Last week, Paul David Miller penned an essay at The Federalist entitled: “I’m An Evangelical, And I Don’t Support Ted Cruz.” In it, he argued that Cruz effectively serves as a poor Christian witness in the public square, asking Christians to vote for him because he is “one of them,” and thus promoting a kind of Christian group narcissism:

If Donald Trump has become the candidate of white identity politics, Cruz is the candidate of Christian identity politics. I dislike identity politics of all stripes and feel insulted when a candidate appeals to me on the basis of my demographic.

I have a brain. I care about ideas. I want to vote for a candidate who shares my sense of justice, not who promises to bring the most benefits to people like me.

This statement profoundly misreads both Cruz’s public philosophy and the nature of the challenge facing Christians today. Much more than some other candidates, Cruz has consistently framed his arguments in terms of the U.S. Constitution, and the rights that it guarantees for all. Note that even on same-sex marriage, he favors returning the issue to the states — when surely he could serve up some redder meat to the Christian “base” by calling for an implausible Constitutional amendment banning the practice, as Scott Walker did.

Yes, in the nitty-gritty, late hours before the Iowa caucuses, Cruz has reached out to his fellow Christians and asked for their vote, effectively promising them that he will be their special advocate — no doubt hoping to remind them that his own faith journey, unlike Donald Trump’s, does indeed mean having to say, “I’m sorry.” And reading the Bible. And defending natural marriage, unborn life, and religious liberty consistently over many years — not suddenly, after unlikely “conversions” on such issues in the midst of a presidential race, as Mr. Trump has claimed.

But it’s time to ask what we mean by “identity politics,” and whether it’s even wrong to inflect one’s patriotic sense of the common good with some sense of collective self-interest. Certainly, our founding fathers were under no illusions that politics in the Republic that they created would be practiced by selfless idealists, representing purely civic-minded voters, whose angelic disputes would merely revolve around the nature of the abstract Good, and the wisest means to attain it.

The Constitutional separation of powers, as illustrated by Rube Goldberg.

Quite the contrary. Our Constitution was drafted explicitly to make it hard for the government to do anything, with a complex separation of powers and hedges against the whims of angry majorities and the power hunger of leaders. It’s a glorious Rube Goldberg by design, crafted by men like George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison who had read their Augustine: They knew that self-interest is an ineradicable part of our nature — which they agreed was fallen, though they might have differed on the nature of our Redemption. In other words, Americans have known all along that there is some measure of self-interest in politics, whether personal (ambitious lawmakers seeking advancement) or collective (different ethnic or social groups promoting agendas that benefit them).

The Congressional White Caucus?

Nor is self-seeking wrong in itself. Mere self-interest isn’t selfishness. Indeed, when a group is in danger or has been long subject to injustice, our culture makes no objection to their employing identity politics, within limits: There is an official Congressional Black Caucus, and politicians do not refuse invitations from the American Israel Political Action Committee. On the flipside, we would have no patience for a Congressional White Caucus, or an American Gentile Political Action Committee — precisely because the advantaged group, by virtue of its stronger status, ought to practice magnanimity, and identify its self-interest with the broader common good. I think that this is what Miller is getting at, when he calls on Christians to renounce “identity politics.”

But he is mistaken. We do not live in 1820, right after the Great Awakening, when huge majorities of Americans embraced some form of orthodox Christianity. We do not even live in the 1950s, when Archbishop Fulton Sheen had the most popular program on television and mainline Protestantism mattered. We live an age when the U.S. government at every level has adopted or is considering laws and policies that threaten our freedom of faith; when the federal government lavishes our tax money on the abortionists of Planned Parenthood, and threatens religious employers with crippling fines if they refuse to provide the abortion pill; when secular elites from the State Department to leading law schools speak not of the broad “free exercise of religion” guaranteed in the First Amendment, but of a narrow “freedom of worship”; when the leading Democratic presidential candidate has told Christians that they will need to change their “deep-seated cultural codes [and] religious beliefs” so as to accept abortion on demand; when the IRS might yank the tax exemptions of orthodox Christian churches and schools; when Islamists around the world are explicitly targeting Christians, who find no help or refuge.

Leaving aside direct persecution, Christians are in the crosshairs of secularist policy-makers in America, as they are in Canada, Australia, and parts of Europe. To suggest that we are so powerful and privileged that consulting our corporate interest would amount to an injustice is frankly delusional — like a fallen aristocrat sitting in prison, calling vainly for his valet.

But there’s a deeper issue than this: Even if we were safe, even if the Left in fact believed in religious freedom, and left us in peace — or if genuine libertarians instead of progressive paternalists came to power — we Christians are called to a certain identity politics, correctly understood. We are not the Organization of Christ, or the Lobby of Christ, or the Jesus Christ Club (“Who’s the founder of the church/ who died for you and me?/ J-E-S…/ U-S-C…/ H-R-I-S-T!”).

We are the Body of Christ, an organic living thing that stretches out invisibly through history, in this world and the next. A body must care for its members. Endangered Muslims look to fellow Muslims for protection and Jews to fellow Jews. Like them, we owe a special debt of protection to Christians who are in danger, more than we owe to Yezidis or Bahais by virtue of their plain humanity. These aren’t just humans, the images of God; they are our brothers, and you owe more to family than you do to strangers.

We owe some concern, for instance, for the hunted Christians of Syria — too much, I’d argue, to help intolerant Islamists come to power there. If we don’t look out for these brother Christians’ safety, who will? Those abstract humanitarians at the U.N., who let Saudi Arabia (the only member state that still practices crucifixion) chair that body’s human rights commission? The U.S. State Department, which even under George W. Bush sat idly by as a million Christians were ethnically cleansed from Iraq? No, it’s our job as Christian citizens, and if we abandon it in the name of high-minded universalism, on the great Day of Judgment those Coptic, Assyrian, Chaldean and Melkite martyrs will stand in glory and their presence will accuse us: “I was persecuted, and you did not protect me.”

It would be another thing entirely if Christian identity politics meant violating justice, imposing on others beliefs that rely solely on scripture, and not on reason. But it was the overwhelmingly Christian legislators of 18^th century America who wrote and ratified the First Amendment, and there has never been a movement to impose a particular creed on every American. As Samuel Huntington argued, the tolerant Anglo-Protestant culture and consensus that shaped America has never been repressive, even when it sometimes overstepped the bounds of prudence, as in the passage of Prohibition. Nor do we Christians wish to repress anyone now.

But we must have the strength of soul, the magnanimity and prophetic courage today to outright demand our human rights, and to aid our fellow Christians who are threatened around the world. To do less will not impress the unbelievers with our “selflessness” and convert them. They will simply and rightly see it as weakness born from a lack of love. It will fill them with contempt, for us and for the Gospel. Such is the healthy man’s reaction to the “pussilanimous,” or small of soul — such as the servant who so feared his master that he dumped his talents in a hole. Our “talents” today are our sovereign votes, our civic voices, our individual claims to guide this careening ship of state away from icebergs. We have no right to squirrel those talents away in “Benedict Option” ghettos, or scatter them like worthless coins at Mardi Gras to prove our generosity. We must husband and steward what power the world has left us, like the wise virgins trimming their lamps.