Breakpoint
Author: John Stonestreet and Timothy D. Padgett
A few weeks ago, a man who should remain unnamed but claims to be a Christian, called The Hiding Place “[o]ne of the most subversive books around.” In his framing, Corrie ten Boom, who hid Jews during World War II, was a villain who cooperated with Communists and who was guilty of “shielding Christ’s enemies.” He is a recent example of what are growing fringes on both the Left and the Right, who claim the mantle of Christianity while preaching a false and misleading “gospel.”
Each side is quick to call out the other when they are guilty of misrepresenting Christianity, and there are plenty of examples. From the Left come politicians such as James Talarico and “Christian” clergy offering blessings for abortion clinics. In a 2023 book, The Godless Crusade, Tobias Cremer described right-wing groups in Germany, France, and the U.S. who claimed to be fighting for Christian civilization but made the “Christian” part secondary.
About a decade ago, New York Time columnist Ross Douthat quipped, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” The following year, Pascal-Emmanuel Gorby described the post-Christian right as having more in common with a European secular, blood-and-soil nationalism than the philosophical and political conservatism that emerged in the English-speaking world.
This kind of conservatism is, as John Ehrett put it recently, “right-wing–hierarchical–thought, shorn of a Christian mooring.” A “Christian” worldview absent anything genuinely Christian is, he continued, dangerous:
The challenge of the post-Christian right is not that its ideas are incoherent and confused, born of healthy instincts which simply need to be channeled in a sounder theological direction. The challenge is that these ideas are in fact deeply coherent – and, taken together, represent a seductive alternative to a faith perceived as too anemic to withstand the coming technological and social storm.
Of course, justifying non-Christian practices using the Faith as cover is not new. However, that does not make the justification of grossly antisemitic and racist ideas any less evil. In many cases, an affectation of Christianity is used as a thin veneer for flagrantly anti-Christian ideals. The “dissident right” voices who do as much while claiming the name of Christ are no different from progressives who deck church walls with rainbow flags, are sexually transgressive and pro-abortion, and reduce the Gospel down to “radical inclusivity.”
More than a few young men have told me that the attraction of these groups for them and their demographic emerges out of the desire to stand against what’s wrong in the world. However, as GK Chesterton noted, “It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.” Put another way, it’s not enough to oppose wrong. We must stand for what is right.
As John Ehrett concluded his article:
Any victory for “conservatism” won through forfeiting the Christian ethic of active love will prove a pyrrhic one. There are other paths, and other strategies. Perhaps “knowing what time it is” means choosing life, and mercy, and the possibility of forgiveness. We can still choose to see, in the eyes and hands of all of those who share our nature, the image of God.
A Christian conservatism without Christ is no more Christian than a Christian progressivism without Him. Being involved in the public square today means inevitably getting into the mess of the “culture wars.” It’s unavoidable, in fact. Still, to paraphrase Christ Himself, it will not profit us in the least if we “win” the whole world in the name of Christianity but, in the process, lose what makes Christianity Christian.