Robert Kaplan’s 2002 book Warrior Politics made a provocative pitch for American statesmanship in the 21st century, arguing that: “.. leadership demands a pagan ethos.” In that work, Kaplan drew a distinction between pagan public virtue versus private Christian faith and moral sentiment in Machiavelli:
Machiavelli believed that because Christianity glorified the meek, it allowed the world to be dominated by the wicked: he preferred a pagan ethic that elevated self-preservation over the Christian ethic of sacrifice, which he considered hypocritical.
Kaplan goes on to develop his, and allegedly Machiavelli’s, disjunction between pagan and Christian virtue, but the quote encapsulates a basic dichotomy those of us seeking to practice our faith in the public square regularly encounter. Moreover, Kaplan highlights a key insight that more pedestrian comparisons of sacred and secular values miss – the attraction of pagan thought and its influence on American leaders.
This idea of an increasingly pagan America has gotten some traction with the recent release of books and associated articles. I, myself, applied Kaplan’s basic framework to Donald Trump and his administration in a 2018 essay. However, even this discussion on the influence of pagan thought in contemporary American culture and politics is missing something: What role does Jesus play in our understanding of leadership? What’s the tradeoff for our political systems when Jesus goes missing?
It may be somewhat dramatic to say that America will lose its soul, but that’s exactly what happens. American leadership, domestically and internationally, loses its purpose, moral legitimacy, and egalitarian ethos without the recognized influence of the work and words of Jesus on our concepts of leadership. Simply put, the leadership model of the Nazarene is what makes liberal political systems possible.
If we look to Luke 22:24-27, we see Jesus make one of his most famous statements about leadership:
A dispute also arose among them, as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. And he said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For who is the greater, one who reclines at the table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at the table? But I am among you as the one who serves.
Jesus presents a leadership model that inverts the common hierarchical model of the pagan world. In doing so, Jesus sows the seeds of egalitarian organizational cultures of all shapes and sizes. In short, Jesus presents us with the archetype of the public servant, critically, one with a particular ethos: “the one who serves is the one who saves” as a recent preacher at my church put it. This is not to say that we should develop messianic complexes around our political leaders. Rather, we must take seriously the idea that those who would aspire to lead or to rule in the polis ought to be found amongst those able to “save,” yet humble enough to “serve.” Right to rule, personal honor and aggrandizement have no place in such a political culture.
A question emerges here: Does Jesus’ introduction of a more egalitarian model of leadership contradict Paul’s acknowledgment of hierarchical realities in Romans 13? Not at all if you also read Paul in Philippians 2:1-11. However, Jesus is inverting the basic power structure from top-down to bottom-up, which should make us reevaluate the application of Romans 13 to more egalitarian political systems like the one we as Americans inhabit. First and foremost, without the servant leadership model embodied by Jesus, liberal democracy loses any meaningful sense of human equality or “the people” as such. The residents of a nation become simply another arbitrary grouping to be ruled over, whether it’s Marx’s proletariat or Bane’s criminal army in The Dark Knight Rises (2012). In an egalitarian world without Jesus that only understands the injustice of oppression without the moral responsibility of servant leadership, “the people” are any oppressed minority, real or imagined.
Additionally, and very practically, we find that legitimacy, sovereignty and authority are now more than just legally invested in the people by constitutional writ. Rather, they are naturally, morally, sourced from the people. Representation, elections, and even their security become sacred trusts under the Christian moral revolution.
Pagan civic virtues map uncomfortably onto the American political system because it is fundamentally Christian in its moral orientation and anthropology. The system of federalism works best when individuals within their institutional capacities and constitutional limits work together, and it resists efforts to consolidate power or promote the interests of any one individual or group. In other words, one must lead Christianly, from a posture of servant leadership, to make our constitutional system work most effectively (e.g. in support and defense of human flourishing).
This brings us to the conundrum of Donald Trump.
In many ways, Trump embodies the pagan civic virtues Kaplan extols, but packages them in a populist appeal that Kaplan also rejects. I’ll let Kaplan sort that out for himself, but the mix of populism and pagan civic virtue embodied in Trumpism illustrates the awkwardness of mapping pagan civics onto American constitutionalism. The more relevant question for Christian voters, though, is if we can accept Trump as an archetypal civic pagan, does that therefore mean we should vote for him? That is a matter for another essay. But before we can even begin to answer the aforementioned question, we should probably contemplate another matter for debate: What kind of pagan would Trump then be? Dante speaks of righteous pagans like Virgil, his Roman guide through Hell and Purgatory – one with whom Dante can at least share an appreciation for virtue and moral goodness. But even then, Virgil can only take Dante as far as the end of Purgatory and cannot ascend with him to Paradise because even the most virtuous pagans can only get so far without Christ.
In our own time and place, the American political system, along with the peace and justice it seeks to pursue, can only bring us so far according to a set of civic virtues bereft of grace and self-sacrificial servant-leadership.