Georgetown Professor Explains His Viral Essay Challenging the Metaphysics of the Christian Right

Joshua Mitchell, a professor of political theory at Georgetown University, came to my attention in the spring when a friend urged me to read his essay “Whither the Reformation in America?” It had been making the rounds in Christian intellectual circles—or as viral as a roughly 6,000-word essay at the nexus of theology and politics can go. Ross Douthat wrote a column about it in his New York Times newsletter. Despite my usual reluctance to read pieces of that length, I took my friend's advice. In the end, I was glad I did.

Part of what makes the essay long is a condensed walk through nearly 2,000 years of Christian history. Mitchell takes the reader from the schism following the Council of Chalcedon in 451, through the break between Rome and Constantinople, and on to the Reformation. Once a church tradition takes a separate path, he argues, it does not simply rejoin the others. That history sets up the question at the heart of his essay: If America is suffering from a spiritual crisis, what kind of remedy could its people actually receive?

Some years ago, I was walking to the office while listening to a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell when he said something unexpectedly profound. As I remember it, he suggested that America's capacity for self-criticism was one of its defining strengths. At that particular moment in 2020, my first impulse was to hear it as another attempt to justify the widespread rioting of the time. Still, I paused the recording. He seemed to have put his finger on something true: The urge to examine ourselves and demand reform, however painful it can be, is bound up with the American character.

Mitchell takes a similar view, but he goes one level deeper: Who gave Americans this tradition of self-examination in the first place? He traces it to the country's Reformed Protestant inheritance: its concern with original sin, its belief that stains can be washed away, and its hope that a new city on a hill can be built.

Readers who are no fans of Calvin should not stop reading yet: Mitchell is not asking every American to become Presbyterian. His view is that a country's spiritual remedy must fit its inheritance. For instance, he told me that historically Catholic countries such as France, Spain, and Portugal should draw on their Catholic traditions. The United States, he argues, has to draw from its own Calvinist well.

What I found most striking, though, was whom he considered the present-day inheritor of that tradition. One might expect him to name evangelicals or the historic mainline Protestant churches. Instead, Mitchell points to the woke Left.

He calls identity politics an "inverted Puritanism." Identity politics preserves the Reformed concern with sin and renewal while losing the Christian answer to sin. In his account, that makes it a heresy but one that still speaks in a recognizably American religious vocabulary. His proposed remedy is for those on the Left to return to Christianity, where Christ alone takes away the sins of the world.

The combined diagnosis and proposed remedy were unusual enough that I wanted to know more about the ideas and the man behind them. This summer, I had a chance to speak with Mitchell at length.

We began with the history behind his essay and his family's religious background, then discussed Mitchell's claim that the Left carries the United States's Calvinist inheritance, his doubts about evangelicals, and why he regards the Left as a mission field. From there, we turned to slavery and the temptation to declare either the United States or its critics entirely pure, the appeal of President Donald Trump as a reaction to collective guilt, and the loss of the churches' authority. Mitchell also spoke about his own religious conversion. He ended with a hope that complicates his account of Christianity's lasting divisions: that this crisis might yet draw the churches closer together.

What prompted you to write your essay, and why did you broaden it beyond the question of an evangelical intellectual movement?

The immediate motivation was a request from American Reformer to comment on Aaron Renn’s essay in First Things about the lack of an evangelical intellectual movement in America. I started down that road, but things were happening so quickly on the right—with rising anti-Semitism and doubts about the Protestant foundation of America—that it seemed to me something larger needed to be said.

My father’s family is Antiochian Orthodox Christian. They lived as part of a minority community in the Middle East for 1,300 years before immigrating to the United States. So in my bones I have the intuition that cultures are ultimately religiously rooted, and once they get started, they do not easily shift.

I have been reading Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant writers. At least since the 1990s, with the emergence of Michael Novak’s “Catholic moment,” there has been a sense that Protestantism was exhausted and Roman Catholicism could be the older brother, so to speak, defending the American project through a more Catholic reading of the world.

I do not think that project fully worked. I think there is a new Catholic presence in American political culture, which is post-Novak and post-Weigel. By that I mean Patrick Deneen, who is a dear friend of mine. We disagree on many things, but I think he is a wonderful man. I think Patrick is basically saying the American project, the Protestant project, is over. I think in the New Right there is that sentiment as well.

My family is Eastern Orthodox, at least on my father’s side. I am well aware that you do not just decide one day that a long inheritance is over. So what I sought to do in that essay was to suggest that if you look at the history of Christianity, you have, to use my language, a number of distinct metaphysical wagers. Once these wagers were made, the civilizations that followed in their wake did not go back.

I think it is safe to say that the Eastern Orthodox Church is thinking in terms of participation. That is the icon. It is a shadow of the world that points to the reality beyond the world of coming into being and passing away. This is deeply Platonic.

With the Roman Catholic Church from Aquinas forward, you adopt a doctrine of nature, which is in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, books one through eight. Superadded to that is a doctrine of grace, which is, in effect, the Nicomachean Ethics, books nine and ten.

These are wagers. They are not going away. They get reinvented in new and deeper guises each time there is a crisis within these civilizations.

What I tried to show was that the Protestant wager was not Greek. It was neither Plato nor Aristotle. It was Hebraic. I teach German idealism. One line starts with Luther, runs through Marx, and then implodes with Nietzsche. I think it was a disastrous move. I am not saying it had to work that way. German idealism was one possible strain of Luther’s legacy. There were other paths not taken that could have been more theologically responsible.

But I think the other Jerusalem wager of Hebraic Christianity is through Calvinism and therefore American. Therefore, it is a covenantal tradition. I do not see that disappearing. I do not think a generation can come along and say, “Well, now that is over, and now we are going to move forward on a new foundation.”

It is a path-dependency argument about the civilizational options within these metaphysical wagers. Despite the apparent weakness of the Reformation tradition in America today, I do not believe it is over. In fact, I say at the end of the essay that the proof it is alive and well, perversely, is the heresy of identity politics. It is a covenantal tradition that understands the depth of purity and stain—a kind of inverted Puritanism.

The conservative right, especially the Roman Catholic wing, thinks that it is over and that you can invoke doctrines of nature and talk about the God of nature and the Declaration of Independence. They think they have an answer to this Protestant project. But I am saying Protestantism is sick and alive in the form of identity politics, and I do not believe the conservative tropes about the God of nature are going to do anything to displace that.

We are still living in a Protestant world, though a deeply distorted one. My political concern is that if the right does not get its act together, it will be overwhelmed in 2028 and 2032 by a reemergence of this identity-politics pathology. That is the argument in a nutshell.