Don’t Let the ‘Friend-Enemy Distinction’ Derail Your Faith

If you’ve wandered into certain back alleys of the internet, you’ve likely run across discussions of the “friend-enemy distinction.” Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist, introduced the phrase in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political. That text has become a staple of the Dissident Right, an amorphous collection of right-wing theorists, activists, and YouTubers, and the disaffected young men who follow them online.

Schmitt’s philosophy now plays a central role in how many people—including some Christians—think about politics, relationships, denominational affairs, and social media interactions. It frames politics as a life-and-death struggle between friends and enemies: those who want to preserve the American Anglo-Protestant way of life against those who want to destroy it.

At the heart of the friend-enemy distinction is the way we view our political opponents. Christians have traditionally appealed to Jesus to answer the question “Who is my neighbor?” In contrast, the Dissident Right increasingly turns to Schmitt to answer a different question: “Who is my enemy?”

Understanding Schmitt

Schmitt wrote The Concept of the Political one year before Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. He was upset by Germany’s treatment in the aftermath of World War I and wanted to transcend what he saw as the weaknesses of modern liberalism. According to Schmitt, political liberalism blindly fixates on the rule of law, abstract norms, proper procedures, consensus, and compromise. Because liberalism refuses to take decisive action, it inevitably weakens a nation, leaving it vulnerable to both external and internal enemies.

Contrary to a classical understanding of politics as the art of wielding power for the common good, Schmitt argues politics is fundamentally about the “distinction . . . between friend and enemy” (26). Enemies are those who are an “existential threat” to a people’s “way of life” (49). Yet the Dissident Right’s definition of “enemy” is often nebulous. It can include everyone from radical progressive activists to apolitical boomers to conservative evangelicals with moderate political beliefs.

According to Schmitt, the state alone is the political entity that ultimately and decisively identifies these threats. The state must be willing to negate its enemies, whether through war or internal purges. It must be willing to command its citizens to die and to kill to preserve its way of life.

Schmitt’s philosophy is functionally atheistic in that it simply ignores God’s relevance to issues of politics. Schmitt is intensely concerned with the state’s absolute sovereignty in its authority to identify enemies and command its citizens to fight. In a very real sense, his exaltation of the state’s decisive authority denies God’s decisive authority over every state, nation, people, government, and human heart.

According to Schmitt, appeals to a “higher law” or to “natural law” are just bids for political power (67). They’re attempts to advance a group’s self-interest and to wrest control from its political enemies. This idea is usually associated with critical theory and the postmodern left, but it’s now inspiring the Dissident Right as well.

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Ethical Challenges

Schmitt’s insistence that politics is a separate sphere from ethics is also problematic. He says the political enemy, who may have to be violently destroyed, “need not be morally evil” but merely needs to be “in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien” (26). This perspective conflicts with Scripture, which states that God ordains political authority “to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good” (1 Pet. 2:14). There’s a significant difference between subduing people because they’re doing evil and subduing people because they’re “existentially something different and alien.”

Furthermore, the morality of a nation’s cause is a central component of Christian just war theory. Aquinas—citing Augustine—insists that both a “just cause” and “rightful intention” are necessary for a war to be just. The decision to go to war may indeed depend on multiple factors that cannot be reduced to ethics. But moral considerations must absolutely be central and nonnegotiable in how the state “[bears] the sword” against either its internal or its external enemies (Rom. 13:4).

Another major concern for Christians is Schmitt’s argument against conscience. He rejects the idea that an individual human being can rightly resist state authority. Yet Christianity insists individuals are ultimately subject to God alone and not to mere human authorities. For example, when the Sanhedrin forbade the apostles from preaching the gospel, the believers rejected its commands and obeyed God instead (Acts 5:29). God alone is lord of our conscience. When a proper authority acts unjustly, especially to the extent that it commands us to kill, we’re morally obligated to resist it.

Friends and Enemies in the Church

Setting aside the historical-political problems associated with Schmitt’s theories—he was, after all, a prominent member of the Nazi Party—the immediate problem for Christians who drink from Schmitt’s well is the temptation to rabid partisanship.

Schmitt’s influence on the modern Dissident Right explains why some believers now claim that biblical virtues like gentleness and charity should yield to political exigencies. They argue that Christians must be willing to employ tactics like ridicule, subterfuge, and deception. The friend-enemy distinction is used to justify online anonymity, the coddling of open racists and antisemites, and generally wicked behavior among some self-described Christians.

By reducing politics—both with regard to national elections and denominational affairs—to war, all sorts of new tactics can be rationalized. Amid open conflict, it’s tempting to let lying or malice pass if it handicaps the right people. It’s easy to justify a little sin on our side because we promise we’ll obey the Bible’s injunctions regarding honesty, impartiality, and charity once we’ve won. The other side is an existential threat. We need to “know what time it is,” right?

Christians must reject these attitudes and tactics because they sear consciences. Yes, we must fight for truth and goodness. But the means we use to fight are nearly as important as the ends.

Schmitt’s ideas also threaten to fracture the church just as thoroughly as critical theory. Rather than dividing the church into oppressors and oppressed, Schmitt would divide it into friend and enemy, not based on serious theological issues like abortion or sexuality but based on a constantly growing litany of political minutiae and tribal shibboleths. While orthodox theology has important political implications, the church shouldn’t exalt political conformity over theology as the basis of our unity.

Finally, despite his attempts to explain the conflict away, Schmitt’s outlook ultimately undermines Jesus’s command to love our enemies. Of course, if our enemies are bent on evil, then loving them (and others) requires opposing them, politically and otherwise. But the Bible’s elaboration on loving our enemies is uncomfortably concrete and personal: Turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give away your possessions, bless your enemies, pray for them, feed them. If loving our enemies goes no further than political opposition, Jesus has every right to ask us, “Do not the pagans and the tax collectors do the same?”

Neil Shenvi (PhD, UC Berkeley) lives in North Carolina, where he homeschools his four children. He is author of Why Believe?: A Reasoned Approach to Christianity and co-author of Critical Dilemma: The Rise of Critical Theories and Social Justice Ideology—Implications for the Church and Society. You can follow him on X and at his website.