent legitimacy are revived in politics—as they ought to be—the enduring lesson of the “postwar consensus” must be a recognition of the unique risks of “immanent sacrality” when specifically coupled with novel mechanisms for the deployment of power at unprecedented scale.
Of course, within political history, appeals to particularistic sources of belonging are nothing new (who can forget King Henry V’s exhortation to “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”?). But I want to note three major intervening developments, within industrial modernity, that render such appeals more susceptible to tipping over into the large-scale violence glimpsed in the Second World War and its build-up: (1) the centralization of state sovereignty; (2) dramatic increases in state capacity; and (3) the emergence of mass media.
First: prior to the modern period, the now-ubiquitous state form did not really exist as it does today. Rather, power within a given geographic region was dispersed across a variety of political configurations. In many parts of feudal Europe, for instance, local landholders—not national monarchs—exercised coercive control over a largely rural peasantry. As such, these landholders constituted an independent power bloc, with the ability to negotiate the terms of compliance with royal or imperial preferences. On this model, any particular monarch was left comparatively unable to secure immediate, widespread acquiescence with his desired policies. Politically decentralized polities—including empires, most of which left local elites and governing systems in place while exercising only limited control from afar—only disappeared comparatively recently. As Avidit Acharya and Alexander Lee explain, “[b]y the time the League of Nations was formed in 1920, both the big empires and small feudal polities had disappeared in Europe, either evolving into or being absorbed into the modern territorial states that claimed absolute internal control and freedom from external influence, and which recognized one another as possessing these traits.”[37]
Once political sovereignty was centralized in this way, leaders lost any need to persuade other, subsidiary units of political power to comply with exterminationist political programs. Hitler, unlike (say) the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, did not need to negotiate with powerful local princes in order to exercise comprehensive authority within Germany. Hence, events like the legendary Nuremberg rallies of Nazi Germany—precisely designed to evoke collective effervescence in service of particularist commitments—could serve as sociopolitical accelerants, with any structural “brakes” left largely unable to constrain the passions generated.
Second, the centralization and expansion of economic production led to major increases in state capacity during the runup to the Second World War. Prior to industrialization, as Acharya and Lee emphasize, “states had difficulty projecting their power over great distances, due to the fact that governance costs were sharply increasing in distance away from the state’s administrative centers. News and orders could travel no faster than a man on horseback, literacy was limited, and military technology and bureaucratic institutions were primitive.”[38]
All this changed with mechanization. Novel industrial technology and production techniques rendered it far easier for sovereigns to extract natural resources and convert them into mechanisms for the deployment of force (weapons, military vehicles, etc.), leading to tremendous increases in any particular sovereign’s ability to project his power across large distances. This, in turn, allowed national leaders to enforce compliance with political diktats—and operationalize any animal passions generated by particularistic “collective effervescence”—well beyond the confines of a city center or local region. In short, pogroms could go from local to national events.
Third, the rise and spread of national-level mass media—aided and abetted by industrialization and the widespread adoption of radio, telephones, and television—dramatically heightened the salience of nationwide political appeals by allowing some form of collective effervescence to be evoked at an unprecedented scale. (Anyone who’s ever been part of a movie theater collectively thrilling to the cinematic events depicted on screen will understand this feeling.) Watching a live political speech from afar is not quite the same as being there, but it is similar enough to inspire a common response.
For a particularly striking example, one might look to the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda, which chronicles the horror of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Perhaps the most haunting element of the film isn’t what’s seen, but what’s heard: the steady background crackling of radio broadcasts galvanizing Hutus to slaughter their Tutsi opponents, and issuing immediate threats to particular individuals: “We have received reports of very important cockroaches and traitors trying to escape from the Mille collines Hotel. Gather up your weapons. Stand by your radios. We will keep you informed.”[39] Such exhortations, inspiring a sense of sacred duty around particularistic commitment, serve to convene in real time the very “imagined communities” of which Benedict Anderson so famously wrote.[40] And their consequences proved famously grisly.
Taken together, these three dynamics (and no doubt there are plenty of others) represent material transformations in the sociopolitical environment during the runup to the Second World War, And it is against this backdrop, I would contend, that the “postwar consensus” emerges and becomes substantially defensible; the “consensus” is a way of expressing the straightforward datum that there is a unique danger posed by specific sort of particularistic political appeals, under particular industrial-modern conditions. That is not to foreclose such appeals absolutely, but it is to admit the specific prudential risks.
* * *
In the experience of the Second World War, we have a case study of Protestant thought on nations and nationhood that went badly astray. In my judgment, it is foolishly ignorant to venture contemporary Protestant political-theological proposals as if the Holocaust did not happen, as if the policies of the Third Reich were not justified within the terms of Protestant political-theological categories, and as if the Holocaust wasn’t made possible due to a complex of peculiarly modern material reasons.
