Month: November 2004

American ex-pat Nora Jacobson, who describes herself as “a bluestocking blue-stater,” has lived in Toronto since 2000, but it hasn’t been everything she expected:

Although I enjoy my work and have made good friends here, I’ve found life as an American expatriate in Canada difficult, frustrating and even painful in ways that have surprised me. As attractive as living here may be in theory, the reality’s something else. For me, it’s been one of almost daily confrontation with a powerful anti-Americanism that pervades many aspects of life. When I’ve mentioned this phenomenon to Canadian friends, they’ve furrowed their brows sympathetically and said, “Yes, Canadian anti-Americanism can be very subtle.” My response is, there’s nothing subtle about it.

An interesting perspective. Read the rest here.

As part of my job, I was able to travel to San Antonio the weekend before Thanksgiving to attend the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. This is easily the largest yearly gathering of academics in the fields of religious studies, theology, biblical studies and comparative religion. Lots of interesting people as you can imagine.

I work for a book publisher, so most of my time was spent manning our booth in the exhibition hall along with all the other publishers. One of the perks of these meetings, as anyone who’s attended will tell you, is that the publishers usually sell their books at deep discounts. Brazos Press, one of my favorite publishers, had a big display and they were selling everything at 50% off!

This was too much for your humble servant to pass up, so I picked up The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society by Murray Jardine and Anxious About Empire, edited by Wes Avram.

The Jardine book is nothing less than a sustained critique of liberal society, specifically its inability to articulate moral constraints on our technological power. According to Jardine, the most pressing problem facing modern Western societies is that we have attained this immense power to alter our environment (and increasingly ourselves), but the liberal political tradition, with its emphasis on neutrality and tolerance, has no coherent grounds for determining which uses of technology are good and which are bad.

Jardine traces the development of liberalism through three phases. First is classical liberalism, which he associates with John Locke and Adam Smith. Classical liberalism was concerned primarily with establishing a free market and a society based on the rule of law and free contractual exchange. The moral underpinnings of classical liberalism Jardine describes as a “secularized Protestant work ethic.” Thus the bourgeois virtues of thrift, sobriety, hard work, etc. become paramount.

The second phase of liberalism is “reform liberalism” or social democracy, New Deal liberalism, etc. In other words, what most of us mean by “liberalism” in the contemporary American political context. Reform liberalism has two major thrusts according to Jardine. The first is to stabilize and reform capitalism through regulation of the market and modest redistributionary policies. By the early 20th century it had become clear to nearly everyone that the laissez-faire capitalism of the 19th century had resulted in large concentrations of unaccountable power in the form of corporate monopolies as well as staggering inequalities between the rich and poor. Thus a modified form of liberalism was needed to stabilize the system and stave off revolutionary movements like communism.

The other prong of reform liberalism, however, was a more thoroughgoing critique of the remnants of the old Protestant-bourgeois work ethic. Reform liberals of the second half of the 20th century pointed out (cogently, according to Jardine) that liberalism’s claims to creating a neutral public square were incompatible with publicly upholding the old bourgeois virtues. Those virtues, far from being neutral, actually favored the middle-class entrepeneurs and businessmen who were the ascendant class in the early phases of capitalism. So we get the counterculture and the attempt to sweep all remnants of traditional quasi-Christian/bourgeois morality from the public square. A truly “neutral” state cannot “privilege” any particular understanding of morality and the good life.

The third phase of liberalism Jardine christens “neoclassical liberalism.” This form of liberalism he associates with the rise of modern conservatism, but it is actually a form of liberalism in that it combines the moral liberalism of “second wave” or reform liberalism with the desire to return to the laissez-faire economic policies of classical liberalism. This is essentially Reaganism-Thatcherism or moderate libertarianism.

