Pope interviewed some attendees. One said, “I think my prime motive for coming is to defend Christmas against the Muslim hordes [that are] eroding our ­culture.” A young speaker testified to his salvation in Christ, adding, “And wouldn’t it be great to see this nation restored back to its ancestral roots?” One of the event organizers championed the revival of “masculine Christianity.”

In advance of the event, some Anglican bishops expressed “grave concern” that Christianity was being used to “justify racism and anti-migrant rhetoric.” A cleric in the crowd shouted that Jesus had been a migrant. The vicar of an Anglican church was handing out leaflets that featured an AI-generated nativity scene in which “black people, Muslim women and three white men wearing Union Jack T-shirts gaz[ed] at the baby ­Jesus in his crib.”

Both the “ancestral roots” and the “all are welcome” themes express political Christianity. Tommy ­Robinson may be a cynical opportunist, but undoubtedly there were sincere Christians among those marching to Whitehall. These “Tommy Robinson Christians” believe that national revival requires a return to the religious foundations of Albion. This is probably a correct assessment. The multicultural and inclusive Christians wish for contemporary Britain to realize the universal mission of Christianity: The gospel is for all of ­humanity—Great Britain must be open to all. 

It would be an abuse of the common usage of “­nationalism” to speak of the multicultural and inclusive Christians as nationalists. But they have a decidedly Christian vision of the nation, and indeed of Western civilization. For them, the open society realizes the inner truth of Christianity. It promises to heal ­societies fragmented by identity politics and demographic change. Their vision is akin to that of the Christians who advanced the Social Gospel more than a century ago. They held that progressive ­politics would Christianize the raw and often inhumane realities of modern economic life. In this regard, the “­post-nationalism” of Christians who oppose linking Jesus the King to a recovery of ancestral roots advances a vision for the future of the West.

Paul Kingsnorth has cautioned against the temptation to turn Christianity into a prop for Western civilization. It was the thrust of his 2024 Erasmus Lecture, “Against Christian Civilization” (­January 2025). Kingsnorth is right to issue this warning. As a friend of mine said many years ago after a speaker at a conference exhorted the Christians in attendance to “save” Europe: “Our Lord did not die on a cross to found Europe and establish Western civilization.”

But even those who are keen to emphasize that we are pilgrims in a strange land must harken to the counsel that Jeremiah offered to the Israelites in Babylon: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (29:7). 

 Globalization, mass migration, and the weakening of solidarity are clear and present dangers. It’s fitting for Christians to propose ways forward amidst these challenges. How could it be otherwise? And in view of the growing polarization of politics, it’s not surprising that Christians offer divergent visions of the future, one keen to return to roots and the other seeking a new and more united world. It’s wrongheaded to accuse one side or the other of “politicizing” Christianity. Seeking the welfare of the city—that’s the intention of both Christian nationalists and Christian post-nationalists.

The Christian political enterprise can be done well—or poorly. Our tradition provides tools to purify our political judgments. The concept of an order of love helps to frame our duties to our near neighbors, as distinct from our far neighbors. Natural law can clarify moral issues. The history of Christian statesmanship offers useful instruction. The Sermon on the Mount unsettles our complacent consciences. 

Let’s not imagine that Christianity exists to sustain (or transform) Western civilization. The object of faith is not to renew (or transcend) our nation, or any other nation. But let’s also not ignore the truth that ­Christianity has a great deal to say about what kind of civilization we should seek to nurture. Our faith informs our ­citizenship.

Paul VI spoke of Christianity’s vocation to cultivate a “civilization of love.” As I survey the city to which God has sent me in exile, I’ve come to a conclusion: The open society, with its vision of a civilization of inclusion, encourages philanthropy but undermines love. This judgment makes me sympathetic to the St. George flags waved beside banners announcing the lordship of Christ, even as I recognize the dangers of nationalistic idolatry. I suppose that makes me a Christian nationalist. It’s a label I’m willing to accept. As I do so, I hope that, when I met my Maker, he will judge that I elevated the Christian above the nationalist.

The post Christmas Nationalism appeared first on First Things.

My first time there, I was surprised to see that so many of the laity were college students. Instead of partying or studying late, they walk over from Catholic University of America’s campus to the priory for Compline. While the lay people will go home and return to their usual routines, the Dominicans will be back for Lauds at 7 a.m. to begin the day, a day where the bell will toll four more times for the Liturgy of the Hours. In between, brothers rush off to classes on the second floor, consecrating their minds to everything from Latin to metaphysics, as each one will have read Aquinas’s entire Summa Theologiae before they are ordained to the priesthood.

How do I know all this? President Dominic Legge appointed me as the McDonald Agape visiting scholar, a position reserved for Protestants. What has caught me off guard is the way the Dominicans expect me to be a participant rather than a mere observer. I am lecturing in class (on Protestant theologians, no less), joining Thomistic conferences with some of today’s most erudite intellectuals, leading soirees over topics of my choice, and participating in their spiritual retreats for university students. I am used to Protestants saying “ready, aim, fire” if there’s a Catholic in sight, but here I encounter Dominicans not the least bit defensive, confident that if they have truth, it will show itself.

I expected to see Dominicans devoting themselves to Lectio Divina—reading, meditating, praying, and contemplating the Scriptures. I did not expect to see Dominicans traveling the world at a neck-breaking pace for the Thomistic Institute, engaging universities with the truths of Thomism. My son caught on quick. “Why is there a dog in the statue of St. Dominic outside?” he asked. “Well, we are called the barking dogs because we bark the gospel everywhere we go,” said Fr. Dominic Langevin. Ready to engage the intellectual life wherever they find it, they see the whole world as their stage.

The experience has given me hope. In the past, ecumenism often meant debating distinctives that date back to at least the sixteenth century. This exercise has not generally been fruitful. Imagine two men arm-wrestling in a pub, each staring at his opponent. Suddenly, a storm erupts, and its wind brings the four walls crashing down. They are so caught up in themselves they don’t even realize the house has collapsed around them.

What should happen instead? The arm-wrestlers must lock arms, only this time to rebuild the walls. Their strength is far more effective together. The storm of secularism has hit Christianity, bringing down its walls. On this side of modernity, it’s time to link arms and rebuild, although neither side must compromise its distinctives to do so.

In the past, Catholics and Protestants have tried to unite around their theological distinctives, which usually results in them being watered down. What we need is a common architect around which we can unite, one who is especially equipped with the metaphysical tools that can help us rebuild the walls of Christianity: Thomas Aquinas. Sadly, while Dominicans have been applying the metaphysics of Thomism to the culture for centuries, most Protestants today are not. If the walls that have fallen are First Principles, then Protestants desperately need the metaphysical tools of Thomism.

In a world of skepticism, Thomism believes theology is a science, an organized body of knowledge dependent on the principle of non-contradiction. In an age of materialism, Thomism believes not only in matter, but form and therefore can give every person hope that their body is informed by their soul (hylemorphism). In a culture rampant with nominalism, Thomism says that universals are real, explaining all the otherwise meaningless particulars of our everyday experience. In an era swept up in naturalism, Thomism believes in causality, capable as it is to move from our sense experience to a First Cause by which all things live and move and have their being (Acts 17:28), thereby infusing our lives with purpose, or telos. In a day of expressive individualism, Thomism puts forward a real distinction between our essence and existence, one that reminds us we are dependent on a Creator who is simple. And, perhaps most importantly, in a world in constant motion, subject as it is to potency and act, Thomism asserts that our security resides in one who is pure act. As the unactualized actualizer, he can direct the fluctuating course of history to its fulfillment.

If real ecumenism is to have a future, it must oscillate around the perennial metaphysics of Aquinas. First, Protestants must learn from the Dominican rule of life. After my experience with them is over, I will be applying its basic principles by starting Anselm House, a school of philosophy and theology through Trinity Anglican Seminary where its fellows consecrate themselves to contemplation for the formation of virtue, as well as participation in the liturgy at St. Aidan’s Anglican Church. What’s distinctive about Anselm House? It is classical, retrieving the ecumenical creeds. It is Thomistic, committed to Aquinas’s First Principles and his way of doing philosophy and theology. And it is Anglican, allegiant to the reformed catholicity of the Thirty-Nine Articles and Book of Common Prayer. If Stewart Clem is right that the twentieth century “was the golden age of Anglican Thomism,” then the story of Anglican Thomism in the twenty-first century has yet to be written. In a small way, Anselm House will turn the page to that next chapter.

