What does a Christian political witness look like in our day?

Politics ought to be defined by fidelity to the common good of all the members of society. But our modern Western politics are defined by a determination to bendthe natural world and human life to its own political and economic ends. This wholesale rejection of the natural order is behind the dominant revolutions in our history, and defines our experience in Western society today—our racialized hierarchy, modern industry, and the sexual revolution.

In What Are Christians For?, Jake Meador lays out a proposal for a Christian politics rooted in the givenness and goodness of the created world. He is uninterested in the cultural wars that have so often characterized American Christianity. Instead, he casts a vision for an ordered society that rejects the late modern revolution at every turn and is rooted in the natural law tradition and the great Protestant confessions. Here is a political approach that is antiracist, anticapitalist, and profoundly pro-life. A truly Christian political witness, Meador argues, must attend closely to the natural world and renounce the metallic fantasies that have poisoned common life in America life for too long.



Jake Meador is vice president of the Davenant Institute and the editor in chief of Mere Orthodoxy, an online magazine covering the Christian faith in the public sphere. He lives with his wife and children in his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska.



Foreword by Karen Swallow Prior

Introduction: Whole Life Politics at the End of the World

1. An Immense Inheritance: A Christian Account of Nature

2. The Great Uprooting: Race and the End of Nature

3. The Unmaking of Places: The Fruit of Industrialism

4. The Unmaking of the Body: Considering the Sexual Revolution

5. The Unmaking of the Real: Wonder Among the Institutions

6. Against the Revolution: The Beginnings of Christian Social Doctrine

7. The EarthIs Our Mother: On Christianity, Land, and Animals

8. A Vision of Christian Belonging: The Household and the Sexual Revolution

9. The World in Cracked Icons: Wonder, Death, and the End of All Things

10. Politics Beyond Accomplishment:Toward a Politics of Care

Acknowledgments

Notes