Monday afternoon, I took a Pew test on political typology, where one of the questions asked the test-taker to choose between (roughly) religion being kept out of government or government being based in religion.

When I see such a question, I tend to assume that the pollster has never had a really deep religious conviction, and that he assumes that a good legislator can set his religious convictions aside on demand, as if thinking (I confess this is something of a caricature):

I know how I feel about this bill I’m voting on, but it is incumbent upon me to disencumber myself of all religious convictions, and to vote as I would were I not a gullible religionist with oppressive tyrannical impulses.

I’m sorry, but humans just don’t function that way in the real world. That conclusion is based both on my personal experience and a lifetime of thinking fairly often about such matters. But that’s not a satisfactory response for anyone who “barely knows me from Adam” and has no confidence in me as an authority (which I don’t really claim to be).

But with the help of AI, I’ve compiled a bibliography, and I was pleased to see how many of them I’ve read and how many others I have passing acquaintance with. I’m leaving in at least the gist of some AI prompts. I hope some of you may enjoy or benefit from this.

A. Bibliography: Religious Convictions and Legislative Responsibility in Liberal Democracies

1. Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press, 1993 (expanded ed. 2005).
   The foundational provocation for the entire modern debate. Rawls argues that in a pluralist democracy, citizens have a moral duty to justify coercive laws by “public reasons” that others could accept — not by appeals to religious or other “comprehensive doctrines.” He later softened this somewhat in his essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” included in the expanded edition. Every other work on this list is, in some measure, a response to Rawls.
2. Carter, Stephen L. The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. Basic Books, 1993.
   Carter, a Yale law professor writing from a liberal perspective, argues that American law and politics have come to treat religious believers with disdain, demanding they privatize their faith or “sanitize” it before it is permitted to enter public debate. Notably, he uses liberal means to arrive at what are often considered conservative ends, recovering the long tradition of liberal religious witness — the antislavery, antisegregation, and Vietnam-era antiwar movements. President Clinton cited this book approvingly shortly after its publication.
3. Audi, Robert, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate. Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
   A structured debate between two prominent philosophers taking opposing positions. Audi defends a “secular rationale” requirement — legislators should be able to justify their votes in secular terms even if religious reasons motivate them. Wolterstorff directly rebuts this, arguing there is nothing wrong with acting in public solely on religious grounds. The dialogue format makes it unusually accessible.
4. Greenawalt, Kent. Religious Convictions and Political Choice. Oxford University Press, 1988.
   One of the first rigorous philosophical treatments of the specific question your draft raises — whether and when legislators may rely on religious convictions. Greenawalt takes a nuanced middle position, rejecting both the demand for purely secular reasoning and unconstrained religious advocacy. His follow-up, Private Consciences and Public Reasons (Oxford, 1995), extends the analysis.
5. Audi, Robert. Religious Commitment and Secular Reason. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
   A systematic elaboration of Audi’s position that citizens in liberal democracies — and especially legislators — have a prima facie duty to be able to justify coercive laws by adequate secular reasons. A rigorous philosophical argument for the “separatist” side of the debate, and probably the most careful version of the position your draft critiques.
6. Eberle, Christopher J. Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
   Eberle is deeply at odds with the dominant orthodoxy among political theorists. His argument is that a citizen may responsibly ground her political commitments on religious beliefs even without being able to provide secular translations. A sustained, analytically rigorous challenge to Audi and Rawls from the other direction.
7. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. “Why We Should Reject What Liberalism Tells Us about Speaking and Acting in Public for Religious Reasons.” In Religion and Contemporary Liberalism, ed. Paul J. Weithman. Notre Dame Press, 1997.
   Wolterstorff argues there is nothing wrong with public advocacy based solely on religious belief, and that exclusion of such advocacy is itself unjust. A more concentrated version of his argument than the Audi/Wolterstorff dialogue volume, and widely assigned.
8. Habermas, Jürgen. “Religion in the Public Sphere.” In Between Naturalism and Religion. Polity Press, 2008.
   In his earlier writings Habermas saw religious beliefs as a relic of premodern consciousness that should fade away. In his later writings, however, religion occupies a legitimate place in the public sphere that should be preserved — because religion can communicate certain meanings that philosophy and science cannot. This “theological turn” by the leading secular European social theorist is enormously significant: it represents a major concession from the secularist side.
9. Stout, Jeffrey. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton University Press, 2004.
   Stout argues that both Rawls and the religious right have misread the American democratic tradition, which has always included robust religious argument in public life. He defends a more pragmatic, Dewey-influenced pluralism that neither banishes religion nor gives it veto power. Widely regarded as a major corrective to the Rawlsian framework.
10. Weithman, Paul J. Religion and the Obligation of Citizenship. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
    A philosophically sophisticated defense of the legitimacy of religious reasoning in democratic politics, arguing that citizens have no general obligation to refrain from acting on religious reasons. Weithman is a Notre Dame philosopher working in the Catholic natural law tradition, which makes him particularly relevant to exactly the Henry Hyde situation you described.

