Evan Collins
Evan Collins is a husband, father, lay ecclesial minister, teacher, writer, and speaker. He is the co-editer of "The Conversation" for the Cristero Party, alongside the founder, Chris Plance. He has a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from St. Bernard's School of Theology and Ministry. Evan is proud to live in the Midwest with his growing family.
We live in the rubble of Christendom. That’s not controversial. The world has looted its mother, stealing her treasures and forgetting their purpose. Ours is a landscape neither purely sacred nor purely profane, a tangle of grace and corruption in likely and unlikely places. Every parish, every family, every nation bears this tension.
Pope Francis declared in 2019, “Christendom no longer exists. Today we are not the only ones who produce culture, nor are we the first or the most listened to.” Yet when Frodo told Gandalf, “‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ he received wise counsel. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’” This is exactly where God has placed us. It is beautiful to encounter in a story, harder to embrace amidst the rubble of a way of life so deeply cherished.
Our world doesn’t really feel like the Shire, it feels more like the fever pitch of Walker Percy’s small town Paradise, Louisiana, “For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man…Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.”1
Modern liberalism complicates this mission because it lives on stolen energy from Christendom. The liberal exaltation of freedom mimics Christian dignity but strips it of its source. It replaces communion with individualistic autonomy and gift with grasping. In the world’s freedom from others, we lose a freedom for God and our neighbors. As D.C. Schindler often says, it is like someone broke into our home and replaced everything with exact replicas. Many of the institutions and ways of life that are the fruit of a Christian worldview have been retained, yet with their very soul, their very essence hallowed out. This diabolical parody of order isolates us, flattening reality into mere will and power. Liberalism, the seppuku of Christendom in early modernity, is finally starting to deflate. The throwaway anti culture of consumerism is starting to be thrown away. People are beginning to flirt once more with the strong gods, to use R.R. Reno’s concept, of nationalism and populism. This is dangerous because the reality of grace cannot be ignored. In this existential order, we cannot afford to forget God.
The old Christian vision of persons ordered together in love, of a society sacramentally open to grace, striving toward universal brotherhood in Christ, is still true. We do not need everything to become a 10x Hobbesian Leviathan where the only arguments are who gets to control the techno-dictatorship. The first principle that allows us to properly order the impulses toward individualism and collectivism that compete amidst our pasted back-together-ness is Christ’s Kingship. There we can authentically recover a political order rooted in friendship, one that respects that there is an ecclesial hierarchy that deals in both temporal and spiritual power, that understands the laity are a part of the Church and that the Church is the field of history, one that understands every person has a vocation, and that every man is essentially social in origin and purpose, that our politics cannot be removed from the common good, but that the common good is found in justice as upheld in the mutual enrichment of subsidiarity, solidarity, virtue, and the law of gift that fundamentally shapes each person’s life in the war of the heart.
By abandoning these realities, we do not find freedom. Instead, the ideas of liberalism, fascism, socialism, and whatever other -ism people are trying to let be the ordering principle of their lives actually restores slavery. Post-Christian politics is slavery with extra steps, perhaps even less steps.
The work of Andrew Willard Jones reminds us of another way of seeing the world. His inaugural book presents the sacramental order of St. Louis IX’s France. It is aptly titled Before Church and State because it was a time when the binary of thought hadn’t calcified on the complex relationship between the Church and the world. St. Louis IX’s kingdom was not perfect, of course, but it was a time when sacred and temporal powers were perichoretic partners, rather than enemies. Law, economics, and institutions flowed from worship. The paschal mystery shaped the lives of the kings, the lords, the normal people, religious, and clergy. The polis itself could be eucharistic in shape because the Eucharist was the source and summit of the kingdom’s members, their ordinary lives. This offers a corrective: we are called to live sacramentally, with grace permeating every sphere of human activity. St. Louis IX was a king, and he served France, but he served as a man bought with a price and given a great gift, the Church’s sacramental life.
The Church’s task is not to retreat from history, but to transform it through indwelling love. Every member of the hierarchy and the laity can bring a perichoretic presence in temporal structure by being guided by grace instead of ideology. We will be strange. Sovereign wanderer. Lordly exile. Worker and waiter and watcher. The modern world is terrifying. You don’t need to convince me. But as Walker Percy prophetically wrote,
“Where did the terror come from? Not from the violence; violence gives release from terror. Not from Leroy’s wrongness, for if he were altogether wrong, an evil man, the matter would be simple and no cause for terror. No, it came from Leroy’s goodness, that he is a decent, sweet-natured man who would help you if you needed help, go out of his way and bind up a stranger’s wounds. No, the terror comes from the goodness and what lies beneath, some fault in the soul’s terrain so deep that all is well on top, evil grins like good, but something shears and tears deep down and the very ground stirs beneath one’s feet.”
This is the war in the heart. In this life, we can either be a neighbor who is Christ for one another, or a neighbor who acts like a monster. Perhaps, often with the portal of the internet, many are both simply moments apart. There is only one source of restoration of the core of man: Christ the King. “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light” (Gaudium et Spes 22). We must turn once more to the light that enlightens all things to navigate a truly loving path in the prudential decisions we must make as members of families, states, our nation, and our Church.
Mission in the mixed world means recovering that vision of grace without nostalgia. We must be the diffusers of grace that the indelible mark given in our baptism assures us we can be. We must let grace permeate our politics, work, family, and culture. The kingdom is already leavening the loaf, in the fires of the ruins. We have an opportunity to salvage many great things from America, but we will fail if we don’t see that the source of our goodness is in something much older than the deficient philosophical worldview of liberalism the Founding Fathers clothed their instincts within. They managed to shamar something deeper than early modernity in their creation of what is now the United States. The Church cannot promise to save the unique patrimony of America, but we know that whatever is good, true, and beautiful of this nation won’t be lost in Christ. The Church’s task is not to build utopia, but to reveal reality: that all things, even now, subsist in the pierced heart of Christ. If we try and save our country apart from that, we might preserve the gold trimmings on the flag while losing our souls.
Understanding this condition raises the question: how does this happen concretely? The answer is worship. In the next article, we will explore the very practical spiritual reality of how the Eucharist shapes our presence in society and provides the form for what it means to sanctify the temporal order. In the liturgy, we discover what can happen to the work of human hands by God’s grace.
1 Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins (1972).