Second, talking across battle lines is not enough; real partnerships must begin. I am linking arms with Tory Baucum, director of the Center for Family Life at Benedictine College, and Msgr. Stuart Swetland, president of Donnelly College. Together we will launch Aquinas KC, a school for Thomistic catechesis, whose genesis began when Archbishop Naumann tasked Tory Baucum to find a creative way to do Thomistic catechesis. When Tory met me, a Thomistic Protestant, that original idea took on flesh. Our first project is a conference at Donnelly in Kansas City, where Catholic and Protestant scholars will gather around Aquinas as their “common doctor” to answer objections to Christianity in the culture. Then, we will launch Thomistic Fellowship Circles modeled after Jacques Maritain. Christians from various traditions will embark on a five-year tour, beginning with Aquinas’s biblical commentaries, then his homilies and hymns, and eventually his philosophy and theology, all for the sake of sharing Thomistic wisdom with the world.

Many Protestants will keep arm-wrestling, even if the walls have collapsed. It’s time to start building.

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A prominent Catholic recently argued in the Irish Times for a new category of victim: those subjected to infant baptism, especially as practiced by the Catholic Church. Former president of Ireland and canon lawyer Mary McAleese declared it to be “a long-standing, systemic and overlooked severe restriction on children’s rights with regard to religion.” Really? At the very moment when thousands are being slain in Iran for protesting the brutal religious regime, McAleese apparently lies awake at night worrying about infant baptism. This is an eloquent testimony to the moral disorientation that marks our present age.

Several comments are in order. First, McAleese does not deny that baptism brings certain “spiritual” benefits, such as “expunging original sin” and “opening up . . . the flow of God’s grace.” But she objects to the lifelong membership of the Church that baptism claims to involve. Of course, her fear of the objective responsibilities that baptism entails only has force if she accepts that what the Church teaches about baptism is true. Yet, like a good therapeutic consumer of spirituality, she embraces what comforts her and discards what causes discomfort or demands too much.

Second, McAleese’s hyperbolic language is ridiculous. Reflecting on her own baptism, she laments that “nothing else was to shape my life so powerfully or impose such formidable restrictions on my inalienable intellectual human rights as that brief Sunday baptism ceremony 7½ decades ago.” Really? Nothing else had such a powerful impact on her life? None of her years pursuing an education? Her marriage? None of the children to whom she gave birth? None of the relationships she had with friends and mentors, intellectual and spiritual? Not one of those shaped her in a more profound way than a ceremony that she sees as deeply problematic in part because she has no recollection of it? That is very hard to believe.

Third, she clearly does not understand that we live in a secular age. As Charles Taylor commented, we today can believe in the same things that people did in the fifteenth century—but unlike them, we choose to believe, whereas they had no choice. In that sense, we might provocatively claim that even Catholics are now Protestants. We are creatures of religious choice. Catholics today may be baptized as infants, but if they are still practicing as Catholics by age twenty, it is because they have chosen to do so. The Church might still claim the apostates as members, but it makes no practical difference. Yes, the Church can excommunicate, as McAleese points out—but that power only has weight if the Church’s teaching about herself is true. Since McAleese rejects church teaching, excommunication should, in her view, amount to little more than an empty gesture.

And that leads to another significant point. McAleese herself has spent much of her public life attacking the Church’s teaching on male ordination, abortion, sexuality, and gender. She was a signatory, for example, to the 2021 document “A Home for All.” That she remains a Catholic would indicate that the Church, far from using baptism as a means to corral and crush her members, is rather lackadaisical or even impotent in that regard. As a Protestant, I am always puzzled by Catholics who so clearly despise their Church’s teachings not only on what it means to be Catholic but even to be human. Why such people continue to use the label “Catholic” even while treating it in the most un-Catholic way—making it mean whatever they want—is a mystery to those of us on the outside. I would argue that the Roman Church hierarchy, far from being a despotic bully, is far too gracious and patient with the McAleeses within her fold. The Church would have far more credibility if she showed that she does make the kind of demands on her members that McAleese bemoans by taking firm action against those who have made careers out of mocking her teaching.

As to McAleese herself, her concern for the victims of infant baptism is quite a contrast to her lack of concern for the unborn. It is odd that baptism of an infant is so abusive whereas the killing of the same child in the womb is a human right. 

I might conclude by saying that nothing else was to shape my life so powerfully or impose such formidable restrictions on my inalienable human rights as that act of love between my mother and my father that led to my conception fifty-nine years ago. I suspect McAleese would agree that life was something imposed upon me without my consent. It’s therefore just a pity that she does not extend the logic of her objections to infant baptism back to the moment when egg collides with sperm.

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The early church offers a very different model. As Leithart observes, early Christians could have claimed protection under Roman law by presenting themselves as a cultus privatus, a voluntary association devoted to personal spirituality. They did not. True to their Old Testament inheritance, they insisted that worship is public, that the church’s common life is public, and that the gathering of God’s people cannot be confined to the private sphere.

The church’s self-description makes this clear. Koinonia—used by Paul to describe the church’s shared life—is the term Aristotle uses in Politics to describe the basic form of political association. Even more striking is the use of ekklesia. In the Septuagint, ekklesia names Israel’s public assemblies: covenant-making at Sinai, dedication of the temple, public repentance, and the reconstitution of the people after exile (Exod. 19; 1 Kings 8; Neh. 5–7; Deut. 23:1). In Greek usage more broadly, ekklesia denoted the governing assembly of the polis. When Christians took this name, they were not positioning themselves as one sect among others under Rome. They were claiming continuity with the covenant people of God and presenting themselves as the visible enactment of God’s kingdom. Worship belongs to this public reality. It proclaims Christ’s comprehensive rule and embodies an alternative politics.

Augustine provides the deepest account of why such worship matters for public life. Throughout The City of God, he assumes the political significance of true worship. Pagan religion, Augustine argues, mirrors the ambitions of the earthly city: pride, honor, domination. It can motivate civic virtue only superficially and cannot reform the heart. True worship, by contrast, is a genuine public good. It unifies a people by directing them to God as the common good; it orders loves by freeing citizens from idolatry; it forms virtue through participation in Christ’s sacrifice; and it humbles a people by rooting them in grace rather than glory.

For Augustine, worship neither sanctifies the state nor withdraws from it. It relativizes politics by denying it ultimacy. Earthly peace is real but provisional. The church already tastes a higher peace and so undermines political idolatry simply by being itself. In this sense, the church is the first and primary polis—the visible form of the city of God on pilgrimage.

We can combine these ecclesiological correctives with classical Reformed conceptions of civil rule and its relation to true religion. Magistrates are not called to coerce belief, but to remove obstacles, maintain order, and enable the church to live and worship in peace. This is the Reformed doctrine of “nursing fathers” and their circa sacra duties. Calvin describes the magistrate as supplying what is necessary for the church’s flourishing: peace, protection, and space. The Jus Divinum Regiminis Ecclesiastici, an authoritative exposition of the Westminster Assembly’s political and ecclesiological teachings, affirms that rulers are to remove all external impediments to true religion, to see that the church is protected, and to regard it as an honor to do so. Even the 1788 American edition of the Westminster Standards retains the language of the magistrate as “nursing father” and enjoins prayer that the church be “countenanced and maintained by the civil magistrate.” Francis Turretin and later Reformed theologians insist that magistrates restrain opposition to Christian worship and provide all necessary external conditions for the church to thrive. William Symington captures the logic with clarity: A nation enlightened by revelation is morally bound not merely to tolerate the true religion, but actively to favor and support it. Desecration of the Lord’s Day is a legitimate concern of civil authority, harmful to both church and commonwealth, and highly displeasing to God.

A desecration has occurred. Scripture consistently treats such acts as grave. The prophets judge nations and rulers—even pagan ones—for desecrating sacred space. Conversely, Scripture commends rulers who protect worship, including not only reforming kings in Israel but even foreign rulers such as Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar, who serve as instruments of God’s providence.

This concern extends into the New Testament. In 1 Timothy 2, Paul commands prayer for “all in authority, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life in all godliness and dignity.” Classical Protestant interpreters rightly understood this prayer as bound up with the magistrate’s nursing-father role: to provide the conditions under which the church may gather, worship, and live faithfully. Prayer for rulers is not concerned only with their salvation, but with their fulfillment of God-given responsibilities toward the church’s public vocation.

