Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
Welcome to Zooming In. I'm Berny Belvedere, senior editor of The UnPopulist. I'm joined today by Raymond R. Roberts, author of A Democratic and Republican Faith, a theologically serious and hopeful book that recovers what authentic Christian faith actually demands of its adherents, at precisely the moment when so much of American Christianity has lost the plot.
On this episode, we discuss what a genuinely God-centered public theology looks like, why MAGA evangelicalism represents a profound departure from it, and what it might take to find our way back.
We hope you enjoy.
This transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.
Berny Belvedere: Ray, I first met you at LibCon last year. We had a wonderful chat as the liberalism and religion breakout session was getting started. And it was really cool because it was an example of how events like that help connect liberals together to more effectively advance the cause. So here we are today having a conversation about a wonderful book you just wrote, and it might not have been possible had we not met at LibCon. So that was a really cool thing. I was happy to see you there. I hope you can make it this year.
Raymond Roberts: Absolutely. LibCon last year was excellent. Every program was inspiring. It was wonderful. Good people to network with and be encouraged by. So I hope I see a lot of folks this year. I’m planning to go back.
Belvedere: I want to start with Tocqueville. He makes an early appearance in your book—as he should. Tocqueville’s a natural place to start on this topic. What Tocqueville noticed when he visited America in the early 1800s was that its democracy was succeeding in a way that European watchers found utterly bewildering. And the explanation didn’t turn out to be a purely constitutional or legal one—it crucially also involved a cultural component. The churches were doing something. They were producing a specific kind of person: someone who can exhibit republican sensibilities, someone imbued with a moral vocabulary, with a sense of civic duty, with a capacity for equality. And you cite the term Tocqueville gave for this, which is: “a democratic and republican faith.”
You do a great job of helping us see how far we’ve fallen from that ideal. Bringing it forward to our own day, you write: “Today, this heritage is at risk. Mainstream Protestant churches are in disarray. They have lost significant numbers of members, and the cultural resources they once helped replenish have eroded. Without these resources to help Americans work through their differences and lend legitimacy to republican government and civil rights, democracy teeters.”
In a second, I want you to walk me through why democracy is negatively impacted by Protestant churches being in disarray. I do want you to walk me through that—I think it’s a very important point. But first, I want you to tell me why you chose the term “disarray.” It was a deliberate choice. You considered other descriptors to capture the church’s current state of being, but you landed on disarray. Political junkies will instantly recognize that from the “Dems in Disarray” headline trope. But you’re saying “Protestants are in disarray”—or, rather, closer to your argument, “the Protestant churches are in disarray.” And you’re including Evangelicals in that category of mainstream Protestants. What are those other terms that didn’t get chosen, and why did you choose “disarray” as the most accurate description?
Roberts: One way to talk about what’s happened is through the decline of mainline Protestantism. The decline in members, in giving, in the number of churches—decline in the institutions, as they’ve lost funding and closed. So, there’s been a decline.
“I do think that our conception of sin has eroded, even in the church. I don’t think we have a strong, robust understanding of sin. For a while, sin became identified with peccadillos rather than seeing it as the chronic human failure that happens over and over and whose results are always bad. And it’s not just about individuals—it’s also about groups. There’s a reason the Founders said that the legislative branch—which is more accountable to the people—should determine how to raise revenue, how to spend, and that they should declare war. Not the executive branch. It seems to me that we need to recover an understanding of the chronic human fault. Because if we can’t, I don’t see how we move back to a place where the Republic is on firmer ground.” — Raymond Roberts
Another way it gets talked about is disestablishment. People in the church especially talk about: “We’re disestablished, we’re outside looking in now. We used to own the culture.”
People who talk like I do sometimes get accused of pining for the old days, but my own sense is that the Protestant church has been in a kind of disarray. It has not adapted well to changes in the culture. Some changes probably needed to happen, but we no longer have effective institutions that transmit the faith to the new generation. We’re not keeping our kids. We no longer have effective institutions for communicating our ideas to others and solidifying a conversational base.
