All modern politics is a clash of totalizing ideologies seeking absolute power. Or at least it seems that way. Christians sometimes find themselves caught in the middle of these culture wars, stuck trying to find compromises between competing goods. Of late, though, increasing numbers of young and restless believers have sought to turn their religion into yet another ideology, itself a tool of war.
Ephraim Radner’s latest book, Mortal Goods: Reimaging Christian Political Duty, offers a truly radical alternative to this kind of power politics. Already one of the Anglican Communion’s most important theologians, Radner is well-positioned as a kind of spiritual elder statesman to offer advice to the church’s youth in these times of trouble. At its heart, Mortal Goods is a plea to remember the limits of power and even the human person. In short, man cannot save himself—only God can. Radner reminds us that any politics that loses sight of this will inevitably fail.
Radner’s starting point is scriptural wisdom about human nature and the fallenness of the world. Citing both the Old and the New Testament, he maintains that “evil days” are simply a fact of human existence this side of the eschaton. Politics can never solve this problem, because the people it empowers are inherently imperfect and even incomplete. His is a tragic understanding of the human person, yes, but nonetheless leavened by hope for a time when all things will be made new by a force higher than earthly power.
In many respects, the modest position Radner stakes out in Mortal Goods is reminiscent of earlier, 20th-century Christian humanist ideas about the limits of politics and power. C.S. Lewis, for instance, titled one of his glowing reviews of The Lord of the Rings “The Dethronement of Power.” The heroes of that novel certainly use a certain kind of strength to fight evil, Lewis noted, “but the text itself teaches us that Sauron is eternal; the war of the Ring is only one of a thousand wars against him. … Every time we win, we shall know that our victory is impermanent.” Utopian schemes or “end of history” politics, whatever partisan colors they wear, can never provide the kind of permanent social happiness they falsely promise.
Unlike ideologues of modern liberalism, though, Radner’s modesty never leads him to an agnosticism about society’s purpose, let alone to any of the distressingly popular radical or vitalistic notions about “self-creation.” Modern dreams of overcoming the givenness of this life, of either a high-minded transhumanist cast or more pedestrian utilitarian aims, will lead only to suffering. “That is why mortality is constituted by goods,” Radner writes. “That is why life’s vocation is the ordering of such goods.” And, as a Christian, he insists on a very concrete definition of the “Good Life”—specifically the one found in Ecclesiastes 12:13: “Fear God, and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”
Radner’s conception of politics, which he defines as “the deliberate judgments and decisions ordering our corporate existence,” certainly falls under this idea of duty. Our lives together must be ordered around this biblical principle just as much as our lives individually, albeit in a different way. As Radner writes, “The common vision of the Good Life picks out only a small portion of the complex matter that forms an actual life, a life as it is constituted by the created form given from God’s hand.” Politics is a limited vocation.
This is classic Anglican wisdom. Since the days of the Reformation, Radner’s ancestral coreligionists have been seeking to balance the duties laid out before the individual and society on the basis of their Christian faith. One of the English church’s most brilliant sons, the 18th-century man of letters Samuel Johnson, put the tension into verse:
Vain, very vain, my weary search to find
That bliss which only centers in the mind:
Why have I stray’d, from pleasure and repose,
To seek a good each government bestows?
In ev’ry government, though terrors reign,
Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain,
How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Politics must then be shaped by the permanent things without being mistaken for one of them. As Radner puts it in the introduction: “Our Christian calling is to limit our politics to the boundaries of our actual created lives and to the goods that stake out these limits: our births, our parents, our siblings, our families, our growing, our brief persistence in life, our raising of children, our relations, our decline, our deaths.” This is as far from utopianism as politics can get. He even argues that the overwhelming pursuit of power in the name of “bettering earth” and making it more like heaven can be a distraction from the actual service of God.
For this reason, Radner is highly critical of what he calls “managerialism.” The pursuers of power, left and right alike, believe they can centrally plan human lives and “nudge” people toward the good. However gentle this nudging is, Radner rightly objects because it places fallen men in a position of power only God should hold. “The organization of common life,” he writes, “cannot finally be manipulated instrumentally in a successful fashion because it is too intricate.” He even notes that biblical accounts of mass organization always take shape as some form of blasphemoustyranny or oppression—the unjust treatment of God’s image-bearers as mere animals.
