Tag: Carl Schmitt

Stanley Hauerwas and the MAGA New Right: Defining and Combating Evil

Stanley Hauerwas, along with the Yale post-liberals, pioneered a radical critique of liberalism, tied as it is to capitalism, individualism, and the nation state. Hauerwas defines liberalism as a set of beliefs built on the primacy of individual autonomy, privacy, rights, and self-interest rather than a shared substantive vision of the good. At one time Christians knew themselves to be “participants in a grand drama of God’s salvation of all creation” but “beliefs” cannot participate in drama. Liberalism robbed Christians of the primacy of a narrative reality.[1] The central point of Hauerwas’s critique is not liberalism or anti-liberalism, but it was a call to the church to be the church. The church, in Hauerwas’s estimate, is the singular community where one encounters truthfulness, or an embodied way of life (a narrative reality), in which the truth about reality emerges. It specifically involves the church community, because living the truth requires formation in principles, such as nonviolence and peace, which are not and cannot be fostered outside of the story of Christ and the church nurtured on this narrative.

The Anti-Liberalism of the MAGA New Right

Among those, such as political science professor Patrick Deneen, who have taken up Hauerwas’s anti-liberalism, there has been a profound misunderstanding.  Deneen has focused on the failure of liberalism (in his breakout work, Why Liberalism Failed) and the need to replace it as captured in Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. The second book shifts to a prescriptive and state-oriented blueprint arguing that anti-liberal forces must actively seek a “regime change” to wrestle control of existing political, legal, and economic institutions from the ruling class. In this shift toward state apparatuses, he has abandoned the central point of Hauerwas’s critique. Those like Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and J. D. Vance, who see Trump as the hammer with which to install an anti-liberal authoritarian government, have missed not only Hauerwas’s point but the point of the cross. They too are seeking to defeat evil, but rather than equate evil with what Christ defeated at the cross, these thinkers equate evil with modern ideas, the rejection of an absolute moral order and traditional values, as in a neo-Marxist wokeism. In the words of Trump, the evil they are aimed at is the left: “They are sick, radical left people.” In their estimate, there must be a return to America’s founding principles so as to once again become a Christian nation, even if this requires regime change and a redefining of rule of law. As Deneen advocates, this means employing evil means for good ends, or in his phrase “using Machiavellian means for Aristotelian ends,” by which he primarily means reorganizing America’s social order and “replacing the elites.”[2]

According to Laura Field, “When the thinkers of MAGA New Right suggest that only conservatives — or as some put it, heritage Americans — have access to America’s founding principles or that America is a Christian nation, they are providing a justification for authoritarian actions on the part of the government.”[3]  Christian salvation, Christian ethics, or the teaching of Christ, become secondary in this project in which the religion is weaponized as an anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, and anti-woke, instrument. For example, Yoram Hazony an Israeli political theorist and a leading advocate for national conservatism, “argues that the nation-state, as a homogeneous cultural entity, sets the true foundation of good politics. Despite being an Orthodox Jew, he has promoted Christian dominance in the United States, arguing that ‘the only thing that is strong enough to stop woke neo-Marxism, the religion of woke neo-Marxism, is the religion of biblical Christianity.’”[4] The point is to use whatever cudgel is necessary to defeat the left, and Christianity is another tool in the primary goal of defeating liberalism.

As James Chappel writes, “The ubiquity of funeral rites for liberalism can distract attention from those few who are genuinely committed to its murder. There are intellectuals and politicians out there who are seeking to uproot liberalism, root and branch.” [5]  He cites Deneen, and Rod Dreher, but is focused particularly on Vermeule, the Harvard legal scholar, who is advocating Catholic integralism, or the subordination of the state to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. “It would certainly ban abortion and pornography, and it would likely mandate Catholic education in schools. It is hard to see what place would be made for homosexuals or religious minorities in such a state. What he has said does not bode well for religious tolerance: he has argued that atheists should not be allowed to hold office, and that Catholic immigrants be given priority over Muslims, Protestants, and Jews.” [6] In his envisioned technocratic rule of elites, centralized rule will have to undermine the rule of courts and the judiciary. Vermeule’s first book, Judging Under Uncertainty (2006), calls for judges to step back and let expert authorities make complex decisions, and Law’s Abnegation (2016), is about the empirical success achieved so far. “Judges have no business, Vermeule thinks, meddling with technical or regulatory matters, and thus they seldom do. So whatever fantasy we might spin about living in a republic of laws, in reality we are living in a republic of administrators.” [7]  This defeat of the rule of law opens the door for the executive branch, the president, to take control.

More than Hauerwas’s anti-liberalism (they would claim both him and Wendell Berry), these theorists are fostered by the Claremont Institute, building upon the theory of Leo Strauss, and the legal theorist, Carl Schmitt (as I have described here). The legal theory enabling Adolf Hitler, according to Damon Linker, has “risen to greater prominence now than at any time since the 1930s.” [8] Schmitt viewed liberalism as containing a fatal weakness in refusing to recognize the nature of human evil (original sin) or its political expression in sorting out the world according to friends and enemies. Liberalism is too weak to draw the necessary line identifying enemies. There must be a decider in chief, as legislatures are fraught with indecision and internal factions, and the rule of law (determinations of friends and enemies) is through the singular leader who can enact the law. “That leaves the executive as the best option for decisive action. It was this line of reasoning that led Schmitt to throw his support behind Adolf Hitler’s efforts in 1933 to transform himself into Germany’s sovereign decider.”[9] The leader as the embodiment of the law, is the law, and as such serves as something of a Christ-like figure.

