Mike Tolliver (00:00)
What is a Christian response to the bombing of Hiroshima in Nagasaki in World War II? Join me in this interview with Dr. Robert Joustra, professor of politics at Calvin University, where we dive into this and other thorny areas of international politics. We talk about what makes international politics extra challenging, historical Christian tools for thinking through these issues, and places in scripture we can go to resource our thinking on the topic. If you like,
what you see and here on the Biblical Mind podcast, why don’t you like and subscribe? Or you can give us five stars. You could also give us a little, you know, to the cause by going to the biblicalmind.org slash give if you’re so inclined. But otherwise, please stay tuned for the show.
Robert Joustra (00:50)
I I am a professor of politics here at Calvin University as of July first. but my interest kind of in this, in terms of especially thinking through the question of geopolitics, world politics, sort of, you know, is a bit autobiographical. I was, you know, I was in my first
Year of college in September of 2001. And I thought that I would probably study history, and I did for the record, because in some ways I think that international relations is sort of almost a branch of applied history. But I realized that I also, you know, 9-11 being kind of in that first week of class, and there were no smartphones stinging, there were no notifications going off, there was just, you know, your buddy in the hall saying you should go home and turn on the TV. So we did. And you know, I was in Canada.
I’m Canadian. and I often actually make my students watch the presidential address after nine eleven as a way to help them understand the role that emotion plays in international relations. We often think of it as kind of, you know, very sort of dispassionate, Machiavellian, kind of, you know, sort of game theory esque. but you know, emotion plays an enormous role. And I remember even as a Canadian, I wasn’t American, still am not, being very
deeply affected by those events. and the sense of horror, the sense of anger. you know, I try to explain to my students, you know, when they talk about Afghanistan and Iraq and kind of the received wisdom 20 years on of 25 years on of where this has gone. And I try to tell them, you know, you need to understand the emotion of where people were. You know, we we all lost our minds for a couple of months. And this is not an uncommon circumstance actually in politics. And I wanted to I wanted to
dig into that to understand, okay, well
I kind of had some inkling that Christians had thought, you know, that they’d worked systematically through scripture in terms of its demands of justice, of righteousness, of the widow, of the poor, of the orphan, of honest weights and measures. And I’d seen that applied in kind of domestic politics. So this is what it would mean for, you know, thinking about your senatorial race or something like that, right? Especially in the United States. but there was really almost nothing in the world of international relations. and a lot of it was just kind of, you know,
sort of derivative of a kind of pragmatism that’s like, well, we do kind of how we think about Christian politics here inside of the kind of sovereign state in which we live, and out there, man, there’s crazy stuff out there. So what do you gotta do? You gotta kinda take care of your own. and I encountered that very quickly with my students. you know, when we would, for example, talk about the bombing of Hiroshima Nagasaki, by the United States of America, at the in in in August of nineteen forty five, they would usually say, Well
You know, it’s not what you would want to do, but you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet, you know. sometimes this is what it takes in order to achieve the outcomes that you’re looking for. And I was fascinated by that because like that’s an interesting argument, but it’s basically not a religious one, right? I mean I it’s it’s it’s not a Jewish one, it’s not a Muslim one, it’s not a Christian one. you know, it’s it’s just pragmatism, you know. Sometimes you gotta do some bad things and you know, maybe they’d watched a lot of, you know, Jack Bauer or something, some twenty-four, and realized, well, sometimes you gotta torture some bad guys to find a
Out where the bomb is, and that’s what you gotta do. And I realized that in the post 9 11 world, we needed a way to think scripturally, not just about honest weights and measures inside of our countries, but what does it look like to have honest weights and measures with and between other countries? What does it look like to think about justice with and between other states and other political communities, and also how to think about justice inside of other political communities? This was clearly a post 9 11 question.
That emerged as well. Well, what responsibility do you have? Is it the pottery barn rule? You know, you break it, you bought it. What is your responsibility inside of Afghanistan, inside of Iraq, when there are genocides, when it’s not in your country, and it’s not immediately proximate? And yet there is clearly a sense that the Bible speaks to, in a kind of perennial and eternal way, that the God of justice, the God of the universe, calls to account these things. And so I said, you know, look, we’ve we’ve got to find a way to talk about this. So I I was not the first one in a lot of ways, you know.
the book sort of tries to mine the Christian social and political and theological tradition and kind of point out where we could go. But you know I I think it’s actually the first book that’s done this since basically the 1980s, since the heart of the Reagan administration. So maybe it was time. And that’s what I hope readers kind of come to and and and come away with.
Mike Tolliver (05:25)
Okay.
Yeah, and it’s it’s called, you know, the subtitle is a Christian introduction, but they’re you’re you’re doing this within a specific tradition, and you’re very self-aware of that tradition. You you mention it often. It’s it’s sort of the Augustine, Calvin, Kuyper trajectory there. So I’m I’m curious to hear from you then. What are what are the unique things of that perspective that come to bear on this topic?
Robert Joustra (05:50)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah. I I I I I do try to be sort of to show my sources my footnotes, as it were. you know, I’ve I’ve had people say to me, well, you know, I read this and I, you know, it seems Wesleyan to me or it seems Catholic to me. or it reads Pentecostal to me. I actually talk about, you the Pentecostal politics of sort of Pentecost and so on. And I said, Well that’s great, because insofar as, you know, Kuyper and Calvin and Augustine are reading scripture, we would hope that they’re bearing witness to the truth of that, right? It’s not, you if Calvin is innovating something that is independent of scripture.
Mike Tolliver (06:04)
Mm-hmm.
Robert Joustra (06:28)
Well, then actually, we might have some problems. So you would expect, as it were, a sort of promiscuous ecumenicity that we’re sort of reading off of each other’s notes, and you would find those resonances. That said, you know, I think you’re right, you know, in terms of the tradition I know best, in terms of the one that I lean on. yes, it is Augustine as inherited through Calvin as as sort of comes to us through Kuyper-Bavig, some of the kind of neo-Calvinists. And really, I think the fundamental insight that they bring, and this is certainly how
Sort of Neo-Calvinism would sort of explain it is that grace restores nature. You know, this is the kind of sort of Wienhoff’s sort of summary of what we mean by Neo-Calvinism, which is, you know, God has created a good world that was bristling with potential and capacity. He has gifted human beings with power, including political power, to name the animals, to rule, to subdue, to do all of these wonderful things. Sin has tremendously disrupted that, right?
