¡Viva Cristo Rey!
Embryo Parson Posted on Wednesday, June 3, 2015 at 05:38PM That was the cry of the Cristero warriors, Catholic Christians who took up arms against an oppressive socialist government in the early part of the 20th century. The Cristero War was one resistance movement in recent Christian history where Christians took up arms to fight political oppression, a weapon they added to martyrdom, and which was based on Christian resistance theory that finds its incipient expression in the works of St. Augustine. Other modern examples would be the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire's rule of Greece and the Balkans in the 19th century, the Catholic resistance against leftist republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and the overthrow of the brutal communist dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu, by Romanian Orthodox Christians wielding Kalasnikov rifles and other weapons. Christianity is not a pacifist religion, despite the sophistic arguments of the John Howard Yoders in the church peddling their unbiblical wares. Western Christians have long believed Just War principles can be applied to Just Revolutions, and even though Orthodoxy does not have a Just War doctrine, it has more or less operated on the assumption that the Just War theory is true. (One notable example can be found in Metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky’s essay The Christian Faith and War.) ACNA Archbishop Foley Beach recently made the unfortunate comment in a Martin Luther King Day sermon that "violence is not the answer. Violence only leads to more violence. It is non-violence which brings lasting social change". I'll give His Grace the benefit of the doubt here and say that he was just trying to say something nice and profound about the civil rights luminary on MLK Day, whose model of activism was indeed based largely on Gandhian pacifism, as noted in the linked article. But Archbishop Beach's comment is flat wrong when viewed in a biblical and Christian-historical contexts. Plus, it's just flat wrong empirically. The Orthodox Serbs and Greeks will tell you that their violent resistance against the Ottoman Turks brought lasting social change to their lands. Gandhi does not represent Judeo-Christian though on this question.
As I have indicated previously, this blog will feature the occasional article on political matters, and one that is near and dear to my heart is the right of resistance to tyranny, awhich has for almost a millennium been considered a right of Englishmen. Now that it is becoming clear to all of us the extent to which the liberal, secular (which is now to say, antichristian) state in Europe, North America and Oceania is willing to go in forcing its will upon the Church of Christ, fresh thought is being given by many Christian writers about what our response should be when things start getting bad.
Eastern Orthodox author and blogger Rod Dreher has fired up a discussion of what he calls the “Benedict Option”, based on some musings of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his book After Virtue. The discussion surrounds the question of what strategies of withdrawal, if indeed withdrawal becomes the only option, the church might embrace. Dreher's Benedict Option idea is based loosely on the model of the monastic societies created by St. Benedict of Nursa and the influences they brought to bear in buidling Christendom after the fall of the Roman Empire. The discussion at The American Conservative, where Dreher published his first article, can be seen here. A recent article by Damon Linker at The Week, The Benedict Option: Why the religious right is considering an all-out withdrawal from politics, deserves a close look. Linker begins his article:
Have you heard of the Benedict Option? If not, you will soon.
It's the name of a deeply pessimistic cultural project that's capturing the imaginations of social conservatives as they come to terms with the realization that the hopes and assumptions that animated the religious right over the past 35-odd years have been dashed by the sweeping triumph of the movement for same-sex marriage.
From the start, the religious right has been marked by two qualities: optimism and a faith in majoritarianism. The qualities are connected. Think back to Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. The name conveyed its ideology: A majority of Americans are morally and religiously conservative. To the extent that the nation's politics and culture don't reflect that, it's because they have been co-opted by a secular liberal minority that has placed itself in control of such elite institutions as the media, Hollywood, the universities, the judiciary, and the federal bureaucracy. The proper response is to take back these institutions using democratic means, primarily elections.
In other words, play by the rules of the democratic game, and social conservatives will eventually triumph.
This sounded like a fantasy at first, since the movement began among evangelical Protestants, who never made up more than about 25 percent of the population, and whose style of worship and belief was profoundly off-putting to non-evangelical Christians, let alone to more secular Americans. But ecumenical and inter-religious efforts throughout the 1980s and early 1990s helped to forge an alliance among conservative believers in many faith traditions: evangelicals, but also Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and Muslims. This made talk of majorities at least plausible, and seemed to vindicate the optimism, too.
