The natural law may be timeless, but it is currently having a moment. A trio of Christian political scientists, Jesse Covington (Claremont), Bryan T. McGraw (Wheaton), and Micah Watson (Calvin), have been quietly laying the intellectual framework for natural law’s renaissance for now over a decade. Their latest effort, Hopeful Realism: Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics (2025) is a highly practical guide for putting the natural law framework to use in navigating contemporary American politics. But before analyzing the strengths of their approach, more about the present need for it must be explained.
Much of what has been described as a “vibe shift” in America and around the world—not to mention the emergence of the “reality-respecters”—is really just the long overdue reassertion of the natural law. Ten years ago, it was far easier to take the existence of a universally, or at least broadly agreed-upon sense of reality for granted. In 2015, as a young, impressionable theology student at Duke Divinity School, I wrote a term paper flippantly dismissing the “Christologically-bankrupt notion of natural law.” I had just read a series of essays by the preeminent theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth (most importantly, his electric debate with Emil Brunner in which Barth gave a roaring “Nein!” to natural theology).
And this was not merely a niche theological phenomenon. The next year, 2016, the bathroom wars began in earnest. Charlotte, North Carolina, approved an ordinance holding businesses legally liable for denying biological men access to women’s facilities. When NC Governor Pat McCrory and the State Legislature took action to protect women, Wall Street and national media erupted in outrage. Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump condemned the legislation, offering that transgender people were welcome to “use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate.” The vibe shift was still a long way off: Trump, the transgender-accommodator, won the popular vote in North Carolina, while McCory, the hardliner, lost his reelection and watched the bathroom bill get repealed the following year.
Years before the bathroom wars, Covington, McGraw, and Watson edited a collected volume, Natural Law and Evangelical Political Thought (2012). Had I read it then, I would have recognized the many problems with my voguish discounting of natural law, perhaps none greater than that Barth’s own perspective on natural law eventually developed to a point where Brunner himself claimed that it “made their [famous] disagreement almost meaningless.” Those unsure of the distinctly Christian utility of natural law would do well to read Jesse Couenhoven’s contribution to that earlier volume, as well as J. Budziszewski’s illuminating response.
Hopeful Realism, released thirteen years later, is the trio’s own case for the applicability of the natural law. By their own admission, this is not “an entirely original or new approach to faithful Christian political thought and action,” but it is uniquely practical in its use of contemporary case studies, from tax policy legislation to Supreme Court decisions, in order to illuminate the clear strengths of a natural law framework.
The book begins with four chapters laying the foundations for their natural law framework, summarized helpfully by the authors as follows: “(1) identifying the good or principle in question and how it relates to human flourishing; (2) choosing among our options by discerning which option is most likely to secure that good while also not damaging other goods… and (3) applying our prudential considerations” (136). The trio then puts the Hopeful Realism framework to the test in the remaining four chapters on economics, marriage, war, and religious liberty.
The book as a whole is strong, but as a pragmatic-minded former congressional staffer, I found the chapters on economics and marriage particularly compelling. In the first of these, Covington, McGraw and Watson turn to the Biden Administration’s suite of family policies, including its “dramatic expansion of the federal Child Tax Credit (CTC)” during the COVID-19 pandemic, “increasing from $2,000 per child up to $3,600 per child and directly paid into household bank accounts.”
Rather than naively pointing to wealth transfers to poor families as self-evidently good (as the Biden administration and many left-of-center think tanks did), the trio asked how any interventions “will support and reshape the institutions necessary for the development of children (family, neighborhood, secondary associations)” and “affect the broader economy.” The type of political intervention matters, as the authors note, because it has an impact on “parents’ prospects and the choices those families might be incentivized to make. A childcare subsidy could inadvertently pressure stay-at-home spouses to enter the workforce, even if that’s not their preference (nor necessarily the common good option).”
The authors’ argument here would have been strengthened further with some discussion of work disincentives and the essential incongruity of funding “family policy” programs that heap public debt upon subsequent generations, but only so much ground can be covered in one chapter.
The chapter titled “Marriage, Sex, and the Family” might disappoint some readers for not taking up the most controversial issues of the day like IVF and transgenderism (other than two passing references to “gender identity”), but it is probably the right decision by the authors to focus primarily on marriage. Arguably, every sexual confusion of our age traces back to a rejection of natural law teaching on the marital bond, and the world is more confused about marriage than ever, as the Republican Party’s abandonment of traditional marriage in its 2024 platform revealed.
Other than proliferating Hadley Arkes’ hilarious and provocative argument against the tendency to reduce sex to just another thing we do with our bodies (your friend can helpfully fill in for you with your spouse for tennis but not babymaking, Arkes observes), the authors’ greatest contribution in the marriage chapter is identifying five different public policy approaches to the marriage question: national decree, nudging, hold-the-line, culture-making, and privatizing. There are problems at both ends: treating marriage as a wholly private good is untenable, but so too is trying to restore traditional marriage undemocratically in a pluralist society without broad support.
Yet, there is still plenty of room to nudge Americans towards traditional marriage at the state or local level, to hold the line at the federal level for the time being so that those who hold a traditional view of marriage cannot be undermined by the government, and work to change the culture to restore political legitimacy and viability towards traditional marriage (including addressing the church’s own failures to uphold the marital bond).
The natural law, denied for so long, is snapping back with force. And yet, Hopeful Realism was written not to be a viral hit, but a lasting and effective appeal to thoughtful evangelicals across America. As its authors know, this is a virtue, making it far more useful to those with ears to hear than any of the outrageous books on Christianity and politics topping the bestseller chart over the last decade. Moreover, its authors know this, writing with “the modest expectation… that Hopeful Realism can help make [Evangelical] politics in the United States” a bit less of a mess.” May God grant more of us the prudence, patience, and humility that Covington, McGraw, and Watson display throughout their book.