To stand within a living tradition is to stand within a stream of thought in which new problems emerge, and new answers are advanced. The postwar consensus was one such answer to the foregoing problem. That answer had flaws: Reno, and those following him, are certainly right to stress that metaphysics cannot be expelled from politics forever—not even for a century. The very nature of politics, and human sociality, demands otherwise.
New questions assert themselves today. And one of them is whether, in today’s return or reclamation of politics-as-metaphysics, anything will have been learned from history. The experience of the twentieth century attests this much: there are “sacreds” that call human beings out of themselves, that bind them together across tribe and tongue, and there are “sacreds” that amount to nothing more than a cohesion of collective affinity, an immanent urgency that may be turned to any end at all. Modern material and technological power raises the stakes.
Protestant political retrieval must engage this history, too—not merely the history of early modernity. It is no good for theologians and commentators to boast about never reading twentieth-century resources. Faithfully stewarding the Christian tradition means confronting the past in all its glories and horrors alike. That, in the end, is what true prudence looks like.
John Ehrett is a Commonwealth Fellow, and an attorney and writer in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in American Affairs, The New Atlantis, and the Claremont Review of Books. He is a graduate of Patrick Henry College, the Institute of Lutheran Theology, and Yale Law School.
See, e.g., Ben R. Crenshaw, “The Postwar Consensus: Exposing the Liberal International Order,” American Reformer (July 12, 2024), https://americanreformer.org/2024/07/the-postwar-consensus/. ↑
Cf. Timon Cline, “Welcome to the Adult Table: The Return of Politics,” American Reformer (Oct. 12, 2023), https://americanreformer.org/2023/10/welcome-to-the-adult-table/ (“A political posture—true political action—foreign to the post-war liberal mind is found here. Initiative dedicated to more than feminine passivity (conflict avoidance), but that also recognizes the brutal necessities presented by real politics. For those conditioned by liberalism, divergent political goals that extend beyond endurance of the status quo or the preservation of preexistent institutions will be offensive, nonsensical even.”). ↑
R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 2019), ebook ed. ↑
Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. ↑
Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. ↑
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 11. ↑
Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. ↑
Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. ↑
Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. ↑
Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. ↑
Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. ↑
Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. ↑
Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. ↑
Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. ↑
Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. ↑
Reno, Return of the Strong Gods. ↑
Augustine of Hippo, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887), XIX.17. ↑
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 424. ↑
For a broad and generally sympathetic discussion of “collective effervescence” as a principle of religious cohesion in a contemporary context, see James K. Wellman Jr., Katie E. Corcoran, and Kate J. Stockly, High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). ↑
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 309, 380; see also Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2017), 19 (discussing the countervailing Christian ontology of “peace”). ↑
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Hurst and Blackett Ltd., 1939), 140. ↑
Hitler, Mein Kampf, 140. ↑
Hitler, Mein Kampf, 169. ↑
Hitler, Mein Kampf, 309. ↑
Hitler, Mein Kampf, 169. ↑
Paul Althaus and Werner Elert, “Appendix I: Theologisches Gutachen über die Zulassung von Christen jüdischer Herkunft zu den Ämtern der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche (Erlanger Gutachten),” trans. Ryan Tafilowski, in Ryan Tafilowski, “‘Dark, Depressing Riddle’: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of the Volk in the Theology of Paul Althaus.” Ph.D. thesis (University of Edinburgh, 2017), 278–84. ↑
Althaus and Elert, “Erlanger Gutachten,” 280 (emphasis added). ↑
Althaus and Elert, “Erlanger Gutachten,” 281. ↑
Althaus and Elert, “Erlanger Gutachten,” 282. ↑
Paul Althaus and Werner Elert et al., “Appendix II: Der ‘Ansbacher Ratschlag’ zu der Barmer ‘Theologischen Erklärung,’” trans. Ryan Tafilowski, in Ryan Tafilowski, “‘Dark, Depressing Riddle’: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of the Volk in the Theology of Paul Althaus.” Ph.D. thesis (University of Edinburgh, 2017), 285–88. ↑
See Paul R. Hinlicky, Before Auschwitz: What Christian Theology Must Learn from the Rise of Nazism (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 21–23. ↑
Hinlicky, Before Auschwitz, 21–23. ↑
Althaus and Elert et al., “Ansbacher Ratschlag,” 286. ↑
Althaus and Elert et al., “Ansbacher Ratschlag,” 287. ↑
Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 8. ↑
See generally Eric Nelson, The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019) (articulating Rawls’s implicit theological commitments). ↑
Avidit Acharya and Alexander Lee, The Cartel System of States: An Economic Theory of International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 3. ↑
Acharya and Lee, The Cartel System of States, 9. ↑
Hotel Rwanda, directed by Terry George (MGM, 2004). ↑
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 6. ↑