Jardine argues that the present-day “conservative” movement is actually a coalition between classical and neoclassical liberals. Both want less economic regulation than reform liberals, but the classical liberals still want to uphold the traditional bourgeois virtues while the neoclassical liberals (libertarians) tend to embrace a variety of moral relativism that treats all values as subjective. While classical liberals like Locke and Smith defended the market as the system that best rewards hard work and rationality, neoclassical liberals like Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek argue that the market system is to be preferred simply because it allows for the maximum exercise of freedom, not because it rewards certain virtues. Since values are subjective, any infringement on choice constitutes an imposition of one person’s (or group’s) values on another. Here the neoclassical liberals join forces with modern liberals in embracing a moral skepticism that enshrines “tolerance” as the highest (only?) virtue.

The culture of this late stage of liberalism is what Jardine calls “expressive” individualism or consumerism. While the earlier phases of liberalism extolled production with their emphasis on hard work and thrift, expressive individualism sees each of us primarily as a consumer of goods, services and experiences, through which we express ourselves and fashion our own unique “lifestyle.”

Jardine sees the development of an expressivist culture as partly the result of the bounty of capitalism. In the older “utilitarian-individualist” culture, goods and services were advertised primarily with respect to how they would meet some preexisting need. But as production threatened to outstrip demand, advertisers shifted to a strategy of inculcating new needs in customers. This was done by promoting products in terms of how they would enable the consumer to attain a certain staus or image:

Early in the development of the consumer culture, advertisers realized that the best way to encourage consumption was to get people to think of themselves and others in terms of what they consumed or, more specifically, in terms of the personal image they projected through their consumption. Stated somewhat differently, advertising began to encourage what might bet be described as an aesthetic orientation, that is, an orientation where beauty becomes the most important aspect of human existence. People were encouraged to think of themselves adn others in terms of how aesthetically appealing they were. Whereas in premodern societies, people were judged on the basis of moral character, and in early liberal society people were judged on the basis of how productive they were (this standard of judgment itself being a distortion of Protestant conceptions of moral character), in a consumer culture people are judged on the basis of the aesthetic image they project. “Personality” becomes more important than character. If in early liberal society one was expected to be a productive person, in later liberal consumer society one is expected to be a beautiful person. (p. 90)

One has only to look at our near-worship of celebrities to see the truth in this statement. Jardine contends that both liberals and conservatives have made peace with the expressive-individualist culture. Both reform liberals and neoclassical liberals accept, at least in practice, the subjectivity of values and the foundational importance of self-expression and “choice.”

This also helps to explain why conservatives and liberals can both feel like the other side is winning. The liberals (and libertarians) have essentially won the battle for unfettered self-expression in the personal moral realm on such “lifestyle” issues as homosexuality, abortion, pornography, etc. So the conservatives perceive the country as on its way to hell in a handbasket. But the conservatives have essentially won the battle for a relatively unregulated competitive market economy, what liberals fear as the ascendance of big business and dog-eat-dog capitalism. What neither side realizes, Jardine says, is that these phenomena are the logical corollaries of each other and of the liberal expressivist culture. “Freedom of choice” has all but triumphed in both the economic and moral spheres.

In fact, this expressivist culture is what drives the movement for greater and greater tolerance:

[M]ost people in present-day Western societies are convinced that the status of moral ideas as subjective opinions does iimply one overarching moral standard, which is tolerance. If all values are relative, we should tolerate all actions except those that impose values. Again, as we have seen, this conclusion is logically incorrect adn indeed meaningless. Why, then, do som many people draw this conclusion? The answer lies in the aesthetic orientation of the consumer culture. If one understands the world in aesthetic terms, then tolerance becomes of the utmost importance, because tolerance allows maximum flourishing of aesthetic self-expression. (p. 97)

The problem with “tolerance” based on moral relativism is that, once we accept the subjectivity of values, there is no logical reason for preferring tolerance to intolerance! We are on the slippery slope to moral nihilism, which is as likely to lead to tyranny as to universal freedom.

