Hanby, Weigel, and Dreher on "The Civic Project of American Christianity"

The exchange among Michael Hanby, George Weigel, and Rod Dreher, over at First Things, is very much worth a read.  Hanby, in "The Civic Project of American Christianity", takes stock of our times, and writes:    

"[A] revolution in fundamental anthropology will invariably transform the meaning and content of justice and bring about its own morality. We are beginning to feel the force of this transformation in civil society and the political order. Court decisions invalidating traditional marriage law fall from the sky like rain. The regulatory state and ubiquitous new global media throw their ever increasing weight behind the new understanding of marriage and its implicit anthropology, which treats our bodies as raw material to be used as we see fit. Today a rigorous new public morality inverts and supplants the residuum of our Christian moral inheritance.

This compels us to reconsider the civic project of American Christianity that has for the most part guided our participation in the liberal public order for at least a century. . . .

George Weigel (among other things) advises -- and makes a point that I think cannot be made often enough to those of us who aspire to some kind of constructive engagement with and expression about the whole "faith, culture, and public life" cluster of matters:

In a culture that has lost contact with reality, a Church in America equipping its people to be the missionary disciples they were baptized to be (a ­vocation that includes responsible citizenship) must, in its preaching and catechesis, help its people reestablish that contact. In circumstances as philosophically impoverished as ours, appeals to “metaphysics” and “anthropology” are likely to fail, save with a very small remnant. Similarly, attempts to fight the new Gnosticism with the weapons of logic deployed in service to moral truth are almost certainly doomed to be frustrated, because public life is not, in the ­final analysis, an exercise in logic alone. But offering the people of the Church a new way to see Things As They Are by looking at the world through the lens of biblical faith might offer a way forward. N. T. Wright puts what I’m trying to say succinctly when he argues that the entire burden of the Pauline ­letters is to teach new Christians to “think within the biblical narrative, to see themselves as actors within the ongoing scriptural drama: to allow their erstwhile pagan thought-forms to be transformed by a ­biblically based renewal of the mind” (emphasis added).

Dreher is (even) more pessimistic (or, as he says, "realistic"):  

If by “Christianity” we mean the philosophical and cultural framework setting the broad terms for engagement in American public life, Christianity is dead, and we Christians have killed it. We have allowed our children to be catechized by the culture and have produced an anesthetizing religion suited for little more than being a chaplaincy to the liberal individualistic order. . . .

The civic project of American Christianity has come to an end, for how can we produce Christian civic life when we are not producing authentic Christians?

This is not to endorse quietism. I don’t think we can afford to be disengaged from public and political life. But it is to advocate for a realistic understanding of where we stand as Christians in twenty-first-­century America. Our prospects for living and acting in the public square as Christians are now quite limited.

Put bluntly, given the dynamics of our rapidly changing culture, I believe it will be increasingly difficult to be a good Christian and a good American. It is far more important to me to preserve the faith than to preserve liberal democracy and the American order. Ideally, there should not be a contradiction, but again, the realities of post-Christian America challenge our outdated ideals.

Read it all.  Think about it.  Thoughts?