Written by Kurt M. Wagner |
Monday, March 4, 2024
America is obviously getting more polarized and that trend is likely not letting up any time soon. Red and blue as categories can be overly simplistic, but given the modern Democrat platform I think it’s helpful and maps well enough onto Renn’s three worlds model. Roughly speaking, “red” can be viewed as more or less positive, “blue” firmly negative, with perhaps suburban pockets with more moderate, so-called “classical liberal” and/or libertarian-leaning neoconservative types representing what remains of the neutral world. It is clear that much of the Federal government, mostly through the administrative state, has been captured by the Left and is deep blue. Retreating to red states for shelter or to engage in political and cultural battles at the state level may make sense for a lot of people.

As evangelical Christians in America enter and wake up to the reality of living in the Negative World, accurate and depressing descriptions of the times abound. However, practical prescriptions are few and far between as many begin to think about the prospect of having to navigate these uncharted cultural and political waters faithfully. Much of the counsel being offered to address this, including Aaron Renn’s own, is a most welcome and good start. However, we are admittedly only in the beginning of the conversation, the exploratory phase of discovering and implementing faithful responses to the challenges ahead. Things still need to be spelled out at a more granular level, with many sensing that certain specific, concrete steps need to be taken sooner rather than later. We need options: Benedict, Boniface, and everything in between. Understanding the times isn’t enough. We also need to know what ought to be done. 
Thinking about civilizational decline and the loss of the rule of law at a national or even state, much less imperial, level can beggar the political imagination and leave one at a loss as to what to do, what practical action one can take to prepare for further decline while hoping for the best. Don’t get me wrong, I like to speculate about possible regime change, civilizational collapse, or the outcomes of potential reactions as much as the next guy, but it’s draining and unproductive for me more often than not. Though I am very thankful for the national political and cultural actors representing God and sanity, for most people, focusing on national politics has a tendency to suck the civic oxygen out of the room, leaving little energy or will for much else. 
Conversely, the potential effectiveness of focusing on the local governance of one’s own community, where the political rubber meets the road, can be easily judged based on the reaction these efforts get from mainstream media and broader political interests, attracting the tireless attention of the proverbial Eye of Sauron. People on both the right and the left seem to instinctively know this. Things get scary for those ostensibly afraid of the so-called Christian nationalism bogeyman when it begins manifesting itself at the local level. Examples have abounded in recent years of regime-resisting actions (think local action and policy from the COVID era, or regarding DEI, gun rights, marriage licenses, etc.) of humble county clerks, sheriffs, school board members, and local DAs, faithfully practicing, whether consciously or not, the doctrine of the lesser magistrates. These are too numerous to be listed here, but any even moderately informed reader could easily call several of them to mind. 
Christians pursuing national excellence in politics and culture is a worthy goal, and fostering a counter-cultural elite that represents evangelicals at the state (kudos to Oklahoma State Senator Dusty Deevers, e.g.) and national level is undoubtedly important for the long-term survival of America as we have known it. Though a good aspiration for some, it’s just not a realistic goal for most Christians. Ambition isn’t a bad thing in itself, but we can’t all be great. In the near term, many ordinary Christians are just trying to find a place to live where they can raise their families within a society that at least still acknowledges the Tao. This doesn’t necessarily signal cowardly retreat or ultimate defeat, but it is a realistic and practical assumption to have for most people in evangelical America. There is currently a dearth of high-trust, rooted, and intergenerational communities that facilitate family formation, encourage living out Christian ethics, and support positive, explicitly Christian civic engagement, and is doubtful if urban or other progressive centers, the magnets of the elite, will be anywhere near fostering anything like this anytime soon.
Why Local?
America is an extremely vast country. Less than an hour’s highway drive from almost any town or city in whichever direction usually leads to huge amounts of relatively unoccupied, undeveloped, and minimally governed space. And like the US highway system, another often overlooked and underappreciated yet ubiquitous aspect of American life is local (county or equivalent) government: that political infrastructure quietly existing in the civic background of virtually every American. I will argue in this essay that the already existing structures of American local government, if properly leveraged, are at least theoretically sufficient to serve as the political backdrop of faithful Christian living in a quickly declining America. As real-world arenas for natural family life and freedom of religion in the public square, counties offer realistic options in the near to mid-term, and in the long-term could serve as potential springboards to greater, actually viable state and national cultural and political action. 
There are over 3,000 counties or equivalents in America, and this gives me great hope. Decentralization will be key going forward, and I would suggest that drilling down beyond the state into the county level is the right scale at this time for practical Christian self-governance, utilizing extant local political structures as a means to further the ends of the common good rooted in natural law, if not to an explicitly Christian local polity. While most of the  “three C’s” (the campus, the coast, and the city) are squarely fixed in the negative world, it’s conceivable that many suburban areas still have a lot of neutral world characteristics, and that many rural areas are still in the positive world in a lot of ways. It’s the particular matter of cultural influence and elite institutional power that makes negative world areas seem so lopsidedly powerful, punching well above their weight in negativity, geographically speaking.
