Tomorrow I will be participating in an online symposium titled, "An Evangelical's Guide to American Christian Nationalism," along with three other participants. The time will be 14:00 UTC -5, or 2 pm EST. I expect this to be a lively discussion about a movement that is in today's headlines. Register here for the event. I hope many of you will be able to make it.
If the American nation is in a covenant relationship with God, along the lines of ancient Israel, we would then have to inquire which institution is responsible to enforce this covenant’s terms. A nation, especially when conceived in undifferentiated fashion, can never be a responsible agent but only an amalgam of pluriform social structures bound loosely together by certain common elements, such as shared culture and language. Yet generally the nationalist assumption is that this responsibility belongs to the state, viewed as the highest agent in that nation. This again makes entirely too much of the state as an institution, in addition to misapprehending its normative structure as led by public justice—a proximate justice falling well short of God’s final judgement.
Last week Allan R. Bevere interviewed me on the subject of my latest book, Citizenship Without Illusions. The interview, which forms a part of his Faith Seeking Understanding podcast, has now been posted online and can be viewed immediately below:
[T]he use of psychological language to censor unpopular speech has become commonplace as we near the second quarter of the century. A phobia is generally thought to be an irrational fear properly addressed by therapeutic means. In contemporary parlance, however, a phobia is something to be suppressed, often by political means. Accordingly, the term love is misused as a way of stifling needed discussion of an issue of obvious importance to families with minor children.
Incidentally, I have spoken remotely to the staff of the Association for Reformed Political Action, referenced in the article, several times in recent years.
Correction: ARPA's Levi Minderhoud has made a correction to this statement of mine in the article: "It is true, of course, that gender reassignment surgery is not permitted for minors." Here is Minderhoud:
Aside from Alberta, that isn't true for most of Canada (which makes this all the more shocking). Every six days on average, one teenage girl has a "gender-affirming double mastectomy" in Canada (sources: Let Kids Be, National Post, attached CIHI data). Bottom genital surgeries generally are not performed on minors, but even there CIHI has stated that at least one minor has received such a bottom surgery in the last few years. Nova Scotia seems to be a big culprit here.
Thanks to Minderhoud for setting the record straight.
Until recently, I assumed that the rule of law was firmly rooted in the political cultures of the English-speaking countries, uniquely heir to the tradition of the common law, Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights of 1689, and numerous precedents which together are the shared birthright of our several countries. A key principle of this heritage is that the law applies to our rulers as much as to ordinary citizens, who enjoy constitutional protections against abuse by government officials. Such protections apply as well to non-citizens who have entered the country legally. Moreover, even illegal immigrants must be treated in accordance with their shared humanity. How do we know who is who? Great care needs to be taken to distinguish rightly between legal residents and illegal immigrants. Cutting corners for a supposedly greater good inevitably leads to miscarriage of justice.
When I was around 10 years old, my parents bought me a telescope. Although my major adult interests would be in the social sciences, arts and humanities, as a child I had a pronounced affinity for astronomy. Something about those bright celestial objects easily fired the imagination of a schoolboy. . . . I collected a small library on the subject, trying to memorize the constellations and to identify them in the night sky. During the wee hours of the morning, my ever so patient mother would get up with me and join me as I set up my telescope and attempted to view the moon, the planets, and the stars from our suburban front garden.
The escape from this idolatry is not a retreat into political apathy. Rather, it is the retrieval of a more robust and biblical political theology, one centered on the concepts of public justice and societal pluriformity.
Recognising the State of Palestine, led by the Palestinian Authority, empowers those who seek peaceful coexistence and the end of Hamas. This in no way legitimises terrorism, nor is it any reward for it. Furthermore, it in no way compromises Canada’s steadfast support for the State of Israel, its people, and their security – security that can only ultimately be guaranteed through the achievement of a comprehensive two-state solution.
This book is a conversational and welcoming invitation to consider a host of enduring challenges for Christians engaging the public square. Koyzis’s voice is personal, and he draws from his own life and experiences in helping the reader grapple with topics like the different roles of citizenship, law, and the competing (and often idolatrous) ideologies that vie for our attention. He moves fluidly from personal reflections based on his own history to more academic (but rarely jargony) mentions of thinkers like Patrick Deneen, Hannah Arendt, Yoram Hazony, and Alexis de Tocqueville. The reader feels almost like Koyzis is engaging us in a conversation on his front porch, drawing from local life in his home of Hamilton, Ontario, as well as from his relatives in Cyprus, his boyhood in Chicago, and his connections in Brazil through the translation of his earlier work into Portuguese.
