Ordered Liberty under God
by Douglas C. Minson
God and Politics in the Fallen World by Robert P. Kraynak
To identify any particular form of government with Christianity is a dangerous error: for it confounds the permanent with the transitory, the absolute with the contingent.... Those who consider that a discussion of the nature of a Christian society should conclude by supporting a particular form of political organization, should ask themselves if they really believe our form of government to be more important than our Christianity. -T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian SocietyThe end of the Cold War has brought in its wake an unrestrained enthusiasm for liberal democracy, even among Christians who had previously maintained an agnostic stance toward any particular political system. Seemingly forgotten are the voices of those tutored under the dehumanizing lash of communism, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, even as they embraced the West, expressed significant concerns about modern democratic liberalism. Perhaps the only consistent opposition to global liberalism remaining may be that of the Islamic states, whose reservations are understandably receiving little sympathy these days.
If Robert P. Kraynak’s Christian Faith and Modern Democracy did nothing more than exhume and reiterate the critique of liberalism by such thinkers as Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Eric Voegelin, and Solzhenitsyn himself, it would be well worth reading. And this much the book certainly does. Kraynak skillfully dismantles the illusory neutrality of liberalism, which in reality “promotes its vision of the Good Life with all the weapons of cultural hegemony and state power.” The book serves as a welcome reminder that a robust social pluralism is incompatible with the totalizing and homogenizing force of the modern welfare state. But Kraynak’s project is significantly more ambitious.
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Read more: www.imaginativeconservative.org
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