And yet we have been tasked by this creator God who comes still to redeem not only us in our disobedience but the whole of our regency, right? To work among those ruins. You know, this is a very kind of Augustinian sentiment. And that’s where we find ourselves today, right? In a world that is created good, that is fallen, that is, as the Calvinists say, totally depraved, not by which we mean as bad as it could possibly be, but simply that there is no thing that is untouched by that sin, including ourselves, by the way, which immediately orients us toward a kind of
political humility toward a kind of a sort of posture, I think. and yet also Christ has come to make all things do new. Not us making it new, that’s very important. As I often tell my students, a little bit of Calvinism is a terribly dangerous thing, right? Well, because it because it’ll tell you Christ is king, right? But it might not tell you we are not. And that’s very important. You know that Christ is king and we are labor. We are co-laborers but we are also waiting. Right? Because
we cannot fix even ourselves. And so God forbid that we imagine we could fix something as sort of trenchant, something as difficult as the injustices that miscarry in international relations. Proximate, yes, that’s the Augustinian insight, right? And yet always, always waiting in the here and now. And so I lean on those voices, but yeah, you know, I’ve studied the Catholic social tradition. I love the encyclicals. You’re gonna find lots of Catholic social thought in here. You’re gonna see Jacques Maritan, you’re gonna see you know Rerum Nivarum, Gadium It’s been
Laborum exercens, caraters and veritate, all of these different encyclicals in the tradition that I think are rich and beautiful. But I think you’re right to sort of know, yeah, it sort of comes by way of that of that sort of more Calvinistic tradition. This is good. Yeah.
Mike Tolliver (09:13)
So you know, I also have my copy you know, of of your book here.
again, I thought it was fantastic. And even as you’re kind of teasing out some of these things, I’m hearing Skillins, the good of politics, Koisis, you know, political visions and illusions, you you name him. and so, you know, those are fantastic works that are on my shelf behind me. I I would add your book to the to the trinity, if you will, of you know, yeah.
Robert Joustra (09:26)
Hundred percent.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah, wonderful. That’s that’s very high praise.
Mike Tolliver (09:43)
yeah, there there you go. It it is
excellent in in exactly what you’re for the reason that you just named, you’ve essentially crammed like a degree’s worth of material into this book in a very accessible fashion. And so it’s going to expose readers to you know, even if you’re not swimming in that stream, it’s gonna expose you to the the issues that need to be addressed and that Christians ultimately need to have an answer for. And so I really appreciate what you’re doing there.
I did want to ask one question though about the tradition, because Kauasis you know, introduces readers to the the the Catholic, I think it was, the social subsidiarity, and then the neo-Calvinist sphere sovereignty. and I I think you took a sphere sovereignty track in in your thinking. But one of the things that that comes out in your book is just how interrelated.
Robert Joustra (10:31)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mike Tolliver (10:41)
political theory and economic theory are. And so I’m curious to hear you kind of interact with sphere sovereignty in these two hyper interrelated things.
Robert Joustra (10:44)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I mean it it’s interesting ’cause of course Kuyper is articulating this idea of sphere sovereignty and George Harink actually has some wonderful history that says, Well, where did he get this idea that it all come from the Germans and so on? but he’s articulating this idea at the end of the nineteenth century, right? and this is actually a moment, you know, if you go back and you read people like John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, which is seen as a treatise actually in modern politics, the separation of politics from economics as sort of discrete and sort of, you know, separable fields, is really a kind of late
modern thing. now that’s not to say it’s not useful and there’s lots of different reasons that you might do it. but it is to say that in particular, you know, when I read scripture, and I go back and I see, you know, these are the demands that, for example, Torah has on the people of God in terms of how they you know, what I see is that power, it’s not always so easy actually when you’re going through the kind of, you know, the commands for the God’s people to understand, well, this is the part of it that’s political power, and this is the part of it that’s economic power. You know, actually, you know,
Mike Tolliver (11:50)
Yeah.
Robert Joustra (11:54)
It it sort of feels like, well, they’re kind of intertwined in a way. Like the joke I always start when I teach international political economy with my students is the thing about it or the thing about political economy is there’s no other kind, right? there’s no such thing as, you know, and by the way, Adam Smith thought this too, because we all go back, you know, it’s the anniversary of Adam Smith. I know you Americans are having a big one this year too, but so is Adam Smith. And, you know, he writes in his you know, A Wealth of Nations, you know, about a huge sort of moral substructure that’s necessary to kind of
Of make these ideas of supply and demand and kind of self-interested economics kind of work. And he actually articulates those first in his book in 1759, Theory of Moral Sentiments, right? Where he had a chair of moral philosophy actually before he becomes known as the father of sort of economics. The point being that I actually think Scripture and Adam Smith are right. That there’s no such thing as a kind of picture of the distribution of political power that does not also imply a picture of how economics.
Mike Tolliver (12:33)
Right.
Robert Joustra (12:53)
Economic goods should also be distributed along the way. I think that’s the witness that scripture gives us. That’s the witness of most political and economic thinking, such as they were for most of human history. And we really kind of only separate them out for discrete inquiry, kind of, I think, actually around the time that Kuyper is writing it into the 20th century. It’s one of the things I mentioned in Koyzis’ book where he treats liberalism. And by the way, you can see, you know, in my book there are homages to David Koyzis and political visions and illusions. I and what I
Mike Tolliver (13:12)
Okay.
Yes.
Robert Joustra (13:23)
When
started college in September of 2001, it was reading a draft of political visions and illusions of David Koyes’ book, where I learned all this from him, you know. So I, you know, I’ve been I’ve been in this literature for for a long time. but when I read that, I mean he treats liberalism. The one the one sort of tweak that I that I sort of make to his argument is I say, well, really, when we go abroad, when we’re thinking in terms of international relations, it actually often doesn’t help to think of liberal internationalism as a purely political tradition. It’s really a tradition of liberal.
Mike Tolliver (13:30)
Okay.
Robert Joustra (13:53)
Liberal, or it’s really a tradition of political economy. and actually, I think that’s true also of domestic politics. To think of just liberalism as a political tradition, I actually think it’s a tradition of political economy. Because can you have a tradition of kind of, you know, individual rights and the rule of law and all of these things we associate with liberalism and also not have private property, you know? can you have a completely state-owned collectivist system that also honors, you know, individual rights and the
Mike Tolliver (14:01)
Okay.
Robert Joustra (14:23)
You know, some of these things it’s like, well, maybe in the abstraction you could, but I haven’t seen any examples in history where that happens, you know. the the the these things typically go together in terms of the way that they organize political and economic power. And so yeah, I do think sort of a little bit contraquises that that is actually a slightly different way to think about the tradition.
Mike Tolliver (14:40)
Okay.
So now I am in complete agreement with you, and I’m I’m very happy to hear you say that. Now I’ve pushed back on other neo-Calvinists that are gonna double down on sphere sovereignty by saying when you look at Torah, you get clan history, you get household codes, you get economic treatise, you get political th I mean y on and on and on, you know, prophetic lodestone, you could you get all these things integrated into this single document.
Robert Joustra (14:47)
Ha ha ha.
Yeah.
Mike Tolliver (15:14)
and the pushback that I’ll receive from the sphere sovereignty folks is that that was for a particular people in a particular time and we are not there anymore. Do you buy that argument?
Robert Joustra (15:25)
Yeah, so I so I buy part of that argument. so but parceled into the kind of doctrine of subsidiarity or this idea is a kind of differentiation, that there’s an increasing differentiation in human societal spheres. I think that’s broadly speaking empirically true. I mean you just kind of look historically and you say, Yeah, you know what, like, they didn’t have a lot of curling clubs, you know, in Jerusalem back then. But as you get into cold weather and as you get a sort of, you know, greater differentiation of society, you have greater sort of s you know, the Neil Calvinists say societal pluriform.
Forgive me, the way it comes over from the Dutch. What can one do? greater societal pluriformity. And that’s true. And so you have you have an increase in kind of institutions, and actually, the sphere sovereigntists, the Kyperians would say that’s actually right there in creation. We see that, you know, not a lot of metal workers right there, but you actually do see them, metal workers and musicians, emerge over the book of Genesis and city builders. You know, this is a differentiation. You know, electricians, again, not a strong demand for electricians, you know, in the time of the Torah, but you know.
Mike Tolliver (16:25)
I’ve
heard, yeah.
Robert Joustra (16:25)
Now, you know,
you know, now, of course, you know, this is you know bread and butter, we would expect such things. So that part of the argument I think is true. It’s also one of the things that makes sphere sovereignty dynamic, right? because you know, it is not as though creation, the potentialities in creation stopped unfolding sometime in the 19th century when Kuyper articulated this. actually, what we see is that increasingly there are all kinds of interesting areas where we need new institutions and new ways of thinking about what norms govern them. For example, there’s a
A lot of concern about so-called artificial intelligence. This was not a problem that the post-war order had to deal with in 1945. There’s a lot of concern about how to govern near Earth orbit. There’s a lot of stuff going on up there right now. Can we weaponize it? Should we weaponize it? By the way, the short answer, the quick answer that is no, we should definitely not weaponize it. But you know, but we need we need answers to these questions in terms of, well, who governs near Earth orbit? Where does the sovereignty of states begin and end in terms of the altitude ceiling? all of these things are new questions.
Right?
The the ancient Israelites didn’t need them. Heck, you know, the Eisenhower administration didn’t need them, but we do. And so I think that part of sphere sovereignty is helpful and true. but where I think sometimes, you know, the Kyperians get maybe a little bit too stoltified where they kind of you know, they kind of lock in on, you know, well, in the early twentieth century in the Netherlands, these were the spheres, you know? And these are the ones we have today. And it’s like, well, you know, some of them, clearly, there’s a continuity, there’s a kind of you know, but some of
Some of them actually are dynamic and they shift and they change, and how you would think about those demands is different today than it was back then. And so I I think you need something like sphere sovereignty, you need something like subsidiarity to understand how is the authority of the king mediated to his stewards, and how ought they to mediate it in turn to the different areas of human life that do indeed emerge, that are indeed organic and dynamic, as we see kind of in the creation sort of account. we do need some kind of account like that.
And subsidiarity is helpful, by the way. I don’t actually turn my back on that, even though I’d probably mention it less in the book. But I think sphere sovereignty is probably one of the more helpful political accounts to help us think through that. It does give us a bit of a picture, as I think you were complaining about, of why these why these norms, why these institutions would have been arranged in the way that they were in the time that they were, right? I think when I see in Torah, when I see those laws being given, this is the way Herman Bavick talks about it, Jesus does it.
Similar thing. You know, Jesus is the law restorer, as Herbert Babick says. And so when he gives his Sermon on the Mount, it is not now here’s the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s a new law, and you won’t have heard anything like this. No, no, no. In fact, what he’s saying is, this is the law you have always heard, but this is how you ought to live it in this place, in this time, where you are. And so it is up to us to also hear the law and understand what is the way that we ought to live, given the demands, you know, the creator of the universe has gifted us a cheat sheet to how.
this place is supposed to work. So you know how ought we to work within those demands? And there I think spirit sovereignty is helpful, but also dynamic and organic. Yeah, it shifts, it changes, it develops, as does human civilization and human institutions.
Mike Tolliver (19:40)
And
you you do a really good job, I thought, of teasing out the organic nature of these things. when you know the modernist mind is looking for just clear cut, give me the hard and fast, you know, all that. but I do want to go a little bit into this, you know, Torah gives us the cheat sheet, because again, I agree with you. Now I am I am curious. This is an observation, not a criticism.
Robert Joustra (20:00)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Tolliver (20:08)
but I feel like in the former prophets and the latter prophets, you would have ample material to work from on the topic of international politics. And but, you know, and it could have been left on the the cutting room floor as you were putting this book together. But I I didn’t see a whole lot of like resourcing your thought in that material. You know, talk a little bit about that for me.
