“When churches render God morally harmless, they abandon the public world to power.”

Robert Jenson on the Moral Corrosion of Our Politics

“The attempt to render Christianity morally harmless is, one fears, hopeless: it only makes Christianity so generally harmless as to be no sort of use to anyone. Thus if Western society should turn out to be irrevocably Christian or nothing, then in this connection also modernity has dissolved its own foundations.”

I recently got my hands on a little essay Robert Jenson wrote for the Trinity Seminary Review’s summer issue in 1996, “Modernity’s Undermining of Its Own Foundations.” Prescient as always, Jens names our national moment with uncomfortable theological precision, and he does so without indulging our cultural or mourning a lost Christendom. What we have come to call “post-modernity,” Jenson argues, is not a stage beyond modernity but the moment when modernity has finally triumphed, a victim of its own internal logic. In other words, post-modernity succeeded in dissolving the very foundations it required to function at all; consequently, we now inhabit a culture that floats without visible means of support. In the absence of those foundations, our culture is sustained by vaccuous slogans, cruel irony, and ultimately force.

Jenson locates this collapse in three modern foundations:

1. Autonomous ethics

2. Antinomian religion

3. Reduction of reason to problem-solving.

Each of these, Jenson insists, arose from real historical pressures. Together they have produced neither tolerance nor freedom but moral exhaustion. It is Jenson’s account of antinomian religion, I think, that most clearly illuminates our present political moment, marked by the brutalizing of citizens and immigrants and the steady normalization of state violence.

I don’t believe it makes me a conservative to posit that modernity wagered that society could sustain moral order without shared worship or shared hope. After the wars of religion, elites concluded— understandably— that grounding public life in historically specific faith was too dangerous. Morality would have to stand on its own. Jens insists this was always an illusion. The apparent moral consensus of early modern Europe was hardly evidence that ethics could float free of religion; in fact, it was the residue of Christian formation still quietly at work.

Once Christian worship and hope were progressively severed from public life, the moral habits they sustained began to erode.

We now live the consequence of their consensus.

If the law is revelation, then moral judgment, Jenson argues, can never be not self-generating. To say “this is good” or “this is evil” already assumes that human life has coherence— that our lives are more than sheer succession. As Stanley Hauerwas says, our lives are more than “one damn thing after another.” For it to be true, moral reasoning always presupposes some “horizon of eternity,” some reality that gathers the fragments of time into a meaningful whole (“I will be your God and you will be my people.”) Once you strip ethics of the horizon that makes it intelligible, judgment withers. The Beatitudes are only compelling if you believe the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount is the logic of the universe; otherwise, appeals to them are but another empty slogan, as easily dispatched as “Make America Great Again.”

After ethics has been removed of its horizon of eternity, what remains is not moral disagreement but paralysis.

In the absence of shared moral foundations, Jenson argues that modern societies default to rights discourse. Remarkably, Jenson treats this not as progress but as a symptom of our paralysis. Rights language asserts claims but cannot distinguish a genuine right from a mere want once it has been severed from an account of the good in light of the Good.

Someone must decide whose rights count and whose do not.

And when moral judgment has been evacuated, this decision will not be made by argument but by power.

While Jenson cites abortion specifically, the logic to which he points also underwrites our present political condition. When federal officers kill civilians during enforcement actions, when immigrants are dehumanized, brutalized, or terrorized in the name of administrative necessity, public debate rarely turns on moral reasoning. Instead, it retreats into procedural defenses, jurisdictional disputes, or abstract appeals to authority and law and order. That is, violence is justified not as good but as necessary.

Power no longer seeks moral legitimacy.

It simply imposes itself through “enforcement.”

This is precisely the outcome Jenson foresaw. When moral reasoning collapses, politics does not become neutral. It becomes coercive. Force rushes in to do the work morality has been forbidden to do.

If autonomous ethics dissolves moral judgment in the public square, antinomian (literally, being a law unto oneself) religion dissolves it from within the church. Modernity suspected that religion, when it makes moral claims, is socially divisive. The solution was to cultivate a religion that either mandates only the least controversial norms or, increasingly, mandates nothing at all. The result, says Jenson, is antinomian religion: churches rich in ritual and language but emptied of binding moral command. God becomes the guarantor of affirmation rather than the giver of law. “Legalism” and “Judgmentalism” become the unforgivable sins.

Just so, love is severed from obedience.

Agreement about what God has done is said to free believers from agreement about how we ought to live.

But this is not grace, Jenson argues.

It is abdication.

Moreover, it both splits the Trinity and separates the person and work of Jesus Christ

When churches render God morally harmless, they abandon the public world to power. They leave the state unchallenged precisely where it most needs challenge—where it exercises violence without moral justification. A church that cannot speak about how we ought to live in the everyday cannot speak intelligibly about justice in extraordinary times. Thus the brutalization of citizens and immigrants is not merely a policy failure; it is the predictable fruit of a culture that has abandoned moral judgment while retaining coercive power. Rights discourse, Jenson says, without moral substance becomes a tool of enforcement. Appeals to legality replace arguments about justice. Violence is normalized because no shared moral horizon remains by which to judge it.

Antinomian religion does not resist this development.

It sanctifies it by silence.

Jenson offers no program for renewal and no fantasy of return. Modernity cannot be revived, and post-modernity is not a solution. Ours is simply the time in which modernity’s emptiness has become undeniable. However— nevertheless! What remains is the church— stripped of cultural privilege and forced to reckon with a world that no longer knows why moral language should matter. The church’s calling is not to rescue modern politics or baptize its slogans.

The church’s vocation is to bear witness.

• Against nihilism, the church must insist that good and evil are real.

• Against antinomianism, it must confess that the God who has saved us is the same God who has revealed to us commandments, Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim.

• And against a politics increasingly ruled by force and even more brutal rhetoric— precisely because it has abandoned moral reasoning— the church must dare to speak of eternity, not as escape from history but as the only horizon within which history can be judged at all.

Jenson leaves us without reassurance but not without clarity. Per his title, modernity has undone itself. Whether God will grant our culture a new foundation remains hidden. What is not hidden is the church’s task: to speak and live truthfully in a world that no longer knows why truth should bind us together at all.

As Jenson ends his essay:

“In the West, those who no longer believe metaphysics nourished by Christianity do not thereupon get along without general interpretations of the world; they instead become persons who can believe anything at all.”