A Rightly Ordered Citizenship

“I knew I couldn’t believe a word that Putin said. His appointment made me determined to resist. I didn’t want someone of that kind to be the leader of my country.”

Once upon a time I dropped out of college, and began a pilgrimage into the rest of my life, asking questions about the world, and my place in it, that I am still pursuing most of life later. Communes on both sides of the Atlantic, hitchhiking everywhere I went, I spent several weeks in Scotland, walking through the ancient city of Edinburgh, traipsing up and down the heather-covered hills of the countryside, and sometimes sleeping in abandoned churches.

In the now-forgotten parish of Anwoth I spent a night amidst the gravestones of a church once pastored by Samuel Rutherford, who in the centuries since has come to be known by his ground-breaking work, “Lex, Rex.” A line-in-the-sand argument against the divine right of the king, Rutherford set forth for history that “the law is king,” lex rex. The English kings were aghast, and began what is still called “the killing times” in Scotland, persecuting to the death the early Presbyterians who dared to believe that there were “two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland,” as the Melville brothers argued before King James. Not denying his true authority as the political ruler of the land, they also argued for a deeper allegiance to Jesus as Lord.

Thousands and more thousands of true believers were martyred in those years, among them “two Margarets” in the bay of Wigtown in southwest Scotland. Refusing to recant their “protest(ant)” convictions, they were staked out into the water, threatened with death by drowning—and they both died, holding onto the integrity of their faith over against the claim of the state for absolute obedience. (My wife Meg was named for these Margarets, as her parents were descended from these Presbyterian protesters.)

This is the long history of those who determine to live in the world, but not be of it.

From Polycarp on through to these Presbyterians, more often than not the history of martyrdom is one of pushing back against the political order, believing that rightly ordered loves will lead to rightly ordered lives, to a true citizenship of earth and heaven; while disordered loves inevitably lead to a disordered life, to a city and state that comes to political and social implosion. (This is a one-sentence summary of Augustine’s, City of God.) In the last century we remember Bonhoeffer for the courage of his commitments, but in those years of the Holocaust in which millions of Jews were murdered—the horrific horror that it was—there were others too, e.g. Franz Jagerstatter of the film A Hidden Life, and the brave students of The White Rose. And only ten years ago 21 Egyptian Orthodox were murdered in Libya by a bullying state which allowed no resistance, each one dying with “Jesus is Lord” on their lips.

The terror keeps on keeping on. Most of a year ago Alexei Navalny, the Russian lawyer known for his counter-cultural critique of Putin’s tyranny was killed by the Russian state for insisting on honesty and integrity in public life. To say it most simply: Putin hated the truth, his whole regime built on a Great Lie.

One of the most important books that can be read, “Patriot” is the autobiography of Navalny, the story of his life written in the last months of his life. On the one hand it is very terrible book, as the reality of his martyrdom hangs over every word; and yet it is also a profoundly-born account of a remarkable man who gave his life for his people and place, loving Russia as much as a country could be loved, believing that the act of saying “no” mattered to God and history.

The words above are Navalny’s, even as they are for all of us, for everyone everywhere. When we choose to believe a lie about what is and what is not, about what happened and what did not, taking into the soul of our society our own Great Lies, we slowly by slowly make our way into the tyranny of tyrants, of political leaders who cannot imagine any other world than one where they are the law, where their identity is one with the state, where their selfish ambitions are the only future for the state, where what they say is absolute, where the king is law—yes, where it is Rex Lex, rather than Lex Rex.

The truest truths are not new; more often than not, we just don’t pay attention, pretending we “know” more than we ever possibly could, when in reality we simply and sadly don’t. And that, in a word, is tragic.

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” — Hannah Arendt