Christianity and Contemporary Politics E-Book

Luke Bretherton

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 564

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Congratulations to Luke Bretherton on winning the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing for Christianity and Contemporary Politics!

Relations between religious and political spheres continue to stir passionate debates on both sides of the Atlantic. Through a combination of theological reflection and empirical case studies, Bretherton succeeds in offering timely and invaluable insights into these crucial issues facing 21^st century societies. 

• Explores the relationship between Christianity and contemporary politics through case studies of faith-based organizations, Christian political activism and welfare provision in the West; these case studies assess initiatives including community organizing, fair trade, and the sanctuary movement
  Offers an insightful, informative account of how Christians can engage politically in a multi-faith, liberal democracy
• Integrates debates in political theology with inter-disciplinary analysis of policy and practice regarding religious social, political and economic engagement in the USA, UK, and continental Europe
• Reveals how Christians can help prevent the subversion of the church – and even of politics itself – by legal, bureaucratic, and market mechanisms, rather than advocating withdrawal or assimilation
• Engages with the intricacies of contemporary politics whilst integrating systematic and historical theological reflection on political and economic life

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Note

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Terms and Conditions of Political Life

Religion and Postsecular Politics

Theological Politics and the Ecclesial-Turn

Summary of Aims and Methodology

Notes

1 Faith-Based Organizations and the Emerging Shape of Church-State Relations

Introduction

“Working Together”: The Shaping of Relations between the State and Religious Groups in a Multi-Faith Society

Social Cohesion, Social Capital, and the “Salvation” of Civil Society

Liberalism and the Continuing Requirements of Public Reason

Theological Politics and the Question of What Constitutes Faithful Witness

Ecclesiology and the Political Mission of the Church

Summary

Notes

2 Local

Introduction

The Alinsky Approach: The Work of Broad-Based Community Organizing

Eschatology, Politics, and the Mutual Ground of the Saeculum

Christian Realism Redivivus?

A Thomistic Democratic Politics?

Reweaving Civil Society

Politics without Piety Is Pitiless; Piety without Politics Is Pitiful

Summary

Notes

3 National

Introduction

Theological Politics and the Liberal Democratic Response to Refugees

Refugees as Bare Life

Bare Life and the Limits of Humanitarianism

Hallowing Bare Life: A Doxological Response

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Sanctuary: The Practice of Hallowing Bare Life

Summary

Notes

4 Global

Introduction

Defining Political Consumerism

Consumerism and the Formation of Desire

Political Consumerism as Apprenticeship in the Virtues

Political Consumerism as Neighbor Love

Fair Trade as Contradiction

Fair Trade, Globalization and the Emergence of Political Consumerism

Ordinary Politics and the Peace of Babylon

Summary

Notes

Conclusion Toward a Politics of Hospitality and a Theology of Politics

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

This edition first published 2010

© 2010 Luke Bretherton

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

Registered Office

John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom

Editorial Offices

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148–5020, USA

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Luke Bretherton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bretherton, Luke.

Christianity and contemporary politics: the conditions and possibilities of faithful witness/Luke Bretherton.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-9968-1 (hardcover: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-9969-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Christians-Political activity. 2. Christianity and politics. 3. Church and state. 4. Citizenship-Religious aspects. 5. Church work. I. Title.

BR115.P7B675 2010

261.7-dc22

2009029983

For my mother and father

But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jeremiah 29.7)

Preface

This book emerges in large part out of reflecting on the neighborhood in which I grew up and close to which I still live. I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in West London. My neighborhood was variously described as North Kensington, Notting Hill, Ladbroke Grove, and Holland Park. Each term had a different social, economic, and political nuance. The first denoted an oppositional identity, with its unspoken assertion “I don’t live in Chelsea”; the second made a claim for bohemian and literary color; the third for street solidarity and multicultural credibility; and the last accented class and good manners. As an insecure teenager I would make use of each of these descriptions so as to recalibrate my identity according to context and to whom I was talking. In addition to a sense of place, issues of class and ethnicity had to be negotiated: I was white and middle class in an area with a large Afro-Caribbean population. The Notting Hill Carnival went past the bottom of my street and in those days it was not perceived as a celebration of multicultural Britain but as a threat of violent disorder. The perception had some truth: there were a number of riots and murders and tensions always ran high. It was not until my late teens that I ventured down All Saints Road, a short walk from my house, as it was then the “frontline” between the Afro-Caribbean community and the police, and a white face was pointedly not welcome. But I had an additional identity that situated me as both an insider and an outsider simultaneously.

My parents are Evangelical Christians. To most of my school friends and neighbors, being this kind of Christian was a mark of weirdness and slightly suspect. For me, it meant that I felt I was supposed to disapprove of things everyone else seemed to find perfectly acceptable, namely sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Yet while it marked me out from my social class, looking back, I realize that it brought me closer to the world around me. We worshiped at a local Anglican church where black and white, rich and poor, old and young came together Sunday by Sunday and many times in between. In 1963, through the church, my parents helped set up and run Latimer Housing Association which provided good quality housing to low income families. It had been established as they began to see first hand the impact of the slum landlord Peter Rackman on members of their congregation. Rackman’s henchmen would violently evict sitting tenants of properties he purchased (as they had statutory protection against high rent increases) and then pack the properties with recent immigrants. New tenants did not have the same protection under the law as the sitting tenants had possessed following the relaxation of rent controls by the Conservative government in 1957. This meant that they could be charged any amount Rackman wished. Most of the new tenants were Afro-Caribbeans who had no choice but to accept the high rents as it was difficult for them to obtain housing in London at the time because of racism. Notting Hill was the main area in which Rackman operated. In response to his activities a number of housing associations were initiated. They raised money from friends, jumble sales, and taking out loans in order to buy properties to refurbish and rent out. It was a form of community self-organization that only later on was helped and supported by state-led initiatives. For many years Latimer’s office was the front half of our sitting room. I had to spend interminable amounts of time accompanying my parents to sort out various problems in the flats they administered, or waiting while my mother talked to some passer-by on the street about their rent situation.1

