WHY POLITICS MATTERS
Conflating what it means to be the people of God with a particular nation is heretical. The technical term for this heresy is phyletism. What it means in practice is that to be Greek is to be Orthodox and, conversely, for a Greek to attend a Russian or Romanian Orthodox church is to participate in a foreign entity. The Synod of Constantinople in 1872 condemned phyletism as a heresy. Protestant forms of phyletism are common, but today these are mostly related to a vaguer sense of being a Christian or Judeo-Christian nation rather than a Lutheran or Reformed nation. This shift represents a movement beyond phyletism as the linkage between the people and Christianity no longer denotes a connection between the nation and a specific form of belief and practice. Instead, Christianity becomes a symbol untethered from doctrinal or ethical content, and is thereby reduced to a civil religion deployed to buttress an exclusionary national identity.14 Theologically, this shift represents a move from heresy to idolatry: the nation not the church is the primary community of belonging. Politically, it converts Christianity into a form of identity politics. In contrast to nationalism, populism emerges when representatives and the institutions through which a sense of a common life is mediated and communicated (e.g., denominational structures, schools, hospitals, political parties, banks, museums, the media, etc.) grow unresponsive to the concerns and fears of those they serve and represent. These fears and concerns (whether just or not) can then be mobilised over and against established modes of representation (e.g., Fox News trades on exactly this kind of process). Crises of representation emerge serially in both churches and states, and populist movements of one kind or another are an inevitable response. They arise from a felt need to make the people rather than
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