Constantinianism – Forging Ploughshares

Finding Christ in the Collapse of Civilization

So Jesus also suffered outside the city to make his people holy with his own blood. So let us go to Jesus outside the camp, holding on as he did when we are abused. Here on earth we do not have a city that lasts forever, but we are looking for the city that we will have in the future. Hebrews 13:12-14

Within the Republican Party Christianity is being weaponized, as either the means of establishing a Christian civilization, or as an instrument by which Christians, at least a few, might manipulate the masses. The former notion, of establishing or “recovering” a Christian civilization is the well-known stance of Steve Bannon (the ideologue behind Donald Trump), who maintains that “we” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or be overrun by dangerous outsiders who will impose a different identity upon us.[1] The fusion of the Republican party with evangelical religion runs from Ronald Reagan, Pat Roberson, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, but in Trump and company it has taken on a more virulent form, with its heightened rhetoric against immigrants, people of color, and notions of civilizational war.

JD Vance however, falls into the second category in that his is not the goal of Christian civilization, but is aimed at a ruling elite (perhaps Christian) taking power. Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel and a student of the work of René Girard, converted to Catholicism, after hearing a lecture by Thiel and recognizing through the work of Girard, that his life was given over to mimetic desire and competition (the heart of Girard’s theory). In this talk, as described by Vance, Thiel described the coming reality of future Yale graduates: “We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness.”[2] Vance came to recognize that raw ambition and mimetic desire were the driving force in his life: “The end result [of all this competition] for me, at least, was that I had lost the language of virtue. I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.” That realization brought a change of heart: “That all had to change. It was time to stop scapegoating and focus on what I could do to improve things.”[3] He even describes how he and his friends used to find a scapegoat to abuse, whether consciously or unconsciously, yet it is clear that his conversion, and entry into politics has not ended his scapegoating but simply redirected it. Now he cynically deploys what he formerly counted as sin, for the greater good. His attack on Haitian immigrants, which he acknowledged was a fiction, is useful for garnering political support. As he put it on CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” He counts himself a Christian, but his Girardian Christianity presumes society will continue to operate through mimetic desire and scapegoating, and if Christians are to rule (to accomplish good), they must deploy this mechanism (evil?) to their advantage. As Ward describes, “Vance is consciously stoking the conflict to promote cohesion among his native-born political base, even if doing so results in real threats of violence against Springfield’s non-native population.” In this, he is following Thiel, for whom Girard has provided an insight into how to manipulate markets and politics, not so as to follow Jesus, but to gain the upper hand in the rivalries constituting culture. The Jesus stuff pertains more privately and locally, but at the level of culture and civilization many Girardians eschew the notion that Christianity can serve as cultural or social foundation. Culture is built upon scapegoating and sacrifice, and Christians, presumably a Christian elite, can only deconstruct and manipulate this reality.

However, even in the former category of those promoting Christian civilization, the deployment of Christianity is no less instrumental and cynical. Jordan Peterson, among the most well-known promoters of Christian civilization, is unique in that he makes no pretense of being a Christian. In his “Message to the Christian Churches,” he describes the key role churches can play in fighting the culture wars, especially on behalf of young men (presumably white) who are made to feel the brunt of cultural guilt. He characterizes this cultural moment as the war against boisterous male children playing with toy guns, competing against one another, and the demeaning of patriarchal male dominance (which he seems to promote). He sees the attack on masculine exercise of power, the war against marriage, the presumption that healthy human activity is despoiling the planet and that human wants and needs are to be curbed, as leading to docility (the feminine?). All of this, in his picture of political correctness, is blamed on healthy male competition, pursuing the masculine virtues, or the masculine spirit of adventure (which Peterson encourages). Peterson names Derrida’s attack on the logos or logocentric society (seeming to confuse Derrida’s phallocentric logos with Christian Logos), equating the enemy with politically correct anti-masculinity, a bloody Marxism, or the work of deconstruction. He notes that the church needs to steer young men back to the adventure of life, to find a woman, to care for a garden, to build an ark, to conquer a land, to build a ladder to heaven, to make a more abundant life. The church he notes, may be rooted in the dead past, but nonetheless there is wisdom to be found in this tradition – the primary thing is not personal belief, but duty to the past, and the broader community of family, city, and country. So, the church must target young men and revitalize a masculine form of civilization.[4]

As Paul Kingsnorth notes in a talk at First Things, the one thing left out of Peterson’s recommendations is Jesus Christ, and of course along with Christ the virtues of humility, peacemaking, giving up worldly possessions, love of God and enemies.[5] He cites the passage in James, “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days” (James 5:1-3). As Kingsnorth describes, what is encouraged could be equated with the seven deadly sins. Pride in masculine acquisition (greed), an open allowance for sexual desire (lust), and acknowledgement of mimetic rivalry (envy, wrath), all topped off with industrious leisure (sloth). Civilization clearly precedes the particulars of Christianity, Christian teaching, or Christian notions of redemption in Peterson’s formula. Christianity is an instrumental means to engage in the culture wars, and in Peterson’s description, Christ does not enter into the discussion at all.

Another example of this instrumental deployment of Christianity on behalf of civilization is from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who describes her “conversion” to Christianity from atheism as a necessity to equip for “civilizational war.”[6] She describes her passage through radical Islam to atheism, and then to Christianity, with the last being motivated by concern for engaging in the war for civilization. The threat of “great-power authoritarianism and expansionism” from the Chinese Communist Party, Putin’s Russia, and the rise of global Islamism, threatens the West ideologically and morally. As she says, “The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Though her faith may be sincere, she expresses the key motive of her Christianity as civilizational. Afterall, “We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools.”[7] Much as Vance is willing to engage in violent scapegoating for pragmatic purposes, pragmatism and civilizational survival are key to Ali.

Of course, this instrumental deployment of a civilizational Christianity has nothing to do with the actual Christian faith. Christ is not on the side of this sort of civilization or culture, which is seen as foundational and in which religion is simply a support. God and Christ are not on the side of kings and cultures, but these are consigned to the Evil One, who is the power behind the throne (in Luke 4:5-8 the devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms in the world and says all these kingdoms “have been handed over to me, and I give them to whomever I wish” and Jesus does not challenge his claim). As Kingsnorth points out, there is a good argument to be made that Jesus should have taken the deal. Why not rule, so as to bring about a more benevolent state, and as with Vance to do good for the poor, or with Thiel so as to bring about a more successful technological innovation, or with Peterson to combat political correctness, or as with Ali, Bannon and Trump, to combat other civilizations. Politics for the greater good, Christian civilization, Constantinianism, world peace through greater strength, feeding the poor on the leftovers of an over-abundant wealth, isn’t this worthwhile, or could it be that the Devil is wrong? Perhaps he is not wrong, in that he has a winning formula, but wrong in that this is not the plan of God for his people.

God is not to be found among the powerful, the cultural elites, the men of war, or in the stability of culture, but he came as a poor carpenter, and associated with the poor and the sick, mostly avoiding the centers of power, and was crucified outside the city in the name of a civilization already failing (and which like all human civilizations was bound to disappear) . As the verse of the epigraph indicates, those who follow him are to imitate this humble life-style, leaving everything for his sake, and taking up the cross of affliction outside the camp (the circle of civil powers). The choice is between the logos and city of man (civilizational Christianity or Constantinianism) or the Logos and communion of Christ (outside the city).

[1] See my piece running this down, “Have the Dark Ages Returned?” Here

[2] JD Vance, “How I Joined the Resistance: On Mamaw and becoming Catholic” in The Lamp (Issue 25), https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-i-joined-the-resistance

[3] Ian Ward, Politico, 09/18/2024 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/18/jd-vance-springfield-scapegoating-00179401

[4] See the talk here https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/blog-posts/article-message-to-the-christian-churches/

[5] https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/against-christian-civilisation-ea2

[6] Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Why I am now a Christian: Atheism can’t equip us for civilisational war” in Unherd (November 11, 2023), https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/

[7] Ibid.

Salvation as Defeat of the Powers

The depiction of the armor of God in Ephesians (6:10-19) is often taken as a colorful illustration, which makes for great sermonizing, but is not usually considered as central to the gospel. Defeat of the powers and personal engagement in this defeat, to say nothing of the notion that Christ came to defeat evil, are often displaced by theories of the atonement focused on deliverance from the wrath of God, and limited to a legal remedy of imputed righteousness, none of which allows for primary focus on personal engagement with and defeat of evil. In this understanding, the gospel is thought to pertain to more effervescent and transcendent categories rather than depicting how it weaponizes those who bear it and wear it with a capacity to engage and defeat evil. Thus, what the early church and Paul considered the very heart of salvation is dismissed as a fun allegory, more suited to children’s choruses than serious theologizing. How this came to be is largely explained by the Constantinian shift.

Constantinianism is a form of Christianity which has abandoned Christ’s strategy for what it presumes is a more effective method. As Nathan Kerr describes it:

Constantinianism most fundamentally names a certain orientation toward the political meaning of history which is rooted in a heretical eschatology based upon a misconception of the relation of Christ to history. Most importantly, Constantinianism proceeds as if what happened in the cross, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus had not profoundly altered history, and it provides for the church a way of acting politically in history which is not entirely determined by the lordship of Jesus Christ.[1]

According to John Howard Yoder, Constantinianism (true to the vision of Constantine), moves the sign of the cross from Golgotha to the battlefield, and conquering under this sign no longer entails taking up the cross as an instrument of self-giving sacrifice but it reinforces sacrificing one’s enemies in violence and warfare.[2] As Jordan Wood describes, Yoder “is not merely claiming that ‘Constantinianism’ tempts Christians to disobey the commands of Jesus, but that it tempts them to renounce their destiny to be like God.”[3] In Yoder’s estimate this temptation becomes reality in the undoing of the church/world distinction, such that the church disappears and the Roman State takes its place:

Before Constantine, one knew as a fact of everyday experience that there was a believing Christian community but one had to “take it on faith” that God was governing history. After Constantine, one had to believe without seeing that there was a community of believers, within the larger nominally Christian mass, but one knew for a fact that God was in control of history.[4]

Prior to Constantine the persecuted and martyred Christians marked the church state distinction, but with the Constantinian embrace of Christianity, all Romans were (mostly) Christian and the church became an indistinct part of the masses, while Rome’s rule in the name of Christ was interpreted as the arrival of the kingdom. Thus, every Roman soldier was required to be a Christian, and soldiering for Christ was sublated by literal killing and service to the State. This ideology persists in Christendom, such that Paul’s illustration is often allegorized and spiritualized away.

Four key points need to be made regarding the gospel armor in Ephesians 6 to regain the meaning and centrality of this passage:

1. If Ephesians is, as I have argued (along with the early church fathers such as Origen, and contemporary scholars such as Douglas Campbell – here) the center and summary of Paul’s gospel, then Ephesians 6 as a summary of all that Paul has said in Ephesians, encapsulates Paul’s understanding of how the gospel works to defeat evil and bring about salvation (as I demonstrate below).[5] As Joshua Greever notes, Romans 13:12–14 is a parallel text, in which Paul urges Christians to “put on the armor of light” (13:12), but then follows this up in 13:14 with “put on the Lord Jesus Christ,” “suggesting that putting on the armor of light is nothing other than putting on the Lord Jesus.”[6] In other words, by encouraging them to put on this armor Paul is urging them once again to “put on Christ” and is summarizing his gospel with the added urgency to do this and thus defeat the powers.

2. Paul’s gospel is built upon resistance to evil. The genius of Walter Wink is in recognizing (and one could point to the failure of theologians such as David Hart and John Milbank, who both eloquently describe a peaceful ontology but fail to recognize) what Wink calls the third way of the gospel. This third way is not nonresistance or violent resistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil. As Wink writes, “Jesus is not telling us to submit to evil, but to refuse to oppose it on its own terms. We are not to let the opponent dictate the methods of our opposition. He is urging us to transcend both passivity and violence by finding a third way, one that is at once assertive and yet nonviolent.”[7] Christ does not promote passive resistance or violent resistance, but Christ offers the singular solution – the gospel.

3. In Ephesians 6:10-19, Paul is describing salvation. Salvation defeats evil in the form of the powers of this world and the only way these powers are defeated is through the means provided by God. Taking Ephesians as a whole and Ephesians six, in particular, as descriptive of salvation, means salvation is not deliverance from God but deliverance from the cosmic powers of evil, death, and the devil. The captivating power, the darkening power, the death dealing power, is not the power of God but the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers (the cosmocrats), the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (6:12). The cosmic struggle is not removed from the historical, political, and earthly, and so too, the Christian engages these spiritual forces through their earthly manifestations. Ideologies and institutions manifesting the various forms of individual and corporate violence and oppression (e.g., nationalism, fascism, racism, sexism, legalism) constitute the cosmos of darkness. There is no mystery as to the power of evil (this power of death and violence is the coin of the realm of the kingdoms of darkness) undone by the gospel of peace, truth, and righteousness.