I am pleased that Watson has found my approach successful, as I tried as much as possible to communicate something of the flavour of my classroom lectures and discussions with my students over the three decades that I taught undergraduate political science. I am grateful for another (mostly) positive review.
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| Yves R. Simon |
I've not spent a lot of effort exploring the origins of my exceedingly rare surname, but this is the best I can do: The last Koyzis. An excerpt:
My Dutch Canadian friends and acquaintances tell stories of how, in 1811, Napoleon compelled residents of the Netherlands to adopt surnames. Prior to that year, many people in the Low Countries had gone by patronymics based on their respective fathers’ first names. Assuming that surnames were a passing fashion, many Netherlanders adopted humorous names, with which, two centuries later, their descendants are still stuck.
In my father’s native island of Cyprus, fixed surnames weren’t adopted until the island’s independence in 1960. Thus my father was born with only a first name and a patronymic: Theodoros Antoniou – Theodore son of Anthony.
As I write, I am looking at my notes from one of Seerveld's lectures from 20 September 1978. In my youthful handwriting, I quoted him: "The world is a created theatre of God," and "One finds meaning in Jesus Christ." Seerveld was above all a faithful servant of Christ and a memorable teacher.
Koyzis lays the groundwork for a deeper understanding of Christian citizenship by discussing what he calls “pluriformity”—the fact that societies are composed of “a multiplicity of social formations, each of which has its proper place and normative task in God’s world.” We have allegiances to family, church, neighborhood, schools, workplace, social clubs, multiple levels of government, and more. We engage in many spheres of life, such as education, healthcare, and culture. And as Christians, we must balance our responsibilities to our country, to all humanity, and to the kingdom of God.
In this context, politics is one important venue, but not the only one.
In our era of social media, reasoned dialogue does not fare especially well. Too many of us are tempted to post short pithy memes containing half truths at best, all in an effort to score points against opponents whom we will almost certainly fail to persuade.
In more than one place I have seen one such meme directed against those who may harbour doubts about the legality of current deportation policies in the United States. It runs as follows: if immigrants failed to respect due process in entering the country illegally, why should they themselves expect to be treated in accordance with due process? On the surface this may sound right to some. But there is an obvious flaw in this reasoning: what if we were to apply it to ordinary criminals, for example, those who commit theft or murder? It would upend the constitutional guarantee of a fair trial for those alleged to have committed such crimes.
What is a Tory? Here in Canada, members and supporters of our federal and provincial Conservative Parties are known as Tories. But what does this mean? Is it similar to the Republican Party to our south? Or is there something distinctive about our Canadian conservative tradition that gives the Tory label a different connotation? Many of our fellow citizens would be at a loss to answer these questions.
But not Ron Dart, with whom I was privileged to talk some weeks ago.
Dart is Canada's resident expert on this country's Tory tradition and an admirer of George Parkin Grant, whom I was privileged to hear on two occasions, and Stephen Leacock, both of whom exemplify the Tory tradition.
Ending on a note that one can see coming, Koyzis affirms that Christians are God's children first, despite any allegiance or feeling of loyalty to a nation. Such feelings come second to our identity in Christ. At a time of rising Christian nationalism and even Christofascism, this is a reminder that Christians must do better for our neighbors, both local and global.
I am, of course, grateful for another positive review of my book.
As I am only two generations removed from arranged marriage, I am well aware that past communities were unwilling to leave so important an institution solely in the hands of the prospective partners. If, as the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a supportive community to make a successful marriage.
Some weeks ago, Peter Bell interviewed me for a second time, primarily on the subject of my second book, We Answer to Another: Authority, Office, and the Image of God, along with several related phenomena, including Catholic and Reformed Christian social teachings, Christian nationalism, and the perennial temptation to use unjust means for desired ends. You can see the entire interview below. This is part of the second season of Bell's series, Sons of Patriarchy.
In my youth I cut my political teeth on the Watergate scandal, which nearly paralyzed the country of my birth for the two years between 1972 and 74. Although my family generally voted Republican when I was growing up, I began to have doubts about Richard Nixon’s presidency after the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters. As Nixon was implicated in the cover-up, many Americans were increasingly persuaded that he had abused his office, putting his own political fortunes ahead of the Constitution. Three years after his resignation, Nixon admitted in an interview with David Frost that “when the president does [something], that means that it is not illegal.”