This insight resonates across Protestant political theology. Karl Barth insists that the state, though fallen, belongs to Christ and must maintain outward justice and peace so the church may act according to its calling. Dietrich Bonhoeffer emphasizes that government exists to establish external righteousness and provide the conditions for free worship. Oliver O’Donovan provocatively argues that, after Christ’s resurrection, secular authorities exist provisionally to serve his kingdom by providing the social space the church’s mission requires. In each case, the state’s task is not to dominate the church, but to externally facilitate its vocation as a public assembly under Christ.

The church’s worship is public.

Christians are called to endure disruption with patience and hope (1 Peter 2–4). But they may also appeal to rulers to fulfill their divinely entrusted duties. Such appeals are not demands for privilege or instruments of coercion. They are invitations to act as nursing fathers, ensuring that public worship—the enactment of Christ’s kingdom—is possible. Worship is public. The church is public. Liberalism’s attempt to privatize worship is an ecclesiological error that neutralizes the church’s witness.

The stakes are theological, social, and political. In worship, the King of kings is acclaimed, the new humanity is made visible, and the church anticipates the eternal polis of God. Civil authorities exist provisionally to serve this mission. Minnesota is not an anomaly. It is a reminder that the church remains a public community under Christ—and that rulers are called, as Paul instructs in 1 Timothy 2, to ensure that she may worship in peace.

Photo by Annalise Kaylor/NurPhoto via AP

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Ferguson, with sixteen books to his name, is one of the world’s most influential intellectuals. Twenty years ago, during the heated, raucous New Atheist moment, it would have been difficult to imagine a figure of his stature making such a statement, much less calling it “simple.” Ferguson’s wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali was a prominent atheist back then, but in 2023 she declared in a viral column that she had become a Christian.

Hirsi Ali was criticized at the time for making a primarily civilizational argument for conversion in her column; Richard Dawkins even wrote her an open letter informing her that she was not really Christian. In a subsequent conversation with Alex O’Connor and an onstage discussion with Dawkins, she explained that her conversion came on the heels of a devastating personal crisis that included a struggle with alcohol. A visibly chagrined Dawkins took it back.

Ferguson and Hirsi Ali were baptized with their two sons in 2023, and he told the Vancouver audience that they are now “practicing, devout Christians, and it has made a profound change to my life.” He describes himself as a “lapsed atheist,” having been raised in a secular home after his parents left the Church of Scotland. But in the “first phase” of his coming to faith, he realized that from a historical perspective, “no society had been successfully organized on the basis of atheism.” As a conservative or, as Dawkins once described himself, a “cultural Christian,” he occasionally patronized churches as a nod to tradition.

In his “second phase,” it became personal—although in a 2024 interview with The Australian, Ferguson said that one cannot know for certain that Christ rose from the dead. But he also observed that “Jesus taught us . . . there were things we couldn’t know. . . . One can’t reason one’s way to God, at least I don’t think one can. The nature of faith is that one accepts that these apparently far-fetched claims are true. That’s the nature of faith.” 

Ferguson’s story is a microcosm of the struggle of many intellectuals who want to believe but find themselves unable to force their modern minds to accept supernatural claims. In his landmark work A Secular Age, Charles Taylor described what he called the “bulwarks of belief” of the pre-modern era; the cultural and social structures and lived experiences that made belief in God seem natural. In his 2023 work, Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age, Joseph Minich observes that our societies are hemmed in by precisely the opposite. Many intellectuals today are engaged in a very public struggle with “bulwarks of unbelief,” wanting to believe but finding it difficult or impossible.

One example is the writer Louise Perry, author of the brilliant book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. While researching it, she said in a recent interview, she found herself “reaching Christian conclusions against my will.” She had read Dawkins’s The God Delusion at thirteen, and “thought it was fantastic because I was thirteen.” Christianity, she observed, was true sociologically. To believe this is to be a “civilizational Christian.” But is it true supernaturally? “I hope so,” she admitted. She and her husband now take their children to church. But she struggles.

“Some weeks I believe, and some weeks I don’t,” Perry said. She worries that being raised in a secular home makes it impossible for her to truly believe, but she and her husband want to send their children to a Christian school because they hope to “give our children the best chance of believing both truths”—that is, that Christianity is sociologically and supernaturally true. She does, however, describe herself as a Christian.  

As I noted in a previous column for First Things, Perry is not alone. Charles Murray, who has long acknowledged the civilizational value of Christianity, now calls himself a Christian, describing his ongoing struggle in Taking Religion Seriously, published last year. Douglas Murray, Tom Holland, and Jordan Peterson have similarly grappled with these topics; the title of Peterson’s chaotic 2024 book sums it up: We Who Wrestle With God.

The paradox, of course, is that those who wrestle with God must lose. As Chesterton famously put it: “It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” For the learned to learn to subject even their intellect to God is impossible without divine grace. Niall Ferguson, one of the most influential historians alive, appears to understand this. Sitting in the pews, he is learning.“

What strikes me, as a regular churchgoer now, not having been one before, is how much one learns every Sunday morning,” he said. “Every hymn contains some new clue as to the relationship between us and God. I think the educational benefit of going to church almost equals the moral benefit, the uplift, the sense one gets of being somewhat reset.”

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There are many kinds of “maybes.” “Maybe St. Paul didn’t write Ephesians” is one kind, presuming a theory about how the world is put together. “Maybe God will have mercy” is another kind, the opening chapter in the story of grace. The first “maybe” is a human conjecture, reflecting our tendency to project our own fallibility, our misattribution or deception, onto the world. The second “maybe” is a prayer to the real maker, the maker even of the theorists, whose actual blueprint for the world is clothed in the vast and abyssal oceans of the inscrutable and unsearchable depths of God (Rom. 11:33).

So, to the first “maybe.” I go to lots of academic and religious conferences. People give papers, often with pointed claims that are aimed at countering common opinions. With appropriate scholarly modesty, ­many of these claims are couched in “maybe.” Maybe St. Paul didn’t write Ephesians—that’s an old conjecture. Along with “maybe Moses is a fictional justification for racial bias.” And “maybe Jesus didn’t really say divorce was adultery,” and “maybe he never thought he was the Christ.” Maybe, because we can’t really say for sure, the scholar notes soberly. But no one is fooled by this tone of caution. The scholar is saying what he really thinks. It’s a challenge, an ensign planted in the ground of ­institutional opinion. A willful wish.

This highlights a major aspect of “maybe”: It reflects our inner desires. Our spouse is sick: Though it looks bad, maybe she will recover! Maybe I will get the job! Maybe you will forgive me. But the hedging is also a mirror to our fears, our angers. Conspiracy theories trade on these:  Maybe these bad people have done some very bad things. 

“Beyond reasonable doubt” limits the sovereignty of “maybe” in law courts. In the academy, reasonable doubts are hardly obstacles to committed claims and strong assertions. In the Church, “maybe” is mitigated by the Creed, tradition, scriptural dogma. But “maybe” will always swirl in the human soul, the ever-seeking, hoping, and even deformed “spirit of man” (Ps. 42:1–2; Jer. 17:9). Here, reason and doubt struggle in a silent and tangled match of confused will. Maybes abound.

But what of God? We can look at some examples. David explains his prayers and fasting for the baby conceived through his adulterous and murderous affair with Bathsheba: “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, ‘Who knows whether the Lord will be gracious to me, that the child may live?’” (2 Sam. 12:22). Later, fleeing Jerusalem in the wake of his son Absalom’s rebellion, David is cursed by Saul’s relative Shimei. Instead of retaliating, David spares him: “It may be that the Lord will look upon my affliction, and that the Lord will repay me with good for this cursing of me today” (2 Sam. 16:12). Joel proclaims the destructive judgment of God upon Israel and exhorts his people to a change of heart: “Who knows whether he will not turn and repent, and leave a blessing behind him” (Joel 2:14). St. Paul urges Christian teachers to instruct (rather than simply condemn) their opponents, for “God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth” (2 Tim. 2:25). According to all these ­celebrated persons of faith, God himself seems like a character marked by the grandest of maybes.

