"We Are Creatures of Matter Who Long to Matter": Goldstein's Mattering Map

                                                                    The Mattering Map

"The Areas of the Continents and Regions Are Determined by Estimations of the Comparative Percentage of Inhabitants" (Goldstein 2026:xiii).  SBNR on the Transcenders continent stands for "spiritual but not religious."  You can click on the image to enlarge it. 

In her new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein thinks through the central paradox of the human condition, which she expresses by saying: "We are creatures of matter who long to matter."  

We are material beings governed by physical laws of nature that are indifferent to our existence--impersonal natural laws that do not care about or for us.  And yet we are obsessed with the significance or meaning of our lives as something more than mere matter that is destined by the laws of nature to disappear in death.  We want to matter in the sense that we are deserving of attention and truly deserving of all the attention that we must give to ourselves to pursue our lives.  We long to prove that we subjectively feel that we matter because we objectively do.

We have to feel that we matter if we are to feel our lives worth living.  Goldstein observes:

We don't want to live if we become convinced that we don't, can't, will never truly matter.  The paradigmatic words of the suicidally depressed are "I don't matter."  It's no accident that the URL for the US Hotline for Suicide Prevention is https://youmatter.suicidepreventionlifeline.org (2).

I have not been able to find this website.  But I have found a suicide prevention organization named "You Matter" at https://www.youmatterawareness.org. 

Previously, I have written about Goldstein's book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.  In that book, she suggests that the deepest emotional attitude supporting religion is the feeling that my life has no meaning or purpose if I am not a creature of God who loves me and cares for me and will give me eternal life. I cannot bear the thought that my appearance in this universe was an accident, the product of cosmic causes that have no special purpose in mind, and that when I die, the world will go on without me. How can my life matter--really matter--if it's not all about ME? This is the thought that moves existentialist Christians who say that Darwinian science cannot explain everything if it cannot give cosmic meaning to the life of human beings as unique persons who don't want to die.

But as Goldstein indicates, this shows the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Wishing for something doesn't make it so, even when the wish expresses an anguished human longing. If there's no good reason to believe that it's all about ME, then my wish that it should be so is unwarranted narcissism. If I undergo an existential crisis as I seek the cosmic reason for my personal existence--why am I here? what am I here for?--there may be no reason, because it might be that my personal existence is ultimately just a contingency of the universe.

And yet, even as Goldstein reaches this conclusion, she gives her reader a novel that suggests that most human beings will never accept this, and so they will turn from reason to religion. Even those few who understand most fully the fallaciousness of the transcendent longings of human beings might feel compelled to yield to those longings by an emotional necessity that overpowers rational necessity.

FOUR CONTINENTS ON THE MATTERING MAP

In her new book, Goldstein identifies these people who rely on religious belief to demonstrate that their lives really matter as "transcenders."  But if you look at Goldstein's Mattering Map, you'll see that transcenders are one of four continents that represent the four kinds of "mattering projects."  These are four ways of answering the question--Do I matter?  The transcenders say, I matter because I matter to the spiritual presence that is the transcendent ground of the universe.  The socializers say, I matter because I matter to others.  The heroic strivers say, I matter because I can achieve a standard of excellence in my chosen area of striving.  The competitors say, I matter because I matter more than others.

Each of those four continents is divided into regions that represent subgroups within each category.  The different kinds of transcenders correspond to different religious movements, such as Christians, Muslims, and Hindus.  The socializers differ in the people they identify as the others to whom they matter: so, for example, some socializers want to matter to their friends and lovers, while others want to be famous and thus matter to many people who are not known to them.  Heroic strivers differ in their chosen areas of achievement--intellectual, artistic, athletic, and ethical.  Finally, competitors differ as to whether they compete as individuals against other individuals or as members of a social group against other groups. 

Notice that most of the transcenders continent is covered by the "Axial Age" religions identified by Karl Jaspers--the major religious traditions that originated in roughly the same period, from 800 to 200 BCE (202-206).  The "folk/traditional" category would include shamanism, the original evolutionary seed of all religious experience.

Goldstein claims that since the Axial Age, for "much of our history," almost all human beings have been transcenders.  The ancient Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) introduced a "secular approach" to mattering, which was lost during the Middle Ages, but then renewed by modern secular philosophers such as Spinoza and Locke (204-205).

Notice that the dimensions of the four continents suggest that about one-third of human beings today are transcenders, while two-thirds are not.  And of those that are not transcenders, about half are socializers, who think they matter because they matter to others.

FOUR PEOPLE WHO MATTER

Goldstein fills in her Mattering Map with narratives of the lives of people who represent the different kinds of mattering projects.  So, for instance, the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is an example of a transcender.  For a long time, he worried about the insignificance of his life in the cosmos: "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space that I occupy, and even that which I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am terrified."  But then, in one night, he had a mystical experience of being in the presence of God and Jesus Christ.  He wrote down some notes about his experience on a scrap of paper, in which he concluded: "Let me never be separated from Him.  He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel: Renunciation, total and sweet.  Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.  Eternally in joy for a day's exercise on earth.  May I not forget your words.  Amen" (200-201).  From that moment, he knew that his life mattered because he mattered to God--the divine creator of the infinite immensity of spaces that had previously terrified him.

Angela Rubino is an example of a socializer who found the purpose of her life when she became a cult follower in Trump's Make America Great Again movement in 2020.  She lives in Rome, Georgia, in the congressional district represented by Majorie Taylor Greene.  Before 2020, she had never felt that she mattered as a citizen.  But then she became captivated by Donald Trump because he seemed to be speaking for her.  She became one of the leading political activists for the MAGA movement in Georgia.  She was determined to find evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump through fraudulent vote counting.  She was sure that the county election board in Rome had destroyed many of the ballots cast for Trump.  So one night, she jumped into the dumpster outside the election board office.  She found two plastic bags crammed with paper shavings.  She took the bags back to her home where she tried to put the strips of paper together like a jigsaw puzzle that would show voting ballots for Trump that had been shredded.

She said that her being part of the MAGA movement made her feel "recognized and even important" for the first time in her life.  She had found her purpose.  She said that her wondering about the purpose of her life began when she was eight years old, sitting in the back seat of her mother's car on the way to a religion class.

The thought just came into my head.  I was thinking, "What are we doing this for?  What are we doing any of this for if we're just going to die?  You die, and it's over.  So, what's the point?"  I felt afraid.  Afraid to the point of not wanting to think about that anymore.

Speaking to a journalist with the Washington Post, she confessed:

Sometimes I'm like, what if I'm wrong?  It crosses my mind.  Then I ask God: If I'm doing something wrong, please give me the strength to figure it out.  Because I really want to understand what the point is.  This can't be what life is, that you get up and go to work and come home.  That as humans, we're nothing (19-20).

Goldstein quotes this as showing the most melancholic thing about the longing to matter--we can never be sure that we have chosen the right way to make our lives matter.  But even if we can't conclusively know that we matter, we must somehow appease the longing to matter--perhaps by becoming a political cult follower--if we are to get on with our lives. 

