Mere Orthodoxy November 12, 2026 20 min signal 2026-11-12

A Christian critique of fusionism as a political philosophy

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It is no secret that the American right is passing through a time of turmoil and realignment. The Trump presidency is effectively over. “Trumpism” as a project now lacks direction and credibility. The American Right now has a chance to raise fundamental questions in ways it hasn’t for some time. The question is which way they will go. One option: A return to what has worked in the past, to the politics of Buckley and Reagan. In her new book, Fusionism, Reason editor Stephanie Slade makes the case for such a return, grounding her argument in the thought of many post-Cold War conservatives who were pioneers of the American conservative movement.

Defining Terms

Fusionism, according to Slade, is not a term referring to a political coalition of disparate groups on the American right which collaborated during the Cold War to resist communism. Fusionism, rather, is a coherent political philosophy that draws from libertarian concerns with economic freedom and liberty as well as Chrsitian concerns with virtue and character.

We should say a bit more about what is meant by “liberty” and “virtue” given how important both of these terms are for the argument. The dominant treatment of “liberty” here regards freedom as being primarily individual and negative in nature. Freedom means that each individual person is free from something–in the case of the fusionists, such as National Review editor Frank Meyer or the author F. A. Hayek, it meant being free from the government coercing one in the use of one’s private property. The opposite of coercion in economic matters was economic freedom, which refers to the right of property owners to dispose of their property as they see fit without others being able to compel them to use their property in ways they would rather not or to deprive them of their property against their will. As for virtue, it refers to the notion that there are ways of behaving in one’s public and private life that are exemplary and conducive to social flourishing. Such characteristics should be encouraged across society for the good of society as a whole.

If either of these concerns is isolated, Slade explains, they quickly go wrong. Economic freedom cut off from virtue quickly collapses into a society of selfishness and potentially cruelty because it lacks an understanding of virtue, but is only concerned with financial growth. But Christian virtue, cut off from the idea of economic freedom, can quickly curdle into a coercive sort of totalitarianism, as when William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr. eventually found himself living as a proto-integralist in totalitarian dictator Francisco Franco’s Spain as a result of his rejection of liberty and fixation on virtue.

Thus “liberty” and “virtue,” which are Slade’s shorthands for economic freedom as defined by libertarians and Christian accounts of the virtues as understood by traditionalist Christians, belong together. Indeed, in this framework the only way of preserving society, free from both anarchy and tyranny, is through fusionism.

Fusionism and Traditional Christian Morality

The trouble for Slade begins when one digs into the arguments advanced by the proponents of economic freedom. For the fusionist philosophy to be coherent, the actual claims made by proponents of economic freedom must not contradict the teachings of Christianity. If they do, there can’t be a ‘fusion’ of the two ideas, for they are actually not reconcilable, but in conflict.

If we take something like the Sharon Statement published in 1960 as a foundational text for fusionism, then her claim is that Christian concerns with virtue are closely connected with economic claims like the following, which I take from the aforementioned statement:

“That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;

That when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation; that when it takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both”

The libertarian idea of “economic freedom” claims that I cannot be compelled by someone else to do something with my property that I prefer not to do. Nor can I justly be deprived of my property without my consent. Compulsion in matters of property ownership is inherently unjust, or at least that is what I understand the proponents of Slade’s “economic freedom” to be saying.

At the very least, those two statements have made some quite strong claims: First, they claim that any non-market economic system (or perhaps any infringements on a market system?) are incompatible with personal freedom and constitutional government. Second, they claim that the redistribution of wealth harms the moral and physical strength of the nation and, specifically, harms the moral autonomy of the poor. Note that these are not conditional claims; they are categorical.

The claim at the heart of fusionism, then, is that economic policies that infringe upon the free workings of markets or that endorse the redistribution of wealth for the sake of the common good are not simply ineffective, but are actually unjust. This is not only a far stronger claim, it is also far more problematic from a Christian point of view. And it is that claim which I understand most of the fusionists to be making.

Christianity and Economic Freedom

Suppose a man owns a quite large farm and each fall hires workers to help him with the harvest. The workers gather what they can carry, but as they take it to the barns, some of what they have picked falls to the ground. The workers leave it, intending to come back for it after they’ve dropped off what they’re already carrying. But before the workers can return, beggars find the field and gather up what the workers dropped, and take it for themselves to eat.

Have the beggars committed theft?

On the merits of the libertarian approach, it seems they have: The crop they are harvesting was not grown on land they owned, nor had they paid the owner of the land for the crop they were taking. They were simply showing up, taking what they needed without paying, and leaving.

Here is the problem: The practice I have described is called “gleaning,” and in Leviticus 19 God commands Israelite land owners not to gather up what the workers drop, but to leave it for the poor. So, minimally, we should probably not call gleaning “theft” lest we suggest that God tolerates “theft” by commanding land owners to allow the poor to glean from their fields. Indeed, we could put it more provocatively and say that God is telling property owners that once crops have been dropped by workers, those crops are, effectively, no longer theirs. Rather, those crops belong to the poor.

In other words, via the gleaning laws of Leviticus, one can argue quite reasonably that the Bible, or the Mosaic law at least, mandates a redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. And, lest the point be missed, I repeat: This is all plainly stated in God-breathed Scripture. So, I ask the fusionists: Has God diminished the moral lives of the poor by allowing them to glean? Has he stolen from property owners by requiring the redistribution of wealth? It seems to me that the plainest reading of the Sharon Statement requires signers to condemn as unjust provisions commanded by God in the Mosaic law.

So how do property rights function within Christian thought, if redistribution is not inherently wrong and unjust, and if the rights of a property owner over his or her property are not absolute? Here we need to turn to our fathers and mothers in the faith for guidance.

Let’s begin with one thinker whose orthodoxy and devotion to Scripture should, amongst Protestants at least, be fairly unquestionable. Here is John Calvin, from his commentary on Isaiah 58, commenting on the nature of property rights:

By commanding them to ‘break bread to the hungry’ he intended to take away every excuse from covetous and greedy men, who allege that they have a right to keep possession of that which is their own. ‘This is mine, and therefore I may keep it for myself. Why should I make common property of that which God has given me?’ He replies, ‘It is indeed yours, but on this condition, that you share it with the hungry and thirsty, not that you eat it yourself alone. And indeed this is the dictate of common sense, that the hungry are deprived of their just right if their hunger is not relieved.

In other words, Calvin sees two sets of rights with the question of gleaning, not merely one. Yes, the farmer has a right to do what he wants with his property. But, more basic than the right to dispose of one’s property is the right to eat. For Calvin, the right to dispose of one’s property as one sees fit is conditional. What this quite necessarily means is that there are forms of economic compulsion and redistribution that are just.

This does not mean that any redistributive scheme is just, of course. Nor does it mean that redistributive schemes are, pragmatically speaking, always the best way to realize a certain desired outcome. But it is not my concern to prove that they are. It is merely my concern here to demonstrate that redistribution and compulsion in matters economic are not, contra the fusionists, inherently wrong.

Calvin is hardly alone in his views on this issue. For example, Calvin’s mentor Martin Bucer had a very simple anti-poverty program. He outlined it in his book De Regno Christi, which he addressed to King Edward VI of England and which he intended to serve as instruction for a Christian political leader on how to govern. Where there are people genuinely in need of financial aid, Bucer said the church should have a fund out of which they give to the poor. If the fund ran out and the poor still had need, Bucer’s solution was that the church should ask the king for more money to give away and the king, being a Christian monarch, would gladly give whatever was needed in order to care for the poor. Presupposing that the king’s money he has to give to the poor would have come via taxation of nobles, then Bucer too can be added to the list of Christian theologians who regard wealth redistribution for the common good as, at least potentially, licit and even just. Yet by the standards of fusionism, or the Sharon Statement at least, Bucer has “reduced the moral and physical strength of the nation.”

To anticipate objections: This is not a simplistic endorsement of modern welfare schemes. There are significant differences between 16th century Europe and the 21st century world. But I don’t need to prove that Bucer is endorsing a welfare program here, even if as a matter of historical fact welfare did first emerge in Lutheran nation-states seeking to follow Jesus through their public policy. I am simply trying to demonstrate that the historic Christian witness regarding economics and property rights are not easily reconciled with the conception of “economic freedom” endorsed by the fusionists.

I could belabor the point here and cite other texts. I could point at the Catholic notion of the “universal destination of goods”, or papal encyclicals, such as Pius XI’s “Quadragessimo Anno” or St. John Paul II’s “Laborem Exercens,” all of which make claims that in a variety of ways repudiate the fusionist treatment of “economic freedom.” (“Quadragessimo Anno,” for example, straightforwardly calls for the normalization of a family wage–a wage paid to one worker sufficient to support an entire family–as a matter of basic economic justice.)

I could cite Augustine on whether property rights are derived from human law or natural law. He says that they come from human law, which means the right to property is not something that arises from nature, but which is negotiated by people according to the demands of justice and the reality of other competing public goods. Property rights are real, in other words (contra the socialists), but also are relative, subservient to natural rights, and how they function in practice must ultimately be defined by the government (contra the libertarians).

I could also cite Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of this issue in Question 105 of his Summa Theologiae I-II, which noted that the Old Testament law is written to allow for both the private ownership of property and for the provisioning of the poor, and that it does this by placing certain restrictions around what it means to own property (such as the aforementioned gleaning laws).

The picture, then, is complex and resistant to simple policy applications. But these principles can be identified: Private property is real and a person’s ability to use their property as they think best should not be arbitrarily violated. However, the free holding and use of one’s property are not most fundamental to the human person. More fundamental is each person’s right to food and shelter, to partake of the fruit of God’s creation which, after all, God intends for the good of all people. When one person’s need to eat conflicts with another person’s wish to hold or use their property according to their desire, the former trumps the latter. Finally, both the Mosaic law and church history allow for the redistribution of goods via legal mechanisms that take some wealth from the rich and reallocate it to the poor and the needy.

As I said, these principles are under-determined when it comes to policy questions. Nothing I have described mandates, for instance, things like a minimum wage, various welfare policies, or single payer healthcare. That said, my purpose here is not to endorse such policies. There are credible arguments to be made against them on prudential grounds as at times being pragmatically ineffective at producing the desired outcomes while also potentially introducing harmful unintended side effects that cause the policy to do more harm than good.

That said, my goal here is to demonstrate that Christians cannot simplistically affirm the idea that wealth redistribution or compulsion in the use of one’s property is inherently wrong, at least not if they care about maintaining a fairly robust doctrine of Scripture and being sufficiently attentive to the teachings of those Christians who went before us and thought deeply about such things.

I list all this out for a simple reason: I am a Christian. I mean to be a Christian who keeps faith with my fathers and mothers in the faith who went before me. Even more so, I want to be a Christian who keeps faith with Scripture. When I look at Scripture and when I look at the teachings of my fathers and mothers, I see rebuke after rebuke after rebuke of the libertarian idea of “economic freedom.”

This is why it matters that Slade is making a stronger claim about fusionism as a political philosophy. If she were merely arguing that the fusionists were a good model of political organizing against a common foe, then I see little problem. Christians can freely recognize that the libertarian conception of “freedom” is sub-Christian and frequently idolatrous while also recognizing that against certain foes it is right and good to work with libertarians. But Slade’s claim is stronger and, if my reading of the tradition is correct, it is also quite wrong, at least so far as Christians are concerned. And that error shouldn’t be ignored in the name of political coalition building.

Perhaps this seems like an over-reading of the argument. But the stakes of this debate are actually quite high. When you imagine your own wealth, what do you see? A kingdom that you have built through your own diligence, work, and ingenuity and over which you rule with absolute dominion? Or do you see it as a stewardship entrusted to you by the Lord who gave it to you by giving you the means to earn it in the first place? If the latter, how does that Lord desire you to steward the wealth?

These are questions of immense practicality, I think. Indeed, they are questions in which the stakes genuinely are eternal, if Our Lord’s words are any indicator: Christ himself seems to regard the accumulation of great wealth as a great danger to one’s soul. So errors regarding the nature of wealth and property are actually quite dangerous. Political philosophies that teach us, implicitly, to hold with an iron grip to what is “mine” and to regard any attempt to deprive me of it, no matter the reason, as a violation of my rights, are philosophies that shape us in vicious ways and which, over time, will actually “diminish the moral strength of the nation.”

Moving outward into the theo-political questions, if the claim here is that Christianity is reconcilable with the very strong form of libertarianism endorsed by many fusionists, then thoughtful Christians have another problem: If so many august teachers of the faith could have been so gravely wrong about the nature of theft and property, where else might they be in error? If Calvin could be so thoroughly wrong about the nature of something as basic to human experience as theft, where else did he err and why should we trust him? The same question must be applied to Augustine, to Thomas, and, indeed, to Scripture itself. To endorse the fusionist perspective on property seems to be remarkably similar to other modernist theological innovations in which the wisdom of our fathers and mothers is tossed aside in favor of newer and supposedly superior ideas. I do not care for such arguments when they concern sexuality and the body. Why should I favor them when they concern the nature of property?

Certainly we can collaborate politically with people who hold to serious error if the project we are pursuing together is not affected by that error. That’s simply how politics work, particularly in democratic systems. I am quite happy to stand with libertarians against government attacks against free speech or freedom of religion, for example. So none of what I have said above is a problem for pragmatic coalition building as an expression of political life. The trouble is it is precisely that conception of fusionism that Slade wants to repudiate in her book.

The Problem of Vice

This brings me to the final question, and which perhaps more than anything else explains why I am taking so much time to address this argument.