Note, though, that David’s “maybes” with respect to God do not finally lay hold of his own desires: The baby dies, Shimei is executed. Indeed, in the long run, few of these human desires work out as hoped—Joel’s, the king of Nineveh’s, perhaps even Paul’s and Timothy’s. Divine judgment comes eventually; mollified hearts turn hard again; heresies and schisms proliferate over the centuries. So much happens. Yet in all these cases, God’s “maybe,” as uttered in the prayers of those who beseech him, is not couched in assertions, but conveys readied openness: Here am I, with whatever hopes I have, and I present myself to the one who will do what he will do, knowing only that he who does what he does is the one who is my God, the maker of heaven and earth. All humility, from the bottom up. All grace, from the top down.

I realize that there is something unsettling here for the forgiven sinner, in whom there is no place for “maybe.” Luther pressed the point, and it was developed into the evangelical “doctrine of assurance.” Newman, however, rightly asserted that we may trust God while we distrust ourselves. Our own “maybes” are always fraught with our vacillating desires, even in their most positive aspects. They can point, nonetheless, to the fact that God does not wander in “maybe.” God is all-­merciful; and in the simplicity of his being, God is also all-pure, all-righteous, all-judging, all-giving, all-taking. Exodus 34:6–7 captures this, if not exactly “nicely” then at least vividly, as does the Book of Job: God forgives, God punishes. It is the same God, not in the sense of acting at different moments or possessing different moods, but as the one who is revealed in a fully integrated ­self-offering. At their best, our “maybes,” uttered with an artless receptivity, can prove an entrance into the depths of God’s life, not the prospect of a fearful choice between options, let alone contraries. God is one; the desires of man are a mess of pottage. “Let God be true, and every man a liar” (Rom. 3:4). And so it is. 

Repentance, in this light, is not a religious supplement in a regime of spiritual health. No, it marks who we actually are before God: sinners in his hands. Nor is repentance a number bought in the grand lottery of God’s favor. For God’s crafting of our lives and beings is not marked by favor or indifference, but by some kind of incomprehensible love in the making of us in the first place.  

When we repent before God, uttering who we are in fact and imploring forgiveness—“maybe” under the great sky of God’s unfathomed Spirit—our sense of hovering possibility allows a space for God’s creation of our times: I am ready to be made by you, we cry. And all our possibilities are, when made real, thereby received as God’s gifts. In repentance, as in all our petitions, we give our maybes over to the certainty of God’s being and act. “I am this,” we say; “Do this for me!” we pray. In return, we are told, “Here is what I give you! This is how it is!” Our “maybes” are taken over by God’s grace, and they become a doorway into the receipt of God’s ­miracles—where Something is given in the face of nothing. Where “maybe”—the full range of God’s making—is asserted in the face of “never,” the promise of our own confused, maybe-saturated wants. We are swept away, not into the fog of our desires, but into the rapids of what is real.  

“Maybe” is not about uncertainty, something that Jesus understands: “I believe, help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). “Maybe” might be the story of a person, certain or not, simply standing alone with the dregs of his wishes. Or “maybe” is the story of the person whose joyful repentance opens his life to God’s unpredictable refashioning. The last story is by far the best, for it contains all the others.

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Liberalism is a contested term. But as I observed last month, it was originally used in theology to denote freedom from the constraints of inherited dogma and ecclesiastical authority. In its optimistic phase, liberalism in theology held that this new freedom would ­unleash the intellectual powers of modern man, allowing him to attain a higher and more universal perspective, which would serve progress and vindicate Christianity. 

This promise animates The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, published by Ernst Troeltsch in 1902. I read this book as an undergraduate and marveled at Troeltsch’s intellectual élan. But I could see that his reframing of Christianity in more universal terms altered its meaning. This alteration was what concerned my teachers at Yale. The first duty of a scholar is to do justice to his subject matter on its own terms. A culturally dense phenomenon such as Christianity requires immersion in its distinctive language and practice.

Congdon offers an accurate summation of the postliberal approach in theology: It “rejects the attempt to account for humanity in general or to speak in global terms.” But he goes on to draw a false corollary: “It is a consistently localist project that views each particular community as essentially incommensurable with every other.” Postliberalism leads to “sectarian ­ecclesiocentrism.”

George Lindbeck was one of the major postliberal figures at Yale. He was also one of the most influential ecumenical theologians of the late twentieth century, a role hardly consistent with “sectarian ecclesiocentrism.” Lindbeck recognized that concepts take on meaning within a language system. As a consequence, we should beware of presuming that seemingly divergent or contradictory statements are in fact divergent or contradictory. The 1999 Lutheran–Roman Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification demonstrated a Catholic–Protestant commensurability that few had imagined possible, and the ecumenical document discerned convergence using Lindbeck’s postliberal methods rather than relying on a supposedly more comprehensive and universal frame of reference.

Congdon makes the same false claims about political postliberalism. He is correct when he observes that political postliberalism, like theological postliberalism, rejects “transcultural universalism.” But it is not true that political postliberalism rejects “the apologetic effort to find common ground with cultural ‘outsiders’ and instead [recommends] protecting the walls that distinguish one’s own community from others.” 

Liberals recoil at the mention of Adrian Vermeule, whom Congden ranges among the postliberals. Yet the Harvard Law professor and proponent of Catholic integralism has coauthored Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State (2020) with his decidedly ­non-Catholic and liberal colleague Cass Sunstein. One need not rely on “transcultural universalism” to discern common ground. History was full of cooperation, ­alliances, and common causes long before the advent of Enlightenment universalism and liberal political theories.

In my experience, rather than promoting unity, contemporary liberalism tends toward an insularity that refuses common ground. As Ryszard Legutko observes, the liberal conception of freedom has become paradoxically obligatory, and liberal pluralism functions as a strange kind of monism. Legutko points out that Isaiah Berlin argued for the moral superiority of pluralism. He’s entitled to his opinion. But note: Berlin’s view requires the rejection of very nearly the entire corpus western philosophy, which sees truth as unitary. Only pluralism promotes human flourishing—that’s a monistic claim. In this regard, Berlin was typical, and Congdon follows his lead. He insists that pluralism is “a positive human good.” To say otherwise is to be an “authoritarian.”

Congden surveys postliberal interventions into recent political debates. His summation: “By rejecting individual autonomy, the new New Right was announcing [its] support for using the mechanisms of authoritarian state power to establish the right kind of society.” But postliberals do not reject individual autonomy. They (and I include myself) reject the liberal conceit that individual autonomy is the highest good. And they reject liberalism’s claim to have discovered the final form of a just society. 

In this regard, postliberals are the true pluralists. Freedom and equality are not the sole measures of justice. Non-liberal principles of various kinds can order a just society. Authority and obedience play fitting roles. Hierarchy and rootedness are features of a humane society. In view of the tyrannical tendency of liberalism, restoring these principles often requires an intransigence that says “no” to liberalism’s relentless demand that freedom and equality serve as the supreme measures of justice. In that sense, postliberals may need to be “illiberal.”

Opposing the supremacy of liberalism does not make postliberals into advocates of “authoritarian state ­power.” Rather, they argue that liberalism does not have the final say about the legitimate exercise of state power. As an example, consider the recent legislation in some states to require the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools. Late-model liberals oppose this measure. They are well within their rights to do so. But describing the required posting of the Ten Commandments as an authoritarian use of state power turns on the fallacy of the excluded middle: either liberalism or tyranny.

I return to my observations about the promise of liberal theology. Liberal theology dreamed of reflection unhindered by inherited authorities. As I noted last month, my teachers at Yale came to doubt that promise. Instead of a richer and more relevant ­Christianity, they saw navel-gazing subjectivism and capitulation to passing fashions. Because they cast doubt on the promise of theological liberalism, they were postliberal. 

Political liberalism harbors a similar dream, one in which the weakening of old social forms—hierarchy, marriage, borders, boundaries, traditional morality—will allow for cramped and limited lives to open up. The upshot of this new freedom will be the emergence of fuller and deeper, more tolerant and more accepting ways of being human. My friends, many of whom Congdon discusses in his essay, have come to doubt this promise. They see a demoralized and dispirited society, an irresponsible and self-serving elite, and an intellectual culture that is functionally nihilistic. They see, too, self-proclaimed liberals who police public discourse, quick to hurl charges of authoritarianism. Because we refuse to prop up liberalism’s promise, for all our substantive disagreements, we are rightly deemed postliberal.

One need not proclaim that liberalism has failed in order to be ranged among the postliberals. It is enough to say that liberalism is not enough; that freedom is not enough; that pluralism, which will always be with us, is a challenge not a blessing; that universal truths about the human condition, though real, do not provide sufficient bases for a fully human life. Liberalism prunes but does not plant. It does not speak the language of love and devotion. Men can live in bondage and be human. But they cannot live without love.

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♦ Matthew X. Wilson penned a useful reflection on the appeal of transgressive right-wing figures such as Nick Fuentes (“How to Take Disaffected Young Men ­Seriously,” Public Discourse, November 4, 2025):

Very broadly, I think that disaffected right-wing young men generally share the following deeply rooted sentiments in common: first, the sense that everyone’s identity, community, and culture is being elevated, celebrated, and supported except for theirs; and second, the sense that the left is deliberately working to dismantle traditional conceptions of American identity and culture—to transform America’s cultural and social fabric into something unrecognizable—and that members of American conservatism’s old guard have been either naïve doormats in this insidious project, or worse, willful co-conspirators. 

Disaffected young men see an economic system that doesn’t seem be working for them, with everything from being able to afford to get married and have children to the ability to buy even a modest house appearing far out of reach. They see a culture that has spun completely out of control; while woke illiberalism seems to have slightly receded after peaking in 2020 and 2021, conditions remain abysmal everywhere from elite university campuses to everyday spaces like public school classrooms and corporate workplaces. They observe the feminization of society and the quiet persistence of deeply embedded DEI structures that seem designed to give a leg up to everyone except straight white men. They see that tribalistic identity politics continues to be acceptable, but as usual, only for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Everyone gets to be affirmed, celebrated, and to feel like they belong except you.  

But perhaps most importantly—and this is the case for nearly every disaffected young man I’ve encountered—there is an existential concern that they are losing their communities, their culture, and their country to extreme levels of immigration and the resultant rapid balkanization of society on identity-based lines.  

Wilson goes on to note that condemnations are likely to be ineffective. As one young friend put it to me, “Charges of racism and anti-Semitism are sooo Baby Boomer.” Wilson:

The best way for older conservatives to respond to the rise of someone like Fuentes, I believe, is not to broadly condemn his young listeners as fellow travelers in Nazism and racism and just be done with the matter. Not only does such a strategy risk pushing young men further toward peddlers of those poisonous ideologies; it is also a lazy shirking of the governing class’s responsibility to offer young people concrete ideas and affirmative proposals to renew their hope in America’s future. To win back disaffected right-wing young men, it is imperative to offer them reason to believe that their lives may well be better than those of their parents and ­grandparents—that they will be able to comfortably raise children in a country their grandparents would recognize, and that America’s trajectory is on the upswing, rather than on an unstoppable course toward late-stage illiberal multiculturalism (see: the YooKay) and irreversible ethno-religious balkanization.  

I agree with Wilson that a successful approach must lead with a positive vision for America’s future. It also should include a call to accept responsibility for building that future, which may require making sacrifices, perhaps heroic ones. Nattering on about Jewish conspiracies is a way of shirking that responsibility. 

♦ If you think Wilson’s approach will be easy, read “The Lost Generation” (Compact, December 15, 2025) by Jacob Savage. His earlier essay, “The Vanishing White Male Writer” (Compact, March 21, 2025) ­documented the discrimination against white men in literary ­publishing. “The Lost Generation” broadens the scope of his research to encompass journalism, academia, and the art world. Savage focuses on the past decade, but what he documents was already occurring in ­academia when I was a graduate student in the late 1980s.

The facts are shocking. Here’s an example: “The Disney Writing Program, which prides itself on placing nearly all its fellows as staff writers, has awarded 107 writing fellowships and 17 directing fellowships over the past decade—none to white men.” The same pattern can be found at universities. “Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men (6.7 percent).”  The University of California system exerted even greater discrimination against white men. “UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-­track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent).” The same story in the art world: “The ‘Big 4’ galleries represent 47 millennial artists; just three are white men. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which featured 45 millennial artists, zero were white American men.”

The systematic elimination of white men from culture-making jobs has not been a conspiracy headed by Ibrahim X. Kendi. Rather, as Savage emphasizes, it has been an openly announced, much celebrated project led by Baby Boomer and Gen-X white men. Whether to protect themselves against DEI censure or because they are true believers, people like Jeffrey Goldberg (editor of The Atlantic) have remained loyal to the older white guys who were already in place, while guillotining the careers of younger white men.

Why did we have to wait for a screenwriter ­shafted by DEI to do elementary research about awards, fellowships, and faculty hiring over the last decade? Conservatives donate millions to D.C. think tanks, and nobody at those institutions exposed the damning facts about the discrimination that we all knew was taking place. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the conservative movement has for a long time been cowed or complicit. 

Savage’s article should stand as a warning to any Boomer or Gen-X conservative who thinks he has the moral authority to police Gen Z online extremism. 

♦ “Faith does not begin in continuity, but in rupture,” observes Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo. He is reflecting on Genesis 12:1, God’s command to Abraham: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Cardozo continues:

Authentic belief requires an inner emigration—a bold refusal to remain imprisoned by habit, culture, or collective sentiment. The religious life is not an extension of the past but a revolution against spiritual complacency. God’s call to Avraham is therefore the most radical upheaval imaginable, and yet—and this is the paradox—it demands that one remain deeply oneself. 

♦ Thirty-eight percent of the adult residents of Manhattan are married—a figure about 12 points lower than that for the nation as a whole. Fifty-one percent of Manhattan’s adult males and 48 percent of its adult females have never been married, a rate much higher than the national rate of 37 percent for men and 32 percent for women. Among the 1.6 million residents of the island, 24,312 have served in the U.S. military (1.8 percent, compared to 6.1 percent nationwide). The low level of military service stems in part from the high level of foreign-born residents in Manhattan (30 percent, compared with 14.3 percent nationwide), as well as from Manhattanites’ educational status (since the rate of military service declines with attainment of advanced degrees). Sixty-five percent of Manhattanites have a bachelor’s degree or higher; the national rate is 36 percent. None of these percentages are surprising. As I’ve often noted, Manhattan is an island off the coast of America. 

♦ A few years ago, I penned an op-ed, “Why I Stopped Hiring Ivy League Graduates” (Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2021). To say I’ve stopped altogether is not accurate. As I explained, I’ve simply become more skeptical of elite degrees and less inclined to treat them as a sign of promise in young people. Rose Horowitch recently gave me more reasons. She reports remarkable statistics about the large numbers of students at fancy universities who claim disability designation for ADHD, ­anxiety, and depression (“Accommodation Nation,” The Atlantic, ­January 2026). “At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of students are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent.” It’s 38 percent at Stanford. By comparison, “only 3 to 4 percent of students at public two-year colleges receive accommodations.” That difference speaks volumes. Either rich kids at top universities are more emotionally fragile and psychological vulnerable than median kids at ordinary schools are (a red flag when it comes to hiring), or they lie and dissemble to get disability status to ­secure more testing time (which is not a good trait in an employee). 

♦ I learned with sadness that Norman Podhoretz passed away on December 16. The first time I met him was at a party in New York. He came up to me, jabbed his finger into my chest, and said, “You’re wrong about Jack Kerouac!” (I had recently published a sympathetic article about the Beatnik writer, “The End of the Road,” October 2008). I held my ground, but just barely. Norman was a formidable man! After we finished jousting over Kerouac, I told him that his book, Breaking Ranks, had played an important role in my life. I had stumbled upon his account of his defection from the dominant left-wing consensus in a used bookstore on Amsterdam Avenue north of Columbia University. An undergraduate at the time, I was beginning to doubt liberal pieties. I thanked Norman for helping me break ranks. May his memory be a blessing.

♦ The smartphone’s invasion of daily life and the coming onslaught of artificial intelligence raise a crucial question: What does it mean to be human? The Center for Christian Studies (our partner for the ­annual First Things Lecture in Austin, Texas) is offering a seven-day course to address this question. Center of Christian Studies director Keith Stanglin will lead the class, and our own Carl Trueman will be one of the guest lecturers. The class begins on Monday, January 29 (7:00–8:30 p.m.) and meets on subsequent Mondays through March 9. You can participate in person or on Zoom. The regular class fee is $150 for the seven sessions. Subscribers to the Journal of Christian Studies (published by the Center for Christian Studies) or First Things can sign up for $100. If you subscribe to both, the fee is only $50! 

♦ Joe Schmitz of Macon, Georgia would like to form a Readers of First Things group (ROFTers). If you’d like to a gather monthly to discuss articles in the most recent issue of First Things, you can join by getting in touch: jeauxschmitz@gmail.com. 

♦ As I write, year-end contributions are flowing into the office. I’m very grateful for the generosity of ­thousands of readers. You support ensures the strength and excellence of First Things. 

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Our flight from reality has other and earlier ­sources, however. As Henry Vander Goot details in Creation as an Introduction to Christian Thought, a great deal of modern theology has turned its back on God’s creative work. Theologians concede the task of analyzing reality to modern science, purporting to focus on the greater truth of salvation in Christ. The effect, Vander Goot argues, is acquiescence in a practical atheism beneath the veneer of a “personal relationship with Jesus.”

Vander Goot’s nemesis is Karl Barth. Vander Goot argues that the great Swiss theologian overdetermined his thought in reaction to National Socialism. By Barth’s reckoning, German Christians were susceptible to blood and soil ideology, because they had already been seduced by “natural theology.” The notion of a created nomos paves the way for the perversion of a Volksnomos. Barth’s solution was to absorb creation into salvation history. From the very beginning, God was “saving” reality from the dark void of “nothingness.” In Vander Goot’s reading of Barth, redemption in Christ becomes the be-all and end-all of Christian revelation. In practical terms, this “Christomonism” means that theology does not contend with secular academic culture’s statements about everything else, ceding the terrain. Again, a practical atheism reigns.

As Vander Goot recognizes, there were deeper forces at work in twentieth-century theology than the crisis of National Socialism. At the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant claimed to solve the difficulties in Enlightenment theories of knowledge, which swung uneasily between dogmatic rationalism and despairing skepticism. Kant shifted the quest for certainty away from our perception of things, urging us to place our trust in the ways in which we analyze and synthesize our mental images of things. Put differently, according to Kant, we don’t know things “objectively.” To use his terminology, we can’t know the “thing-in-itself.” Rather, we know things rationally, which is to say in accord with reason’s a priori patterns, which impute cause and effect and other relations.

 Kant developed an elaborate technical vocabulary to describe these forms of understanding, but we need not be detained by the details. More important is the overall effect. After Kant, philosophical emphasis fell on how we think rather than on what the world is like. Very quickly, philosophers questioned Kant’s presumption that reason’s pre-set patterns are universal. Having articulated the project of modern idealism (the mind frames reality), Kant opened the way for the many modern reflections on how our thinking is shaped by historical, social, and psychological factors. 

Karl Barth’s theology had tremendous influence in the middle decades of the twentieth century. He ­defended the “realism” of God’s revelation in Christ, which was an exciting break from liberal theology. But he did so without challenging Kant’s anti-realism, his strictures against knowledge of things-in-themselves. This accommodation of modernity was as much a source of Barth’s influence as his theological bravado.

Vander Goot offers an especially astute assessment of Jürgen Moltmann, who followed in Barth’s footsteps. Vander Goot wryly notes that “the future” is the topic of Moltmann’s book, The Future of Creation—not creation as we experience it here and now. In this conception of Christianity, the power of reality rests in the future, the coming realization of Christ’s lordship over all things. Theology is thus excused from the task of describing (and defending) the order and distinction of things established “in the beginning” by God’s creative Word. Again, the upshot may be lots of theological talk about Christ, but everything else falls under the authority of science. Practical atheism.

Vander Goot does not wish to gin up a revival of Aristotelian metaphysics. He endorses an aspect of Kant’s skepticism about knowledge of things-in-themselves, noting that we lack firm bases on which to determine which metaphysical schemes are correct and which are misguided. But we are not unmanned. Following ­Calvin (and the Dutch Reformed tradition), Vander Goot holds that Scripture provides Christians with a divinely authorized construction of reality, as it were, one that avoids metaphysical conundrums and vindicates things as they appear.

The inspired text authorizes us to trust our common-­sense perceptions. The matter-of-fact tenor of the creation account in Genesis licenses us to reason about the nature of things without worrying about philosophical foundations. Moreover, the first chapter of Genesis does not encourage speculative efforts to get underneath or above what we experience. Vander Goot quotes Calvin to good effect: “It must be remembered that Moses does not speak with philosophical acuteness on occult mysteries, but related those things which are everywhere observed, even by the uncultivated, and which are in common use.” Moses was the first ­common-sense realist.

St. John Paul II often spoke of the anthropological crisis of modernity, our confusion about what it means to be human. He regularly cited a passage from the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, which teaches that we discover the truth of humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. I don’t think Vander Goot would disagree. But he recognizes that modernity has fomented a metaphysical crisis, a despairing sense that we cannot know the stable, enduring place in which we live out our lives. Modern science offers little consolation, because most presume that its tacit metaphysics is a mute materialism, epitomized by Richard Dawkins’s metaphor of a blind watchmaker.

Vander Goot warns against too much talk of the ­doctrine of creation. By his reckoning, Scripture authorizes us simply to talk about things, all things, as Christians formed by the self-same Scripture. He ­recommends what the Church Fathers called Christian philosophy, by which they did not mean an academic discipline, but the wisdom that arises when the eyes of faith are trained on all things—and report what they perceive.

I would add liturgical worship to Scripture as the divinely authorized means by which our perceptions of reality are trained and sharpened. And I’m inclined to defend the precision found in the Catholic tradition of natural law, which Vander Goot criticizes. But we should take to heart the larger point of Creation as an Introduction to Christian Thought. Vander Goot often returns to an epigram: “Life is religion.” God asks us to live in accord with his creative will, here and now. This vocation will not get us to heaven. But it is religious nonetheless, because it cleaves to the order and purpose God has ordained “in the beginning.” That God has ­done more, that he offers us fellowship, despite our sin and defilement, is another matter, more important, to be sure, but distinct. And this offer does not efface or supersede the way things are. As St. Thomas teaches, grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.

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It is popularly held that religion is a matter of individual and collective feeling and that all historical religions are merely culturally dependent expressions of these feelings. In this vein, no religion is deemed to have a monopoly on truth. But the Church positions itself as the authority appointed by God precisely because it understands itself as the divinely mandated teacher of the revelation given once and for all in Christ and, therefore, as the sacrament of salvation in him. 

In his final major work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, the new Doctor of the Church John Henry Newman gave Catholic hermeneutics a modern form. Today, however, the error of double truth often reappears under the guise of a “paradigm shift.” While such shifts may be appropriate for theory formation in the natural sciences, where hypotheses are provisional, their application to theology is disastrous, as theology is grounded in the definitive fullness of truth and grace revealed in Christ. Modern philosophies such as those of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which make truth dependent on perspective or on its disclosure within a particular historical epoch, render truth time-bound. Christ, by contrast, is the truth in person, revealed in the fullness of time. In him, all epochs of salvation, ecclesiastical life, and doctrinal development are united within the Church’s consciousness of faith across past, present, and future. By assuming human nature, the Son of God brings every believer and the whole Church into direct communion with the one true God, who in the unity of his divinity and humanity encompasses all ages.

One destructive consequence of the doctrine of double truth is the demand that pastoral care take precedence over the revealed truths of faith and morality, such that what is dogmatically true can be pastorally false, and vice versa. For example, marriage between a man and a woman is recognized to be grounded in the Logos of the Creator and Redeemer, in whom all things came into being. Yet, for supposed pastoral reasons (namely, the subjective well-being of individuals), homosexual couples may be led into the illusion that their objectively sinful relationship is nevertheless blessed by God. 

To provide another example: On the one hand, the Church professed in Vatican II the hierarchical and sacramental constitution of the Church (Lumen Gentium). On the other hand, the Synod of Bishops is at times treated as a forum of participants from all and any areas of the Church, whose opinions are then, contrary to genuine episcopal collegiality, endowed by the pope with the authority of the ordinary magisterium. Yet the ordinary magisterium properly refers to the regular proclamation of revealed truths by the bishops in communion with the pope (for example, preaching the Incarnation of the Son of God at Christmas), not to the promotion of their private political views. Nor can the Church in Germany call itself Catholic while the Synodal Council, a humanly constituted decision-making body, undermines the teaching authority and jurisdiction of the bishops under divine law (iuris divini) and effectively allows the episcopal office to dissolve within an Anglican-style parliamentary structure.