Moreover, consumerism as a way of life is ultimately unsustainable. This is true not only for ecological reasons, but more importantly on the level of human relations. An expressivist-individualist consumer culture will inevitably, Jardine thinks, have three disastrous results. It will result in a general loss of competence as people are more concerned with consumption than with developing skills and virtues. It will lead to an increasingly competitive “winner-take-all” society as everyone strives to be one of the “beautiful people.” And, perhaps most destructively, it will make us literally incapable of replacing ourselves:

When the fundamental goal of human existence is aesthetic self-expression, children are likely to get in the way. Or, perhaps even worse, children may themselves be regarded as a form of self-expression, as we mentioned above. Leaving aside the possibility of “designer children,” less drastic manifestations of this mentality can be seen in the way many North American parents relentlessly push their children toward high achievement…. In either case, a complete lack of interest in children or an obsession with creating perfect children is not likely to result in large families. (p. 128)

The fundamental problem is that moral nihilism is implicit in liberalism’s DNA, so to speak. It is the inexorable outcome of a system that enshrines individual freedom as its foundational value:

Liberalism attempts to avoid the central question of premodern moral reasoning, that is, the question of how people should live, by taking as its basic principle individual freedom, and stating that every individual should be free to do as he or she wants, within certain limits, which themselves would be neutral in the sense that they did not favor any particular social group or impose any particular belief system or way of life on society. In attempting to establish those neutral limits, however, liberalism initially simply used remnants of premodern natural law formulations, which, when examined more carefully, clearly favored some people–the bourgeoisie–over others, and clearly promoted both a particular belief system and a particular way of life, which I have termed a secularized Protestantsim. In attempting to eliminate these biases and create a truly neutral system, liberal theorists eventually destroyed any conceivable moral standard. (p. 133)

It might be thought, then, that the solution involves a return to a robust pre-modern natural law ethic such as that of Aristotle. But this is impossible, Jardine says, because traditional natural law ethics presuppose a static natural order to which human beings should conform. The problem with this is that our technological power has given us the ability to alter the natural order (and with the advent of genetic engineering, possibly human nature itself). We no longer find the idea of an unchanging natural order credible, and so it can’t be a source of moral norms for us.

What is needed is a moral framework that can account for our creative powers, but also gives us a sense of limits on how we use those powers. This ethic Jardine claims to find in the biblical narrative and its cosmology and anthropology.

This is as far as I’ve gotten, but I’m looking forward to seeing how Jardine is going to try to show that the practices of Christian communities can offer a response to the moral crisis he finds at the heart of Western liberal capitalist democracies.

More to come…

Harvard Law professor and evangelical Christian William J. Stuntz thinks secular academics and evangelicals have more in common than they might like to admit, and even thinks a political alliance might be feasible:

True, university faculties are heavily Democratic, and evangelical churches are thick with Republicans. But that red-blue polarization is mostly a consequence of which issues are on the table — and which ones aren’t. Change the issue menu, and those electoral maps may look very different. Imagine a presidential campaign in which the two candidates seriously debated how a loving society should treat its poorest members. Helping the poor is supposed to be the left’s central commitment, going back to the days of FDR and the New Deal. In practice, the commitment has all but disappeared from national politics. Judging by the speeches of liberal Democratic politicians, what poor people need most is free abortions. Anti-poverty programs tend to help middle-class government employees; the poor end up with a few scraps from the table. Teachers’ unions have a stranglehold on failed urban school systems, even though fixing those schools would be the best anti-poverty program imaginable.

I don’t think my liberal Democratic professor friends like this state of affairs. And — here’s a news flash — neither do most evangelicals, who regard helping the poor as both a passion and a spiritual obligation, not just a political preference. (This may be even more true of theologically conservative Catholics.) These men and women vote Republican not because they like the party’s policy toward poverty — cut taxes and hope for the best — but because poverty isn’t on the table anymore. In evangelical churches, elections are mostly about abortion. Neither party seems much concerned with giving a hand to those who most need it.

That could change. I can’t prove it, but I think there is a large, latent pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first politician to tap into it. (Barack Obama, are you listening?) If liberal Democratic academics believe the things they say they believe — and I think they do — there is an alliance here just waiting to happen.

