Post-Christian Christianity: a Response
Constantine, Simon Magus, and other historical antecedents
Several readers of my ‘Post-Christian Christianity’ have objected that what I’m not really referring to anything new at all. The powerful have always appropriated Christian language, symbols and institutions for their own ends. If politicians brandish Bibles, if national projects are clothed in Christian rhetoric, if religious identity becomes a source of legitimacy, then surely the obvious historical parallel is the emperor Constantine. What we’re witnessing today, the argument goes, is simply another chapter in a very old story that stretches back to him.
There’s some merit in that argument. From the fourth century onwards, rulers discovered that the faith could supply a language of solidarity, moral authority and social cohesion. The Church hasn’t always resisted the embrace of political power particularly well. Any account of the present moment that ignores this history risks mistaking a perennial temptation for a novel development.
At the same time, I don’t think the question is whether Christianity has been used politically before — to claim otherwise would be absurd. The question is whether what’s happening now is structurally different. I believe it is, and that post-Christian Christianity may be what political capture looks like after Christendom.
The Constantine Comparison
The manipulation Constantine practised depended on something that’s easy to overlook. He needed Christianity to be something. He couldn’t use it as a unifying force if it dissolved into doctrinal incoherence. The Church had to have recognised boundaries of faith. I’m not sure he cared all that much what those boundaries were, so long as everyone adhered to them. But he needed a Church capable of saying what Christianity was and what it wasn’t.
This is why Nicaea mattered so much. Whatever Constantine’s personal convictions, his political project required bishops, councils and creeds capable of making determinate truth claims. A Christianity that meant everything would ultimately mean nothing. He needed a Church confident enough to define orthodoxy and exclude alternatives. Notably, he never presented himself as the one defining that orthodoxy — had he done so, it would likely have looked less like homoousia and more like Romanitas in Christian dress.
Paradoxically, this gave the Church a degree of independence. It could be confident enough in its own doctrine and institutions to hold even rulers to account. If emperors could see the Church as a vehicle for imperial unity, the Church could see Rome as a vehicle for proclaiming a Gospel that circumscribed imperial claims. The confrontation between Ambrose and Theodosius after the massacre at Thessalonica still resonates precisely because it demonstrated that emperors didn’t simply determine Christian truth. The Church possessed something Constantine could neither bestow nor remove.
The dynamic feels very different today. Contemporary movements deploying Christian symbols usually show little interest in capturing or reshaping the Church. Many of them see it as part of the liberal establishment they oppose. What they want is Christianity’s accumulated inheritance — its moral seriousness, historical depth and symbolic authority. The institution that generated those things becomes secondary, expendable, even suspect.
Part of the reason is that the conditions of influence have changed. Constantine needed bishops and councils because authority and communication were concentrated within the Church itself. Today there is often no comparable need to capture institutions at all. A successful podcaster or online commentator can command an audience far larger than most bishops or church preachers could ever hope to reach. Authority increasingly flows not through ecclesial office but through visibility, personality and ideological strutting. The televangelist of an earlier generation, however showman-like, still needed something resembling a pulpit, a denomination, an ordination. Today's Christian nationalist influencer needs none of these — only an audience.
The result is that Christianity’s symbols, language and moral authority can now be detached from the institutions that once transmitted and interpreted them. One no longer needs the Church in order to acquire influence. Indeed, the Church can only ever be an obstacle — a source of accountability, theological constraint or unwelcome limits on what Christianity can be made to mean.
From Civil Religion to Post-Christian Christianity
To understand how we got here, it’s more helpful to look not to late antiquity but to a distinctive feature of modern American life whose effects have spread well beyond America’s borders.
For much of the twentieth century, American public culture treated Christianity less as a set of doctrinal commitments than as a reservoir of civic virtue. Christianity was valued because it encouraged honesty, self-restraint, responsibility and sacrifice. It supplied a moral vocabulary capable of sustaining democratic institutions and binding together an extraordinarily diverse society. During the Cold War this acquired an additional edge: religious belief became a marker of what distinguished the United States from its atheist rivals.
Perhaps no phrase captures this better than In God We Trust, adopted as the national motto in the 1950s. Its strength lay precisely in its deliberate vagueness. It didn’t require assent to the Nicene Creed, confidence in the Trinity or agreement about the Incarnation. It invoked a broad and undefined God around whom citizens with very different convictions could gather.
During this period, Churches generated enormous stores of moral capital — habits of service, neighbourliness and civic responsibility upon which democratic life genuinely depends. Yet the arrangement also contained a subtle and eventually fatal shift. Christianity increasingly came to be valued for how it supported civic life rather than for whether its doctrinal claims were true.
