Thursday Club members - please enjoy this week's note from the Editors on the relationship between Church and State.
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Midterm elections are coming up, which means that many Americans will be voting. And many Christians, presumably, will be voting as well. So I thought it would be a good time to discuss one of the most important topics in modernity: what is the relationship between Church and State? And how should Christians vote? In many ways, these two questions form the bedrock of this publication. We started The Paradox Press because, in our estimation, we couldn't find a living soul within the broader Protestant Church who was able to articulate a cohesive and clear relational dynamic between politics and Christianity. Thus, we began the investigation which we called The Paradox Press.
Before I begin, I want to be clear: there are many Catholics who have been able to construct a vision for conservative politics that I think is both biblical and politically practical. Men like Dr. Patrick Deneen and the postliberals, Dr. Dale Ahlquist, and even Dr. Robert P. George (whom I disagree with on some issues, but who nonetheless has a thorough political philosophy) have been able to crack the political code and set forth volumes of articulated political philosophy that remain biblically faithful and politically savvy. And I appreciate that. As for Protestants—there’s much less to see here. In the past 100 years there are a handful of people who have made an attempt. Men like J. Gresham Machen and Francis Schaeffer were able to speak politically and prophetically—but even they never really laid out a philosophical politics. The closest we Protestants have gotten to a legitimate political philosophy is Doug Wilson and Stephen Wolfe in their disastrous eschatological catastrophe called “Christian Nationalism,” which is only nihilistic “will to power” manipulation wrapped in Christian language.