Two events drew all the different Christian denominations in the area together, including the large black majority Pentecostal church, Kensington Temple. The first was the communion services before Carnival where we would pray for peace and joy during the event. The second was the “Way of the Cross,” a Good Friday stational liturgy that reenacted the Passion through the streets and culminated in staging the crucifixion in one of the large council housing estates. A particularly memorable one involved Cardinal Basil Hume, the then Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, leading a meditation surrounded by the tower blocks of the Lancaster West estate after David, who was black, had played the role of Jesus and hung on a cross in the middle of the estate. This was at a time of intense racial conflict and unrest.

It was the churches that were central to the civic life of my neighborhood and the vector through which the different and otherwise unrelated communities intersected. Differences were not denied or overcome but did, at the very least, come into relationship and a common world of action and shared responsibility was forged. My parents’ relationship with Fr David Randall and Robin Tuck illustrates this. My parents were North Kensington Conservatives - a kind of Victorian civic conservatism that was very different to what my father viewed as the somewhat decadent, self-serving Conservatives who lived around Chelsea and South Kensington. Mrs Thatcher was a hero to him and he would fulminate against left-wing liberals who were, in his view, destroying the country. My parents are also very morally conservative. Fr Randall was a gay Anglo-Catholic and Christian Socialist priest who was much influenced by Liberation theology. Mr Tuck was an active member of the Liberal Party. Yet they all worked closely together in relation to the local Church of England primary school of which my mother is still a governor. Mr Tuck was the chair of governors, my mother the vice-chair, and it was Fr Randall’s church to which the school was attached. When the school was destroyed in 1983 as result of a fire their relationship was crucial to building a new one and amalgamating the school with another local Church of England primary school, in order to create a stronger and better institution. Theirs was not simply a professional or civic relationship, but an ecclesial friendship that interlaced the public and private, oikos and polis, and common worship. As well as committee meetings and signing contracts, they enjoyed each other’s hospitality and prayed and worshiped together.

The world I grew up in has been all but swept away by rising house prices, processes of gentrification, and the local impact of the City of London becoming the clearinghouse of global capitalism. There is little left of the conflicted yet common world that once existed. Notting Hill is now a homogenous if picturesque dormitory for plutocrats and their entourage. Most of its current immigrants are wealthy cosmopolitans from across the globe. Understandably they have little sense of place or involvement in the fabric of their neighborhood as they are only passing through. Of course, the irony is that when my parents moved into the area in 1961 they were the vanguard of these processes of gentrification. And gentrification has made the area safer, cleaner, and more prosperous.

What has all this to do with a book on Christianity and contemporary politics? Embedded in the home I grew up in was a particular understanding of the relationship between church, civil society, the market, and the state. In my parents’ response to the world around them the market had a place but it must know its place. Vulnerable strangers were not to be treated as commodities to be exploited for monetary gain, but potential neighbors to be hosted. The state had a role but neither law nor central government was either the best or first place to turn to in order to address social, economic, and political problems. In the first instance neighborhoods could organize themselves to address issues of poverty or racial and religious conflict. One’s identity, beliefs, and practices were to be hallowed and formed the deepest level of motivation, yet it was recognized that one’s own primary community, be it based on religion, class, or ethnicity, was never all encompassing and never sufficient in itself to sustain a life of human flourishing. Rather, a shared life based around goods in common - for example, the good of education, health, or family - must be forged in order that the welfare of both you and your neighbor might be met. As the recent history of Notting Hill suggests, if the power of either the state or the market or of one particular community becomes too dominant, the fragile ecology that sustains a common world of action and responsibility amid difference and difficulty will collapse under the stress.

Luke Bretherton Easter, 2009

Note

1 Latimer Housing Association was eventually merged with Octavia Hill Housing Association in 1985. My father is still a trustee.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Michael Banner, Stanley Hauerwas, Charles Mathewes, Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, Oliver O’Donovan, and Paul Janz for their comments on and critique of different aspects of this book; their insights were invaluable. I owe a huge debt to Maurice Glasman for the ongoing conversation, friendship, and perspective he has given me and without whom some of the key political insights could not have been developed. I am also greatly indebted to Neil Jamieson, Jonathan Lange, Jane Wills, Leo Penta, and all the many organizers and leaders of London Citizens and the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) for their trust, inspiration, and for opening out a world and a work to me that has provoked many of the reflections set out here. In relation to this I must thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for the grant that sponsored some of the research for Chapter 2 and David Perry and the Great Cities Institute, University of Illinois in Chicago for their generous hospitality during my use of the IAF archive. The AHRC grant is related to a three-year qualitative, historical, and theoretical study of the relationship between the churches and community organizing. A particular word of thanks is owed to my immediate colleagues at King’s College London, Alister McGrath, Andrew Walker, Pete Ward, and James Steven, all of whom have supported and enabled me to undertake this research in innumerable ways and whose conversation and encouragement have been key in its development. I would also like to thank my PhD students and the many students on the DMin and Theology, Politics, and Faith-Based Organizations MA who have interacted with various parts of this work. Their insights and responses, drawn as these students are from ongoing leadership in congregations and Christian ministries, have helped keep the work honest and engaged with their questions and struggles in negotiating faithfully the contemporary context. From another angle, I am grateful to John Casson and the participants in the Roundtable on Political Theology and Public Policy, which included representatives from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), civil servants, politicians, and party activists, who kept asking how current debates among Christian theologians related to the policy issues they faced on a daily basis. I am not sure if this book goes any way to answering their question, but I hope it clears some of the ground. I must thank Ashley Meany for his prayerful support of this work. My greatest thanks go to my wife, Caroline, and my children, Gabriel and Isaac, for sustaining and abiding with me amid the vicissitudes of the writing process. Lastly, I would like to thank Rebecca Harkin and all those at Wiley-Blackwell who have contributed to the production of this book.

Parts of Chapter 1 have been taken, with revisions, from an article that appeared in Political Theology, volume 7, number 3 (2007) under the title of “A New Establishment? Theological Politics and the Emerging Shape of Church–State Relations.” This is reprinted by permission of Equinox Publications Ltd.

Parts of Chapter 5 have been taken, with revisions, from an article that appeared in Studies in Christian Ethics, volume 19, number 1 (2006) under the title of “The Duty of Care to Refugees, Christian Cosmopolitanism, and the Hallowing of Bare Life.” This is reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd.

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

This book is an attempt to make sense of, on the one hand, the intersection between Christianity, place, and identity, and on the other, the relationship between church, civil society, the market, and the state. Understanding the relationship between church, civil society, the market, and the state is vital for addressing the central questions that dominate contemporary politics, namely: What are the limits of the state? What are the limits of money? And what are the limits of community? These questions about the limits of the state, the market, and community are political questions because they relate directly to the just and generous ordering of a common life. For Christians, the challenge is whether there is a specifically Christian response to these questions or whether they can simply accept the responses derived from other, non-Christian ways of framing politics.

Churches today are presenting a variety of answers to these three questions. Some respond by letting the church be construed by the modern bureaucratic state as either one more interest group seeking a share of public money or just another constituency within civil society which can foster social cohesion and make up the deficiencies of the welfare state. The former reduces the church to a client of the state’s patronage and the latter co-opts the church in a new form of establishment, one where the state sets the terms and conditions of, and thence controls, the relationship. Another response is for Christians to construe themselves as part of an identity politics. This entails reframing Christian political witness in terms of either multiculturalism – the church becoming just another minority identity group demanding recognition for its way of life as equally valid in relation to all others – or the rhetoric of rights the church decomposing itself into a collective of rights – bearing individuals pursuing freedom of religious expression. A third response is to let Christianity be construed by the market as a product to be consumed or commodity to be bought and sold so that in the religious marketplace Christianity is simply another privatized lifestyle choice, interchangeable with or equivalent to any other. These three responses can be summarized as the dynamics of co-option, competition, and commodification.

Yet the above responses do not represent the sum total of how churches are answering the questions about the limits of the state, the market, and community. If the wider implication of the dynamics of co-option, competition, and commodification is that they let the church be shaped by conceptualizations and forces external to Christian belief and practice, then there are other forms of practice that attempt patterns of response which are congruent with Christianity. It is these practices that are the subject of this book, which is an attempt to discern ways in which, at a practical level, churches and individual Christians are responding faithfully to the questions about the limits of the state, the market, and community. The first chapter assesses the debate about the state funding of faith-based organizations and their contribution to the provision of social welfare services, both in the US and the UK. The chapter situates church–state relations within the context of wider debates about the contribution of religious actors and religious discourse to public life and assesses how non-theological discourses understand the limits of particular communities in relation to the state. The second chapter develops a constructive model for how different faith groups can work together at a local level. It does this through a theological analysis of broad-based community organizing as exemplified in the work of the Industrial Areas Foundation in the US and London Citizens in the UK. This second chapter outlines how different religious groups, through working together (and thence beyond the bounds of their particular communities), can establish limits to the state and the market. The third chapter addresses debates about asylum seekers and immigration as a case study of the contribution of churches to national politics and the question of how to value national identity. This chapter develops an account of Christian cosmopolitanism as an alternative to, on the one hand, overly protectionist visions of the nationstate, and on the other, abstract accounts of liberal cosmopolitanism that call for borderless states. The chapter sets out a case for, on the one hand, the importance of the nation-state as a territorially bounded arena of law and order, and on the other, of how the nation-state has only relative value. The chapter ends with an analysis of the US Sanctuary movement as an example of political action that embodies a Christian cosmopolitan vision in practice. The last chapter assesses the possibilities of Christian political witness under conditions of economic globalization. It does this through examining the involvement of Christians in “political consumerism,” and in particular the Fair Trade movement, as a way of analyzing how Christians in the West can respond to their neighbors in more deprived and unstable parts of the world. The focus of this chapter is how a particular form of practice both values and tries to bring accountability to the globalized economy. At the same time, it sets out a “politics of ordinary time” that describes the responsibilities of ordinary political actors or citizens within their everyday life under conditions of globalization and how this intersects with Christian discipleship.

One way of conceptualizing the mixed response of the church to the questions about the limits of the state, the market, and community is via Augustine. My turn to Augustine is driven not only by the conceptual richness of the categories he developed but also because Augustine is a key figure both in the development of political thought and also in contemporary debates in political philosophy and theology. An additional reason to turn to Augustine is that historically we stand in a context analogous to his own. As Graham Ward notes: “Poised as [Augustine] was on the threshold between radical pluralism (which he called paganism) and the rise of Christendom, we stand on the other side of that history: at the end of Christendom and the re-emergence of radical (as distinct from liberal) pluralism.”1 As will become apparent, Augustine is a key conversation partner throughout the book and provides a common reference point for engagement with a number of other theologians and philosophers.

Augustine divides human societies in two: there is the city of God – which combines both the true church in this age and the New Jerusalem of the age to come – and Babylon or the earthly city.2 Augustine characterizes the division not as a division within society but as a division between societies. These two cities are understood as two polities coexistent in one space and time: the time before Christ’s return. Citizens of both cities seek peace; however, in the earthly city peace is achieved through the imposition of one’s own will by the exercise of force, and is at once costly in its creation,3 lacking in real justice,4 and unstable in its existence.5 For Augustine, the only true society and true peace exist in the city of God. Within Augustine’s theology the visible church is as much part of Babylon, and thus directed to prideful ends, as any other part of a society and we should be suspicious of any attempt to identify one particular take on Christianity as somehow the embodiment of the New Jerusalem now. The visible church is always a field of wheat and tares, combining the earthly city and the city of God, and so cannot be separated until the last judgment. An Augustinian political vision identifies the first three responses outlined above – that is, letting the church be co-opted by the state, or situating itself in competition with other minority groups in society, or commodifying Christianity – as forms of pride. They are attempts to create a peace in the church and pursue justice for the church by prideful means.

Augustine’s use of Babylon and Jerusalem as tropes draws on Jeremiah 29. The key passage in Jeremiah 29 states:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.6

For Augustine, Jeremiah 29 is an allegory of what it means to be a Christian in the earthly city while we wait, not for a return to Jerusalem, but the coming of the New Jerusalem. He writes:

For, while the two cities [the city of God and the earthly city] are intermingled, we also make use of the peace of Babylon. We do so even though the People of God is delivered from Babylon by faith, so that it is only for a while that we are pilgrims in her midst. It is for this reason, therefore, that the apostle admonishes the Church to pray for kings and for all that are in authority, adding these words: “that we may live a quiet and tranquil life in all godliness and love.” [1 Tim. 2.2] Again, when the prophet Jeremiah foretold the captivity which was to befall the ancient People of God, he bade them, by divine command, to go obediently into Babylon, thereby serving God even by their patient endurance, and he himself admonished them to pray for Babylon, saying “in the peace thereof shall ye have peace”: the temporal peace which is for the time being shared by the good and the wicked alike.7

Augustine is recognizing that before Christ’s return the godly and the wicked share a common world, a world in which the sheep and goats can only be separated by God at the last judgment. And that while the People of God are no longer bound by Babylon, until Christ’s return, they share in and benefit from the peace and prosperity of Babylon, i.e., the prideful and sinful earthly city. Unlike the responses that fall prey to the dynamics of co-option, competition, and commodification, it is the contention of this book that practices such as Fair Trade or broad-based community organizing are ways in which the church pursues the peace of Babylon, all the time recognizing that this peace is a contingent, relative, and earthly peace. As a whole, the book attempts to hold up a mirror to the churches so they might discern patterns of faithful witness amid the earthly city and recognize when they are motivated more by pride or self-love than by love of God and neighbor.

The allegorical contrast between Jerusalem and Babylon is of course a central theme not only in Augustine but also in the Bible. In the New Testament it is seen most explicitly in Revelation. Despite the very negative portrayal of Babylon as representing the empire of the anti-Christ, Revelation does not counsel Christians to leave Babylon but to be faithful witnesses martyrs – within Babylon so that all peoples might come to acknowledge and worship God.8 Following Revelation, Augustine sees the Roman Empire as equivalent to Babylon – a strange, sinful, and evil place directed away from the love of God – but a place that nevertheless, Christians, for the moment, are called to serve God within and enjoy its peace. Augustine is in many ways doing no more than interpreting Paul’s advice in Romans 13.1–7 – a passage that directly echoes Jeremiah 29 in its advice to a fearful, oppressed, and diaspora community gathered in a pagan city.9 Paul advises the church in Rome to be subject to the governing authorities that, although pagan, nevertheless serve the purposes of God.

The challenge of Jeremiah 29 is to repentance and to relearning obedience to God.10 However, the place and manner of this learning is somewhat counterintuitive: the Israelites were to learn obedience through pursuing the welfare of Babylon and through forming a common life with pagans and oppressors. Jeremiah’s call to seek the welfare of Babylon comes to a defeated, subjugated, and marginal people struggling to make sense of what has happened to them.11 In many ways that is the situation of Christians today: the church no longer has priority and Christians are not in control. The salience of Jeremiah 29 is its call to become part of the public life of the city and to reject the false prophets who perpetuate illusions of escape into a private world of gated communities, religious fantasies centered on Christ’s immanent return, or daydreams of revolution; while at the same time, Jeremiah warns us not give way to a despairing fatalism that believes nothing will ever change.

What Jeremiah 29 alerts us to is how the place of exile is now the place where justice and faithfulness can be pursued and how Jerusalem – i.e., where we were most at home – has become a place of faithlessness, oppression, and corruption. In short, the Israelites are to learn in exile what they failed to learn in Jerusalem.12 Instead of seeing suffering, dislocation, and domination as a reason to despair, the Israelites were invited by Jeremiah to see it as the context where God is most powerfully at work bringing new vision and being present in new ways (something made explicit in Jeremiah 24.1–10).13 Following John Howard Yoder, this can be pushed further to suggest that Jeremiah is proposing exile in Babylon as a return to the true vocation of the People of God.14 On Yoder’s reading Jesus and the early church follow the Jeremianic pattern of not orienting themselves to the world politically or militarily so as to regain control or be in charge, but missiologically, so as to bear faithful witness.15 Such a missiological orientation implies neither withdrawal nor subcultural resistance but, as exemplified in the stories of Joseph, Daniel, and Esther, entails combining active investment in Babylon’s wellbeing with faithful particularity and obedience to God. On a Christological reading this can be put even more strongly and in the words of Yoder’s suggestive translation of Jeremiah 29.7, it entails seeking “the salvation of the culture to which God has sent you.”16 On this account we discover at the heart of Easter the theo-logic of Jeremiah 29: that the way of the cross, the journey into exile, is the beginning of new life and new hope.17 As will be seen, Jeremiah 29 is a leitmotif of this book and a key text for framing my account of Christian political witness in the contemporary context.

The Terms and Conditions of Political Life

The book offers a primarily theological analysis of the terms and conditions of political life in the contemporary context. However, it is helpful to situate and contrast this analysis at the outset with some other accounts drawn from political philosophy and social theory. There is a wide-ranging debate about the health and vibrancy of democratic life and patterns of civic association in Western liberal democracies. Some argue that what is seen is decline in political participation and the deracination of existing forms of solidarity that are central to maintaining social cohesion and political stability. Others argue that far from decline, what is occurring is the emergence of new forms of political participation and ways of acting together for the common good, ways that are more appropriate to contemporary political problems and patterns of life. For Christians this debate is of direct concern because, on the one hand, churches are and have been historically deeply immersed in the kinds of political association that are said to be declining. In addition, churches in themselves constitute an example of the kind of institution that is said to be under threat. On the other hand, churches are key catalysts and sponsors of emergent forms of political association. As will be seen in Chapter 4, the Fair Trade movement is but one of the most prominent examples of this. Theologically the above debate should be of concern because it directly relates to the conditions and possibilities of Christian witness amid the earthly city.

Four basic approaches can be identified to the question of whether solidarity and political participation in the West is declining or just adapting. First, there is the critique of contemporary political and social life that is pessimistic in outlook and sees the processes of modernization, and liberalism and capitalism in particular, as inherently diminishing the ability to pursue a common good and a just and generous society. The work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Sheldon Wolin are examples of such an approach.18 The implication of such critiques is that we now live in a post-democratic market-state that has substituted mass, broad-based mobilizations of unions and political parties around substantive political visions for managerial and legal proceduralism divorced from any thick conception of the good. For MacIntyre, the remedy for this decline lies in building up thick communities of character formation that embody particular traditions of practice and visions of the good.19 These thick communities of character foster the bonds of friendship and enable the rational deliberation that is a necessary precondition for the formation of a just and generous political order.

Second, there is a less stringent version of the first approach that is not directly critical of modernity per se. Its concern arises out of a desire to maintain and uphold modern liberal democratic regimes, but it does argue that there is an ongoing decline in social cohesion and long-established forms of civic association. For example, Robert Putnam tells a story of rise and fall, with a low point in America in the 1880s and a high point of political and civic engagement in the America of the 1950s. Putnam argues that since the 1950s “social capital” in all its forms has declined.20 For Putnam and others, mass membership organizations, from trade unions and political parties to scouts and churches, socialize members into being more civic-minded and more oriented toward cooperation, trust, and reciprocity.21 At the same time, such organizations help integrate citizens and the state into a common project.22 Hence, it is argued, a decline in forms of civic and voluntary association affects the health of civil society, the stability of liberal democracies, and the ability to address intractable social problems such as urban deprivation.23 Putnam, along with Theda Skocpol, is critical of emergent forms of political organization such as Greenpeace and what they see as the attendant “checkbook activism” and mail-order membership schemes.24 In Putnam’s view such organizations do not foster the kind of give and take and thicker forms of association that older forms of social capital did.25

A third account concurs with the first and second insofar as it agrees that there has been decline in both traditional institutions such as churches and modern bureaucratically mediated forms of solidarity such as political parties. However, it is not pessimistic because it sees the new forms of political and civic association and action that are emerging as supplementing and equivalent to older forms of solidarity (or what I will refer to has civic or public friendship). Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, and Manuel Castells are key exponents of this third response.26 For example, Ulrich Beck, as part of his broader account of “reflexive modernization” and the “risk society,” argues that traditional collective and group-specific sources of meaning and identity are disintegrating, leading to a process of individualization and selfreflexivity in relation to social, economic, and political relationships.27 However, instead of this leading to privatization, active reflection on society, social norms, and rules led to “new socio-cultural commonalities” and a “process of societalization.”28 In other words, new ways of relating and new large-scale forms of solidarity are emerging. These take the form of social movements, subcultures, and fluid political alliances that respond both to the increasing risks of the modernization process and the industrial and administrative interference in the realm of the personal.29 Existing political institutions (for example, parliament) lose currency as people begin to construct their political and social lives differently and what was previously considered apolitical becomes highly politicized. In turn this leads to what Beck calls “sub-politics.” Sub-politics is the de facto shaping and organization of political and social life by agents and organizations outside any formal political-administrative systems.30 Sub-politics opens a space for new forms of direct political action by ordinary citizens in a global context.31 It comes to mean for Beck “the shaping of society from below.”32 It has a number of consequences, one of which is that decision making is a much more contested and variegated process requiring multilateral negotiation. For Beck, sub-politics “sets politics free by changing the rules and boundaries of the political so that it becomes more open and susceptible to new linkages – as well as capable of being negotiated and reshaped.”33

The fourth account again accepts that there is a shift in how people in the West are acting together politically. However, exponents of this account say that this is to be welcomed, neither constituting a decline in political engagement nor posing a threat to the health of liberal democracies. They argue that mass membership organizations and formal institutional patterns of political action may have been appropriate to the early stages of democratic development. However, a lack of trust and participation in such mechanisms is a sign of maturity indicative of higher education levels and greater and more widespread critical scrutiny. Pippa Norris argues that “indicators point more strongly towards the evolution, transformation, and reinvention of civic engagement than to its premature death.”34 Ronald Inglehart counters Putnam’s pessimism by suggesting that the decline of prior modes of political association is part of a global and structural shift in values in Western societies. What he calls “survival” values of trust, obedience, and work commitment are being replaced by more self-expressive and what Inglehart calls “postmaterialist” values such as tolerance, freedom, and individual fulfillment. This may signal a change in how politics is done, but for Inglehart it represents a deepening of a commitment to democracy.35

A complementary but very different account can be found in some strands of post-Marxist thought.36 For example, emergent forms of political association can be interpreted as part of a move to what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “absolute democracy,” and represent the most developed form of resistance to the dominant forms of economic and social production.37 They state: “The future institutional structure of the new society is embedded in the affective, cooperative, and communicative relationships of social production. The networks of social production, in other words, provide an institutional logic capable of sustaining a new society.”38 Hardt and Negri claim, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, that:

In the era of imperial sovereignty and biopolitical production, the balance has tipped such that the ruled now tend to be the exclusive producers of social organization. This does not mean that sovereignty immediately crumbles and the rulers lose all their power. It does mean that the rulers become ever more parasitical and that sovereignty becomes increasingly unnecessary. Correspondingly, the ruled become increasingly autonomous.39

Like Hardt and Negri, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in their critique of the “new spirit of capitalism,” see emergent forms of political association as representing both a critique and an outworking of the contemporary form of capitalism.40 Boltanski and Chiapello argue that capitalism, in order to sustain and legitimize itself, absorbs and adapts to the criticisms that are made of it. Thus, for example, social democracy and the welfare state were adaptations to the critique of Marxism and Socialism.41 Likewise, the critique of capitalism that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, which focused on the alienation and inauthenticity of the “mass society,” and the monolithic, totalitarian conformity and huge size of the bureaucratic organization, have been incorporated into new patterns of management and business. The new spirit of capitalism, exemplified by the ethos and organizational structures of Microsoft and Ben and Jerry’s, emphasizes fuzzy organizational boundaries with flat hierarchies, networks of people working in teams, innovation and creativity as part of a constant process of change, and personal flowering through the flexible world of multiple projects pursued by autonomous individuals. This new form of capitalism does bring new forms of oppression and injustice. However, on the basis of Boltanski and Chiapello’s work, emergent forms of political association both embody the new “spirit” of capitalism and represent its critique.

All four accounts set out above are problematic when it comes to evaluating the condition of contemporary political life because they all misconstrue the relationship between emergent and existing forms of political and civic association.42 The first two accounts preclude any symbiotic relationship between existing and emergent patterns of association. Likewise, in the third account, which attempts to relate existing and emergent forms constructively, there is an underlying assumption that what Beck and Giddens call “reflexive modernity” will inevitably result in the breakdown of traditional patterns of association and the emergence of more voluntaristic and individualized ones. Bureaucratic and institutionally mediated forms of association and older, “traditional” forms of solidarity are assumed to be relics of an age that is quickly passing. Thus the fourth account simply makes explicit what is implicit in the third account. Yet there is much evidence to suggest that emergent forms of political association both feed off and renew long-established patterns of political life and rely on and extend prior forms of social capital.43 An additional factor that destabilizes the above accounts is that the historical development of patterns of political association is far less disjunctive than any of the above accounts allow. We are neither falling from a golden age nor are we locked into a historically deterministic process of inevitable change in one direction. As we shall see, there is a symbiotic relationship between what we might call “traditional” (e.g., churches), “modern” (e.g., political parties), and “emergent” (e.g., Greenpeace) patterns of civic and political association in the contemporary context. A sub-theme of this book is how churches integrate and mediate the relationship between different forms and levels of political action and how faithful political witness must reject overly deterministic declension or ascension narratives about the nature of political life. As will be delineated in Chapter 2, an Augustinian understanding of the relationship between politics, eschatology, and history provides a far more “realistic” basis for assessing the nature and direction of contemporary politics.

Religion and Postsecular Politics

Running alongside and cutting across debates about whether political participation in the West is declining or just adapting within the contemporary context are debates about the relationship between religion and politics. One term increasingly used to name the contemporary conditions and possibilities of the relationship between religion and politics is that of “postsecular.” Part of the background to this term, as noted by one of its most prominent exponents, Jürgen Habermas, is a revision of the “secularization thesis.”44 The classic secularization thesis identifies modernization with secularization and sees secularization as an inevitable outcome of processes of modernization such as industrialization, urbanization, specialization, societalization (the shift from local to large-scale and increasingly complex patterns of social formation), and bureaucratization. Secularization names the process whereby, as Bryan Wilson puts it, “religious institutions, actions and consciousness, lose their social significance.”45 The secularization thesis posited a fundamental incompatibility between modernity and religious adherence. However, the empirical basis of the thesis has increasingly come into question, to the extent that Peter Berger, a former leading advocate of the secularization thesis, writes: “The world today, with some exceptions … is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labelled ‘secularization theory’ is essential mistaken.”46 Confirming this evaluation, Rodney Stark argues that not only was the secularization thesis mistaken, it was based on false presuppositions about a previous “age of faith” that never existed, and was blind to the remarkable stability and, in places, increase of religious adherence since 1800 in Europe and elsewhere.47 Debates about secularization are still ongoing, but what we can say is that a straightforward assumption that modernization leads to secularization is no longer tenable.

Since modernization is a worldwide process, advocates of secularization assumed that secularization would be a worldwide and uniform phenomenon. However, processes of modernization play out in different parts of the world in different ways depending on how they were transmitted (i.e., whether they were self-generated, as in Western Europe, imposed by colonialism, as in Africa, or imposed by elites, as in Japan and Turkey) and when they were transmitted (for example, it makes a difference if a society interacted with capitalism in its early stages or in its advanced stages of production). Thus, as Shmuel Eisenstadt argues, we must talk of “multiple modernities” all of which interact with religious belief and practice in different ways.48 David Lyon and David Herbert both note that far from leading to a decline in the public significance of religion, processes of modernization can provoke and enable religious reinvigoration and an increase in its public significance.49 Some, such as Grace Davie, now see Europe as the exception rather than the norm in terms of the relationship between religion and secularization.50 However, as José Casanova points out, the most interesting thing about secularization in Europe is not whether it is an empirical reality, but that the secularization thesis was so internalized that both the non-religious and religious believers viewed it as normal. As Casanova puts it:

We need to entertain seriously the proposition that secularization became a selffulfilling prophecy in Europe, once large sectors of the population of Western European societies, including the Christian churches, accepted the basic premises of the theory of secularization: that secularization is a teleological process of modern social change; that the more modern a society, the more secular it becomes; and that secularity is “a sign of the times.” If such a proposition is correct, then the secularization of Western European societies can be explained better in terms of the triumph of the knowledge regime of secularism than in terms of structural processes of socioeconomic development, such as urbanization, education, rationalization, and so on.51

The term “postsecular” has been deployed variously since the late 1990s as a way of coming to terms with the unfulfilled nature of the prophecy Casanova outlines. However, few of those who use the term question the assumption that drove the secularization thesis, namely, that secularity represents a decline, rather than the transformation, adaptation, or new developments in the social significance of religious belief and practice. Its use by Habermas to indicate the renewed visibility of religion in contemporary culture and the need for a model of law and politics in which religious arguments are not excluded still maintains that the secular, and in particular the secular state, is something that religious groups must conform or adapt to or be in conflict with.52 This is made explicit in Wayne Hudson’s use of the term. He states:

Postsecular civil society on my account is paradoxically consistent with the view that the state would regulate manifestations of religion and impose civil values, where need be, on forms of religious education and practice. … On my account postsecular civil society can only realistically allow a greater role for the sacral if it is committed to state-based regulation and reform of religion.53

On accounts such as Habermas and Hudson’s the term denotes neither an increase in religiosity, after an era of decrease, nor does it call into question the terms and conditions of a secular public life. Rather, it seeks to account for and positively demand a change in mindset among those who previously felt justified in considering religions to be irrelevant or moribund. In such a reading, as Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan put it:

What undergoes transformation is less the nature of the secular state, let alone its constitutional arrangements guaranteeing, say, a separation between church and state, but rather the state’s “secularist self understanding.” Needless to say, it is far from clear what kind of “self-understanding” might come to substitute for the secularism (or “secular fundamentalism”) of old, not least because the phenomenon on which the postsecular condition reflects – namely, religion’s persistent role – is increasingly difficult to grasp conceptually and to situate empirically.54

Note, however, that the term postsecular as used by de Vries, Sullivan, and Habermas is one deployed by dominant power holders – whether political or intellectual – to describe a situation that religious groups themselves may describe in very different terms. This is certainly the case within Christian theology as the example of Radical Orthodoxy illustrates.

Most uses of the term “postsecular” remain committed to a notion of the secular as a neutral, autonomous, and rationally governed sphere of social and political relations.55 By contrast, Radical Orthodoxy uses the term to call into question the very possibility of a secular space understood as neutral and uncommitted. On this account there are only pagan/religious or apostate spaces and one cannot divorce politics (or reason itself) from either relationship with God or some form of determinate confession.56 For example, John Milbank argues that much modern social theory is itself deeply religious and constitutes a form of anti-theology. He states: “The most important governing assumptions of such theory are bound up with the modification or the rejection of orthodox Christian positions.”57 For Milbank, supposedly secular social theory is supported not by a neutral, universal rationality free from determinate commitments, but by an alternative confession. As understood by Radical Orthodoxy, a postsecular politics – whether of Christian or some other origin – recognizes the inescapability of worship and belief in public life and how “secular” politics is parasitic upon and a parody of religious forms.

As the contrast between Habermas and Milbank illustrates, uses of the term “postsecular” are various and contested and it is questionable how helpful the term is in describing the contemporary relationship between religion and politics. Habermas asserts that: “A ‘post-secular’ society must at some point have been in a ‘secular’ state.” Yet it is arguable that in terms of religious adherence and the public significance of religion we never lived in a “secular age” even if, as Charles Taylor argues, we do now live in an age when religious belief has become a self-reflexive act. Taylor gives three meanings to the term “secular”: The first denotes a decline in the public role of religion and the second posits a “falling off” in religious adherence. The third refers to the conditions of belief whereby belief in God moves from being a given to becoming “one option among others.”58 For Taylor, this third development was itself a partially religious development rather than an inevitable outcome of processes of modernization. This third meaning of the term does have traction. For Taylor, our “secular age” is characterized neither by a necessary decline in religious belief nor by an incompatibility between religion and modernity, but by a plurality of forms of belief and unbelief which are themselves constantly interacting and changing. On this account, secularism and the secularity of both particular institutions, such as a university, and of a society are as much the result of dynamics and discourses within Christianity as the fruit of external pressures. In the light of Taylor’s thesis, use of the term “postsecular” in the ways Habermas uses it can be seen as illustrative of the condition of belief and unbelief within the contemporary context wherein everyone, including the ardent “secularist,” has to be selfreflexive and critical about their commitments.59 No one, from the confessional Darwinist to the so-called fundamentalist, can assume that their view is “normal” or simply the way things will be.60

Against the assumptions of the secularization thesis, religion has always played a prominent role in public and political life – even in Europe. At the macro level, with the exception of France and the USA, churches have been incorporated into the state through a variety of forms of establishment. And throughout Europe and the USA, not only have churches been involved in the delivery of welfare services, but the very formation of the different welfare systems and policies regarding poverty has been directly shaped by differences in belief and practice between the Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions.61 At the micro level, for example, within supposedly secular institutions such as prisons, the military, and hospitals, chaplains have continued to have an established and often prominent role. However, even if religion never really went away, what is clear is that we are currently going through a period of deconstruction and reconstruction in which perennial questions about the relationship between religious and political authority are being asked again and previous settlements renegotiated.

There are specific material changes that can be identified that have led to this process of renegotiation. Many of these changes are set out in more detail in Chapter 1 through a case study of the UK context. However, the three most prominent ones are the following: new patterns of immigration are changing the religious demography of Western liberal democracies such that there is greater and deeper religious diversity (albeit in limited, mostly urban pockets); the events of September 11, 2001, the “war on terror,” and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to an increased consciousness of Islam as a world religion and political force and raised questions about whether tolerance is an adequate response to religious diversity; and the state is increasingly situating itself as a partner, not a provider of social welfare services, which in turn is creating new opportunities for and new forms of engagement between religious groups, the state, and the market.

Material changes such as changes in religious demography have led to new moments emerging within existing patterns of relationship within the contemporary context. These moments are ones in which the relationship between religious groups, the state, and the market is undetermined and ambiguous while at the same time those from many different religious traditions and non-religious actors are encountering each other in new and deeper ways within shared territory. The contemporary context may be described as a postsecularist space as far as the state and certain elite groups are concerned, but it is better understood overall as a period in which, for the first time,multiple modernities, each with their respective relationship to religious beliefand practice, are overlapping and interacting within the same shared, predominantly urban spaces. Within such interactions, existing binary oppositions, such as secular and religious, tolerant and intolerant, public and private, conservative and radical, and left and right, that tend to frame political relationships break down. Yet incommensurable otherness remains to be negotiated within a shared territory in pursuit of goods in common.

What I am describing is best articulated through a concrete example. In Brixton, an area of South London characterized by multifaceted religious and ethnic diversity and a high rate of youth delinquency, which was a recruiting ground for those involved in the July 7, 2005 terrorist events in London, there are a number of pilot projects developing a new partnership between statutory bodies and Islamic groups in assessing and intervening with young people considered “at risk” of involvement in crime, gangs, and social disorder. One such project, run by a group which can be broadly characterized as “Salafi,” receives referrals from the probation service to work with at-risk youths while simultaneously being monitored by the security services as a source of Islamic “radicalization” and violent opposition to the liberal democratic state.62 Thus, the same group is perceived by the state both as contributing to law and order and as a source of violent opposition to its regime of law and order. The nonreligious or secular statutory bodies are being forced to move beyond mere tolerance and ignorance of the religious “other” to make fine-grained distinctions between different groups within the same tradition as they seek to work with some and monitor others, or do both at the same time. This more intensive engagement is leading to a felt need to engage directly with what are understood as theological questions by government agencies. A measure of this shift to engage with (or some might say intrude upon) the “theological” is given by the creation of two posts in the UK’s Department of Communities and Local Government, as of November 2008, entitled “Theology and Institutions” and “Theology” and by the advocacy of direct engagement with “theological” debate.63 From the perspective of the youth project, the state is a threat, in that it is making its religiously framed dissent a security issue rather than a religious or political one and is seeking to intrude upon the formulation of its belief and practice. But it is also a source of opportunity to the group for it to achieve goals commensurate with their religious commitments: the formation of faithful young men. Both the religious group and the statutory bodies involved have an undetermined, constantly shifting and deepening relationship with each other as they negotiate a common life within the same territory in pursuit of a shared good – namely, stopping young men becoming involved in crime. Religious belief and practice, in particular the place of the authority of revelation as against the status of political authority, is central to the negotiation of this relationship in a context where, at the micro level, no single religious or non-religious hegemony is dominant. The example given here is a particularly acute one, but it illustrates experiences common to many religious groups where even though there is not the direct securitization of religion, there is a deep suspicion of religious groups. The example represents a particular spatial-temporal moment within a much wider, more variegated array of relationships.

Theologically understood, these moments are neither new nor, as de Vries and Sullivan suggest, “difficult to grasp conceptually.” Rather, through drawing on Augustine’s conception of the saeculum as that time after Christ’s resurrection and before Christ’s return, the saeculum can be understood as an ambiguous time, a field of wheat and tares, neither wholly profane nor sacred. What we might call postsecularist moments can be viewed as part of the normative condition of the church as it seeks to bear faithful witness within the ambiguous, undetermined time of the saeculum, wherein both “Christians” and “non-Christians” are constituted in their personhood by the earthly city and the city of God, where both the church and those various others with whom it must negotiate an earthly peace are capable of good and evil, pride and love, and where there is often a hazy boundary between church and non-church. This theologically defined understanding of the secular/saeculum is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2 where a contrast is drawn between my own approach and that of John Milbank.

Theological Politics and the Ecclesial-Turn

As well as situating the book within some of the dominant ways of conceptualizing the conditions and possibilities of contemporary political life and the relationship between religion and politics, it is necessary to locate it in a specific theological conversation about the relationship between Christianity and politics. It is this conversation that lies at the heart of the book. A key problem in contemporary Christian political thought is whether the church has a distinctive politics and is itself a particular polity or whether it is best understood as a constituency within civil society whose politics takes the form of democratization and a commitment to a liberal state. In the midtwentieth century, Jacques Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others argued, first, for the compatibility of Christianity and liberal democracy, and second, against both totalitarianism and an ideologically secular liberalism.64 In recent years a growing number of theologians have emphasized that the first task of the church is to be a church. For them, it is not the business of the church to invest itself in one particular form of temporal political order – namely liberal democracy. In the view of one of the most prominent exponents of this critique, Stanley Hauerwas, the church has its own politics and should refrain from turning to the state as the first or only way of addressing social and political problems.65