Since my essay on “The End of Protestant Retrieval” went live a few weeks ago, there’s been a lot of discussion online about the nature and direction of Protestant “retrieval” efforts writ large. That essay has been characterized in a lot of different ways—as an effort to litigate various private grievances, to gatekeep archaic texts, to hold back the tide of discourse, or what have you.^[1]

But there’s no conspiracy. What I said was what I meant. And the basic claim of my essay was, in fact, quite modest: there is a sense in which the retrieval of the Reformers’ context-bound claims about politics—developed against a thick lattice of background assumptions—ought to be pursued more judiciously than retrieval of theological insights that are more analogous to mathematical truths, though this in no way denies that there is such a thing as timeless political first principles in Christian theology.

I didn’t think this would be a particularly controversial stance. It is, after all, basically how the overwhelming majority of conservative Lutherans approach Martin Luther’s writings. Luther was an unsystematic thinker, whose political and social teachings fluctuated significantly throughout his lifetime in response to unfolding conditions. Among Lutherans, his offhand remarks in the Table Talks, or his inveighing against disorder in Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, are simply not theologically “weighted” the same way as the claims in the Small Catechism, which enjoys confessional status. That theological weight is there, to be sure, but could be said to be much “further down” in the work.

Certainly, none of this is to suggest that political retrieval should be stopped. Far from it—to take an obvious example, Luther’s work on antitrust and monopoly has been of particular interest to me.^[2] But that work is interesting and important more because it is true than because Luther was the one who happened to say it. And carrying forward Luther’s insights on usury and monopoly to contemporary conditions is inherently a more challenging, and fraught, project than carrying forward his insights on justification or hymnody. That was the point of my piece.

But I think it’s worth saying a little more about one issue in particular.

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There was one specific aspect of the piece about which I’ve received (largely friendly) pushback: my apparent skepticism of the concept of “prudence” as a useful means of conceptualizing the way that social and political insights from the Reformers’ era might be carried forward to the present. About half the folks I’ve spoken with grasped the point I was trying to make in the piece; the other half disagreed with my formulation. That’s enough to indicate that I wasn’t as clear as I should’ve been. So let me try to make the point a bit more lucid.

As background, I’ve been engaged with the “Christian criticism of liberalism” intellectual space for a number of years now, starting with the rise of “Catholic integralism” circa 2017-2018, and continuing on into the more recent intra-Protestant conversation around “Christian nationalism.” And that’s because I basically agree with the larger project’s central intuition: since all things come from God, our Christian faith necessarily touches all aspects of life, and our politics is value-laden through-and-through. Hence, John Rawls’s “public reason” liberalism—which rules out comprehensive metaphysical doctrines as bases for public reason and justice—goes badly astray by disregarding this reality.

For many—probably most—Christian critics of liberalism who agree with that central intuition this insight naturally leads into a radical, and highly specific, critique of the ills of the modern world: secularism, abortion, deaths of despair, drag queen story hour, exploitative working conditions, an economy that increasingly enriches only a few, and so on. Again, I share that critique.

But the next step is trickier: many nonliberals (integralists and Christian nationalists alike) have made the argument that this critique offers a roadmap for the exercise of real-world political power, on a comparatively near-term time horizon. Implicit or explicit in their arguments is the assumption that their particular paradigm, or their new way of conceiving the relation between theology and politics, offers the strong medicine needed now by a decadent and dying Western world, to address the specific aforementioned ills of modernity. In other words: you must jettison your liberal priors and adopt a whole new way of thinking if you really want to solve these problems root-and-branch.

That is a bold claim. And, when framed as a political strategy, it requires bold support. And both of those things are well and good, and indeed necessary at certain times in history. Here’s the rub, though: it is very difficult to figure out what a lot of Christian nonliberals actually would do, today, if handed the reins of absolute power. For example, if you raise the question of religious liberty in an argument with a Christian nonliberal, you will often be met with an answer that looks something like this: well, we must firmly reject the liberal principle of religious liberty, in which everyone has a right to believe and practice whatever they want. Heresy is bad for the body politic. Error has no rights.

Certainly, this claim sounds radical to the ears of almost any American in 2025. It’s meant to shock and provoke, to unsettle categories and “shift the Overton window.” And it does in a way. But here’s the problem: upon reflection, it becomes clear that the radicalism is a matter of rhetoric more than substance. That’s because basically nobody, liberal or nonliberal, actually endorses an entirely unrestricted account of religious liberty. Obviously, it would be illegal to perform human sacrifices as part of Aztec worship rites, no matter the rationale.

