American society is polarized; that is no secret. Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, are increasingly occupying different media and social ecosystems. When President Donald Trump won in November 2024, many Democrats and left-leaning liberals feared for the future of the country, and going into the election, the fears of many Republicans and conservatives for a potential Kamala Harris presidency were just as high. It is an open question how long constitutional and democratic institutions can hold when both sides have existential fears of the other side gaining power.
Into this stew of increasing extremism and polarization, many people across the political aisle are eschewing America’s classically liberal constitutional ideals for radical in-group ideologies. On the left, this is manifesting in the popularity of Democratic socialists like New York’s Zohran Mamdani or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, and others. Donald Trump’s political rise was fueled by excesses and abuses on the left including his direct predecessor Barack Obama. Trump himself engages in many abuses, and now people on the left are reaching for more radical politics of their own.
The next stage of America’s descent into radicalization is particularly concerning for me as a Seventh-day Adventist Christian. As Adventists, we have long believed and preached that in the end times, the United States would play a key role in prophetic events as the second beast of Revelation 13. In Adventist eschatology in the name of a restored Christianity, America “...shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions…” as written by Ellen White in her book “Testimonies for the Church.” Largely in response to perceived and actual radicalization on the other side of the aisle, many American Christians (though I believe still a minority) are embracing radical post-liberal Christian ideologies that, if acted upon, would upend constitutional government in America.
Before I expound on those post-liberal ideologies, I need to define liberalism in this context. In the popular vernacular today, we often flippantly call the two sides of American politics “conservative and liberal,” corresponding to right and left. But this characterization of liberalism as left hinders our ability to understand the post-liberals of today. To the emerging Christian post-liberals, Ronald Reagan and Thomas Jefferson are just as problematic as Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. The liberalism that is being pushed back on is the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment, of men like John Locke. Classical liberalism is the general idea that natural rights exist pre-government, and that governments are formed for the protection of said rights. In classical liberalism, the individual is the most important unit, and the collective “good” cannot be used as an excuse for violating the innate natural rights of any one individual.
The American founding was a classically liberal, Lockean founding. Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence grounds his entire argument in the seemingly self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.” In the Federalist Papers, James Madison consistently lays out the case for limiting and checking government power so that liberty would be able to flourish. This founding premise is increasingly under siege in modern America due to our rapidly increasing polarization. Democratic socialists and other left-wing postliberals reject it on the basis of wanting a more active and robust government to solve America’s problems and because many on the left fail to separate the hypocritical sins of the founding generation (slavery, removal of Indigenous people) from the good principles of government they established. And increasingly many Christians are rejecting it because they feel that liberty itself is a threat to civil and religious order.
Christian post-liberalism takes two broad forms: Catholic Integralism and Protestant Christian Nationalism. In an essay in Liberty Magazine, professor Kevin Vallier from the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership in Bowling Green, Ohio, defines Catholic Integralism as a movement of lay Catholic thinkers to restore what they believe to be a lost Catholic political tradition. Rather than seeing the church and state as separate spheres, as in liberal democracies, Integralists see the church and state as two levels of authority: the state is designed to promote the temporal good, and the church is designed to promote the eternal good. Given that the church’s mission is higher than the state’s mission, that gives the church superiority over the state and, in certain conditions, the right to direct the state’s temporal means to the church’s eternal mission. These ideas obviously run in direct contradiction to the American and classically liberal ideal of complete religious freedom for all.
While Catholic Integralism is generally an elite project among highly educated academics and thinkers, there is a much larger and more populist movement happening within Protestant America. Increasing numbers of American protestants have begun to associate themselves with the term “Christian Nationalism.” One of the foremost scholars embracing and advancing the ideals of Christian Nationalism is the Reformed Presbyterian Stephen Wolfe. He defines Christian Nationalism as a Christian Nation seeing itself as explicitly Christian and seeking the eternal and temporal good by means of law and custom. So for Wolfe, Christian Nationalism requires the state to be conscious of religious/doctrinal truth. Any observant Adventist should immediately have alarm bells going off: Who determines what is doctrinal truth? What happens to dissenters?
It is helpful if we address Revelation 13 in the light of Romans 13. Romans 13 tells us that secular government exists for a reason, and that it does have a God-ordained role of maintaining order, but Revelation 13 tells us that before Jesus comes again, secular government will claim for itself authority it does not rightly have. The perennial question for the Christian statesman is, “Where is that line?” In Matthew 22:15-21 (RSV), Jesus answers a trap question of the Pharisees on taxes by encouraging people to pay taxes to Caesar because it belongs to Caesar. In His answer, Jesus lays out an important principle of political philosophy, “Render unto Caesar [government] what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” Protestant Christians, like Roger Williams, have further refined this to mean that things pertaining to worship are God’s realm and things pertaining to our relationships with other humans are the civil government’s realm.
As Adventists, we should stand for liberal democracy amid post-liberal threats from the right and left, because we know that in the end times those who oppose civil and religious liberty are going to be against God’s people. This includes not being partisans, but instead to be constitution and declaration-first voters. We should be the first to sound the alarm when either side violates those founding principles, and we should live out the principles of free society as citizens: exercising our vote and freedoms for the defense of liberty.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.