Defending Christendom

There’s a lot in Peter Leithart’s interview with Jason Hood at the Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology’s website, so I won’t try to summarize it all.  Leithart is, as he says, “an advocate of Christendom” who believes that Christians are to tell rulers that they must “kiss the Son” (Psalm 2) and obey the risen Lord of the universe, Jesus Christ.

Here are a couple of excerpts, but I’d really suggest that you take 15 minutes or so to read the whole thing if this topic interests you:

Political theology is not some specialized branch of theology, but a dimension of all theology.  Politics is not simply about passing this legislation or electing that candidate.  Politics addresses questions about the distribution of power, and more broadly questions about the shape and future of a group.  Theology cannot help but address those questions, and do it all the time.  The Bible certainly deals with political questions like this.

So, even when I am not doing political theology, I am doing political theology.  Let me given a couple of examples of what I mean.  Ecclesiology has been a major focus of my work, and, as I see it, that bumps directly up against political questions.  The intimate connection between ecclesiology and politics has been obscured in modernity because the church has been marginalized and has allowed itself to be transformed into a sociologically invisible and politically innocuous religious group.  Scripture, by contrast, treats the church as a political entity in itself, each individual congregation as an outpost of the heavenly empire of a heavenly Emperor.   That means that the church and its claims about Jesus, sin, and salvation are political claims, necessarily.

Secondly,

7.  Some political theologians note that Daniel simultaneously models service, critique, and a message of divine judgment.  Are all three of these to be implemented by believers?  Are they postures we should always exhibit, or are they more appropriate at some times than others?

PL:  I do think that the mix of these three postures varies depending on the political circumstances, and depending on the person involved.   And Scripture indicates that men and women can work faithfully even under the worst of rulers – think of Obadiah during the days of Ahab.  In thinking through this, my thoughts again gravitate to ecclesiological issues.  Daniel was able to serve, but also maintain a critical distance, because he was a member of another community, of Israel.  It seems that Christians today have difficulty maintaining that complex stance, or doing that complicated dance, because we don’t have an alternative home.  When Christians enter political life deeply conscious of the fact that they are members of the church, Christians first and foremost, that gives them a place to stand when they critique and when they serve.

I noticed significant overlap between the eccelesiology of Leithart and that of James Davison Hunter in To Change the World.  Both long for a church that is a true alternate community and that forms its members so that they can engage with society in a way that pleases God.  A big difference, of course, is Leithart’s postmillenial confidence that the kingdom will triumph in history, while Hunter has more of a two kingdoms view.

To see a bit of where Leithart is coming from eschatologically, check out his sketch of “the long view.”  The consideration of just war and total war that he discusses can be found here.

Hat tip: Justin Taylor

To Change the World, Essay III and Book Review

I’m going to review Essay III and the book as a whole in one post, but I will do a summary of each chapter first.

Chapter 1, “The Challenge of Faithfulness”: Hunter looks at two major facets of this challenge: difference and dissolution.  In a pluralistic society, the existence of many different beliefs pose a challenge to Christian beliefs.  Hunter discusses what Peter Berger calls “plausibility structures,” which are the cultural and institutional supports for beliefs.  Think about a medieval person for whom Christianity was a given and much of the culture supported the centrality of the faith (to borrow Doug Wilson’s example).  Even kings who fought the church for influence would claim that God willed it so.  A more pluralistic society undermines this certainty as the institutional supports are not nearly as aligned.

The challenge of dissolution, which Hunter defines as the waning of the belief that words and concepts can have any ultimate meaning, comes from both high culture and middle/low culture.  On the high cultural end, we have deconstructionist theory and skepticism that doubts the existence of truth.  On the other hand, the pluralism and especially the media environment of modern American life have contributed, as electronic media have significantly reduced the barriers of time and space, present information in a more fragmented way than ever before without any “overarching narrative structure” or differentiation between the serious and ephemeral, present everything as entertainment, and “create an illusion of intimacy” with people that we’ll never know.  This all creates an environment that trivializes information and makes depth and reflection more difficult and helps to dissolve meaning.  This was really interesting but probably required a whole book to be completely convincing.  It rings true, though there are also many good things that come from having access to so much information.  But it will drive us crazy if we let it.  Figuring out how to deal with this cultural transformation is essential for the church, Hunter believes.

Chapter 2, “Old Cultural Wineskins”: Here he revisits the three predominant Christian approaches in America that he has discussed.  He characterizes them as “defensive against” (conservative Christians), “relevant to” (mainline Protestants, progressive evangelicals, emerging church, and seeker-sensitive churches), and “purity from” (neo-Anabaptists, New Monastics, and Pentecostals who withdraw from the world).  Each of these has its strengths and weaknesses.

Hunter also evaluates these stances in relation to the challenges of difference and dissolution.  Two interesting points stood out.  Progressive evangelicals tend to focus more on living out the faith to the point that Hunter worries that doctrines themselves will be deemphasized for future generations.  Secondly, conservative evangelicals have embraced the electronic media, which he believes plays a huge role in the dissolution of meaning, in order to get out their message.  While he sees benefits in this, the problem is that they offer the same “pseudo-intimacy” with famous Christians that the electronic media offer with secular celebrities, and the whole industry is sold using the same market rules as the wider culture.  Thus, he believes these play a role in the dissolution of meaning as well.  I think that one way Hunter might explain it is that it’s great to listen to a sermon by John Piper (which I actually intend to make a part of my week when he comes back from leave), but it’s even better to listen to and know your own pastor who you can have a real relationship with.  And I imagine that Hunter is really worried about the cyber-church phenomenon, which kind of freaks me out too.