Might democracy threaten ordinary politics? The American founders were not democrats in the contemporary sense of that term but were building a republican constitution with limited democratic elements, embodied especially in Congress’ lower chamber, the House of Representatives. Nearly a century later, Canada’s Fathers of Confederation established a constitution “similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom” (Constitution Act, 1867). Here too the new dominion was to be a careful balance of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements, although the term republic was not used for obvious reasons.
Beginning in the 20th century, however, both systems came to be described as democracies without qualification. In Canada, the powers of the nondemocratic institutions, especially the governor general (representing the monarch) and the Senate (appointed by the governor general on the prime minister’s advice), effectively atrophied, with the prime minister gaining more power—all in the name of democracy.
Thirty years ago, Catholics made up 82.9% of Brazil’s population but now account for just over half, 56.7%, according to the 2022 census – whose results on religion were only released on Friday.
Meanwhile, the number of evangelicals has continued to grow, rising from 9% of the population to 26.9% over the past three decades.
Although the growth rate has slowed slightly – rising by 6.5 percentage points between 2000 and 2010, and 5.3 since – the new data shows that, for the first time, at least one in four Brazilians identifies as evangelical . . . .
Christian Courier has just posted my monthly column, titled, Beyond Lament. An excerpt:
After John Diefenbaker’s Conservative government was defeated by Lester Pearson’s Liberals in 1963, [George Parkin] Grant was convinced that Canada’s days as a distinct nation were numbered. Diefenbaker’s reluctance to accept American nuclear weapons on Canadian soil had irked the “ruling class,” whose members determined that he had to go. But Grant believed that Diefenbaker’s only offence was his conviction that Canadian defence policies should be made in Ottawa and not Washington.
I couldn’t help recalling Grant’s Lament as we have been subjected to Donald Trump’s repeated trolling comments about Canada becoming the 51st state of the United States. Grant would express anger at this, of course, but it’s far from clear that he would have rallied the (literal and metaphorical) troops in opposition. His professed purpose in his book was not to make “practical proposals for our survival as a nation,” but simply to lament – to grieve the loss of those traditions that had once made Canada distinctive.
For more than two decades I had my students reading Grant's Lament and writing a paper on it. But at some point I put it aside because of the author's tendency to underestimate the importance of political factors in human motivations. I explain this more fully in something I wrote for Comment just over two decades ago: George Grant and the Primacy of Economics.
Citizenship is not at odds with being a Christian. For Koyzis, the reverse is the case: To be a good Christian, one must also be a good citizen. He references the parable of the Good Samaritan and other examples from scripture on taking care of your neighbor and, by extension, your community. This message is important and bears repeating in the months to come, so Koyzis’ encouragement is welcome.
While the book thoroughly covers the idea and issues of citizenship, it is not exhaustive. Koyzis stops short of going into the weeds of political culture and the nation-state superstructure. He focuses on defining conservative and progressive movements, not just in the United States but in Canadian politics as well.
U.S. Catholic is a publication of the Claretian Missionaries USA-Canada Province, "a global Roman Catholic congregation of priests and brothers who tend to the religious and pastoral needs of vulnerable communities."
This week her son King Charles III was in Ottawa to read the Throne Speech opening the 45th Parliament in the Senate's temporary facilities in the Senate of Canada Building at 2 Rideau Street. Suffice it to say that, although the monarch is entitled to read the Throne Speech and perform any number of monarchical duties relevant to Canada, most of these functions are handled by his Governor General, currently Her Excellency Mary Simon.
Canadians went to the polls on monday, 28 April in the 45th federal election since Confederation in 1867. The final results were not unexpected, but they nevertheless represented a stunning turnaround from where we thought a few months ago we would be today. Under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party had become hugely unpopular, with pundits predicting an easy victory by Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives in the election expected sometime this year. Throughout most of the life of the 44th Parliament, the Liberals ruled as a minority government, a supply and confidence agreement with Jagmeet Singh's New Democrats keeping them in power.
Late last year, it became clear that the New Democrats had wearied of this arrangement and threatened to pull the plug on the government. For readers unfamiliar with Canadian politics, parties with only a plurality of the seats in the House of Commons rarely form coalition governments with other parties. The closest we have come to this at the federal level was the Union Government of Sir Robert Borden formed during the Great War between the ruling Conservatives and dissident Liberals outside Québec. It is exceedingly rare for a party to receive a majority of votes cast, and in recent years it has become difficult for a single party to obtain a majority of Commons seats as well. In many other democracies, a party lacking majority support would negotiate with other parties to form a multiparty coalition government. But not in Canada.