That no longer being the case, and will likely never be the case again, Linker mentions a previous episode in American history where conservatives had given up the notion that the collapsing American experiment could be salvaged:
Before the present moment, the one flicker of genuine gloom came in 1996, after a series of court rulings seemed to signal that secular liberalism was using the judiciary to thwart the will of the people. That inspired the conservative religious magazine First Things (for which I later worked) to run a notorious symposium titled "The End of Democracy?" An unsigned editorial introducing the symposium suggested that religious Americans would soon have to decide on options ranging "from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution."
The First Things symposium Linker references can ge read here. It caused a number of conservatives, such as Midge Decter, to desert the First Things culture wars project, as the periodical had jumped the shark by starting to preach sedition. However, one must take into account just how bad things were back in that day. Author Ambrose Evans-Pritchard provided a glimpse into how bad it was in his book The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, mentioning the First Things symposium in his description of the times:
In Washington, Clinton moved with ruthless efficiency to take control of the federal machinery of coercion. While the U.S. watchdog press barked and howled with pitiful irrelevance about Clinton’s $200 hair cut, he quietly fired every U.S. Attorney in the country and then made his move on the FBI, which would be transformed gradually, one appointment at a time, into a replica of the Arkansas State Police. When he sacked William Sessions in July 1993, it was the first time in American history that a president had summarily dismissed an FBI director. The putsch passed without protest. This is how a country starts to lose a democracy.
I have not lost my faith in the American people. In the end, I believe, it is the ordinary citizens who will cleanse the institutions of the country before they become irretrievably corrupt. They are the heroes of this book. Ultimately, this is an optimistic essay, a paean to the American spirit. But let me tell you, I am astounded by the bullying and deceitful conduct of the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies under this administration. No doubt there have been abuses in the past, but I believe that malfeasance has become systemic over the last five years. It is spreading down, by example, lodging itself in the institutional apparatus of government. Whether it is the Internal Revenue Service targeting foes of the president, or the Immigration and Naturalization Service expediting citizenship for “Democratic” voters in time for the 1996 elections, or the prostitution of the Lincoln Bedroom, the Clinton reflex is in evidence everywhere. To put it with brutal honesty, you can sniff the pungent odors of decay in the American body politic. I expect that this is what it smelt like in continental Europe in the 1920s, even as the boom rolled on.
When you are living through events day-by-day it is hard to know whether you are witnessing an historic turning point in the life of a country, or just mistaking the usual noise of politics for something meaningful. But there can be no doubt that the undercurrents in the era of William Jefferson Clinton are unprecedented. It was driven home to me by a symposium in November 1996 held by Father Richard Neuhaus, a respected Catholic intellectual and editor of First Things. Neuhaus warned that the experiment of the founding fathers was in danger of failing, and he pointedly spoke of the “the trail of abuses and usurpations” that set off the first American Revolution. Has it reached the point, he asked, “where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime?”
Yes, he said “regime.”
Something about Bill Clinton—his ineffable caddishness, perhaps—is changing the political discourse of the country. Every year that he continues in power, he eats a little deeper into the eroded legitimacy of the political order. The importance of this cannot be exaggerated. Three-quarters of the American people now tell pollsters that they do not trust the government to do the right thing. If ever there was a time when a leader of stoic virtue was needed to restore the authority of the national institutions, it is surely now.
It is under this president that domestic terrorism has become a feature of daily life in America. For decades the country was largely free of the political violence that has afflicted much of western Europe. Indeed, Europeans looked across the Atlantic with envy, marveling at the way this huge bustling nation managed to order its affairs with such cohesive goodwill. Not any longer. The actions and character of President Clinton have engendered the most deadly terrorist movement in the industrialized world. I choose the word “movement” advisedly because I do not accept the Justice Department claim that Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh were acting alone when they killed 168 people in the Oklahoma federal building in April 1995. There has been a steady campaign of bombing since then: three in Atlanta alone, including the deadly pipe bomb that eclipsed the 1996 Olympics. The attacks are so ubiquitous that they do not make the national news unless somebody is killed. To a foreign eye, America looks like a country that is flying out of control.