It’s a complicated story about how we reached this point. But I think “disarray” is a more helpful way to talk about it because it suggests that we need to get our act together—and that we could get our act together. If we were more effective at forming disciples, sharing our ideas, communicating even with our own members—I think that would go a long way. It won’t bring back the days of yore, and I don’t think that’s possible or even desirable. But it might help the mainline church—which has historically been a keeper of democratic and republican values—be effective again in sharing those values in ways that bleed outside the church into the broader culture.
Belvedere: You have these Three Ds as possible explanatory diagnoses. You have decline, disestablishment, and disarray. “Disarray” captures the true state of the church in its chaotic erosion. The others don’t quite grasp the predicament the way that “disarray” does. Is that your thinking?
Roberts: Yes, and I would say that “disestablishment” really does name something about the way the church … back in the 1950s, when there were just a few radio networks and early television networks, the networks were viewed as belonging to the people, not to the networks. There was public service time that was demanded of the networks, and they gave a lot of that to mainline churches in recognition of their status in society. And then what happened, I think, is that as that recognition declined—as the sense [developed] that the airways belonged to the public [and needed to be] pulled back—the mainline church didn’t want to pay for [airtime]. And in fact, the Evangelicals who did were often caught up in financial scandals and message deterioration—saying crazy things just to get an audience. The National Council of Churches used to have an office dedicated to public media.
And, similarly, higher education. A lot of colleges were founded by churches to spread their ideas—the idea being that spreading ideas and training future leaders of society is a good way for those ideas to penetrate the culture. Over time those institutions became more secular. Some of the particularities of the faith were marginalized in light of an emphasis on freedom and tolerance and those sorts of values—which were, and I would argue are, Christian values. But then in the mid-century there was a great push by neo-Orthodox people—the likes of Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich—who, through the Federal Council of Churches and National Council of Churches, started campus ministry programs, started journals and magazines designed to show the intersection of faith and areas of human study. These things were going pretty well until about 1968, when the churches began pulling the plugs on their campus ministries because the campus ministers opposed the Vietnam War and were supporting civil rights—and the churches were not up for supporting that. It was a huge mistake, I think.
The disengagement from higher education is strategically devastating. That’s a time when people are choosing their vocation. It’s a time when they’re deciding their place in the world, figuring out what they’re called to do and to be and what they’re going to give their lives to. And for the church to just pull the plug on that stuff—it turned out exactly how you might expect. So we need to figure out how to reengage on those things.
Belvedere: So, [when looking at] the framework you’re offering for potential diagnoses of the problem: we might say that the “decline” option is the numbers narrative. Membership, money, the institutions themselves—these began hemorrhaging. “Disestablishment,” by contrast, locates the problem a little bit more externally—maybe the media and communications infrastructure no longer privileged mainline Protestantism’s voice. “Disestablishment” is a really interesting word. This is more of a “soft” disestablishment, [closer to] a “de-privileging.” [The Protestant church] was never established as the official church of the country. We don’t want to cede ground to the Christian nationalists and others who would make that affirmative claim. It’s more like: “You are no longer privileged, and that has eroded your social influence, or you haven’t been able to recover that social influence very easily.”
“For a long time, the mainline church has thought: ‘If we speak truth to power, we have done the work.’ And that’s not enough. We have to speak truth to people in a way that they find compelling. It’s in that formation of a thick theological vision—lived out in concrete ways, like the abolition movement, like the Progressive movement of the turn of the century, like the Social Gospel movement—I don’t think most Protestants know the history that we have here.” — Raymond Roberts
And then “disarray” locates the problem internally. What’s interesting about the disarray diagnosis is it’s the kind of thing where the church can get its act together and it’s under its control to do so, in a way that decline and disestablishment are largely not. We—and by “we” I mean Christians all over the country—can’t really do anything about whether membership goes down or whether media venues no longer want to carry certain messages. But what we can do is self-correct in certain important ways that would lead us out of disarray.
Roberts: Yes, I think that’s a good summary. It’s sometimes discussed as “cultural disestablishment”—it’s not formal legal establishment, but cultural. There’s probably no mainline thinker today who holds the kind of status that, say, Reinhold Niebuhr held at one point. Or Martin Marty—for years at University of Chicago he was somebody who was quoted continually. Stanley Hauerwas is probably the most recent person who has been something of a mainline spokesman, though his theology is really not mainline at all in a lot of ways. He’s very much a pacifist—a brilliant guy, contrarian, and funny as all get out. But I wouldn’t call him representative of the mainline project as historically understood. In fact, he’s critical of it. He thinks the church just sold out—that’s his take.
Belvedere: Let me stay on that theme for a second. Because there are a lot of liberals who are irreligious. There are a lot of liberals who find religion to be a problem, at least in many manifestations that we see in society and around the world. And [they] might wonder: “What’s the big problem with the church being in disarray? What really is the negative consequence there?”
I want to actually take a step back and answer that question. You have a short passage in your book that I think is really meaty and helpful. It’s short because you make it in passing, to move on to the next point, but I want to stop for a second because I think it most vividly captures what religion at its best can do for liberal society. You provided a list of the Protestant church’s achievements. And what’s striking is that when you inventory what the church has accomplished over the two centuries following Tocqueville’s visit—and I mainly have in mind civic accomplishments, not artistic or whatever else—the list is extraordinary in its breadth and ambition.
You brought up schools and colleges. Protestant denominations founded hundreds of institutions of higher ed across the country—not as a luxury or an afterthought, but as a deliberate strategy of civic formation. The idea was that training leaders for church and society was among the most effective ways to embed democratic values in the culture. They also developed publishing houses. Denominations invested heavily in producing materials—not just spiritual or devotional content, but ones that had a civic application. This was the information ecosystem of its era and mainstream Protestants were major players in it.
The abolitionist movement is another legacy. It drew on Protestant moral resources—the conviction that every human being bears the Imago Dei, the image of God, and that no political configuration can sanction the treating of another human being as mere property. Churches and church networks provided the infrastructure, the platforms, the speakers, even safe houses for some of this work. You mentioned missions to the unhoused and children’s homes for at-risk kids. Prison reform movements. Settlement houses for immigrants—as waves of immigrants arrived in America, Protestant-affiliated entities provided settlement houses that included educational components, too. Peace conferences. The Civil Rights Movement—that’s perhaps the one that least needs elaboration. We all know what it was, and we know how it’s indebted to Protestant theology—Black Protestant churches were the sites where this stuff got dreamed up.
If these are the things you have in mind that the mainstream Protestant churches in America helped deliver, and if that is no longer a significant source of reformist energy we can count on, then that is indeed a very big loss. The rest of your book grapples with that. Can you give me a big picture of what our way out of this mess looks like? How do we get religion supplying that animating impulse behind these things again?
Roberts: I think the church is going to have to be intentional about seeking to revitalize itself. It can’t just assume it will coast along. We’re going to have to invite people to take a theocentric perspective. We’re going to have to invite people to respect the dignity of other human beings in concrete ways. We just saw in New Jersey the other day people protesting the conditions under which immigrants are being kept. And the reason we should care about that is because they bear the image of God. If we believe that, we’ll have to speak up.
“Tocqueville made a distinction between democratic and republican religion and undemocratic religion. In France he saw that the priests were allied with the aristocracy and were not in tune with the movement towards freedom. In the South, he was critical of slaveowners. And throughout history we see forces of illiberal religion at work. It’s never simply that religion is good or bad. You’ve got to look at religion as always held by particular people at particular times—and it’s what they believed and what they did with it in the times they lived. And they sometimes were chafing against each other.” — Raymond Roberts
I keep repeating the word “invitation” because I do think there’s a chance here that we could make a course correction. In some ways the evangelicals made that course correction when they realized how disestablished they were back in the ’60s and ’70s. They built institutions for sharing their ideas. They built Liberty University. They understood that they needed to train people and that they needed to reach people.
For a long time, the mainline church has thought: “If we speak truth to power, we have done the work.” And that’s not enough. We have to speak truth to people in a way that they find compelling. It’s in that formation of a thick theological vision—lived out in concrete ways, like the abolition movement, like the Progressive movement of the turn of the century, like the Social Gospel movement—I don’t think most Protestants know the history that we have here. And it wasn’t just Protestants. Catholics also—Rerum Novarum, they have a Catholic social tradition as well. The work that the mainline church did around the Just and Durable Peace conferences in the 1930s, because they could see the world was headed to war and they wanted to figure out how to make it better—that was critical for the reconstruction after World War II. And we’re seeing today that those institutions are fraying and falling apart. That order is gone.
The church has to be theologically intentional. This is where I think Stanley Hauerwas is right—the church has taken for granted its own identity. It has almost assumed that to be a faithful person is to be a good American. In some ways I affirm that in the book. But I think that’s not going to be enough. You don’t need to go to church, you don’t need to listen to sermons, you don’t need to study the Bible, you don’t need to enter into conversation with people you disagree with in a Sunday school class and hash things out, if all you need to do is be a good American. There’s something more that we’re called to be. For Christians, it’s being called to be people of faith, followers of Christ. And we have to be way more intentional about that than we have been.
What I saw when I was a pastor in New Jersey is that a lot of folks think—when their kids are in high school—I want my kids to be good kids. That’s why they’re involved in sports on Sunday morning. And it was hard for the church to compete with that, because the sense of identity had been so merged with the culture. The church needs to once again claim that, “Yes, we have a distinct vision.” Our vision—this is where natural law comes in in my book—doesn’t mean that everybody else is wrong, or that we can’t learn from anybody else, or that like the Christian nationalists we have to control everything. It means that we can work with others. But we’ve got to recover that theological sense of who we are. It’s a generous sense, I think. Historically, the best of it has been generous.
Belvedere: You introduce a really helpful distinction that I want to briefly lay out—one that I think helps us find a way out of this, or at least understand what the church must at minimum be in order to retain its strong presence without eroding or becoming a shell of itself or becoming absorbed into the larger culture. That distinction is the one Michael Walzer makes when he distinguishes between thick and thin moral reasoning. I’ll come to that in a second.
But I just want to stay with Tocqueville for one more question. You quote John Adams in the book—he’s got this famous, or infamous, statement: “Our constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.” One of Tocqueville’s insights, though, was that religion isn’t always democratically beneficial. In France, he saw religion and the free society almost always pushing against each other. Tocqueville did like what he saw in early 19th-century America. But if you were to run his analysis today, what would he conclude about the forms of religious expression present in American Christianity today?
Roberts: That’s a very good question. He made a distinction between democratic and republican religion and undemocratic religion. In France he saw that the priests were allied with the aristocracy and were not in tune with the movement towards freedom. In the South, he was critical of slave owners. And throughout history we see forces of illiberal religion at work. It’s never simply that religion is good or bad. You’ve got to look at religion as always held by particular people at particular times—and it’s what they believed and what they did with it in the times they lived. And they sometimes were chafing against each other.
The abolition movement had other people who argued against abolition. The Social Gospel had folks who claimed that those people wanting to install sewer systems and other improvements, labor laws and such, had forsaken the gospel, which is only about saving people from hell. And when the church was supportive of eliminating official formal prayer from public schools, they were always accused by illiberal religious voices of forsaking the gospel.
I think what we have seen, maybe for the first time in a while, is that illiberal forms of religion are ascendant in our culture. They are recognized by, say, the Secretary of Defense in ways—he brings a person to speak to a group, and that person is someone who wants to get rid of women’s right to vote. We haven’t seen that for a while. The Christian nationalists have gotten a hearing, and things that used to be rather fringe have moved to the mainstream. And I think we have to be able to speak out about that.
