Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies

by N.T. Wright

Kenyan Anglican archbishop David Gitari put it, ‘Taking arms to fight autocratic regimes should only be done when all other means of bringing the desired political change have failed.’

Nazism was seductive precisely because it promised an immediate fix to parliamentary gridlock, an end to economic chaos, and a refusal to bow to the crushing indemnities and humiliating conditions imposed upon Germany by the Western powers after the First World War.

Nazism was not an alien political doctrine that appeared out of nowhere. Nazism succeeded because it embodied what people either believed or wanted to believe.

Concerning Communism, it cannot escape our notice that Christianity and Marxism have remarkably similar meta-narratives. The Christian story of creation, Fall, sin, Redeemer, redemption, Parousia and consummation finds its parallel in the Marxist story of primitive society, the invention of capital, worker exploitation, the proletariat, the proletarian revolution and Communist utopian society.

The ironic thing about Communism is that it is simultaneously too Christian and not Christian enough.

On the one hand, Communism is too Christian in that it constitutes an over-realised Christian eschatology, trying to bring heavenly justice to earth by violent revolution, attempting to manufacture the conditions where ‘the last will be first, and the first will be last’.13 Such a Communist utopia can only be created, Marx said, ‘by despotic inroads’,14 so that the road to paradise runs through several caverns of hell. We cannot forget that ‘the Kharkov famine [of the Soviet Union] and the Killing Fields [of Cambodia] were perpetrated by atheists in an attempt to realise the most lofty ideals of human perfection’.15 On the other hand, Communism is not Christian enough because it lacks a doctrine of total depravity. In Marxism, evil is what capitalists do, what the bourgeois do, what the factory owners do, but it cannot accept that evil lives in the hearts of Communists too. Marxist leaders believe that they ‘are exempt from error and can therefore arrogate to themselves the exercise of absolute power’.16 That is precisely why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his Gulag Archipelago that ‘the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts’.

It is baffling that, in the USA, many Baptists are coming out as supporters of Christian nationalism. It is baffling to us because Baptists fled the religious sectarianism of the British Isles to go to America in the seventeenth century. The reason they fled was because Baptists, and other Nonconformists, were persecuted, discriminated against and cajoled in matters of religious conviction.

In other words, we are concerned about a progressive post-liberal order that does not value the right to dissent, the value of ideological diversity or the necessity of public debate, and that does not tolerate religions it cannot dictate to.

In the end, the progressive political vision amounts to what US political philosopher Stephen Macedo calls civic totalism, where the State is invested with all power and seeks to regulate as much of public and private life as possible.47

There is something terrifying about a state so convinced of its own self-righteousness, that excites its citizens into a frenzy of rage and worship, a state that feels free to control, coerce and kill, all in the name of its empire, for the sake of progress, or to prove it is on the ‘right side of history’. As Lévy cautions: I fear nothing so much as a state which mobilizes, inflames the hearts of its subjects, dispenses them from the trouble of thinking, and then one fine day leads them like sleepwalkers along the paths of glory and concentration camps.59

Tom Holland argues that the moral disputes at the heart of our culture are between rival versions of Christian ethics that are playing out in the conservative versus progressive divide. The problem is that only one side of the culture wars is aware that its argument functions within Christian grammar. It is fiercely ironic then that the secular Kulturkampf is really a critique of Christian ideas with other Christian ideas. Hence G. K. Chesterton’s complaint that ‘the modern world is full of old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.’

Western liberalism, with its talk of rights and aversion to injustice, is Christianity’s prodigal son squandering his inheritance on ‘disordered loves’, while claiming it has inherited nothing from its parents.

Theologians in the past have recognised that while all power is from God, the legitimation of that authority comes through the people.27

Democracy is only as good as the people and institutions guarding it.

in-house critique is possible in a liberal democracy but impossible in an authoritarian nation.

Note, too, that over the centuries of church history, Greek Orthodox Christians and French Huguenots often preferred to live under Muslim Ottoman rule than under a Catholic king. Even today, Christians in Syria have sided with the Assad regime because of the horrors perpetrated against them by Sunni extremists. Sometimes it is a matter of siding with the lesser evil.

T. S. Eliot: ‘To identify any particular form of government with Christianity is a dangerous error for it confounds the permanent with the transitory, the absolute with the contingent.’

Even so, there is nothing to stop us advocating and celebrating liberal democracy as one of the most noble achievements of human civilisation, an achievement that would not have happened, and is not even conceivable, apart from the Christian heritage of the West.

Luke Bretherton notes, ‘Christians do not need democracy to practice their faith, but democracy enshrines some central Christian commitments, and so, as a judgement of practical reason, democracy should be an aspirational feature of political order for Christians.’35