How We Christians Squandered Our Influence Over Politics Throughout the West, and Why That’s a Disaster for Church and State

Years ago I issued a warning: The U.S. must not follow the path of Western Europe in a profoundly crucial arena, and the Church must act decisively to help. Or at least stop making things worse.

The disaster I saw in Europe and foresaw in America was this: A total separation between patriotic, populist, reality-based political movements and principled Christian citizens. In Europe, the parties alive to the existential threat of non-Western immigration, political Islam, and globalist attacks on national sovereignty are mostly thoroughly secular. They’ve fallen completely silent on unborn life, the institution of marriage, and other social issues which are absolutely crucial, in the long run, to the survival of their countries. The foundation of their house is cracked and starting to crumble, but these conservative parties are no longer paying attention.

Why? Because the house is on fire, and structural reinforcement doesn’t seem as urgent as putting out the flames. When thousands of jihadists stupidly imported from war zones march through the streets of German cities demanding sharia, and hundreds of churches in France burn down after arson attacks, and British girls are trafficked by Muslim grooming gangs whom it’s literally a crime to complain about … arguments over abortion or the LGBTQ agenda tend to get pushed onto the margins.

In the past, conservative parties would be expected to march along both tracks, to fend off foreign invasion and cultural subversion. Pro-life, pro-family policies were part and parcel of sane, conservative platforms in Europe, as they were in the U.S. right up through 2020. But first in Europe, and by 2024 in America, these movements began to splinter. Trump’s winning platform this year was heavily diluted, markedly less conservative on social issues than Mitt Romney’s was in 2012. (Not that Romney or the GOP really meant any of it, but they felt constrained to pretend.)

What happened and who’s at fault? Not the secular politicians, who follow public opinion rather than form it. The villain of this piece is in fact the Church and its leaders. (For this piece I’ll focus on my own Roman Catholic Church, but the lessons apply equally to leading Evangelical bodies, especially those thought leaders whom critics such as Megan Basham rightly calls “regime Christians.”)

Virtue Sniveling for Head Pats from Our Masters

Put bluntly, Church leaders eager to present themselves as “winsome” and eke out social acceptance from our elites have deliberately adopted political stances grounded in Utopianism, sentimentality, and misguided “compassion,” then pretended that these positions were “demanded by the Gospel.” This, even though for centuries most Christians and Church leaders believed and taught otherwise, and on many issues Scripture itself demands a sterner, more realistic stance.

The most ludicrous examples come from Pope Francis and his tame bishops’ conferences. Francis has falsely taught the heretical position that capital punishment is everywhere immoral — and always has been. (Thus it was wrong for God to demand capital punishment for murder in His covenant with Noah, and wrong for Moses to impose it as part of the Old Law.)

Francis’s docile bishops in the U.S. called for the commutation of hundreds of death sentences, which Joe Biden duly issued. Francis’s Vatican also issued a document claiming that any deportation from any country at all for any reason is intrinsically evil, akin to human trafficking or forced prostitution. U.S. bishops are already lining up to fight Trump’s effort to repatriate any of the 10 million or more illegal aliens Biden smuggled in. In fact, those bishops earned some $3 billion over 15 years in U.S. government contracts via their tame “nonprofits” such as the far-left, entirely secular Catholic Charities, which traffic illegal immigrants.

When the churches are taking outlandish stances like these, which contradict the teachings and example of sane Christian statesmen over two millennia, rational citizens rightly ignore them, then start to scorn them. The message sent by churchmen who teach that we cannot execute Nazi war criminals or deport members of drug cartels is simple: Christianity is stupid, and stupidity is Christian.

These pastors implicitly teach us that the Gospel is a worldview for sappy 10-year-old girls and timid, slow-witted boys, and for adults willing to live in a state of clueless wishful thinking. So when the same Church, which calls for masochistic measures amounting to national suicide, chimes in to denounce abortion or check transgenderist madness, nobody listens. Nor should they.

I Kissed Papal Stalinism Goodbye

I once used to follow Vatican statements scrupulously, and try to conform my opinions to match what the pope was teaching. That’s actually demanded of Catholics since Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium, which calls for “religious submission” even to the pope’s fallible ramblings. Now, after Pope Francis? I’m not even curious about whatever emerges from the Vatican B.S. Generator, except sometimes for a dash of gallows humor. And I’ve had to reexamine past fallible statements by much better popes on their merits alone, since clearly it isn’t safe to outsource my thoughts to an institution, however venerable.

How many other Christians have had to do the same with their churches and their leaders? Does anyone really wonder what Christianity Today has to say about any issue whatsoever? How about high-profile pastors? How many of them solemnly taught that locking down, canceling worship services, and taking an abortion-based vaccine were demanded by “love of neighbor”? Why would you ever listen to such a person again?

If we Christians now respond to our leaders’ teachings by saying, “Talk to the hand,” should we be surprised that secular politicians scoff too? After decades of Christian leaders essentially teaching that “Christianity is stupid, and stupidity is Christian,” these politicians now shrug and say, “Okay, we believe you.” And since they have countries to run and millions of people to protect, they look elsewhere for answers.

That won’t work in the long run, however. Secular right-wing movements realize that marriage is the bedrock of society, birthrates are much too low, and a strong religious faith is the best antipoverty program in history — guiding people away from hedonism and self-destruction. But political movements, even coercive laws, can’t do much about such issues. They are the domain of the Church, which has squandered its moral authority over decades of pharisaical virtue-signaling and cringeworthy scrambling for approval from anti-Christian elites who hate us.

The Church must reclaim its legacy of uniting faith and reason, of teaching the hard truths that prevail in a fallen world. Only after that will Caesar have any reason to listen.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.

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