William James is an example of a heroic striver whose striving was for intellectual achievement in philosophy and psychology.  But for many years as a young man, James could not identify the project that would make his life worth living, and consequently, he fell into long periods of persistent depression.  He suffered such a disgust for life that he would lie in bed for days contemplating suicide.  In 1860, at the age of 18, he became interested in art, and he spent a year studying with the prominent artist William Morris Hunt.  But he decided art was not his calling, declaring, "Nothing is more contemptible than a mediocre artist."  In 1861, at age 19, he entered Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard.  But after three years there, without getting a degree, he switched over to the Harvard Medical School in 1864, at age 22.  He received his medical degree in 1869, at the age of 27.  But he never practiced medicine.  And shortly after leaving the Medical School, he fell back into a severe depression, in which he felt a "horrible fear of existence" (127-132).

Finally, in 1872, at age 30, he began to teach at Harvard, first teaching comparative anatomy and physiology, and later teaching psychology and philosophy.  At that point, it seemed that he had found his life's calling, although he continued to endure occasional bouts of depression.  The publication of his book, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890 made James the founder of American psychology.  The publication of his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, in 1902 made him the first evolutionary psychologist of religion.  The publication of his book, Pragmatism, in 1907 made him one of the founders (along with Charles Sanders Peirce) of the pragmatist tradition of philosophy.  

These intellectual achievements arose from his conviction that he could decide what matters in life, and in that decision he could make his own life matter.  As he once said, he could "believe in my individual reality and creative power."  Or, as he said in his lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?": "Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

                                   Frank Meeink Tells His Story--From Neo-Nazi to Faithful Jew

Frank Meeink is an example of a group competitor who thought that his life mattered because he belonged to a neo-Nazi group of white supremacists who mattered more than the targeted groups--particularly, Blacks and Jews--whom he hated.  He grew up in the brutal neighborhoods of South Philadelphia, where he faced daily violence not only on the streets but in his home, where his stepfather regularly beat him and called him a retard.

Then, at age 14, spending a summer with relatives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he came under the influence of a cousin who was a neo-Nazi skinhead, who persuaded him to join a white supremacist group.  Later, he explained:

They knew what to do and say to snag the interest of a fourteen-year-old half-Irish, half-Italian kid from Philly whose real dad was an addict, whose stepdad was an asshole, whose mom was indifferent, whose school was a war zone, and whose only real desire was never to feel like a fucking victim again: they gave a shit about me.  The Lancaster County white supremacists talked to me like they cared about what I thought and what I could become.  Then they told me I had a destiny.  They told me I could become a warrior.  They told me all I had to do was look in the mirror and see the truth: I was white and that was all that mattered. . . . For the first time in my life, I felt like I mattered (261).

By the end of the summer, he had earned the red shoelaces in his combat boots by having shed blood.  When he returned to Philadelphia, he organized his own neo-Nazi group, and he became a charismatic leader.  But at one point, he had so many warrants out on him that he was sure he would be soon arrested.  So he left Philadelphia, and eventually ended up in Springfield, Illinois, where he organized a skinhead group.  

But then, at age 17, when he was convicted of kidnapping and torturing another teenager, he was incarcerated for three years.  In jail, he became friends with two Black inmates.  When he was released, he found that he could no longer hate Blacks.

Out of prison, he was looking for jobs, but someone with his record had dismal prospects for employment.  He was so desperate that he took a job with a Jewish antique dealer in New Jersey who needed someone to move his heavy merchandise.  But when it came time to be paid, the boss was not around.  Frank assumed that the Jew was going to jew him out of his pay--because he had heard people talking about jewing as what you should expect from a Jew.  But instead, his boss paid him a little extra for his good work and offered him a full-time job.  Now Frank could no longer believe the stereotypes about Jews.

One day, Frank accidently broke a piece of valuable furniture.  He apologized for being so "stupid."  But his boss became angry that he so often called himself stupid.  He told Frank: "Listen hard to what I'm saying.  Smart people can fake being dumb, but dumb people can't fake being smart.  You are just smart.  Get used to it."

Those words had a powerful effect.  When Frank quotes these words today, he tears up.  That was the beginning of his transformation.  He explains: "When people started to talk to me like I was a fellow human, it changed everything.  We have to start talking.  It's human beings being human beings among human beings."

He became a cofounder of "Love After Hate," an organization that helps to rehabilitate people who have been members of hate groups.  An avid hockey fan and player, he organized "Harmony Through Hockey," associated with the Philadelphia Flyers, to teach kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, from different racial groups, to play together on a team.  He has also lectured widely about his life.  And he has testified before the U.S. Congress about the threats coming from white supremacist groups--particularly, the police brutality that comes from neo-Nazis who have joined police departments.  

So at that point, Frank's self-mattering came from his moral activism against racist hate groups.  He had changed his location on Goldstein's Mattering Map--moving from being a group competitor to being an ethical heroic striver.

But then another change in his sense of how his life matters came when he discovered that he was Jewish!  He talked with a rabbi who told him that Meeink was clearly an Ashkenazi Jewish name, and that Frank also looked Jewish.  Frank then discovered that his mother's maternal great-grandmother had been Jewish.  Since Jewish identity is matrilineal by Jewish law, this lineage makes Frank Jewish.

Now, after years of studying Judaism under the instruction of rabbis, Frank has become an observant Jew.  He frequently invokes Ha-Shem, which is a Hebrew word which means the Name.  This is the way observant Jews refer to God to avoid violating the divine commandment against taking God's name in vain.

Now, as Frank goes through his day, he reminds himself to STAY--"stop thinking about yourself"--and instead think about serving Ha-Shem and praying to him at least an hour and a half every day to ask for his guidance.

He has changed his position on the Mattering Map again--he is not just an ethical heroic striver but also a Jewish transcender.

DONALD TRUMP AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN ON THE MATTERING MAP 

                               Planned Kim Il Trump Statue at the Trump Presidential Library

Donald Trump is an example of an individualist competitor who thinks that his life matters only if he matters more than anyone else.  That's why he becomes so angry when someone disagrees with him, challenges him, or just doesn't profess to love him as much as he loves himself.  That's why he must hate every person who stands up to him or who does not bow down to him.  That's why he can never have any friends because friends respect one another as equals.

When Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic interviewed Trump a year ago, they asked him if his second term felt different from his first.  He said it did.  "The first time, I had two things to do--run the country and survive--I had all these crooked guys.  And the second time, I run the country and the world."  A few days ago, Parker and Scherer reported that a Trump confidant had told them: "He's been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live."

Previously, I have written about Trump's grandiose narcissism and the belief of his followers that he has been chosen by God.

For Trump, his life matters because he thinks he's the most powerful person to ever live--because he thinks he runs the country and the world--and therefore he matters more than any other human being who has ever lived.

