The late Rev. Dr. Richard Turnbull wrote in 2022 that it was a mistake to think that political theology was an afterthought in John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. “To the contrary, Calvin recognizes that he cannot complete his great work without addressing the nature and role of governmental order for human society. We also have a variety of other sources, not least his Commentaries, where Calvin discusses specific verses of relevance in the biblical corpus.” Turnbull emphasized that Calvin understood the necessary distinction between “God as Creator and God as Redeemer.” Because God was Creator, “the glory of God manifest in the universe is discernible for all to see. This renders humanity inexcusable in respect of knowledge of God but, more importantly for our purposes here, establishes the idea of a created order for the good of all people for all time.” That sin marred the created order did not, in Calvin’s view, lead him to see political order as detached from the divine economy. Embracing God as Redeemer and Creator, Turnbull noted, enabled Calvin “to draw a distinction between the civil realm and the spiritual realm—but not too sharp a distinction, as we will see. We can also see why this idea of the created order into which civil government is set creates a good, godly, and positive reason for government, as well as government’s responsibility to restrain evil.”

Modern Evangelicals, Turnbull feared, had drunk deeply from the well of God’s redemption, but not so much from the doctrines of his creation. Calvin did not fall into “the trap of later evangelicalism of ignoring the social order of the world because our true home is heaven—a problem that continues to beset some evangelicals.” Turnbull supposed, accurately, that American Evangelicals ignored the social order far more than their British counterparts because British Evangelicals had a more robust history of social activism than American Evangelicals.

Turnbull was right, but only partly so. American Evangelicals had participated robustly in the shaping of the political and social order in the nineteenth century. What ended their influence was the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy. Faithful Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and other Evangelicals certainly saved their soteriology, but they did so by tossing out the majority of Protestant intellectual life. Those communities are slowly recovering from what Mark Noll rightly termed the scandal of the Evangelical mind, but a major obstacle to that recovery—especially in Baptist and Reformed circles—is the degree to which political theology, or Protestant-oriented political philosophy, is seen as a licit or illicit form of Christian inquiry. It is telling that Richard Turnbull, an insightful commentator and explorer of Calvin’s political theology, was a Church of England priest.

The only Protestant communion in the United States that has had a place in the longue durée of American intellectual and religious development is Anglicanism. And unlike other Protestant groups, it was until very recently largely untainted by Fundamentalism, although the large numbers of former Evangelical converts now filling the ranks of the ACNA are changing that. Still, there is not a significant controversy in Anglican circles over whether politics is a valid form of theological inquiry. Responsible Anglican irenicism, particularly with Presbyterians, is necessary to overcome the continuing theopolitical scandal of the Evangelical mind. Irenic scholarly action will help both groups, not for the purposes of religious syncretism, but for the strengthening of both groups’ historical particulars. Anglican open-mindedness on intellectual life can give Presbyterians comfort with a more expansive post-Fundamentalist intellectual life, and Presbyterian (and Lutheran) confessional seriousness can call Anglicans to being more than an ecclesiastical “all things to all people,” which has led the ACNA to intellectual anemia.