A note on scope: This literature is almost entirely conducted among Anglo-American political philosophers and legal scholars. If you wanted a parallel bibliography drawing on theology (e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, John Courtney Murray, or more recent Catholic social thought), or on empirical political science rather than normative theory, that would be a somewhat different list. Let me know if you’d like either direction explored.

[I asked for a parallel bibliography drawing on theology (e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, John Courtney Murray, or more recent Catholic social thought)]

… Here is the parallel bibliography.

B. Bibliography: Religious Convictions and Political Life — Theological Sources

1. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” April 16, 1963.
   The single most powerful practical demonstration that the Rawlsian demand for “secular reasons only” would, if consistently applied, have ruled out the most morally serious political argument of the twentieth century. King’s public life, with its frequent appeals to a comprehensive religious doctrine to justify disobedience to the law, represents a direct challenge to the ideal of public reason — and Rawls is in something of a bind: either King’s argument is not acceptable under the terms of public reason, or public reason simply cannot limit contemporary public discourse in the way Rawls intends. The central point of King’s argument, drawn from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, is that there is a law higher than human law, and that any human law which is at odds with this higher law is unjust. Freely available; no excuse not to read it.
2. Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense. Scribner, 1944 (University of Chicago Press reprint, 2011).
   Niebuhr took up the question of how democracy could best be defended. Most proponents of democracy, he claimed, were “children of light” who had optimistic but naïve ideas about how society could be rid of evil and governed by enlightened reason. He argued for a prudent, liberal understanding of human society chastened by a realistic understanding of the limits of power, and wrote what became his most famous line: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” Niebuhr’s “Christian realism” insists that theological anthropology — specifically, the doctrine of sin — is essential, not merely decorative, to sound democratic theory.
3. Murray, John Courtney, S.J. We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. Sheed & Ward, 1960.
   Arguably the most important Catholic theologian ever to write on the relationship between Catholic philosophy and theology and American political life, Murray used the natural law tradition to argue that there is a strong and thoughtful humanism that is not necessarily sectarian — suggesting possibilities far exceeding common Protestant and secular evaluations of Catholic thought. Murray integrated a theological account of human good with the search for public consensus in a constitutional democracy, and his understanding of the relationship between religious freedom and political life was incorporated into Catholic social teaching at the Second Vatican Council. Murray is directly relevant to the Henry Hyde situation: he provides the intellectual framework for a devout Catholic to argue from natural law rather than from revelation, engaging the pluralist public on its own terms without abandoning his convictions.
4. Neuhaus, Richard John. The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. Eerdmans, 1984.
   Neuhaus argued that “the naked public square” — which results from the exclusion of religious values from the public forum — will almost certainly result in the death of democracy, and that the great challenge is the reconstruction of a public philosophy undergirded by Judeo-Christian religion. Religion, Neuhaus believed, is “at the heart of culture” and necessary to foster the shared reference points around which democratic debate can occur. Written before Neuhaus converted to Catholicism (he was a Lutheran pastor at the time), so it speaks ecumenically. The phrase “naked public square” entered the permanent vocabulary of this debate.
5. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “Doctrinal Note on Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life.” Vatican, 2002.
   An official magisterial document issued under Cardinal Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) directly addressing the question your draft raises. It asserts that a Catholic legislator cannot simply bracket his faith when voting, and that the Church’s moral positions on matters such as human life are not the imposition of religious opinion but the expression of moral truth accessible to reason. Concise, authoritative, and directly on point. Freely available at the Vatican website.
6. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004.
   For the first time, the rich teachings of the Church on questions of the human person, society, political authority, economics, and world peace were synthesized into a single systematic work. Chapter sections specifically address the political community, the state and religious communities, and the commitment of lay faithful in social and political life. The relevant chapters (particularly on political life and the role of lay Catholics) constitute the most comprehensive official Catholic account of why religious conviction and political responsibility cannot be cleanly separated.
7. O’Donovan, Oliver. The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
   Taken together with its companion volume The Ways of Judgment (Eerdmans, 2005), these books provide a theologically substantial and thoroughly Christian analysis of the political order, written with the conviction that the political order cannot be understood without theology and that theology requires and entails an account of the political order. O’Donovan is an Anglican moral theologian, widely regarded as the most rigorous Protestant voice in contemporary political theology. Demanding reading, but rewarding.
8. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Princeton University Press, 2008.
   Wolterstorff appears in the first bibliography as a political philosopher; this later book reveals the theological foundation of that work. He argues that the only adequate grounding for universal human rights — the premise on which liberal democracy rests — is theological: the equal and inherent worth of every human being as the object of God’s love. In other words, the secular liberal state depends, whether it acknowledges it or not, on a theological premise it cannot itself supply. One of the most important books in this literature precisely because it turns the secularist argument on its head.
9. Stout, Jeffrey. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton University Press, 2004.
   (Listed in the first bibliography but belongs here as well, since Stout is a scholar of religion and ethics engaging the theological tradition directly.) He argues that the American democratic tradition has always incorporated robust religious argument, citing the abolitionist movement, the Social Gospel, and the Civil Rights movement as examples. He engages Hauerwas and Milbank — who argue that the Church should disengage from liberal politics altogether — as well as the Rawlsian secularists, finding both extremes mistaken.
10. Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World). Second Vatican Council, 1965.
    The foundational conciliar document on the Church’s relationship to modern society, political life, and culture. It explicitly rejects a privatized faith that retreats from public engagement, and affirms that the Church has a responsibility to illuminate temporal affairs with the Gospel — while also affirming the legitimate autonomy of secular disciplines. Murray’s influence is evident throughout. Freely available; the relevant sections are Part II, Chapters 4 and 5.

A note on shape: This list skews Catholic, for the simple reason that Catholic social thought has produced the most systematic body of theological reflection on exactly this question — the proper relationship between a legislator’s religious convictions and his public duties. Protestant contributions (Niebuhr, O’Donovan, Wolterstorff, King) are substantial but less institutionally organized. If you wanted a third bibliography drawing specifically on evangelical Protestant or Reformed political theology — figures like Abraham Kuyper, or more recent work by scholars like Timothy Keller or James K.A. Smith — that is yet another distinct conversation.

[I asked for the third list]

Good — I have enough solid material. I’ll now assemble the bibliography, being candid about the varying levels of directness with which these works address the specific question of legislative religious reasoning.

C. Bibliography: Religious Convictions and Political Life — Evangelical Protestant and Reformed Sources

A preliminary note on shape: the Reformed tradition’s contribution to this specific debate is, paradoxically, both deeper and more indirect than the Catholic one. Catholics have a magisterium that can issue documents saying precisely “here is how a Catholic legislator should relate faith and public duty.” Reformed thinkers instead tend to address the prior question — whether Christian conviction has any legitimate standing in public life at all — and leave the legislative application to the reader. The entries below range from the foundational to the more recent and applied.

1. Kuyper, Abraham. Lectures on Calvinism (the Stone Lectures). Eerdmans, 1931 (original lectures 1898; multiple reprints).
   The fountainhead of the entire neo-Calvinist tradition of political engagement. When Kuyper was at the height of his powers he was invited to deliver the prestigious Stone Lectures at Princeton in 1898, demonstrating that Calvinism was more than a church polity or doctrinaire religion but an all-encompassing worldview. In the Stone Lectures, Kuyper argued that Calvinism had been a key influence on the development of modern freedoms — freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and freedom of association — and that God’s will was that no one institution, including the state, should dominate a society. His doctrine of “sphere sovereignty” — that God, not the state, is the ultimate sovereign over every domain of life — is the theoretical foundation for arguing that a legislator’s conscience is not the state’s property.
2. Dooyeweerd, Herman. A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. 4 vols. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1953–58.
   Kuyper’s intellectual heir at the Free University of Amsterdam, Dooyeweerd built a comprehensive Reformed philosophy of law, knowledge, and society. In A New Critique, Dooyeweerd elaborates a Reformed and neo-Calvinist philosophy that examines the pre-conditions for theorizing, arguing that all theorizing necessarily depends on non-theoretical religious views. The political implication is radical: the demand that legislators reason from “secular” premises is itself a hidden religious commitment, not a neutral starting point. Dense and not for the faint of heart, but the most rigorous philosophical development of what Kuyper intuited.
3. Plantinga, Alvin, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, eds. Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God. University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.
   This seminal work launched Reformed Epistemology, which argues against modernist foundationalist criteria that religious belief may be “properly basic” to one’s structure of knowledge — that is, not in need of prior secular justification to be rational. The political application follows directly: if a legislator’s religious convictions constitute genuine knowledge, the demand that he set them aside before voting is a demand that he reason worse, not better. More accessible than Dooyeweerd, and Plantinga’s later Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford, 2000) develops the argument at full length.
4. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Until Justice and Peace Embrace: The Kuyper Lectures for 1981 Delivered at the Free University of Amsterdam. Eerdmans, 1983.