Belvedere: There’s nuance here that we need to make sure we get across, as you do in the book. You mentioned the “Social Gospel”—you invoked it earlier in that list of achievements that the church has been able to help propel. And it remains controversial among Christians of a more conservative or evangelical bent. I think on this one, both sides [have a] problem.
There are formulations of the Social Gospel I personally find wrongheaded. But the idea, in its good form, is straightforward. The gospel—with no “social” qualifier before it—the euangelion, or good news, is the central teaching of Christianity: Christ died for our sins, freely offers redemption to anyone who wants it, and that’s the path forward to reconciling with God. Our sin puts us at alienation from God; he’s bridged that gap through a sacrifice; we claim it by simply believing in him. When the “social” descriptor comes in, however, it can reconceive Christianity as first and foremost an instrument for positive social change. And of course there’s nothing wrong with positive social change—in fact there’s everything right with it—but the Christian faith at its core is a revealed religion. It makes grand metaphysical claims. It has doctrines, propositional content that is foundational to its reform efforts. It’s not incidental to those reform efforts.
That’s the thing that I think you’re doing a good job in the book of pointing out: you can have all these reform goals and ideas, but if they’re not powered by a genuine theological core, it’s going to eventually wither into, “Why don’t I just keep the helping-out-society bit without going to all these meetings on Sundays and having all these extra obligations, if it’s just the same sort of output?” There has to be something different to it. It has to be powered by a different set of beliefs. So I’d say that the “Social Gospel” fails as an alternative to the gospel proper, because it’s never meant to replace it properly—or it shouldn’t. But it is supposed to be the natural outgrowth of someone genuinely impacted by the traditional gospel. As the book of James puts it, faith without works is dead. And as a Christian, if you’re not wanting the church to positively impact society—if the achievements we’ve been documenting don’t seem to you to be an important impact the Christian church can have—then you might be falling afoul of James’ diagnosis.
“For the first time in a while, illiberal forms of religion are ascendant in our culture. They are recognized by the Secretary of Defense in ways—he brings a person to speak to a group, and that person is someone who wants to get rid of women’s right to vote. We haven’t seen that for a while. The Christian nationalists have gotten a hearing, and things that used to be rather fringe have moved to the mainstream. And I think we have to be able to speak out about that.” — Raymond Roberts
I think a lot of churches today are. And I think that’s a good way to show why it’s not enough just to have a moral vision for society, or at least an interest in certain reform efforts. For the church to retain its distinct character, it has to be backfilled by theological tenets that do that inspiring work for those reform efforts.
Roberts: I would add to that that the Social Gospel people—like Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, and others—were writing in a time where they could assume a lot of things. Like that Christianity was more central to our culture, and that people were familiar with the Bible (everyone had one; everyone read one). And then the people who were heirs of that tradition kind of continued to operate in that mode without really understanding that the thick religious and spiritual practices that make a faith compelling—sensing the glory of God, the beauty of God, a sense of awe and a sense of gratitude—that thick piece of it is all part of the gospel, inspired by the sense of this overwhelming love that’s been made manifest to us. Without those pieces, it becomes what you might call “do-goodism.” It becomes partisan. And sometimes when I’m with some folks who are more progressive Christians who don’t want to talk about the theology part, it comes across as do-goodism.
Belvedere: Right—or, at best, it just becomes like any other kind of reform effort where the Christianity layer of it becomes epiphenomenal. “I’m just getting together and feeding the unhoused with other people—why do I need this other thing?” It needs to have a distinctive theological core, and to emphasize it and not hide from it but to embrace it—in a way that’s consistent with the biblical record and the tradition, and with what it means to be a contributing member of society, but that doesn’t obscure its propositional theological content, that is anchored in that content. I think that’s the answer. A lot of theorists have said it can’t help but be that, or you get a watered-down church that won’t end up lasting. It simply cannot last as a kind of add-on that you don’t really need, because you sense that and then you dispense with it and just do the reform efforts without it.
