One of my longstanding concerns has been the need for an approach to political pluralism in which people of faith are welcome to bring their convictions about morality, human dignity, and the nature of a just society to relevant discussions in the public square, to make their arguments in a publicly accessible way, and to utilize the tools of political process to further the cause of justice and mercy.

Matt Tuininga has posted an interesting reply to my earlier “The Culture War Is Here, Whether We Like It or Not” article here on the Aquila Report.  He has little good to say about it, claiming that I have misconstrued his own position, misrepresented 2K theory in general, and that I advocate a sort of “culture-war” stance that I myself find objectionable and problematic.  While exchanges such as this can be tedious, several targeted comments are in order to illumine larger issues.

First, Tuininga claims that I misinterpreted his earlier article, that his comparison of Reformed thinkers and Islam had to do with “militant Calvinists who advocated disobedience to and even rebellion against any government that does not promote the Reformed faith” and not with transformationalists in general.  I accept at face value and welcome Tuininga’s clarification here, and I have no doubt that he is sincere.  But Tuininga’s protestations notwithstanding, he describes this “militant Calvinist” position in terms that, ironically, would seem to include nearly all Reformed transformationalists (and most Americans as well).  Let’s look at this more closely.

In his earlier piece, Tuininga seems to identify this “militant Calvinist” position primarily with two elements—a theonomic effort to impose Old Testament civil law on society, and a stance that affirms the propriety of civil rebellion for religiously funded reasons under certain circumstances.

The first is easily dealt with—despite repeated recent efforts by some on the progressive left to conjure up, in witch-of-Endor fashion, the ghost of Rousas John Rushdoony as a threat to the commonwealth, as far as I can tell the theonomistic impulse has run out of gas in this country.  Something similar to the English Puritan pattern seems to have taken place—having despaired of reforming the broader society they have turned their attention to the reform of family and parish, hence the rise of the Federal Vision and related post-theonomic impulses.

The second element is more substantial and more problematic for Tuininga.  How would society respond, he asks, if “Calvinists today were advocating theories of resistance and revolution, or if they were suggesting that the government of Barack Obama is illegitimate”?  The problem here is that the right of rebellion against tyranny is hardwired not only into the Calvinist tradition but also into the American version of modern democracy.

Despite what Tuininga says, John Calvin had a theory of civil resistance, though he expressed it inconsistently and it was carefully circumscribed by his doctrine of the “lesser magistrate” (see Institutes IV.20.30-31), and so the much more militant stance of Calvin’s student John Knox regarding civil resistance did not emerge completely out of the blue.  Moreover, the Declaration of Independence was an expression of civil rebellion on the grounds that rights given to human beings “by their Creator” were being violated.  So, Tuininga describes this “militant Calvinist” position in terms that include nearly everybody, an impression that is strengthened by the way he then goes on to suggest that even those who reject this allegedly Islamesque “militant Calvinism” cannot do so consistently without 2K.

Second, Tuininga argues at length that I have failed to do justice to the range of views and nuance present in 2K circles, and that I have engaged in “a few hit-and-run attacks.”  But given the conventional standards expected of a brief and somewhat impressionistic Internet essay, I stand by what I said—both with regard to the intellectual history and current deployment of 2K.  I continue to believe that there is manifest and significant distance between Calvin and much contemporary 2K theory.  There are reasons, after all, why Calvin is repeatedly portrayed by some as a theocrat and why we tend to associate 2K more with the Lutheran tradition.  Furthermore, I continue to sense that, especially when the 2K position is combined with an exaggerated conception of the spirituality of the church, it serves to silence Christians and to provide a “theological fig leaf for . . . evangelical culture-war fatigue.”

Finally, Tuininga imputes to me, without any textual basis, a view of culture war that I do not share.  In other words, he has set up a straw man and then set out to beat it about the head.  For example, he attributes to me a pugnacious “culture-war” stance of “divide and conquer,” to which he conveniently juxtaposes his own emphasis on “faithful witness and loving persuasion.”  Of course, the term “culture war” is a metaphor that has considerable baggage.  In the essay to which Tuininga objects I was using the term, not in the bellicose Fallwellian sense, but in the more academic sense of cultural conflict over matters foundational to the ordering and governance of society.  That is, I was employing it in much the same way as James Davison Hunter in his splendid Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (Basic Books, 1991).   Of course, there is a place for “faithful witness and loving persuasion.”  There is also a place for political activism and wisdom as long as Christians are careful to maintain their integrity as Christians and seek to avoid being co-opted.  Here I quite agree with Tuininga’s observation that “the rhetoric of the gospel and of Christianity is easily hijacked by people and movements whose agenda is most certainly not that of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

In case anyone missed it, the larger point of my article was that the culture war (or better, cultural conflict) has entered a new stage, and this is worth expanding on here.  As Irving Kristol famously observed, “The culture war is over, and we lost.”  The initial impulse of often religiously based culturally conservative social action in the 1980s accomplished some good, but it did not stem the tide of cultural decline, the “slouching towards Gomorrah” of which Robert Bork so eloquently wrote.  Moreover, the vast expansion of the federal government in recent years (and not just under the Obama administration) has changed the playing field and the dynamic of cultural conflict.  Christians are facing new challenges, especially threats to religious liberty and the systematic exclusion of faith-based perspectives from the public square, that would have been unthinkable even a few decades ago.  With new problems and new terrain come new options for engagement, but silence and inaction, I would contend, are not among them.

All that being said, I suspect that there is a good deal of agreement between Tuininga and myself.  We both reject the theonomic, theocratic option and we both apparently believe that Christians have a role to play as Christians in the political sphere.  In addition, I appreciate some of the criticisms Tuininga himself has expressed regarding more problematic versions of 2K.  We obviously differ, however, as to how useful the 2K theme is when applied to the larger political question.  One of my longstanding concerns has been the need for an approach to political pluralism in which people of faith are welcome to bring their convictions about morality, human dignity, and the nature of a just society to relevant discussions in the public square, to make their arguments in a publicly accessible way, and to utilize the tools of political process to further the cause of justice and mercy.  As we both doubtless realize, the current prevailing model tends to exclude such and instead privileges secular perspectives that are, at heart, just as religious as the convictions that we share.

William B. Evans is the Younts Prof. of Bible and Religion at Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina, where he teaches courses in theology, American religion, and religion and culture.  He holds degrees from Taylor University, Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and Vanderbilt University.