The Abandonment of the Cross

Taking charge, gaining control, saving the nation, the Christian definition of evil, is specific to what killed Christ and what Christ defeated in his death and resurrection. Evil is defeated through the work of Christ, and not a human politic or social organization attempting to extend that work. The politics of Jesus institutes its own social structure in the church where he is proclaimed as Lord, and this does not pertain to either liberalism or opposition to liberalism. But Deneen and company miss that Christian salvation is precisely concerned to defeat the state monopoly on the power of life, one which they would institute, through its control of death and destruction. In Hauerwas’s reading, Christ has abolished war and violence and political strife, and along with it the liturgy of the state, which imagines through government, through the president, through the legal order, through the death of the victims of state, freedom is gained.[10]  This is the lie Christ confronted in his life and in his trial and death. With the resurrection, the state power of death and coercion is defeated.

This new MAGA Right, not only miss Hauerwas’ point, but the point of Christianity, which is not to coerce through imposition of Christian doctrine (the point of this group, who would install ruling elites), but to participate in Christian freedom inaugurated in the cross. This freedom is not that of the Enlightenment but neither is it the imposed liberation, focused on a human agenda of gaining control over liberal democrats. In fact, these anti-liberals need to return to Hauerwas critique of liberalism, as it could serve as well as a critique of their aim to gain control, exercise their will, and implement their justice. It is still self-creation, and will to power, but under the auspices of religion. As Chappel notes, their plan “is to be achieved not through a coup but by the installation of a cadre of anti-liberal conservatives into positions of power in the administration. From those perches, they would leverage state power to create a new social order.” [11] Through social engineering they would impose what they perceive to be the Christian ethic, but in their method, they betray the faith they would promote. Peace, non-violence, taking up the cross, cannot be violently imposed. If liberalism seems to promote an ethically neutral state, the MAGA Right religionists have a definitive ethic, but it has little to do with the ethics of Jesus. As Fields concludes, “Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance, the kingpins of the MAGA New Right, embody a different form of politics. With particular ideas and a MAGA intellectual elite behind them, they are seeking to dominate a nation and impose their politics on those who don’t share his vision.”[12]

There is a definitive brand of religion and intellectualism behind the chaos of Trump, but those focused on Trump, should not miss that the project is to displace liberal democracy, as if this is the evil Christ defeated. Other than the critique of liberalism, and even this is misguided in presuming the problem is inherent to a form of government, this has nothing to do with Stanley Hauerwas. As Hauerwas has said, “the primary concern in my work has not been to critique liberal society; it has been to offer a vision for the church (in particular the integrity of the church) so that Christians might help negotiate the challenges of a liberal society. . . my position certainly does not entail a wholesale rejection of `secular civilization’, or even of liberalism.”[13] Hauerwas is a man of the church, and a church of a very different kind than those promoting regime change and the installment of an authoritarian government as part of their church work.

The Confusion Concerning Church

Hauerwas is not advocating an overthrow of liberalism or a taking control through regime change, but an acceptance of the already accomplished defeat of the world through Christ lived out in the church. Certainly, the Christian is not obliged to understand evil, peace, freedom and justice, under the dictates of an enlightenment rationality (which presumes such notions are available through a universal reason). The Christian need not presume autonomy, individualism, and universal reason, as defined by liberalism are the case, but neither is this the epitome of evil, as if to oppose liberalism is to side with Christ. The issue, for Hauerwas, is not liberalism or its opposite, but the centrality of Christ and living in a community of believers who learn to live this story. The embodiment and meaning of peace, justice, and freedom are specific to the person of Christ. “Though we continue to live in a time when the world does not dwell in peace, when the wolf cannot dwell with the lamb and a child cannot play over the hole of the asp, we believe nonetheless that peace has been made possible by the resurrection. Through this crucified but resurrected savior we see that God offers to all the possibility of living in peace by the power of forgiveness.”[14] We do not take charge and institute this peace, we receive it and inhabit it.

To take control and direct the Christian social strategy, the MAGA Right’s project, is already an abandonment of Christ’s kingdom. His truth cannot be relegated to human political organization, certainly it cannot be privatized or made to serve another story – i.e., the story of the nation state, the story of the rise of liberal democracy, the story of Rome or America, but neither does it promote Constantinianism or the story of a modern Catholic integralism.

The Church is a Politic and Method

As Hauerwas puts it, “The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.”[15] Hauerwas is picturing the role of the church as a practical defeat of evil in living out peace. Peace is its own fruit, and its own end as an overcoming of deception, a defeat of violence and death, and a coming to reality. The church is to be the instantiation of the peace of Christ, and every other means, including liberalism or illiberalism, falls into division and violence. As Hauerwas puts it, Jesus is the embodiment of the peaceable kingdom, he is the embodiment of Sabbath peace. “God’s kingdom, God’s peace, is a movement of those who have found the confidence through the life of Jesus to make their lives a constant worship of God. We can rest in God because we are no longer driven by the assumption that we must be in control of history, that it is up to us to make things come out right.” [16]

The justice or righteousness (or the making right) of Christ cannot be extracted from the church, as if American freedom or liberal justice or illiberal justice, mean the same thing as they mean in the story and rule of Christ. As Hauerwas writes, “We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.”[17] The idea of a Christian nation, according to Hauerwas is extraordinarily destructive. Instead, “The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action.”[18] The people of God are the empirical reality of the rule of God, the embodiment of the crucified reality.[19] The point is not to determine the outcome of history, “For Christians hope, is not ‘in the processes of history,’ but in God whom we believe has already determined the end of history in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” [20]

Peace Not Coercion is the Method

For Hauerwas, peace is at the center of the gospel, as violence, whether in the name of justice or equality, is inevitably about power and control over others. Violence derives from the self-deceptive story that we are in control – that we are our own creators – and that only we can bestow meaning on our lives, since there is no one else to do so.” [21] Violence is the practice of a lie, a form of deceived meaning. It is not that violence may not gain short term goals, but Christians cannot rely on a justice that comes from the barrel of a gun, or that indicates less worthy motivations (being in charge), “for God does not rule creation through coercion, but through a cross. As Christians, therefore, we seek not so much to be effective as to be faithful – we, thus, cannot do that which promises ‘results’ when the means are unjust.”[22] The New Right, in abandoning the centrality of peace and nonviolence have missed that violence is the primary problem with liberalism and anti-liberalism, or any means other than the cross. In the name of their Anti as definitive, they stand against the means and method of Christ and the cross.