For most people, the mere thought of local government, with its seemingly petty and provincial details, such things as zoning, sidewalk committees, utilities, waste management, levies (property taxes!), etc., can understandably make one’s eyes glaze over. It doesn’t exactly spark the imagination or inspire zeal. At the same time, local government can also be so accessible and practical that once it is on one’s mental radar, one is almost without excuse for not getting involved to some degree. It falls within a kind of political ordo amoris (town/city, county, state, nation, empire) which has much more of a claim to our immediate civic duty. Maybe that’s why it’s more common to describe, theorize, and speculate about issues on the national rather than local level. There is actually more of the uncomfortable possibility, even obligation, that one get personally involved with the latter rather than the former. As state governments are constitutionally sovereign, focusing locally (at the county or equivalent level) means that the higher authority one is mostly dealing with is the state government, which acts as an intermediary between the local and Federal governments. This serves as a buffer and added level of protection not afforded at the state level, which would be set up for direct challenges from and confrontation with Federal actors. Not many have the stomach (not to mention the actual position, capacity, or skill) for that kind of thing. 
County Government 101
Enough with the generalities, let’s get into the weeds. One can get a quick, basic education on American counties and their equivalents here and here. A few key concepts to know going forward in this essay revolve around what are called Dillon’s Rule and Home Rule, along with the legal term state preemption. These are important terms when considering the feasibility of living out a positive local Christian vision within a viable legal framework. 
Every state’s relationship with its counties or equivalents is unique, generally being written into their constitutions, and counties can vary widely even within the same state. I would encourage everyone to become familiar with their own state and county details, or the details of those in which they would be interested living in. For example, some state constitutions allow for county home rule and charters, allowing for varying degrees of state constitutional county authority within their jurisdictions without direct, specific approval from state legislatures. Other states control their counties in a much tighter way. 
Dillon’s Rule vs. Home Rule
“The founding document of the United States, the Constitution, is silent on local governments. Instead, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments reserve all other powers not previously delegated or prohibited to the states and the people. Therefore, each state is responsible for granting broad or limited authority to each local branch of government, such as counties, municipalities, school districts, and other political subdivisions. There are two guiding principles of governance for local governments: the Dillon Rule and Home Rule.”
Home Rule refers to the constitutional granting of municipalities (towns, cities, and county or equivalents, etc.) more local control over their governing structures, policies, and even some legislative power. Dillon’s Rule on the other hand views local government as merely an agent of the state, created by and deriving all authority explicitly by law from the state legislature. Dillon’s Rule gained more national traction after a SCOTUS decision in 1907 in favor of the states, establishing a precedent for the dominance of this view of state-county relations well into the 20th century. However, in reaction to this, Home Rule later gained more popularity, with many states amending their constitutions to explicitly grant local governments more flexibility and agency in matters of “county concern”. This is especially true in the Western states as counties became responsible for larger and larger legal jurisdictions and service areas. One could make the argument that Home Rule is the local expression of federalism the Founders had in mind, and that the last clause of the 10th Amendment, “or to the people” could refer or apply to local government. 
“The history reveals that, contrary to modern assumptions, local governments were not always seen as subunits of states, but instead, were often treated as voluntary quasi-private associations that possessed considerable power as a matter of custom.”
Read More
Related Posts:

This year marks the 100th anniversary of J. Gresham Machen’s famous, and probably one of the most important theological books of the past century, Christianity and Liberalism.[1] The book’s significance cannot be overstated and its larger impact on the modernist-fundamentalist debates, along with the rise of evangelicalism in the twentieth century is incalculable. Numerous reasons could be given for the book’s importance, but I will mention only three.
Three Reasons to Remember Christianity & Liberalism
First, in Christianity and Liberalism, Machen masterfully and correctly distinguishes true, orthodox Christianity from its counterfeit known as “classic liberal theology.” Due to the cultural, philosophical, and religious impact of the Enlightenment on society and the later embrace of the Darwinian theory of macroevolution, some within the church sought to recast Christianity to “fit” and “conform” to the current thought of the day. Convinced that Christianity could not survive unless it embraced the “spirit of the age,” which meant for these people that Christian theology had to reject its own starting points and authority structure grounded in God and his revelation. Thus, instead of starting with the triune God who is there and who has spoken infallibly and authoritatively in Scripture, theological liberalism continued to use the language of Scripture but divorced from its theological grounding. The result of this attempt to correlate the Bible with contemporary thought (which functioned as the authoritative grid by which we read Scripture) was not the “saving” of Christianity or even making it “relevant” to its cultured despisers, but its ultimate destruction. Instead, of faithfully expounding and applying Scripture to the present day, classic liberalism constructed a different religion of its own making that had no resemblance to historic Christianity. They continued to use biblical language, but they hollowed out its biblical meaning and significance. No doubt, Machen was not the first to sound the alarm that theological liberalism was not Christianity, but his book was certainly one of the most significant works to remind the Church of this crucial point.
