The Secular Hole in Modern Protestant Political Thought

Advocating for Christian realism and Great Commission optimism

Within the past few weeks, I’ve listened to several public conversations featuring Christian intellectuals discussing the plight of Western Civilization. The degradation of society never fails to spark outrage and concern among followers of Jesus. The talking points should be predictable by now. Secularism has taken over. The Woke agenda forces culture to celebrate perversity under the pretension of equity and acceptance. The spread of other religions threatens the Christian social order that undergirds the American experiment. It’s bad out there.

For the record, I agree with most of these assessments. I too prefer culture to reflect my Christian values. In fact, I labor to spread the knowledge of Jesus Christ so that his lordship informs all of life. I teach both my family and my church to reject the perverse values of our secular culture and to joyfully embrace our righteous identity as salt and light in the world. I too love many aspects of the Western Tradition and want to conserve it.

Agreement aside, I’m taken aback by the level of Christian outrage over culture’s vain decadence. Are orthodox Christians genuinely surprised that “the world” is evil? Did they forget that Paul calls the world order the “present evil age” (Gal 1:4) and warns Timothy that “hard times will come in the last days” (2 Tim 3:13). Of course, Paul believed he was already living in the “last days,” so there’s no reason to think these passages teach a steady progression of increasing evil until Christ returns. The world was bad and will continue to be bad. It may not get worse, but there’s no reason to expect it to get better.

Reinhold Niebuhr called this perspective Christian realism. In response to the progressive social gospel movement in the early twentieth century, he pointed to the Bible’s doctrine of sin to put to rest utopian dreams of a gradually improving political order. Human depravity will always prevent us from implementing heaven on earth in this age. Niebuhr upheld Augustine as the original Christian realist. In the City of God, Augustine set realistic expectations for Christians living in the world. We should involve ourselves in efforts to better the city of man, but as citizens of the city of God, we must remember that we are exiles here. As such, we have no reason to expect things to go our way in culture.

Christian realism maintains the proper tension between the already and the not yet without relegating its adherents to political passivity or withdrawn quietism. Christians throughout history have rightly applied Jeremiah’s instruction to Jews living in Babylonian exile to their own position as exiles in the world: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jer 29:7). We ought to do all we can to improve the conditions where we live. As citizens of a constitutional republic, Americans can do more than most. However, our primary allegiance is to the kingdom of Christ. As Christians, we must remember our limitations. We await the final redemption of creation; we certainly cannot bring it about.

While the level of outrage surprises me, I’m most concerned not by what is said in these public conversations about the fall of Western civilization, but by what is left unsaid. In all the handwringing about mosque construction and the progressive cultural takeover, the Christians doing most of the talking—often pastors, public intellectuals, and seminary professors—rarely mention the church and its mission of evangelism, discipleship, and church planting in their list of solutions. The conversations typically go from “look how bad it is out there!” to “how can we organize politically to get our culture back?” without ever considering how the proclamation of the gospel has historically transformed cultures.

The historical Christian cultures we so prize today were not instituted top down through political authority but bottom up through what Alan Kreider calls “patient ferment.” The gospel took root in Roman culture slowly through a mysterious fermentation process that manifested divine power through the faithful habitus of the redeemed.[1]

Scholars estimate that Christians comprised ten percent of the Roman population by the time of Constantine’s conversion, which mainstreamed the faith in 313. How did this fledgling movement go from Jesus’s five hundred eyewitnesses plus to six million people in less than three hundred years? The late sociologist, Rodney Stark, who devoted his career to answering this question, concluded that Christianity spread by offering a compelling way of life embodied in its local church communities. In other words, Christians attracted their neighbors by living out a superior ethic modeled on Christ’s sacrificial love.

More recently, Stephen O. Presley argues that our present struggle against a secular culture “reflects a revival of the ancient struggle between paganism and Christianity”—the very struggle the early church faced in its first three centuries. The early church impacted that pagan world, not by harnessing governmental power in service to the church, but through “cultural sanctification.” Presley writes, “This Christian performance of sanctification involves defending the faith, sharing the good news of salvation found in Christ, and visibly embodying all the virtues of the Christian spirituality in ways that persuade others.”[2]

The debate among Baptists about Isaac Backus is an interesting illustrative case. Those who claim Backus as some kind of “magisterial Baptist” love to point to Backus’s alleged support of religious test laws for public office and the use of the Westminster Confession in public schools. However, they often fail to point out how central missions was to his political vision. Backus never supported mandating the Christian faith through political fiat. He believed culture would become more Christian as Christians believed the gospel.

William McLoughlin describes Backus’s vision this way: “Isaac Backus, a leading spokesman for the Baptists at the time, believed in separation of church and state, but he was also among those who thought the United States was and should be a Christian nation. That would be true as soon as all those outside the churches were persuaded to become members. Religious liberty would create an open marketplace for preaching the various forms of Christianity and, in his opinion, the United States would ultimately be a Baptist nation, for the Bible says that ‘the Truth is great and shall prevail.’”[3]

The truth is that Christian missions isn’t sexy anymore. In our flirtation with magisterial political utopianism, we’ve succumbed to Great Commission defeatism. In our embrace of secular political idolatry, we’ve lost confidence in the power of the gospel to save and transform.

Here’s what I know: the only way to get a Christian nation is by making that nation’s citizens Christian. The only way to do that is by preaching the gospel and making disciples—a process that depends ultimately on God and will likely take generations. We can wring our hands and discuss political strategy until the end of time, but the power to change the world remains Christ and him crucified. If culture warring seems more exciting to you than baptizing your pagan neighbor, you may be contributing to Western Civilization’s secularization more than stopping it.

---

[1] Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbably Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), 12.

[2] Stephen O. Presley, Cultural Sanctification: Engaging the World like the Early Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024), 12.

[3] William G. McLoughlin, Soul Liberty: The Baptists’ Struggle in New England, 1630–1833 (Hanover and London: Brown University Press, 1991), 249.