   Calling Christians to be true to God’s shalom in all dimensions of life, Wolterstorff brings the religious vision of the Reformation to bear on such urgent matters as world poverty, nationalism, and urban ugliness. One reader captured it well: what is needed is not less Christianity in politics, but Christianity that is more in touch with the tradition. This book applies neo-Calvinist principles to specific public issues and engages liberation theology as a fellow “world-formative” tradition — a conversation you won’t find in the more philosophically abstract literature.
5. Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Nature and Destiny of Man. 2 vols. Scribner, 1941–43.
   Already mentioned in connection with the theological bibliography, Niebuhr is worth a separate entry here because his intellectual roots are explicitly in the Reformed tradition — specifically its Augustinian and Calvinist anthropology. These Gifford Lectures argue that a sound political theology requires a realistic account of human sin and finitude, and that the Enlightenment’s faith in secular reason as the neutral arbiter of public life is itself a form of pride. Widely regarded as the most important work of American Protestant theology in the twentieth century.
6. Henry, Carl F.H. The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Eerdmans, 1947.
   A short, prophetic book by the founding editor of Christianity Today, addressed to American evangelicals who had retreated from public life into cultural separatism. Henry argued that the gospel has social and political implications that cannot be privatized, and called evangelicals back to engagement with the public order. Historically significant as the document that launched the neo-evangelical movement’s re-entry into public discourse. Only 89 pages; still readable.
7. Skillen, James W. The Good of Politics: A Biblical, Historical, and Contemporary Introduction. Baker Academic, 2014.
   Skillen, a Dooyeweerdian political scientist and founder of the Center for Public Justice, applies neo-Calvinist political philosophy directly to the American context. He argues that Christians are called to serve the common good through political institutions — not to withdraw from them and not to Christianize them, but to do politics as Christians, with convictions shaped by a biblical understanding of justice. The most accessible entry point for applying Kuyper’s thought to American legislative life specifically.
8. Smith, James K.A. Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology. Baker Academic, 2017.
   Negotiating through the confusions of political theology, Smith develops a constructive and nuanced position in the Reformed tradition, engaging Oliver O’Donovan and Jeffrey Stout, and should be read by anyone interested in the fundamental questions of church and politics. Smith argues that “the history of Western liberal democracy is one filled with craters from the impact of the gospel” and that Christian political engagement should be rooted in liturgical formation — the church as the community that shapes the loves and loyalties that citizens bring to public life. The most sophisticated recent Reformed contribution to the debate.
9. Mouw, Richard J. He Shines in All That’s Fair: Culture and Common Grace. Eerdmans, 2001.
   Mouw, a Calvin College and Fuller Seminary philosopher-theologian, retrieves the Reformed doctrine of common grace — the idea that God’s grace restrains evil and enables genuine goods even among those who don’t acknowledge him — as the theological basis for Christian engagement with pluralist public life. This is the doctrine that allows a Reformed legislator to reason with non-Christian colleagues toward genuinely good legislation without pretending his convictions are irrelevant. Short, lucid, and directly relevant.
10. Bratt, James D., ed. Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader. Eerdmans, 1998.
    This volume contains primary resource material that had long been out of print or never before translated, reproducing representative samples from various periods of Kuyper’s writings across a variety of disciplines, complementing the Stone Lectures with documents from speeches, newspaper columns, sermons, party speeches, and academic addresses to round out more of Kuyper’s nuances of thought and pragmatic applications of principle. If you want Kuyper in depth beyond the Stone Lectures alone — and his political thought is richer than the lectures alone convey — this is the anthology to have.