You introduced a set of theological principles that I want to get to. You think these can do the work of civic renewal that Tocqueville’s “democratic and republican faith” would ask of us—or that once did. You have nine of them. I’m going to list them, but I don’t want to go deep on all of them. You have: Theocentrism, Creation, Imago Dei, Natural Law, Sin, Hope, Vocation, Covenant, and Ecclesiology. These are categories you might find in a systematic theology book—theologically weighty stuff. Tell me: how can these realize the Tocquevillean vision today?
Roberts: That’s a great question. I should back up and say that Max Stackhouse—a professor of Christian ethics at Princeton—wrote a book called Public Theology and Political Economy and lists 10 theological themes or principles. When I read it, I always wished he’d said a lot more about them. When I came up with my own list of nine, the purpose was to try to flesh out in a deeper way for lay people in particular: here are some theological principles and their practical implications.
Different traditions sometimes talk about these principles differently. If I talk about natural law, a Roman Catholic would probably jump right to Aquinas. It might be more assumed there than in Protestant circles, especially after late-20th-century theology kind of dumped natural law. But the idea of natural law is there at the founding of the country and carried forward by all the Puritans. James Wilson, the founder of University of Pennsylvania Law School, was inspired by what I would call reformed Puritan natural law ideas in his lectures on law, which happened very early in the Republic, and reflect that.
Belvedere: These principles—you were asking how they can help us realize that Tocquevillean vision of a democratic and republican faith, a Christianity that is robust enough to continue existing and continuing to be influential, but also very liberal-friendly, activating the best parts of the scriptures and the tradition when it comes to how we view each other, how we interact with each other, how we live with each other, how we treat each other.
Roberts: These principles float in our culture. Even the one I think is maybe most lost—the idea of covenant—it’s still a part of our language.
Belvedere: How would you contrast covenant with contract, for example?
Roberts: Contracts are transactional. “I will do this, you will do that.” You enter contracts for what you get out of them. Covenants are a recognition of the binding of our lives together. Think of a couple getting married, or citizens taking a naturalization oath—your lives are bound together for good and for ill, is the idea. “We’re in this together now.” In a contract, if you don’t perform, the contract’s over. With covenants, there’s a recognition that your life is bound to this other person. That’s why the church has been reluctant sometimes to recognize divorce—and probably should be more affirming that in bad relationships, you may still be bound together, but you’re not really living out the inner heart of the relationship, which is love.
Belvedere: When I read your treatment of “theocentrism”—the principle that you signal as really important—I keep coming back to Tim Keller, the author and Presbyterian pastor who recently passed away. Keller, drawing on John Calvin’s observation in the Institutes of the Christian Religion—one of the most famous works of theology in Protestant history—that the human heart is relentlessly idolatrous. It’s essentially an idol factory. And Keller spent much of his ministry making the pastoral or spiritual version of that case: that idolatry isn’t only about literal statues. At its core, it’s about taking any good thing and making it an ultimate thing. Whether that’s career, family, romance, success—whatever you want to fill in that slot.
Many irreligious liberals will disagree with the diagnosis here, and understandably so. But Keller’s argument was that when you take a good thing and make it the ultimate thing, the good thing can become a destructive thing if it isn’t God, because it can’t bear the weight you’ve placed on it. It can’t fill the role you’ve designated it. I think your framework is extremely complementary to that, but on a more civic wavelength than a pastoral one.
So, for example, MAGA Christianity on this, let’s call it the Keller-Roberts reading, isn’t just a political phenomenon. It’s a kind of collective or national idolatry. But in this case it’s not work or vocation or family or whatever else—it’s nation, leader, even the idea of MAGA, the cultural restoration piece of it. That has been placed by some of these MAGA Christians where God belongs in their lives. And what follows is exactly what both you and Keller predict: moral blindness, a ferocity toward outsiders, a willingness to excuse anything done in the service of the cause because this is a political phenomenon now. Does that framing resonate with how you’re thinking about theocentrism? And does it apply with equal force across the ideological divide, or is there something distinctive about the particular idolatries of this particular moment?