Trump often compares himself with Abraham Lincoln.  But while Lincoln was politically ambitious, his ambition was different from Trump's.  Although Goldstein never mentions Lincoln, he is a good example of a political fame-seeking socializer whose noble ambition makes Trump's juvenile craving for attention look petty by contrast. 

I have written about Lincoln's ambition and his suicidal depression when he thought that his ambitious strivings might never be fulfilled.  For example, at age 32, Lincoln was plunged into one of his deepest bouts of melancholic misery while serving as an Illinois state legislator.  He withdrew into his room in Springfield and stopped attending sessions of the Legislature.  He considered committing suicide, and his friends removed all sharp instruments from his room.  He spoke with his best friend--Joshua Speed--who later reported the conversation to William Herndon:

In the deepest of his depression, he said one day he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived; and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation, and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow-men, was what he desired to live for.

22 years later, shortly after Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he reminded Speed of this earlier conversation about his ambition for doing something great so that he would be remembered forever, and he told Speed: "I believe that in this measure, my fondest hopes will be realized."

Lincoln thought his life would matter if he could link his name to the vindication of the American principle of equal liberty by the emancipation of slaves.  Trump thinks his life matters if he can exercise such absolute power over the world that everyone will be forced to pay attention to him.

THE MATTERING OF TRANSCENDERS IS SPECIAL

Goldstein does not rank any of the different kinds of mattering projects as better than the others.  And she warns against the mistake of universalizing one's own mattering project by moving from "this is what most matters to me, if I'm to matter" to "this is what ought to matter to everyone, if they're to matter."  

She does say, however, that the transcenders are special in that "there is no greater sense of mattering than that experienced by transcenders" (193).  She explains:

To be a transcender is to believe that your personal existence has a role to play in the narrative of eternity.  You would not be at all unless you had a role to play in the drama of all of existence.  There is no greater mattering that you can conceive for yourself, short of imagining that you are yourself a transcendent being existing on an exalted plane beyond other mortals--in other words, short of lunacy.  Compared to transcendent mattering, any other sense of mattering limps far behind, which again explains why psychologists keep producing data showing that the religious and spiritual report comparatively higher levels of life satisfaction (197).

What I see here is a suggestion of Goldstein's envy of the transcenders for having a greater sense of mattering than she does.  Or perhaps it's a regret that she lost the transcenders' sense of mattering when she lost her ultra-Orthodox Jewish faith at age fourteen.  As she reports in her book on Spinoza, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, she attended an ultra-Orthodox all-girls high school, where her favorite teacher--Mrs. Schoenfeld--warned the girls that they must never read Spinoza because he was a Jew who became an atheist.  But then as Mrs. Schoenfeld described his atheistic philosophizing and how the Jewish community in Amsterdam had excommunicated him as a heretic, Goldstein felt an attraction to him: "The thought occurred to me that he must have been a lovable man.  I sat in Mrs. Schoenfeld's class, and I felt that I loved him" (47).

Goldstein became a professional philosopher whose sense of mattering comes from her being an intellectual heroic striver who finds her life's purpose in achieving intellectual excellence.  But she still feels some faint longing for that most intense sense of mattering that she once had as an ultra-Orthodox high school girl.

She hinted this in one of her conversations with Frank Meeink:

Frank asked me once about my own Jewish faith and observance.  We were in an Uber returning from the quirky marina where his waterlogged boat is still docked.

When I come clean to him about my lack of religious belief and observance, he gave me his lopsided grin and tells me that it's all okay, but he hopes I know I'm going to hell.  (A joke.  Frank doesn't believe in hell.)

Wait a minute, I say, grinning back.  You of all people have got to believe in redemption.

"Yeah, you're right," he says.  "Me of all people.  I gotta believe in redemption even if it ends up killing me." 

Doesn't their awkward joking about believing in redemption suggest their aching longing for religious transcendence? 

In my next post, I will argue that Darwinian Lockean liberalism supports Goldstein's theory of the Mattering Instinct.

The Lockean Liberalism of Douglas Wilson's "Boniface Option"

How do we get a Christian nation?  In his Frequently Asked Questions About Christian Nationalism, Douglas Wilson says there are three common answers to that question: the Benedict Option, the Bonaparte Option, and the Boniface Option.

Oddly, Wilson does not mention Rod Dreher, although the Benedict Option was originally proposed by Dreher in his book with that title.  I have argued that Dreher's argument is incoherent, because while he claims to reject liberalism, his proposed alternative to liberalism is founded on the liberal principle of individual liberty by which social order arises through voluntary choice.  I am making the same argument about Wilson's Christian nationalism: although Wilson appears to be arguing for an illiberal theocracy, his careful readers can detect a secret teaching in favor of a liberal social order with religious liberty and toleration.

Dreher tells the story of St. Benedict (480-543 A.D.) and the monastic tradition that he began.  Disgusted by the corruption that he saw in Rome under barbarian rule, Benedict turned to a life of prayer and contemplation, living for three years as a hermit in a cave.  After leaving his cave, he joined a monastic community, and founded twelve monasteries of his own.  To guide the monks and nuns living in such monasteries, Benedict wrote a book The Rule of Saint Benedict with rules for how each day in a monastery can be devoted to prayer, work, eating, fasting, and other orders of ascetic discipline, in which monks learn to live a holy life in this world to prepare for the eternal life to come in Heaven.  This guided the monastic tradition of the Middle Ages.

To show that this is a living tradition today, Dreher describes his time visiting the Monastery of St. Benedict in central Italy near Norcia--the modern name of Benedict of Nursia's birthplace.  This monastery was founded in the tenth century.  It was closed in 1810 under the tyrannical rule of Napoleon, who was trying to destroy the Catholic Church in the territories under French imperial rule.  The monastery was reopened in 2000 by some young American men who wanted to live the contemplative life of Benedictine monks.

Oddly, Dreher does not reflect on how this manifests the religious liberty secured by liberalism.  This monastery was closed under the illiberal rule of Napoleon, but then reopened under the liberal order of modern Italy.  Moreover, as Dreher indicates, all of the monks have voluntarily chosen to submit to the discipline of this monastery, because they want to live a Christian monastic life.  Therefore, the monastery is a voluntary association, which is possible in a liberal social order that secures the liberty for forming such voluntary associations.  So, if the Benedict Option is optional, if it's a product of individual choice without coercion, then it is founded on the liberal principle of social order arising by individual consent. 

Now, of course, few people will choose to live in a monastery.  But Dreher points to many other ways that people can choose the Benedict Option.

Here's how to get started with the antipolitical politics of the Benedict Option.  Secede culturally from the mainstream.  Turn off the television. Put the smartphone away.  Read books.  Play games. Make music.  Feast with your neighbors. It is not enough to avoid what is bad; you must also embrace what is good. Start a church, or a group within your church.  Open a classical Christian school, or join and strengthen one that exists.  Plant a garden, and participate in a local farmer's market. Teach kids how to play music, and start a band. Join the volunteer fire department (98).