From S. M. Hutchens at Christianity Today’s Books & Culture:

For many Catholics C. S. Lewis is an enigma that needs explaining. This is especially true for those who are strongly attracted to his writings, and most particularly those for whom he has been of aid in their own pilgrimages from Protestantism to Rome. How can it be that this man with such deep understanding of Christian life and faith, a master of so many masters, never converted? Why did he who gave so much light to others never himself lay hold of the fullness of the faith? Why in so many matters—the Church, the papacy, the sacraments, the Mother of our Lord, the priesthood, the doctrines of grace, the veneration of the saints, Purgatory, auricular confession, and Creed of which Catholic teaching is the best explication—did the brilliant and perceptive Lewis go so far and understand so much, yet not carry through to the reasonable end? Why was he content to remain an Anglican, in a church that at its best is a poor reflection of the Church of Rome?

Read the rest here.

UPDATE: I think Hutchens’ puts his finger on some of the major difficulties many Protestants have with Roman Catholic ecclesiology:

Lewis was a very typical Protestant in that he saw an absolute division between the claims of the Roman Church and her reality, the reality belonging only to a Church that is precisely not the Roman (or any other) particular church, and which while it touches upon and runs through this and other churches, is greater than them all. […]

One could envisage Lewis breaking communion with Canterbury, but not joining communion with Rome. He was, as Thomas Howard accurately notes in his introduction to Pearce’s book, a mere Protestant, and ferociously so—not because he thought the Christian Church did not exist in the Roman communion, but because he believed it could not subsist in her, the Church being something Other.

Apparently by not shopping on the day after Thanksgiving I was engaging in an innovative form of social protest! And here I thought it was just an aversion to crowds. Who knew?

Max Sawicky has some interesting thoughts on anti-consumerism, work and leisure here.

Camassia continues to blog her way through John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus.

One of the great virtues of Yoder’s work, in my view, is to situate the debate between pacifism and just-war as an attempt to answer to the question: How do we most faithfully follow Jesus?

Yoder’s project can be viewed as simply an attempt to draw out the full implications of orthodox Christology. If Jesus is both true God and true man, then doesn’t it follow that Jesus’ humanity is normative for us, at least in certain important respects?

Jesus’ command to love our neighbors, and the kind of love he himself exhibits become the standards for those of us who would follow him. However, the debate is over how to put this love into concrete action.

For just-war proponents, a just war is a way of defending the innocent from aggression, and thus loving our neighbor. It’s an act of charity. This distinguishes just-war theory from “realism” and other assorted “lesser-evilisms.” A Christian cannot do evil that good may come, but for just-war proponents, going to war under the right circumstances is not a case of choosing the “lesser evil” but a positively virtuous action.

Just-war proponents like Paul Ramsey argue that neighbor-love can require the use of force to protect the innocent and punish aggression. They don’t see this as qualifying or watering down the ethic of Jesus, but of translating it to the sphere of politics, which intrinsically involves the use of force.

On the other hand, the pacifist will argue that Jesus didn’t use violence to defend himself and specifically ordered his disciples not to use violence to defend him either. For the Christian pacifist nonviolence is about faithfulness first and effectiveness only secondly.

The pacifist is wary of any attempt to qualify the ethic of Jesus in order to be more “realistic,” where “realism” is defined as meeting the standards of the world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer discusses this at great length in The Cost of Discipleship. Specifically with respect to non-violence, Bonhoeffer critiques the Reformation notion that a Christian can participate in the use of force as long as he’s doing so in the course of carrying out the duties of his office or station in life.

In other words, according to the Reformers, as a private individual, the Christian must turn the other cheek, resist not evil, etc. But if he also happens to be a government official, a hangman, a soldier, etc. he can deploy violence as part of his official duties:

[The Reformers] distinguished between personal sufferings and those incurred by Christians in the performance of duty as bearers of an office ordained by God, maintaining that the precept of non-violence applies to the first but not to the second. In the second case we are not only freed from the obligation to eschew violence, but if we want to act in a genuine spirit of love we must do the very opposite, and meet force with force in order to check the assault of evil. It was along these lines that the Reformers justified war and other legal sanctions against evil.

The Reformers took this even further by arguing that one might be required to resist attacks on one’s person because of one’s duties as, e.g. a spouse or parent, not just as a government official. If I am responsible for providing for my family, I am obliged to resist aggression against my person, even if, considering only my personal safety I would ideally not resist.

The problem with this, according to Bonhoeffer, is that we are never acting merely as a private individual. We all have multiple roles as family members, citizens, workers, etc., so there would always be a plausible reason to use violence if the situation seemed to call for it. The Reformers’ teaching ends up seriously qualifying the radical ethic of Jesus. Bonhoeffer points out that the disciples didn’t divide their lives into their “official” capacities and their capacities as followers of Jesus:

But this distinction between person and office is wholly alien to the teaching of Jesus. He says nothing about that. He addresses his disciples as men who have left all to follow him, and the precept of non-violence applies equally to private life and official duty. He is the Lord of all life, and demands undivided allegiance.

It’s difficult to judge who has the better argument. The just-war theorist will always accuse the pacifist of leaving the innocent and defenseless to the mercy of aggressors and allowing evil to triumph. Is this a proper way to display neighbor-love? The pacifist’s reply will be that faithfulness to Jesus requires following his precept and example and trusting in God to ensure the ultimate victory of his justice. The pacifist might also point out that few, if any, wars have actually been fought within the bounds of just-war theory, and that in practice it has served as rhetorical cover for governments at war more often than it has provided a check on their behavior.

This debate is directly implicated in the realist vs. sectarian debate I’ve been going on about ad nauseum. Pacifists are more likely to reject the nation-state as an object of Christian loyalty (even penultimate loyalty) and are less likely to see it as an instrument for justice. Some, like Jacques Ellul, reject the state altogether. They think the efforts of Christians are better directed to communities of discipleship that exist on the margins of society rather than in the corridors of power.

It’s often asked of the sectarians: Must we take the first century position of the church as normative for all other generations? Just because the church existed at the margins of society in the first century, does that mean it shouldn’t seek to infiltrate the institutions of society such as the government? Might there not be a providential aspect to what sectarians deride as “Constantiniansm”? The answers to all these questions, I think, will depend greatly on how we answer the question of violence vs. non-violence.

Here’s Rodney Clapp on the Pledge of Allegiance:

The Supreme Court’s June ruling on whether “under God” should be part of the Pledge of Allegiance passed with relatively little notice, since the case was rejected on procedural grounds. For those who paid attention to the arguments, however, it conclusively exposed the incompatibility of American civil religion with any kind of robust Christianity. If one considers Elk Grove Unified School v. Newdow theologically, with the conviction that God ultimately refers to the Creator-Redeemer met in Israel and Jesus Christ, then the “God” Americans are to pledge their nation to be “under” is at worst an idol and at best the true God’s name taken in vain.

Clapp goes on to discuss the Justices’ various arguments for why “under God” should be retained, ranging from Chief Justice Rhenquist’s assertion that invoking the name of God is not a “religious exercise” but a “commendable patriotic exercise,” or a simple recognition of our nation’s history, to Justice O’Connor’s adversion to a “ceremonial deism” that is in no way intended to provoke religious sentiments such as awe or penitence.

In other words, the “god” of the Pledge is – according to its defenders – utterly devoid of theological content.

Clapp concludes:

Short of hanging on to the muddy, vacillating devices of ceremonial deism, Christians appear to face one of two choices. One is the open, deliberate restoration of Christian theocracy. Then the referent of “God” in the pledge would be clear and honest. Some evangelicals and conservative Catholics lean in this direction, but gingerly and equivocatingly, if not disingenuously, because of the sheer infeasibility of theocracy in a pluralistic America. With most contemporary Christians, I would argue that theocracy is not only politically dangerous but theologically disastrous.

We are on much more solid theological ground if we turn to the other choice. That choice is to recognize what the Bible and such exemplars of the Christian tradition as Augustine have taught us: to see and trust that the church and not any nation-state is preeminently the social agent through which God works God’s will in history. The church catholic stretches throughout the world and is its own “public,” crossing the comparatively sectarian boundaries of nation-states. Knowing themselves first of all as “citizens with the saints,” Christians may then, like the Babylon-dwelling Israelites counseled by Jeremiah, work and pray for the welfare of the cities (and nations) in which they now dwell, but never confuse those cities with the kingdom for which the church stands.

Apologies for the dearth of posts – I’ve been away on business since last Friday and am now spending Thanksgiving with my family in western Pennsylvania.

Soon: more on sectarians and maybe something on Paul Griffiths’ article “Orwell for Christians,” which I think makes some important points.

Happy Turkey Day to all!

Okay, this will probably be the last of these mammoth posts for a while.

This month’s First Things arrived in the mail yesterday and one of the highlights is an essay (not online yet) by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, the editor-in-chief of FT in which he offers a spirited defense of his particular brand of political theology. The essay is Fr. Neuhaus’ response to an essay by Daniel M. Bell Jr. called “State and Civil Society.” Bell, a professor at Lutheran Theology Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, offers a typology of Christian political theology. The two main camps Bell identifies are the “dominant” and “emergent” schools. Based on Neuhaus’ account (I haven’t read Bell’s essay) this typology matches pretty closely the realist/sectarian dichotomy I’ve been discussing.

According to Bell (according to Neuhaus) the dominant school of political theology accepts the structures of modern society as basically given. The role of the church, on this view, is to be the bearer or guardian of “values” that can be brought to bear on the state and other institutions of society. This view accepts the primacy of “statecraft” – i.e. that the state is or should be the primary instrument by which social change is brought about. This school has a “left” and “right” wing; the former includes liberation theologians like Gutierrez, and progressives like Jurgen Moltmann, while the latter Bell identifies with Neuhaus and company.

This school, Bell says, has capitulated to the “political captivity” of the Church. Neuhaus quotes Bell:

…Whether it is Neuhaus’ eschatological prohibition of sanctifying any political order, Gutierrez’s condemnation of “politico-religious messianism,” or Metz’s and Moltmann’s abhorrence of “political religion,” the “general” or “indirect” role accorded the Church as a guardian of values reduces Christian political engagement to the options offered by the world, more specifically, by the regnant liberal order. This is to say, the dominant tradition conceives of Christian political engagement on the world’s terms…whether in its conservative or progressive modes.

The “emergent” tradition, by contrast, includes people like Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank (British theologian and architect of the “radical orthodoxy” school), and Oliver O’Donovan. These thinkers, according to Bell, identify the Church as itself an alternative political order, a counter-polis or “contrast community.”

Here’s Neuhas:

The aim of the emergent tradition, says Bell, “is not simply the replacement of a sovereign state with a hegemonic Church, but a political rendering of the claim that Christ is Lord.” To say that the Church is the exemplary form of human community “is first and foremost a claim that the meaning of all politics and every community flows from participation in Christ.” Rejecting the statecraft of the dominant tradition, the emergents favor “a distinctly theological politics founded on the conviction that God is active in history now bringing about a new age, the contours of which are discernible not in Western liberalism, democratic socialism, or the Pax Americana but in Christ, in the work of Christ’s Spirit as it gathers in Christ’s body, the Church.” All the issues of ecclesiology, eschatology, and soteriology, writes Bell, can be summed up in one question: “What is the proper political correlate of the Christian mythos? Leviathan or the Body of Christ?”

For the emergent school, the Church is the true community, while the state is a kind of freakish parody of genuine community because, to the extent that it brings about peace and unity, it does so through coercion and violence. For Christians at least, it seems that the Church supplants the earthly political order, laying claim to their allegiance and ordering their economic, cultural and religious life.

Neuhaus then turns to the three thinkers identified by Bell as champions of the emergent view. He chides Hauerwas for emphasizing the importance of the Church as a radical, countercultural community while remaining a member of the decidedly non-radical United Methodist Church (no offense, Jennifer!):

[Hauerwas’] insistence upon the primacy of the community of the Church apparently does not require, for him or for others, actual membership in an ecclesial community that is in political tension or conflict with the culture of liberalism. Indeed, his countercultural posture is warmly celebrated by the culture he would presumably counter.

To his credit, Hauerwas has sometimes acknowledged a certain “ambiguity” in his ecclesial placement. He speaks admiringly of the Mennonite tradition of his mentor John Howard Yoder, and also of certain communities of radical discipleship in Catholicism, but he remains personally associated with the liberal United Methodist Church while pursuing his eccentric and highly effective vocation as a theological freelancer within his primary community of engagement, the liberal academy. […] he insists upon a Christianly-mandated position of absolute pacifism while, at the same time, claiming a role as moral instructor in the exercise of what Bell calls “statecraft” when it comes to how the state should employ force.

The last bit seems a bit unfair. I see no reason, in principle, why a pacifist couldn’t recognize that the state will continue to use violence but seek, nevertheless, to limit that violence. I don’t see that political quietism is mandated for pacifists (more on this later).

The point about the Church, however, seems to me to have a bit more heft. When representatives of the “emergent” tradition talk about the Church, I often wonder if they intend the description they offer as an empirical or a normative one. If the former, then I have to ask: where are these churches? There may be countercultural communities of radical discipleship, but Neuhas is surely right to point out that they are not usually to be found among the UMC (or the ELCA, to be fair!). At the very least we don’t have churches that encompass every aspect of their members’ lives.

If the description is a normative one, then I think the question is whether the sectarians (emergents) are asking the Church to be something it isn’t intended to be. Is the Church really supposed to be a couter-polity, a new political order unto itself? Or is expecting the Church to replace the earthly political order a kind of category mistake? This is ultimately a theological question to which Neuhaus returns later.

Neuhaus has far less patience with John Milbank whom he basically dismisses as peddling knee-jerk leftism gussied up with a lot of postmodern theoretical gymnastics and neologisms. What I’ve tried to read of Milbank I’ve found nearly impenetrable, but that could be because I’m not well schooled in the postmodern idiom he and his followers tend to work in. A lot of people think he’s the cat’s pajamas. Who knows?

Neuhaus is much more sympathetic to Oliver O’Donovan’s project and here we get a clearer view of Neuhaus’ own position. O’Donovan advocates a kind of “chastened liberalism,” that is, the state that recognizes the Church as the bearer of salvation and ultimate meaning will correspondingly be more humble in its claims. As Neuhaus puts it:

While this is not the place to summarize O’Donovan’s project, the mandate of this journal and my own work are in strong sympathy with O’Donovan’s invitation to rethink Augustine’s two cities, based on two loves, for our time. The promise to Israel and the coming of the Kingdom in Jesus Christ are emphatically public claims, and the efforts of political modernity to relegate that claim to the sphere of the private and “religious” must be sharply challenged. Christian fidelity relentlessly contends against what has been called the naked public square. To this end, says O’Donovan, the state must be kept “humble” and “minimally coercive,” as befits the “desacralization of politics.” These and other arguments pressed by O’Donovan are consonant with the tradition of political liberalism that carefully distinguishes between state and society, with both under the lordship of Christ.

I haven’t read O’Donovan’s Desire of the Nations, but for a fuller synopsis of his project, see this review essay by Gilbert Meilaender.

On this understanding, which we could call “Augustinian Liberalism,” the state has a role to play, but it is a role significantly diminished because of the coming of Christ. No longer can or should people find their ultimate meaning or identity in politics. The state serves rather to create a space within which the Church can go about proclaiming the Good News. The Church doesn’t replace the existing political order, but it reorients it to the more humble goals of maintaining an earthly peace.

Here’s Neuhaus again:

The final question, writes Bell, is: “What is the proper political correlate of the Christian mythos? Leviathan or the Body of Christ?” That is, I suggest, an unfortunate muddling of the matter. As St. Augusine understood, the Church is not a political correlate of the gospel but a distinct society that is integral to the gospel. The political correlate is the politics by which the Church is confronted in the course of her sojourn through history.

