First Things RSS Feed - Joshua Mitchell https://www.firstthings.com/author/joshua-mitchell en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:54:19 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/joshua-mitchell 60 The Age of Incomplete Religions https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/08/the-age-of-incomplete-religions https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/08/the-age-of-incomplete-religions Wed, 28 Aug 2024 07:00:00 -0400 Beware the copula “and.” Politics and religion. Church and state. What does it mean to bring these into relationship? Are they immiscible? Soluble? In certain respects, but not others? At certain times, but not others? A host of questions to be considered anew. How did conservatives get here? What prompts them today to wonder aloud if they need to rethink the relationship between church and state, between politics and religion?

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]]> Identity Politics: Guilt and the Scapegoat https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2023/01/identity-politics-guilt-and-the-scapegoat https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2023/01/identity-politics-guilt-and-the-scapegoat Fri, 27 Jan 2023 11:00:00 -0500 Dr. Joshua Mitchell addresses the rise of identity politics, its relation to Christianity, and the resulting destruction of societal institutions. He describes how the Christian categories of guilt, innocence, and the scapegoat have been fundamentally perverted in Identity Politics, and therefore only a restoration of the superior Christian account of these terms will redeem society. 

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]]> By the Sweat of Our Brow https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/08/by-the-sweat-of-our-brow https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/08/by-the-sweat-of-our-brow Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0400 After almost a century, what fruit has the conservative distinction between nature and history yielded? Many conservatives today gather in the shade of the tree grown by Leo Strauss, who concluded that because modern man had abandoned nature and been seduced by history, all things—including the Nazis—were possible. Other conservatives gather in the shade of the tree grown by Alasdair MacIntyre, who concluded that modern man’s real existential alternatives were Aquinas and ­Nietzsche, the former bringing life, the latter death.

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]]> The Politics of Scapegoating https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/12/the-politics-of-scapegoating https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/12/the-politics-of-scapegoating Tue, 21 Dec 2021 06:00:00 -0500 The Dying Citizen:
How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
 by victor davis hanson
basic books, 432 pages, $30

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]]> Identity Politics and the Election https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/11/identity-politics-and-the-election https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/11/identity-politics-and-the-election Fri, 06 Nov 2020 15:05:00 -0500 Nothing has been settled. As of this morning, votes are still being tabulated and the results of the November 3 election remain indeterminate. It looks like Joe Biden may have won. Yet no one knows when, or if, there will be an uncontested winner.

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]]> A Godless Great Awakening https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/07/a-godless-great-awakening https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/07/a-godless-great-awakening Thu, 02 Jul 2020 06:00:00 -0400 Why did millions of Americans don surgical masks, insist on an inviolable national quarantine to keep death at bay, then suddenly remove their masks, take to the streets, and protest in close quarters in the name of racial justice? Hypocrisy is one answer. The desire to unseat President Trump by any available means is another. But neither answer goes deep enough. The explanation is identity politics, a fever making America delirious. 

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]]> Seizing the Crown of Thorns https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/01/seizing-the-crown-of-thorns https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/01/seizing-the-crown-of-thorns Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500 As we watch the mostly white officials of the Democratic party pander to black Americans with talk of reparations on which they will never deliver, it is worth pondering their motive. The support of black Americans for the Democratic party is pre­carious. Black America, the secret soul of our country, has seen one group after another appropriate its moral authority to become new Democratic party vanguards: first women, then gays and lesbians, and now the transgendered. On what authority would these causes rest if the agonizing struggle to heal the wound of slavery were not their backdrop? None of these claimants wears the crown of thorns as black Americans have.

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]]> Embarrassed by Our Nations https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/10/embarrassed-by-our-nations https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/10/embarrassed-by-our-nations Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400 Among conservatives today there is an emerging confidence about the nation. But it remains a timid confidence, expressed among fellow-travelers but not in the broader political culture. Awkwardness still prevails. We are living “after ­globalism,” yet we are embarrassed by our return to the nation.

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]]> Sex and Sin in Protestant America https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/10/sex-and-sin-in-protestant-america https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/10/sex-and-sin-in-protestant-america Tue, 25 Oct 2016 06:00:00 -0400 The now infamous second presidential debate was a spectacle that few decent Americans want to witness again. It was also a spectacular one-act recapitulation of the four-hundred-year-long drama of sex and sin in Protestant America.

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]]> Tocqueville in Arabia https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/09/tocqueville-in-arabia https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/09/tocqueville-in-arabia Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400 Over the course of the last three hundred years, in broad swaths of the globe where Anglo-American and European thought has prevailed, history has been understood as the story of the advancement of human freedom. When there was debate, it was about what freedom meant and how freedom could be achieved. In the Anglo-American world, the larger concern was coercive power, and freedom was thought to be achievable through limited government and market commerce; elsewhere, the larger concern was scarcity and want, and freedom was thought to be achievable through greater state control of the economy and, sometimes, by harsh restrains on political liberty.

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