David French: The attempt to control others will not preserve our virtue, and it risks inflicting our own failures on the nation we seek to save.
The real story is just as profound, but less succinct. In 1905 Chesterton wrote a much longer letter to London’s Daily News, and that letter included these sentences: “In one sense, and that the eternal sense, the thing is plain. The answer to the question ‘What is Wrong?’ is, or should be, ‘I am wrong.’ Until a man can give that answer his idealism is only a hobby.”
Years ago, I laughed at claims that Christian conservatives were dominionists in disguise, that we didn’t just want religious freedom, we wanted religious. Yet now, such claims are hardly laughable. Arguments for a “Christian nationalism” are increasingly prominent, with factions ranging from Catholic integralists to reformed Protestants to prophetic Pentecostals all seeking a new American social compact, one that explicitly puts Christians in charge.
Of course that is not to say that external voices and ideas can have no negative effect in our lives. We might be our own greatest enemy, but we’re not ourenemy. But if we are deeply flawed, then that realization has to profoundly impact how we approach politics. It has to temper our confidence that we either can control or should control the public square.
But, as Professor McKenzie argues, this understanding faced an early and serious challenge in a political movement that we’d recognize today — Jacksonian populism, the idea that “the people” were, in fact, righteous enough to rule. You see echoes today in the constant refrain from the Trumpist right that “we the people” represent the “real America,” the virtuous core that can save the nation from what they see as a decadent left.
But one doesn’t have to look to national politics to see that threats can emanate from within the church as well as without. One of the most terrifying and poignant parts of the hit Amazon Prime documentary series “Shiny Happy People” was the story of Josh Duggar, a young man who was raised in a deeply religious family. He was protected from the corruption of the “outside world” in almost every way that could be devised.
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