Who Neutered the Churches?

Once the heart and soul of American civic life, churches today have been reduced to ciphers. Is this the work of the radical Left who hates them or the feckless Right who gave them the kiss of death?

The conservative political class complains endlessly that the Left hates religion and seeks to have it “banished from the public square”.  Its absence from that “square” today is undeniable. Possibly nothing has done more to debilitate the civic culture of America.

Moreover, in explaining the coup d’etat that brought the radical Left to power in the United States 3+ years ago, account must be taken of the churches — or their conspicuous silence. Throughout American history, churches had been the foremost organizations through which Americans combined their efforts and made their voices heard, not just on religious matters but civic ones as well. Yet today they have almost zero role in political affairs. Can it be an accident that their disappearance as a civic institution preceded today’s assumption of power by the extreme Left?

Making America Great the First Time

Churches created America and its civic culture. Since long before the American Revolution and Constitution, ever since the settlement of New England and during the revolutionary upheavals in Old England that drove that settlement, churches had made themselves the principal vehicles (if not the first ones) for citizen participation and checks on government.  It is no exaggeration to say that the proliferation of churches as voices of political dissent was the driving force behind both the English Revolution of the 17th century and the consequent exodus to America.  (The standard myth about “religious freedom” had little to do with it.) Their successor churches then agitated for the next revolution in 18th-century America, led the abolition of slavery, furnished the organizational structure for the early working-class and trade union movements, opposed World War I and Vietnam, mobilized for civil rights in the 1950s-1960s, and more.  This dynamic was almost unique to the English-speaking world.  It provided the principal moral leverage for citizens seeking to limit government power.

In some ways the religious sects of England and New England were the first modern “pressure groups.” But unlike today’s versions, churches did more than voice grievances or push legislation and litigation.  They also conveyed values and inculcated virtues necessary for effective citizenship for which today’s lobbying groups have no substitute: self-sacrifice, self-discipline, sobriety (in multiple senses), delayed gratification, a work ethic (applicable to politics as much as to business), perseverance, fidelity (in secular as well as religious matters), a fierce commitment to family integrity and sexual morality, courage.  And they furnished the essential ingredient for political success: organization.  Individuals may exhibit these virtues, but it is much less effective in isolation.

Did the Left really destroy all this? I see little evidence for that. They may have commandeered some of the churches into their own causes, but that is hardly the same thing. In some ways, the Christian Left is more vibrant, energetic, and successful than the Christian Right.

More likely is that the professional conservatives themselves are the ones that gave the kiss of death to the churches’ traditional civic role.  Imitating the Left, it is their lobbies and law firms (ostensibly “Christian” or not) that eclipsed the churches and drove them from active public engagement — or gave them the excuse to run away.

The rise of the “public interest” lobbying firms was, to be sure, the initiative of the Left. These ostensibly “nonprofit” organizations provide political advocacy for affluent, ideologically driven Americans.  Corporate lobbyists have a bad name because their money buys politicians and legislation on behalf of wealthy special interests, but in the long run those who claim to speak for us and the “public interest” may do more to undermine our freedom.  These “nonprofit” and “nongovernmental” organizations (the almighty “NGOs”) are now wealthier and more integrated into the power structure than ever, and the only thing that checks their power is just different versions of the same.  George Soros’ Open Society organizations are only the latest and most extreme example.

Some go back generations: Americans for Democratic Action (founded 1947), American Civil Liberties Union (1920), NAACP (1909), Sierra Club (1892).  But their numbers and influence exploded with the radicalism of the 1960s.  Alongside these firms came ideologically driven “think tanks” and media.  Colleges and universities were also sucked into the maelstrom of professional activism, with pressure and enticements to retool both research and education to serve the needs of advocacy.

So effective were they at imposing elitist, leftist agendas on the population that they were quickly imitated by conservative versions.  Thus was born the Washington political class: professional activists and surrogate citizens, people we pay to perform the duties of citizenship for us.

For all their pretense of representing the “public interest,” the lobbying firms do not really “empower” citizens or enable their voices to be heard.  On the contrary, citizens are precisely what they marginalize and muzzle.  Like courtroom lawyers to their clients, the message of the lawyer-lobbyists to the citizenry is, “Be quiet and let me do the talking,” as if we are accused criminals on trial.  Small wonder that that is precisely what we are all becoming.

Nothing did more to decimate the civic culture of America, transfer power from the multitude of citizens to a tiny legal-judicial priesthood, and entrench an ideological duopoly operated, not simply by the Democratic and Republican parties, but by the broader political classes of Left and Right. 

