The intertwining of the two cities in this present age helps us to realize “culture” isn’t something that sits obediently outside the church door waiting to be let in; it forms us inside the church too, whether we like it or not. And the separate destinies of the two cities remind us that, however comfortable late-modern assumptions feel (and we’re fooling ourselves if we think we aren’t late moderns), they’re not our home and we must be ready to critique them.

Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar. Society is divided into die-hard factions that seem to do little but shout at each other. A self-congratulatory rhetoric of freedom and openness thinly veils a dogmatic, authoritarian demand of reverence to the idols of our age. Political and economic forces conspire to sustain a lifestyle for the elite. And a society that assures itself of having moved beyond superstition and lives on “the right side of history” is riddled with a host of bizarre superstitions and archaic assumptions.
Welcome to the world of fifth-century Rome: the complex, tottering, divided, and self-contradictory society in which Augustine wrote his famous work of social and political theory, The City of God. The bishop of Hippo’s treatise offers a compelling pattern for cultural critique that still holds up.
Here are six tools from Augustine’s masterwork that can help us deepen and develop the ways we engage modern culture.

1. Be an inside outsider.
Augustine hasn’t simply read a cheat sheet on late Roman culture. He knows it intimately from the inside, and it shows. He has lectured on rhetoric in Carthage and Rome, and he can quote Cicero with genuine admiration. He isn’t writing about Roman culture just so he can perform a cheap takedown; he understands why it sparkles to those who claim it as their own.
But Augustine is also an outsider. Yes, he’s North African, from Tagaste in modern-day Algeria, and yes, he has a Christian mother and pagan father, but what puts him on the outside of Roman culture more than anything else is his allegiance to Jesus Christ.
Our own approaches to cultural engagement tend to make us choose between “sensitive insider” or “valiant outsider.” Augustine shows us the importance of combining the two.
2. Critique the whole culture.
Augustine doesn’t assess isolated trends within late Roman culture. Instead, he engages with deep structures and fundamental assumptions: the culture’s virtues as well as its vices, its piety as well as its philosophy, its political environment as well as its popular entertainment. The City of God isn’t a SWAT team parachuting in to tackle one particular cultural bogeyman; it’s a police force ranging over the full length and breadth of Roman society.
It’s important to realize that no one had done this before. As Augustine scholar Charles Mathewes notes, The City of God marks “a very crucial moment in the development of what we can call a critical mindset toward the received and unreflective inhabitation of a given social world.” In other words, all comprehensive social and critical theories trace their roots back to Augustine.

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The Bible presents a complex view of reality and how modern political ideologies dismember parts of this complex reality, isolate them, and treat them as the whole. And it helps Christians to engage with liberalism, CRT, and other political ideologies in a way that doesn’t invest them with ultimate, messianic hope or allow them to become the uncontested and sovereign ideology of our souls.
Perhaps you saw the video. A woman stares down the lens of the camera, straight into our eyes. Her expression is weary, her tone angry. “How can you win?” she cries, with the air of a question she’s asked a thousand times. “You can’t. The game is fixed,” she answers. “So when they say, ‘Why do you burn down the community? Why do you burn down your own neighborhood?’—it’s not ours. We don’t own anything. We don’t own anything.’”
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Kimberly Jones’s viral video gave voice to the anger and anguish felt by many black men and women in the United States and beyond. She spoke of a society rigged so that most black people cannot succeed—however hard they work and whatever the content of their character.
Though the assumptions and commitments informing this view of a systemically racist society go by multiple names, here I’ll use “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) as a general term to capture the set of concerns. (To be clear, lamenting the presence of systemic racism does not necessarily make one a CRT proponent.)
When discussed in Christian circles, CRT is often explicitly or implicitly contrasted to a version of classical liberalism: not the liberalism of the liberal/conservative divide, but the liberalism of individual freedom, universal rights, and the importance of property propounded by thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith. Some Christians, rightly sensitive to the problems of CRT, end up espousing a secular liberalism because it provides an off-the-shelf alternative. Others, whose education or life experience have primed them to see liberalism’s dangers, give a free pass to CRT as the go-to tool for addressing them.
But both reactions sell the Bible short, not by opposing it at every point but by isolating an aspect of its interconnected truth, distorting it, and making it into the whole truth. Many of today’s social and political pitched battles are staged between complementary biblical truths that have been dismembered, isolated, and opposed. This tragic and unnecessary spectacle characterizes much of the struggle between CRT and liberalism.
To be clear, my  aim in this article isn’t to keep score between these secular ideologies and pronounce which error is worse or which is more compatible with biblical Christianity. I simply aim to show how both reduce the complexity of biblical truth, often in symmetrical and opposite ways.
The Bible is not, of course, a book of secular political philosophy: it addresses ultimate realities and calls people to find eternal life in knowing the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he sent (John 17:3). Nevertheless, the Bible does describe the world, human beings, and the flow of history in particular ways (in a forthcoming book I call them “figures”), and these ways have implications for how we think about political and social issues. So let’s consider the key biblical turning points of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation as a grid through which to compare CRT and liberalism to the biblical truth they both simplify and distort.