My latest: how (not) to talk about Christian nationalism, in CT

This morning Christianity Today published my column. Titled “How (Not) to Talk About ‘Christian Nationalism,’” it argues we should retire the term entirely, because it has ceased to refer to anything concrete while functioning in our discourse as a slander term for “politics and people to my right I dislike.” It’s true, though, that there are things worth worrying about that go under the label, like racism and lawlessness; we should just talk about those things instead of a huge umbrella term that no longer picks out anything specific in the world (or picks out far too much). Here’s how the piece starts:

Some years ago, the Reformed philosopher Alvin Plantinga gave a useful definition of fundamentalist. He noted that, in academic settings, it served as little more than a smear word; he offered an expletive I can’t print here, so let’s just substitute son of a gun.

Where it retained any content beyond the smear, Plantinga argued that fundamentalist meant “considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.” Thus did academics, journalists, and many Christians come to deploy fundie to mean a “stupid [son of a gun] whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of” their own. And because there’s always someone to one’s right, the F-word is essentially relative: It has no stable reference, but it certainly can never refer to me.

These days we might say the same about Christian nationalism. The phrase has lost all substantive content. In nearly every conversation, it has little reference beyond those “stupid [sons of guns] whose political opinions are considerably to the right of mine.” Allegations of Christian nationalism can mean almost anything: Maybe the accused is a literal Nazi. Or maybe he’s just a lifelong Republican whose big issues are abortion and tax rates.

Click here to read the rest.

Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline

Why do people convert to Christianity? Why do intellectuals and other public figures convert so often to Catholicism (or Eastern Orthodoxy) and so rarely to Protestantism? And what is the fate of both Catholicism and Protestantism among American elites and their institutions, given the decimation of the liberal mainline? Could a new mainline arise to take its place, and if so, who would it be and what would it look like?

Dozens of writers have taken up these questions in recent weeks, some (not all) prompted by Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion and her written explanation for it. Here’s Douthat and Freddie and Tyler Cowen and Alan Jacobs (and Alan again). Here’s Justin Smith-Ruiu. Here are two reflections about why Catholicism instead of Protestantism. And here is a series of pieces by Jake Meador on both the “new mainline” question and the “why Catholicism” question—with a useful corrective by Onsi Kamel.

I’ve got some belated thoughts; in my mind they connect to all of the above.

1. It’s worth making clear at the outset that countless people defect annually from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, whether into unbelief or into some Protestant sect. So the question isn’t about who’s winning or which group people in general prefer or comparing overall numbers. The question is about public figures and intellectuals and their conversions, as adults, from unbelief to faith. Why does that type of person always seem to be joining “catholic” traditions (defined, for now, as Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and perhaps also the Anglican Communion)?

2. Summed up in a single sentence, the reason as I see it is that Catholicism is a living tradition embodied in a global institution that stretches back millennia, claims divine authority, and contains both a storehouse of intellectual resources and a panoply of powerful devotional and liturgical practices. Let’s unpack that.

3. Catholicism is a world. Protestantism is not. Protestantism is not anything particular at all. It’s an umbrella or genus term that encompasses numerous unconnected or at best half-related Christian traditions, the oldest of which goes back five hundred years and the newest of which is barely older than a generation. There are not “Protestants,” somewhere out there. No ordinary layperson says, “I’m Protestant.” What he or she says is, “I’m Presbyterian” or “I’m Methodist” or “I’m Pentecostal” or “I’m Evangelical” or “I’m Lutheran” or “I’m Church of Christ” or “I’m Moravian” or “I’m Calvinist” or “I’m Baptist” or some other name. And the thing about midlife conversions on the part of public intellectuals is that they aren’t looking for a sub-culture. They’re looking for a moral and spiritual universe. They don’t want a branch of the tree; they want the tree itself—the trunk, the very root. “Protestantism” makes no exclusive claims to be the trunk as such. Its trunkness is never even in view. The question, therefore, is almost always whether Catholicism East or West is, properly speaking, the Christian trunk. Folks already in the West typically, though far from always, opt for the West’s claim of primacy.

4. Note well that this observation isn’t per se a critique of Protestants or a presumption against them. The fundamental feature of Protestantism is an ecumenical evangelicalism in the strict sense: a Christian whole created and sustained and defined by nothing else than the gospel itself. So that second-order sub-gospel confessional identities are subsumed in and comprehended by God’s singular work in Christ, which is the sovereign word proclaimed by the good news. In this way, according to Protestants, any and all attempts to be, or searches to find, “the trunk” is a distortion of true catholicity.

5. Be that as it may, the catholicity of Catholicism tends to be what wayward, agnostic, restless public intellectuals are after. And so they find it elsewhere than in Protestantism.

6. There is a reason why so many evangelical and Protestant graduate students in theology move toward “higher church” traditions. Intellectually, they discover thinkers and writings their own “lower church” traditions either ignore or lack; liturgically, they discover practices handed down century after century that function like a lifeline in a storm. Reading Saint Ignatius or Saint Justin or Saint Irenaeus or Saint Augustine, it occurs to them that they don’t have to imagine what the church’s ancient liturgy looked and felt like; they can simply visit a church down the street.

7. Speaking only anecdotally, I have never known students of Christian theology to move “down” the ecclesial ladder. I have only known them (a) to move “up,” (b) to move “left,” or (c) to move “out.” That is, relative to where they started, they go catholic, they go liberal, or they go away, leaving the faith behind. This remains true even of those who do not shift from one tradition or denomination to another: Baptists start reading Aquinas, evangelicals start celebrating Ash Wednesday, non-denom-ers start reciting the Creed. Or, if the move is lateral instead of vertical, one retains inherited beliefs and practices but changes on moral and social questions. Either way, “down” is not an option in practice.

8. Once again this fact, or observation, need not mean anything in itself. The populist or evangelical criticism might well be apt: Theological education places obstacles between students and the plain gospel. A student of theology “classes up,” thereby rendered unable to join “lower” classes in the purity of normal believers’ unadorned worship. Perhaps, then, this is an argument against the sort of theological education dominant today!

9. All this applies, mutatis mutandis, to public intellectuals. Put another way, suppose you are an atheist or agnostic exposed, over time, to the desert fathers, or to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, or to Saint Maximus Confessor or Saint John of Damascus, or to Benedictine monks, or to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, or to Julian of Norwich, or to Saint Francis or Saint Bernard or Saint Anselm. It would simply never occur to you that what you find in these authors is what you’d find in the Methodist congregation on the corner, or the Baptist church around the block, or the non-denom start-up across town. Not only do the devotional and liturgical, spiritual and theological worlds conjured by these writers and texts not exist in such spaces. The traditions themselves do not claim the figures in question. You go, therefore, to the people and the places who are bold enough to say, “Those names are our names; those saints are our saints; those books are our books. We nurture and preserve and pass them on. Come learn them from us; indeed, come learn from us what they learned themselves, in their own time.”

