Michael F. Bird

A Christian Case for Liberty, Equality, and Secular Government

Religious Freedom in a Secular Age

Sean Wilson

This was not a good book.

1. The book was not absolutely void of references to Scripture or theological principle, but it wasn’t much more than that. Scripture says a lot about politics and the civil order, and many of our fathers have turned their minds to these questions, but little engagement can be found with them here. 

2. The main argument is that Christendom was so bad that benign secular government is our only feasible choice. This is by no means self-evident and should have been defended rather than assumed. However, Bird generally appeals to the “End of History” assumptions which most of us living have grown up with some version of.

3. It isn’t clear what Bird wants Christians to do with “earthly power”. He is critical of the religious right for pursuing power to achieve their own ends, but he later exhorts Christians “to be ‘in the room where it happens’… and aspire to positions where we can be a positive influence and a positive role model in the world.”

4. The conclusions Bird comes to fall out necessarily from the way he has loaded his definitions. Because Christendom/theocracy is defined as a Bad Thing (“religious fanatics bent on realising their own political eschatologies through violence and oppression”) its flaws are always evidence of its inherent badness. However, he is happy to subdivide secularism into benign and militant forms. When secularism goes to seed, Bird simply distinguishes the benign version from the militant version, and advocates that we roll back a little bit to the benign version from a few years ago. But this is like saying that stage 3 cancer never killed anyone. Bird doesn’t see that militant secularism is not benign secularism that has lost its way, but is rather benign secularism that has come to maturity.

5. Bird mischaracterises Luther’s two kingdoms. Luther’s two kingdoms were concerned with the “inner” kingdom (i.e., the realm of the conscience), and the “outer” kingdom. In Luther’s schema, the church was a “common kingdom” polity as well. What Bird describes is much more like the modern Escondido version than what Luther advocated.

6. Bird makes a “brutally honest” concession towards the end that political pluralism is “not conducive to public unity”. This appears to me a fatal blow to his main thesis: Bird believes that benign secularism is an inherently unstable foundation for a social order, and it is never very far from metastasising into its dystopian militant form… but we must pursue it. It’s the principle of the thing. 

There is a lot of very provocative and interesting writing these days about various postliberal options from a number of perspectives, but this is not one of the stronger entries.

I would encourage kings everywhere to continue to kiss the Son as per the existing arrangement.

Religious Freedom in a Secular Age A Christian Case for Liberty, Equality, and Secular Government

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