An Ongoing Conversation

A friend and I continue to make an effort to articulate what, exactly, is the way forward for Christianity in our culture–trying to discover how, in a situation where an increasingly intolerant ruling elite actively takes steps to make us inconsequential, Christians can successfully anticipate and defuse the conflict.  From some of my recent comments on the problems in finding a way to do that:

I agree in principle that “we can share this country” is the better part of “this town ain’t big enough for the both of us.”  Just the same, saying this with our hands in the air to those who regard our “share” as a strictly notional, de-institutionalized, publicly inconsequential “freedom of worship” is–well, it’s like making a statement at a sentencing hearing, like pleading with the firing squad.  To “share” will have to mean something that actually permits us to institutionalize our principles, in some real and publicly consequential times and places.

(source: How To Do This?)

Greg sensibly replies thus:

Acting as useful idiots for the church’s enemies…that’s not the path I’m advocating. That’s not “we can share this country” but “please kill us last.” It feeds the persecution of the church just as much as culture-warriorism. The solution is to be neither. Admittedly, models for that are few, though not nonexistent. But I don’t see any alternative to trying. We don’t know whether we can bulid moral consensus. We do know that culture-warriorism is a cure worse than the disease.

(source: How To Do This?)

I reply by pressing him to “draw me a picture” of the alternative, because as far as I can see it exists only in the cracks, right now–or where massive legal and even constitutional change alter the total situation:  

It’s important to me to try to get this down to cases, because whether I approach it from a pragmatist, a Lockean, or a Thomistic point of view, I cannot coherently decide what means to employ without concrete expectations about the end–to be evaluated based on desireability, achievability, etc.

I agree that being aggressors in “culture war” is folly. I also believe that only one party is necessary to make war; two are only necessary if there is to be any doubt about the outcome.

(source: How To Do This?)

This last point is one I have made before, at considerable length:

You don’t have to be eager for conflict to find that you are in one.  It is folly to believe that all wars are optional, that all deployments of violent rhetoric and forceful means are to be met with anxious soul-searching rather than honest refusal to cave in and kowtow to the mob’s anointed.
…
It is always unwise to ignore how much our culture owes to the totalitarianism envisioned by Bismarck and his enablers, the likes of Virchow.  Kulturkampf was originally a specific phase of German politics, but it was always a deliberate “war of choice,” an intentional violence of the regime against the Church and her faithful.
…
That influence…lasted well beyond the fierce 1871-1878 hostility.  It remained a prominent feature of the Third Reich, as well, and set the background for the Vatican’s protracted negotiations over the rights of clergy and the faithful with Bismarck’s totalitarian heirs, Hitler and the Nazis.  And it influenced the relations of Christians to Stalinist regimes, as well as the American debate over the Progressive economic and eugenic policies such as abortion, forced sterilization, mandatory universal public education in government schools, secularization of the public square, nationalization of “commanding heights” industries by corporate/regulatory conglomerates, and nationalization of higher education.  American politics were deeply corrupted by the adulation of these policies cribbed or adapted from Bismarck’s Prussia common to our anti-Semitic, upper-class, white, liberal, coastal elite political and cultural minorities

(source: Kulturkampf is just what it says)

And it is with that in view that I point out a couple of “bottom line” considerations that we sometimes forget in our efforts to come up with an acceptable modus vivendi in our present circumstances:

In any case, I could not agree that a rhetoric of conciliation is the only right way to deal with fundamental moral conflict. As long as Christ is still coming with a sword proceeding from His mouth, as long as among His promises to His saints is rule, it cannot be *in principle* wrong–though it may well be *imprudent* at almost all times and places–for there to be secular power in service of the eternally True, Good, and Beautiful. In fact, there is no non-tyrannical reason for a government to require obedience other than its subservience to just such a divine order. And there cannot possibly be any fundamental human right to commit a mortal sin; it is impossible that the secular arm’s forcibly forbidding such should, in itself, ever violate a real human right. Even if doing so *under certain circumstances* might be wrong, it cannot be *in itself* wrong to do so.

And that is why, in the case where it *would* be wrong or imprudent to appeal to the secular arm to do so–which I think it would be, in our case–I still have no problem urging people to “be wise as serpents, harmless as doves” about their involvements in the world. It is quite prudent to remind regimes that Christians obey government precisely “for the Lord’s sake,” a principle which limits that obedience as profoundly as it commands it (hence most of Christendom’s strong rejection of Caesaropapism).  We–as Church and as families, and in our neighborhoods first–ought to be living in a way that embodies the good definitively enough that it can provoke embrace or martyrdom from the regime, and if toleration is the via media, that’s totally acceptable.

And when we do that, we must definitely also find that we have principled reasons as Christians to advocate a charitable and hospitable Toleration as a policy (and that doing so in no way requires us to pre-emptively surrender to the violent and nihilistic who aim to destroy that charity and hospitality).

(source: How To Do This?)

So:  how do we do this?