Robert Joustra (20:20)
Hundred percent, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Some of so some of it was on the cutting floor, you’re absolutely right. I mean I open you know the chapter on realism opens with the dialogue with Sennacherib right? And the i in Assyria. And I think, you know, often international relations sort of starts with Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian Wars and there’s this one little line from the Melian dialogue that says, Yeah, a actually your your Stephen Miller said it at the White House recently, the strong will do what they can, the weak will suffer what they must. And I think, you know, I I said, Well, actually, you know, if I were a Christian, I would go to the dialogue you know, with a
Mike Tolliver (20:37)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Robert Joustra (21:04)
Syria much more much more dramatically. This I think is actually a picture of it. You know, when I started my PhD with Scott Thomas in I don’t know, 2013, the first thing he had me do, the first thing, which by the way was I think is really weird, is he said, you know what, you you should go back, you know, it’s great to meet blah blah. You should go back, you should read the book of Isaiah. And you should come back to me and help me understand what is Isaiah’s vision vision for human security and geopolitics.
Politics.
And you know, Scott and I had a wonderful rich dialogue about that, and actually his book is footnoted because he does he did do a book on Isaiah’s vision for human security, and he’s got a number of other smaller articles about that. And I tried to work some of that through. Admittedly, some of it got cut out. But I think one of the things that the prophets I think bear the strongest witness to, and so it probably comes out the most in this chapter, is the chapter on realism. And that’s where, you know, because constantly, you know, we are looking for.
Mike Tolliver (21:35)
Okay.
Robert Joustra (22:04)
For the sources of human security and power, you know, the horses, the chariots, the treasury, the interdynastic marriages. You know, and actually the book of Deuteronomy, I think it’s chapter 17, specifically lays out in terms of, you know, you know, basically you’ll have a king, but he won’t get to do any of the kingly things, you know, that you’re accustomed to. And it’s sort of specifically cutting off at the knees, as it were, the idolatries of human security that we so easily turn to. You know, Tim Keller used to talk about, you know, the the big
Mike Tolliver (22:22)
Right.
Robert Joustra (22:34)
Big three, and I’m a simple boy who was born on a farm, so that’s good enough for me. Sex, power, money. You know, those are the ones that we go to, you know, and and we go to them because by the way, you know, this is the kind of neo Calvinist insight, they’re actually so good, right? I mean, how do I really need to talk about how good sex is? It’s how we all at some point got here, you know? but also power and money, they’re actually profound gifts, right? That we either image in our capacity or have been gifted to us, that we have sort of innately, and yet, as Kuyper liked to say, the best correct.
Becomes the worst, you know. And I think you know that has a very kind of prophetic edge to it. And that’s where that that’s where I think, you know, the when you’re resting on one of those sort of you know idols of human accomplishment, of identity, of power, of purpose, that’s where the prophets I think speak most directly to the often sort of Machiavellian kind of material secularity of kind of you know realism and neo-realism. And the prophets say, This is what you see, you know, like like the servant of Elisha, right? You know, you look out.
On
the hillside, you say, Well, there are the armies, you know, they are arrayed against us. And he says, Well, actually uncover their eyes and let the let them s let my servant see that the chariots of the Lord are aflame and all around. And always I think, particularly as Christians thinking about politics, you know, we are in danger of trusting, as it were, in you know, the strong arm of the bow and the chariots and the horses. And I don’t mean to be naive. Those things are important, they are not immaterial. There are still fighting men in Israel, you know, but what I do want to do is I want to create a kind of
Prophetic context within which to understand the witness about those things. And so I think you’re right. The prophets don’t show up as much as they could. But I only got one chapter on scripture in international relations. So I got I got a little bit of Isaiah in there. I got, you know, summer first and second Kings. But yeah, I would I would love to dive deeper into that. I think that’s a totally fair point, and I think would be a really, really rich point of departure. Certainly, my old doctoral supervisor, Scott Thomas.
Thomas would think so.
Mike Tolliver (24:35)
Yeah, well, you
know, just consider it for your sequel. yeah, we’ll have you back on when you do. so we just had Yoram Hazoni on.
Robert Joustra (24:39)
Yeah, I could, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Mike Tolliver (24:46)
this must have been six months or so ago now, but talking about the anniversary of his book on nationalism and how it is a virtue, he he does a couple of things in that book that at least are tangential, if not immediately relevant to what you’ve done here in international politics. but one of those things is that he contrasts the the nation with empire.
And this idea that empire, you know, is taking over other nations. and so as you’re writing on international politics, you know, what what do you see in this? you use the the phrase covenantal pluralism. So are are you then agreeing with him, empire bad? you know, just talk talk a little bit more about this.
Robert Joustra (25:30)
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, it’s always hard. Now, would you say empire is bad? You know, it’s kind of like one of those questions like, now, sir, when did you stop beating your wife? It’s like, well, you know, so generally speaking, no, I I’m I’m not in favor of empire. That said, I I don’t I don’t love the so I don’t love the terms that Hazony leaves us with. and actually, this is where the Augustinian intervention is, I think, the most important. So I don’t love, you know, nation, and I’ll come back to that in a moment. I definitely don’t love empire. I like the Augustan.
Mike Tolliver (25:47)
Right. Okay. Yeah.
Okay.
Robert Joustra (26:07)
Framing of Commonwealth. Okay? And here, so here are some of the recoveries. So let me do the Canadian thing. I’m going say a lot of what I think are really helpful and constructive things first, and then I’m going to apologize for criticisms after. I think, yeah, yeah, exactly. So what I think is really helpful, one of the things that Hazony sort of recovers, and I think this is over and against the kind of more materialist, secularist kind of liberalism that he has in mind, that is particularly I think is occasionally parodied, but I think also.
Mike Tolliver (26:17)
Thanks.
sorry. Yeah. Okay.
Robert Joustra (26:37)
Sort of exists to some degree, in in in hit in his book, the way he talks about it. I want to talk about a recovery of religion, culture, and language, you know, as constitutive on some level of a kind of national identity. Okay, now this is not a new idea. Samuel P. Huntington talked about this in his book, A Clash of Civilizations, right? It was an article in 1993, a book in 1995. It was contra Francis Fukuyama’s, you know, The Last Man, etc. etc. So those of you who know.
No,
no, the these these debates. you know, so there was this there was this argument that goes back a pace. And of course, Huntington borrowed it from the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. You know, Dawson was making a kind of anti-secularist argument too. He said, you know, we’ve all absorbed this kind of pagan secular philosophy of history. You know, we all believe that, for example, the great civilizations of the world produced the great religions of the world, that was all one big race for calories, is our kind of historiography. and that basically then the Big Mac.
Is basically the kind of crowning achievement of civilization. You know, we’ve put so many calories in such a package. I, you know, this is the this is the crowning achievement. But Dawson says, actually, that that historiography is completely wrong in the reverse. It is not the great civilizations of the world that produce the great religions, but it is the great religions that produce the great civilizations, right? And he says, now go around and look at the world and its architecture.
Mike Tolliver (27:43)
Mm.
Hmm.
Robert Joustra (28:02)
Right, and the ancient world, and tell me that it was not, in fact, this kind of primordial, the Dooyeweerdians would say, ground motive, the religious ground motive, right? It is not it is not in some way the restlessness of our hearts, to put it in a more Augustinian way, that actually helps define, you know, the boundaries of the context of a commonwealth, of a community. It does. You know, what what what were the pyramids of Giza? Were these aluminum smelting factories? No. You know, these were these were you know, as best as we can.
Mike Tolliver (28:13)
Good.
Robert Joustra (28:32)
Tell projects of divinity of some form, right? And in the ancient world, the far you know, all you go all over the place and you see these monuments. These are projects of what? Public works, you know. Did you know? Was this you know the Eisenhower interstate system? You know, well, there were roads, the Romans did do those. but you know, but generally speaking, actually, I mean these these are these are phenomenal achievements that actually rise out of, I think, this kernel Augustinian insight that our hearts are restless into the rest of the we’re searching after the divine about who God is. And so
So I think Kazzoni is right to recover those things. Those are an intrinsic part. But here’s where I disagree with him, and when I think this is very important disagreement, that you can have, particularly in a post, particularly in a Pentecostal world, you know, so this gets into kind of my reading of it. You can have a proximate politics, the way that Augustine describes it. That you can have Commonwealths committed to proximate goods, right? But they do not need to be, or they must not necessarily all be, enjoined by all.
Ultimate goods, right? Jacques Maritain, the Catholic, a very famous Catholic political philosopher, put it this way on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We all agree on these rights, provided nobody asks us why. Right? And this was his very sort of pithy thing. Now, by the Maritain was a Catholic, and so if you go on and read him, he’ll make it very clear. I don’t know how the Protestants get here, their theology is a mess. But the Catholic way, you know, the Buddhists, you know, the Muslims, you say, I don’t think it works for them. They say it does, but I don’t think so. You know, the way to get here, the way to get here is with Catholic social doctor. Well, of course, Mary.
Mike Tolliver (29:43)
Right. Yeah.
Robert Joustra (30:02)
Would that. He’s a Catholic, and if he said otherwise, that would be kind weird. And I’m a Calvinist, and I’ll say that about Calvinism too. You know, I think that’s the kind of best way to get there. But the point is that I think what Hazony is confusing, and I and I say this generously, but also I think there is a danger to it, is he is saying that political communities in today’s day and age must be enjoined by ultimacy, right? And I actually think one of the geniuses of the modern political order, and by the way, I think this is the genius, this being the 250th anniversary, one of the geniuses of the
American political order is that it creates the conditions in which there is at least some optionality politically. I’m not trying to sell you a worldview here. I’m trying to sell you a politics. Okay, that’s very important. Because I think Hazoni makes this argument that, well, if you have this politics, it necessarily produces this kind of worldview. And I think I don’t think that has to be the case. You can have a political view, and it’s sort of how should we say intrinsic to that sphere, to use that Kyperian language. you know, so you can be committed, as Augustine would say,
Mike Tolliver (30:58)
Okay.
Robert Joustra (31:01)
You know, two proximate loves. Now, how would we know what those are? Well, I’ve got great news for you, especially if you’re an American. They wrote them all down, right?
You know, go and read your Declaration of Independence. Go and read your Constitution and study the way that your political institutions have been set up. And what you will find is you will not find the Westminster Catechism, you will not find the Canons of Dord the Belgian Confession. But what you will find is a political constitution, the content of which, if I am an atheist or I’m a Muslim, or I’m a Hindu or I’m a Calvinist or I am a Catholic, I could actually come behind and say, these are proximate political goods. I am committed to these things and I am actually
As committed to them, by the way, as my Hindu, Muslim, Baha’i neighbor is, right? But they have them for their own particular reasons. The concern that the nationalists have, and I don’t disagree with their concern, I just think the only way to resolve this is to do something very dangerous politically, right? The concern that they have is that that is unstable, that we need to trust, you know, those little platoons, as Burke would call them, those little communities, of coming up with their own indigenous religious religious rationale for supporting, you know, the declaration and the constitution.
All the different elements of what we would call American political order, the hierarchy of loves that sort of define the American political community and political experiment. But my argument would be actually it’s gone pretty well. And we’ve seen it work. We’ve seen Muslims and Baha’is and Jews. So this is an empirical assessment, right? So you tell me, well, I’m not sure that we can trust them. I don’t know. I think we could. You know, for a while, by the way, in the middle of the 20th century, Americans were pretty sure we couldn’t trust Catholics. It was a whole thing with Kennedy, right? Now are we sure? Are we sure that we can have a
Catholic president, you he’s gonna be out, he’s gonna be taking orders from the Pope. At least nobody’s worried today’s vice president is gonna be taking orders from the Pope. you know, there’s there’s there’s this idea in which you know, can we trust their political theology? And of course, actually, and it did take the Catholics a while, by the way. I don’t mean to overstate this, the Ultramontas, the Gallican controversy, the early 20th century Vatican II, but eventually, actually, there are really robust, substantive, distinctively Catholic theological reasons for supporting something like a limited liberal democracy.
Democratic
capitalist order. And so I worry that with the Hazonis of the world, they’re anxious, and so they say, nope, you’ve got to have a unity of religion, language, and culture. That’s what gives identity to the nation. That’s how they should go in the world. They shouldn’t try to export that. It’s indigenous to them, it’s indigenous to themselves. I worry about the argument of indigeneity, right? Now I come from Canada. We talk about indigeneity a lot, right? I don’t think you talk about it so much here in the United States. But if you go into for example, the Middle East, which you’ll
know well, they talk about indigeneity a lot. Right? And and that’s not, you know, scoring points in the faculty lounge, right? That’s that’s life and death. And by the way, it is it is in India too now, with an Indra Modi and the Bahiryajanata Party, right? The BJP. Certain religions are indigenous, they are Vedic, right? But by the way, Christianity and Islam are not. The Russian Orthodox Church and our Patriarch Kirill and President Putin’s version of the Ruskimir, right? This also has religion, language, and culture.
Mike Tolliver (33:43)
Sure.
Robert Joustra (34:10)
Right? and certain things are not indigenous, right? Well, guess what those are, right? and and actually, increasingly, this is Xi Jinping’s nationalism as well. He’s rediscovered religion, actually, which is a funny thing for a Marxist to do, but I’m not sure how good of a Marxist he is. you know, but he’s rediscovered Taoism and Buddhism and Confucianism. You know, I watched a children’s cartoon that included you know, a somewhat tubby looking Karl Marx and a tubby looking Confucius hugging it out as the long lost friends that they were, as the
Origin of the genius of Chinese civilization. I think, well, that’s funny, because actually in the Cultural Revolution, they weren’t actually very hot on Chinese history and civilization and religion. They actually purged it all. In fact, one of the reasons that they’re so hot on the reclamation of Taiwan is it happens to be where a lot of the history of mainland China was, because it’s where the Nationalist Party fled with all of the treasures of the imperial regime, which were eviscerated in mainland China. So yeah, so a lot of their identity is locked up in there because they burned it all to the ground on the mainland.
Mike Tolliver (34:51)
Right.
Robert Joustra (35:10)
What’s my point? My point is Hazoni has a recovery of some of these concepts that I think is important, right? We’ve been too footloose, too secular, too too materialist in imagining, well, you know, the government is just a kind of you know, it’s like a contract with the telephone company, you know, this is the way that Alistair McIntyre talked about it, killing for the telephone company. it’s not a telephone company, you know. it is in fact in the ordering of our loves, as Augustine would have it. Nation, family, hearth, home, these are substantive, serious things. They are related to things.
Things like the history of religion, of language, of culture. And yet, some of the best, the most productive, dare I use the word just in like a very Torah sense of the term, civilizations and states, I think have been open on the basis of inviting others in to see those proximate goods and articulate their own individual, ultimate indigenous rationale for why they are so substantive. And that’s why I like Commonwealth. Empire, it enforces.
From top down. Commonwealths see a set of goods. This is very C. S. Lewis the Four Loves kind of thing, and he’s getting it from Augustine too, right? They see a set of goods and say, Do you see them too? Right? And this is, by the way, I mean, this is one of the things I think this administration sometimes gets a little backwards. This is the reason why so much of the world envied the United States of America and was and wanted it and wanted to be its best friend, right? the United States was powerful, all the United States is rich. Those things are both true.
But the power and the wealth are derivative of something else, right? They’re derivative, in my opinion, of having a comparatively better ordering of loves. Seeing a way of living that seems to be, now look, I don’t want to go all baptized, you know, an idealistic here. You know, let me say as Churchill would, it’s an abomination, it’s rife with idolatries. All of those things are true, and yet it’s the best thing we have, or it’s the worst thing we have except for all the others, you know. so that’s what they envy.
Mike Tolliver (37:09)
Sure.
Robert Joustra (37:10)
That’s what they envy. and you know, I as I sometimes remind my friends in Washington, you know, the Germans, after 1945, you’ve had the Germans at your feet for 80 years. And Kissinger used to make the joke, the Germans, they’re either at your feet or at your throat. You know, well, why were they at your feet? Because they were fr they envied the American experience. you know, they envied the American experiment, right? Its robustness, its sense of self, of identity, of morality, and yes, all of its fights and fissures and all of these things. But it was welcomed into it as a Commonwealth would, not as
Imperially, not impressed upon it, right? But actually we opted in, you know. Why do the Canadians? You know, we love a little bit of light anti-Americanism. Of course we do. It’s part of our it’s part of our national identity. And yet, you know, the Americans are also our best friends. Why? Is it because you’ve oppressed us so much that we have to? No. It’s because actually, if you go and you look at the Canadian Constitution, you look at our Bill of Rights and later our Charter of Rights in 1982, one of the things you’re gonna find is that Canadians and Americans are different, but boy, in some really fundamental political ways that matter an awful lot.
We are the same. Right? And and and that to me, that to me is so important. And that’s the piece that I think Hazony miss misses by not sort of, you know, eliciting some of that more Augustinian language. It’s either empire or nation. You know, it’s nations that are on their own individual linguistic and religious and historical terms, or empires that are oppressing their views. But that’s not the view of history we’ve had for the last 80 years. It’s actually been quite different, not imperially imposed, but invited into. And very much to the benefit I have to say.
Mike Tolliver (38:12)
Okay.
So just totally throw it out there, it’s clear that you love the words proximate and penultimate. And so I would recommend it as the name of your four-piece band. you know, certainly as we talk about politics, these these are not themselves ultimate goods. So I understand that you’re trying to like emphasize that. but as you’ve articulated you know, kind of your vision for what
Robert Joustra (38:52)
Ha ha ha.
Yeah
Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yes.
Mike Tolliver (39:11)
Politics is aimed at in general. If I could summarize, and I’m curious to hear if I’ve done so well, you would say that it is how was I gonna say it? justice rooted in love. And so my question then is: are there definitions of those words that are not religious?
Robert Joustra (39:33)
Yeah, right. no I so so I would actually say that justice is the right ordering of loves, right?
Mike Tolliver (39:40)
Sure.
Right or right.
Robert Joustra (39:41)
Yeah, yeah. So that’s that’s how I would
put it. That’s a very Augustinian way to put it, right? which is another way of noting, by the way, that like there are disordered loves, but just like, you know, the idols themselves are not, you know, it’s not somehow in and of itself evil, but it’s actually the ordering of how human hearts have attached themselves to it that has that has created disordered affection, disordered loves. so other non religious meanings to that. no. I don’t I don’t think so. you know, when we talk about justice is right relations, right? What we mean by right relations
I don’t think there are sort of, you know, abstract, non-religious sort of answers to those questions. And so I think religion, so if you’re saying, you know, isn’t religion therefore important to a political society? yeah, it’s fundamental. Remember, Dawson says that the great religions produced the great civilizations. And I have no problem, by the way, saying, as many people do, that, you know, Christianity played an enormously important and even fundamental role in the American experiment, you know, Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic, stuff like this. I’ve got no problem with that.
Right? The question that I have is so all that I think is as a matter of empirical historical record true. That’s what people were dealing with. That’s what they were thinking about. By the way, you know, it’s the same, you know, if you go into the Vedic subcontinent and you talk about Ashoka and his rock edicts, you know, and the articulation of what we would call freedom of religion or belief within the Vedic tradition, you know, what we would call the Hindu tradition. you know, wasn’t that a Vedic articulation that sort of comes into the new Indian state, you know, Nehru and sort of the yeah it is. I mean, it comes from a Hindu source, but no problem.
you can have Islamic conceptions, you know, no compulsion of religion in these things as well, you know, sure, absolutely. you would have that. So there’s a kind of historical recognition that I think is true, that you have these religious, you know, ideas that give that give fuel, that sort of articulate these sort of more proximate, penultimate, my band name terms. The question that I the question that I have for Hazony and the kind of nationalists and otherwise then is to say, but does it does it have to does it always therefore have to be that religion, that specific religion
Mike Tolliver (41:28)
Yeah.
Robert Joustra (41:41)
That fuels those ideas, right? That fuels those proximate political ideas. And I’ve already given one example where Hindus have done that, right? I think the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an example where actually a lot of different religious traditions did that, right? So I think the genius of the American political experiment is it does have that origin, that history, that founding, but then it is promiscuous in its invitation to say, well, come on down. If you can join this American experiment and agree with
These basic values of the declaration of the Constitution, and you can do that for your own internal rationale that aren’t Christian, right? That aren’t, you know, religious in the way that we would typically think about it, then you can be here too. You know, this was what Reagan described as the genius of America. He said, you know, you can go to Germany, you’ll never be German. You can go to Japan, you’ll never be Japanese, but you can come to the United States of America and you can be American, right? And that is, I think, you know, what is so attractive about the United States. And I think that’s the challenge to Hazony. Because I think Hazoni’s nationalism.
Wants to say Reagan was wrong about that, right? That there has to be a kind of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. You know, look, I’m I’m you I’m Paul, I’m the Jew to the Jews here. I’m as Anglo Saxon, I’m as Anglo Saxon and Protestant as they come, you know. but I’m saying, you know, but I’m saying, look, I think the genius, I I think to give up on that genius is to actually relent into a much more coercive, into a much more imperial, ironically, and into a much less just society.
Mike Tolliver (42:43)
Okay.
Sure.
Robert Joustra (43:10)
Imagines
that the king, as it were, that King David, you know, that his throne is now the presidency. But actually in my world, King David’s throne is Jesus, right? And the president, to use Tolkien-esque language, or you know, I don’t want to overstate the presidency and the executive branch, the government of the United States in its totality and its and its governmental authority, right, is a steward. And it is not for the steward to deny, as it were, the return of the king. He will come and make all things new. We do proximate justice here and now. Yeah.
Mike Tolliver (43:10)
Okay.
So I’m
I’m curious then, in that, this you know, benefit that America enjoys that Germany and Japan and and others do not, do you see a moral deficiency in their cultural expression of government, we’ll say?
Robert Joustra (43:58)
In Japan and Germany’s cultural expression.
Mike Tolliver (44:00)
Yeah, yeah. Just the examples
that you gave there where you’ll never be German, but you know, here you’ll be American.
Robert Joustra (44:04)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think it speaks to well, I you know, there’s an American dream.
In a way in which I think it’s harder to point to the Japanese dream. You know, look, I lived in Japan. I love Japan. It’s a beautiful place. Don’t get me wrong. you know, I lived in Japan for a year. I enjoyed it very much. You know, the school children chased me through the street and said gaijin, gaijen, gaijin, you know. this is very normal. I’m a very large white guy. I look a little out of place in Osaka. you know, even more so in the in the in the town and village where I lived. so I think, you know, there’s a dynamism, both economically and politically, to the United States of America that I think other other more linguistic
Ethnically, and religiously bound political economies lack. And of course, by the way, especially in some of the East Asian and European contexts, you know, the religious element has kind of evaporated, right? We experienced this in Canada too with the Quiet Revolution, where there was a very French, very Catholic province in Quebec. And then after the 1960s, it was just very French, right? And the question is: well, is the French language enough to like hang a civilization?
On? I mean, it’s a lovely language, don’t get me wrong. I grew up French aversion. I appreciate it very much. Everything here in Michigan basically has a French name, even though they’ll all deny it. But is it enough? Like if if Huntington’s, you know, religious religion, language, and culture, you know, are the kind of cornerstones, and you lose religion, and you kind of lose culture, you know, and what you got is language, you know, you kind of end up with, you my friend Tobias Kremner, you know, he goes to a bunch of, you know, he studies, you know, nationalist movements in Germany and France, you know, the AFD and so on. and you
He says, you know, where where you’ve got German nationalists singing silent night, Stile Nacht. But they say, well, they don’t believe in the virgin birth. They’re not particularly religious. It’s a German cultural song, right? And I think, no, it’s not. You know. You know, and that’s that’s that’s not so there is there is, as it were, a kind of rediscovery of well, what is German identity? What is French identity? What is Swedish identity? What is Dutch identity? What is Canadian identity?
These are questions that we’re all asking because we all leaned on a certain kind of privileged ethnicity and religion to give meaning to that. What’s great about the United States, what’s dynamic about it actually is it specifically said, right? Yeah, we have a history. Yeah, we have a culture. Sure, Christianity is a big part of you know the history of the United States of America. No question, you’ll see it everywhere. It’s very dynamic. Toqueville talked about it, right? That’s an anniversary too of democracy in America. All of that is true, but you don’t have to be, right?
Be something different. In fact, we’re excited to see what you could make of it. And I think that honestly, that explains economic productivity, that explains political power, it explains the American dream that people want to come here, they want to be friends with it, they want to emulate it, that there are these aspects of it that I think, and the reason why it works, bringing us right Torah back full circle, is because that ordering, I think, there’s a kind of Pentecostal politics to it. There’s a rightly ordered, proximate nature to the way that the American experiment has done it. And other countries are struggling toward some version.
Of that, but it’s hard because in some cases they have a lot more history, and it was a lot more very specifically religious and ethnic, right? and you know, especially in East Asia, this is true, by the way. You know, we often you know to to go there and imagine that you’ll be Korean or be Japanese if you’re not these things. Good luck. well, their economies are in a lot of trouble because guess what? They’re not having enough babies and they’re in demographic free fall, and so is the United States of America. That’s true too. But I’ve got great news for you. As long as you don’t give in to your worst xenophobic impulses, the
United States of America has the best and it has the best labor in the world at its fingertips. Now I say that somewhat self-interestedly as a Canadian sitting in America right now. but you know it has that because people people want to come here, because there is this kind of dream. and so yeah, I do think that is that you do see that as an empirical observable advantage that’s intrinsic to the United States.
Mike Tolliver (47:57)
One final
question, and then I’ll let you go. so you mentioned those those three things that they unify you know, historically, I guess the ethnicity, the language, and the religion. Peter Peter Zeihan I was trying to remember his name, who wrote The Accidental Superpower. He adds geography to that mix.
Robert Joustra (48:17)
Yeah.
Mike Tolliver (48:23)
And and I’m curious your thoughts on that. Because you do raise these three in your book, but he would add as a significant force is geography in international politics. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Robert Joustra (48:31)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I I I think I’d probably agree w with with that argument. I remember reading it and thinking, yeah, Kaplan makes very similar arguments for the revenge of geography and so on and so forth. so so the land. I mean, yeah, I I I I th I think the land is enormously important, especially when it comes to identity. I mean, we have this experience in Canada. Our culture and economics in North America actually move north south, they don’t move east west, right? And so, you know, people have often said, well, you’re moving to the United States, this will be a major challenge. Like, move
Mike Tolliver (49:00)
Right.
Robert Joustra (49:05)
From the province of Ontario to the state of Michigan. I mean, these are Great Lakes states. The geography is exactly the same. In many ways, a lot of the culture is very, very similar. It would be a much bigger move to move from Ontario in Canada to Alberta in Canada, or British Columbia in Canada, or Newfoundland in Canada. Those are really culturally and economically, and even linguistically, different places. I can almost come off as Michigan, you know, in in some of my accents. So I I I do think that land is an important and a constitutive component. I mean
Mike Tolliver (49:26)
Yeah.
Robert Joustra (49:35)
This is clearly going to be the case, much more so even in Europe, definitely in the Middle East, and certainly in East Asia as well. and I know this is sort of part of Hazony’s argument too. the problem with an argument about geography, if it gets paired with some of those other arguments about religion, language, and ethnicity, is that what you end up with is you end up with an argument about land that is exclusive for a particular group of people, right?
And I do think there’s something about the land in the United States of America that is intrinsic to its identity, its oceans, its particularly protective buffer, you know, the sort of fledgling little Canada to the north, most of Mexico that you took in 1848 to the south. you know, there is something sort of distinctive about the United States of America that feeds into its history and its geography in that way. But I think the genius, again, of the United States of America is that while that land is an intrinsic part of its identity, it’s not a it’s not exclusive in either its ethnic, religious, or linguistic, right?
I seem to recall there’s a lot of people who speak Spanish in the United States of America. That’s not really how it started in 1776, right? But it’s where it went. And actually, our son, who by the way is a very plump little Dutch boy who did French in Canada, is doing Spanish immersion here in Michigan this September, right? Why? Because, you know, this is the country that it lives in now, and also language is fundamental to human brain development and so on. But I mean this is this is the argument. And so the land argument to me is very important. I concede it, but I want to be very careful.
And how it pairs to those other identity characteristics, because then all of a sudden, you know, we end up with Modi and the BJP somewhere in the Indian subcontinent, and we say, well, actually, this village is not for Christians. And it’s not for people of this color or this identity. And I think the genius of America is that it says, well, actually, the land is it’s it’s promiscuously, as it were, available, right? Provided that there is a kind of creedal commitment to some of these more proximate things. Right? And there’s there’s something about that, that’s that it creates a more proxy.
proper ordering of land within that ordering of loves, right? Where it doesn’t subject it to more sort of imperialistic or nationalistic exclusivism, but actually invites it, not in an unlimited way. I’m not trying to be a naive idealist and saying, look, open borders, everybody can be American. Right? No, there are real things that the United States of America believes. There are real values that it holds. And there are people in the world who do not think those things and do not believe those things and are not ready to be American, you know, and never want to be, because maybe they hate those things, right?
That’s okay, right? But there is at least in principle that opportunity. And I think that’s that sort of puts land in the mix, but within a rightly ordered sort of Augustinian framework.
Mike Tolliver (52:20)
Thank you so much for allowing me to pepper you with questions here. the the new book is Christ I don’t know if maybe my my thing is too blurry there. You’ve got it there. Christ Christ and Covenant in Global Politics. Again, I would throw it out there as part of the big three that that should be on the shelf for somebody who’s interested in the topic of politics. Robert, thank you so much for for joining us.
Robert Joustra (52:29)
Yeah. There we go, yeah.
Ha ha ha.
Yeah, such a pleasure. Thanks, Mike.