In other words, there’s already basic agreement, between liberals and nonliberals, on the principle that “religious liberty can’t be absolute.” The only question (potentially) separating them, then, is one of “prudence”: how do we work out the application of the agreed-upon principle that religious liberty can’t be absolute?

Indeed, when pressed about whether the principle—religious liberty can’t be absolute—means (for instance) that the American government should shutter synagogues and mosques, many nonliberals will retreat to talking about “prudence” in the implementation of the no-absolute-religious-liberty principle. But when the issue is viewed in that light, it’s not clear that the nonliberal critique—at the level of principle—counts for much at all. The only thing that’s truly relevant to the actual policy conversation is how that principle is going to be worked out prudentially. Are mosques and synagogues going to be closed, or not?^[3]

I’ll make it harder for myself. Let’s add in an additional principle—that the public authority has a duty to promote the true religion (which we can stipulate for the sake of argument as “Reformed Protestant Christianity”). Of course, that principle might be more contested a priori than the claim “religious liberty isn’t absolute.” But again, it’s not clear to me that establishing this principle means all that much without more. Within this frame, it seems to me that a public authority could perfectly well conclude, as a prudential judgment, that the promotion of true religion is best achieved through a policy of “ceremonial deism” at the magisterial level, coupled with a laissez-faire approach allowing religions to compete against one another and the truth of Reformed Christianity to stand out. (This is, after all, what a lot of Christians have argued.)

Now, that policy is actually what we have in America today. That’s the status quo. So how does establishing the abstract principle actually speak to the specific problems identified as the basis of the critique of liberalism writ large? In practice, it would seem that establishing the principle achieves basically nothing of consequence. The victory is merely rhetorical. At the level of addressing actual problems, the relevant conversation is only ever about the public authority’s prudential judgments.

The point of all this is that it is very difficult to intellectually engage with nonliberals who identify concrete problems in society, and claim to offer a paradigm capable of solving them decisively, but are only willing to articulate and defend principles at a level of generality that—without more detail and specificity—would leave those concrete problems largely unsolved. If you want to make the argument that your political philosophy is capable of addressing concrete problems, then you need to stipulate concrete potential solutions. Simply invoking “prudence” is not good enough. But that is often what happens in these conversations. And that’s the phenomenon that I was writing about in the original piece.

At the risk of being charged with Bulverism, I think there are two potential explanations for this use of “prudence” as a crutch.

First, I suspect that in many cases, the quick appeal to “prudence” follows from simple ignorance of the complexity of governance in the contemporary world. Today, vanishingly little government time is spent on high-salience social conservative issues (abortion, LGBT issues, etc.). A huge amount of actual legislative and executive-branch time is spent on assorted topics like energy permitting, police department funding, and merger filing fee reform, to name just a few. The average federal appellate judge will handle 100 times as many appeals of Social Security benefits denials as cases having to do with abortion.

Now, I believe that all of these are “values issues” just as much as abortion and transgender policy—but the applicability of the Christian intellectual tradition to these questions is much less obvious. There’s a lot more connective tissue that needs to be established. (What does a theologically informed vision of energy policy look like? Any takers?)

I would venture that in many cases like this, to appeal to “prudence” is to admit that one doesn’t really know all that much about how to fix a problem, but merely feels strongly that it ought to be fixed (presumably, by somebody else who knows more about it). This is understandable, but it’s an intellectually lazy move. (As some have said: do the reading!) And paradoxically, it neuters the real-world force of any nonliberal critiques. If those committed to the paradigm aren’t willing to build out some connective tissue themselves, their genuine insights will remain trapped in an echo chamber of abstractions.

Second, the appeal to “prudence” can be a dodge allowing the speaker to avoid expressing a policy preference that will provoke immediate backlash. Recall all those social pathologies that integralists, some Christian nationalists, etc., claim to be able to better tackle on their new paradigm. Well, the problem is that a lot of concrete potential solutions would almost certainly come across as extreme and off-putting if voiced directly.