10. In sum: What intellectuals, especially agnostic intellectuals in midlife, are restlessly searching for is something not man-made, but divine; not provisional, but final; not a question, but an answer. They are looking for rest, however penultimate in this life, not more open-ended restlessness. Something that lasts. Something that can plausibly make a claim both to antiquity and to permanency. A bulwark that will not fail. Something to defer to, submit to, bow one’s head in surrender to; something to embrace and be embraced by: a teacher but also a mother. And the truth is that Rome plausibly presents itself as both mater et magistra, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Orthodoxy does as well. The plausibility explains why so many intellectuals find port of harbor with each of them. The reverse, in turn, explains why so few of those sorts of people convert from rudderless adult atheism to Protestantism with a capital-p.

11. As for motives, if what I’ve outlined so far is true, then it makes perfect emotional sense for restless brainy seekers whose spiritual midlife crisis is prompted by perceived civilizational decline, torpor, and decadence to turn to catholic Christianity, East or West, as a haven in a heartless, spiritless, lifeless world. They aren’t making a category error, nor are they (necessarily) joining the church in a merely instrumental sense. For all we know, their search for capital-t Truth in a culture that refuses the concept altogether may be wise rather than self-serving. As Alan remarked, “what matters is not where you start but where you end up.” Doubtless there are people who join Christianity as a cultural project; must they remain there forever? I see no reason why we must, as a matter of necessity, say yes, for all people, always, in every circumstance. No adult is baptized without a confession of faith; if a new convert makes an honest confession and receives the grace of Christ’s saving waters, then he or she is a new creation, God’s own child, whatever the mixed motives involved. To say this isn’t to worship the God-shaped hole in our hearts instead of God himself. It’s to acknowledge, from the side of faith, that the hole is real. Because the hole is real, different people will find themselves knocking on Christ’s door—which is to say, on the doors of the church—for every manner of reason in every manner of situation. What Christ promises is that, to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. He does not lay down conditions for what counts as a good reason for knocking. Nor should we.

12. See here the opening paragraph of Christian Wiman’s new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (from entry 1, page 5):
    Thirty years ago, watching some television report about depression and religion—I forget the relationship but apparently there was one—a friend who was entirely secular asked me with genuine curiosity and concern: “Why do they believe in something that doesn’t make them happy?” I was an ambivalent atheist at that point, beset with an inchoate loneliness and endless anxieties, contemptuous of Christianity but addicted to its aspirations and art. I was also chained fast to the rock of poetry, having my liver pecked out by the bird of a harrowing and apparently absurd ambition—and thus had some sense of what to say. One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness but because one senses—miserable flimsy little word for that beak in your bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant. There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emptiness can feed, and the only true antidote to the plague of modern despair is an absolute—and perhaps even annihilating—awe. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness,” writes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, “and You gave them to me.”

13. Now: Given this apparent movement among once-secular intellectuals toward faith, or at least a renewed openness toward the claims of faith, what about a parallel movement toward a kind of Christian establishment—and in America, a “new Protestant mainline”? Any answer here is always subject to the ironies of divine providence. Christ’s promise to Saint Peter stands, which means that the forces arrayed against Christ’s body will never finally succeed. That doesn’t mean all or even any of our local or parochial ecclesial projects will succeed. But some of them might, against the odds. That’s God’s business, though, not ours. For now, then, some earthbound comments and fallible predictions.

14. I can’t speak to the situation in Europe or Great Britain, though my two cents, for what little it’s worth, is that we will not be seeing anything like a renaissance of established religion among elites and their institutions in our or our children’s lifetimes. In the U.S., I likewise think anything like a renewed liberal mainline is impossible. The once-dominant mainline—mainly comprising Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists—is on life support where it isn’t already dead and buried. As a coherent civic bloc, much less a motive force among elites, it is undeniably a thing of the past. I take that as read.

15. So the only viable question in the American context, if there were ever to be a “new” mainline, is whether it would be Catholic, magisterial Protestant, or evangelical. There was a moment, as many others have written, when American Catholicism was in process of making a bid to function like a new mainline. That period runs basically from the birth of Richard John Neuhaus in 1936 (the height of the Great Depression, the end of FDR’s first term, with World War II imminent) to his passing in 2009 (Bush in disgrace, Obama triumphant, the Great Recession, in the sixth year of the Iraq War). Catholics were well represented in elite universities, in think tanks, in D.C., in presidential administrations, in magazines that fed and fueled all of the above. But between the priest sex abuse scandals, Iraq, the divisiveness of abortion, and rolling political losses on social issues (above all gay marriage), the dream of an American Catholic Mainline proved not to be.

16. As for conservative Protestants and evangelicals, the former lack in numbers what the latter lack in everything else. Here’s what I mean. A genuine mainline or unofficially established church has to possess the following features: (a) so many millions of adherents that they’re “just there,” since some of them are invariably “around,” no matter one’s context; (b) powerful centralized institutions; (c) an internal logic that drives its laypeople to seek and acquire powerful roles in elite institutional contexts; (d) a strong emphasis on education in law, politics, and the liberal arts and their various expressions in careers and professions; (e) an investment in and sense of responsibility for the governing order, both its status quo and its ongoing reform; (f) a suspicion of populism and a rejection of revolution; (g) a taste for prestige, a desire for excellence, and an affinity for establishment; (h) wealth; (i) the ears of cultural and political elites; (j) networks of institutions, churches, and neighborhoods filled with civic-minded laypeople who can reliably be organized as a voting bloc or interest group; (k) groups of credentialed intellectuals who participate at the highest levels of their respective disciplines, whether religious or secular; (l) a loose but real shared moral and theological orthodoxy that is relatively stable and common across class and educational lines; (m) an ecclesial and spiritual culture of thick religious identity alongside popular tacit membership, such that not only “committed believers” but mediocre Christians and even finger-crossing public figures can say, with a straight face, that they are members in good standing of said established tradition.