I have now lived through eight papacies. Given that successive conclaves of cardinals generally choose older men to fill the office, the length of a particular papacy is typically fairly short. Pope John XXIII reigned for only five years, yet his legacy has endured in the form of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). The recently departed Pope Francis was on the papal throne for a dozen years. John Paul II reigned for an unusually long 27 years, during which he managed to contribute to the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and its bloc of client states, including his native Poland. In the 19th century, Pius IX broke the record for length of tenure, reigning for 31 years, during which he convened the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), setting the agenda for the Roman Catholic Church into the mid 20th century.
My recent conversation with Carmen LaBerge aired today, on Maundy Thursday. The subject is my recent Cateclesia essay, By Schisms Rent Asunder: The Four Seasons of Church Splits. My previous interview with her can be found here. The programme is called The Reconnect on Faith Radio. I've set the video to begin at approximately ten minutes into the broadcast when our conversation begins.
For years I’ve found myself in this place. I recognize that we need good governance from the officials we elect. But I cannot fully endorse what either of our parties propound nor give unquestioning allegiance to person or party. What is difficult is that I have friends on both sides of the partisan divide who seem to give unflinching allegiance to their party and the people they have elected or want to elect. Often, I find conversations with such individuals futile. There is no questioning allowed and only one side is right on everything. It is particularly disconcerting when my friends resort to lies and character assassination to buttress their political allegiance. I grope for a different kind of political engagement or want to just withdraw.
Citizenship Without Illusions is written for people like me.
Although I'm tempted to make a punny reference to the generation born in the 1980s and 90s, my recent Christian Courier column actually has to do with the finer points of Christian eschatology: Why I'm Not Postmillennial. An excerpt:
Only in recent years have I made the acquaintance of postmillennialists, who expect a gradual advance of the kingdom of God in the present age to be followed by a long period of widespread obedience to his will before Christ returns. As attractive as this prospect appears, I do not find the position persuasive.
Incidentally, I have also written on the topic here—more than can be fitted easily into a 500-word column: Revelation 20 and the thousand years. As for one of the best books on biblical eschatology, you would do very well indeed to read James Skillen, God's Sabbath with Creation, which I reviewed here.
Having grown up with the King James Bible, I was briefly enamoured of the paraphrases of the Bible, including J. B. Phillips’ New Testament in Modern English, from which my mother read to us. Ken Taylor’s complete Living Bible was published when I was 15. (My parents knew him slightly, as we lived in the same town.) I received a copy for Christmas. Over the next months I eagerly devoured it from cover to cover. As easy as it was to read, I was put off to read that “your words are a flashlight to light the path ahead of me” (Psalm 119:105) and repeated references to Asia Minor as “Turkey.” Such obvious anachronisms ruined the paraphrases for me.
Last summer Peter Bell interviewed me on the subject of my two best-known books, Political Visions and Illusions and Citizenship Without Illusions. In this conversation I discuss two events in my youth that pushed me to the study of politics and, much later, how I came to write my books. The length is just under 50 minutes.
Balancing political engagement with ultimate allegiance to God’s Kingdom has always challenged Christians. Tackling that challenge, Koyzis draws from the experiences of people and movements ranging from biblical antiquity to the present. He addresses the legitimacy (or not) of civil disobedience, providing guiding principles for those who choose to resist governments. He warns readers of the ever-present danger of falling prey to political illusions imbedded in an over reliance on ideologies such as liberalism, socialism, conservatism and nationalism, to name a few. He reminds Christians that allegiance to the Christian gospel “may come to be regarded as an affront to the jealous gods of expressive individualism” so evident in western democracies today.
One of the benefits of being an author with InterVarsity Press is that the publisher occasionally sends me other books it has published in my field. One of these is Hopeful Realism: Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics, written by my esteemed colleagues Jesse Covington, Bryan T. McGraw, and Micah Watson, whom I regularly see at the biennial Henry Institute Symposia at Calvin University. The co-authors here undertake to address the relative paucity of evangelical political reflection and the tendency of flesh-and-blood evangelicals to embrace dubious political positions without engaging in the due reflection necessary for wise political judgement and action. Thirty years ago historian Mark Noll wrote that the "scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." As we approach the quarter-century mark, our co-authors express a similar lament:
I assume that items written by other past bloggers have been deleted as well and that my 21 January post, FT's evolution: 'populism' overtakes 'highbrow', didn't play a role. But who knows?
Here is the conversation that I had with the incomparable Jason Scott Montoya two days ago. Although our discussion was about my new book, Citizenship Without Illusions, it ended up being more wide-ranging, covering several related topics, particularly the new administration in the United States.
