Political Visions & Illusions Quotes

“Concern for one's political community is, of course, right and proper, and
Christians can hardly be faulted for wishing to correct their nation's deficiencies. At the same time, this variety of Christian nationalism errs on at least four counts. First, it unduly applies biblical promises intended for the body of Christ as a whole to one of many particular geographic concentrations of people bound together under a common political framework. Once again this requires a somewhat dubious biblical hermeneutic.
Second, it tends to identify God's norms for political and cultural life with a particular, imperfect manifestation of those norms at a specific period of a nation's history. Thus, for example, pro-family political activists tend to identify God's norms for healthy family life with the nineteenth-century agrarian family or the mid-twentieth-century suburban nuclear family. Similarly, a godly commonwealth is believed by American Christian nationalists to consist of a constitutional order limiting political power through a system of checks and balances, rather than one based on, in Walter Bagehot's words, a "fusion of powers" in the hands of a cabinet responsible to a parliament. Thus Christian nationalists, like their conservative counterparts, tend to judge their nation's present actions, not by transcendent norms given by God for its life, but by precedents in their nation's history deemed to have embodied these norms.
Third, Christian nationalists too easily pay to their nation a homage due only to God. They make too much of their country's symbols, institutions, laws and mores.They see its history as somehow revelatory of God's ways and are largely blind to the outworkings of sin in that same history. When they do detect national sin, they tend to attribute it not to something defective in the nation's ideological underpinnings, but to its departure from a once solid biblical foundation during an imagined pre-Fall golden age. If the nation's beginnings are not as thoroughly Christian as they would like to believe, they will seize whatever evidence is available in this direction and construct a usable past serviceable 34 to a more Christian future.
Fourth, and finally, those Christians most readily employing the language of nationhood often find it difficult to conceive the nation in limited terms. Frequently, Christian nationalists see the nation as an undifferentiated community
with few if any constraints on its claims to allegiance. 45 Once again this points to the recognition of a modest place for the nation, however it be defined, and away from the totalitarian pretensions of nationalism. Whether the nation is already linked to the body politic or to an ethnically defined people seeking political recognition, it must remain within the normative limits God has placed on everything in his creation.”
― David T. Koyzis, Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies

“According to Allan Bloom the whole world is divided between the followers of John Locke and Karl Marx-between liberalism and socialism.42 While the configuration of human ideological loyalties is surely more complex than this statement suggests, and despite the fact that this ideological cleavage has diminished considerably since 1989, it does point to an important truth about the contemporary political debate, namely, that its very parameters have been determined by this secularist religion, whose principal tenet is a belief in human autonomy. Because of this religion's impact, it is no longer doubted that human beings shape their world autonomously. Rather, the principal controversies revolve around the issue of who is the bearer of that autonomy, the individual or some form of community. Those who question autonomy altogether are effectively left out of the discussion.The fact that the world's principal collectivist ideology is in decline and individualism is (at least for now) in the ascendancy has not fundamentally altered this picture.”
― David T. Koyzis, Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies

“For example, efforts at party reform during the late 1960s and early 1970s aimed to remove the presidential nomination process from the hands of the politicians and turn it over to “the people.”31 This had two unintended negative results. First, the lack of an initial vetting process for potential candidates increased the risk of electing officeholders lacking basic competence or even personal integrity. Second, because the people as a collectivity are incapable of enforcing accountability between elections, and because their choice may not have the support of other officeholders, a new president facing an uncooperative Congress may be tempted to act unilaterally. F. H. Buckley sees this as a potentially fatal flaw in the system as a whole: “The increased likelihood of deadlock in a presidential system might invite dictators to step in and cure the problem by ruling extralegally, or at a minimum, by extending the scope of executive power.” Excessive democratization can produce conditions favorable to the rise of a plebiscitary ruler—a Napoleonic figure or “a Weberian charismatic hero with a dangerously exaggerated sense of self.”32 Clearly, the American example illustrates that while democratic checks on power are positive and beneficial, they cannot be applied indiscriminately throughout a political system without incurring negative consequences.33”
― David T. Koyzis, Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies

“This is where we encounter the truth in liberalism. During the sixteenth century, for example, the notion that an individual subject of a ruler could claim a right to practice her religion according to her conscience against the interference of the governing authorities would have been inconceivable, as reflected even in the Reformation confessions of faith.3 Similarly, as late as the nineteenth century in much of Europe, censorship was imposed on those who would publish ideas deemed seditious or critical of political leaders. John Stuart Mill’s (1806–1873) rationale for protecting the right of persons to express even unpopular opinions seems unremarkable today, but at the time he wrote, the point still needed to be argued against considerable opposition, not the least of which was to be found within the churches.”
― David T. Koyzis, Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies

“So where does a biblically Christian worldview take us? If, as I have been arguing, the various ideologies are rooted in an idolatrous religion, then what does a nonidolatrous approach to society and politics look like? To begin with, it properly and unquestionably acknowledges the sovereignty of God over the whole of life. Like liberalism, it sees a legitimate place for individual rights and freedoms whilst reminding us that the individual is not sovereign. Like conservatism, it calls us to recognise the proper place of tradition and repudiates those who facilely believe we can do without it. Yet unlike conservatism, it cannot countenance a simple and uncritical deferral to tradition, but recognises that traditions are human formations, subject, like all other human works, to the taint of sin. Like both nationalism and the democratic creed, it recognizes the rightful place of human community, however defined, but rejects all effort at positing such community as an all-encompassing focus of loyalty from which other loyalties, to the extent they are permitted, are merely derivative. Similarly, a nonidolatrous political perspective recognizes the legitimate, though limited, capacity of government to affect economic equity, but it eschews socialist expectations of an eschatological consummation engendered by a salvific working class.”
― David T. Koyzis, Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies