“If we fail to unite the Power of Origin with the Demand of Justice, the Demonic forces of political romanticism will win, leading to Barbarism.”
— Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision (1933)
A Voice from the Abyss
In the winter of 1933, as Adolf Hitler consolidated power in Germany, a forty-six-year-old theologian named Paul Tillich published a book that would cost him his university position and force him into exile. The Socialist Decision was Tillich’s attempt to understand why Germany—a nation of churches and universities, of Bach and Goethe—was surrendering itself to barbarism. More than that, it was his attempt to chart an alternative path, one that the German people would not take.
Within months of the book’s publication, Tillich was dismissed from his professorship at the University of Frankfurt. He fled to the United States, where he would become one of the twentieth century’s most influential theologians, teaching at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. But The Socialist Decision remained largely untranslated and unread in the English-speaking world for decades. It was considered a period piece—a relic of Weimar politics, interesting to historians but not to contemporary readers.
I believe this judgment is mistaken. Tillich’s analysis of how religious nationalism seduces the soul, of why progressive movements fail to offer compelling alternatives, and of what authentic faith might look like in times of political crisis speaks to our moment with unsettling precision. The parallels between Weimar Germany and contemporary America are not exact—history never repeats so neatly—but the underlying spiritual dynamics Tillich diagnosed are at work among us. Understanding his framework may help us see our own situation more clearly and respond more faithfully.
This essay introduces Tillich’s argument for Christians living in what we might call Trump’s America—not as a partisan intervention but as a diagnostic and spiritual one. Whether you voted for Donald Trump or against him, whether you consider yourself conservative or progressive, Tillich’s analysis illuminates something about the current alignment of Christianity and politics that we need to understand. Something has gone wrong. Something is demanded of us. The question is whether we can see it clearly enough to respond.
The Two Roots of Human Existence
Tillich begins not with politics but with anthropology—with a fundamental claim about what human beings are. We are creatures stretched between two poles, defined by two basic questions that pull us in different directions.
The first question is “Whence?”—Where do I come from? This question binds us to what Tillich calls the “powers of origin”: soil, blood, ancestors, tradition, the particular community into which we were born. It is the question of roots. Before we choose anything, we are already embedded in a world we did not make. We have a mother tongue, a homeland, a people. These are not abstractions but visceral realities. The smell of your grandmother’s kitchen, the hymns you sang as a child, the cemetery where your ancestors lie—these constitute the depth dimension of your existence. Tillich calls this the “myth of origin,” and he means myth not as falsehood but as the narrative framework that makes life meaningful.
The religious expression of this first root is what Tillich elsewhere calls the sacramental dimension of faith—the sense that the Holy is present here and now, in this particular place and people. God is not merely an idea but a presence mediated through bread and wine, through sacred spaces, through the gathered community. This is Christianity’s Catholic inheritance, though it appears in Protestant forms as well: the attachment to the old hymnal, the beloved sanctuary, the traditions passed down.
The second question is “Whither?”—What ought I to become? This question breaks the cycle of mere biological existence. It introduces demand. The child grows and asks: Is what my tribe does right? The conscience awakens and perceives that the stranger, the enemy, the one outside my group also has a face, also makes a claim upon me. Justice enters the world—and justice is always, in some sense, a disruption of the powers of origin. It says: your tribe is not the measure of all things. There is a Thou beyond your We.
The religious expression of this second root is what Tillich calls the prophetic dimension of faith. This is the voice of Amos crying out against Israel’s injustice, of Jesus cleansing the Temple, of the Protestant reformers declaring that the Church itself stands under judgment. Tillich names this the “Protestant Principle”—the refusal to let any finite reality, however sacred, claim absolute authority. No king, no nation, no church, no tradition is God. All stand under the unconditional demand of justice and love.
Here is the crucial point: authentic human existence requires both roots in dynamic tension. We need belonging and critique, roots and wings, the sacramental and the prophetic. Origin without Demand becomes suffocating tribalism—my group right or wrong, the worship of blood and soil. Demand without Origin becomes rootless abstraction—ideals floating in a void, moral pronouncements that cannot move the heart because they are disconnected from any living community.
The prophets of Israel held both roots together. They were fiercely attached to their people—”How can I give you up, O Ephraim?” God cries through Hosea—yet they pronounced judgment on that same people with devastating clarity. Jesus wept over Jerusalem even as he prophesied its destruction. This is the model of biblical faith: rooted enough to care, free enough to judge.
How Things Go Wrong: Heteronomy and Empty Autonomy
If authentic existence holds the two roots in tension, pathological existence collapses the tension in one direction or the other. Tillich names these two collapses heteronomy and autonomy—and understanding them is essential for diagnosing our present crisis.
Heteronomy: The Tyranny of Origin
Heteronomy literally means “rule by another”—a condition in which an external law or authority is imposed on the self, crushing its freedom and reason. In political terms, heteronomy is authoritarianism: the demand that you submit to the Leader, the Party, the Nation, the Tradition without question. In religious terms, heteronomy is fundamentalism: the demand that you accept the dictates of Scripture or Church as interpreted by those in power, without critical engagement.
Tillich saw Nazism as heteronomy in its most dangerous form—what he called “political romanticism.” The Nazis offered a return to the unbroken myth of origin: blood, soil, the Germanic Volk, the ancient gods. They rejected the Enlightenment demand for universal human dignity, dismissed it as foreign contamination (often blamed on Jews), and promised to restore a lost golden age of tribal unity. Against the complexity and anxiety of modernity, they offered the simplicity of submission.
What made political romanticism so seductive was that it spoke to real human needs. The powers of origin are not illusions. People genuinely need belonging, identity, rootedness. Weimar Germany was marked by economic chaos, cultural upheaval, and the humiliation of defeat. Many Germans felt unmoored, lost, anxious. The Nazis provided a powerful counter-narrative: you are not lost; you are the master race. You are not anxious; you are destined for greatness. Submit to the Führer and the Volk, and your life will have meaning again.
Tillich calls this the “demonic.” The term requires explanation. For Tillich, the demonic is not supernatural evil but a structure of existence in which a finite reality claims infinite status. The Nation, which is real but limited, becomes God. The Race, which is a biological category, becomes the bearer of sacred destiny. The Church, which is a human institution, becomes the infallible mouthpiece of the divine.
The demonic has power—this is what distinguishes it from mere error. Demonic movements are genuinely creative; they release energies, inspire sacrifices, generate community. Nazi Germany built highways, produced art, gave millions a sense of purpose. This is why demonic movements seduce: they deliver real goods, at least for a time, at least for some. But because they lack the prophetic principle of self-criticism, because they have absolutized something finite, they inevitably become destructive. The creative energy turns demonic precisely because it recognizes no limit, no judgment from beyond itself.
Empty Autonomy: The Dissolution of Origin
If heteronomy is the tyranny of roots, autonomy in its pathological form is the dissolution of roots. Tillich associates this with bourgeois liberalism—the Enlightenment project in its more naive expressions. In our contemporary moment, one could think of the populist critiques of neo-liberalism from both the right and left.
Autonomy, positively understood, is the self-governance of reason. It is the great achievement of modernity: freeing thought from superstition, liberating conscience from coerced conformity, establishing the dignity of the individual against the crushing weight of tradition. Tillich does not reject autonomy; he affirms it as essential to human maturity.
But autonomy becomes pathological when it imagines that reason alone, disconnected from any depth dimension, can sustain human existence. Tillich calls this the “bourgeois principle”: the treatment of the world as objects to be analyzed and controlled, the reduction of human beings to rational calculators of self-interest, the assumption that tradition, myth, and community are merely superstitions to be outgrown.
The fatal flaw of bourgeois autonomy is what Tillich calls the “belief in harmony.” Liberalism assumed that if you freed individuals to pursue their rational self-interest in free markets of goods and ideas, harmony would spontaneously emerge. Remove the old authorities, and enlightened self-interest would create a rational society. Reality refutes this. Class struggle does not disappear through rational persuasion. Existential anxiety is not dissolved by economic growth. Tribal psychology is not transcended by good arguments.
More profoundly, empty autonomy cannot sustain human meaning. By cutting the roots to depth, it leaves souls hungry. Tillich saw this clearly in Weimar Germany: the socialist and liberal movements relied on rationalist arguments while the Nazis provided symbols—flags, rituals, songs, a mythology of destiny. “By discarding symbols,” Tillich writes, “socialism left the human soul hungry, allowing the Nazis to feed it with the toxic symbols of blood and soil.”
The critique extends to progressive religion. When liberal Christianity, in its proper rejection of superstition and obscurantism, stripped away symbol, ritual, and embodied practice—when it became lecture series rather than liturgy, social ethics committees rather than sacramental community—it hollowed out its capacity to move the heart. It spoke to the enlightened mind but not to what Tillich calls Eros: the vital depths of human desire. It offered critique without alternative symbols, protest without transforming practice.
The American Translation
The reader will already be drawing parallels. Let me make them explicit while acknowledging their limits.
White Christian nationalism in America functions as a form of political romanticism. It offers a return to an imagined golden age—a “Christian America” that supposedly existed before secularists, immigrants, and cultural elites corrupted it. It absolutizes the nation, treating America as God’s chosen instrument. It sacralizes a particular cultural expression of Christianity—white, evangelical, politically conservative—and treats deviations from this norm as apostasy. It provides powerful symbols, rituals of belonging (the rally, the prayer breakfast, the flag-draped worship service), and a mythology of destiny (America as city on a hill, Trump as divinely appointed defender).
In Tillich’s terms, this is demonic: a finite reality (American national identity) claiming infinite status. Note that demonic does not mean personally evil. Most adherents of Christian nationalism are not monsters; they are people seeking meaning, community, and identity in a disorienting world. The movement meets real needs, delivers real goods—a sense of belonging, clear moral boundaries, explanation for anxiety, hope for significance. This is precisely why it is dangerous: it has power precisely because it addresses genuine human hungers, but it addresses them in ways that absolutize the tribe and demonize the other.
The parallels to 1933 are not exact. America is not Weimar Germany. We have different histories, institutions, and cultural resources. But the structure Tillich describes—the seduction of origin-without-demand, the hunger that empty autonomy cannot fill—operates in both contexts. When eighty percent of white evangelicals support a leader who mocks the disabled, brags about sexual assault, and separates children from their parents at the border, something has gone wrong at a level deeper than policy disagreement. When masked federal agents charge toward cars in Minneapolis screaming profanities, when an administration invades Venezuela and hints that Greenland might be next, when the President openly celebrates what Robert Wright calls “the law of the jungle”—a deep respect for might-makes-right that operates identically on domestic and international fronts—we are watching the demonic in action. A finite political identity has claimed sacred status. The prophetic principle has been abandoned. And the positive-feedback cycle Tillich warned about is visible: aggressive state action provokes mass reaction, which justifies further crackdown, which provokes further reaction. The danger, as Robert Wright observes, is not that Trump is Hitler but that he “has enough in common with Hitler to set in motion a very negative kind of positive-feedback cycle and then happily do what he can to sustain it, making good use, at key moments, of his contempt for the principles of liberal democracy.”
But—and this is equally important—progressive Christianity bears responsibility for the vacuum that Christian nationalism fills. When mainline Protestantism became indistinguishable from the Democratic Party at prayer, when it offered sociological analysis instead of sacramental encounter, when it treated traditional symbols with embarrassed condescension, it abandoned the field. The religious right did not steal evangelical Christianity; progressive Christianity ceded the symbolic terrain.
Tillich’s critique of socialism applies: rationalist progressivism assumed that good arguments would be enough, that exposing the contradictions of conservative religion would liberate people from its grip. It underestimated the depth of human need for belonging, symbol, and sacred meaning. It overestimated the power of critique disconnected from alternative community.
There is another dimension we must acknowledge: the estrangement that drives people toward authoritarian religion. Tillich analyzed the proletarian situation—the condition of workers reduced to objects, alienated from meaningful labor and community. Contemporary America has its own forms of estrangement. Economic displacement, the hollowing out of rural communities, cultural contempt from coastal elites, the collapse of mediating institutions (unions, lodges, churches)—these create real suffering. Many who embrace Christian nationalism are not simply bigots; they are people experiencing genuine loss, seeking explanation and hope.
Understanding this requires what we might call cognitive empathy: the disciplined effort to understand others’ perspectives without necessarily agreeing with their conclusions. Our tribal instincts push us to attribute the worst possible motives to those we perceive as enemies. If they do something objectionable, it’s because they’re bad people; if we do something objectionable, there are extenuating circumstances. This bias operates in all directions. Progressives caricature conservatives as simply racist and stupid; conservatives caricature progressives as simply godless and elitist. Neither caricature helps us understand or persuade.
Tillich’s framework demands more. It asks us to understand the legitimate needs that demonic movements address, even as we reject their demonic forms. The hunger for roots is real. The need for belonging is not weakness. The desire for sacred meaning is not superstition to be cured by education. Any faithful response must address these needs, not simply denounce those who seek to meet them in destructive ways.
The Solution: Theonomy and Belief-ful Realism
Tillich does not simply diagnose; he prescribes. The solution to the oscillation between heteronomy and empty autonomy is what he calls theonomy.
Theonomy literally means “God’s law,” but Tillich uses it in a specific sense. A theonomous culture is one in which autonomy is preserved—reason and conscience remain free—but they are filled with “depth” or “substance.” The rational forms of culture become transparent to the unconditioned meaning that underlies them. It is not that God dictates external commands (that would be heteronomy), but that human creativity and criticism operate in awareness of the sacred ground from which they spring.
Let me put it concretely. A theonomous Christianity would honor both roots: the particular and the universal, the sacramental and the prophetic, tradition and justice, belonging and critique. It would celebrate local community, embodied practice, and ancestral wisdom while subjecting all of these to the prophetic demand: Does this serve justice? Does this honor the stranger? Does this absolutize anything less than God?
Theonomy does not mean theocracy. Tillich is not calling for Christians to seize political power and impose their vision. The Protestant Principle applies to Christian movements as much as any other: the Church itself stands under judgment, must never claim absolute authority, must always be reformed. A theonomous politics is one in which the religious depth dimension informs political engagement without dominating it—where justice and mercy are pursued through democratic persuasion, not imposed by sacred violence.
Tillich also proposes what he calls Belief-ful Realism (or “self-transcending realism”). This is an attitude toward politics that looks unflinchingly at the concrete facts—class interests, power dynamics, economic forces, psychological motivations—but perceives within them the “light” of unconditional meaning. It refuses both cynicism (which sees only power and self-interest) and idealism (which imagines that good intentions are sufficient without attention to actual structures).
Belief-ful Realism would engage Christian nationalism by understanding its appeal—the real grievances it channels, the genuine needs it meets—while refusing its idolatry. It would acknowledge progressive Christianity’s failures without surrendering to cynicism about the possibility of faithful engagement. It would practice cognitive empathy toward opponents while maintaining prophetic clarity about injustice.
The central symbol Tillich proposes is Expectation. Expectation unites origin and demand, power and justice, the already and the not-yet. It is neither nostalgia for a lost past (the temptation of political romanticism) nor abstract hope for a disembodied future (the temptation of empty progressivism). It is rooted in tension toward the genuinely new—what the prophets called waiting for the Lord, what Jesus announced as the Kin-dom breaking in.
Expectation knows that the Kin-dom has not fully arrived—that all our political and religious achievements remain broken, compromised, subject to judgment. But it also knows that the Kin-dom is arriving—that within the grime of politics, the eternal shines through. It sustains both engagement and humility, both prophetic courage and recognition of our own participation in what we critique.
Practical Implications
What would a theonomous, belief-fully realistic Christianity look like in practice? Let me suggest several directions.
First, recover sacred symbols without idolizing them. Progressive Christianity’s allergy to symbol and ritual has been a mistake. It is ultimately naive to believe we have evolved past the need and the gift of a community bound to each other and the Other, be it our neighbors or our enemies. Humans need embodied practice, not just good ideas. The cross, the bread and wine, baptism, the church year, pilgrimage—these are not primitive superstitions but vehicles of depth. But they must be held with the Protestant Principle: no symbol is God; all symbols point beyond themselves. The flag is not the cross. America is not the Kingdom. The Church itself is ecclesia semper reformanda: always being reformed.
Second, practice cognitive empathy as spiritual discipline. Our tribal instincts distort our perception of those we consider enemies. We see their worst actions as revelatory of their character while explaining away our own. Mindfulness—the practice of observing our reactions without being captured by them—can create space between stimulus and response, allowing us to see more clearly. When you feel righteous rage at “those people,” can you notice the feeling, interrogate its sources, consider what you might be missing?
This does not mean false equivalence. Some positions are genuinely better than others; some actions are genuinely evil. Cognitive empathy is not agreement. But understanding why people believe what they believe—understanding the path by which they arrived at conclusions we reject—is both strategically useful (you cannot persuade people you do not understand) and spiritually commanded (love your enemies and refusing to bear false witness requires, at minimum, seeing them as human beings with comprehensible motivations).
Third, address material conditions, not just beliefs. Tillich understood that ideas do not float free of social conditions. The appeal of authoritarian religion is connected to economic displacement, status anxiety, and the collapse of community. You cannot simply argue people out of Christian nationalism; you must build alternative communities that meet the same needs for belonging and meaning. You must address the material suffering that makes people susceptible to demonic solutions.
This is what game theorists call non-zero-sum thinking: seeking arrangements where all parties benefit, rather than assuming that someone must lose for someone else to win. Much political discourse frames every issue as zero-sum: if they gain, we lose. But many of our most pressing problems—climate change, public health, economic security, the advent of AI—require cooperative solutions. Building coalitions around shared material interests can sometimes transcend tribal divisions that arguments about values cannot bridge.
Fourth, maintain prophetic witness without self-righteousness. The Protestant Principle cuts both ways. Yes, we must name idolatry when we see it— we must refuse to let our nation or race or party claim sacred status. But we must also recognize our own complicity. Progressive Christianity has its own idolatries: its own self-righteousness, its own tribal satisfactions, its own tendency to absolutize penultimate goods. The prophet who does not recognize their own standing under judgment becomes another form of the demonic.
Jesus offers the model. He pronounced devastating judgment on the religious establishment of his day—”whitewashed tombs,” “brood of vipers”—yet wept over Jerusalem. He loved the tradition he criticized. He was rooted enough to care, free enough to judge, humble enough to suffer with those who would not hear him.
The Decision Before Us
Tillich wrote The Socialist Decision in what he called a moment of kairos—a time pregnant with meaning, demanding a specific decision. The ordinary flow of chronological time (chronos) is interrupted by a crisis that reveals what has been hidden and demands a response. Such moments do not last forever; the window opens and closes. Germany’s kairos in 1933 resulted in catastrophe. The decision for socialism—which for Tillich meant the decision for a political order that honored both roots, united power and justice, created theonomous community—was not made. The pendulum swung violently toward the roots, and barbarism followed.
Are we in a kairos moment? I believe we are—though not the same one, and with different possibilities. The alignment of white Christianity with authoritarian politics is not a passing aberration but a spiritual crisis that reveals what has been latent for generations. The question is not primarily political but religious: What has gone wrong in American Christianity that so many see no contradiction between following Jesus and following a movement built on resentment, exclusion, and the worship of power?
Tillich’s analysis suggests that the answer lies deeper than bad theology or political manipulation—though both are present. It lies in the fundamental human tension between origin and demand, and in the failure of progressive Christianity to hold both roots in creative tension. Authoritarian religion offers roots without justice. Progressive religion often offers justice without roots. Neither is sustainable. Neither is faithful.
The way forward is theonomy: a Christianity that is rooted—in Scripture, tradition, sacrament, particular community—yet free—because all these roots point beyond themselves to the God who cannot be captured by any finite form. A Christianity that loves the local while recognizing the universal, that celebrates belonging while welcoming the stranger, that holds tradition in one hand and justice in the other.
This is not an easy synthesis. It requires living in tension rather than collapsing into one pole or the other. It requires the spiritual discipline of holding opposites together: already and not yet, particular and universal, roots and wings. It requires what Tillich calls courage—the courage to be despite the threat of nonbeing, the courage to affirm meaning in spite of the forces of meaninglessness.
But this is precisely what Christian faith offers: the power to live in creative tension, sustained by a God who became particular (a Jewish peasant in first-century Palestine) for the sake of the universal (the redemption of all creation). The Incarnation itself is the model of theonomy: the infinite entering the finite without ceasing to be infinite, the universal taking particular form while remaining open to all.
We stand where Tillich stood, on the edge of an abyss. But we also stand in the stream of those who have faced the abyss before and found the courage to be. The prophets faced it. Jesus faced it. Tillich faced it. We are called to face it too—not with confidence in our own wisdom or power, but with expectation: the trust that even in the darkest times, the eternal is breaking through.
The decision is before us. Roots or abstraction. Justice or idolatry. Theonomy or barbarism. What will we choose?
The Essay’s Origin Story
This essay was inspired by two recent Substack posts from two of my regular reads, Tony Jones’ What the Hell is Going On and Robert Wright’s Some useful Trump-Hitler comparisons (in light of Minneapolis and Venezuela). Tony ends his post by saying, “I don’t know what will replace Christendom as our moral framework. Some have argued for a return to the virtue ethics of Aristotle and Aquinas. Others think a religious revival is the only thing that will save us. Neither of those seems likely. Some days — and today is one of those days — I fear that we’re too fragmented to come back together under any single umbrella of morality.” Tony and I had a rather lengthy text exchange about it, and in it, I said, “It seems as we lose the cultural and ethical inertia of Christendom, evangelicals get mean, and Mainline Protestants turn to vapid nostalgia.” As I was doing dishes and ruminating, I thought of Paul Tillich’s The Socialist Decision, an often-neglected work, and found it helpful in processing the current moment. What sparked it? Robert Wright’s measured and provocative reflections on useful Trump-Hitler comparisons. If this essay was interesting, then check out all three.
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