Again, it is under Clinton that an armed militia movement involving tens of thousands of people has mushroomed out of the plain, an expression of dissent that is unparalleled since the southern gun clubs before the Civil War. People do not spend their weekends with an SKS rifle, drilling for guerrilla warfare against federal forces, in a country that is at ease with itself. It takes very bad behavior to provoke the first simmerings of armed insurgency, and the militias are unmistakably Clinton’s offspring.
Here in 2015 under the Obama regime and with another possible Clinton regime in the wings, things are immeasurably worse. As Linker intimates, therefore, maybe First Things had it right. I for one believed they did when I read the symposium back in 1996, and I believe it with fervor now.
Hence the “Benedict Option”, where, as Linker put it with respect to the conclusion of the First Things symposium, “religious Americans (will) soon have to decide on options ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.’" Three things, in that order. The Just Revolution, like the Just War, is always the last resort. But a justifiable resort it is.
Charles Murray has recently jumped onto the resistance bandwagon in his new book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission. A review published yesterday at the Washington Post can be read here. What Murray says about resisting an out-of-control bureaucracy can apply to any out-of-control behavior of the government, including the unconstitutional assaults on free speech, right to keep and bear arms, right to privacy, states right. . . and freedom of religion. And that’s what I will be addressing from time to time here at OJC.
I recently stumbled onto a related article at First Things from 1998 entitled, The Neo-Augustinian Temptation, by Robert Benne. The author is critical of the writings of a number of authors from this movement because of their desire to opt out of cultural and political engagement. Early Benedict Optioners, in other words, though of an Augustinian stripe. Their suggestions are interesting:
The movement, if it is cohesive enough to be called that, is committed to the construction of an independent and distinct churchly culture based upon the full narrative of Israel and the Church as it has been carried through the ages by the Great Tradition. Theologically, the neo-Augustinians are anti-foundationalists who believe that a religious tradition like Christianity is a cultural-linguistic system that cannot and should not be compromised by any standards not its own. They learned that from Lindbeck.
Biblically, they argue that the early Christianity depicted in the Pauline letters was a churchly “public” or culture of its own, flourishing along side of but radically distinct from the Roman, Jewish, and Hellenistic cultures of the time. “Paul already regards the Church as a new public order in the midst of the nations with its own distinctive culture,” argues David Yeago. Christians who entered such a culture were “dying to the world” in the sense that they were entering a new ecclesial world.
Ethically, they contend that the practices of this distinct, living tradition form the Christian virtues that sustain such an ecclesial world. The Church’s worship, preaching, teaching, and communal life shape the virtues that maintain the practices of marriage and family life, charity, hospitality, governance, art, and thought that provide a real alternative to the dying world about us. The Church essentially needs no sources other than its own for the ethical task. Milbank asserts that the Church produces its own “ecclesial society,” with an attendant ontology, social theory, ethics, and economics.
Ecclesiology, that formerly unexciting branch of systematic theology, takes on urgency in the neo-Augustinians’ writings. The Church is a constitutive dimension of the Gospel, manifesting a comprehensive new life. It is the Body of Christ in a direct and literal way, a people in continuity with the people of Israel. It needs to live truly from its own sources and forget about worldly relevance. “The Church is a public in its own right,” says Hütter. “The world,” when pressed hard, is simply another religious vision of life that is a poison when ingested uncritically by the Church. . . .
Above all, they are contemptuous of the “modern settlement,” to use Yeago’s term, in which secular, liberal society, with its procedural definition of justice, has succeeded in marginalizing the religious vision. The modern settlement has insisted on a “naked public square” in which religion is relegated to the private sphere of life. Meanwhile, modernity’s own “scientific” way of understanding life is dogmatized as the only public meaning available. Rather than being “objective” or “scientific,” secular social theories are, Milbank argues, “concealed theologies or anti-theologies.” In this “settlement,” Christian belief becomes a weekend hobby in no real competition with the really serious ways of understanding life in this world-sociology, psychology, economics, and political science. . . .
