Wesleyans, Doug Wilson, and Post-Liberalism
Photo by jimmy teoh
Doug Wilson, the highly successful Idaho Calvinist entrepreneur who has founded a college, a denomination (with a new church plant on Capitol Hill in DC), classical Christian schools across America, and a national thought movement, has helped start new conversations. He wants a Christian confessional state that would privilege Christianity and Christians in law. And he thinks women ideally would not have voting rights in civil society (except possibly for female heads of household). He hopes to revive Christendom, as he understands it.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, a Roman Catholic, recently interviewed Wilson about the finer points of his version of Calvinism and its political implications. It's a fascinating conversation in which Wilson is articulate, engaging, and clever. When was the last time that Douthat or another major commentator interviewed a Methodist, whose adherents far outnumber Wilson's, about the details of Wesleyan theology? The answer, of course, is not for decades. The early and mid-century pugilist H.L. Mencken routinely mocked Methodist societal sanctimony. Now nobody talks about us. Why?
Wilson is a great organizer and communicator who’s often deliberately provocative. His message and movement are offensive to many and bracing to his fans, especially young men. He is also a man for our postliberal moment. Post-liberals believe that liberal democracy has failed. Perhaps it worked in the early days of the American republic when virtue and religion were ostensibly stronger. Catholic author Patrick Deneen, who wrote Why Liberalism Failed, believes America's Founding was based on false premises from the start. Post-liberals who find merit in America's founding think American democracy has corroded to the point of running its course. A new system is needed. Religious liberty for all, freedom of speech for all, equality in law for all, may or may not have been good ideas originally, from their perspective, but they have led to destructive decadence. Freedom, they believe, led directly to Drag Queen Story Hour, etc. A good society, they say, will, through its government and laws, point to the ultimate good, which is God in Jesus Christ. As one postliberal manifesto signed by prominent figures declared, Jews and other religious minorities in America should be protected in their own sphere but accept Christian dominance.
Protestants of this perspective, some of whom, like Wilson, identify as "Christian nationalists," want a generic Christian republic, inscribed in law, which they hope will eventually become a Protestant and ideally a Calvinist republic. Catholic post-liberals, who often identify as integralists, want the Catholic Church once again to be paramount in society, including in government and law, with direct jurisdiction over all baptized Christians. Some post-liberals, perhaps most, decline to go this far, but still they want religion specifically privileged in law and irreligion and its behaviors punished in law.
Where do Methodists and Wesleyans fit into this conversation? There are some online, mostly younger Methodists who resonate with versions of post-liberalism, which fills the oxygen of today's conservative Christianity. But formal Methodist/Wesleyan participation in this conversation is largely lacking. Methodists and Wesleyans are not active participants in America's meaningful national conversations. Methodism helped to shape America and its democracy. Now it is largely a bystander. Hopefully, a renewed Wesleyan Christianity will contribute to American intellectual discourse.
How might Methodists think about today's post-liberalism and figures like Wilson? Our witness should be very different. Self-identified "Christian nationalists" are almost always Calvinist and have their own anthropology and order of salvation that shapes their public view. (Most American Calvinists and Reformed Christians, of course, do not share Wilson's perspective, it's important to remember.) John Wesley supported religious toleration and freedom of speech as it emerged from the Glorious Revolution, with the supremacy of parliament, and protections against state caprice against liberty and property. He thought English freedoms dated back to Magna Carta, if not before. He also, of course, backed the state church and believed in governance by hierarchy, that God exercised his will through those in power, to whom the governed should lawfully submit. This perspective partly explains his opposition to the American Revolution.
But like many great religious reformers, Wesley's dynamic theology unloosed forces he did not foresee and perhaps would not have welcomed. Methodism bred an egalitarian perspective that was politically uplifting for society's lower strata. The social impact was revolutionary, but gradually. As Theodore Weber explains in his Politics in the Order of Salvation: Transforming Wesleyan Political Ethics, Wesley himself attached the "political image" of God to all persons irrespective of faith. That image was corrupted by, not erased by, The Fall. Effectively, each person bearing that divine political image becomes a vice regent of God on earth with political rights and responsibilities. Hence, Methodists played leading roles in abolishing slavery, enfranchising women, alleviating poverty, and reforming society, wherever Methodists have existed.
It can also be argued that Methodists are more eschatologically patient and do not expect, much less demand, a Christian confessional state or the legal privileging of Christianity. Contrary to Wilson and other professing Christian nationalists, Christ's lordship does not require formal legal recognition by the state to be enacted. He is already Lord, and all who look to Him serve Him as such. A civil statute citing his Lordship is artificial and potentially undermines the church's mission of making genuine converts. Methodists, who have never had a state church, have always been a voluntarist movement, relying on persuasion empowered by the Holy Spirit. And Methodists are social reformers who chiefly combat personal and social sin through changing hearts and attitudes, not legal compulsion. When Methodists have resorted to mass coercion, as with Prohibition, they have failed.
Methodists, among all the major Protestant traditions, are the most optimistic, based on their robust view of God's grace in the world. Post-liberalism and its religious allies see only decline, decadence, and calamity, which can only be remedied by authoritarian alternatives to liberal democracy. Methodists look at the world and see all that God has done already and is doing right now. Society is awash in sin, as always. Yet the Gospel shines and advances. And Methodists know that to see only sin without also gratitude for God's work among us is the height of ingratitude. Christians today in America are more materially blessed than ever before and more privileged than any other people in history. We are called to give thanks, rejoice, and work harder towards advancing God's Kingdom.
We Methodists should be renewing our own communities and planting more churches, especially in America's cities and college towns, saving souls, changing lives, and renewing the nation. And we should join the great debates about our nation's future, with all the spiritual and intellectual resources that our Wesleyan tradition has bequeathed to us, by God's grace.
Mark Tooley is the President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy.