Known to the theologically literate is George Lindbeck’s dictum that the words “Christ is Lord” are always false “when used to authorize cleaving the skull of an infidel,” even if “the same words in other contexts may be a true utterance.” When spoken in acts of violence, such as the violence of war, he said, the statement is rendered false, even a lie.
The late Lutheran theologian’s argument is admittedly complex, but the gist of it is that for any Christian utterance to be true, what is said — as it’s said — must be consistent with the stories, the meaning and the worldview in which such words are fully coherent.
That is, to say “Christ is Lord” in a truthful way would be to speak those words within a life shaped by the fact that Christ chose to be killed rather than kill, that he was made Lord precisely because he renounced violence rather than inflicted it. It would be to speak such words only after renouncing violence oneself, accepting the proposition that Jesus invites his followers to welcome death rather than cause the death of others.
It would be to speak such words knowing that Jesus did not cause death but conquered it. It would be to know full well that the Christian way is to imitate the Crucified and not the Romans. It would be to pattern one’s life upon death and resurrection, not killing and resurrection.
Of course, there is much more to say here, more to argue. I do recommend Lindbeck to you. But obviously, what I’m talking about, why I recall Lindbeck’s dictum, is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s increasingly spiritual militarism. Because it keeps making headlines.
About a month back, for instance, Hegseth invited his pastor, Doug Wilson, to preach at the Pentagon. Now, homiletically speaking, Wilson’s sermon recalls the early church father Irenaeus’ complaint that the problem with heretics is that they attempt to “weave ropes of sand” by their misuse of Scripture, that they disregard or destroy context so thoroughly that they make no sense. But that’s a theological critique I’ll keep to myself.
My point is that Wilson was given the floor in the Pentagon and suggested the event was akin to Pentecost, that the objectives which the Pentagon is charged to accomplish somehow align with the great acts of God recounted in the Bible.
And his moral point was that the American warrior should remember that to God belongs the glory. “We want God to get great glory in and through the win,” Wilson preached. Or as his medieval crusading forbears, swords in hand, would have put it: Christus est Dominus.
Now, here I will be candid about what is wrong with American Christianities today. And I really must insist that we speak of Christianities and not one homogenous American Christianity. For there is no such thing.
It is reasonable to suggest that many American Christianities today have become a kind of sub-Christianity — near heresy or heresy outright.
That is, much of what is branded Christianity today in America isn’t Christianity in any meaningful sense. Instead, today’s American Christianities have become either cults of nation or of race or of wealth or of identity or of some mixture of each.
How this came to pass, I can only offer a hypothesis. My guess is that since our nation’s religious and cultural roots are fundamentally Protestant, our instincts are therefore similarly Protestant, and that these instincts are still at work in American Christianities today, even at times in American Catholicisms.
Now the Protestant Reformation was, among other things, rightly or wrongly, a wholesale renunciation of the Catholic Church, replacing the Roman Church either with some completely spiritualized or nationalized account of the church, varying across different forms of Christianity ranging from the Church of England to Pietism.
But what happens when one’s theology of the church — that is, one’s ecclesiology — is radically spiritualized, arguably to the point of non-existence? Traditional Catholic theology suggests that the church is a real society, sociologically and historically identifiable, that it is a real body of people, gathered by faith and the Eucharist, which transcends and therefore in some measure desacralizes all nations and ethnicities.
Thus, from the standpoint of political theology, what happens when that more traditional theology of the church is absent?
Well, you fill the void. And here, suddenly, things like Christian nationalism, religious racism and the fetishizing of identity found among Christians both conservative and progressive begin to make sense. Because where once a sociologically and theologically coherent church held diverse people together, ever since renouncing such a church, it seems many American Christians have been looking for something else to do the job the church once did. Here enter myths of nation, race or the collective.
By this point one might wonder if this makes me a Catholic integralist; I assure you I am not. For that would demand I accept the notion that Christians wield power I think they shouldn’t want to wield. But again, that’s a theological critique I’ll keep to myself.
What I am suggesting is that many of the Christianities in America today are deformed, possibly heretical, sub-Christian. Now I’m not here insulting anyone’s conscience or religious practice. Rather, I’m suggesting that what is today in America often called Christianity, when measured against broader Christian thought and practice, shows itself to be something quite different.
What is urgent today is the intelligent discernment of Christian discourse. Wholesale secularist rejection of “religion” is not helpful here; that’s idealistic, utopian, ignorant, dangerous. Rather, what is required is something like what Lindbeck’s dictum suggests — which is why I began with it — that we henceforward once again insist that Christian speech be coherent.
Take as a case study, current dialogue between the Trump administration and the Vatican and some members of the Catholic hierarchy.
When, for instance, Hegseth, a known admirer of the Crusades, recently quoted Psalm 144 in a press conference, praising God, he said, “who trains my hands for war,” Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, snapped back that “God has nothing to do with this.” Rather, he said, “If God is present in this war, he is among those who are dying, who are suffering.”
Or take the more sedate exchanges of diplomacy. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke in 2019 about what he called “common-good capitalism,” which Brian Burch, the current ambassador to the Holy See, tweaked into something called “common-good conservatism” when he spoke with Pope Leo XIV for the first time, what was being evoked was a language and a set of ideas similar to those found in Catholic social teaching. But is it the same?
That is, terms some use in the Trump administration are the same ones used in Catholic social thought, terms like “common good.” This moves people like Trump’s ambassador, as he did in a recent interview, to say, “Now you have an American pope, with a president who has a deep commitment to broad human flourishing and the common good, rightly understood.” But again, is that the case?
When Catholic conservatives speak of the “common good,” influenced in part by thinkers like Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton, is it the case that they are speaking the same moral language as the Catholic Church? Here, I am not certain; in fact, I’m suspicious. And that’s because I can’t help but close my eyes to rehearse images of Minneapolis and elsewhere, as well as images of arrogance and hatred and so much else unwelcome and new in this bleaker America, and which I cannot accept has anything to do with real Catholicism.
How then should we go on? Renounce religion? No. Renounce religious fools and hypocrites? Yes. It may not seem to follow, but the mess described above is a big reason why I am, in fact, a Catholic. I’m not an American Catholic, of course, just a Catholic.
I’m a Catholic because of the vastness of it, for the deep memory of Catholicism, its memory of sin and stupidity, grace and redemption. Of course, it is, I believe, simply true; but the vast memory of real Catholicism is what makes me alert to its counterfeit, alert to the petty theologies of secretaries of war and the theological stupidities of politicians. It is also at present the secret to my religious sanity.
Which suggests a task for each religious American, and that is, to rediscover the true faith. For me, that looks like discovering Catholicism undistorted by American politics and culture wars. For Protestant Christians, I can only assume something similar might be possible, a renewed Protestantism more traditionally recognizable, unstained by latter history. But I don’t know, maybe that’s not possible; maybe it is. That’s not for me to say.
But I do hope.
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