[1] A Community of Character: Towards a Constructive Christian Social Ethic, 4th edition, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1981), 11. Robert Jenson, “Hauerwas Examined” in First Things (August 1, 1992). See also  Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer on Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 114 Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer on Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 114.

[2] Laura Field, “The 77-Year-Old Book That Helps Explain the MAGA New Right”, New York Times (Dec. 13, 2025). In Laura Field’s book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, Patrick Deneen serves as a leading figure and key architect of the postliberal intellectual faction.

[3] Laura Field.

[4] Laura Field.

[5] James Chappel, “Nudging Toward Theocracy: Adrian Vermeule’s War on Liberalism” in Dissent (Spring 2020). https://dissentmagazine.org/article/nudging-towards-theocracy/

[6] Nudging Toward Theocracy.

[7] Nudging Toward Theocracy.

[8] Damon Linker, “These Thinkers Set the Stage for Trump the All-Powerful”, New York Times (May 4, 2025). Robert J. Shapiro, “The German Political Theorist Who Explains What’s Happening in Washington” The Washington Monthly (February 10, 2025).

[9] Damon Linker.

[10] Stanley Hauerwas, “Ten years and counting: Christianity and the end of war,” ABC Religion and Ethics – https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ten-years-and-counting-christianity-and-the-end-of-war/10101158

[11] Nudging Toward Theocracy.

[12] Laura Field.

[13]‘Will the Real Sectarian Stand Up! ‘, Theology Today, 44/1 (April 1987), 87-94. p. 93. Cited in J. B. Thomson, `The Ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas as a Distinctively Christian Theology of Liberation (1970-2000)’  (PhD University of Nottingham, 2001), 88.

[14] The Peaceable Kingdom, 135.

[15] Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader, John Berman ad Michael Cartwright eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 124.

[16] The Peaceable Kingdom, 134.

[17]Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 47-48.

[18] Resident Aliens, 83.

[19] The Peaceable Kingdom, 107.

[20] The Peaceable Kingdom, 145.

[21] The Peaceable Kingdom, 94.

[22] The Peaceable Kingdom, 104.

Trump as Sovereign: The Theological Impetus Behind Donald Trump

Both the New York Times and the Washington Monthly have recently drawn a direct link behind Donald Trump’s pursuit of expanded presidential power and the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank built upon the thought of Leo Strauss and his mentor, the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt.[1] The legal theory enabling Adolf Hitler, according to Damon Linker, has “risen to greater prominence now than at any time since the 1930s.”[2] Schmitt viewed liberalism as containing a fatal weakness in refusing to recognize the nature of human evil (original sin) or its political expression in sorting out the world according to friends and enemies. Liberalism is too weak to draw the necessary line identifying enemies. There must be a decider in chief, as legislatures are fraught with indecision and internal factions, and the rule of law (determinations of friends and enemies) is through the singular leader who can enact the law. “That leaves the executive as the best option for decisive action. It was this line of reasoning that led Schmitt to throw his support behind Adolf Hitler’s efforts in 1933 to transform himself into Germany’s sovereign decider.”[3]

Trump in his deployment of the military to the southern border, imposing tariffs, invoking the Alien Enemies Act to round up migrants, trying to end birthright citizenship, investigating his critics, suspending funds appropriated by Congress, firing the Inspector Generals, turning over personal data of Americans to Elon Musk, and making more emergency declarations in the first weeks of his presidency than any previous president, is setting himself up in the mold of Schmitt’s sovereign leader. It is not that Trump is reading Schmitt, but advisors such as Russel Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, are working a definitive plan, in which power flows through the presidency. According to both Linker and Shapiro, Trump is surrounded by ideologues who are implementing the philosophy of Schmitt, Strauss, and the Claremont Institute. The President’s approach to politics, “to cast supporters as friends and critics as enemies,” is precisely the formula of Schmitt.[4] As Shapiro concludes, “This is not muddled thinking or engineered chaos. It’s a coherent view of politics that supersedes the debates between a strong versus weak presidency. A new battle over Trump’s Schmittian approach to America has begun, and the outcome is unsettled.”[5]

The Sovereign Power of the Leader as Rule of Law

While it may not be as obvious as Christian nationalism, Christian Zionism, and the alignment of evangelicals behind Trump, this understanding is consciously theological (Schmitt began his career as a devout Catholic) both in its understanding of the leader as sovereign, and the necessity of this strong leader due to evil (original sin or Hobbes state of nature). People are driven by fear of violent death (the ultimate evil), and this fear is a healthy realism which drives them to the protections offered by a strong leader.