Roberts: I think there are two things you can say about idolatry. One is that it has practical, ethical implications. When we put other things, other centers of value, before God, the way we value other things in our value field changes. The New Orleans Saints had this bounty system where if they injured a player on the field, they’d receive a bounty. Well, if your center of value is winning and your team, other people become expendable. You can sacrifice them.
What’s tricky about idolatry is when it picks up religious symbols—as in Christian nationalism right now. Then it becomes harder for people to sort out what’s going on.
“The thick religious and spiritual practices that make a faith compelling—sensing the glory of God, the beauty of God, a sense of awe and a sense of gratitude—that thick piece of it is all part of the gospel, inspired by the sense of this overwhelming love that’s been made manifest to us. Without those pieces, it becomes what you might call ‘do-goodism.’ It becomes partisan. And sometimes when I’m with some folks who are more progressive Christians who don’t want to talk about the theology part, it comes across as do-goodism.” — Raymond Roberts
And inevitably, every human values things. That’s part of what I tried to deal with in every chapter—each of these doctrines addresses some aspect of human being, whether it’s valuing, or forming relationships, or discerning right from wrong. There’s some fundamental human question that these doctrines answer. They get answered in different ways by different traditions, but everyone has to struggle with this, even non-religious people. They have to figure out how to value things. And idolatry is a way of talking about what we value, how we value it, and asking whether we’re valuing it correctly.
Belvedere: Let me ask about one of those doctrines. I found your treatment of sin really worthwhile. And I want to make sure listeners understand what I mean, because sin is one of those words that can sound like it’s only about personal morality or individual failing.
Your argument is that a robust doctrine of sin is actually one of democracy’s best friends. If you genuinely believe that human beings are chronically prone to self-deception, self-interest, and the abuse of power, then checks and balances aren’t mere suggestions. They’re not even just inconveniences. They’re absolute moral necessities. The Founders understood this intuitively, and they designed a Constitution that assumed the worst about human beings and human nature, even while hoping for the best. All the liberal valuing of limited government and constitutional checks on power flows from it. But one of the most striking features of the current authoritarian moment is a kind of demand for trust—trust the leader, trust the movement, trust that power won’t be abused if it’s in the right hands. A serious doctrine of sin is a direct theological rebuttal to that demand. Do you think that’s a case that can land with people who don’t share our theological vocabulary? Does sin play in a non-theological context too?
Roberts: I hope so. I mean, you’ve got people like Thomas Paine, who wrote Common Sense and was not an orthodox believer by any stretch of the imagination. But he notes that republics are less likely to go to war than monarchies. I do think that our conception of sin has eroded, even in the church. I don’t think we have a strong, robust understanding of sin. For a while, sin became identified with peccadillos rather than seeing it as the chronic human failure that happens over and over and whose results are always bad. And it’s not just about individuals—it’s also about groups.
There’s a reason the Founders said that the legislative branch—which is more accountable to the people—should determine how to raise revenue, how to spend, and that they should declare war. Not the executive branch. It seems to me that we need to recover an understanding of the chronic human fault. Because if we can’t, I don’t see how we move back to a place where the Republic is on firmer ground.
We need to be able to say: “We’ve made a wrong turn here.” We’re now seeing the consequences of what happens when one person makes a decision about war and the wisdom of the group is not allowed to weigh in. If the wisdom of the group had been consulted—if a case had been made to the people—it doesn’t mean we’ll always get it right. Groups also make mistakes and are prone to sin. But there’s a greater possibility that a better path will be found.
Belvedere: In the book, you distinguish between knowledge and wisdom. All of us distinguish between the two in our most clear-eyed moments, but I wondered if you could unpack that distinction a bit in terms of how you understand the two.
