With such impiety pervading the human race, and the State threatened with destruction, what relief did God devise? … I myself was the instrument he chose . . . Thus, beginning at the remote Ocean of Britain, where the sun sinks beneath the horizon in obedience to the law of Nature, with God’s help I banished and eliminated every form of evil then prevailing, in the hope that the human race, enlightened through me, might be recalled to a proper observance of God’s holy laws.
Constantine the Great, quoted by Eusebius, /De Vita Constantini,/II, 28
Rod Dreher recently wondered what exactly the post-liberal right wants. I’ve been wondering this myself. As an orthodox Christian who has observed the last decade with horror, where every institution seems to have aligned against me in a suicidal logic, I’ve been feeling around for answers.
There is a growing voice on the right making the case that the solution isn’t minor adjustments to a system that is fundamentally healthy but that we are seeing the fruits of late-stage liberalism. They argue that because liberalism is a virtueless framework (I.E. freedom and tolerance are as much vices as virtues) it creates a moral void for all sorts of evil and madness to fill. The liberal project must be replaced with a project that puts virtue at the core.
The critique of liberalism is hard to deny. If liberalism can only be sustained through an increasingly authoritarian oligarchy, if the end is woke tyranny, then liberalism as a system should be abandoned. And the level of doublethink required to deny that we are living in a tyranny is getting harder and harder to sustain. The system we’ve created is fundamentally unjust, self destructive, and perverted.
That’s where Dreher raises an excellent question: So if liberalism doesn’t work, what system does? To end the institutionalized perversion, do we also need to knock down liberal pillars like freedom of speech, academic liberty, rule of law, religious pluralism? Does the post-liberal right really want a Caesar?
No, is the obvious answer.
They want a Constantine.
A Constantinian future
The reasons Constantine adopted and championed Christianity as the religion of the Empire are complex but it’s hard to miss that Christianity rose to political prominence after a period of anarchy where the empire was increasingly destabilized from without and within. It’s even harder to miss that Christianity was the thing that preserved the treasures of civilization as the Empire crumbled around it.
An American Constantine would be a tyrant that established a broad civic Christianity as the religion of the land and the Torah as the law of the land. The levers of institutional power would be used to promote Christian social values as they are currently used to promote woke social values. It would use the power of the sword to reorient business, the academy, and media towards the promotion of virtue.
Dreher is highly skeptical of the idea (as am I) that secularizing America would welcome a Constantinian tyranny, much less tolerate it for a second. But it is also worth noting that pagan Rome did just that. If a system becomes unstable enough, you can see drastic changes in short periods of time.
Consider what will happen when the boomers and gen-xers are all dead along with their fondness for classical liberalism? Do we really think the coming generation will take up the mantle of liberalism? Do the fragile legions that populate Twitter and TikTok seem capable of self-government? Tyranny is coming, one way or another.
If history is truly cyclical, if all democracies turn to tyranny and eventually crumble under their own weight, and if God is merciful, then it seems like a new Constantine would be a good outcome.
At least a better outcome than another Nero.
Should we welcome a Constantine?
This is where I start to feel deeply uncomfortable. This entire exercise feels like cutting off my nose to spite my face. Wouldn’t it be far better if we became a virtuous people that was once again capable of self-government? If liberalism is a treasure that can only welded by the strong, then it seems better to grow strong then throw away the treasure.
Yes. One hundred times, yes.
A new Constantine would be a disaster that likely would destroy much of what the right holds dear as much as the left. Consider what sort of civic Christianity might an American Constantine institutionalize? Would it be Baptist? Catholic? Presbyterian? Mormon? What would happen to us minor Christian bodies, like my church the Lutherans, who came to American to escape religious unification at the point of the sword? What about the devout Catholics, who have always been outsiders in American culture? What about the non-Christian devout, such as the Orthodox Jews or Muslims?
The arrival of a Constantine might be as much a judgement against the faithful as the faithless.
There must be a better way. But the post-liberals are right about one thing: We’re running out of time to find it.
In many ways, I feel like we are a house that is deeply in debt and we haven’t yet reckoned with the fact that the creditors are coming to collect. “Summers just won’t be the same without our trip to the Caribbean, I need this home gym to stay fit, I watched my children grow up in this yard,” we say as if that changes anything. The bills are coming due.
If we want to keep these precious things, we need to figure out how.