One cannot separate Christ as teacher of truth from Christ as good shepherd in a neo-Nestorian manner, for he is one and the same divine person who both teaches divine truth and grants his disciples the divine life of grace, conversion, and renewal in the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, we must overcome the dualistic opposition between dogma and pastoral care, between truth and life. We must also guard our thinking and judgment against ideological categories that divide the one and undivided body of Christ, the Church, into traditionalists and progressives, conservatives and liberals.

Apostolic tradition recognizes progress under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the Church’s understanding of revelation, especially through the preaching of those who, in succession to the apostolic office, have received the sure charism of truth. Only in the one and same Christ, however, is the full depth of truth about God and the salvation of humanity revealed, since he is “both the mediator and the fullness of all revelation” (Dei Verbum).

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In recent times, this hymn tradition of wonder has turned the amazing statement into a principle: God likes “small things.” “God, immortal, invisible, / Love indestructible, / In frailty appears,” writes the popular British Christian musician Graham Kendrick. There is a subtle shift in conception here. Frailty is an attribute, not a person. And the attribute, then, in typical modern fashion, turns into a principle: Littleness—babies and stables—is like the law of gravity: It’s how God works. Indeed, we often hear that God not only works with “small things” but prefers them. God speaks in “the still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12), not just to Elijah, but to all of us and all the time, as so many sermons today tell us. The Universal Small Voice, the Universal Baby.

This is certainly a comforting notion. Most of us are basically nonentities on the stage of human history. It’s a condition of smallness that comes with being human: “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:4) Contemporary preachers quite like this principle on several counts. First, it’s an encouragement to the unexceptional or unsuccessful (most of us). God likes you just the way you are. Second, it encourages religious, moral, or political action. You may not be much, but like Gideon or the mustard seed, big things can come from small beginnings. Take heart and get involved! And third, the principle of divine preference for the small underwrites a certain kind of political action, one that labors on behalf of the poor and marginalized, the “small” in worldly economic terms. Now we know how to order our votes, policies, and protests! 

In the 1970s, “small is beautiful” represented claims about what or how social relations work best. I am myself persuaded by many of these functionalist appreciations of the small. But today’s apotheosis of the small does not concern quotidian judgments about how to organize society on a human scale. It’s about cosmic moral values. Call it “nanotheology.” The term has been used around the edges of religious discussions on nanotechnology. But I think “nanotheology” has a better use, one that signifies a kind of ethical metaphysics in which God orders the whole of reality in a way that values the little over the big. By whatever name, it is a pervasive theology in our time.

The notion that there is a reciprocal patterning between the Baby Jesus and the shape of the world has its origin deep in the recesses of ancient Greek philosophy and pre-modern Christian thought. Drawing on ideas from Plato on the correspondences between the human soul and true reality (found in the Timaeus), Stoics later developed the idea that human beings were “microcosms” of Nature, a miniature pattern of natural processes. That idea captured the Christian imagination, buttressed by scriptural notions of human beings created “in the image of God.” Gregory of Nyssa called man “a small world within the great,” containing within himself all the parts of creation, material, rational, and spiritual. And Maximus the Confessor outlined the specific microcosmic vocation of humanity, fulfilled in Christ as the true Microcosm. All this was intricately elaborated by medieval and Renaissance natural philosophy and alchemy.

I find the microcosm–macrocosm paradigm helpful, even invigorating in its impulse to explore the world’s astounding coherence in God’s creative hands. But it is also potentially misleading when it becomes a grammar, let alone an ethical code for human life: The Baby-in-the-Manger Grand Principle is a human invention. Christmas celebrates this baby (lowercase “b”) in this manger, just one, whose personal name is Jesus. And ­only he. No other baby, no other manger, no other place. Not “smallness” as a category, but that particular “young child” in this particular “house” (one could say, “with a given address”) into which three men “enter,” who “see” the child with “Mary his mother” (Matt. 2:11). 

This is not a microcosm, the cosmos writ small, but instead what one might call “goddity,” expressed in the quip of the British journalist William Norman Ewer from the early 1920s: “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” That “given address” raises an obvious question. Why would God be so peculiarly particular in a universe of infinite possibilities? How can this singular infant move history forward when justice can only function well according to comprehensive and impartial (which is to say impersonal) laws? Yet God does one thing, chooses one thing, orders one thing. Many other things, too! But they are not all the same. Not only that, but some differences, or even one difference, one thing (small though it seems), bears the weight of all the others, big, small, and medium. Here is God—just here, in this one and only Israel, this one and only Jesus, singled out from all other peoples, births, and infants. How odd!

The reality of the true God (versus a god of principles) is not about having Jesus confirm or valorize one’s insignificance. Hence the great and to some extent novel thirteenth-century Franciscan focus on the Nativity and its rustic setting—crèches and the rest—was not aimed at generating the order’s principles of humility and poverty. Rather, it put before us God’s choice for the “poor one,” Jesus. The motive for the Christian ideal of poverty was not about embodying a general divine principle in favor of the small. The embrace of poverty comes simply from following this particular God-Man Jesus of Nazareth, the “elect.” Our goddity, then, is also about following just this Jesus. “Baby Jesus” is Jesus as a baby, not the Baby, who happens to be presented as Jesus.

The difference is profound. Goddity evokes oddness rather than following logic. To be odd is literally “not to fit”—to stand apart from a pattern or reasonable presumptions about cause and effect. The way of the Cross, the call to the lowest seat, the command to forgive enemies and to turn the other cheek do not make sense. They cannot be deduced from one man Jesus, showing how he “fits” into the flow of the universe. They could not be derived from the grand schema of Nature, nor scanned in the panoply of the heavens. Natural theology may well seek to discern some coherence between Golgotha and the empty tomb. After all, the odd choice of God to become a human infant is not arbitrary in any divine fashion: It is who God is. And thus the world that God has made must somehow reflect the same “who.” But the order here is paramount: The world follows the oddity of Jesus, not the other way around. To embrace Smallness as a principle is not to follow, but to leave Jesus behind, to trade the person for a concept. By contrast, if there is a pattern to the world, it is itself always “odd,” the fact of “just this person.”

That is why it is impossible to apply Jesus’s smallness to the world—to the world of politics and economics and architecture and nanotechnology. Rather, the world is applied, as it were, to the Jewish infant of Bethlehem, to his and his parents’ specific prayers and devotions in the Temple of Israel, to his hidden life in Nazareth in a home of workers and family with their savory or banal meals passing down the throat on Shabbat or otherwise, to a journey into the desert for baptism and temptation, to his particular reading of the Scriptures of Israel, to his wandering and teaching in Galilee, to the calling of a few named disciples, each with their own history, and to his explicit end “under Pontius Pilate” and to the counting of three days to his rising—God’s odd choice for his own life is just where the world is going. It is a wrenching conformance. We do not apply Jesus to the world, but the world to him.

“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak . . . low and despised” (1 Cor. 1:27–28). How would we know such a thing as this? Only because God did indeed choose to be born in Bethlehem, and to be despised and rejected (Isa. 53:3). And yet all the while to be God, the maker of all things, who “incomprehensibly made man.” Only because we have heard that God-Man’s voice, “Come, follow me!” (Matt. 19:21), and in doing so, we discover a world where everything, large and small alike, is wondrously odd and divinely touched. Even the hairs on our head (Luke 12:7).

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Leo should be warmly commended, then, for trying to find good fruit in these conciliar decrees, and to sketch more fully what Congar desired: a clear statement on the identity and mission of the priest today. 

The pope highlights several crucial themes found in the decrees: Ordained ministry is a gratuitous gift from God; fidelity to one’s vocation is strengthened by staying close to the Master; living a faithful life is “a journey of daily conversion”; and spiritual formation is a life-long process. Priests are called “to follow Christ every day,” and to develop a “rich and solid spiritual life,” placing all their trust in the Lord.  

The pope also puts a strong accent on priestly fraternity and communion even while stating, wisely, that such fraternity “can never be established by the standardization of individuals and the charisms or talents that the Lord has granted to each one.” Leo’s comment reminded me of Tocqueville’s remark in Democracy in America: Besides the legitimate passion for equality among persons, there exists a “depraved” notion as well, which seeks to drag all men down to the same level. By accenting uniqueness, Leo sagely proscribes this warped notion of fraternity.  