Schmitt justified the rise of Hitler to the position of sovereign leader on the basis of what he calls metaphysics. He contends that religious and metaphysical assumptions translate directly into political organization, and (he presumes) nominalist voluntarism is the proper underpinning of the role of the secular state. Nominalism pictures God, in his essence, as beyond human cognition and therefore we only have access to God’s law. This law is not based on human reason or notions of morality, but coming as it does from God, it is to be accepted in and for itself (sometimes called “divine command theory”). God does not obey laws of morality because they are moral, but the law is moral because he so commands (thus voluntarism). He is the originator of morality; it does not rest upon anything other than his decision (“God said it, and that settles it”).[6]

The voluntarist God translated into politics means that just as God is sovereign (and this is the ground of morality and law), so too the president or leader is sovereign and his word is law. The leader is the instrument of God and he enacts divine sovereignty through his decisions. Legislators, judges, and courts serve the president, who is the arbiter of the law. Legislatures and bureaucrats cannot make unified and uncontested decisions; this is the sole domain of the absolute leader. Thus, Trump has declared his “authority is total,” he stated his intention to be a “dictator from day one,” he does not intend to uphold the constitution (as he recently revealed), and the Supreme Court has agreed the president cannot break the law while acting as president (he is the embodiment and enactor of the law).

Original Evil in Fear of Violent Death

The peculiar role of evil for both Strauss and Schmitt is built upon the work of Thomas Hobbes, who grounds the work of the state in warding off violent death. Strauss referencing Hobbs maintains, “the fear of death, i.e. the emotional and inevitable, and therefore necessary and certain, aversion from death is the origin of law and the State.”[7] Fear of the other, my potential murderer, is prerational but it gives rise to the drive for self-preservation which undergirds all morality. “For death is not only the negation of the primary good, but is there with the negation of all goods, including the greatest good; and at the same time, death-being the summum malum, while there is no summum bonum – is the only absolute standard by reference to which man may coherently order his life.”[8]

The fear of death, or the negative and prerational (and perhaps preconscious) is the root of the more positive “preservation of life,” but the negative fear is the ground of the positive drive. “Only through death has man an aim . . . [the] aim which is forced upon him by the sight of death the aim of avoiding death. For this reason Hobbes prefers the negative expression ‘avoiding death’ to the positive expression ‘preserving life’.”[9] Hobbes concludes that fear of death is the root of virtue and the reason for the State: “consolidating peace, [and] protecting man against the danger of violent death.”[10]

Schmitt, taking up Hobbes’ root cause (fear of violent death), concludes that the essence of politics is discerning friend from enemy (the one to fear): “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”[11] Just as good and evil in the moral sphere and beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere, are basic to these realms, so friend and enemy functions as the foundation of the political: “it is independent, not in the sense of a distinct new domain, but in that it can neither be based on any one antithesis or any combination of other antitheses, nor can it be traced to these.”[12] No other binary gets to the root cause of human striving: “The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation.”[13] The fear of death at the hands of the enemy, the other, the stranger, or the foreigner, is not based upon anything else; it may or may not pertain to economics, business or competition. “But he (the enemy) is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.”[14]

This fear of death is the fundamental fact, having nothing to do with any outward cause: “the morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not necessarily be the enemy; the morally good, aesthetically beautiful, and economically profitable need not necessarily become the friend in the specifically political sense of the word.”[15] The fear of the other is the basic state of nature, and “the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses.”[16]

For Schmitt it is not simply that the friend/enemy distinction is the given reality, but it is the necessary reality for being human. A world of peace, without this distinction or without politics, would be a world without meaning: “It is conceivable that such a world might contain many very interesting antitheses and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and kill other human beings.”[17] Meaning is created through death – the fear of death, the warding off of death, the shedding of blood, killing other humans, and sacrificing one’s life in this killing. Where would be the meaning in a world of peace?

Schmitt does not believe peace could prevail, anymore than he thinks it possible for humanity to exist without politics. “If a part of the population declares that it no longer recognizes enemies, then, depending on the circumstance, it joins their side and aids them. Such a declaration does not abolish the reality of the friend-and-enemy distinction.”[18] It just means that those who do not recognize our enemies have become the enemy. Having the same enemies is key in determining our friends. Someone who says they have no enemies is simply trying to stand outside the reality of a political community. For a nation to attempt such friendliness is dangerous: “If a people is afraid of the trials and risks implied by existing in the sphere of politics, then another people will appear which will assume these trials by protecting it against foreign enemies and thereby taking over political rule.”[19]

“What always matters is the possibility of the extreme case taking place, the real war, and the decision whether this situation has or has not arrived.”[20] War is the situation in which the fulness of meaning is made clear: “For only in real combat is revealed the most extreme consequence of the political grouping of friend and enemy. From this most extreme possibility human life derives its specifically political tension.”[21] This tension is the very substance of meaning and war makes this clear. Hobbes, through his experience of war, discovered war wipes away any illusions: “then all legitimate and normative illusions with which men like to deceive themselves regarding political realities in periods of untroubled security vanish.”[22] War washes away delusions of untroubled security and reveals the state of nature which prevails beneath political realities: “In it, states exist among themselves in a condition of continual danger, and their acting subjects are evil for precisely the same reasons as animals who are stirred by their drives (hunger, greediness, fear, jealousy).”[23]

Man is evil, and this reality once exposed stands behind true politics: “What remains is the remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.”[24] While the educator may be optimistic that all can be educated, and a judge must presume innocence, and the moralist must presume a freedom of choice, the political philosopher must recognize the reality of evil and the necessity of controlling this evil. The theologian and political philosopher begin with the reality of human evil. “A theologian ceases to be a theologian when he no longer considers man to be sinful or in need of redemption and no longer distinguishes between the chosen and the nonchosen.”[25] By the same token – “Because the sphere of the political is in the final analysis determined by the real possibility of enmity, political conceptions and ideas cannot very well start with an anthropological optimism.”[26]

Recognizing the reality of human evil or being duly frightened by evil is necessary to both theology and political philosophy: “The fundamental theological dogma of the evilness of the world and man leads, just as does the distinction of friend and enemy, to a categorization of men and makes impossible the undifferentiated optimism of a universal conception of man.”[27] There are friends and enemies and enemies are deadly. It may be necessary to frighten people into recognizing this basic human condition, along with the need to find protection. Afterall, “No form of order, no reasonable legitimacy or legality can exist without protection and obedience.”[28] The role of inducing fear is played by key political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Fichte who “presuppose with their pessimism only the reality or possibility of the distinction of friend and enemy . . . Their realism can frighten men in need of security.” By frightening men one can instill in them the fundamental recognition of the need for protection rendered by the state. Schmitt compares recognition of the need for the state protection to the Cartesian cogito: “The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state. A political theory which does not systematically become aware of this sentence remains an inadequate fragment.” [29]

As John McCormick sums up Schmitt, “fear is the source of political order. Human beings once confronted with the prospect of their own dangerousness will be terrified into the arms of authority.”[30] Schmitt sees his task as building on Hobbes view of humanity and to keep fear alive through posing the realism of the basic human condition, demonstrating the continual threat of war, convincingly showing that only a state under the control of a sovereign leader can provide security.[31]

Conclusion: An Alternative Theology and Politic

Donald Trump’s politics of fear, of multiplying enemies, of sovereign power vested in himself, of determining law above and beyond its written and judicial forms, and of holding out the possibility that only he can provide safety, has a clear lineage through Carl Schmitt and in failed theology. Nominalism and voluntarism constitute the abandonment of the identity of God in Jesus Christ, the true Sovereign, leaving a political blank slate on the order of the theological blank slate (filled in by law). Schmitt extended this theological error to include the political rule of law through the sovereign; a necessity in order to control this world which has been handed over to evil (in the absence of a robust understanding of the cosmic and universal work of Christ). The two-tiered concept of reality (God made inaccessible in heaven) displaces the revelation of God in Christ with law (which does not resolve but regulates evil). However, by identifying Christ as the final and full revelation of God (God in the flesh), the one who defeated evil and overcame death (even violent death on a cross) along with its enslaving fear, including fear of the enemy (displaced with love of enemy), in this faith there is a suspension of the punishing law, in the politics of the Kingdom (Rom. 6-8). This Christian vision is precisely what is missing in the political theology of Trump.  

[1] Damon Linker, “These Thinkers Set the Stage for Trump the All-Powerful”, New York Times (May 4, 2025). Robert J. Shapiro, “The German Political Theorist Who Explains What’s Happening in Washington” The Washington Monthly (February 10, 2025).

[2] Ibid, Linker.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, Shapiro.

[5] Ibid.

[6] See Jack Huchison, “The Political as a Theological Problem in the Thought of Carl Schmitt” A dissertation submitted to the Department of Government, the London School of Economics and Political Science, 2018.

[7] Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, Transl. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) 17.

[8] Strauss, 16.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid,18.

[11] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007) 26.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid, 27.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid, 35.

[18] Ibid, 51.

[19] Ibid, 52.

[20] Ibid, 35.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid, 52.

[23] Ibid, 59.

[24] Ibid, 61

[25] Ibid, 64.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid, 65.

[28] Ibid, 52.

[29] Ibid, 65.

[30] John McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany,” Political Theory, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Nov., 1994) 622.

[31] Ibid, 623.

Abba – Father as Fulfillment of Cosmic Incorporation

“What is God to man, that is man’s own spirit, man’s own soul; what is man’s spirit, soul, and heart – that is his God. God is the manifestation of man’s inner nature, his expressed self; religion is the solemn unveiling of man’s hidden treasures, the avowal of his innermost thoughts, the open confession of the secrets of his love.” Ludwig Feuerbach – The Essence of Christianity

Ludwig Feuerbach’s notion that God is a projection of human values and needs is a key modern theme. Nietzsche maintains God and religion are a product of the resentments of the weak; Freud teaches us that God-language is really about sex; Marx teaches us that it is an instrument of economics, and Carl Schmitt teaches us that God-language is the structuring principle of the state. Psychoanalysis, atheism, Marxism (Communism and Socialism), fascism, and nationalism, all turn theology on its head, claiming that the theological and divine are really about the human.

The proper theological move is to turn theology back round by reclaiming secular insights: instead of God language being for the weak, weakness is really about God and how God comes to us; instead of God language really being about sex, sex is really about God – the erotic is not over and against agape love but is woven through it and indicates its proper end; instead of religion being an opiate to numb economic oppression, economics and economic justice is all about God; instead of allowing for the modern theory of state to occupy theological concepts and structures, the theological must challenge the sole sovereignty of the state.

This final point, Schmitt’s recognition of the sovereign as the exception which establishes the law and the order of state power, pinpoints the unified theme underlying all of these realms. In each instance, God was marked out as a point of exception, the means of escape, the point of oppression, a tool of legitimation, so that the transcendent concept of God came to occupy the supreme place of power, emptied out of immanent categories and these categories were then turned, in secularism, against his transcendence. “God is dead, and we have killed him,” is not an admission of defeat but a claim of power. The power of state, the power of sex, the power of money, the power of the human psyche, each unleashed from its sun have proven deadly and out of control. Capitalism, nationalism, the state as sovereign, sex as an identity, or simply the manipulation of psychic categories, each have claimed their own legitimating frame in pure power, but in their own way each realm has bottomed out. Which is to say God cannot simply be dropped back into the formula as a continued resource for exploitation. Inasmuch as the God of modern religion is a stop gap, a legitimating source for state power, the exception which establishes the law, the gold standard of capitalism, modern religion is atheistic in its practice.

To truly believe in the Trinitarian God, the Abba of Christ, and the Spirit of love, has economic, sexual, ascetical, psychoanalytic, political, and environmental requirements. God With Us, comes to us in and through the realms of the world and where deity has been evacuated from these realms both God and world are lost for us. Where there is no horizon beyond the economic, the sexual, the ascetic, the psychoanalytic, the political, and even the environmental, this becomes sole horizon. There is no proper ordering of these realms, no telos, but only a random groping as in each instance in money, in sex, in the psychoanalytic, etc. we live and move and have our being and this is not a realm apart or a distinct entity in our life but is our life. On the other hand, to picture God as accessible apart from these realms is not to elevate God, but is to demean him to a projection, an instrument, a justification, an opiate, an abstraction who leaves the world to our power.

The point is not that we understand God on the basis of the categories of the world but the categories of the world are mediated to us on the basis of our understanding of God. For example, we do not understand God as Father on the basis of human fatherhood, but we grasp the meaning of human fatherhood as it mediates to us the Fatherhood of God. But, of course, it is not simply fatherhood per se that pertains to recognizing God, but all things, all categories, all ordering of the world, must pertain to being able to rightly realize the identity of God. We understand what children are, what fathers are, what sex is, what a healthy psyche is, what a proper politic is, and what love is on the basis of rightly integrating God and world in Abba (as in Ro 8:15 and Gal 4:6). I presume the realization of this truth of God and world integrated, is what is conveyed in the proper name given to God, communicated by his Son, and realized through the Spirit. God is integrated into our lives and world, not on the basis of the world but on the basis of who he is in Christ in the world, and it is also on this basis that we receive the world. In the incarnation we receive God in the world and the world and all of its categories are transformed in light of Christ. The world is not too low for God; the womb is not beneath God; eating and working and growing tired and living and dying are transformed by Christ. All that is of the world is taken up by Christ and through the world we are now given divine insight.

God has poured himself into the world and into human experience due to his yearning and love, and he draws all things back into himself through this same yearning. So, for example, we can say with Dionysius, that human desire originates in divine yearning and that the basis and end of eros is agape: “let us not fear this title of ‘yearning,’ nor be upset . . . for, in my opinion, the sacred writers regard ‘yearning’ (eros) and love (agape) as having one and the same meaning.”[1] The desire of love pertains to ultimate reality, to God himself, as source and substance (as I have described it here). But this is an understanding that opens up every phase of human subjectivity and experience. The erotic or embodied as agape points to the deepest and earliest phases of human subjectivity as the groundwork of the divine. Just as the erotic rightly ordered is the root of agape, so too all unconscious/conscious origins of development, though we may know only of their disorder, must serve as ground and structure of divine love. As Dionysius puts it, through excessive yearning of his Goodness he is transported outside Himself “to dwell with the heart of all things”:

hence this universe, which is both One and Many; the conjunctions of parts together; the unities underlying all multiplicity, and the perfections of the individual wholes; hence Quality, Quantity, Magnitude and Infinitude; hence fusions and differentiations, hence all infinity and all limitation; all boundaries, ranks, transcendences, elements and forms, hence all Being, all Power, all Activity, all Condition, all Perception, all Reason, all Intuition, all Apprehension, all Understanding, All Communion—in a word, all, that is comes from the Beautiful and Good, hath its very existence in the Beautiful and Good, and turns towards the Beautiful and Good.[2]

All perception, all intuition, all development is in and through and drawn toward His goodness. It is only where this flow and development is stopped short or stunted that the disorder of sin enters in. This principle of sin, a misorientation toward the law, would interject law in place of God and might be described as a misperception of God’s fatherhood. God or the law is pictured as a delimiting factor or a point of proscription. The law is taken as an end in and of itself and God perceived through this law does not beget, desire, or engender but forbids and disrupts. Just as rightly ordering the world is summed up in the realization of Abba-Father, so too the disordering of sin is summed up in the failed orientation of perceiving God through the law.

Without recounting the details of this failure, I presume this stands behind Paul’s culminating point of the Gospel found in the name Abba. The realization of God as Father puts right, not simply the failure of earthly fathers and mothers, but it completes compliments and teaches a true form of subjectivity by locating the human subject in the Trinitarian Subject. Just as Christ calls God “Abba,” we take up this relationship through the Son and the Spirit and this relationship re-appropriates and fulfills the worldly order. This order displaces the monism and pantheism of the world as mother (the law of oneness), and it escapes punishing patriarchy (the binary law of difference). It is in the Trinity, in the place of the Son that brings out the cry “Abba,” through the Spirit. This is not a law-like relationship imposed from outside but describes an interpenetrating realization of true subjectivity. Kittel notes, “Jewish usage shows how this Father-child relationship to God far surpasses any possibilities of intimacy assumed in Judaism, introducing indeed something which is wholly new.”[3]

As John explains, No one has seen God at any time but God the only Son who abides in the bosom of the Father has made him known or explained him (Jn 1:18). As both Galatians and Romans explains it, the Son is born under the law so as to deliver the future sons and daughters from enslavement to sin under the law. In both Romans and Galatians, the shift from slave to adopted child is realized in the heart cry induced by the Spirit: “Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, ‘Abba! Father!’ Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God” (Galatians 4:6-7). The explanation and the adoption accomplished through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, in Paul’s explanation, confronts the lie of sin in regard to the law and defeats the enslaving death dealing orientation. The Abba relationship to God involves all of the work of Christ but it must also involve every aspect of human subjectivity. Paul pictures it as involving the conscious and unconscious self; it addresses the punishing and enslaving aspect of the law taken up into the self and replaces this form of subjectivity with one who is able to imitate Christ.