Almost as objectionable are the desiccated religious bodies that have accepted the modern settlement, albeit unconsciously. Mainstream church bodies have tacitly bought the argument that politics and therapy are more important than Christian faith, and have allowed their theologies to become handmaidens of ideology or psychology. They give sacred legitimation to secular knowledge and action and thereby become “relevant.” (Several of the neo-Augustinians have made the surprising charge that the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr is best understood as a religious legitimation of liberal democracy.) These mainstream bodies, though they think they are involved in “transformation,” are more likely being acculturated more deeply into the modern settlement. According to Hütter, such attempts ironically “deepen the Church’s irrelevance and undermine its public (political) nature by submitting and reconditioning the Church according to the saeculum’s understanding of itself as the ultimate and normative public.”. . . .
The neo-Augustinian project strikes some critics as a new sectarianism, but it is far from that. Its proponents believe in culture-Christian culture. They are not inimical to the arts, music, politics, economic life, education. But these cultural activities, they insist, will have to be renewed-if not entirely rebuilt-on Christian assumptions. Culture under the modern settlement is depleting its inheritance from the Christian past and is gradually descending into perversion and chaos. A new culture must arise from the Church.
The neo-Augustinians are also catholic-even if they are Lutherans, Methodists, or Presbyterians. They transcend modern Christian divisions by attempting to retrieve a premodern Christian consensus. They have a “high” Christology, sacramentology, and ecclesiology and are committed to maintaining strong continuity with the great catholic tradition. They emphasize Catholic substance over Protestant principle.
There is much that is attractive and compelling in this movement. Its confidence in and clarity about orthodox Christianity is highly persuasive. It is refreshing to encounter serious thinkers who argue unabashedly that the Christian vision is true and trustworthy and that it matters ultimately.
This neo-Augustinian outlook is particularly tempting in moments when one is convinced that the current culture of the West is unraveling. Modernity’s commitment to individual rights and procedural justice seems to have no way of affirming substantive moral notions as to how we should live together in community. Indeed, “rights talk” is used as a trump card to override the inherited moral substance of our common life. The Protestant culture that provided the social glue for most of American history is in shambles and shows scant prospect of being revived or renewed. What little remains of the Protestant Establishment indicates no commitment to such traditional Judeo-Christian notions as the sanctity of life at its beginning and end, of marriage as a lifelong convenant of fidelity between a man and a woman, of intrinsic, non-utilitarian moral norms, or of the grateful acceptance of given conditions of life.
As one watches the moral norms that make for decency and restraint slowly erode, it is tempting to declare a pox on our national house and opt out of the struggle for a common culture. It would be pleasant to lose oneself in an ecclesial culture that affirms orthodox Christianity and is eagerly building a parallel culture, one built on the rock of faith instead of the endlessly shifting sands of modernity. In such circumstances, one could quit the perpetual struggle with those in both church and society who seem to have wholeheartedly bought into the modern settlement. Who wants always to appear reactionary or nostalgic?
This new vision offers the prospect of creating a genuine “people,” not merely a collection of political or psychological activists or, worse, religious consumers. It aims at incorporating full persons into a full ecclesial culture that can overcome the terrible fragmentation of modern life into semi-autonomous spheres of existence. One would have a coherent and cohesive “world” to live in along side the decaying world around it. Wasn’t this in fact what the early Church provided at the beginning of the common era?
Benne’s rejection of their program because of what he perceives as a failure of nerve or lack of trust in the process is difficult to defend in light of what’s transpired in Western Europe, North America and Oceania since 1998. I plan to start reading these authors, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that someone, somewhere has mentioned them in the Benedict Option discussion.
Sounding much like the Neo-Augustinians on these points, Anglican author T.S. Eliot presciently wrote,
The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.
This, in fact, is where we are. Whether or not it is God’s will to renew Christian civilization remains to be seen, for it is certainly possible that we are heading into events that will directly precede the Parousia. But as history shows, it is folly Christians to operate on the assumption that the End is near. It may be, rather, that Christian history is simply repeating itself. If so, we need to keep all the tools in our shed, including the option for armed resistance should that become necessary (and, please God, it won’t).
Whatever happens, our battle cry will always be ¡Viva Cristo Rey!, Long Live Christ The King!, for He is our only true, dread sovereign. All other political authority is delegated by Him, and we obey it only so long as it remains legitimate.
I've created three new categories today in the left sidebar for links to pertinent articles: Resisting Political Antichristianity and Resisting Radical Islam. Please see the articles I lnked today and check back for more.
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