IF LIBERALISM WEREN'T CHRISTIAN IT WOULDN'T WORK:

If Christianity's promise was apolitical and fully otherworldly, it would be a quietistic religion offering no visible hope or aid to those groaning under the oppression of worldly masters. Perhaps this line of theological argument is beginning to sound familiar? It should -- antebellum slaveowners used to make such arguments to justify owning, torturing and killing other human beings. They too were good secular liberals.

The hope that Christianity offers to the subjugated is not just otherworldly, but rather offers an immediate and direct remedy to the woes of this world. Its offer is precisely political in the classical sense of the world. Christians are given membership of a political community -- the local parish and the universal Church -- which treats them as worthy of full human dignity, as future and present citizens of the Kingdom of Christ.

Christians are required to look for the coming Kingdom

The first Christian Roman emperor Constantine, and the Church which embraced him after his victory over his pagan rivals, are seen by many liberal Christians as perverting a pure, otherworldly Christianity with political power. But when Eusebius praised the "victorious Constantine" and the cross as a "victorious sign", he was not reducing Christianity to a pagan ode to victory -- but rather articulating an already existing Christian theopolitics.

As he notes when speaking of the churches Constantine has built, they are "trophies of his [Christ's] victory over death". For Eusebius, physical churches, the empire, the emperor and the Cross itself are all outward signs of a hidden victory over death embodied by the resurrected form of Christ:

He soon recalled his body from the grasp of death, presented it to his Father as the first-fruit of our common salvation, and raised this trophy, a proof at once of his victory over death and Satan, and of the abolition of human sacrifices, for the blessing of all mankind.

Though Christians must reject utopianism, the Church is a political community. We are not merely permitted but required to look for visible signs of the coming Kingdom, and strive towards it in our lives. Without the living, theopolitical hopes of Christianity, the ethical miracle ending terrible practices like human sacrifice and infanticide would never have come about.

What those like Hobson are really calling for is not the end of theopolitics, but rather the subordination of Christian theology to the state, no less surely than it is enslaved in Russia. As Hobson writes: "This is not a sell-out to a secular ideology, for the liberal state has Christian roots. It echoes the kenosis of Christ." He wants Christian theologians to baptise liberalism, lending what influence they have to the triumphant progress of the liberal project.

The issue with this perspective is not that Hobson is wrong to say that liberalism has Christian roots, or even that in some sense Christians ought to defend liberalism. There is much that is good in liberalism, and much owed to Christianity. Christians should defend these goods.

The issue is that he thinks we should abandon Christianity as a theopolitical project altogether and hand the moral authority of the Church over to the dubious hands of liberal ideologues.

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