The Abba relationship and naming of the Father is specific to the work of the Son and the fulfillment of the Spirit, such that to change the name (for example, to Mother) would seem to miss both the universal father problem of the law and the cosmic answer to this problem found in Christ. To erase, evade, or change the name would seem to create the danger of falling back into or failing to be extracted from the original predicament. This in not to occlude the feminine characteristics of God, as it is precisely where we encounter the mothering, birthing, nurturing images of God in the Holy Spirit that the Abba relationship is made possible. This Abba relationship must be a fulfillment of the child’s early concept of mother/father as the unified source engendering one’s individuality. The child’s development is not unlike Paul’s depiction of the Spirit’s (feminine) engendering of sonship as enabling the Abba relationship.

 In conclusion, the development of human subjectivity in all of its stages, known and unknown, along with “all Being, all Power, all Activity, all Condition, all Perception, all Reason, all Intuition, all Apprehension, all Understanding, All Communion” comes from God and turns all things toward God. This pull of divine desire is realized in the Abba relationship, a fulfillment of the specific work of Christ as it overcomes the universal problem (a perceived problem of father) in a cosmic and universal human incorporation into the family of God.    

[1] Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, IV. 12.

[2] Dionysius, IV. 10.

[3] Kittel, G. (1964–). ἀββᾶ. G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 1, p. 6). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

A Genealogy of the Lonely Modern

In the typical scenario, which comes loaded with the modern view of history, the question is posed, “Would you smother baby Hitler in the crib, given the opportunity?” What if we discover, perhaps with the deed complete, it was actually Hitler’s reading of Nietzsche, and that in fact there were many German boys of a peculiar intellect and disposition who, given bad philosophy, could fill the role of Hitler candidates. Smothering baby Nietzsche will not really help, as he too arises with the secular age whose end he envisions.[1] The problem with the scenario is contained in the presumption that Hitler is an isolated, unique individual, and not a product of his time and circumstance.

John Milbank though, has the perfect candidate for smothering. According to Milbank, Duns Scotus is the culprit who created the theological vision that ultimately disenchanted the world which has given rise to both modern experience and modern political structure, with all of its attendant disasters. Milbank would explain the modern and secular, whether modern American evangelicalism or modern global Christianity as a “thinned out version of the Catholic faith” – all the result of the theology of Scotus.[2] In turn, Milbank imagines that if we could recover medieval ecclesial and political structures the root problem would be addressed. He puts on display both a failed understanding of the nature and depth of the human predicament and its solution.

My point here is not simply to indicate the weakness in attaching blame for all of modern thought to one medieval scholar. Milbank, after all, is simply following a long line of modern scholarship (the very thing he is critiquing) which would attach supreme importance to one individual or a particular stream of history. While it is not exactly “the great man theory of history” (in which history is biography), it is something of a “disastrous idea theory of history” which attaches a near sui generis notion to particular ideas, periods and persons. For example, Leslie Newbigin, typical of the previous generation, wrote of Rene Descartes having caused the second Fall of humanity. He presumed that if Descartes had not gone into that warm room on a cold day and composed his meditations (beginning with “I think, therefore I am”) the modern period would not have commenced or would not have been so disastrous. The tendency is to think, “That darn Descartes, he ruined it for all of us.” This, “If it weren’t for that darn Descartes-that darn Scotus-that darn Hitler-view of history,” is faulty, not simply in its simplistic view of history but is attached, I would claim, to a peculiarly thin (modernist) theology which does not presume, as I think the New Testament does, something like a negative unified field theory of sin (addressed in the work of Christ).

It is not that we cannot or should not trace the genealogy of ideas, as we really do live in a world impacted by the thought of particular individuals and there really are streams of thought or historical circumstances that shape our horizons. It is true, that basic human experience is changed up in this secular age and that our world has been disenchanted, no matter our personal (religious or nonreligious) frame of reference. There is no passing over the depth of details to be found in Scotus or William of Ockham and their part in bringing about the secular. The mistake is not in tracing the genealogy of ideas, but it is in imagining that any one individual or any one age or epoch is a realm apart and thus does not share in a common root failure. Milbank’s intense focus on Scotus could and has been argued on the details but the larger error, whatever the merit or lack in the details, is to imagine this failure is a one-off event which can then be corrected by returning the world to something like its pre-Scotus state.[3]

Conceptually modernity, for example, with its turn to nominalism and the focus on divine sovereignty (divine power) in philosophy and theology (something like a pure formalism or legalism), with its juridical-constitutional model of autonomous state authority (the government is secular and the ecclesial powers are now subservient), with its presumption of bio-political control of the human body through the body politic (the biological body is written over with secular law), seems to simply be an aggravated reconstitution of Paul’s depiction of sin as a misorientation to law. The voluntarist conception of God (focus on the will or causal power of God) was secularized in the conception of the state and in the focus on the individual, and this raw power is codified in law and by legal (state) institutions.