Here is another snippet of a past conversation with Jason Scott Montoya. Jason interviewed me again yesterday about my new book, Citizenship Without Illusions. I will link to that interview once he has posted it.
Incidentally, near the end, they mentioned that I would be speaking at the annual Jubilee Conference in Pittsburgh, sponsored by the Coalition for Christian Outreach. Unfortunately, I suffered an attack of "benign" vertigo this week and was unable to go after all. Perhaps next year.
On thursday, 6 February 2025, Global Scholars Canada celebrated its 30th anniversary with a book launch for four affiliated scholars who have published recently, including Andrew Barron's Human Difference and Disability, Peter Schuurman and Angela Bick's Blessed Are the Undone, Michael Wagenman's The Power of the Church, and my own Citizenship Without Illusions. The event took place at Faith Baptist Church in nearby Oakville, one of the larger suburbs located between Hamilton and Toronto. There was a modest turnout for the event, and I was pleased to see some people I've known for nearly 50 years show up.
You can see my comments introducing my new book below:
Although some may think that controversies within the church are a recent phenomenon, a reading of both the New Testament and subsequent church history will quickly reveal that church splits have been with us since the beginning. The major themes of these controversies have come at approximately semi-millennial intervals, revolving first around Christology, then ecclesiology, then soteriology, and finally anthropology.
As a young adult citizen of the United States, I cast my first presidential vote in 1976 for Jimmy Carter, who had risen quickly from relative obscurity to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the White House. A Washington outsider, he became the first in a series of presidents lacking previous experience at the federal level. As such, Carter’s presidency was less than successful, but in the long aftermath he would become the best ex-president Americans have ever had, with the possible exception of Herbert Hoover, another one-term president who devoted his life to humanitarian causes.
Most presidents of the United States have used—and abused—their executive powers upon attaining office. In a balanced constitutional framework, the monarchical powers of the chief executive can be used legitimately to address issues that need immediate attention and cannot wait for the slow deliberative process characteristic of the legislative branch. During the 20th century the presidency grew in its power during the back-to-back emergencies of the Great War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the ensuing Cold War. Both political parties were complicit in this accumulation of power at the expense of Congress. Indeed, national crises prompt virtually all governments to assume emergency powers, as we saw during the global COVID pandemic. Whether these powers are used properly is up for debate and the subsequent decisions of the courts, which function, sometimes only in retrospect, as the guarantors of the rule of law.
In recent weeks, Jason Scott Montoya has been posting snippets of longer conversations we have had in the past. Jason has a gift for bringing out the best in the people he interviews and deserves to get more subscribers to his YouTube channel. Here is one such snippet below on the subject of sovereignty:
In November 2023 I delivered a remote address to the Eighth Latin American INCHE Consultation. INCHE stands for International Network for Christian Higher Education, which began in 1975 in South Africa and now stretches around the globe. My topic was "The Christian university and public policy in North America." The proceedings of this event have now been published in Spanish, and my address is included.
As a boy I was fascinated with radio broadcasting, especially after my father gave me a shortwave radio enabling me to tune in the world. Thus I found it a minor thrill to be on what may be the oldest commercial radio station in the US, whose call letters antedate the assignment of initial "W" call letters to stations east of the Mississippi. KDKA went on the air in November 1920, only two years after the end of the Great War and before radio began to make its way into the homes of North Americans
In this book I see three takeaways on what it means to set our loyalties in order as Christian citizens. First, ultimate loyalty to God and loyalty to governments often go hand-in-hand . . . . However, this is not to say that we should politicize the church, nor does it mean that obeying the government always aligns with obeying God . . . . Second, ultimate loyalty to God should make us both appreciative and suspicious of partisan politics. “If we find ourselves always parroting one party’s agenda and vilifying the other party’s,” Koyzis writes, “I suggest that something is amiss.” . . . Third, ultimate loyalty to God requires political humility.
On 23 January Carmen LaBerge interviewed me for The Reconnect with Carmen LaBerge over Faith Radio. The interview can be heard here or immediately below:
The book is a wonderful complement to his earlier volume and both books should be read together. Christians today need to have some hard conversations about the notion of citizenship in the worlds where alternative political ideologies are proliferating. Christian citizenship and political loyalty are significant because Christians claim that ultimate citizenship is in the kingdom of God, but at the same time Christians “have responsibilities to the communities of which we are part.” For this reason, I pray that Koyzis’s work is read widely [and] motivates Christians to seek the welfare of the city.
