On Engaging Politics Faithfully

A Reflection on Faith in the Public Square’s Essay

I was struck by Faith in the Public Square’s recent essay on faithful political engagement. It touches questions I find myself returning to repeatedly in Well-Tempered: what it now means for the Church to speak in public life, whether the authority it assumes is the authority it actually possesses, and what faithful witness looks like once the cultural conditions that sustained Christianity have largely dissolved.

The central theological instinct of their piece seems entirely right to me. There is no neutral territory untouched by God. The moral grain of creation runs through parliaments as surely as through churches. Politics concerns the ordering of our common life, and Christians can’t pretend the Gospel has nothing to say about justice, obligation, power, or the treatment of the vulnerable.

Yet reading the essay, I found myself considering a different question: not simply why the Church should engage politically, but from what position, and in what condition, it’s now attempting to speak in public life at all. Those aren’t the same question. The essay by Faith in the Public Square largely assumes that the principal obstacle is a lack of confidence, formation, or intellectual resources. But what if the difficulty runs deeper? What if the Church itself lacks the moral coherence, institutional confidence, and social credibility from which persuasive public witness can emerge?

The Furniture of Authority

Much of the Christian political theology Faith in the Public Square draws upon was formed in a world where such authority could largely be assumed — where bishops, priests, and would-be prophets occupied a recognised place within the public moral imagination. That settlement has largely dissolved. Its architecture remains: bishops in the House of Lords, coronations in abbeys, churches marking both the landscape and the lifecycle of the nation. Yet these increasingly resemble heirlooms in a renovated house — retained out of habit or sentiment, but no longer integral to how most people understand public life.

The assisted dying debate in the House of Lords in 2025 illustrated this precisely. The bishops who spoke most compellingly did so not because of their constitutional privilege but because of their long pastoral familiarity with death and dying — their proximity to suffering charged their rhetoric. Yet the public response largely ignored the substance of their interventions. Those who agreed were mildly grateful; far more used the moment to renew calls for removing bishops from the Lords altogether.

This is, I’d suggest, the characteristic reception facing Anglican public speech today. Allies receive it with mild gratitude; opponents react with the impatient irritation reserved for an elderly relative who insists the world still works the way it did in their youth — not quite taking the argument seriously enough to engage it, but annoyed enough to want it out of the room. Neither really attends to what’s actually being argued.

Of course, a church that still crowns monarchs and sends bishops to speak in the upper chamber can be forgiven for assuming it retains the moral authority those roles once carried. But institutional form can persist long after the cultural assumptions that sustained it have faded. One of the characteristic temptations of contemporary Anglicanism is to mistake inherited prestige for power. It has something of the flavour of a former empire that assumes itself still to be a great power.

I suspect this situation infuriates a great many clergy — and understandably so. Most of us were inspired by brave Christians who witnessed against injustice and were heard: Tutu, Romero, King, Bonhoeffer. Their example still fires the imagination. But even their prophetic interventions presupposed publics willing to recognise the Church as a meaningful moral interlocutor. To acknowledge that this can no longer be assumed is not to diminish their witness. It is simply to ask what faithful public speech looks like under different conditions. A political theology that fails to reckon with that change risks leaving Christian leaders speaking as though they still occupy the centre of public life, while increasingly finding themselves heard only at the margins.

The Strange Shape of Post-Christian Christianity

If the preceding analysis is correct, it also helps explain why the ideological appropriation of Christian language and symbolism has become such a prominent feature of contemporary public life.

What we’re witnessing isn’t simply the cynical misuse of religion by ambitious politicians. That’s as old as politics itself. Something more interesting is taking place. The hunger for meaning, belonging, and moral authority hasn’t disappeared with the decline of Christian belief. People still seek narratives capable of explaining what’s wrong with the world and offering some vision of redemption.

The difficulty is that symbols often outlive the institutions that gave them meaning. When churches appear unable to exercise the kind of moral or political influence people want, Christian language and imagery can be detached from the communities that sustained them and attached instead to movements that promise agency, identity, or power. The symbols remain potent even when severed from the theological framework that once governed their use. Think less Constantine and more Simon Magus.

This is what I’ve elsewhere called post-Christian Christianity: not the disappearance of Christian faith but its mutation. Christian language, symbols, and moral intuitions continue to circulate through public life, generating emotional and political energy while becoming increasingly detached from serious Christian practice, discipline, and doctrine.

This differs from ordinary hypocrisy. Hypocrisy at least acknowledges a standard it fails to meet. What we increasingly encounter instead is a Christianity emptied of binding authority — a floating vocabulary that can be attached to almost any political project.

Seen in this light, the Church’s inability to prevent such appropriations reveals something important about its own position. The issue isn’t simply that Christian symbols are being used in ways Christians may find objectionable. It’s that the Church no longer possesses sufficient cultural authority to shape how those symbols are understood. The symbols continue to circulate. The institution that generated them increasingly doesn’t control their meaning.

The Anglican Habit of Restraint

What, then, can the Church do in such a situation? Demanding the return of lost authority isn’t a serious option, nor is imagining that press releases and social media interventions can compensate for its absence. The more difficult question is whether a Church that has lost control of its symbolic inheritance might recover something more durable: not a better argument, but a more convincing way of life. That’s where Anglicanism’s political inheritance, rightly understood, becomes unexpectedly relevant.

For much of English history, Anglican common life wasn’t separate from civil society; it was woven into it. The parish helped sustain local governance, poor relief, education, and communal identity. The Church’s political contribution wasn’t confined to what its leaders said. It was embedded in what its communities did — in the habits, obligations, and mutual responsibilities parish life sustained across generations. Its political witness was, in the most literal sense, a form of common life.

That history, of course, had profound pathologies. Anglicanism gave theological cover to empire, sanctified social hierarchies, and often baptised the interests of the powerful as the will of God. The parson and the squire weren’t accidental companions but integral features of Christendom in England and Wales. The parish system was woven into structures of deference and local authority that made genuine community and coercive hierarchy difficult to disentangle. The treasures of the tradition have always sat uneasily alongside privilege and power.

Yet running through that history — sometimes in genuine tension with its more compromised elements — is a strand of the Anglican inheritance worth recovering: sceptical of ideological purity, cautious about grand schemes of social reinvention, alert to the corruptions of concentrated power, and inclined towards reform through inherited institutions rather than revolutionary rupture. That disposition rested on theological convictions about fallen human nature and the provisional character of every earthly settlement. No party, movement, or leader fully embodies the Kingdom of God. Politics matters profoundly, but it remains penultimate.

What I find compelling about that strand is that its deepest political contribution was never primarily what the Church said to the powerful. It was what the Church became in its own common life: the virtues it cultivated, the patience and restraint it practised, the obligations it sustained between people who might otherwise have had little reason to regard one another as neighbours.

The irony of the present moment is that the loss of political influence — painful and disorienting as it is — may create the conditions for recovering precisely that inheritance. A Church no longer sustained by social expectation, no longer the default chaplain to local hierarchies, and no longer able to rely on inherited deference is forced back onto the quality of its own corporate life.

It has to become, in a way it rarely had to before, genuinely worth belonging to.

And that may prove a gift as much as a loss. In a culture increasingly suspicious of institutional authority, a Church that has visibly surrendered the privileges of status yet retained the capacity to form communities of trust, obligation, and mutual care may discover a different kind of influence. Stripped of inherited prestige, it may recover the authority that comes from embodying a form of life others can actually see and judge for themselves.

This matters because constitutional cultures across much of the democratic world appear increasingly fragile. Constitutions don’t sustain themselves. They depend upon habits of restraint, patience, compromise, and a willingness to accept obligations one has not chosen. Yet consumer culture steadily erodes those habits, encouraging us to imagine ourselves primarily as sovereign choosers rather than citizens formed by mutual responsibility.

In that environment, a Church that genuinely embodies constitutional virtues within its own common life may be offering a more significant political witness than it realises. Not principally by advocating such virtues, but by practising them. That witness doesn’t depend on privileged access to power. It depends on the Church becoming visibly and recognisably different in the way it orders its corporate life.

Witnessing from the Margins

Which brings me to what lies at the heart of Faith in the Public Square’s essay: formation.

He frames political engagement primarily as something Christian leaders must be equipped for through better theology and more persuasive arguments. I don’t disagree. During my own time teaching in theological colleges in the UK, I was repeatedly struck by how little serious engagement there often was with political theology — a sharp contrast with my experience at Duke Divinity School, where Augustine, Hooker, Temple, Barth, Niebuhr, and O’Donovan formed a substantial part of my studies. That kind of formation matters. It shapes not only what one thinks about politics but how one approaches it: with a sense of the tradition’s depth, its internal tensions, and its resistance to easy conscription by any single programme or ideology.

Yet intellectual formation alone can’t generate the credibility that genuine witness requires. For a Church that no longer enjoys the automatic authority of establishment, credibility has become indispensable.

A community deeply formed by the strangeness of the Gospel will speak politically with an eloquence no curriculum can supply. The early Church’s most effective public witness wasn’t a theory of the state but a way of life. “See how they love one another,” pagans were said to remark. Christianity became intelligible because it embodied forms of solidarity, charity, and mutual obligation that the surrounding culture struggled to explain. John Chrysostom later made the same point in a different register: the Church’s witness about the poor can’t be separated from its treatment of the poor. The Gospel becomes publicly credible when it takes visible social form.

The crisis, then, isn’t simply that Christians lack the language for political engagement. It’s that the Church often struggles to embody a form of life recognisably distinct from the political cultures surrounding it. If the wider culture is increasingly shaped by hyper-individualism, consumerism, and grievance, and the Church is being shaped by precisely the same forces, then better arguments can only accomplish so much.

What’s needed is the recovery of a common life so thoroughly shaped by Christ that it becomes, once again, a genuine social alternative — not merely a better argument, but a different kind of community. Freed from the assumptions of status and establishment, such a witness becomes visible in a way it rarely could when social deference carried much of the Church’s authority for it. That’s what makes political witness credible. It’s also, I suspect, what will eventually make the Church’s voice worth hearing again.

Which is, in the end, where I find myself both agreeing with and extending Faith in the Public’s argument. They want to equip the Church to speak. So do I. But a Church that has lost much of its cultural authority, that finds its symbolic inheritance repurposed by movements it can’t control, and that often discovers its public interventions met with indifference rather than engagement, requires something deeper than better techniques of communication.

It must recover the integrity of its own common life. Not as an alternative to public witness, but as its foundation.

The history of Christianity suggests that the Church has often exercised its most enduring influence when it cultivated communities capable of carrying the faith through periods of uncertainty, fragmentation, and cultural change. The margins, it turns out, aren’t where Christian witness falls silent. They may be where it learns to speak with clarity once again.

Postscript: Before anyone points it out, I realise that the reception of Magnifica Humanitas appears to provide a rather awkward counterexample to much of the argument above. I’m not so sure. An encyclical isn’t a statement or a press release; it’s a teaching document. Perhaps its success lies precisely in that fact. I hope to explore that question in a later post.