Even without living in a monastery, Dreher argues, parents can turn their home into a "domestic monastery."  A Christian family can have regular times of family prayer.  The family can have strict rules limiting television and online media.  The family can live in neighborhoods with other Christian families.  And the family's life can be organized around their church's worship services and around their private Christian school. 

Notice that Dreher identifies the Benedict Option as "antipolitical politics."  It's "antipolitical" in the sense that it does not require that Christians become politically influential in striving for political power.  For Wilson, that means that while it's a good starting point for Christian nationalism, it doesn't go far enough towards achieving the triumph of Christian nationalism as a political project.  Wilson explains:

The Benedict Option emphasizes a grassroots cultural build-out.  It's about making enclaves where we can keep the faith alive until all of this blows over.  Any concrete political applications or proposals are down the road, on the other side of a bridge that we should cross when we come to it.

The Bonaparte Option believes that a lot could be done through decisive political action.  If we could just get ourselves a Christian prince with some backbone, willing to knock a few heads, we could put a lot of things right around here.

The Boniface Option is the one I hold, which is a deft combination of the first two.  Start with grassroots foundations: sticking to practical Bible teaching, starting classical Christian schools, beta testing a Christian culture in a small town, writing and publishing on the subject.  Do all of this over the course of many years, hoping to establish an intelligent Christian populace that will provide the necessary support and platform for some decisive Christian leadership.  This is basically the first option, but with the expectation that we are going to get to that bridge we need to cross a lot sooner than the first-option men think we will (FAQ, 133-34).

What Wilson says about the Bonaparte Option is incoherent.  First of all, Napoleon Bonaparte was not a "Christian prince."  As Dreher indicated, Napoleon shut down the Monastery of St. Benedict in Italy because suppressing the Catholic Church was part of his plan for imperial conquest.  In fact, a few paragraphs after the passage above, Wilson says that the proponents of the Bonaparte Option are not necessarily looking for a Christian prince: "We need a strong solution, they think, not necessarily a Christian one."  He goes on to say that what's most likely is that they will put into power someone like Hitler or "a bargain-bin Mussolini" (135).  

When Wilson first proposed these three options, in a 2023 blog post, he said that the Bonaparte Option would be the rule of a "strong man of some sort," and he did not identify this strong man as a "Christian prince."  Nor did he say that the Boniface Option included the Bonaparte Option.  So on the question of whether the Bonaparte Option means the rule of a "Christian prince" or the rule of a fascist "strong man," Wilson contradicts himself.

Wilson does insist that his Boniface Option is not "Christofascism."  Because he does not want "a red Caesar."  He does not want "Donald Trump to be made the Lord Protector."  He does not want "women to be relegated to breeding status only, and forced to wear those scary red dresses."  And he does not want "resurgent antisemitism" (136).  I have written about the Claremont Institute's plan for making Trump the "red Caesar."  Apparently, Wilson is rejecting that.

So it's hard to know what exactly Wilson means by the Boniface Option.  He takes this term from Andrew Isker's book The Boniface Option (2023).  Instead of St. Benedict, Isker argued, Christian nationalists should choose another monk for their model--St. Boniface (675-754).  Boniface was a Benedictine monk best known as a missionary to Germania who converted the pagan Saxons to Christianity, as a reformer of the Frankish Church, and as a promoter of the alliance between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty that began with Charles Martel.

The most famous story about Boniface is prominent in Isker's book.  When he arrived in Germania, Boniface found that the Saxons were mixing what little they had learned about Christianity with their ancestral paganism.  In their "sacred forest," they had altars to both the Germanic gods and Jesus Christ.  At the center of the forest, was Thor's Tree, a large oak tree that overshadowed Christ's altar.  Benedict wanted to show that Thor had no power and therefore could not be the one true God.  He announced to the Saxons that he was going to cut down Thor's Tree with an axe, and the Saxons gathered around to see Boniface killed by Thor's lightning bolts.  After one swing of the axe into the roots of the tree, according to one of his biographers, a mighty wind swept down from the sky and quickly toppled the tree.  The Saxons who saw this quickly converted fully to Christianity.

For Isker, this story illustrates what he means by the Boniface Option: instead of withdrawing from the pagan world around them and retreating into their cultural enclaves (the Benedict Option), orthodox Christians should become active missionaries to the pagans and seek to convert them.

But notice that there's nothing theocratic about this.  Boniface converted the pagans through persuasion not by force.  And he did not call upon political rulers to help him coercively impose Christianity on the pagans.

The forcible conversion of the Saxon pagans began after Boniface's death, when the Frankish King Charlemagne conquered the Saxons and used violence to motivate conversion in Saxony.    Previously, Christian rulers had used force to correct dissident Christians (heretics and apostates).  But this was the first time that a Christian ruler forced the conversion of pagans.  (See Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity [University of California Press, 1997].)

It would seem, therefore, that the Boniface Option is not illiberal or theocratic because it accepts the liberal principle that religious belief and practice must be voluntary rather than coerced.

That Wilson's Boniface Option does indeed manifest a Lockean liberal view of religion becomes evident in the last chapter of FAQ with the title "What Christians should be doing now."  He explains nine things that Christians should be doing now:

1. Worship in the splendor of holiness.

2. Put away your idols.

3. Stay in the Word.

4. Love your wife; obey your husband.

5. Read.

6. Make money.

7. Live not by lies.

8. Preach the Word.

9. Keep your kids, and keep having kids.

This is a restatement of Dreher's Benedict Option, and it assumes a liberal social order in which Christians are free to live their Christian lives in their voluntary associations--families, churches, schools, clubs, and neighborhoods.  Nothing theocratic about that.

But then Wilson might respond by saying that this Benedict Option is only preparing the way today for a future time--"maybe in 500 years"--when most human beings around the world will have become Christians, and then it will be possible to move to the Bonaparte Option and have Christian princes ruling Christian nations around the world.  In fact, Wilson argues, God has told us--in the Book of Revelation--that this is inevitable because it is prophesized that Christians will rule over the whole Earth for a thousand years, and this will be the ultimate theocracy on Earth.  After that thousand-year reign of theocracy, Jesus will come back to Earth to usher in the Day of Judgment, with the saved ascending into Heaven and the damned descending into Hell. 

If Wilson is correct in this "postmillennial" interpretation of Revelation, this would prove that Roger Williams and the Baptists generally are wrong in their claim that the New Testament does not support Christian theocratic government.  Because even if the New Testament Christians did not try to establish a Christian theocracy, they saw in the Revelation of St. John a prophecy of Christian theocracy at the end of history.

But as I will indicate in a future post, there is no reason to believe that John's Revelation clearly says that.  If the revelation of Christ to John was perfectly clear, we should be able to define the content of that Christian revelation in a way that all Christians will accept.  Since Wilson admits that his interpretation of what Revelation says about the millennium has not been accepted by all Christians, because there are at least three or more Christian views of the millennium, that means that his interpretation is not the clear revelation of God's word.  It is just "the opinions of some guy."

