Written by C. Jay Engel |
Wednesday, June 26, 2024
The Church can certainly become a political entity—which is what Luther criticized Rome as doing against the Turks—but it does not undermine the Schmittian framework if the Protestant Christian denies to the Church this civil function.

Among the growing number of self-consciously right-wing Christians, many are turning away from the core assumptions of what has been termed the Postwar Liberal Consensus. Included in these is this idea that the American political order can be explained with reference to eternal, abstract values that transcend the biased interests of the people and groups that make it up. As I wrote in a recent contribution to a Paleoconservative anthology,
Liberalism operates from the false premise that… political strife can be eliminated by a kind of “neutral” state. […] It attempts to supersede so-called outdated levels of intense political hostility by relegating such tensions to private economic competition, the “marketplace of ideas,” or competing ideological sects. Thus, conflict over once existential “ways of life” can be pacified and consigned to personal preference.
This attempt to remove human antagonism from the realm of politics and in its place implement mechanisms of procedure, legal norms, and value-free conventions is the essential story of liberalism’s trajectory in the twentieth century. It is the story of what might be described as managerial liberalism, the reign of expertise, or “public policy” as a function of public administration and organizational management.
One of the figures in the twentieth century who was most adamant about the failures of the procedural approach to matters of state was the German jurist, Carl Schmitt. For many, Schmitt’s critiques of the liberal tendency in the West offer a compelling challenge to the foundations of the now faltering liberal order—especially since it was Schmitt’s position that a committed drive toward liberalism would wind up laying the preconditions for what he called the Total State. If the state itself was denied the task of distinguishing between friends and enemies and absorbing the drama of man’s antagonistic nature, such elements of man’s natural being would not simply disappear. As Dr. Paul Gottfried explains in his study of Schmitt, for Schmitt, “liberals [are not merely] destroyers of our political nature, but [are] dangerously neglectful and even contemptuous of it.”
Schmitt represents a tradition of Western political theory that can best be described as realist; it is realist in the sense that Schmitt was famously disinterested in upholding the myths and ideals that animated Western liberal theorists. Laws and norms can never be the pinnacle of political action, because the political is animated by constant human judgement and determinations about Friends and Enemies.
For Schmitt, there is always a human actor, or human-controlled institutions, even if we don’t admit it, behind the veil sanctioning the legal order, interpreting it, applying it, determining its meaning, and its exceptions. This what Schmitt meant when he elaborates on the “challenge of the exception.” No matter how brilliantly exposited or constructed, the legal order cannot account for all situations and there is always a human element upholding the order based on judgement, interests, calculations, and a complex network of myriad factors. The legal order is not a machine that works itself out automatically. One can see glimpses of the reality of the political, beneath all the myths, in recent decades and especially during moments like Trump’s trials.
It is important to emphasize here that Schmitt is not calling on his readers to inject an element of antagonism into their political practices, but rather to step back and recognize that antagonism is the very cause of the political in the first place. The political is an aspect of the human experience which precedes the existence of the state. What then, is the essence of the political?
For Schmitt, whenever a collectivity of people contains any element that it considers a non-negotiable and intricate component of its own existence, and this collectivity comes into conflict with another collectivity which threatens that non-negotiable, there the political arises. Life is full of many types of disagreements between groups, but such disagreements transform into political phenomena when one group determines the threat against the non-negotiable is such that there is a need to distinguish between friends and enemies. Any cultural, ethnic, “religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis [can] transform into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.”
Schmitt attempts to make us aware of the danger in ignoring the reality behind everyday politics. Often this is done in an attempt to place a veil over the political with procedure, legislation, rules, and even Constitutions. Such things can be helpful—and a healthy society incorporates them to function well— but they must not be treated as effecting the elimination of the core of the political as the clash of friends and enemies. In the twentieth century there was strong danger, Schmitt declared, to treat legislation and procedures as themselves the final arbiter of political dispute. This significantly ignores the underlying essence of political conflict. As Auron Macintyre explains, “Schmitt sees the friend/enemy distinction as the fundamental organizing principle of politics and says all other distinctions that exist while forming political coalitions are subordinate.”
This doesn’t mean that there must constantly be an obvious enemy, that political actors must be always in conflict with others. If there were a situation where there was no clash between friend and enemy, the political itself would not be a component of that society. But, Schmitt warns, modern man deludes himself if he refuses to recognize that the political is always possible, lurking beneath the scene. The failure of liberalism was that it pretended that it could do away with this reality of human relations. In doing so, it was unable to see clearly the coming return of the political as the veil of neutrality has completely been torn down. Those who deny the existence of the political will always lose to those who embrace it—which is why Schmitt has for many decades been so popular among the Far Left, especially in Europe.
Macintyre explains this well:
Even when those in power were more disciplined, this was always an illusion. Schmitt says such carefully choreographed negotiations have always been window-dressing meant to obfuscate the continuing battle for control between friend and enemy that rages behind the scenes. Despite the comforting fiction of the marketplace of ideas where only the best policies were supposed to emerge victorious, it is increasingly clear that policies advantageous to the ruling groups and their interests win no matter what.
Liberalism, with its promise to eliminate existential political conflict and replace it with objectively beneficial governance, serves as the perfect narrative justification for the expansion of the total state. But the total state does not eliminate the friend/enemy distinction because that is impossible. Instead, it seeks to become the only entity with the authority to define the terms of the friend/enemy distinction for an ever-expanding ideological empire. Those who serve to strengthen the power of the state are friends, while those who seek to compete with or restrain it are the enemy.
With this as a backdrop, we can now turn to an essay published in Ad Fontes, which motivated the present article. There, John Ehrett struggles to understand Schmitt and in some places construes him quite poorly. His purpose is to confront the rising interest in Carl Schmitt among Christians. He does not grapple deeply with Schmitt’s critique of liberalism or his description of the political as built on antagonism, but instead spends most of his time on Christ’s call to love our enemies. If for Schmitt politics is animated by the distinction between Friends and Enemies, Ehrett wants Christians to consider that such an approach to human relations is undermined by Christian virtue.
It should be remarked, however, that it is not Schmitt’s purpose in his exposition of the political to advise Christians on how to act. Nor is he interested in urging increased agitation within the social order. Rather, Schmitt seeks to offer a realist framework for properly understanding the foundations of political phenomena, which then informs the political thinker as to the limits, possibilities, and necessities of political activity and statecraft. At least, Schmitt might say, we can proceed without all the liberal myths and delusions that taint our understanding of political reality.
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