Four Americas: ideologies & idolatries: Keller's analysis

It has been three years since the Rev. Timothy Keller left us and entered into the presence of his Saviour. Although I never met the man, I am personally indebted to him for endorsing my first book, Political Visions and Illusions, several times beginning in July 2020. I regret that I never had an opportunity to thank him personally for his support. Now Keller's Gospel in Life website has published the first part of an essay, A Political Case Study: Four Americas, Ideologies & Idolatries (Part 1 of a 2-Part Series), written a few months prior to his death in 2023. Here he undertakes to analyze four ideologies shaping political life in the United States, drawing on Reinhold Niebuhr, George Packer, and yours truly. An excerpt:

Recently, George Packer wrote Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, summarized in an article in The Atlantic (“How America Fractured into Four Parts,” July/August 2021). He outlines four recent U.S. political movements that employ moral visions of a good society. He concludes that they are all inadequate and that he does not want to live in any of the four “Americas” that the political movements are seeking to establish.  

Over eight decades ago Reinhold Niebuhr addressed an assembly of world church leaders in Oxford, UK. In 1937, as the clouds were darkening before a World War, he outlined four “idols” which were the basis of four political ideologies that were headed for a terrible, bloody conflict. This was later published as “The Christian Church in a Secular Age” and is now found in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses. The similarities of Packer’s and Niebuhr’s schemas are remarkable and are instructive if compared. Even more interesting is to cross-reference these two essays with David T. Koyzis’ Political Visions and Illusion: A Survey of and Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies—which I will do briefly below.

I look forward to reading the second part of this essay, which is due to be published this summer.