The Politeness Criterion

Prudence is not baptism

Russell Moore’s working theory of Christian politics, as far as I can make it out, is this:

A magistrate who threatens the church’s legal existence may still be honored, provided he is conventionally respectable. A magistrate who restrains those threats may not be supported, if he is the sort of man who makes the respectable blush.

Call this the Politeness Criterion. It has a certain parlor elegance. It also has the disadvantage of being false.

A belief can be aimed at the right target and still hit it by accident. A certain philosopher made a career of such stories. Moore has a true-looking warning—don’t baptize power—and a true-looking observation—this magistrate is no Sunday-school superintendent. From these he concludes that support for the man who will actually keep the state off the church’s neck is a spiritual emergency. The warning is aimed at the right target. It hits by the wrong route.

Distinguish three claims.

1. The church may not call a scoundrel a saint.
2. The church may not let a campaign do the work of a creed.
3. The church ought not prefer the magistrate who will protect it from those who mean to bind its conscience.

(1) and (2) are Christian. (3) does not follow from them. It is a further thesis, and it is a thesis about prudence, not about worship. Call that Christian realism if you like: the church may refuse to sanctify a President and still prefer the President who will restrain the people who mean to bind it. The alternative is a moralism that keeps its hands clean and its institutions exposed.

Suppose, in some nearby possible world, a president of exquisite manners signs a regulation requiring Christian schools and hospitals to underwrite what they believe to be the taking of innocent life, and instructs the Justice Department that the ministerial exception is a relic. Suppose, in another world, a president of deplorable manners appoints judges who restore the opposite settlement and tells the agencies to stop treating orthodox conviction as a public nuisance. The Politeness Criterion ranks the first man above the second. That is not prophecy. That is a preference for tone over the thing tone was supposed to protect.

“Ah, says the objector, “but you are doing evil that good may come.” No. I am not asking anyone to call the second man righteous. I am asking whether a people who must raise children, preach, hire, and gather may take account of which administration will leave them free to do those things. Romans 13 already tells us the magistrate exists to terrorize evildoers, not to win our admiration. Isaiahs “nursing fathers” were not recruited from the faculty club. If that is an embarrassment, it is an embarrassment as old as providence.

Moore is right that the church must not become what oppresses it. He is wrong that the only way to avoid that fate is to reserve our sharpest language for the champion who is, at the moment, standing between the church and the people who would shrink it. That is not refusing the oppressor. That is scolding the fireman for smelling like smoke.

Moore would not sign the Politeness Criterion if you handed it to him as a creed. He would say he prefers a leader of ordinary honesty, limited power, and no taste for turning the church into a precinct. He would say the issue is character and witness, not etiquette. Grant him the self-description. It still does not explain the asymmetry. A theory of character that can honor an administration while it writes the church into a corner, and then discover a spiritual emergency when a ruder man begins to unwind the corner, is not yet a theory of character. It is a theory of which faults are permitted to count. What Moore would actually prefer in a magistrate—and whether that preference can survive contact with any available President—is a different question.

Prudence is not baptism. It is also not optional.

Notes

1. The occasion for this post is Russell Moore, “Christians, Let’s Stop Abusing Romans 13,” Christianity Today, January 14, 2026. The article is about the sword. What it presupposes is a theory of which administrations may hold one without the church declaring an emergency.
2. Romans 13:1–4; Isaiah 49:23.