Second, in Christianity and Liberalism, Machen reminds us that God’s glory and the truth of Scripture demands a loving confrontation of the church against all error that seeks to undermine the truth of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. There comes a time when people who claim to be Christians have so departed from the truth of God’s Word that separation and division is inevitable. We ought to seek the unity of the church, but not when the truth of Scripture and the gospel is at stake. We no longer have unity when biblical truth is either redefined, undermined, or rejected. Machen knew this well. As a result of his stand against the drift towards theological liberalism within the Presbyterian church, he was instrumental in founding a new seminary (Westminster Theological Seminary) and a new denomination (the Orthodox Presbyterian Church). None of these decisions were easy for him to make, but Machen knew that in order to honor God, his Word, and glory of Christ, truth required confrontation against error, and even separation from those who identified as Christians.
For the evangelical church today, this is a lesson we must learn from Machen. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the battle was over the authority of Scripture and the objective truth of historic Christianity over against classic liberalism. Classic liberalism rejected the supernatural triune God of Scripture, the pervasive nature of human sin and depravity, and the only saving hope for humans in the finished work of the divine Son who assumed our human nature in order to perfectly obey for us in his life, and by his death pay for our sins to secure our justification before God. In contrast to the theological liberalism of his day, Machen knew that Christianity was not simply about doing good for our fellow humans and thus seeing “kingdom” progress in this world. Instead, first and foremost, Christianity is about what the true and living God has done to take the initiative to save sinners in and through Christ alone. It is about what the triune God has done to establish his church, which no doubt impacts the world. But the first things of the gospel must come first so that Christianity is not turned into a liberal social program, and not what it truly is: what God has done to save sinners from their sin.
Of course, this raises the question of our day. The specific form of theological liberalism that Machen stood against may no longer be with us, but the need to stand against error and all that opposes the truth of Scripture is perennial. On every side, the evangelical church is floundering as it accommodates to the current Zeitgeist, whether regarding the present sexual revolution that demands we change our biblical convictions, or in our redefinitions of God, humans, sin, Christ, salvation, and so on. Even the issue related to female pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention is tied to larger issues of Scripture, interpretation, and biblical authority. What Machen teaches us, therefore, is that we must recognize today where the battle rages and to lovingly confront error based on the truth of God’s Word.
Third, in Christianity and Liberalism, Machen not only speaks against the error of his day but also positively expounds and defends the truth of Scripture and Christian theology. Machen’s rejection of theological liberalism meant that he had to put historic Christianity in its place, hence his concern for theological education and the establishment of faithful churches who would join to form a new denomination. Machen knew that it was not enough to reject error; he also knew that he had to ground the church in the truth of the whole counsel of God. This too is a lesson that the evangelical church must learn today. Poll after poll reminds us that those who identify with the evangelical church know less about Scripture and sound theology.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, May 20, 2024
The threat to religious liberty remains and has indeed expanded, but a new one has also emerged: the temptation to combat this by fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same. For want of a better term, it’s a kind of pop Nietzscheanism that uses the idioms of Christianity. It’s understandable why such a thing has emerged. Many Christians think America has been stolen from them. And the path to political power today is littered with crudity, verbal thuggery, and, whatever the policies at stake, the destruction of any given opponent’s character. 

Some years ago I wrote a piece for First Things entitled “The Calvary Option.” It took its cue from the 2014 movie Calvary, which followed the last seven days in the life of a priest who knew that someone was planning to kill him. The killer wanted to do so as revenge for sexual abuse he had suffered as a child at the hands of the clergy. The twist was that he chose his victim because he was a good priest. He had not abused anybody. Once the priest knew he was the target, he faced a choice: flee, or stay and be a good pastor to his parishioners, many of whom despised him. He chose to stay and fulfill his obligations, and in the end he was killed for it. I commented at the time that one might also call this “the traditional pastoral work in an ordinary congregation option.” 
I wrote the piece when Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option was the talk of the town. At that time, the big threat to the faith was the emerging pressure on religious freedom, focused then on the issue of gay marriage. The threat to religious liberty remains and has indeed expanded, but a new one has also emerged: the temptation to combat this by fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same. For want of a better term, it’s a kind of pop Nietzscheanism that uses the idioms of Christianity. It’s understandable why such a thing has emerged. Many Christians think America has been stolen from them. And the path to political power today is littered with crudity, verbal thuggery, and, whatever the policies at stake, the destruction of any given opponent’s character. While the left may pose an obvious threat, there is also a more subtle danger in succumbing to the rules of the political game as currently played by both sides. And the internet doesn’t help. All ideas—however silly, insane, or plain evil—can seem rational and workable in the frictionless kindergartens of social media bubbles. In the real world, things can be just a bit more complicated. 
Read More
Related Posts: