Can Democracy be Christian? Reflections on How To (Not) Be a Political Theologian

I have always assumed that any theology reflects a politics, whether that politics is acknowledged or not. The crucial question is: what kind of politics is theologically assumed?

In the tradition in which I was educated, it was assumed that democratic politics was normative for Christians. Because I do not share that presumption, some think I have no politics. In truth, I have no stake one way or the other in being counted among those doing what is often called “political theology.”

I have always resisted modifying theology with descriptors that suggest theology is the possession of certain groups or perspectives. For me, nothing is more important than the fundamental task of theology to be of service to the church; it belongs to the church. I am well aware that time and place make a difference for how theology is done. But too often I fear when theology is made subservient to this or that qualifier, it has inadequate means with which to resist becoming a mere ideology.

It is true, however, that there is no “method” that can protect theologians from engaging in ideological modes of thought, even when they claim to be doing theology. Theology stands under the permanent temptation to “choose sides,” which means theology can become ideological long before anyone notices. I have no objection to calling theology “Christian,” but that description does not insure that theology that bears the name will be free of ideological perversion. “Christian” is no guarantee that theology can be safeguarded against being put at the service of political loyalties and practices that betray the Gospel.

I resist using the phrase “political theology” for many of the same reasons I try to avoid the phrase “social ethics.” Ask yourself what kind of ethic would not be social? In similar fashion, I assume every theology – even theology done in a speculative mode – has been produced by and in turn reproduces a politics. If theology is done faithful to the gospel, it will not only be political but it will be so in a particular way. Thus John Howard Yoder’s observation in The Politics of Jesus, that appeals to Jesus as “political” too often are only slogans that fail to indicate the kind of politics Jesus incarnated.

What is “political theology”?

Whether or not I am a political theologian depends on how “political theology” is understood. It is important to remember that the nomenclature “political theology” has only recently been reintroduced into discussions in theology and political theory. Indeed, as Elizabeth Phillips rightly reminds us, political theology did not originally come from Christian theology, but rather originated in Athens in which politics was understood as the art of seeking the common good of the polis. Phillips observes that task was later taken up by Christian thinkers like Augustine, who compared and contrasted Christianity to what had been done in the name of political theology.

The phrase “political theology,” however, has only recently been reintroduced into political and legal theory through the work ofCarl Schmitt. Schmitt maintained that all significant concepts that constitute the legitimating discourses of modern state formations are in fact secularized theological concepts. Phillips observes that this claim has given new life to diverse approaches to “the political” – not the least being the discussions and ongoing debates around Schmitt’s strong claim about the totalizing character of modern politics. Accordingly, political theology has become an attempt to identify how ideas concerning salvation and devotion to God migrated from Christian theology to the nation state.

Paul Kahn argues that Schmitt’s understanding of sovereignty has structured an inquiry into the political that is a kind of mirror image of the political theory of liberalism. For Schmitt, it is not the law but the exception, not the judge but the sovereign, not reason but decision that determines the character of the political. Kahn argues that Schmitt’s inversion of liberal presuppositions about politics is so extreme, one “might think of political theology as the dialectical negation of liberal political theory.” Given my identification as a critic of liberal political theory, some might – with some justification -think I am rightly described as a political theologian.

I doubt, however, I deserve such a description. I confess it is tempting to claim that identity as a way to counter the oft made criticism that I am a “sectarian, fideistic, triabalist” who is trying to get Christians to abandon the task of securing justice through participation in politics. It is true, moreover, that I find much of the work being done in political theology to be quite congenial with the way I think about the political challenges facing Christians in contexts such as America. But the path I have taken for how I understand the political stance Christians should assume in the world in which we find ourselves is quite different from those who now identify themselves with “political theology.”

In order to explain that “path,” as well as how I now think about the politics of Christian existence, I need to provide an account of how Christians in America became convinced they had a moral obligation to be political actors in what they took to be democratic politics. The expression “the politics of Christian existence” I use to describe my position indicates my distance from the story I have to tell about how Christians came to ask themselves what political responsibilities they had as Christians. That question would often produce investigations into the relation of Christianity and politics. From my perspective, that way of putting the matter – namely, “What is the relationship between Christianity and politics?” – is to have failed to account for the political reality of the church.

My point is not unlike John Howard Yoder’s argument concerning the inadequacy of H. Richard Niebuhr’s “method” in Christ and Culture. Yoder argued that the very way Niebuhr posed the problem of the relation of Christ to culture failed to be properly Christological, just to the extent that the Christ who is Lord is separated from Jesus of Nazareth. Yoder argued that Niebuhr’s account of Christ as the exemplification of radical monotheism failed to give adequate expression to the full and genuine human existence of the man Jesus of Nazareth. That Christological mistake, from Yoder’s point of view, shaped the problematic character of Niebuhr’s typology because recognition of Jesus’s full humanity is necessary to recognize that Jesus himself is a “cultural reality.” As a result, the Christ of Christ and Culture was assumed to be alien to culture, thus creating the problematic that shaped Niebuhr’s book.

But before going any further, what I must now try to do is to tell the story of the “and” that created the question of the relation of Christianity and politics.

How Christians became “political” in America: From Rauschenbusch to Niebuhr

The story I have to tell is not unlike the story I planned to tell by writing a book on the development of Christian ethics in America. In a chapter in A Better Hope – entitled, “Christian Ethics in America (and the Journal of Religious Ethics): A Report on a Book I Will Not Write” – I explain why I did not write the book. I did not write the book because I did not want to write about a tradition I thought had come to an end.

That the tradition had come to an end had everything to do with what I took to be the storyline of the book. The storyline is that the subject of Christian ethics in America was, first and foremost, America. That such was and still remains the case means: just to the extent Christians got the politics they had identified as Christian – that is, democratic politics – they seemed no longer to have anything politically interesting to say as Christians.

Put differently, I suggested that the book I did not write would ask the dramatic question of how a tradition that began with a book by Walter Rauschenbusch entitled, Christianizing the Social Order, would end with a book by James Gustafson entitled, Can Ethics Be Christian? The story I sought to tell was meant to explore how that result came to be by concentrating on people such as Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, James Gustafson and John Howard Yoder. Yoder, of course, did not stand in the same tradition as those from Rauschenbusch to Gustafson, but that was just the point – namely, that only an outsider could offer the fresh perspective the mainstream theological tradition so desperately needed.

It is not quite true that I did not write the book I had planned. I did write a number of essays on Rauschenbusch, Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, and James Gustafson that developed some themes that the proposed book was to be about. What I failed to do, and the failure was intentional, was to bring these essays and chapters together in one book. I do not regret that decision, but that I did not write the book means I can use this opportunity to make explicit how the development of Christian thinking about politics resulted in the loss of the politics of the church.

A strange claim to be sure. The social gospel was, after all, largely a movement of churchmen to convince their fellow Christians that they had a calling to engage in the work of social reconstruction. Of course, the central reality for the social gospel was not the church but the kingdom of God. Yet, as Rauschenbusch claimed in A Theology for the Social Gospel, the church is the social factor in salvation because it “brings social forces to bear on evil.”

“It offers Christ not only many human bodies and minds to serve as ministers of his salvation, but its own composite personality, with a collective memory storied with great hymns and Bible moral feelings, and with a collective will set on righteousness.”

Rauschenbusch appealed to Schleiermacher to emphasize that the church is the social organism that makes it possible for us to share in the consciousness of Christ. According to Rauschenbusch, the individual is saved by membership in the church because the church is necessary to make Christ’s consciousness the consciousness of every member of the church. It is not the institutional character of the church, its continuity, ministry or doctrine that saves, but rather the church provides salvation by making the Kingdom of God present.

According to Rauschenbusch, the Kingdom of God is the heart of the revolutionary force of Christianity. It was the loss of the Kingdom ideals that put the church on her path to abandon her social and political commitments. As a result, the movements for democracy and social justice were left without religious backing. In the process, many Christians lost any sense that social justice might have something to do with salvation. Absent the Kingdom, Christians failed to emphasize the three commitments that the Kingdom entails:

• to work for a social order that guarantees to all personalities their freest and highest development;
• to secure the progressive reign of love in human affairs so that the use of force and legal coercion become superseded; and
• the free surrender of property rights which means the refusal to support monopolistic industries.

All of which can be summed up by Rauschenbusch’s claim that the social gospel is the religious response to the historic advent of democracy. For Rauschenbusch, the social gospel sought to put the democratic spirit which the church inherited from Jesus and the prophets once more in control of the institution of the church. Another word for salvation, Rauschenbusch asserts, isdemocracy because Jesus’s highest redemptive act was to take God by the hand and call him “our Father.” By doing so Jesus democratized the conception of God and in the process, not only saved humanity, but “he saved God.”

The Christian’s task is to work to extend this democratic ideal. Rauschenbusch thinks the ideal that has been largely achieved in the political sphere, but now the same democratic ideals must be applied to the economic realm. That means Christians must work to see that the brotherhood of man is expressed in the common possession of economic resources of society. They must also seek to secure the spiritual good of humanity by insuring such a good is set high above the private profit interests of all materialistic groups. Rauschenbusch was convinced, moreover, that these were not unrealizable ideals, but possible achievements Christians could bring to fruition if the gospel was recognized to be a social gospel.

It is tempting to dismiss Rauschenbusch as hopelessly naive, but that would be a mistake. His rhetoric invites the judgment that he is far too “optimistic,” but it should not be forgotten that after Rauschenbusch it was assumed by most people in mainstream Protestant denominations in America that Christians had a responsibility to be politically active in order to extend democratic practices.

Reinhold Niebuhr will criticize Rauschenbusch for failing to account for the necessity of conflict and coercion for the establishment of justice, but Niebuhr never called into question Rauschenbusch’s fundamental insight that Christians have to make use of politics to achieve justice. Critical of the social gospel he may have been, Niebuhr simply assumed that Christians must be politically responsible. Niebuhr’s chastened realism, to be sure, was a critical response to Rauschenbusch’s far too optimistic presumption that justice was achievable, but in many ways Niebuhr’s criticisms of the social gospel was made possible by the achievement of that movement.

Of course, it was sin that determined Niebuhr’s fundamental perspective on the necessity of politics. Because we are sinners justice can be achieved only by degrees of coercion, as well as resistance to coercion. Thus his oft made claim that “the political life of man must constantly steer between the Scylla of anarchy and the Charybdis of tyranny.” That alternative – anarchy or tyranny – was the kind of dualism Niebuhr often confidently declared were our only choices if we did not strive to sustain democratic life and institution. Thus his contention that democracy is the worst form of all governments, except all other forms of government, because democracy provides an alternative to totalitarianism or anarchy.

For Niebuhr, Christians have a stake in democratic societies because, given the realism that the Christian understanding of sin requires, Christians know “that a healthy society must seek to achieve the greatest possible equilibrium of power, the greatest possible centers of power, the greatest possible social checks of the administration of power, and the greatest possible inner moral check on human ambition, as well as the most effective use of forms of power in which consent and coercion are compounded.” Democracies at their best are, therefore, able to achieve unity of purpose within the conditions of freedom and to maintain freedom within the framework of order.

It is particularly important to note that for Niebuhr democracy is a system of government that does not require the governed to be virtuous. Rather, it is a form of social organization that limits self-interested men from pursuing their interests in a manner that does not destroy community. Of course, a too-consistent pessimism concerning our ability to transcend our interests can lead to absolutist political theories. So Niebuhr is not suggesting that democracies can survive without some sense of justice. Rather he is reminding us that, as he puts it in what is probably his most famous epigram, “man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

The task of social Christianity, for Niebuhr, is not to advocate particular solutions for economic or social ills, but to produce people of modesty about what can be accomplished given our sinful condition. It is equally important that same modesty be applied to the church, which is no less under the power of sin. In fact, from Niebuhr’s point of view, the sins of the church may even be more destructive given the temptation to identify religious politics with the politics of God. For Niebuhr, the task of the church is:

“to bear witness against every form of pride and vainglory, whether in the secular or in the Christian culture, and be particularly intent upon our own sins lest we make Christ the judge of the other but not of ourselves.”

The contrasts between Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr are clear, though they share more than is immediately apparent. In particular, democracy plays a very similar role in their respective positions. The question of the relation of Christianity and politics is fundamentally resolved for Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr if the politics the Christian is to presume as normative is a democratic politics. Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr are vague about what makes a democracy democratic, but the language of democracy became their way to assure Christians in America that they must “be political.”

The difference John Howard Yoder makes

I simply assumed, as I suspect almost anyone that did work in Christian ethics in the second half of the twentieth century, that Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr’s different understanding and justification of democracy was a given. Yet, even before I had read John Howard Yoder, I was beginning to explore issues in democratic theory that would make me worry about the assumption that democracy is normative for Christians.

For example, in the earliest article I wrote on Christianity and politics, “Politics, Vision, and the Common Good,” I began to worry about issues intrinsic to democratic practice and theory. The civil rights movement, the protest against the war in Vietnam and questions of economic inequality made me question pluralist justifications of democratic processes. Drawing on the work of Robert Paul Wolff, Ted Lowi and Sheldon Wolin, I begin to explore what alternatives there might be to Niebuhr’s “realism.”

The article on politics and the common good was pared with another chapter in Vision and Virtue entitled, “Theology and the New American Culture.” “Theology and the New American Culture” is probably best described as an attempt at theological journalism. Reinhold Niebuhr was the master of this genre as he ably helped us see what seemed to be quite theoretical issues in political theory had concrete manifestations. In “Theology and the New American Culture,” I was trying to suggest that the cultural despair that was so evident among many in the 1960s was not accidentally related to some of the fundamental presumptions of liberal democratic theory and practice. Drawing on Philip Slater’s The Pursuit of Loneliness, I tried to show there was a connection between our isolation from one another and our inability to discover goods in common through the political process.

Somehow, and it may have come from reading the Social Encyclicals, I began to think there was a deep tension between liberal political theory and accounts of politics that appealed to the common good. Niebuhr’s political realism expressed in terms of interest group liberalism can, at best, give you an account of common interests. For Niebuhr, as well as more secular accounts of liberal democratic theory, there are no goods in common that can be discovered as well as serve democratic politics. The democratic state, as Ernst-Wolfgang Bockenforde has argued, is an order of freedom and of peace rather than an order of truth and virtue necessary for the recognition of common goods. Accordingly, defenders of liberal democracies seek to establish institutions that make possible the achievement of relative justice without people themselves being just.

As I have said, I was just beginning to explore critical questions internal to issues in democratic theory. That way putting the matter is, I think, important because it indicates I was not calling into question the presumption that some account of democracy is important for Christians if we were to be politically responsible. My book A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic, published in 1981, included a chapter entitled, “The Church and Liberal Democracy.” In that essay, I began to try to distinguish democratic practice from liberal political theory. Drawing on the work of C.B. Macpherson, I tried to show how liberalism, particularly in its economic modes, subverted the democratic commitment to sustain a common life necessary to make possible lives of virtue. Accordingly, I argued just to the extent the church is or can be a school for virtue, Christians can be crucial for the sustaining of democratic social and political life.

By the time I wrote A Community of Character, I had read and begun to absorb the work of John Howard Yoder. What I learned from Yoder meant I was destined to be labelled a sectarian, fideistic, tribalist because I was allegedly tempting Christians to withdraw from political engagement. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact, the attempt to distinguish democratic practice from liberal political theory reflected my conviction that Christians could not and should not withdraw from serving their neighbour through political engagement.

Some people suggested the book I wrote with Romand Coles, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations Between a Radical Democrat and a Christian, represented a more positive approach to the political than my previous work. That may be true of the tone of the book, but I understood the conversation between Coles and myself to be the continuation of my attempt to find a way to talk about forms of democratic life that were not shaped by liberal presuppositions.

That is not to say, however, that Yoder did not make a difference in how I thought about Christian political engagement. Prior to reading Yoder, I had the sense that my emphasis on the virtues meant that the church was a crucial politics for the formation of lives of virtue. The church became the polis that Aristotle knew had to exist but, in his case, did not. Accordingly, Yoder’s ecclesiology supplied the politics I needed to make intelligible the stress on the virtues. That meant, as Daniel Bell argues, that I had to resist any politics that portrays the church as apolitical in a manner that leaves the formation of the body to the state. I refused any reduction of politics to statecraft in order to emphasize the political character of the church as a political space in its own right.

From such a perspective, the moral emptiness at the heart of liberalism could be construed as an advantage for Christians if the church was capable of producing lives that are not empty. Liberalism as a practice for organizing cooperative arrangements between moral strangers could be good for Christians, though I think it bad for liberals. Indeed, I thought my critiques of liberalism were charitable because my criticisms were an attempt to suggest to liberals that there are alternatives to a liberal way of life. Of course, one of the difficulties with that way of conceiving the political mission of the church is too often Christians had policed their Christianity to make it compatible with liberal tolerance. The other difficulty being that the alleged indifference of liberal states concerning formation of “citizens” was anything but “neutral.” In fact, the liberal state is quite good at the formation of people with virtues to sustain war.

I do not mean to suggest that Yoder’s influence on me made little difference. In fact, it made all the difference. Thus his claim:

“To ask, ‘What is the best form of government?’ is itself a Constantinian question. It is representative of an already ‘established’ social posture. It assumes that the paradigmatic person, the model ethical agent, is in a position of such power that it falls to him to evaluate alternative worlds and to prefer the one in which he himself (for the model ethical agent assumes himself to be part of ‘the people’) shares the rule.”

Yoder’s challenge, interestingly enough, made me wonder – given my interest in exploring issues in democratic theory – whether, in fact, rather than being a “sectarian” I did not continue to be a Constantinian. Of course, if Alex Sider is right – and I certainly think he is – it is very hard to avoid being Constantinian because even Yoder was unable to avoid that fate. According to Sider, Constantinianism is not so much a “problem” as it is a totalizing discourse. That means that the resources one has to map a way out of Constantinianism will themselves likely be implicated in Constantinianism.

In short, Constantinianism conditions the possibility for its own investigation just to the extent it determines what is to count as history. That is why Sider argues that more fundamental than the distinction between transcendental and empirical uses of the description “Constantinianism” is the distinction between historicist and eschatological discourse. That means, for Yoder, “the true meaning of history is in the church. And this history is, at least in part, one of disavowal and apostasy.” But the very narration of Constantinianism as apostasy reproduces a Constantinian view of history.

Sider’s account of the unavoidability of Constantinianism makes clear how, in spite of what I have learned from Yoder, I have in many ways remained a Constantinian. Yet I have never pretended that everything associated with Constantinianism is to be rejected. Certainly Yoder did not think that such a rejection warranted or required because he often saw much good in some developments associated with Christendom arrangements.

It is, moreover, important to note that Yoder’s observation about the question of what is the best form of government is one made in the context of his chapter, “The Christian Case for Democracy.” With his characteristic analytical power, Yoder explores in that essay the limits and possibilities of appeals to the rule of the people, observing that it is by no means clear why rule by the people is a good, and how would we know it to be good if the people did rule? Yoder worries that the glorification of democracy as the rule of “the people,” as well as the presumption that democracy represents a form of government that does not suffer from the disabilities of other forms of government, results in uncritical support of wars fought in the name of democracy.

So his strategy in this chapter on democracy can almost be described as Niebuhrian, just to the extent he seeks to humble the rhetoric surrounding the uncritical celebration of democracy by Christians. Yet, he argues if Christians accepted our minority status in societies like those in North America, we would be free to hold rulers to account by asking them to rule consistent with the rhetoric they use to legitimate their power. What we dare not forget, however, is that the assumption that “we” the people are governing ourselves is actually not the case. We are governed by elites. Democracies are no less oligarchic than other forms of government – but it is true, according to Yoder, that democratic oligarchies tend to be the least oppressive.

For Yoder the task is not to justify “democracy.” Rather he simply accepts the fact that we are told we live in a democracy. He is not convinced we know what that entails. But drawing on Alexander Lindsay’s argument in The Modern Democratic State that the origins of democracy were in Puritan and Quaker congregations where the dignity of the adversary made dialogue not only necessary but possible, Yoder argues the church can serve democratic orders in a similar fashion by being a community that continues to respect the adversary both within and outside of the church. From Yoder’s perspective, the church best serves the social orders that claim to be democratic by taking seriously the internal calling of the church rather than “becoming tributary to whatever secular consensus seems strong at the time.”

That is the strategy I have tried to adopt in my work. It is a strategy that makes any identification as a “political theologian” doubtful. There is much to learn from work in political theology, but the way I think about Christian political engagement is less grand than most of what is identified as work in political theology. For example, I think calling attention to the work of Jean Vanierhas a political purpose. For it must surely be the case that the existence and support of the work of Vanier to secure homes for the mentally disabled indicates the kind of moral commitment necessary to sustain a politics capable of recognizing the dignity of each human being. But to hold up the work of Vanier as politically significant I am sure seems to many simply a way to avoid the primary political challenges before societies like the United States of America. That may be the case, but that is the way I have learned to think theologically about politics.

In his The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity, Robert Wilken observes that Christianity is a culture-forming religion. Consequently, the growth of Christian communities led to the transformation of the cultures of the ancient world, which meant the creation of several new civilizations. At the heart of that process was language because, as Wilken suggests, “culture has to do with the pattern of inherited meanings and sensibilities embedded in rituals, institutions, laws, practices, images, and the stories of people.” Wilken’s description of the conceptual revolution represented by Christianity rightly directs attention to the significance of language as the heart of politics. That is why I resist any attempt to suggest that the church is one thing and politics something else.

Luke Bretherton puts this just right when he suggests that doing church and doing politics are both about the formation of shared speech and action that forms a common world. Therefore, according to Bretherton, politics and ecclesiology name two mutually constitutive locations where a sensus communis can be forged. I take it to be one of the characteristics of the culture currently described as democratic is the loss of elegant speech. It is not simply the loss of elegance, but the language used in politics is intended to obscure rather than illumine. If, as Bretherton suggests, ecclesiology is politics by another name, the church can serve the world in which we find ourselves by attending to our speech. Well-formed sermons may turn out to be the most important contribution Christians can make for a politics that has some ambition to be truthful. To so conceive Christian witness may seem insignificant and to require patience we do not have, but that is why Jean Vanier is so important. He is the culture Christianity produces.

The church as foot-dragging

I am aware that these last suggestions may seem far too abstract, so let me try to suggest the kind of concrete politics I think they entail – at least the kind of politics for Christians in advanced capitalist societies – by calling attention to James Scott’s recent book, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. I am well aware that to identify with Scott’s account of anarchism will only confirm for many I am a “sectarian, fideistic, tribalist,” but I have long given up on any attempt to counter that charge. That I am directing attention to Scott’s book is not meant to suggest that he provides the only way to think about political character of the church. In fact, I am quite sympathetic with Luke Bretherton’s more robust account of what a Christian politics might look like.

One of the attractions of Scott’s account of anarchy is his reticence about any account of anarchy that tries to be comprehensive. Accordingly, he describes his “method” as an “anarchist squint” that is intended to help us see what we might otherwise miss. Scott does not deny that Proudhon’s description of anarchism as “mutuality or cooperation without hierarchy or state rule” certainly captures some of what may pass as anarchy, but that description may not adequately suggest the anarchist tolerance for confusion and improvisation that accompanies social learning. Scott has no reason to try to nail down a definition of anarchism, being content to use anarchism to describe a defence of politics, conflict and debate, along with the perpetual uncertainty and learning they entail. That means, unlike many anarchists, Scott does not believe the state is always the enemy of freedom.

Scott’s project might be called an exercise in small politics. For example, he tells about his stay in Germany when he was trying to learn German by forcing himself to interact with fellow pedestrians in the small town of Neubrandenburg. He tells the story of crossing the street to get to the train station in obedience to lights that indicated when it was legal to cross the street. He reports that fifty or sixty people would often wait at the corner for the light to change even though they could see no traffic was coming. He reports after five hours of observation he saw no more than two people cross against the light. Those two who would cross against the lights had to be willing to receive from those that waited gestures of disapproval. Scott reports he had to screw up his courage to cross the street against their disapproval. He did so justifying his law-breaking performance by remembering that his grandparent’s could have used more the spirit of breaking the law in the name of justice. But because they had lost the practice of breaking small laws, they no longer knew when it really matters to break the law. Scott calls such practice of law breaking “anarchist calisthenics” – implying that Germans could use the practice.

Scott observes that under authoritarian regimes, subjects who are denied public means of protest have no recourse but to resort to “foot-dragging, sabotage, poaching, theft, and, ultimately, revolt.” Modern forms of democracy allegedly make such forms of dissent obsolete. But Scott argues that the assumed promises of democracy that makes “foot-dragging” no longer necessary is seldom realized in practice. He argues that what needs to be noticed is that most of the political reforms that have made some difference for democratic change have been the result of disruption of the public order. Accordingly, Scott argues that anarchism at least is a reminder that the cultivation of insubordination and lawbreaking are crucial for political developments we call democracy.

Yet Scott observes that proponents of liberal democratic theory seldom attend to the role of crisis and institutional failure that lead to political reform. The fact that liberal democracies in the West are generally run for the top 20% of those that possess wealth is no doubt one of the reasons for the occlusion of crisis to account for democratic developments. Indeed, Scott observes the greatest failure of liberal democracies is the lack of protection they give to the economic and security interests of their least advantaged citizens. As a result, Scott argues, the contradiction between the renewal of democracy by major episodes of extra-institutional disorder and the promise of democracy as the institutionalization of peaceful change is seldom noticed.

Scott’s book is an account of episodes of foot-dragging and disruption. In particular, he directs attention to matters not often considered “political” to illumine our political landscape in advanced industrial societies. For example, he pokes fun at the use of quantitative measures of productivity in the academy in order to show how democracies like the United States have embraced meritocratic criteria for the elite selection and distribution of public funds to create “a vast and deceptive ‘antipolitics machine’ designed to turn legitimate political questions into neutral objective administrative exercises governed by experts.” This strategy to depoliticize protest masks a lack of faith in the possibilities anarchists and democrats have in the mutuality and education that can result from common action.

Scott’s defence of anarchy, therefore, turns out to be a defence of politics itself. He observes that, “if there is one conviction that anarchist thinkers and non-demagogic populists share, it is faith in the capacity of democratic citizenry to learn and grow through engagement in the public sphere.” Yet he argues that the formation of bodies wrought through populist politics is often defeated by something as simple as an SAT exam. For that exam serves as a way to convince middle class-whites that affirmative action is a choice between objective merit and favouritism. As a result, the SAT robs us of the public dialogue we need to have about how educational opportunity ought to be allocated in a democratic and plural society. Cost-benefit analysis often functions in a similar way to make the conflict needed seem petty.

Scott ends his book by directing our attention to the role of “history” in modern politics. The purpose of such histories is to summarize major historical events by making them legible by a single narrative. As a result, the “radical contingency” of history is domesticated in an effort to underwrite the assumption that the way things turned out is the only way they could be. Such condensations of history, the needs of elites to project an image of control, creates a blindness to the fact that the “emancipator gains for human freedom have not been the result of orderly, institutional procedures but of disorderly, unpredictable, spontaneous action cracking open the social order from below.”

I confess it is with some hesitancy that I use Scott’s account of anarchy to exemplify what a Christian politics might look like. I worry that “anarchy” may suggest that I have no use for institutions that inevitably involve hierarchies of authority. I assume it is never a question of whether hierarchies of authority should or should not exist, but rather how authority should be understood as an aid for the discovery of the common good of a community. Indeed, I am in deep agreement with Victor Lee Austin’s argument in Up With Authority that because the common good of communities is not one isolated goal, “authority is needed because it is desirable that particular goods should be taken care of by particular agencies.” The irony is that such an account of authority stands as a challenge – a challenge that may appear to threaten anarchy – in a liberal social order in which common goods by design are reduced to common interest.

The church is rightly a hierarchical institution. It is so because the church is a community that believes the truth matters. Accordingly, the saints and martyrs stand as authorities necessary to test the changes necessary if the church is to remain faithful to the gospel. Those singled out for the offices in the church to insure that the church attend to the saints must recognize that the exercise of their authority can never be an end in itself. But it is “political” in the most basic sense of what it means to be political and accordingly can serve as an example for the exercise of authority beyond the church. If that is a Constantinian strategy, then I am a Constantinian.

I have already I referred to Alex Sider’s suggestion that Yoder’s anti-Constantinianism is best expressed in terms of the church being the true meaning of history. That is an extraordinary claim, requiring a people to exist who know how to drag their feet when confronted by those who think they know where history is headed – which, I hope, is one way to say that the church does not havea politics, but rather the church is God’s politics for the world. If Christians are well-formed by that politics, they hopefully will serve the world well by developing an “ecclesial squint.” By doing so they might just be able to serve their neighbour by helping us see “it did not have to be.” That, moreover, is the most radical politics imaginable.

Stanley Hauerwas is Senior Research Fellow at the Duke University Divinity School. His most recent books areApproaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life and Without Apology: Sermons for Christ’s Church.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/06/24/4032239.htm