If we are preaching the gospel faithfully, we will clash with the various, proliferating religions of the “postmodern” world — with Mormons, Hare Krishna, Moonies, and Scientologists. But, we will also be clashing with other “competitors”. The Church’s competitors are nation-states and international political bodies like the United Nations. The Church’s ethos and culture are not just a challenge to other “religions,” but to the ethos of Americanism and the culture of globalization, insofar as such an ethos and culture exist. (Against Chrsitianity, Peter J. Leithart, pg. 34)

Leithart’s greatest ability as a writer is to force his reader into seeing things from a shatteringly different perspective – in a sense to shock them out of stagnant beliefs with a short, worldview-changing paragraph. This is a good example. If Leithart is right, and I think he is, then we should see a clear competing interest in the mission of the Church as stated in the gospel and the mission of the U.N., which states that its mission is primarily “peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance” as well as working “to promote respect for human rights, protect the environment, fight disease, and reduce poverty.”

But these are, I submit, all things whose responsibility lies in the Church, not in government. And not in a united bureaucracy of governments, either. This is not simply an example of government encroaching. Government only encroaches when the Church abdicates. Somebody needs to do it. That doesn’t mean government should.

Take world peace, for example. What institutions does God command us to work through in bringing this about? The Great Commission has “political” side effects because, if we are doing our job in preaching the gospel, world peace will come. That’s the promise given to Israel: they will be a light to the nations. Israel’s job is our job. There will be no need for government to come and solve the issue.

This is also true with human rights and humanitarian aid. And what happened to the Church’s role in caring for the sick and clothing the naked? These are not duties of the United Nations, they are duties of the Church. (I found it interesting in reading Edmund Burke’s Reflections, who was very annoyed at preachers who would make inflammatory speeches in favor of this or that political idea when they should have been sticking to their work in “charity”. I fault Burke on the first point, but I fault the Church on the second. We are abdicating and letting the U. N. do all the “charity” work.)

Leithart also mentions Americanism. In Against Christianity, Leithart favors a return to Christendom in his chapter “For Constantine”, but a Protestant Christendom that will have some significant differences from the more magisterially centered culture emerging in the centuries before the Reformation. This reminded me of Thomas F. Madden in his lecture series Sword and Cross on the Crusades. He pointed out that if you asked an Englishman in the middle ages what he was, he would probably respond that he belonged to thus-and-such shire or county. But if you pressed him further to account for a larger identity, he would not say he was an Englishman. He would say he was a (baptized) Christian. A member of Christendom. That was where he was from and what he belonged to.

This sort of identity, Leithart argues in his book The Baptized Body, must emerge not only out of an assent to Constantine (the idea, not the person) but centrally out of a right understanding of the civil and social implications of baptism. Our most fundamental identity must lie in a body of believers who are baptized, and this identity is a social, civil, and cultural identity.

So, is the United Nations a competitor of the Church? And, if it is, how must we regain our responsibility?