A note on your own tradition: Given that you spent twenty years in the Reformed world, you have probably encountered Kuyper’s name and possibly Dooyeweerd’s, but the political theology literature is less commonly taught in American Reformed churches than the dogmatic theology. The practical line of descent in the United States runs roughly: Kuyper → Dooyeweerd → the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto → scholars like Wolterstorff, Mouw, Skillen, and Smith. If any of these names are familiar from your earlier years, they will repay re-reading now with this specific question in mind.

My confidence in the scholarly standing of these entries is high. Confidence that this is a complete list of the most significant works is moderate — this is a living literature and I may have missed important contributions from figures like David VanDrunen (who takes a more two-kingdoms approach) or Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew, who work in the missional theology stream.

[I prompted, guardedly, for Orthodox sources]

You called it — I do struggle to get to ten. Let me be transparent about that rather than pad the list with marginal entries.

D. Bibliography: Religious Convictions and Political Life — Eastern Orthodox Sources

A candid prefatory note: you were right to anticipate difficulty. Orthodox Christianity has produced extraordinary theology, but systematic political theology in the Western academic mode is genuinely underdeveloped within the tradition. As Papanikolaou himself acknowledges, “the Orthodox voice in matters of law and politics is severely underdeveloped,” revealing “unpreparedness to deal with questions of politics” in a world without a Byzantine emperor or a Russian czar. The reasons are structural: the tradition formed in an imperial context (symphonia), then survived under Ottoman and Soviet rule, leaving little occasion to develop a theology of democratic political participation from inside the tradition. What exists tends to fall into two camps — those who embrace engagement with liberal democracy and those who resist it as a Western imposition. I can give you seven entries of genuine quality; the last three are honest explanations of why the shelf runs short.

1. Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1963 (revised ed. 1973).
   Not a work of political theology as such, but the essential starting point for understanding the Orthodox worldview that underlies everything else on this list. Schmemann suggests an approach to the world and life within it that stems from the liturgical experience of the Orthodox Church, understanding secularism and Christian culture from the perspective of the Church’s unbroken experience as revealed and communicated in her worship. The political implication is that an Orthodox Christian cannot bracket his liturgical formation when he enters public life any more than he can bracket his lungs — the Eucharist is not a private devotion but a vision of what the world is for. This is the foundational premise from which Orthodox public engagement must begin.
2. Papanikolaou, Aristotle. The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy. University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.
   The first comprehensive treatment from an Orthodox theological perspective of the compatibility between Orthodoxy and liberal democracy, Papanikolaou argues that a political theology grounded in the principle of divine-human communion — theosis — must endorse a political community structured around freedom of religion, human rights, and church-state separation. He hopes to forge a non-radical Orthodox political theology that moves beyond reflexive opposition to the West and nostalgia for a Byzantine-like unified political-religious culture. The most rigorous Orthodox engagement with the specific questions that concern your draft.
3. Guroian, Vigen. Incarnate Love: Essays in Orthodox Ethics. 2nd ed. University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.
   A major contribution to Orthodox ethics that aims to articulate a social ethic making sense of the Orthodox experience in the United States, challenging the Orthodox tradition to formulate a new strategy for church and societal interaction. Guroian, an Armenian Orthodox theologian, is the other pole of the key American debate: where Papanikolaou tends toward accommodation with liberal democracy, Guroian is more skeptical, insisting that the Eucharistic community has its own social logic that cannot simply be translated into liberal rights language. An extended exchange between Papanikolaou and Guroian has highlighted points of tension in their respective accounts of the relationship between the ethos of the Church as a Eucharistic community and Western democratic social orders.
4. Stoeckl, Kristina, Ingeborg Gabriel, and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Political Theologies in Orthodox Christianity: Common Challenges and Divergent Positions. T&T Clark, 2017.
   The contributors present their views by drawing lessons from the past and elaborating visions for how Orthodox Christianity can find its place in the contemporary liberal democratic order, touching upon anarchism, economy, and political theology, and examining how Orthodox Christianity reacts to liberal democracy. The most comprehensive academic survey of the current state of the debate, including both the liberal-democratic and the traditionalist-conservative streams. Useful as a map of where the conversation stands.
5. Ecumenical Patriarchate. For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church. 2020.
   A document that can be understood as a political manifesto of Eastern Orthodoxy for the 21st century — not for a bygone historical setting or a Christian utopia like the Byzantine Empire or Holy Russia, but for this period of history with its urgent problems, positively receiving liberal democracy, human rights language, and solidarity with the poor. Issued under the blessing of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, it is the closest thing the Orthodox world currently has to what the Catholics achieved with Gaudium et Spes or the CDF’s 2002 Doctrinal Note. Contested within Orthodoxy — not all jurisdictions have embraced it — but significant precisely because it exists. Freely available online.
6. Hovorun, Cyril. Political Orthodoxies: The Unorthodoxies of the Church Coerced. Fortress Press, 2018.
   A Ukrainian Orthodox theologian’s critical examination of how Orthodox churches have repeatedly been seduced by political power — Byzantinism, nationalism, Soviet accommodation, and now Russian imperialism. Directly relevant as a cautionary account of what happens when the Church’s political theology becomes an instrument of the state rather than a prophetic witness to it. Hovorun argues for a recovery of the Church’s genuinely prophetic and eschatological stance, which neither withdraws from public life nor baptizes political power.
7. Bulgakov, Sergius. The Orthodox Church. St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988 (original 1935).
   The great Russian émigré theologian’s introduction to Orthodoxy includes substantial reflection on the Church’s relationship to society and the state. Bulgakov’s broader project (in his major theological trilogy and elsewhere) develops an Orthodox social philosophy drawing on the concept of sobornost’ (conciliar unity) as an alternative to both individualism and collectivism. Not directly about legislative ethics, but provides the theological anthropology that grounds Orthodox engagement with political life.

Why the list stops at seven:

The honest answer to why this is difficult is threefold. First, as noted above, the tradition simply hasn’t produced the volume of systematic political theology that the Catholic or Reformed traditions have — the institutional conditions for it didn’t exist. Second, much of the most significant Orthodox political thought was written in Russian (Solovyov, Bulgakov, Frank, Berdyaev) and only partially translated; it is also more philosophical than theological in the strict sense. Third, what does exist in English tends to either address the Church-state relationship at a structural level (symphonia and its discontents) rather than the conscience of the individual believer, or it addresses American Orthodox life in ways that are still quite new and developing.

If you wanted a supplementary list of Russian religious philosophers (not strictly Orthodox theologians, but thinkers formed by the Orthodox world) who addressed public life and political ethics, figures like Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Semyon Frank would populate it — and they are genuinely significant. That would be yet another conversation.

My confidence in the quality of the seven entries above is high. My confidence that there are not three more works of equivalent standing that I may have overlooked is only moderate — this is a field where my training data is thinner than for Catholic or Protestant sources.

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

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