The apostolic letter is rich in its analyses. I offer here some related, theological points. 

There is much in Leo’s letter on the priest as a man of service (the word appears frequently), but little on the priest as teacher. Generous service, of course, is at the heart of ordained ministry. Yet Presbyterorum Ordinis also insists that priests must be “strenuous assertors of the truth, lest the faithful be carried about by every wind of doctrine.” And the dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (which is central to any reflection on priesthood), underscores the priest’s teaching role when it states that the “ministerial priest, by the sacred power he enjoys, forms and rules [efformat ac regit] the priestly people.” Of course, the primary way priests mold God’s people is by teaching the truth of the gospel. The critical role of the priest as teacher would be a welcome addition to this document.

Given our times, it comes as no surprise that Leo strikes an egalitarian note, insisting that the service of priests takes place “within the equal dignity and fraternity of all the baptized.” Of course, with all the Christian faithful, priests are, first and foremost, disciples of Jesus Christ, called to live their baptismal vocation. But just here, it might have been beneficial to note, with Vatican II, that while all the faithful participate in the priesthood of Jesus, the ministerial priesthood differs from the baptismal “in essence and not only in degree.” This phrase, originally used by Pius XII in 1954, is decisive since it makes clear that while his ministry is always oriented toward the faithful, the priest at the altar, offering the one sacrifice, stands uniquely in the person of Jesus Christ. Asserting this singular status is not priestly “domination” nor clerical “exaltation” over others—stances that Leo rightly denounces. Such uniqueness is, rather, a crucial and defining element of priestly identity.     

Leo also refers to the sentence in Presbyterorum Ordinis that reads, “Therefore, on account of this communion in the same priesthood and ministry, bishops should regard priests as their brothers and friends.” As an American, Leo is no doubt aware of the incisive 2022 National Study of Catholic Priests that revealed a yawning chasm between priests and bishops in the United States, largely because of the draconian implementation of the Dallas Charter. Although this letter was not the place to address it, one hopes the pope has directed the American bishops to attend to two tasks: to root out actual abuse wherever it occurs and to ensure that just processes exist for priests who have been accused on the basis of little or no evidence. Ensuring that accused priests are treated justly, with due process, will stimulate the priestly vocations that Leo, at the conclusion of his letter, so vigorously encourages.  

One of the wisest counsels of Optatam Totius is this: “No difficulty of the priestly life is to be concealed from seminarians.” When I was teaching, I often referred to this conciliar passage before discussing the Dallas Charter and its Essential Norms. It was and remains my conviction that seminarians need to understand the obstacles presented by the Charter’s implementation—not for the sake of inculcating fear—but so they can make an informed and free decision to continue toward the priesthood. I never wanted a man to tell me, years after ordination, that he was ignorant of the severe penalties meted out to a priest merely accused of abuse.  

Leo’s apostolic letter offers solid teaching and wise reflection on many topics. I hope at some point he issues a full-bodied, deeply theological encyclical on the priesthood. Such a document, encompassing the entire history and tradition of the Church, would greatly benefit this currently embattled office.

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As we traveled into Palestinian territory to visit Bethlehem, we stopped at the West Bank barrier to contemplate its manifold graffiti. Among crude representations of Donald Trump, declarations of “Free Palestine,” and paintings of young children encountering soldiers, one phrase graffitied in all-caps upon the barrier particularly caught my attention: “Rachel is weeping.” The phrase is taken from the prophecy of Jeremiah and famously quoted in relation to Herod’s murder of the innocents in Matthew’s Gospel: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more” (2:18).

Rachel, the graffiti artist suggests, weeps still. Her weeping still transcends time and holds the figural significance given it by Matthew. Perhaps she weeps for her own murdered people. But more likely, at least by virtue of the graffiti being on the Palestinian side of the barrier, the graffiti artist contends that Rachel weeps for all murdered innocents, whether Palestinian or Israeli.

Whatever the case, Rachel’s mournfulness followed me into Bethlehem that gray January day. What’s more, Bethlehem, like Nazareth, the Jordan River, and many of the other famed sites we visited, did not possess the quaint and holy quality I hoped it would. I doubt Bethlehem felt quaint and holy to the Holy Family as they sought a place to stay or to the Magi as they, some time later, sought the mysterious child-king. Perhaps they felt, as I did, rather overwhelmed by the place. For the noises of traffic and of the Muslim call to prayer resounded through the streets, Christmas decorations blinked, souvenir shops beckoned from every corner, and people—whether tourists like ourselves or Palestinians in hijabs or keffiyehs—swarmed everywhere. 

As we made our way in the darkening evening through the crowded Manger Square and even more crowded Church of the Nativity, my own mind, too, was crowded with doubt and uneasiness. Upon entering the church through its low door—the “door of humility”—and descending further into the Grotto of the Nativity, I felt that typical Protestant distaste at the finery I saw, and I felt a surge, too, of that rationalistic skepticism common to Protestants and all moderns: Is tradition trustworthy in this matter? 

The place has been honored by Christians since the second century as Christ’s birthplace. It is therefore the oldest site of continuous Christian worship in the world—over a thousand years older than my own church tradition and the skepticism that too often accompanies it. Helena, the mother of Constantine, likely encouraged her son to commission the church after her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Supervised by Bishop Makarios of Jerusalem under Constantine’s orders, construction began in A.D. 326, around a year after the Council of Nicaea. Today it represents a sort of common ground between the Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian Christians, and others who worship there. 

In the grotto, Christ’s birthplace is covered in marble and marked with a fourteen-point silver star engraved with the words “Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est” (“Here Jesus Christ was born to the Virgin Mary”). The nearby manger is likewise covered in marble and decorated with various candles, lamps, and hangings. 

I did not appreciate the marvelous simplicity of that little word “hic”: Here Jesus Christ was born. At the time, I reckoned that whatever the place might have been had long since been buried under stone and jewels and artwork. As classicist and biblical scholar E. M. Blaiklock put it in his book Eight Days in Israel, Christ’s birthplace seemed to me to be “hung and cluttered with all the tinsel of man’s devotions.” And my own heart was cluttered with skepticism and fatigue. 

But now, as I look back upon that Epiphany Sunday, I do so with the awe that I ought to have felt in the grotto. 

For little did I appreciate the rarity of the opportunity to visit the tension-riddled Holy Land, which in a few months after our visit would descend into war following the October 7 massacre. Little did I realize the great significance of standing before Christ’s birthplace as tourists from my own country and many others milled about me, talking in hushed tones of languages I hardly recognized, yearning for their chance to stand before the star or manger. Little did I comprehend that Providence had allowed us Gentiles to arrive at Christ’s birthplace on the same Sunday that the church celebrates Christ’s first Gentile worshippers, the Magi. And little did I connect the Magi’s generosity of great finery—gold, frankincense, and myrrh—with the same worshipful spirit that has encouraged Christians throughout the centuries to decorate and honor that most honorable place of Christ’s birth. 

I did not have the humility to do so. 

My experience of Epiphany in Bethlehem did not impart any large-scale lessons or grand mysteries to me, but my memory of it has, over time, come to manifest to my mind the meaning of Epiphany. I see, now, that centuries later the nations are still coming to him and to the place of his birth. And they are kneeling before him, with that humility that I, too, am still learning. 

In Anglican priest-poet Malcolm Guite’s sonnet on Epiphany, he writes of our connection with the Magi:

But when these three arrive they bring us with them,
Gentiles like us, their wisdom might be ours . . .
They did not know his name but still they sought him,
They came from otherwhere but still they found;
In temples they found those who sold and bought him,
But in the filthy stable, hallowed ground.
Their courage gives our questing hearts a voice
To seek, to find, to worship, to rejoice.

The revelation of Christ to the Magi represents, too, his revelation to us. With them, we are invited to seek, to kneel, and to rejoice. The Herods of the world still reign: The heaviness imparted by the West Bank barrier and its reminder of Rachel’s weeping did not disappear from my heart as I stopped in the Grotto of the Nativity, nor has it disappeared as I have reflected on that day. The innocents of the world are still murdered, mutilated, bombed. But in the grotto shines that star that has already put to shame and will finally overpower every Herod and every evil: God in his mercy is beckoning worshippers to his “hallowed ground,” both in Bethlehem and to the ends of the earth.

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