Perhaps our moment in American history is leading Christians to recognize that while they can and should continue to engage a more general public culture, and to participate in it in various ways (helping people, laughing with people, enjoying the company of others in diverse settings), I think that it is no longer wise to make (or feel) themselves responsible for this culture as a whole or its public life. Life issues should continue to inspire vigorous intervention (on questions of life and death like abortion and euthanasia and torture, some form of public advocacy whether within and without the political realm cannot be optional). On a variety of other issues, however, community consensus is clearly moving away from Christian sensibilities and imperatives towards a kind of strange philosophically liberal mysticism (see preceding post). The attempt to arrest or reverse this movement has not only not been successful, it has often embroiled Christians in some very dubious alliances in which their own goals were not met or even advanced, even as their support was used by others for distinctly non-Christian ends.
It may be that a kind of partial divergence of ways is coming that requires Christians to live in a larger culture that is quite explicitly distinct from their own, as they did for several centuries in late Antiquity, or as fairly large Christian communities did in the Islamic world for hundreds of years. Christian life and the example of Christian living can burn bright, sustain itself, and more than that, flourish. But increasingly, the idea of Christendom (even in its quite reticent and minimalist American form), is no longer tenable. To return to the posts of the last couple days, I think in various ways Father Neuhaus thought that individual voters, persuaded of the rightness of Christian ideas, could elect (in a couple different senses of the world) to restore a traditional notion of a broad, tacit American Christendom. The last eight years should teach Christians something about the costs of pursuing that end in direct political terms, and its real prospects for success in a postmodern culture.