Roberts: I think of knowledge as the things we know about the world—it’s not unrelated to wisdom. But wisdom is knowing [the true value of things]. Knowledge is knowing the price of everything; wisdom is knowing its true value. Wisdom is knowing that you depend upon others and that others depend upon you—you see yourself in relationship with others. Wisdom is that deeper level of perspective on oneself and on others.
Wisdom is knowing that it’s not a smart idea to give one person too much power. That’s wisdom, because people are prone to corruption.
Belvedere: Given that many Protestant churches, denominations, and affiliated organizations are among the most depleted or defeated—where do they draw the resources for institutional regeneration and renewal? Is it purely a leaning into our scriptural tradition? Is it more a pragmatic sense of what works as effective forms of communication, and we jostle against other groups for attention? What is going to propel these Protestant denominations and churches to be able to play a bigger role in society once again, for the benefit of all—as the argument goes?
Roberts: I think there’s a great deal of discouragement in the mainline and mainstream Protestant churches right now. It’s hard work. We don’t have institutions to spread our ideas that are very effective. There are some, but they don’t have broad or deep reach into the culture. And so what happens is that a lot of people come to church on Sunday and then they go and watch Fox or MSNBC during the week. Who gets to form the people? It might not be the one hour in the pew on Sunday.
But I think the source of encouragement has to be God. The idea that God is truly the glory that lasts. Maybe this republic has reached the end of its rope—I hope not, I don’t think it has. But no republic lasts forever.
“The Protestant church has been in a kind of disarray. It has not adapted well to changes in the culture. Some changes probably needed to happen, but we no longer have effective institutions that transmit the faith to the new generation. We’re not keeping our kids. We no longer have effective institutions for communicating our ideas to others and solidifying a conversational base. It’s a complicated story about how we reached this point. But I think ‘disarray’ is a more helpful way to talk about it because it suggests that we need to get our act together—and that we could get our act together.” — Raymond Roberts
I’m giving a paper this weekend on the Founders and the principles that guided them. One of the principles I’m not going to be talking about, because I wish I had more time, is the idea of providence. They had a sense of providence. Things didn’t always go well in the war, but that’s kind of what carried them through. Providence was how they talked about a sense of hope—that even in the midst of discouragement, there is a sense of hope. And in every movement that has moved forward in this country, whether it’s the abolitionists or the civil rights movement, it has been inspired by a theological sense that I may not see it, I may not get to the mountaintop with you, but we will see it. We will.
Belvedere: And that authentic form of Christian hope—as opposed to its fake alternatives—is one that can take on that work without collapsing or falling back into a siege mentality. That’s the key thing. You can have a belief that things aren’t right and that things need to be put right, and you can have hope, without it leading to all the pathologies we’ve seen. Authentic Christian hope is inviting and hospitable and kind in the face of harm, and decent, and doesn’t violate its principles and stands true to what it believes and treats people with dignity and honor. That’s authentic Christian hope.
Roberts: Yeah, and that chapter on hope was the one that took me the longest to put together. It was originally going to be called “Liberation,” and in talking with my dissertation advisor, he said: “Why are you calling it that?” Well, I called it that because that’s what Max Stackhouse called his section on that. But then I thought, maybe it’s “Redemption.” In a way I’m talking about redemption. But then it occurred to me that every other chapter had been rooted in a fundamental human question. And finally it occurred to me the fundamental human question is about hope. Everybody has some way of putting together an attitude towards the possibilities of history.
That took me longer to put together than any other chapter, because the question is: What is the fundamental human question? And: Must things always be this way? Can there be change? And the answer to that question, especially for believers, is yes. For Christians, things can be different. Are you going to have the kingdom tomorrow? No. But God is still at work as a redeeming presence. And in the end it’s God’s glory, and that’s enough to get us to tomorrow.
Belvedere: Raymond Roberts, thank you so much for joining me today.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