17. If even part of my (surely incomplete) list here is accurate, it should be self-evident why neither evangelicals nor conservative Protestants could possibly compose a new American mainline. It’s hard to put into words just how tiny “traditional” or “orthodox” magisterial Protestantism is in the U.S. It would be unkind but not unfair to call it a rump. Its size has been demolished by a quadruple defection over the past three generations: to secularism, to liberalism, to evangelicalism, to Rome. It’s arguable whether there ever even was any meaningful presence of magisterial Protestantism in America of the sort one could find in Europe. The four-headed monster just mentioned is a ravenous beast, and old-school Lutherans and Wesleyans and Reformed have been the victims. You need numbers to have power, not to mention institutions and prestige, and the numbers just aren’t there; nor is there a path to reaching them. It’s not in the cards.

18. Evangelicals still have the numbers, even if they’re waning, but as I said before, they lack just about everything else: the institutionalism, the intellectualism, the elite ethos, the prestige and excellence, the allergy to populism—nearly all of it. Evangelicalism is Protestant populism. This is why evangelicals who enter elite spaces slowly, or sometimes not so slowly, lose the identifying marks of evangelicalism. It isn’t strange to learn that Prestigious Scholar X on the law/econ/poli-sci faculty at Ivy League School Y is Roman Catholic. It is a bit of a surprise to learn that he’s an evangelical. The moment you hear it, though, you wonder (or ask) whether he’s an evangelical Anglican or some such. Consider high-rank Protestant universities with large evangelical faculties, like Wheaton or Baylor or George Fox. Ask the religion, theology, and humanities professors where they go to church. Chances are it’s an Anglican parish. Chances are that not a few of them, if they left, or if the university permits it, have transitioned from evangelical to Anglican to Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. This is just the way of things in higher-ed as well as other elite institutions.

19. Here’s one way to think about it. An evangelical who climbs the elite ladder is more or less required, by the nature of the case, to shed vital elements of her evangelical identity. But a Catholic is not. And a Catholic is not for the same reason that, once upon a time, a liberal Protestant was not. A high-church Episcopalian wasn’t working against the grain by earning a law degree from Princeton or Yale a century ago. That’s what Episcopalians do. It’s what Episcopalianism is. Moreover, if said Episcopalian began as a wide-eyed conservative and ended a enlightened liberal, he would remain Episcopalian the whole time. There’d be no need to leave for some other tradition; the tradition encompassed both identities, indeed encouraged passage from one to the other. Whereas an evangelical who becomes liberal becomes a self-contradiction. A liberal evangelical is an oxymoron. He lacks any reason to exist. Evangelicalism isn’t liberal, in any sense. It is axiomatically and essentially illiberal. To become liberal, therefore, is to cease to be evangelical. That’s not what evangelicalism is for. Evangelicals who become liberal remain evangelical only for a time; they eventually exit faith, or swim the Tiber, or become actual liberal Protestants, where they feel right at home. Which means, for the purposes of this discussion, that every single time evangelicals send their best and brightest to elite institutions to be “faithfully present” there, only for them to become liberal in the process, evangelicalism loses one of its own. The same goes, obviously, for a rising-star evangelical who loses faith or becomes Catholic or Orthodox.

20. The other thing to note is that the “moral” part of “moral and theological orthodoxy” is absolutely up for grabs right now, in every single Christian tradition and denomination in America. No church has successfully avoided being roiled and split in two by arguments over gender and sexuality. Nor is there some happy middle ground where everybody agrees to disagree. One or another normative view is going to win out, in each and every local community and global communion. We just don’t know, at this point in time, where the cards are going to fall. In that light, any ambition for conservative Protestants (or Catholics, for that matter) to form an established religious backdrop for elite cultural and political organs in America is a pipe dream, given what “conservative” means regarding sexual ethics. Whoever is still standing, Christianly speaking, at the end of this century, the wider culture is not going to welcome new overlords who oppose the legality of abortion, same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, and artificial contraception. I mean, come on. Most Protestants I know take for granted the legality (and usually the morality, too) of all but the first, and are politically ambivalent about the first as well. Protestants are in numerical decline anyway, a fact I’ve bracketed for these reflections. Put it all together, and the reasons why public intellectuals don’t convert to Protestantism are inseparable from, and sometimes identical to, the reasons why magisterial Protestantism is not poised to become a new American mainline. Do with that what you will.

Christians and politics

My friend and colleague Richard Beck did me the honor of writing a seven-part series in response to a post I’d written last May, itself a reply to a previous post of his a few days prior. I told him I’d find the time to write about the new series, but I haven’t found it until now.

There’s much to say. As it turns out, Richard and I are not far apart here, but our instincts lead us in slightly divergent directions. Let me see if I can summarize his own views before laying out my own.

Richard begins by taking my point: In a liberal democracy, it can be an all-or-nothing proposition for Christians; namely, electing (or not) to be politically active and engaged. He allows that perhaps his hope for a kind of holy ambivalence, to use Jamie Smith’s phrase, is unrealistic. Democracy saps the energies of the electorate, Christian or otherwise. Be that as it may, Richard wants a certain baseline for Christian thought and practice with respect to political witness, in this or in any context. In ten theses:

1. The powers that be are always already at war with the kingdom of God.

2. The church, therefore, ought always to be on the side of God’s kingdom over against the kingdoms of this world.

3. It follows that the first and enduring political vocation of the church is prophetic criticism. Whatever else the church does, it begins and ends with the prophetic task.

4. Because the powers are fallen, our view of both the state and the arc of history should be deeply Augustinian: not tragic, but pessimistic. We are not going to bring heaven to earth, or establish God’s kingdom here and now, or proclaim peace in our time. Utopian dreams, including the Christian variety, are false and dangerous.

5. Because the powers are created, though, Christian pessimism need not write off the state altogether. This isn’t pure Anabaptism. Not only does the state have a divinely ordained role to maintain a modicum of peace and relative justice; Christians may—within limits, with modesty and caution—participate in and contribute to governance and other forms of political action in the wider society.

6. Such modest involvement does not lead to Christendom, however. Christendom is a dead end, precisely because it is not pessimistic enough about either the powers or the perduring sinfulness of Christian communities, projects, and institutions.

7. Together, these commitments repudiate any and all nostalgia for or attempts to “reclaim” a lost Christian past, pristine in innocence or even supposedly preferable to the present. Whatever one thinks of the middle ages, they aren’t coming back and Christians in America should not try to resuscitate an erstwhile medieval order. Stop working toward your imagined American Christian Commonwealth. Not only is it not happening (being a fool’s errand), it’s not worth the effort: it’ll blow up in your face like all the other attempts.

8. In a word, Christian politics should begin wherever we are, not in some other time or place where we most decidedly are not. Given the Augustinianism (or Pascalianism) of the foregoing, then, there is no One Right Way for Christians to approach politics. It’s piecemeal personal discernment all the way down, based on context, temperament, local conditions, prayer, opportunity, and other similar factors. Some Christians in the U.S. will “get involved”; others won’t. Realists will vote, march, and advocate, thereby getting their hands dirty; radicals will find themselves unable to do so. Neither is right or wrong. It’s a matter of prudence. We should stop duking it out to see who’s the victor between the Augustine of Niebuhr and the Yoder of Hauerwas.

9. The political challenge for American Christians today is thus an odd one: emotional disengagement via recalibration. American Christians have to find a way to stop caring so much, to stop finding their identity in politics, to stop investing the totality of themselves in winning or losing the latest (existential) political fight. Even if this borders on the impossible, it’s what’s called for in our situation.

10. To illustrate the point, suppose Christians in America stepped away from politics entirely for the next decade. From 2023 to 2033, no one in this country heard from a single Christian about political matters. A ten-year silence from the church. Christians kept living their lives, going about their business, seeking to be faithful, following the Lord—but without commentary of any kind (personal, public, digital, media, pulpit) on political affairs. Richard asks: “Do you think this ten year season would improve the church? Would this season improve the church internally, helping us conform more fully to the image of Jesus and more deeply into the kingdom of God, and externally, in how the world might perceive us?” He believes the answer is yes. The church needs a political detox, and it would be good for all involved.

I hope I’ve done Richard justice. Let me make one major point before I try to unpack a few more minute ones.

I take my original challenge to be this: Democracy is a genuinely new challenge for Christian political thought, because democratic involvement makes comprehensive demands of citizens. Self-governance is an exacting affair. Even prior to matters of identity, democratic action has the potential to be all-consuming. Because it is the business of life, our common life, it soaks up the whole of one’s attention, energy, and emotion. The most successful democratic movements in American history never could have happened if their adherents had been half-invested. Richard makes this observation a premise of his response, rather than a point of disagreement. The upshot as I see it, then, is twofold.

On one hand, it seems to be the case that democracy is a problem for Christian discipleship. Democracy wants your soul. But no servant can serve two masters. So how can politically engaged Christians also be disciples of Christ alone? I’m far from the first person to ask this question. Roman Catholic political thought has had anxieties on this score for two centuries and more. But it’s worth highlighting outright because it’s something of a taboo for American Christians to see democracy per se as a problem. To say it is a problem is not to say it should be dismantled or replaced. Only that it shouldn’t be assumed to be unproblematic from a Christian perspective.

On the other hand, Richard’s series left me thinking that we find ourselves where we started (or so it feels to me): that is, with the BenOp. Or in Richard’s words, from a post written six years ago, a progressive version of the Benedict Option. But the overall picture is the same. The American imperium is at odds with Christian witness. Don’t make the error of shoring up the imperium, much less mistaking shoring it up for the mission of the church. Instead, withdraw your heart, mind, voice, and labor to what is before you: the local congregation in its surrounding community. Attend to that. Think little, as Wendell Berry puts it. Stop thinking big; stop selling your soul to politics, only to be shown a fool for the umpteenth time.

In my view, this is where Richard lands: at a theologically orthodox, socially progressive version of the Benedict Option. A soft Anabaptism that doesn’t scream Nein! to politics so much as ignore it with a shrug before turning to love one’s neighbor—whose face and name one knows, living as one does in a flesh-and-blood neighborhood, not on Fox News or CNN or Twitter or TikTok.

I think this is wise counsel. For individual believers, I think it’s good advice, and especially for those most in need of a detox, i.e., folks who can tell you in detail what happened yesterday in D.C. but not the names of a neighbor in any direction, or the problems facing the city they actually live in.

So that’s that. Now let me turn to some larger thematic or architectonic matters that Richard’s series raised and about which I think we disagree.

First, while the “ten years of silence” proposition is an instructive thought experiment, I don’t think it works on its own terms. What it reveals, after reflection, is how it is impossible to live as a Christian without doing politics. For example, there are a lot of school-age children in Abilene (where Richard and I live) who are homeless. Christians here rightly see this as a pressing problem that calls for their involvement. But issues like family breakdown, poverty, nutrition, abuse, schooling, and homelessness are all political matters. Christians can’t be part of the solution if they forswear politics. Moreover, the call for silence overlooks the fact that speech is a part of action, indeed is a form of action. “I have a dream” is far more than a set of words. It’s a public political performance. It’s a world-shaping deed, expressed verbally. Words get things done. We know this from the Bible. That’s what prophecy is! Words that do things, words that make things happen. In short, Christians can’t follow Christ without doing or speaking about politics. That means ten years of silence is a nonstarter—even if we all (as I do) understand what Richard has in mind.

Second, I am very wary of framing the question of Christians and/in politics by present conditions and possibilities. Doing so results in ahistorical assumptions and parochial answers. Twenty-first century American liberalism sets the terms of the debate. But why should we let it? The church has two millennia of reflection and practice on these matters. If we allow ourselves to listen to it, not only will we expand the horizons of our imagination (the proverbial Overton window); we will see that the status quo to which we are so accustomed is far from necessary or immutable. It is contingent, like all social and political arrangements. We need not take it for granted.

Third, I am equally wary of issuing judgments in the present that entail wholesale indictment or repudiation of past Christian teaching and practice. It may well be true that American believers need not advocate for Christendom in 2023. That is not the same as saying Christendom is and always was an error. Whatever seems given in the moment appears inevitable and right to those living in it. I don’t want to fall for that temptation. To see all past political forms endorsed by Christians as fundamentally wrong, because they had not yet arrived at what we, now, endorse and inhabit, seems to me undeniably myopic, anachronistic, and uncharitable. To be clear, I doubt Richard would endorse that view, but it is all too common in modern Christian political thought. I want to avoid it at all costs.

Fourth, some political questions are existential. Granted, most political questions are prudential and still others can be disagreed about by reasonable people (Christians included). But some are matters of life and death, or of ultimate, or at least penultimate, significance. Chattel slavery is one example from our history. Civil rights is another. War and capital punishment are perennial. Abortion and euthanasia are relatively newer, in terms of laws and technology. If, for example, prenatal life is human life created and beloved by God, then it would seem to follow that political regimes should protect it and, to the extent that they do not, Christians should work to persuade them to do so. If the vulnerable, the poor, the unhappy, the lonely are finding themselves ushered by a medical bureaucracy to allow themselves to be killed rather than to be cared for, then Christians’ obedience to the command of Jesus would seem to require their active political involvement, precisely for the sake of the least of these. “Lord, when did we see you a victim of MAID and intervene…?”