The steps that lead to exclusive focus on divine sovereignty (as opposed to divine love or beauty) follows the course Paul traces as the universal predicament, in which the unmediated presence of God is traded for the force of the law. For Paul, the reality of every individual is understood in light of the experience or identity of corporate humanity (unregenerate humanity) in Adam and in Israel. In Eden, the law of the knowledge of good and evil literally displaces God and is made the means to life, and the law of Sinai is made to serve the same end. Part of the point of Christianity, perhaps the main point, is to separate out this obscene orientation to the law (psychologically and religiously) so as to be able to arrive at the law of love. Sin, in Paul’s definition, fuses itself with the law so that one who becomes a servant of the law (as Paul did, and as Adam did, and as, in Paul’s explanation, everyone does) becomes a servant of sin and incapacitates agape love.

The irony is that Christianity has done its work in extracting this condition (orientation to the law of sin and death) from religious enchantment. Now the law is not presumed to have any religious (ontological) ground but is a secular establishment, a bare and open law built upon raw power, that nonetheless reigns in the psychic and social orientation. In this nominalist universe no appeal can be made to an actually existing goodness, as the best we have – all we have – is the mediating power of law and legal institutions. “Might makes right” may have always been the case, but in the medieval period kings presumed they were the channel of a divinely bestowed power (and there was a check on this power), but in the secular realm power is its own legitimating force (there is no ecclesial legitimating power) so that war is the constituting power of the state to which it will need continual recourse. Making war makes the state. In the same way money, in the early stages of capitalism, was a sign of God’s blessing and depended upon this theological construct, now money need not appeal to any outside legitimation. Money is its own legitimating power. Human life is literally and metaphorically put on the market, so that life and time become a commodity to be bought and sold.  

As Charles Taylor has described it, the immanent frame now prevails, or as Carl Schmitt (the famous Nazi jurist) has put it, “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state but also because of their systematic structure.” As Schmitt describes it, “the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver” and with secularization we are left with omnipotent law.[4] It is no surprise then that miracles (due to natural law), become an impossibility, and by the same token, according to Mike Pompeo, there should not even be the possibility of questioning the constitution. The modern constitutional state reigns supreme (in place of the divine). The constitution replaces commandments, the nation replaces the community of faith, and at an individual level human decision and will is the final arbiter of ethics.

Among the many consequences of modern secularism is the rise of an intense and peculiar individualism, in which the organic and communal sense of the subject is displaced by the notion that the individual is a monad – an isolated entity.  It is only with the secular that there needs to be a reaffirmation of a basic biblical understanding and an integral part of medieval culture: humans are constituted as part of a family or group. Hegel hits upon this truth as if it is a discovery. As he explains in the very beginning of “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage,” self-consciousness could be achieved only through being acknowledged by others. As the philosopher Immanuel Levinas has described it, at the most fundamental level, “self-consciousness is not one-sided action as people assume, but; it necessitates an other to reach it.” Facing with an “other” is not only necessary for the recognition of the self but it is also a must to have a self-consciousness.

The necessity to describe this mutuality would not likely have arisen in a traditional culture. As Taylor describes it, “One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are ‘buffered’ selves.” The traditional porous sense of self came with certain deficits in that the emotional and moral life did not exist in an inner, mental space and was thus subject to a variety of malevolent influences such as spirits, demons, or cosmic forces.[5] But the buffered individual has been removed from this world of fear at the price of a profound sense of isolation. An article in JAMA journal of psychiatry refers to this as an epidemic of loneliness responsible for the death of 1 American every 5.5 minutes due to suicide and opioid overdose, which is chalked up to the root cause of loneliness. An annual mortality of 162 000 Americans is attributable to loneliness (exceeding the number of deaths from cancer or stroke), which is a term that, according to the British historian Fay Bound Alberti, did not exist in the English language until 1800.[6]  

Is not the destructive nature of modern loneliness an indication this is simply an aggravated condition of the objectified “I” which Paul depicts as arising in conjunction with the alienating law? In Paul’s depiction, this ἐγὼ or “I” is not subject to growth and change as it is an object fixed as part of a formal structure under the law, characterized by fear and struggle. The antagonistic dialectic between the law of the mind and the law of the body is, according to Paul, the very thing that produces this isolated ego desperately grasping after life and power through the law. Freud could be quoting Paul in calling the ego “the seat of anxiety” due to its fear of annihilation under the cathected law (the superego).[7] As Lacan will describe the ego (renaming it the imaginary), “Alienation is the imaginary as such.”[8] This fully interior or self-conscious ego, or this “I” which is one’s own is, in Paul’s description (and Paul is commenting on Genesis 3) the Subject of sin.  

This is not an attempt to simply lump together all forms of sin, but it is to suggest that a true genealogy of the modern begins with a biblical diagnosis, which also promises more than a return to the medieval or artificial attempts to reenchant the world.

[1] Enough smothered babies equal a holocaust type strategy – Hitler was, after all, attempting to correct history. It is the strategy of the powers from Pharaoh to Herod to the late modern Democratic Party.

[2] See John Milbank, Beyond the Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of People, (Wiley Blackwell).

[3] If modernity is a turn to the individual, and society is pictured simultaneously as made up of individual monad’s, this is not an error corrected by imagining one individual has reconstituted the whole.

[4] Carl Schmitt,  1928 (2008), Constitutional Theory, transl. J. Seitzer, (Duke University Press, London), p. 36.

[5] Charles Taylor, “Buffered and porous selves” https://tif.ssrc.org/2008/09/02/buffered-and-porous-selves/

[6] Dilip V Jeste, Ellen E Lee, Stephanie Cacioppo, “Battling the Modern Behavioral Epidemic of Loneliness: Suggestions for Research and Interventions,” JAMA psychiatry, 77(6) https://escholarship.org/content/qt47n6790s/qt47n6790s.pdf?t=q7c0kj

[7] Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (Standard Edition), 59-60.

[8] Jacques Lacan, Seminar III, 146