While much of the managerialism plaguing Western society is inspired by liberal or left-wing ideology, unfortunately a kind of theocratic managerialism also seems to prevail on the edges of Christian circles today. Whether we label it “Christian nationalism” or “integralism,” it is the authoritarian product of a great impatience with the imperfection of the world. Advocates of these rising ideologies hold that power can make human beings virtuous, and therefore should be put in their hands so they can rightly order society.
What makes Radner’s book one of the most persuasive condemnations of this power-worshipping attitude in print is that he recognizes instead the beauty of sacrifice as the highest expression of our duty to God. Authoritarian ideologies that seek to dictate the terms of life are, in fact, the furthest thing from “virtue politics.” “Politics is what the Christian does with others in order to provide such a service of offering,” he writes, “the well-shaped artifact of a mortal life that properly reflects and names, and thus recognizes, what ‘is,’ what is true.” The State cannot force a person to sacrifice this way—that is to say, live a Christ-like life.
One practical application of this wisdom can be made in regard to school prayer. Many conservatives rightly see its elimination as a step toward the radical secularism now engulfing the West; law is a teacher, they argue, and prohibiting public prayer teaches the wrong values. It does not seem to me that any of Radner’s political principles would absolutely prohibit a restoration of school prayer. But Mortal Goods should serve as a warning that merely implementing such a policy would not spark widespread religious revival. Faith, and the cruciform life that flows from it, is a gift from God—internal belief is simply not something the State can ever coerce.
All the same, Radner does not commit the liberal error of banishing religion from politics altogether. He criticizes social contractarians such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke for their attempt to reduce belief to something merely private. Christian faith, Radner concludes, “cries out for the freedom of godly service.” Our souls long for something more than the material security of liberal-democratic regimes, and Christians must acknowledge that this longing is collective just as much as it is individual.
What the State can do, then, is protect the person’s ability to pursue a good life, especially as Christians understand it. In the first place, it can secure the lives of citizens against mortal threats, external or internal. It can prevent exploitative abuses of power, whether by governmental bodies or market forces, and pursue justice for those who are wronged. Or, as Saint Paul puts it in Romans 13, “rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.” Given this view, perhaps a Christian could say that the just State guards morality without necessarily enforcing it. It properly acts on the basis of a true conception of human dignity.
In the penultimate chapter, Radner sketches out what a Christian approach to living out these duties looks like. While he addresses what it means for particular issues, such as the war in Ukraine, historical injustices committed against minorities, and the homelessness crisis, he largely avoids articulating any kind of all-encompassing platform for his view of Christian politics. Instead, Radner points to the “Holy Family’s hidden life in Nazareth” as an image of what faithful political witness means. “Nazareth is a place that proceeds through the generations, struggling over the mortal goods of its inhabitants and neighbors,” he writes. “To last in this way is its vocation.” Politics ought to aim at preserving the communities—schools, parishes, families—where human souls can be shaped toward the good.
Radner is a theologian, not a politician, and it would be wrong to criticize Mortal Goods for lacking a spelled-out political program. But it may be worthwhile to consider what would be required for Christians seeking to preserve their own Nazareths in practice. How can statesmen prudently plan to avoid certain catastrophes or withstand them when they come? How might institutional arrangements prevent the accumulation of power in the hands of sacrilegious tyrants? How should our religion shape the constitution of society?
One unlikely figure with answers to these questions who came to mind throughout Radner’s book is the 20th-century conservative journalist and anti-totalitarian Whittaker Chambers. Just as Mortal Goods concludes with a beautiful letter from its author to his children about the nature of the good life, the opening chapter of Chambers’ anticommunist memoir Witness is a letter to his own. “Without freedom the soul dies,” Chambers wrote to them, but “without the soul, there is no justification for freedom.” This is why he believed the United States and the free West had to prevail against all forms of totalitarianism.
Freedom is not a word that appears very often in Radner’s book, but it is an excellent way to describe the true end of the Christian politics he articulates. It is not the false freedom of the ideologue, nor the low freedom of the materialist. Rather, it is the kind of freedom we need to become everything God created us to be.
