How Christians should engage in public life has been debated since at least Augustine’s The City of God. Over the centuries some believers have put too much hope in governments while others have wrongly spurned them altogether. Threading the needle between these extremes, which are often presented as a false dichotomy, is never easy, yet it is an important part of the Christian life.
Recently the church’s consciousness has been occupied with this question. It has been the subject of, and inspiration for, numerous articles and even contentious debate, in which various parties have offered different diagnoses and remedies pertaining to Christian political involvement in a nation caught in a fast-flowing current of cultural malaise.
One recent title that seeks to identify the source of this malaise and explore its potential remedies, is Jake Meador’s In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World. Whereas many writers have focused on the steady rise of an intolerant secularism—manifested in the loosening of sexual mores—Meador, the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy and vice president of the Devanant Institute, goes deeper, addressing the root problem, of which the latest iteration of secularism is merely one offshoot.
Meador looks to post-war Paris and the cafes lining the Seine where philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir “held court” and developed and refined the philosophy that has come to define the modern west. In describing their work and the modernist narrative, Meador writes, “…the existentialist story is one of liberation, of how people can be free from unjust and unchosen norms imposed on them against their will.”
Our culture’s commitment to existentialism’s self-defining powers corrupts nearly everything it touches. Meador explains that in existentialism, “love necessarily becomes a zero-sum competition…and so our love ends up being consumptive in nature.” Consumptive love in turn begets a host of negative manifestations, including distrust, broken relationships, fractured communities and a loneliness epidemic that is crippling the west.
Meador offers vivid illustrations of how existentialism and consumptive love play themselves out in our culture today. He compares Tinder to Amazon: “Here is a picture. Do you want to consume this person?” He references the term “deaths of despair”—the rising number of suicides and deaths caused by drug overdose and alcoholism—due in part to the loss of meaning and awe that has become prevalent in tandem with existentialism. These deaths of despair have ravaged whole communities, West Virginia in particular, where over a six-year period 780 million painkillers were sold in the state, has been rocked by their destructive effects.
Our work too has become hollowed and distant. Many of our best and brightest are encouraged to sacrifice relational pleasure on the altar of career success. Meador laments just how far apart home, community and work have become. He rhetorically asks, “What if there are higher goods than machine like efficiency?”
Indeed, Meador’s portrait of our culture is bleak. But as noted, he frames the problems facing our society not in terms of “an ascendant secularism prepared to batter Christianity into oblivion. It is rather one of a comprehensive social breakdown that leaves no corner of life untouched, no person immune to its effects.” The difference between Meador’s diagnosis and the one suggested by many others is important, for without a proper diagnosis a cure is nearly impossible.
Unfortunately, both the Catholic and Protestant church have been complicit. Priests who consume young parishioners and pastors who are embroiled in extramarital scandals that have plagued our congregations in recent decades are hardly an advertisement for Christian fidelity. Meador also remarks on evangelicalism’s regrettable and unhealthy obsession with political power, often at the expense of true service and self-sacrifice.
In a rather witty part of the book, Meador quotes Ugandan priest and scholar Emmanuel Katongole, who, when considering the oft-asked question of why the political system had failed so spectacularly in post-colonial Africa, retorted, “What makes you think it has failed?” He went on to explain, “Chaos, war, and corruption are not indications of a failed institution: they are ingrained in the very imagination of how nation-state politics work.”
Meador interprets this idea, writing, “rampant civil war, economic inequality, and failing public institutions…may be proof that the existing political institutions have done what they were designed to do.” He then extrapolates this logic onto the church. Given that the church has been designed to grow by creating a seeker-sensitive—and, one might add, shallow—atmosphere and securing power through an unqualified alliance with the Republican party, Meador quips that, “evangelicalism has succeeded spectacularly, if by succeed you mean do what it was designed to do.” The implications of Meador’s appraisal are clear: without deep change to the way evangelicals live our their faith, we cannot hope to achieve the fruit of righteousness we are called to.
Though Meador doesn’t unpack the full breadth of his prescribed remedy until the book’s second half, he hints at it early on. “A simple life of work and prayer in a particular place among a beloved people is all that God’s people need aspire to,” he explains. In unpacking this vision, Meador writes poetically on the value of hidden fidelity and faith as a decidedly political act. He rejects an ineffectual pietism or bland centrism, but rather sees the smuggling of Sabbath peace and rest into the “factory” as an act of defiance and a key way to break out of our individualistic ways. For some this might mean pursuing holiness and rest at the expense of career advancement and material wealth.
Those familiar with Wendell Berry will feel at home in the second half of Common Good. Meador draws from the distinguished author at length in calling for a recovery of “the membership.” The membership as Meador describes it is “the idea that we do not exist in the world as lonely, alienated individuals, but as embodied creatures made by the same God who made the rivers and the animals and the mountains and the oceans… the world has an order to it, that we are a part of that order, and that the order is far larger than we are.”
To more fully illustrate “the membership,” Meador quotes a beautiful passage from Berry’s Jayber Crow, in which he describes the character Athey Kieth: “He was the farm’s farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life, and it lived his; he knew that, of the two lives, his was meant to be the smaller and the shorter.”
Meador offers a thorough vision for how Christians must approach work if they are to subvert an economy that does not promote local places’ health and life. Good work must be ordered toward life and sacramental, communicating love. It is not merely what one does for a paycheck, unmotivated and unattached to the people and place where the work is done. The threat of automation and the frustration of work in general in the age of sin, makes this perhaps Meador’s most challenging prescription, though also perhaps the most important.
Throughout the book, Meador weaves tales of his life in his native Nebraska, and in Minnesota, where he proposed to his wife. Rather than distracting from his important message, these glimpses into his life—a life that adheres to its preaching—humanizes Meador’s message and reveals that it is possible for Christians to live rooted, faithful, publicly-engaged lives in modern America.
While many will continue to preach a gospel that relies on political power, and others will reject all attempts at faithful, Christian political engagement in favor of secluded communities, Common Good calls us to something more, something beautiful: a life marked at once by a “holy indifference to power,” yet seeking to faithfully serve its community through patiently-cultivated humility and wisdom, through hidden fidelity and constancy. Meador has lived this life, knows its power, and now, has shared it with others.