On this understanding, the Church and the state do not have competing tasks (when properly understood), but complementary ones. Here’s Meilaender discussing O’Donovan’s position:

The core of the idea of Christendom is that each of the two authorities—which we can here call simply the Church and the state—is to render service to the other “predicated on the difference and the balance of their roles.” The state serves the Church by making possible its mission; the Church serves the state by instructing it in what it means to be a “humble state.” The esse of political authority still characterizes the humble state; it exercises power and sustains the identity of a community. But now that the new age has dawned in Christ, we can be clearer about the bene esse—the proper action—of political authority. Now the exercise of power and the preservation of communal identity give way somewhat to the execution of right and justice. Power is now exercised under law, never as if it were the ultimate source of justice and right. “The responsible state is therefore minimally coercive and minimally representative. . . . This is not a restraint imposed by the nature of political authority as such, which can thrive on excesses of traditional legitimation and on splendid displays of force; it is imposed by the limits conceded to secular authority by Christ’s Kingdom.”

The Church’s primary task is to spread the Word of God, “announce the rule of God in Christ” and call the nations to repentance and obedience. But this task in itself displaces any ultimate authority the state may lay claim to. Under “Christendom” the state recognizes this and confines itself to the maintenance of social order.

Meilaender again:

If the Church serves the state by helping it to be the humble state, it in turn serves the Church by creating space in which the latter’s mission may be carried out. In part it accomplishes this simply by being the responsible state that understands the limits to which the dawning of God’s kingdom now makes it subject.

Of course, someone like Hauerwas would argue that such a “chastened” liberalism is impossible. Liberalism will always subvert communities committed to an “illiberal” notion of the good, leaving atomized individuals in its wake. Neuhaus, on the other hand, would say that our current society is a diseased form of liberalism, and not the inevitable outcome of a liberal order.

Again, I have to ask if the differences between these positions are as stark as they appear. As far as I can tell, there are significant similarities between the “Augustinian” position sketched by Neuhaus and the “sectarianism” of (say) John Howard Yoder. (In fact, see here for a discussion of Yoder’s Augustinianism.)

Here are a few of the more important similarities as I see it:

1) The Church is a new society that trains its members in the virtues appropriate to the Kingdom of God. Being a Christian means learning how to rightly order our loves, as Augustine saw. The Church becomes the new bearer of our identity and lays claim to our primary allegiance.

2) The state continues to be necessary. For Yoder the state still fills the role of maintaining order until the Lord returns. He explicitly disavows the idea of anarchism or that the Church could replace the functions of the state. Indeed, Yoder even goes so far as to say that the state exists for the sake of the Church – i.e. to makes its mission possible. Thus I think it’s fair to say that, for Yoder, the Church constitutes a new community but it doesn’t constitute a self-sufficient political order. (Perhaps Yoder parts company here with Hauerwas and/or Milbank?)

3) The state is under the lordship of Christ. The powers have been defeated, and, correspondingly, have been chastened by Jesus’ victory. No longer should people locate their identity or transcendent purpose in the politics of the earthly city. And the state can no longer claim the unqualified loyalty of its subjects. This doesn’t mean that the state won’t continue to overstep the bounds of its legitimate functions, but that is when the Church must call it to change.

4) As a corollary to 3, Christians have the task of challenging the social order to improve. The fact that the powers have been subordinated to Christ means that Christians should challenge the state when it claims authority that doesn’t belong to it. And they will also seek incremental improvements in the social order, even while recognizing that there is no permanent or definitive political order to be built.

I would add that, contra Neuhaus, this means that it’s perfectly consistent for someone committed to pacifism to critique the state’s use of force. An Augustinian pacifist could recognize the state cannot renounce coercion but still challenge it to do better. This could take the form of insisting that the state live up to certain stated principles such as just war theory.

No doubt I’m missing a lot here, but it seems to me that an Augustinian position that recognizes the fragmentary, limited and fragile nature of any earthly peace or justice is quite compatible with a “sectarian” view that the role of the Church is to witness to God’s reign through Christ. The pilgrim Church has the dual task of making disciples and witnessing to the larger society.

Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada has been elected to the post of minority leader in the Senate, replacing Tom Daschle. Sen. Reid is characterized by CNN as opposing abortion rights (it also says he’s pro gun rights). NARAL gives him a 29% approval rating, while National Right to Life gives him a 55%. Could this be a bid to cross the red/blue divide?