Example: “Well, we would promote true religion by restricting all non-Catholic worship, and sustain this in the long run by denying voting rights to Protestants.” I pulled that example from Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister’s large manual Integralism—and I do appreciate that they’re honest about what they think, so we can have a conversation about it. Adrian Vermeule is also admirably candid about his policy agenda. But the same can’t be said of a lot of nonliberal interlocutors. Instead, ambiguity and evasion of details—a sort of taqiyya about actual means, ends, and intentions—often seems to be the name of the game.

Maybe this is a winning political strategy (though I doubt it). But it is definitely not a path to productive conversation. Where a particular nonliberal critique of modernity is pitched as a concrete means of solving concrete problems (“under Christian Nationalism, this thing XYZ won’t happen”), but where the concrete plan itself is sketched only thinly, nonliberals come off as saying something like this: I have in my back pocket a secret plan to fix our society, but I won’t tell you about it because you’ll get mad.

Perhaps that’s the point—as Frank Herbert put it, “when I am weaker than you I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.” But I’d like to presume better intellectual faith than that. And that means clarity regarding concrete applications.

All of this is why I objected, in my original piece, to a too-quick retreat to “prudence.” It’s certainly not that I object to, or fail to recognize, the importance of Christian wisdom in applying high-level principles to real-world conditions. Every leader is required to do that. My concern is solely that “prudence” is a concept that—in my experience talking to Christian nonliberals for years now—frequently abbreviates a conversation that needs to be developed.

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We could leave off there. But I want to briefly note the strongest substantive objection raised against my article, an objection that was put forward under various argumentative forms, but basically reduces to a common point. At back of many of the critical responses was, I think, the assumption that my piece was a thinly veiled apologetic for “liberalism,” a term which here serves as synecdoche for the broad status quo of the world in which we find ourselves today. Many serious Christians would like to contest that status quo.

In particular, the closing phrase of my essay, which referred to what—“maturity, under modernity, asks of us” sparked controversy. I’ll admit: the choice was a bit puckish. In my view, “maturity” under modernity doesn’t mean becoming modern in our categories and practices. For one thing, it simply means acknowledging the technological changes that make premodern political retrieval extraordinarily difficult (a topic I’ve written about previously).^[4] For another: it means acknowledging, in our politics and our political theologies, a need to learn from history—including twentieth-century history, and, yes, the Second World War and the Holocaust.

This naturally invites a discussion of the “postwar consensus”—a concept which has come to bear a great deal of weight in ongoing conversations about Protestant political retrieval. I will address this at length in forthcoming work. For the moment, I’ll just say that in my view, the term obscures more than it clarifies. Additionally, I see the challenge of postwar political thought as a challenge that, in many ways, is internal to the Christian tradition. It may be comforting to believe that shortly after 1945, “They” (opinions vary as to the precise malefactors involved) pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes and suppressed the truth of politics. But this reading does violence to history, and to Christian wisdom.

On that theme, more to come.

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.

1. Some have characterized the essay as an attempt to bridle a long-running conversation on Protestant wisdom as applied to a broad range of political and social issues. As I have stressed, that is not the case. But I would note here that a phrase like “Protestant retrieval” probably occludes the fact that the very word “Protestant” has connoted rather different things as the larger “retrieval” project has unfolded. For instance, the term “magisterial Protestantism” has been used to push against theonomic and libertarian readings of the Protestant inheritance, by stressing the Protestant tradition’s historic respect for political authority and nuanced account of individual liberty. In a different vein, “Protestantism” has been lately used to denote an intellectual project that is other-than-Catholic but no-less-than-catholic. More recently, “Protestantism” has been used by some retrievalists (whether intentionally or not) as a term effectively synonymous with “American paleoconservatism”—with the term “Protestant” specifically connoting support for the national form, and for a rejection of the purported universalism of the Catholic Church. ↑

2. John Ehrett, “Martin Luther’s Theology of Antitrust,” Modern Reformation (June 3, 2022), https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/martin-luthers-theology-of-antitrust. ↑

3. Perhaps the nonliberal might respond by saying that non-Christians will probably convert in a society mostly composed of Christians. I would respond that this is a historically unrealistic stipulation: for millennia, religious minorities have maintained subcultures of difference even within polities that are largely religiously monocultural. The question at issue is how these religious minority populations, under a Christian nonliberal order, will be treated in their difference. ↑

4. John Ehrett, “Christendom After Comcast,” Ad Fontes: A Journal of Protestant Letters (Feb. 1, 2024), https://adfontesjournal.com/commonwealth/christendom-after-comcast/. ↑
   

*Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons