Last year, Aaron Renn posed a question on X: “Who are America’s leading Protestant intellectuals?” The answers were, for the most part, unsatisfying, with a few key exceptions. My own list would be quite different than those proffered by most, and there are some young up-and-comers (Samuel James and Jake Meador, for example) that I suspect will make their mark in the years ahead. I hope that a layman’s version of Joseph Minich’s recent book Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age will be published, too, just as Carl Trueman followed The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self with Strange New World.
Any list of leading Protestant intellectuals must also include Andrew T. Walker. Walker is associate dean in the school of theology and associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, as well as the director of the Carl F.H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement and managing editor of WORLD Opinions. He writes invaluable commentary for Public Discourse, National Review, First Things, and American Reformer, among other outlets. His 2022 book God and the Transgender Debate: What Does the Bible Actually Say about Gender Identity? is an important contribution to a key cultural debate.
Walker’s upcoming Faithful Reason: Natural Law Ethics for God’s Glory and Our Good (B&H Academic, 2024) is an ambitious corrective to Protestantism’s drift away from the theology of the Reformers and their spiritual descendants. Walker kindly agreed to an interview on his work in the church and in the public square with The European Conservative.
What do you see as the primary goal of your work in communicating to lay Christians?
Playing on offense. Western Christians know by now that the views they hold are in the growing minority. My response to that is, well, “Who cares?” Modern secular morality is bankrupt, barbaric, and brittle. It is deeply irrational. Where it isn’t, it is borrowing from Christianity. Secular morality has no satisfying answers to humanity’s deepest questions. It is a cesspool of relativism, therapeutism, and hyper-individualism (my next book, if picked up by a publisher, is going to be on the failures of secularism). If that is the case, then Christians should be willing to confront secularism head-on. That shapes a large portion of my teaching and writing ministry.
Chiefly, I want Christians to understand the intelligible reasons for the ethical convictions we hold and to understand that those reasons are more satisfying and life-and-culture-sustaining than rival secular counterfeits. I have no pretenses for ‘taking America back for Christ’ in some God-and-country sense; no, we need to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ amid the ruins of secularism. I really believe there has never been a better time to be authentically Christian than right now, especially in the West. Frankly, there is something exhilarating about resisting secular progressivism. Furthermore, the growing ranks of ‘red-pilled’ ex-liberals is showcasing how secularism’s attempts to transgress the outer boundaries of the natural law is impossible. Christians need to be there when reality snaps back and people find themselves burned out and dejected from bottoming out on secularism.
Much of your recent work involves analyzing how American Christians can respond to our post-Christian moment in practical ways. What are some of the key temptations Christians face during this cultural moment that you believe must be avoided?
Despair is the greatest temptation. Despair is incompatible with joy and gratitude. The older I get in my Christian faith, the more I am convinced that joy and gratitude are the wellsprings for Christian holiness and Christian witness. Paul likens cultural despair and rebellion in Romans 1 as a failure of gratitude. Gratitude accepts limits and orients. Despair gives birth to apathy and bitterness. Spiritual and political enemies of Christianity want nothing more [than] for Christians to not only lose tactically but to surrender their hope.
I think we also need to be ever constantly vigilant and crucifying respectability in the eyes of the world. The sin of respectability is merely updated language for what the Apostle Paul calls “man-pleasing” (Gal. 1:10). All it does is turn you into a ventriloquist dummy who only mouths the talking points of what those who hate Christ expect you to say to remain in their good graces.
Much has been written in the past decade on how Christians should react to an increasingly hostile culture, from Rod Dreher’s ‘Benedict Option’ and Douglas Wilson’s ‘Christian Nationalism’ (and the Catholic version, integralism) to Aaron Renn’s practical advice on navigating a ‘Negative World.’ What, in your view, should the Christian approach to this emerging landscape be? Are you sympathetic to any of these views?
There are elements of truth in each of the above approaches you’ve mentioned. Depending on how it is defined, I’ve been critical of ‘Christian nationalism’ not because I’m opposed to nations exhibiting Christian values (I very much want that), but because of a theological concern of the gospel playing chaplain to worldly politics. In my theological worldview, the government is a poor disciple and an even worse pastor or priest.
To be brief, since the question lends itself to a book-length answer, my general approach for Christianity and culture reduces down to an ecclesiocentric vision that Carl F.H. Henry once wrote: “The Church is also to declare the criteria by which nations will ultimately be judged, and the divine standards to which man and society must conform if civilization is to endure.” In my view, we are not promised total victory in this age (though victories are possible); in the meantime, we should be adamant in stating the truth publicly, if only to rebut those who utter lies about human nature, the human person, and the true grounds for the common good’s realization. The task of the Christian in this age is to remind Babylon that it actually belongs to God and is not its own sovereign.
Your new book, Faithful Reason: Natural Law Ethics for God’s Glory and Our Good, deals with an area of theology largely (or almost entirely) ignored or forgotten by Protestants. For centuries, natural law ethics were considered part of the collective Christian inheritance, while many Protestants today appear to assume that this is the purview of Catholics. What should Protestants understand about natural law as part of our Reformed heritage?
The loss of natural law in Reformed circles is a 20th-century phenomenon. To return to the natural law (as we must) is to return to one of the most ancient fields for Christian moral thinking. It is to our great shame that Protestants abandoned the natural law due to the influence of figures like Karl Barth, who I think is vastly overrated and who helped midwife theological liberalism into 20th-century vernacular. To go deep into Protestant history is to cease being Barthian and voluntarist in one’s ethics. Moreover, I would urge Protestants to go and read their Protestant sources. They will be shocked to learn, for example, how much figures like Calvin, or Hemmingsen, or Junius sound positively Thomistic in their ethics.
What do you hope to accomplish with Faithful Reason?
My goal is simple as it is audacious: I want conservative evangelicals to regain familiarity with the natural law, natural law theory, and natural law tradition. As I write in the introduction of the book, my goal is to frame how the natural law ought to be thought about (which is one of the biggest hurdles), explain what the natural law is, and then how to apply it on a range of issues. I know that I cannot do that single-handedly. But I can join the chorus of like-minded Christian minds to use our collective efforts to recapture a lost tradition.
But to more narrowly focus my goal in writing Faithful Reason, it is for conservative evangelicals to understand that the primary utility of the natural law is not found in its apologetic prowess (though I think it is certainly persuasive) but rather in its explanatory power for showing the intelligibility of Christian moral claims. Ethical catechesis for Christians is, I guess, what I’m most after.
In your view, has Protestant ignorance of natural law ethics led to significant compromises since the Sexual Revolution? Are there other implications?
Oh my, yes. I do not think we can adequately comprehend the extent to which the modern Protestant sexual ethos has been shaped by modernity’s view of sexuality. The typical Protestant pastor and typical Protestant layperson has no category for contraception being a historically taboo subject in Christian history. The fact that Protestant Christians have, by and large, bought wholesale into the contraceptive mentality means we have obliterated sexual teleology and, in turn, obscured the uniqueness of marriage as an inherently generative institution and turned it primarily into an adult-centered institution. By failing to understand our design as ultimately governed by a reproductive telos, we’ve substituted eros as the highest good to be sought after. This produces a cascading number of ethical misfires when you begin from wrong assumptions about sexual design.
When it comes to Christian apologetics in the public square, there has been much debate about which approaches are the most effective in having ‘break-through’ conversations, especially as Christians are increasingly speaking what amounts to a foreign language on a range of issues, including sex and gender. Which approach do you believe is both truthful and effective at communicating complex Christian principles to post-Christian audiences?
I don’t mean my answer to be blithe, but we live in a post-rational society, and I have very little pretense that it will be the natural law and the natural law alone that will help the West crawl out of its over-sexed stupor. There are non-Christian figures like Louise Perry and Douglas Murray who understand that the brutality and barbarism of late Western secularism can only be resisted by the Christian moral tradition. But these figures, as of right now, are not (yet) Christians (we should pray for them). While I want anyone on my cultural team who understands the failures of secularism and the triumphs of Christianity, what I ultimately want is for individuals like those I mentioned to come to Jesus Christ. Only he has the words of eternal life (John 6:68). As much as I care about cultural sanity, I’m an evangelical, which means my greatest animating drive is wanting people to know Jesus, in whom there is forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace for the soul. I want to begin and end my entry into the public square with the declaration that Jesus is the risen Lord. That’s the central claim of Christianity.
An evangelical witness must simultaneously do two things: (1) It must announce the Lordship of Jesus Christ for sinners; and (2) insist upon the Lordship of Christ over creation, evident in the pattern of design we call the natural law. I am clear-eyed about the fact that no amount of natural law reasoning will persuade the unpersuadable if what they are really afraid of is how Jesus threatens their sense of autonomy. To the progressive skeptic or the red-pilled ex-liberal, I would simply ask, “What say you? Is Jesus alive? If he is, then everything he and the Bible say about sexuality, family, and civilization must be true, too.”
Everyone must answer that question: Is Jesus Christ risen? How you answer that question is the most important thing about you.
