Is Darryl Hart serious?

Darryl G. Hart is a Church and American religious historian (yes, those are two distinct categories), and a ruling elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I've read several of his books and attended some of his lectures, mostly of a historical and sociological bent, and am rather appreciative of his lonely quest to ground Christian identity in the marks of the visible Church rather than the ineffable experiences in which most American baptists and evangelicals try to root their assurance of salvation. As sympathetic readers of this blog know, it's a quixotic endeavor, and in much of his scholarly work I find Hart a supportive voice in the campaign to restore the visible Church to her God-ordained primacy.

However.

Some years ago now, I heard an interview in which a political thinker of some note (no, I can't remember who it was) was asked what he thought of something Ann Coulter had recently said. After a moment of sincere hesitation, he responded to the effect that he considered Ann Coulter a performance artist, not a political analyst; and since he didn't think she believed what she said, he didn't feel any obligation to refect on her words either. I think much the same thing when I read Darryl Hart on the relationship of Church and state or of Christian to these United States. There's a serious philosophy in there, but he demands a consistency and purity which seems to me utterly disconnected from the world in which we live.

While I am accordingly dubious of much which appears on his blog, this month I was driven to jaw-dropping astonishment by his review of Richard Gamble's In Search of the City on the Hill, which appears in the current Ordained Servant. I haven't read Gamble's book, which explores the ways in which a metaphor Jesus deployed in the Sermon on the Mount to describe his disciples and the Church was appropriated into American political rhetoric. An interesting topic, that, and perhaps Gamble succeeds in even-handedness and nuance. Hart does not. His stance becomes a self-defeating posture in the final paragraph of his review (commas supplied by my compulsion to line-edit):

Far too often Christians in the United States have let partisan politics obscure their higher commitment to Scripture. That is why evangelical Protestants, for instance, overwhelmingly supported Republican candidates who, despite the misuse of biblical language, appeared to be defending traditional American ideals. Of course, as Gamble shows, those ideals were not Jesus’s or Winthrop’s. But patriotism proved to be a more forceful influence than Scripture’s own teaching.

Re-read that paragraph if you like (I certainly have), or go read it in its original context. Hart seems to suggest that evangelicals who vote for candidates who defend traditional American ideals are somehow betraying Scriptural ideals. Wait: really? Writing as someone who chooses to vote for fringe candidates rather than compromise my (admittedly idiosyncratic and unspeakably lofty) principles, I nonetheless understand why other Christians make a different choice. If one believes the best way forward is to participate in the system as it currently operates, perhaps in the hope of gradual reformation towards more genuinely constitutional principles, that's a legitimate choice which, in itself, doesn't compromise one's allegiance to Christ's Lordship (at least so far as I can tell). Given that prior choice, why wouldn't a Christian vote for candidates who appear to defend traditional American values, not to mention what was once the consensus moral position in our national culture?

With (I am given to understand) Richard Gamble, Hart appears shocked, shocked, that 20th century politicians would appropriate a Biblical metaphor and Christians not rise up in furious umbrage. Now, I hate to point this out to historians, but America is an English-speaking country, and the two greatest influences on all educated discourse amongst English-speaking peoples are Shakespeare and the King James Bible. As a high-Church presbyterian, I believe only the Church is the city on the hill in the way Jesus meant that metaphor. As an American devoted to the propositions on which this nation was founded, I in all sincerity believe these United States are also a city on a hill and a light to the nations, but in a way quite different from the way in which the Church is. If I can believe both of those things, then a man of Hart's learning and education ought at least to understand that such a reconciliation of beliefs is possible, and that one can think of America as a city on a hill without being a blinkered idiot who has abandoned all commitment to Biblical principle in the public sphere.

Darryl Hart has some interesting points to make about the way Christians conceive of their role in the political arena. Perhaps if he presented them with more nuance and seriousness, those points would be taken seriously.