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Progress often comes from hurting others." That, according to Robert Kaplan, is Machiavelli's cruel but accurate assessment of political reality. And that is why America's political leaders today need a pagan rather than a Christian ethic if they are to defend American lives and interests. So says Kaplan, author of Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (Random House, 2002). "Machiavelli," says Kaplan, "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."

Exactly right, says Duke University theologian Stanley Hauerwas. "War becomes the great event in American life, because that's when we send the young out to die and be killed. … It's an extraordinary sacrificial system, but sacrificing to the wrong god, Mars. … Christianity is an alternative to that sacrificial system" (quoted in Mark Oppenheimer, "For God, Not Country," Lingua Franca, September 2001).

Kaplan the political warrior and Hauerwas the pacifist agree: it is time to break up a Christian-pagan political marriage that should never have taken place. Kaplan thinks Christianity's private morality offers no public virtue. Hauerwas believes that Christianity's greatest virtue is displayed when Christ's followers renounce all use of violence. Furthermore, they say we can't have it both ways. If you want to protect America and the best of its "private, Judeo-Christian morality," says Kaplan, you will have to work publicly to uphold good pagan virtue for "the preservation and augmentation of American power." On the other hand, if you want to be an undivided Christian, according to Hauerwas, you must relinquish the ungodly identification of Christianity with patriotism, and follow Christ, pure and simple.

But are these the only two choices? Is there another way forward? Indeed, I believe the wholehearted following of Jesus Christ does entail a public ethos that stands in marked contrast to Kaplan's pagan ethos.

Furthermore, Christ's lordship sustains a role for human government that stands in marked contrast to the pacifism advocated by Hauerwas.

We need not dwell long on Kaplan's contention that Christianity offers no public ethic. His book is typical of those who are largely ignorant of Christianity and read it only through the eyes of Kant, Nietzsche, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Nietzsche, like Machiavelli, rejected as a grave human error the soft, unmanly meekness of Christianity. Niebuhr, though, is said to be the most important public theologian of the 20th century. But his view of the direct public usefulness of the Christian love ethic was dim.

With Hauerwas, however, we must spend more time. First, he does not stand alone. He speaks for a growing community of Christians who look to the moral theology of John Howard Yoder and to the biblical exegesis of theologian Richard Hays. All three men believe that Jesus Christ has called his followers to live as an entirely new community—a new polis (Greek for "city"). The members of this polis worship, evangelize, and pursue social justice together as an alternative society that lives in contradiction to the world.

In an important 1979 essay titled "The Spirit of God and the Politics of Men" (published in For the Nations, Eerdmans, 1997), Yoder argues that Christians should

be guided by the claims of God upon the one real world which he intends by the power of his Spirit to redeem. The choice or the tension which the Bible is concerned with is not between politics and something else which is not politics, but between right politics and wrong politics. Not between "spirit" and something else which is not spiritual, but between true and false spirits. Not between God and something else unrelated to God, but between the true God and false gods.

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November 18 2002, Vol. 46, No. 12