Why should churches now take a public stand even on issues that lie firmly within their turf — marriage, the family, sexual morality — let alone others, like the punishing of dissent, the killing in Ukraine, or hijacking the criminal justice system?  Why should they speak out as the consciences of the nation, alert us when government officials abuse their power and then prepare and compel the rest of us to do our duty, even when it involves hardship, sacrifice, and danger?  Nowadays we have the Family Research Council, Alliance Defending Freedom, American Center for Law and Justice, and other groups of paid advocates to do it all for us — without incurring the slightest hardship, sacrifice, or danger.¹

Should we now expect churches to exhort and mobilize us by the millions to stand up to the destructive madness of the Biden administration?  A handful of lawyers and lobbies will surely handle it instead, and we need not do anything.²  But if they do not, then it does not get done, which is why we all sit by helpless as the adolescent Biden junta continues wreaking its havoc and tyranny on the world.

This also explains why the conservative proclivity to lose all their battles is especially pronounced on the issues of family and sexuality once dominated by churches: family breakdown, no-fault divorce, fatherlessness, same-sex “marriage,” homosexual adoption, transgenderism.  On every battle, they lose.³ 

This is because defeat is built into their logic — as the last 3+ years should have taught us. No pressure group, no lobbying organization of lawyers or political operatives, however skillful or conscientious, can possibly have the omniscience to understand and the flexibility to respond effectively to all the innovations devised by a rapidly evolving Left, especially when it is sponsored and underwritten by Permanent Washington. They can only react to each little pinprick – a lawsuit here, a bill there – always with an eye to protecting their own bosses, turf, donor base, media image, and other interests. Even if they want to, they cannot recalibrate their operations quickly or precisely enough to answer the Left’s latest grievances or demonization campaign. The Left will always remain a step ahead of them.

Effective opposition must come from precisely what the right-wing pressure groups have displaced: citizens, householders with families and property, millions of them with a thousand responses to each move by the Left in a thousand localities, each a little different, all using face-to-face pressure; clergymen in thousands of churches, organizing and channeling the millions of voices, giving them coherence, and exorting them to act; plus aggressive, independent journalists who investigate facts, rather than opinionated “columnists” herded into the latest, quickly improvised talking points, and engaged intellectuals, real ones who habitually champion the losing side⁴ and who speak out forthrightly without fear of being “canceled” by their own institutions.  

Such citizens and others exist, and some do try to speak out.  But they have no organizational voice or coherence, because the conservative law firms, think tanks, and media monopolize the responses.  The citizens are reduced to venting their frustrations on social media, which even when not censored provides no outlet for action.  This allows them to be ignored, not only by the Left, but also by the Right.  Meanwhile, social media “influencers” enrich themselves by thinking and speaking for us, enraging our passions without offering any remedy. All we have to do is click “Like”.

Reconstructing this citizenry involves more than just mouthing communist-style pieties about “the people”. But it can be done, as we will see in a future post.

1. The author regularly works with attorneys from such groups and has considerable respect for their effectiveness.  Yet the principle remains: their effectiveness is almost irrelevant and cannot be measured when they have a monopoly on opposition.  Inevitably, such attorneys are constrained to serve organizational needs rather than the public ones the groups profess.

2. Current campaigns defending “religious freedom” illustrate this. For conservatives (and churches) to complain that their “religious freedom” is being curtailed is like an army complaining that someone is shooting at them.  Churches traditionally carved out their own “religious freedom,” a by-product of fighting larger social ills and injustices.  If they ever hired lawyers to plead for it, that was not what procured it (as current Covid politics illustrate).  Again, liberal-conservative mythology credits the Puritans with creating “religious freedom,” though they never advocated any such thing and vehemently opposed it in principle.  But they certainly did advocate many other things, and religious freedom was an unintended result.  Stephen Baskerville, Not Peace But a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution (Routledge, 1993; expanded, Wipf & Stock, 2018).  Robert Lopez, Whatever Happened to Family Values? (Gatekeepers Publishing, forthcoming), ch. 1, argues that religious freedom became the fallback campaign for conservative groups who were defeated in family politics.

3. On gun ownership alone they seem to prevail, perhaps because the gun lobby depends for its clout directly on a membership of millions of citizens who take a direct, hands-on interest in the issues that affect them.

4. I am thinking of Vaclav Havel’s principle, “There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.”