My state recently voted on two ballot measures which, had they passed, would have legalized online sports gambling in the state of Nebraska. Extravagantly wealthy gambling companies, whose wealth comes largely from exploiting gambling addicts, spent $20 million campaigning for these two measures. For their part, opponents of the measure resisted with only $1 million in ad spending, alongside the advocacy work of the Nebraska Family Alliance and the Roman Catholic Church. Despite the heavy financial disadvantage, my home state successfully defeated both ballot measures. I was equally shocked and delighted by the outcome, so much so that I drove down to Nebraska Family Alliance’s offices last week to thank them for their work and congratulate them on quite a remarkable victory.

Yet it seems to me that on the merits of her argument, Slade would see the restrictions we have here in the Good Life as an unjust violation of economic freedom because it prevents companies from disposing of their wealth in order to grow their business and it prevents would-be gamblers from being able to use their own personal money to participate in a recreational hobby. Thus the economic freedom of both the gambling companies and the private gamblers is violated—an injustice, according to the fusionist paradigm, which will, ironically, undermine the moral life of the nation.

My own denomination’s theological confession calls the government a “nursing father,” which suggests not only a duty to protect, which most libertarians recognize, but also a duty to guide in some way. If such a duty exists, then surely a ban on bank-account destroying (and soul-destroying) endeavors like online sports gambling is a just application of the duty?

We can approach these things reasonably, of course. If libertarians express concerns that poorly crafted legislation banning online sports gambling might attack individual liberty in more alarming and unintended ways, we should consider their claim and, where appropriate, revise our policy accordingly. The argument that banning sports gambling is licit is not an argument that all policies banning sports gambling are good. Badly designed policies exist and libertarians in particular are often quite good at spotting them.

Even so, the options on offer to us politically are not “the total eradication of online sports gambling in all its forms” or “full legalization everywhere for everyone.” We can, justly, create limited common sense measures to make it harder to set one’s money ablaze while being manipulated by the algorithms created for precisely that purpose by predatory billion dollar companies. The goal is not perfection or utopia, but, where possible, simply making it easier to be good. In the past I have called it Frog and Toad Politics.

We now live in a cultural and technological moment that makes vice extraordinarily easy: It is trivially easy to become entrapped in a crippling gambling addiction—and the gambling companies design their software to make it even more so. It is likewise quite easy to access online pornography or to acquire various illicit drugs. On the other hand, we now have technological, cultural, and political norms that make virtue more difficult: It is hard to find a spouse. It is hard to afford children. It is hard to afford a home to house those children. It is hard to afford the sort of things one might need to care for an aging parent. In many places, it is hard to simply access a bit of natural beauty within an easy walk from one’s home—and given what we know about our need for natural beauty, that is a serious concern.

If the functional reality of our nation today is that we make vice extremely easy and virtue quite a bit more difficult, then it’s no surprise that we have millions of neighbors ensnared in soul-killing vice, longing for the virtuous life in some way, but unable to lay hold of it for all the difficulties we throw at them.

Are these normalized and easily accessed vices the blessings of economic liberty, which we must tolerate so as to avoid unjustly depriving people of the right to dispose of their property as they will? Or are they socially and legally sanctioned forms of wealthy predators exploiting the vulnerable? It’s not that I want government to solve all of these problems. But I would very much like more governments to do what we have done in Nebraska and not allow for easy access to highly destructive vices.

Slade, I am sure, would protest here and say that such vices should be legal, but also that certain social stigmas and pressures should exist that mitigate the harm they cause. But this is unsatisfactory precisely because it is often the tolerance of such public vice that does much to weaken the social structures that might otherwise resist them. Those who rely on soft social pressure and not hard power to police public vices being pushed by multi-billion dollar companies should not be surprised if soon the soft pressure is diminished and the hard power is bought and paid for.

Government is no savior. It’s power is, rightly so, limited within the American system. But to say that its power is limited is not the same as to say its power is purely negative and purely aimed at protecting property rights and public safety, as many libertarians seem, at least in practice, to say. Rightly understood, government is not a threat to our common life; it is a collaborator in it alongside a host of other social bodies, each of whom have distinct responsibilities and each of whom must respect the responsibilities of other spheres.

The problem I see with Slade’s argument, then, is that her vision of fusionism is founded on ideas about the purpose of government and the nature of property rights that are themselves deeply hostile to Christian ideas about society and the good life.

If Christians want to work for the good of neighbor and the renewal of our politics, they absolutely should partner, where possible, with libertarians of good will, like the people at Reason where Slade serves as an editor. But, at the exact same time, they must not adopt the principles of Slade’s fusionism.

To do so would be, whether they recognize it or not, to turn their back on Scripture as well as their fathers and mothers in the faith. It would be, in short, the sort of impious act that is already far too common in our world today. If a lack of piety is one of our besetting sins, then the problem will not be solved by other, tweedier forms of the same error.

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Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, National Review, Comment, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. He is a contributing editor with Plough and a contributing writer at the Dispatch. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.

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