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In this week’s briefing

Remember why the blood of the guillotine and gulag cry out, explore the purpose for our freedom, and discover why Northern reformers and Southern conservatives are better together.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference

Sometimes politics delivers the narcissism of small differences. And sometimes you get a divide as wide as the Grand Canyon.

Standing on one side that canyon on Valetine’s Day at the Munich Security Conference was U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Representing the Trump administration, Rubio sounded themes familiar to those who followed his failed 2016 challenge to Trump in the 2016 Republican primary:

We are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.

Rubio also struck a more conciliatory note than his colleague and potential 2028 rival, Vice President J. D. Vance, at the same event in 2025. Alluding to last year’s fallout, Rubio said:

We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline. We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history.

Whatever the differences between Rubio and Vance they don’t come close to the chasm between them and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. At the same event this year, Ocasio-Cortez offered a familiar, contrasting view of the West:

Over the last five years, we’ve seen such a breaking and such a fraying of these alleged Western values that people wonder if it ever existed in the first place. So, I don’t know if it’s necessarily that we were in a post, if we are in a post rules-based order. I think it’s possible that we were in a pre-rules-based order. And we have an opportunity to explore what a world would look like if we upheld democracy, human rights, trade that actually centers working-class people instead of accruing overwhelmingly the benefits of trade to the wealthiest.

I’m not sure if Ocasio-Cortez is referring to a breakdown related to COVID-19 or something else within the last five years. Whatever events she has in mind, she’s not making a new argument. As Allen Guelzo and James Hankins write in volume two of their brand new textbook The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, “In recent decades, the Western past has been widely condemned and even held in contempt, and surprisingly often from a position of near-total ignorance. Voices from outside and inside the Western tradition have condemned Westerners as oppressors, imperialists, colonizers, and appropriators.”

Problem is, Ocasio-Cortez isn’t speaking out of ignorance. The Munich Security Conference would have adjourned before she finished recounting the innumerable offenses against humanity committed over centuries in the West and in the name of Western values. Neither side claims perfection. But the sides split over what to foreground and background.

A few years ago a friend reading Howard Zinn asked me to describe the American political divide. I said the most basic divide is between those who think the United States is and has been basically good with some bad exceptions, or basically bad with some good exceptions. You could say the same of the West.

But there’s another, wider divide. If we agree that we want a fair and just world for all (which is itself a Western value owing especially to Christianity), how do we achieve it? By reaching back into the Western tradition for inspiration and direction? Or by working toward a new order?

Given the litany of Western sins, the promise of a new order always appeals. The Western tradition has often been challenged from within, especially since the 18th century when the United States kicked off the Age of Revolutions that spread to France in the 19th century and then to Russia in the 20th century.

The true test of the Western tradition is how it handles conflict and failure. How did the United States build a nation without dissolving into endless factions, a nation that has endured for almost 250 years? The founders reached backed into the Western tradition. One century later, how did Abraham Lincoln save the republic from itself and its original sin of slavery? Look at his Second Inaugural Address. He reached back into the Western tradition. Another century later, how did Martin Luther King Jr. save the country from another civil war when the promise of civil rights had been denied? Look at his Letter from Birmingham Jail. He reached back into the Western tradition.

Now again, we sense how with the widespread decline of Christianity across the West, democracy lacks solidarity. We’re standing on opposite sides of the canyon. How can we come together once more and move forward toward justice for all with malice toward none?

Perhaps we could build a new order with new rules that would benefit everyone? That way madness lies, to borrow from one of the Western tradition’s greatest bards. The blood of the guillotine and gulag cries out.

As utopian alternatives have proven, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Christianity has chastened the Western tradition with a sensibility that accounts for sin even as it hopes toward holiness. To borrow from one of the Western tradition’s greatest statesmen, “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” It’s not perfect. But Western civilization has been a force for good.

COLLIN HANSEN

Editor in Chief

How Your Church Witnesses to the World

Collin Hansen • Bob Thune

When we receive applications for fellows at The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, we ask them to answer the question “What’s the most important thing Christians should do right now to introduce their neighbors to Jesus?”

It’s not that we think there’s only one answer. It’s that we want them to identify the top priority. Last year, we were surprised when every applicant gave the same answer. They talked about the public witness of gathered Christians, the church.

Maybe they were responding to negative press about the church, going back 25 years to the Catholic abuse scandal at the same time the internet became ubiquitous. Or maybe they were expressing renewed appreciation for the gathered church after the COVID-era shutdowns and public disorder. Either way, they were going back to a biblical concept rooted in Israel’s testimony to the nations, and the early church in the book of Acts that found favor with all.

Bob Thune is a fellow for The Keller Center and writes about this ecclesial apologetics in a chapter for our new book, The Gospel After Christendom: An Introduction to Cultural Apologetics (Zondervan Reflective). He’s also a featured teacher in an exciting new video small-group curriculum called Making Sense of Us, published by The Gospel Coalition and The Keller Center. His session, recorded against the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty in New York City, covers the cultural narrative we tell each other in the modern West about liberty.

Bob’s friend and fellow Nebraskan, former Senator Ben Sasse, picked up a similar theme in his interview last week with the Hoover Institution. “Freedom from certain kinds of restraint is really important, but it’s to get to the freedom to questions,” said Sasse, who turned 54 this week amid an advanced bout with pancreatic cancer. Sasse pointed out that with AI promising world-changing advances to our information age, we don’t lack for knowledge. We’re not lacking for resources. We lack meaning and purpose. We don’t know what it’s all for.

We believe this curriculum can help you, especially young adults, to both evangelize and edify as you consider these big questions. When you watch and study with other church members, and even non-Christians, you can learn together about the Bible’s better story about liberty, which we live out together in the church.

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union

Richard Carwardine

Never before or since have evangelicals wielded so much influence in American history than 1860. You’ll probably recognize that date as the year South Carolina seceded from the Union, the first domino that fell into the catastrophe of Civil War.

Richard Carwardine of Oxford University is one of the world’s pre-eminent historians of the United States and a specialist on the Antebellum period, Abraham Lincoln, and evangelicals. While distinguished historians such as Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch have extensively documented this period, I don’t think evangelicals widely understand how these events still affect us. The sectional divisions between Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians in the 1840s and 1850s not only contributed to the later Civil War but also dug the divides over race and politics that still afflict us.

Carwardine identifies competing national visions: a Northern reform streak, and a Southern conservative streak. Having lived on both sides of this divide, I’m often translating the sections to each other. Carwardine writes about Southern evangelicals, “It is hard to overstate wartime Democrats’ bitterness at what they cast as Protestant Republicans’ dictatorial temperament, galling assumption of superior morality, and self-righteous interference in the lives of others.” Indeed, I would go so far as to define Southern identity as opposition to this Northern superiority and interference.

As I met with church leaders last week in Chicago, I shared a few reasons why we’re better together. We need both impulses, to reform and conserve. On its own the conservative impulse has sometimes called good what God’s Word condemns as evil (slavery and segregation). On its own the reform impulse has done the same (by undermining scriptural authority, including with sexuality).

One reason I advocate for The Gospel Coalition’s convening work is that we bring together evangelical leaders across these divided denominations, across these sectional differences. Some of our leaders incline toward reform. They’re quick to point out where our actions don’t yet match God’s Word. Others include toward conserving. They’re quick to remind us where we need to defend God’s Word against the world’s attacks.

We need each other. We’re better together.

Next week on Unseen Things

Michael Keller helps us see the stories we live by.