That the mode of this salvation is provided by God is made clear in the armor passages Paul is echoing. The description of God’s armor in Isaiah (which Paul must be following) and God’s saving is Israel’s only hope: “And He saw that there was no man, And was astonished that there was no one to intercede;Then His own arm brought salvation to Him, And His righteousness upheld Him” (Is 59:16). God alone can accomplish this salvation and he alone has this armor.

Why can only God save? The obvious answer is in Paul’s depiction of the power of God (equated at 6:10 ff. with the armor) found (as he has explained) in Christ’s resurrection, ascension, and reign over the powers:

what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion (Eph 1:19–21).

Paul has explained the strength of the Lord and how believers appropriate this strength, thus his command to “be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might” (6:10) is a reiteration of the opening of the letter. It is through the gospel that God in Christ defeats death, and the powers that depend upon death. Christ is seated at the Father’s right hand in the heavenly place and this exaltation of Christ implies the disarming of all cosmic powers, and this disarming power is to be appropriated by each Christian.

4. Salvation involves a real-world defeat of the principalities and powers in the life of the believer. There is simultaneously the corporate empowerment (implying an army), but the focus in this passage is on the individual soldier. To state it most succinctly: to be saved is to be saved from the powers as outlined in the armor passage. This is inclusive of the thought (head), action (feet), and heart (breast) of the individual. The armor weaponizes the individual against the “fiery darts of the evil one” by creating a new plan of action (feet shod with the gospel of peace), a new world of thought (the head and mind transformed by the helmet of salvation), and a new ethic and worldview (the breast plate of righteousness and the belt of truth girding up the whole outfit). Defeating the powers, though it may not be a full explanation of salvation, is synonymous or at least synchronous with salvation in that the fulness of the gospel is required (with all of its positive benefits) to counteract, as Ephesians puts it, “the flaming arrows of the evil one” (Eph. 6:16).

Paul’s picture of salvation through the defeat of the powers focuses on the perspective of the individual soldier. This soldier has the resources of his Lord seated at the right hand of God, but he only sees the battle in the limited perspective of one directly engaged in warfare. It is only the commander on high who can survey the entire field of battle and he alone understands how this battle is to be won. One must trust that God is in control of history, as only the immediate warfare is in plain sight. The temptation is to judge this methodology ineffective and to replace the armor and weaponry of the gospel with the sword of state. The kenotic self-sacrificing power of the cross, the feet shod with the gospel of peace, the head protected by salvation, are unlikely strategies for victory by the standards of worldly power, so the soldier must have faith in his weapons and his commander or abandon the gospel. The final outcome is assured only in the eschaton.

[1] Nathan R. Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Eugene: Cascade, 2009) 7. Quoted in Jordan Wood, Assessing the “Constantinian Shift”: A Defense of the Theological Question, Presented at “For the Good of the Many”: Constantine and the Edict of Milan on Its 1700th Anniversary St. Louis, September 20, 2013.

[2] The description is from John Howard Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics,” in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984): 145. Quoted by Wood, 7.

[3] Wood, 7.

[4] Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources,” 137. Quoted in Wood, 4.

[5] Throughout his description of the armor, Paul is appealing to his former key points (a few examples must suffice): “the strength of his might” of 6:10 is defined by resurrection and ascension at 1:19; “put on the whole armor of God” has its parallel explanation at 4:24, “put on the new self”; “the schemes of the devil” (6:11) are explained at 4:14 as “deceitful schemes” and the Ephesians are warned “give no opportunity to the devil” at 4:27; the first three pieces of armor—peace, truth and righteousness (6:13-15) are defined earlier by Christ. Truth is directly equated with Jesus (4:21), and truth and righteousness are found in the one new man created and embodied in Christ (4:24; cf. 2:15), and the original preacher and resource of the gospel of peace is Jesus (2:17); the defeat of the rulers and authorities of 6:12 has been explained at 1:21, as Christ (resurrected and ascended) is far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, inclusive at 2:2 of the authoritative ruler of the air and at 3:10 the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. For an exhaustive list Joshua M. Greever, The Armor of God, the Gospel of Christ, and Standing Firm against the ‘Powers’ (Ephesians 6:10–20); [JBTS 5.1 (2020): 72–89].

[6] Ibid, 84.

[7] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (p. 101). Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.