Fifth, we should not presume to be more Augustinian than Saint Augustine himself. Augustine saw that, all things being equal, a polity that pays homage to Christ as Lord and seeks to do justice in accord with Christ’s teaching is a polity to be desired, to be sought, and to be received with gratitude. Personally, I want to live in a city and a state whose laws and social norms run with and not against the grain of the Word made flesh. Now, is that easier said than done? Yes. Does it open up leaders, of the church as well as the state, to abuse, corruption, hypocrisy, and dissimulation? Yes. Has such an approach failed before? Yes. All granted. I fail to see, though, that these admissions automatically and in all circumstances render the question moot. Christianity has never taught that one form of polity is ordained of God: empires, city-states, nation-states, monarchies, republics, democracies, and others have been led and supported by Christians. All I want to add is that I see no reason to rule out, on principle, the possibility of a genuine Christian commonwealth, whether in the past, the present, or the future, here or elsewhere.

Sixth and finally, there is no way banish God from politics. That’s true for Jews and Muslims as well as Christians, because God is one, and his claim to allegiance is total. That allegiance cuts against the claims of the state but also makes inroads on the state. For example, if the state is grinding the faces of the poor, followers of Christ know this is wrong. More, they know whose side God is on in the struggle. And they therefore know what to say to the state as the word of the Lord. This is exactly when prophetic criticism enters into the equation. My only point is that prophetic criticism is not a distancing mechanism; not a way to keep church and state separate. It’s a way of holding the state’s feet to the fire—that is, the consuming fire of God’s judgment. And if God is both the judge and the desire of the nations, then we are never going to be free of the entanglement of faith and politics, church and state, discipleship and governance, prophecy and law.

That indefinite entanglement suggests to me, in conclusion, that the sort of emotional and psychological disengagement (and recalibration) for which Richard is calling is a dead end. I too want Christians in America to call cease-fire in the infinite culture war and to stop letting tribal identities overwrite their baptismal identity in Christ. I too want Christians to worship God and love their neighbors and to worry less about Washington. In general, arguing over Christendom and Commonwealths and Integralism and Christian Nationalism (Lord help us) can easily become a distraction from the command of Christ to me, here and now, to do his will within the limits and opportunities of my life, not another.

Nevertheless, the command of Christ also, as we’ve seen, necessarily includes the realm of politics, a realm from which Christ is by no means absent. Finding him there, following him there, obeying his will there is not for the faint of heart. It takes much wisdom. It usually ends in one form of failure or another. But it can’t be avoided. And Christians are right to want to succeed there, and to care about the results. For the results bear on the lives of their neighbors—lives of great concern to the Lord.

One note on “negative world”

I’ve written twice on the minor internet dust-up over James Wood’s essay last month on the political witness of the church, an essay that contains some modest criticisms of Tim Keller. There Wood uses a framework taken from an essay published last February by Aaron Renn, which was an expanded version of a piece he originally proposed a full five years ago. Many folks have written about Renn’s framework, including (to my mind) most incisively and critically by Jake Meador a few weeks ago.

A simplified version of the framework is that there are three dominant modes of Christian experience in any given social and political context, in this case the American context. These are positive, neutral, and negative. Each concerns the public profession of Christian identity. The question is: On balance, do the nation’s elite institutions together with the persons who lead and occupy them reward, ignore, or penalize the public profession of Christian identity? If the first, then this makes for a “positive world”; if the second, then a “neutral world”; if the third, then a “negative world.”

Renn has a timeline, relatively compressed, whereby before the mid-1990s, America was—again, in the aggregate, on balance, and concerning the mainstream culture as influenced and governed by elite spheres, professions, persons, and institutions—a “positive world.” Then this ambient context shifted into a “neutral world” for a couple of decades before, sometime in the last decade, another shift occurred and we entered a “negative world” for public profession of Christian identity.

In my view, this proposal should not be controversial. The reasons why it has been taken to be controversial are numerous; here’s a guess at a few of them.

First, the focus seems overdetermined by recent history, in particular the fortunes of white evangelicals. Second, the issues that signal loss of status are culture-war fodder like gender and sexuality rather than, say, racism, poverty, and immigration. Third, the framework is liable to being interpreted as one more American-Christian decline narrative: once things we great (because “we” were on top), now they aren’t (because “we” no longer are). Fourth, some of the examples of writers and pastors held up for critique are beloved or perhaps not worthy of it, as with Keller. Fifth, the descriptive nature of the framework is taken to be normative in character, thereby implying that Renn and Wood want to argue that it is harder to be a faithful Christian today than it ever was before in America.

As I said above, I don’t take Renn’s framework to be especially controversial, because if you don’t worry about haggling over the details, it’s self-evidently true; indeed, unless I’m seriously misunderstanding and therefore misrepresenting it, something like it is taken for granted in all sociology and history of American religion published in the last century.

The framework has nothing—I repeat, nothing—to do with the challenge of living faithfully as a Christian, now or at any time in the past. Likewise it has nothing to do with the nature of the gospel or the demands of Christian discipleship. It is not and does not involve any substantive moral or theological claim whatsoever. It is a purely sociological observation about the public status of Christian identity in American life. What it says is simply this:

• Once, it was reasonable to suppose that, broadly speaking, if you claimed in America to be a Christian (or church-affiliated), then that public claim was more likely than not to enhance your reputation and/or social status and/or professional-political-familial-marital-financial prospects;

• now, it is reasonable to suppose the opposite;

• some complex set of factors led from the first situation to the second;

• doubtless a sort of intermediate period covered the time of transition.

That’s it. That’s the framework. Is it false? I confess I’m not even sure what it would mean to say that it could be false.

Note that the proposal as summarized here has nothing at all to do with the substance of Christian faith and morals—nothing to do with orthodoxy. It makes no claim to the “Christianness” of the American republic (or its antecedent colonies) at any point in its history. It’s not about anyone’s heart, mind, feelings, or sincerity. It’s not about a golden age. It’s not about a time we ought to recover or reestablish. It doesn’t even entail that those matters of traditional teaching for which one might be socially or legally disciplined today are either true or of first order importance relative to prior contested issues in American church history.

(It’s worth observing that theological liberalism a century ago would have entailed denial of creedal doctrines—bodily resurrection, virginal conception, divinity of Christ—alongside affirmation of moral doctrines regarding marriage, sexual ethics, and divorce, whereas today the reverse is the case. In other words, the transition from “positive” to “negative” world isn’t per se a transition from “conservative” or “traditional” to “liberal” or “progressive” theology. That particular fight, or dialectic, has been a live one for a full two hundred years, with no signs of abating. For that reason it doesn’t map onto the Renn framework under discussion.)

To take a concrete example, one offered by Alan Jacobs, it was damn hard to be a faithful Christian in the Jim Crow South. A lot harder by comparison to today, with far harsher penalties for following Christ (whatever one’s race) than nearly anyone faces at present. I take that as read. Nevertheless it remains true at the descriptive level, as a sociological fact that publicly professing to be a Christian in the 1950s was—on balance, no matter who you were or where you lived, with relatively minor exceptions—more likely than not to enhance your reputation and/or social status and/or professional-political-familial-marital-financial prospects.

Consider, finally, that this claim does not of itself require approbation (nostalgic, reactionary, or otherwise) of the erstwhile “positive world.” Plenty of Christians might suppose the “positive world” was, on the whole, a bad bet for Christians and/or a raw deal for Jews, Muslims, agnostics, and other non-Christians. Perhaps it created pressure for countless businessmen and politicians to voice aloud a fake faith or a merely civil religion all the while living as pagans in their personal lives. Perhaps this sullied the church’s witness. Perhaps Christians should be grateful to inhabit a “neutral” or “negative” world. Perhaps!

My only point is that it doesn’t matter what one makes of these shifts, nor how one might revise the minor details (dates, epochal events, how hostile contemporary “negative world” really is, and so on). The shifts are real. I’d go so far as to say they’re undeniable. It’s only once we agree about that that we can hold a meaningful conversation—or argument—about the significance, implications, challenges, and opportunities created by the shifts in question.

Politics cathexis

I’m of two minds about the suggestion that my friend and colleague, Richard Beck, made last week regarding Christians and/in politics. Here’s what he wrote:

Coined by Freud, the word "cathexis" comes from the psychodynamic tradition in psychology. A cathexis is an unhealthy concentration of mental energy on a person, idea or object. The word "fixation" is a related concept, as we become "fixated," to an unhealthy degree, where there is a concentration of mental energy and investment. Along with "fixation," "obsession" is another word that points to a cathexis. 

You can think of a cathexis as a "hot spot" in the psyche, a "gravity well" that creates a mental orbit, even a kind of "black hole" that sucks up available energy. And that's a key notion in psychodynamic thinking, how our mental energy is a finite resource. Our various cathexes, fixations and obsessions hurt us because they suck up mental energy, leaving us less energy to allocate, devote and invest in other areas of our lives. Like the pull of a large gravitational mass in space, a strong cathexis warps and distorts the psyche causing it to become twisted and imbalanced.  

Given that, let me restate my concern. Politics has become a cathexis in the Christian psyche. Like a psychic black hole, the power of this cathexis is warping and distorting the Christian mind, heart and soul. Worse, the cathexis of politics is sucking up all the available mental and emotional energy, energy that needs to be directed toward other pressing endeavors and concerns.

As a diagnosis, this seems right. I’m temperamentally inclined to agree with him, moreover, and on the merits I’m in agreement at least every other day, maybe two out of every three days.

Richard is responding to the minor hubbub surrounding James Woods’s reflections on Tim Keller (about which I myself have written a bit). He goes on to say:

To be clear, I think it's perfectly appropriate for Christians to be involved in democratic politics. Feel free to vote and be politically engaged. The issue involves the cathexis of politics in the Christian psyche, the unhealthy concentration of psychic energy being devoted to the state and electoral politics. Psychic energy is a precious and limited resource, and every bit of energy sucked up by the cathexis of politics is energy that could be devoted to your family, your friendships, your church, your creativity, your spiritual formation, and your works of mercy in the local community.

In a post the next day, Richard quotes the Epistle to Diognetus before commenting:

This, it seems to me, is a healthy and proper emotional relationship to the state and politics. As citizens we "play our full role." We pay taxes. We vote. And yet, the nation in which we live is not our homeland, we dwell here as if living in a foreign country. Christians live in their nation as if we are only passing through.

Again, as I say, more often than not, I’m on board with this vision. Over the years, however, my reading in both the Christian tradition and in political philosophy has chastened my intellectual commitment to this approach. In other words, I’m open to being wrong. Not, to be sure, that I’m in doubt about the relativization of politics, the priority of discipleship, the centrality of the church, the provisionality and passing nature of temporal concerns. This world is not our home: that is the first principle of Christian politics. But more must be said.

So here are a few ideas and questions to ponder on this matter. (And, as it happens, this will be my last post for the next two weeks. See you in June.)

1. What is the status of the governing authorities under God? May they conduct themselves, precisely as holders of specific offices, in accordance with the will and authority of Christ? Ought they?

2. What is the relationship between the divine Rule of the risen and ascended Christ and the human rule of governing authorities, of whatever kind? And what is the relationship between the proclamation of the former by the church in the midst of and before the face of the latter?

3. As Peter Leithart once put it: What if they ask? That is, what if governing authorities look to the gospel of Christ proclaimed by his church for wisdom, guidance, or authority? And then: What if they listen?

4. Is the church essentially apolitical in the sense that its entanglement, communally or in the persons of its members, with politics is intrinsically secondary to and derivative of its principal mission? Or is it (could it be) the case that such entanglement belongs, properly and inwardly, to the mission?—if, for example, the mission is to announce and embody the truth of the Rule of the One Lord Christ to and among the nations, and some of those nations, like Ninevah, repent and believe the good news qua nations, even qua rulers? (Think: Constantine in Rome; Ezana in Ethiopia; Tiridates III in Armenia; Vladimir the Great of the Rus’.)

5. Put differently, is an established or national church ruled out ipso facto on this view? Or is disestablishment merely a contingent feature of the present time, a parochial fact of our cultural context neither (necessarily) superior to past regimes nor (per se) predictive of future just arrangements?

6. Is it possible genuinely to participate in active democratic politics without comprehensive (not to say ultimate) engagement? Has anyone ever won an election or passed a measure or successfully promoted a law or policy who went about it half-heartedly? It seems to me that passionate partisanship to a cause, a law, an issue, a policy, a candidate, a party, or what have you is actually a precondition of democratic success—that is, winning.

7. You might say: But that’s precisely it; Christians shouldn’t be in the business of winning, but of being faithful. Fine. Tell that to the abolitionists of the nineteenth century, though. Their engagement in democratic politics wasn’t penultimate. It wasn’t half-hearted. It wasn’t patient. It was all-in. It was win or go home. The same goes for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Doubtless an eschatological horizon controlled their non-utopian activism, at least some of them, some of the time. Nevertheless they expected, even demanded, and worked tirelessly to bring about conditions of justice that seemed, to many of their contemporaries, including some of their allies, impossible in this world. And they won. I’m glad they won. But I don’t know that I (we) are in a position to be grateful for the ends of their labors if we repudiate their means.

8. Let me put it this way: If Christians believe that justice matters, not just for us but for our neighbors, above all the most vulnerable and marginal among them; and if we do not believe that participation in political affairs—governance, authority, law, etc., whether or not it is democratic—is inimical to faithful discipleship; then it follows that active, engaged, even full-throated partisan participation in law and public policy, at every level, is a logical upshot of Christian mission. And that’s going to require constant debate, disputation, perseveration, indeed a certain fixation, if there would be any chance of actually succeeding. Movements, institutions, organizing, activism, policy writing, popular messaging, getting out the votes: these take time, energy, money, and passion. In a democratic society, they require such things at a mass level.

9. The full-circle objection that might arise here is anti-democratic: namely, that because this is all true, then the ideal sociopolitical arrangement is not democratic, since the ineluctable result is the irresistible hoovering-up of everyone’s, including Christians’, energy, interests, time, and focus. Better, on this view, to leave the arts of governance to those few to whom the duty falls, whether they belong to a certain family, are born to a certain class, or are simply chosen at random. This perspective isn’t exactly mainstream in American politics or in Christian political theology, though it’s not not mainstream in the tradition; either way, it’s worth mentioning, though I’m going to assume for the purposes of this discussion that it’s not the direction the folks I’m talking to (Richard or others) want to go.

10. So where does that leave us? It seems to me that the full implications of Richard’s position are finally quietist, apolitical, and/or Anabaptist in scope and substance. To which Richard might justly respond: Well, yes; that’s the whole point. My counterpoint has to do with clarity, though. Historically, full-bore sectarian, Anabaptist, or retreatist ecclesiologies have not endorsed either democratic politics (from the top down) or participation therein (from the bottom up). The Lord’s providence would superintend the affairs of history; the church’s job was to be faithful, as a radical minority community, in the midst of the evil age passing away before our very eyes. From which it does not follow that the church or its members ought to participate in politics. Yet my sense is that, for many today who have been influenced by this line of thought, this sense of withdrawal or non-participation has been weakened, which generates a sort of “two cheers for democratic engagement!” position. Is that viable? I don’t see how. In a democracy, anything but three cheers means, at a practical level, no cheers at all. Furthermore (as any Anabaptist would agree) it entails a strong rejection of church establishment, of Christendom as such, and of traditions of theopolitical reflection and participation that hail from the patristic, medieval, and modern periods, for such traditions teach that political power and authority may and ought to be used by Christians and for Christian interests. Granted, these interests have sometimes included wicked things. But they have also included things like abolition and civil rights. To pick and choose—to say, We’ll seek and use power only for good things, not for bad—is already to be pot-committed, that is, committed to the just exercise of power. To be so committed is thus to have abandoned the Anabaptist M.O. By the same token, to refuse to pick and choose is to accept the all-or-nothing of political participation, and thereby to opt for “nothing.” Simply stated, if you’re in at all, you’re all in.

One long thought on Wood v. Keller

It seems to me that there is a single pressing issue raised by James Wood’s essay (and follow-up) on Tim Keller: namely, the social and political fortunes of evangelical churches under social and political conditions that are truly post-Christendom.

For seventeen centuries Christianity in the main has not been averse to seeking, maintaining, and deploying political power in the name of and in the service of explicitly Christian convictions, purposes, and interests. Even those offshoots of Christianity, beginning some five centuries ago, that to some degree expressed concerns or hesitancy about the Christian exercise of political power—and these have always been minority traditions in any case—have continued, broadly speaking, to operate under the conditions laid down by Christendom, and even to presuppose certain fundamental features of a Christian or semi-Christian regime. Even when, in the last two centuries or so, the overt Christian elements of “Western” political regimes have dried up, it is unquestionable that most of those elements remained, covertly, in one form or another. It is only in the last century, and in the U.S. in the last half-century, that the lineaments of a genuinely and comprehensively post-Christian political order have come into view and begun to be implemented. Whether or not that order has fully arrived in certain European nations, it has not yet here in the States. It is coming, though, and about that there should be no illusions.

Here is the point. Magisterial Protestantism was never anti–political power. It retained a vision, rooted in Christendom, for what it means for a nation (or state) to “be” Christian. That vision concerned both the character of leaders and the content of laws. As forms of populist, non-magisterial Protestantism grew, developed, and expanded—let’s just call these groups “evangelical” for lack of a better word—even where the magisterial political vision went unclaimed or repudiated, the political order created and maintained by it remained in place. In other words, evangelicalism in all its varieties knows no other regime in the West other than Christendom, semi-Christendom, or covert-Christendom. Post-Christendom is a new beast altogether.

(To be sure, evangelical churches have existed and do exist in other parts of the world, where Christendom never took root; some of these places are actively hostile to the faith. I leave to the side all the very interesting issues that attend this intersection of evangelicalism and non-Christian or anti-Christian contexts.)

The question posed by this confluence of factors is the following: How is evangelicalism supposed to operate politically in a truly post-Christian civilization? I take this to be the fundamental issue Wood is raising for us; bracket all that he says about Keller, and how you might feel about that. The heart of the matter is how both (evangelical) Christians and the (evangelical) church ought to comport themselves politically in relation to a full-bore, actually realized post-Christian culture.

Here’s the problem I think he’s putting his finger on. Historically, Christians have not had an ideal-typical, above-the-fray political program for society. Their program has been actionable, and they have acted upon it. They have commended it to the wider society; they have executed it in the courts of kings and magistrates; they have expanded on it in legal and theological texts. In no sense was the Christian vision for political order a “trans-partisan” affair. It was partisan all the way down. It could not help but be so if it would be concrete, which every political platform must be.

Roman Catholicism has not abandoned this approach to politics, though the reception of the Christendom vision is a matter of enormous debate since Vatican II. In principle, though, Rome rejects the wholesale privatization of religion and does not renounce its having a role in public affairs, even (at times, past or present or future) being established as the faith of the land.

Likewise, magisterial Protestantism has not abandoned a modified version of the Christendom project. Yet—and I don’t mean this to be as harsh as it sounds—magisterial Protestantism is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Those Protestants who seek to maintain or to recover the magisterial and confessional traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may well be performing admirable and good work; but as a living institution with either ecclesial or political power, it’s a thing of the past. Whether they like it or not, they’re all evangelicals now.

