America's Hope

For the present, Western Christians find themselves in some important respects in the same situation as the Christians of the early centuries A.D. We face not merely a hostile elite, but a hostile culture. Orthodox Christians must stop thinking of ourselves as the temporarily exiled rulers of America who can be restored to power if only an election or two would go our way. We must start accepting the truth that, sociologically speaking, we are a minority subculture. If this accurately describes the current state of American Christianity, the task before the church is not to ‘take back the levers of power,’ but rather to convert a pagan world. Our cultural crisis, in short, goes much deeper than moral majoritarians suspect. It is not as if the top floors of the edifice of Christendom need some remodeling. The entire building has collapsed, and now, if it is to be rebuilt at all, it must be rebuilt from the ground floor. The problem is not that America has been the site of a coup that can be corrected by a counter-coup. America is the site of a death, and the only known antidote for death is resurrection.

- Peter Leithart, The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church, pp. 10-11