Political Theology

Politics is essential for any working society, let alone a thriving one. To the extent that Christians abandon politics or leave it to the jackals, society will suffer.

Christianity’s political theology tips its hand at Christmastide. What’s in the cards for world order? Tidings of a coming “Desire of the Nations.” Songs of how “He rules the world with truth and grace, and makes the nations prove the glories of his righteousness and wonders of his love.” Promises of “peace on earth.” Juxtapose all this with our time, when trumpeting “America first” sounds to some like jingoist nationalism and to others like the return of national sovereignty.

The key to a nations ability to administer authority is an understanding among its individual leaders that theirs is not the ultimate authority. And the key to a nation’s ability to harbor morality is an understanding among its individual leaders that their common sense is not the ultimate source of morality. 

On PBS News Hour, David Brooks quoted St. Augustine to criticize President Trump’s response toward the Saudis for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Was Brooks right about Augustine?

Would those Catholics promoting integralism instead of liberalism support a nationalist-isolationist foreign policy, or empire?

For American Protestants used to the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom, integralism—the doctrine that the state should publicly support the Catholic Church and protect that faith—sounds strange.

The long history of Christian reflection does not share Mark Labberton’s confidence that “God so loved the world” means the rejection of power and worldly politics.

Christians should remember this: any political theology that treats its own people as a divinely chosen political community treads on heretical soil.

Christian theo-political witness has always contended that political responsibility cannot be had by seeking either greatness or goodness absent the other.