Which brings us back to where we started. I understand the ecclesio-political program criticized by Wood to be one that keeps the (evangelical ) church qua church apolitical, while encouraging individual Christians to be faithfully engaged in democratic politics, where “faithful engagement” means (a) keeping political activity penultimate by (b) permitting Christians to be on both sides of most/all political questions, which in turn requires (c) avoiding partisanship, because (d) the gospel stands above and in judgment upon all political endeavors, inasmuch as (e) neither the gospel nor the church is fully aligned with any political party, platform, or policy. The upshot is a modest, even ambivalent, investment in political activity, characterized by gentleness, civility, and the self-critical admission of a general fallibility.

Many of us may find this picture of Christian participation in politics to be an attractive one. What Wood wants us to see, however, is three things.

First, it has little precedent in Christian history. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But we should realize just how new it is. Its newness should caution our sense that it’s self-evidently “the” “Christian” approach to politics; it is certainly a such approach. Prima facie we can’t say much more than that. In historical perspective, it’s something of a novelty.

In part that’s because, second, our circumstances are radically new—and, again, without precedent in the church’s past. The church once found itself in a pagan world that judged it worthy, at best, of benign neglect and, at worst, of legal and social punishment. But the church has never faced a post-Christian legal-cultural regime. So even those politics-reticent ecclesial traditions that have arisen since the mid–sixteenth century have no previous experience of what we are (currently or imminently) facing.

Third, Wood believes this picture of winsome, faithful presence is bound to fail—that is, as a social and political program. That doesn’t prejudge whether it’s what Christ demands of us. Nor does it amount to a suggestion that the tasks of Christian discipleship are measured by (likelihood of) sociopolitical success. Instead, it’s meant to draw attention to the fact that “faithful discipleship” and “faithful political engagement as outlined in this particular proposal” are not synonymous. The latter is a contingent suggestion that may or may not be (a) good in the merits and/or (b) apt to specific material conditions. I take Wood’s bedrock claim to be that, as a concrete but intrinsically contestable proposal, this vision of political engagement is good on the merits and was apt to the conditions of its time and place when it was proposed. But, given a change in social and political conditions on the ground—being an at least partly empirical question subject to all manner of analysis—the practical question of what faithful discipleship requires of American Christians today, in terms of active political engagement, calls for a rethinking of said proposal in favor of a revised or even altogether new vision. Not, I repeat, because the former was or is ineffective, but because, given certain cultural mutations, it is inapt (unfitting, unresponsive) to the needs and demands of Christian life and witness in this moment, in our context as it stands.

If this is granted, then the question is not whether (what Wood takes to be) Keller’s project is “good” or “faithful” or “worth defending.” The question is whether, as a contingent proposal for how Christians in a particular time and place ought to comport themselves politically, it continues to be properly responsive to the social, political, and missional challenges facing the American church today. Perhaps it does; perhaps it doesn’t. Much of one’s answer will turn on the logically prior question regarding the state of those challenges and whether, across the last four decades, they have changed, or are currently in process of changing, as substantially as Wood believes.

This is where the historical backdrop I offered above is meant to give some credence to Wood’s argument—which is, recall, about Protestant evangelicalism in America. There is no one-size-fits-all “Christian relation to politics.” (And if there were, it would be of the Christendom variety, not the belated liberal-democratic variety.) Christians have always adjusted, with impressive flexibility, to countless regimes and types thereof. In our case, this means (on one hand) that what has “worked” in the recent past will not necessarily be what works in the present or the future; and (on the other) that we ought to hold before us a far greater variety of Christian approaches to politics than what we are lately used to. If we are truly entering a post-Christian period, we’re going to need all the help we can get. Some of that help, therefore, may turn out to come from the distant rather than the recent past. Some of it may look wholly unfamiliar to us. We cannot know in advance what may prove useful or apt to the moment. Everyone is agreed that no proposal is licit that contradicts the teaching or authority of Christ. Granting that criterion, the floor is wide open. The moment is unprecedented, the terrain uncertain. Only by hearing from everyone and taking into consideration what surprises or even confounds us can we move forward, together, into the unknown.

New essay: “Market Apocalypse” in Mere Orthodoxy

My latest is up at Mere Orthodoxy this morning. Titled “Market Apocalypse,” it’s a review essay of Rodney Clapp’s new book, Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. Here’s a taste:

Clapp’s book is titled Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age. But you might imagine it renamed, à la Patrick Deneen’s bestseller, Why Neoliberalism Failed. Like Deneen, Clapp wants to draw critical attention to what is hiding in plain sight. “What goes unnamed” in such circumstances “is the neoliberal framework that entraps us all.” Entrapment is the proper image for Clapp’s view: we are seduced and deceived by neoliberalism’s lure, but once we fall for the trick, we’re stuck. And the consequences are comprehensive: “Neoliberalism has transformed us — heart, body, and soul.”

Clapp is uninterested, however, in merely naming neoliberalism: many writers and scholars have already done that. He wants to name it as a Christian. That is, he wants to reveal neoliberalism for what it is in theological perspective, and to propose a specifically theological alternative. He thinks this task crucial because neoliberalism can be neither fully understood nor adequately opposed without reference to God, specifically the gospel of the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, and his people, the church.

Go read the rest here.

Karen Kilby book forum in Political Theology

At long last, the newest issue of the academic journal Political Theology is out, and it features a book forum I organized and edited for the journal. The forum, or roundtable discussion, is devoted to Karen Kilby’s latest book, a collection of mostly previously published essays titled God, Evil, and the Limits of Theology. Here is how the forum is laid out:

• My opening essay, “Theology in the Dark,” introduces the book’s major themes.

• Andrew Prevot, associate professor of theology at Boston College, writes about “Karen Kilby on the Politics of Not Knowing.”

• Kathryn Tanner, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, writes on “The Limits of Political Theology.”

• Katherine Sonderegger, professor of theology at Virginia Theological Seminary, writes on “Modernity in the Theology of Karen Kilby.”

• Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, writes about what constitutes “A True Otherness.”

• Sarah Coakley, professor of theology emerita at the University of Cambridge, writes about theology and the Trinity “Beyond Understanding.”

• Miroslav Volf, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, writes in defense of “Apophatic Social Trinitarianism: Why I Continue to Espouse ‘a Kind of’ Social Trinitarianism.”

• Karen Kilby, professor of Catholic theology at Durham University, writes a “Reply to Critics.”

Though it took a full 16 months to see the idea from conception to print, it was a pleasure to do so. What a feast. Thanks to editor Vincent Lloyd for the invitation. Now go buy Prof. Kilby’s book and read this issue of PT cover to cover