Douglas Wilson's Theocratic Libertarianism Is Not Theocratic: Esoteric Writing in the Service of Religious Liberty

Pete Hegseth and Douglas Wilson Praying Before a Worship Service at the Pentagon.

Douglas Wilson is a Calvinist pastor in Moscow, Idaho, who has become the most influential proponent of American Christian Nationalism.  His influence extends into the Trump Administration, as indicated recently by his being invited by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to deliver a sermon at the Pentagon.  Tucher Carlson has said: "Pastor Doug Wilson is the Christian Nationalist they warned you about."

Wilson identifies himself as a "theocratic libertarian."  But if you study what he says carefully, you will see that he's not theocratic at all because he's really a Lockean classical liberal who embraces religious liberty and toleration, and therefore he's closer to the liberal America of Roger Williams than he is to the illiberal America of John Winthrop.  

As evidence for this, I'll be relying mostly on two texts:  his most recent book--Frequently Asked (Shouted) Questions About Christian Nationalism (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2025) and Ross Douthat's interview with Wilson at the New York Times ("He Believes America Should Be a Theocracy," Oct. 9, 2025).  I'll refer to the book as FAQ and the interview as NYT.

Let's start with a definition of the word "theocracy."  As I noted in my previous post, the English word "theocracy" is a translation of the Greek word theocratia that was coined by Josephus as a term for ancient Israel as ruled by the Mosaic laws.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines "theocracy" as 

"A form of government in which God (or a deity) is recognized as the king or immediate ruler, and his laws are taken as the statute-book of the kingdom, these laws being usually administered by a priestly order as his ministers and agents; hence (loosely) a system of government by a sacerdotal order, claiming a divine commission; also, a state so governed: esp. applied to the commonwealth of Israel from the exodus to the election of Saul as king."

This is not libertarianism.  On the contrary, it looks more like the theocratic regime sought by conservative Catholic integralists who argue that politics must order the lives of citizens to direct them to the eternal salvation of their souls, and for this the temporal power of government must be subordinated to the spiritual power of the Church.  Some integralists point to the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX in medieval France as their model.  This is a Christian version of Israel under the Mosaic law or of Plato's theocratic city in the Laws. 

This suggests to me that deciding whether a God-centered metaphysics requires a theocratic political regime will depend upon whether one is looking to the God of the Old Testament or the God of the New Testament.  As I have indicated in a previous post, Roger Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for denouncing the Puritan rule there as a theocracy enforcing Mosaic law that was contrary to the New Testament, where the Christian churches were voluntary associations that did not persecute heretics or unbelievers.  In Rhode Island, he established a political order that tolerated all religions and even atheists.  This showed how God-centered Christians could reject the theocratic God of the Old Testament and embrace the Lockean liberal principles of toleration and religious liberty suggested in the New Testament.  One can see this, for example, in the Christian Lockean liberalism of C. S. Lewis.

Therefore, to identify Wilson's Christian Nationalism as theocratic, we would have to see him clearly argue for returning America to Winthrop's Puritan theocracy based on the Mosaic laws of the Hebrew Commonwealth as incorporated into the "Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts" (1647).  

I emphasize that we would need to see him clearly argue for this because while I admit that what he says conveys a superficial impression of an argument for Puritan theocracy, I never see him clearly and explicitly saying this.  I see him engaging in what Leo Strauss used to call esoteric writing: Wilson wants to convey a secret teaching to his careful readers that will not be seen by the less careful readers who would be shocked by the secret teaching.  

There are two reasons for believing that Wilson is a secret writer.  First, the weaknesses in his arguments for theocracy are so clear that any attentive and well-informed reader can see them.  That's one of the main techniques of the secret writer: he makes his arguments for his surface teaching so easily refutable that the careful reader suspects that the writer is not taking these arguments seriously, and he is inviting his reader to look for the secret teaching. 

The second reason for thinking Wilson is a secret writer is that he contradicts himself in a way that is easily noticed by the meticulous reader, which is another technique of the secret writer.  Wilson seems on the surface of his writing to be arguing for a theocracy like that of Winthrop's Puritans in Massachusetts.  But if you look carefully at what he proposes, you will see that it does not follow the model of the Puritan theocracy, and it actually looks like the sort of liberal social order that Williams established in Rhode Island.  

Wilson then distracts his theocratic readers from seeing this contradiction by promising them that his final goal is the "ideal theocratic republic," but he puts this off to the distant future--"like 500 years from now," as he says to Douthat.  So those who want theocracy will have to wait at least 500 years!  And even that promise depends on Wilson's debatable interpretation of chapter 20 of the Book of Revelations as teaching a postmillennialist eschatology. Until we reach the "end-times," Wilson advises his theocratic readers that they should be happy to live in a liberal regime that secures their religious liberty in a pluralist society.

WEAK ARGUMENTS

The first question in FAQ is "What is Christian Nationalism?"  Here's Wilson's answer:

Fundamentally, Christian nationalism is the belief that human societies require a transcendent anchor to hold all our cultural, political, and social assumptions in place, and that this transcendent anchor should be the true and living God, not an idol.

All ethical judgments, in order to be ethical judgments, rely on some form of "Thus saith the Lord."  Otherwise, they are not ethical judgments at all, but rather the opinions of some guy.  For an atheist, they are the burbling of certain protoplasmic chemicals, reacting as they always would under these conditions and at this temperature.  Whatever the case, they have no authority at all.  This is a foundational principle, one that every Christian accepts, at least implicitly.  Justice is not arbitrary--it's rooted in the character of God himself.  But the thing many Christians miss is that this principle applies to communities as well as individuals. A law is either righteous or unrighteous in the same way that an action is either righteous or unrighteous.  The basic reality doesn't change just because the scale is larger.  If we want a standard for right and wrong--regardless of whether that standard is going to be applied to a next-door neighbor or to Congress--we need God's word for it.

. . . At the end of the day, if our standard of judgment originates from somewhere other than God, then the only authority it possesses is that of power. . . .

Christian nationalism thus holds that we cannot order our corporate lives without reference to the divine. . . . (1-2).

This conception of Christian nationalism assumes a Divine Command Theory of ethics--that the only standard of right and wrong is the command of God: whatever God commands to be done is right, and whatever God commands not to be done is wrong.  And since the only standard of right and wrong is supernatural, there can be no purely natural standard.  The truth of this claim depends on at least two factual assertions about human history. 

First, there's the Fact of Supernatural Law--that the true God has clearly revealed his supernatural moral law to all human beings who sincerely want to know it.  

Second, there's the Fact of No Natural Law--that human beings cannot know a natural moral law by natural human experience without any supernatural revelation.

Wilson does not provide any strong arguments or evidence to support these two factual claims about human history.  On the contrary, much of what he says indicates that both of these factual assertions are false.

Supernatural Law?

In chapter 13 of FAQ, Wilson asks: "Is Christian nationalism fine with other forms of religious nationalism?  Hindu nationalism in India?  Jewish nationalism in Israel?"  His answer is no.  "Generic religious nationalism is no good."  The only good religious nationalism is Christian nationalism because "Christianity is the true religion."  Therefore, the Hindus in India should become Christians and establish India as a Christian nation with Christian laws and government.  And the Jews in Israel should become Christians and establish Israel as a Christian nation with Christian laws and government.

There are two claims here.  God has clearly revealed to all human beings that Christianity is the only true religion.  And God has also clearly revealed to all human beings that every nation should establish a Christian theocratic government with Christian laws.  Can Wilson give us proof--or at least plausible arguments and evidence--to support these claims?  If not, then they are just "the opinions of some guy."

Wilson seems to assume that most of his readers will be Christians, and therefore he does not have to argue for Christianity being the true religion since his Christian readers will take that for granted.  But if so, doesn't that mean that the foundation of his whole argument is not some clear revelation from God but just "the opinions of some Christian guys"?

Now, of course, the Christians will say that it's not just a matter of their "opinions" because they look to the clear revelation of God's commands in the Bible.  But then the Jews will say that the Hebrew Bible is a clear revelation of Judaism as the true religion and the God of Israel as the one true God.  After all, God revealed Himself to Moses, speaking to him out of the burning bush, telling him that he was to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt.  God then revealed his name--Yahweh, which is usually translated as "the Lord" in English Bibles (Exo. 3:1-15).  Later, Yahweh met Moses on Mount Sinai and gave him his law summarized as Ten Commandments (Exo. 19-20, Deu. 5).  

The first commandment was "You shall have no other gods before (or besides) me" (Exo. 20:3).  Although this is often said to be the first declaration of monotheism, it's unclear what exactly is being said here.  Notice that Yahweh speaks of "other gods."  So it's not clear whether Yahweh is really saying that He is the only god who exists (monotheism), or that He is the one god among many that the people of Israel should choose as their god (henotheism), or that He is the only god among many who is worthy of worship (monolatry).

There is some evidence in the Hebrew Bible that the people of Israel had to choose from among the many gods that were believed to exist.  Genesis 33:20 says that Jacob "set up an altar and called it El Elohe Israel," which means "El is the God of Israel."  In the ancient Levant, El was the white-bearded king of the gods who ruled over an assembly of the gods.  So it's possible that El was the first patron deity of the people of Israel.  Notice that "El" is even part of the name Israel (yisra-El).  But it seems that eventually the people of Israel chose Yahweh as their god, who was a subordinate god of weather and war.  They might have chosen him because they needed a more militarized theology.  That Yahweh was not the only god is suggested elsewhere in the Bible--such as Psalm 82, where Yahweh "presides in the great assembly" and "renders judgment among the gods."  The Bible thus creates some doubt as to whether Yahweh is the only god that exists.

But even if we set that aside and say that Yahweh the god of Israel is the only true god, that creates a problem for Wilson. How can he say that Judaism is not a true religion?  Because the New Testament has revealed Jesus as the son of God who established Christianity as the true religion that supplanted Judaism?  But apparently that revelation was not clear enough to persuade most of the Jews to convert to this new religion.  Presumably, Wilson will say that the revelation of Christ was perfectly clear, but most of the Jews were stubbornly resistant to that revelation.  But couldn't the Jews respond to this by saying, "this is just the opinion of some Christian guy"?

If the revelation of Christ was perfectly clear, we should be able to define the content of that Christian revelation in a way that all Christians will accept.  Wilson suggests:

The definition of Christian in this context is straightforward.  It refers to the system of belief expressed by the Apostles' Creed, with those beliefs being accepted and received as the truth of God, by means of faith alone.  In the American context, the expression of this faith is by and large Protestant and evangelical (FAQ, 5).

Here's an English translation of the Latin Apostles' Creed:

I believe in God the Father almighty,

Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died and was buried;
he descended into hell;
on the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.

Amen.

The origin of this text is unclear, but it was probably developed in southern Gaul sometime around the middle of the 5th century.  It is shorter than the Nicene Creed adopted in 381, and unlike the Nicene Creed, it does not explicitly define the divinity of Jesus or the Holy Spirit, although it does affirm the Trinity of God, Son, and Holy Spirit.  It's called the Apostles' Creed because it originally was believed to have been written by the twelve Apostles, and some copies of the text even divide it into twelve parts, with each of the Apostles contributing a part.  But there's no clear historical evidence that the Apostles had anything to do with this.

The most obvious question here is why do Christians need these "creeds" at all?  If the text of the New Testament is clear in its teaching to all Christians, there should be no need for an interpretive summary of its doctrines in the form of a creedal text composed by some church council.  If the Protestant Reformers were right about their principle of sola scriptura, the meaning of revelation as conveyed in the Biblical text should be clear enough that all Christians can agree on what it means without the need for priests or church traditions to interpret the Biblical text for them.  But then the Catholic Church argues that the Protestants are simply wrong in assuming the perspicuity of the Bible--that the meaning of the Bible is clear to all believers--because the Bible is actually so obscure that it needs to be interpreted by the tradition of the Church as expressed in the councils of the church that agree on the various creedal statements.  This is suggested in the Apostles' Creed by the affirmation of "the holy catholic Church."  And, of course, the Roman Catholic Church can claim to be the one true Church by virtue of the Apostolic Succession of the Popes from Saint Peter.  A Protestant like Wilson must reject this.  But this illustrates the problem, Christians can't agree on what exactly is revealed in the Bible because that Biblical revelation is obscure.  And that's why there have been hundreds of heresies and schisms in the Christian church over the past two thousand years.

This Illumination from a 13th-Century Manuscript Shows the Twelve Apostles Writing the "Apostles' Creed," While Receiving the Inspiration from the Holy Spirit (the Dove at the Top).

This illustrates what I have called the problem of the Holy Spirit or the problem of religious pluralism.  Notice that in the Illumination, the Holy Spirit (symbolized as a dove) hovers over the Apostles to inspire them with the correct interpretation of the Biblical revelation.  But if that shamanic spirit really speaks to Christians, he does not speak clearly enough for them to agree on what he is saying.  Consequently, as John Locke observed, "everyone is orthodox to himself," and "every church is orthodox to itself." And if that is true, that means that any coercive theocratic interpretation of orthodoxy imposed on a nation is just "the opinions of some guy"--or the opinions of some priestly tyrants.

Moreover, you should notice that while Wilson points the Apostles' Creed as the defining statement of Christianity, the Creed says nothing about Christian nationalism or theocracy, and thus it provides no support for his argument.  God's supernatural revelation in the New Testament does not include a clear revelation of God's command that his moral law be enforced by a Christian theocratic government just as it was previously enforced by a Hebrew theocratic government.

Actually, Wilson admits that there is a "conspicuous absence" in the New Testament of anything like the Mosaic theocracy that was present in the Old Testament (NYT).  That was Williams' point in his debate with Winthrop--that the Puritan theocracy in Massachusetts was a turn away from New Testament Christianity, because the Christian churches in the New Testament were voluntary associations that did not have and did not seek theocratic political power.

Wilson says that while for the early Christian churches, enacting civil penalties in the name of Christ "was still centuries out," they were "nevertheless preparing for that day" (FAQ, 52).  But Wilson cannot cite any passage in the New Testament where the early Christians say they are preparing for the day when they will have theocratic political power.  Wilson is simply reading into the New Testament his own personal preference.  Similarly, Wilson says: "What Paul did was preach the gospel, plant churches, and wait for three centuries" until the "conversion of the Roman empire," when he could have "his audience before Caesar"--that is, Constantine.  But, again, Wilson cannot cite any passage in the New Testament where Paul says or even implies that he's waiting for a Roman Christian theocracy (FAQ, 138).  This is not a supernatural revelation of God's command in the New Testament.  This is "the opinions of some guy."

Natural Law?

If God's revelation of his supernatural moral law is so obscure that human beings cannot agree on what it means, then we have to wonder if there is a natural moral law that human beings can know by their natural human experience.  Wilson says no, because as a Divine Command Theorist, the only standard of right and wrong for him is the supernatural law of God's command: "Thus saith the Lord."  And if that is true, then there can be no stable moral order in any society without some theocratic enforcement of God's commands.

This was the fundamental issue in the dispute between Roger Williams and John Winthrop.  Williams argued that not only did the Christian religion not depend on the support of human laws, but the civil government did not depend on an established religion, because as Williams indicated, the "civil peace" of a political community did not depend on the "spiritual peace" of a true church.  After all, Williams noted, native American Indians and pagans have kept the peace of their communities without belonging to the true church of God.  Here Williams agreed with Pierre Bayle that a society of atheists could live together in a peaceful social order based on their natural moral sense without any religious beliefs in a supernatural moral law.

This natural moral sense is what C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man called the Tao--the universal sense of right and wrong rooted in human nature.  Remarkably, although Wilson recommends the reading of The Abolition of Man, he says nothing about Lewis's account of natural moral law and how that supported Lewis's rejection of theocracy (FAQ, 9, 151). 

Lewis saw the Tao as manifested in three levels of social order--human nature, human traditions, and human judgments. At the first level, the Tao is "Natural Law" (56, 95). Natural law is natural in the sense that it belongs to "the very nature of man," because it provides "a common human law of action" (31, 84). The Tao is "the Tao of Man," it is the "only known reality of conscience" that distinguishes human nature from the rest of nature (62, 90).

The nature of Lewis's natural law is not cosmic nature as a whole, but human nature in particular. Cosmic nature cannot provide values for human life, Lewis suggests, because "nature as a whole, I understand, is working steadily and irreversibly towards the final extinction of all life in every part of the universe" (50).

Although natural law is often assumed to come from a supernatural lawgiver, Lewis insists that understanding the Tao as natural law does not require any belief in the supernatural. He writes:

Though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reasoning as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become skeptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more 'realistic' basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with (61).

At the second level of social order, the Tao corresponds to human cultural traditions--"the human tradition of value," "traditional values," "traditional morality," or "traditional humanity" (54-55, 76, 78, 85). In the Appendix to his book, Lewis provides "Illustrations of the Tao" that consist of short quotations from some ancient texts of moral teaching from Egypt, Babylonia, Israel, Greece, Rome, India, China, Scandinavia, and Anglo-Saxon England, and a few texts from early modern England. Lewis's Appendix shows great cultural variability in the moral traditions of human history. But it also shows recurrent themes that reflect how universal human nature constrains these moral traditions--as manifested in Lewis's eight categories of classification: the law of general beneficence, the law of special beneficence, duties to parents, elders, and ancestors, duties to children and posterity, the law of justice, the law of good faith and veracity, the law of mercy, and the law of magnanimity.

At the third level of social order, the Tao allows for individual judgments of value, but only within the broad constraints of human nature and human tradition. Lewis admits that traditional moralities show many contradictions and some absurdities, which invite criticism and improvement. Although the Tao does not permit criticisms and changes coming from outside the Tao--because there are no standards of value outside it--the Tao does permit development from within. So, for example, we can recognize that the Christian version of the Golden Rule--"Do as you would be done by"--is a real improvement over the Confucian version--"Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you"--because we can see that the new positive statement of the rule is an extension of the old negative statement (57-58). Individuals have authority to modify the Tao only insofar as their modifications are within the "spirit of the Tao" (59).

Lewis saw that this natural law of the Tao did not require coercive enforcement by a theocratic government because for Lewis the primary aim of government was securing individual liberty in private life:

The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life.  A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging his own garden--that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time (Mere Christianity, 169).

Notice that the State's concern here is with human happiness "in this life"--not in the next life.  A government that would be directed to eternal salvation would be a theocracy, and Lewis said that "theocracy is the worst of al governments," because any government that would pretend to have the power of salvation would be tyrannical.

Lewis thought that government did not need to promote Christianity in order to provide a common morality for society because Lewis believed that God had imprinted His moral law on every human heart, whether or not that person had come to faith in Jesus Christ.  Consequently, Lewis accepted the Lockean argument for the toleration of all religions.

One good illustration of how the Lockean moral law arises naturally in the human mind is in Lewis's essay "Delinquents in the Snow."  He tells the story of how some young hooligans had been caught stealing and vandalizing Lewis's home, and how they had not been properly punished by the legal system.  He complained that "according to the classical political theory of this country," we "surrendered our right of self-protection to the State on the condition that the State would protect us" (98-99).  But if the State does not protect our natural rights, including the right to property, the natural right to protect ourselves and our property reverts to the individual.  This is what Locke called the natural "executive power of the state of nature."  This natural right to protect oneself, one's property, and one's family from attack arises naturally in the human mind without any need for a Christian faith that such a natural law is divinely ordained.

Although Locke denied that government needed to inculcate virtue, Dyer and Watson observe, his Thoughts on Education is all about inculcating virtue.  So that even without the legal enforcement of virtue, which would threaten individual liberty, Locke assumed that the education of children in their families, their churches, and the wider society would shape the moral and intellectual virtues. Lewis agreed.  In fact, his fantasy writing for children--such as the Chronicles of Narnia--was intended to contribute to the moral education of children supervised by parents rather than the State.

So, as a Lockean liberal, Lewis denied that Christian citizens have any right to use their political power to coercively impose their Christian morality on their political community.  This is particularly clear in the way Lewis speaks about homosexuality, religious education in schools, and divorce law.

Although Lewis was clear about homosexuality being a sin, he saw no justification for the State punishing that sin as a crime.  In a letter, he observed: "Of course, many acts which are sins against God are also injuries to our fellow-citizens, and must on that account, but only on that account, be made crimes.  But of all the sins in the world, I should have thought homosexuality was the one that least concerns the State.  We hear too much of the State. Government is at its best a necessary evil. Let's keep it in its place."  Lewis's view of homosexuality was probably influenced by his life-long friendship with Arthur Greeves, who was a homosexual.

In the passage just quoted, Lewis seems to assume John Stuart Mill's harm principle--that the only justification for limiting anyone's individual liberty is to prevent harm to others. While this seems to be a uniquely modern principle, it can be found in the premodern natural law tradition.  It's stated by Thomas Aquinas: "Human law is framed for the mass of men, the majority of whom are not virtuous. Therefore, human law does not prohibit every vice from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more serious ones from which the majority can abstain, and especially those that harm others and which must be prohibited for human society to survive, such as homicide, theft, and the like" (Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 96, a. 2).

Lewis also showed his Lockean liberalism in which he said about the place of religion in public education.  He saw England as becoming increasingly secularized, and if most of the public school teachers are not Christian, we cannot expect them to teach Christianity.  Christians should raise their children as Christians and send them to Christian schools, without expecting the public schools to inculcate Christianity in the children.

A third illustration of Lewis's Lockean liberalism is in what he said about marriage and divorce.  Since Christianity teaches that marriage is for life, Lewis observed in Mere Christianity, divorce is not normally allowed. But he saw no justification for legally enforcing this Christian condemnation of divorce.

. . . I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused.  The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question--how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself, you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the  British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. This distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not (101-102).

If we bring together what Lewis says here about marriage and what he says about homosexuality, we might infer that Lewis could have supported the legalization of same-sex marriage, with the understanding that the rules of marriage enforced by the State will differ from the rules enforced by the Church.  In fact, I have argued that a Lockean natural law argument can be made for legalizing same-sex marriage.

 

CLEAR CONTRADICTIONS

Although presumably Wilson would disagree with Lewis's claim that "theocracy is the worst form of government," he often contradicts his arguments for theocracy in ways that invite his careful readers to wonder whether his secret teaching agrees with Lewis's condemnation of theocracy.

No Rerun of "Christendom 1.0"?

Wilson told Ross Douthat: 

I've been arguing for a mere Christendom, or a Christendom 2.0, OK?  Christendom 1.0 had some bugs in it.  I don't want a rerun of Christendom 1.0--don't want that.  The Christians screwed it up in different areas.  "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition," as Monty Python taught us--and I don't want the Spanish Inquisition again, OK?  I want a Christendom that learns from history.

Elsewhere in the interview, Wilson explained: "I really do want Christendom 2.0 to have learned the lessons of criminalizing things that were sins, not crimes."  

If the whole point of Christian theocracy is to punish sins as crimes, then Wilson has just declared that Christendom 2.0 will not be theocratic.  For example, the Mosaic law in the Old Testament and the "Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts" (1647) both treat the sin of adultery as a capital crime.  But Wilson agrees with Douthat that adulterers should not be put to death.

And yet, there are at least two sins that Wilson clearly wants to criminalize--abortion and homosexuality.  But even so, it's notable that he does not say that these should be capital crimes.  Homosexuality was a capital crime in Puritan Massachusetts.  Nothing was said about abortion.  Perhaps this was because the Bible says nothing about abortion.

The Ten Commandments begin with commandments about the proper worship of God, and therefore theocratic regimes have punished people for not worshiping God in the right way.  But Wilson told Douthat that he was "a libertarian on how people worship," and so he would allow Catholics and Jews to worship as they please.

This is very different from the laws of Massachusetts Bay, which required that anyone teaching "damnable heresies" should be banished from the Colony.  The laws also excluded Jesuits and all priests or bishops of the Catholic Church.  They were to be banished.  And if they returned after being banished, they were to be put to death.  Clearly, that's what Wilson does not want for Christendom 2.0.  But that means that his Christendom 2.0 will not be theocratic.

When Douthat warns Wilson about "pushing toward Puritan New England," Wilson responds: "the warning is well taken."  Indeed.

A "Godless" Constitution?

The United States Constitution as ratified in 1789 and as amended in 1791 supports religious liberty and the separation of church and state in three ways.  First, unlike most of the state constitutions, the national Constitution is literally "godless" in that it says nothing about any divine being, which suggests that the national government does not need the support of a national religion.  Second, there is the provision in Article V of the Constitution that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."  The third way is the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Wilson insists that "our Constitution was written by Christians--and the goal . . . was to create and preserve a Christian community" (FAQ, 108).  But Wilson does not explain why these Christians who wrote the Constitution refused to introduce into that document any reference to God, Jesus, or Christianity.  Nor does Wilson say anything about the long history of Christians complaining that the Constitution was "godless," and that it needed a "God Amendment."  The most prominent example of this movement to put God into the Constitution was the National Reform Association that emerged during and after the American Civil War.  This was a movement of evangelical Protestant ministers, theologians, academics, lawyers, and judges, who claimed that the Civil War was God's punishment of America for having a godless Constitution, and that this showed the need for amending the Constitution.  They formally petitioned President Lincoln and the Congress to support an amendment.

They proposed an amended version of the Preamble to the Constitution--with the new language in italics:

We the People of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, his revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America (National Reform Association 1874, p. 7).

They could persuade neither Lincoln nor the Congress to take their proposal seriously.

Wilson says nothing about this history, although he does admit that there needs to be "an acknowledgement of Christian orthodoxy at the federal level, in the Constitution" (FAQ, 122).  He thus invites his reader to wonder, why hasn't this been done?

Wilson accepts the "no religious test" clause because he thinks the Founders "didn't want to introduce denominational strife" at the federal level (FAQ, 87).  But he is silent about those many Christians who have complained that without a religious test that requires public officers to be Christians, America cannot be a Christian nation.  For example, one speaker at the Massachusetts constitutional ratifying convention warned that having no religious tests "would admit deists, atheists, etc., into the general government; and, people being apt to imitate the examples of the court, these principles would be disseminated, and, of course, a corruption of morals ensue."  

Wilson points out that the "no religious tests" clause applies only to federal offices, which allows religious tests at the state and local level, and he notes that at the time of the Founding, "they were commonplace at the local level."  He does not tell his readers, however, that by 1800 all of these religious tests at the state and local level were eliminated.

Wilson accepts the no establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment because he agrees that having a national church like England had would have been a mistake.  He points out, however, that the no establishment clause applies only to the national Congress, and thus it leaves the states free to establish state churches.  In fact, he observes, at the time that the First Amendment was ratified, nine of the thirteen states had established a Christian denomination.  But he does not tell his readers that by 1833 all state establishments of religion had been abolished.

Remarkably, Wilson says he thinks having established churches at the state level is "a bad idea" (FAQ, 21).  So, here again, we see a remarkable contradiction in his arguments.  On the one hand, Wilson argues for a theocratic Christian nationalism.  On the other hand, he argues that an establishment of religion at either the national or the state level is a bad idea.  His careful readers have to suspect that his apparent argument for Christian theocracy is not his true teaching.

The "Boniface Option"?

In Wilson's FAQ, the final question is: How do we get a Christian nation?  He says there are three common answers to this question: the Benedict Option, the Bonaparte Option, and the Boniface Option.  Wilson defends the Boniface Option as a deft combination of the other two options.

In my next post, I will try to unravel Wilson's ambiguous account of this Boniface Option.