Something of this logic still shapes Christianity’s public role in the UK. I was reminded of this only recently at a primary school leavers’ service where pupils reflected on the Christian values they had been taught. They spoke warmly and sincerely about inclusion, diversity, respect and self-confidence. None of these are bad things. Yet Christianity appeared primarily as a language for affirming the social virtues most prized within a liberal democracy — less a set of claims about God, Christ or salvation than a moral framework for producing well-adjusted citizens.
For a time, this arrangement could appear perfectly stable: so long as Christianity supplied a shared moral vocabulary, questions of truth could remain in the background. But once the faith came to be valued chiefly for the social goods it produced, its meaning became negotiable. The culture wars accelerated this process dramatically. As debates over identity, sexuality, immigration and national belonging grew more polarised, Christianity ceased to function as a common moral language and instead became a marker of cultural affiliation — a signal of which side you were on. I remember my own ministry in the United States when prospective members of my congregation would ask about abortion or same-sex relationships. The questions were often less theological than tribal — direct ways of discovering which side we were on.
Post-Christian Christianity emerged from this transition. It didn’t arise because secular people suddenly discovered religious symbols they could cynically exploit. It arose within a culture already accustomed to treating Christianity instrumentally and performatively. The culture wars simply redirected that logic from national cohesion towards identity and populism.
Why Simon Magus Is the Better Comparison
If I were to reach for a more illuminating comparison for what we see today, it would be Simon Magus.
As related in Acts 8, Simon is described as a man who
“amazed the people of Samaria, saying that he was someone great. All of them, from the least to the greatest, listened to him eagerly, saying, ‘This man is the power of God that is called Great.’”
He encounters the apostles, witnesses the power associated with the Holy Spirit and immediately seeks to pay the apostles for it. He’s not interested in becoming part of the community gathered around Christ. He wants power, not discipleship; revenue, not faith. He imagines that divine power can be detached from divine truth and used for his own profit. Simon wants Christ’s power while remaining outside Christ’s body.
Contemporary movements reaching for Christian symbols often display a similar structure. What attracts them isn’t Christianity’s truth claims but its accumulated civilisational pedigree and symbolic force — its moral seriousness, historical depth, and the language it offers for understanding oneself and one’s place in the world.
Simon, however, was at least unusually clear-sighted about what he was doing. His error was profound, but it was explicit. The present situation is more complicated because it needn’t involve the same cynicism at all. Part of the reason may be that many of us have been formed by a culture that increasingly trains us to enter stories and worlds as sovereign consumers. People don’t simply watch Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings, or lose themselves in vast fictional universes and immersive games. They form attachments that become part of how they understand themselves and return to these worlds repeatedly, inhabiting and extending them in personally meaningful ways.
This impulse isn’t unhealthy in itself. It reflects a deeply human desire for meaning, belonging and a story large enough to live in. But it can cultivate a subtle habit of imagination: approaching narratives as realities we personalise rather than realities that make claims upon us.
Post-Christian Christianity can satisfy that desire rather effectively. It offers a symbolic inheritance rich enough to feel genuinely profound and a sense of participation in something ancient, heroic and consequential. Unlike Middle Earth or the galaxy far, far away, it also comes with a real civilisational inheritance and speaks to genuine anxieties about belonging, continuity and loss. Christianity can therefore become less a truth to which one submits and more an identity one inhabits on one’s own terms — and social media has proved remarkably effective at supplying curated points of entry into that world.
The result is a Christ who gradually becomes the guardian of a civilisation, a culture or a political vision rather than their judge. He reassures and vindicates more than he disrupts and transforms. Rather than calling people into a new life, he baptises what people already are and already believe.
Jesus himself warned that not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven. The danger has never simply been outright rejection of the Gospel. It has always been possible to invoke Christ’s name while remaining attached to something else. That is why idolatry remains the more precise category here. Some idols don’t announce themselves as rivals to God. They borrow his language, his symbols and, if possible, even the face of his Son. The form remains recognisably Christian while the object of devotion remains the world, the flesh, and perhaps even the devil.
In the end, the Constantine comparison risks flattering the present moment. Post-Christian Christianity has little need for an institutionally powerful Church. It requires no authority that the powerful of our own age can’t acquire elsewhere. What it needs instead is a Church uncertain about its own message, hesitant about its own teaching and content to become a vehicle for deeper loyalties that lie elsewhere. The question my critics rightly press is whether this is genuinely new.
I think the answer is yes — not because political captivity is new, but because for the first time the captor doesn’t need the Church to be the captive. It only needs her clothes.