Chapter 3, “The Groundwork for an Alternative Way”: This is a mostly theoretical chapter.  Hunter turns around the concerns of Christian leaders who say that Christians just don’t think and believe enough.  The problem, he says, that Christians are not formed by the church but instead by the wider culture.  Thus, it is the leaders’ responsibility to recapture a church that truly forms its members in a Christian culture, the church.  The church’s goal is to model shalom (the Hebrew word translated as “peace,” with deeper connotations of “human flourishing”), a way of life that is better than the world’s and based on God’s revealed will in the Bible.  In light of this, the church has a stance of both affirmation of the good in creation and human culture and antithesis in which it offers a better way.  He believes that it must avoid the error of Constantinian takeover or taking back of culture, but that we must engage in “critical resistance” in which “the church … stands antithetical to modernity and its dominant institutions in order to offer an alternative vision and direction for them” (235).

Chapter 4, “Toward a Theology of Faithful Presence”: Hunter roots his idea of “faithful presence” in the creation and incarnation.  God’s creation and the incarnation of Christ show true identification between word and world militates against the dissolution that we experience in late modernity and God’s acceptance of us in Christ, though we are “other” because of our humanity and sin, provides a new model for encountering the pluralism of the world in which we live.  He writes that God’s “faithful presence” bears four attributes: he pursues us, identifies with us, offers us life in its fullest sense, and sacrificially loves us.  We, then, are to be faithfully present to each other, in his words, in our tasks, and in our spheres of influence.  He believes that the downfall of the relevance-driven liberal and emergent Christians is they focus on deeds without creeds, that evangelicals and fundamentalists tend to prioritize specifically Christian work (celebrating C.S. Lewis’s apologetics, for example, but not his work as an academic), and that the neo-Anabaptists see the world as neutral at best and denigrate work.  Faithful presence, instead, calls for the pursuit of faithfulness and excellence in all that we do.

Chapter 5, “The Burden of Leadership: A Theology of Faithful Presence in Practice”: Hunter now wonders how Christians lead, since that is what he is asking them to do.  I think that a good way to put it is that the church needs to be a culture that envisions life differently and according to God’s vision of life.  This culture is present in the broader culture, not isolated from it.  One way that Christians can show a different vision of life is through the idea of broad and deep covenantal relationships rather than narrowly-defined contracts.  In business, for example, the employer-employee and business-customer relationship is based on a deeper idea of obligations, rather than simply the exchange of labor, products, and money/benefits.  One example of this was that a car dealership group noticed that its profits were much higher in its inner-city locations as compared to its suburban locations (the implication that Hunter gives is that higher-educated people in the suburbs had a greater ability to shop for bargains and perhaps make deals with the dealership, but it’s not entirely clear).  The company decided to fix its prices in the inner city, lowering profit margins but attracting many more customers.  It also decided to pay college tuition for its all employees’ children.  The reward for this has been employee loyalty.

Christians’ faithful presence needs to be supported and connected by local churches.  Also, the results will vary depending on the circumstances, but faithful presence is nonetheless good for whatever community it touches.

Chapter 6, “Toward a New City Commons”: The final chapter sums up Hunter’s points and considers a bit more how “faithful presence” can become reality.  Leaving behind ambitions of world-changing, as commonly defined, the church must focus on being a community that models shalom.  Hunter considers Jeremiah 29’s call to the Jews to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile” to be relevant for Christians in a post-Christian culture today.  It would be a long period of exile, and exile in which the first generation of exiles would have to raise their children rather than returning to Zion in their lifetimes.

Hunter calls for patience, even self-imposed silence, while Christians figure out how to engage the world in ways that are public expressions of shalom rather than purely political.  Christians also must learn to unite and love each other that they might be able to love the world.  He believes that the primacy of the formation of Christian disciples actually means that differences between Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox are largely irrelevant in the face of the need to form disciples in late modern culture.  In thinking about our relationship to the outside world, Hunter returns to the double responsibility of affirmation and antithesis.  He ends with the suggestion that if Christians truly focus on creating the alternate culture of the church, they may succeed in making the world slightly better.

The end of the book is very much in keeping with what Hunter has been saying all along. Changing the world is difficult, and making it our goal without understanding how culture change works sets us up for failure.

There was a lot about this book to praise.  Reading Hunter’s observations on cultural change and seeing some examples (Chapters 4 and 5 of Essay I) was fascinating and it seems like an important thing for publically-engaged Christians to understand.  His description of the political culture (Essay II, Chapter 2) was a skillful diagnosis, and his exploration of the Christian Right, Christian Left, and neo-Anabaptists were insightful and thought-provoking.  His vision for the church as a true community that offers a vision of a better life and forms disciples is something that we need to be reminded of in a culture where we want the church to help us feel good and “spiritual” and to follow our program.

On the other hand, there were some frustrating things about it.  It sometimes felt like a rough draft, especially in the latter part of the book.  He didn’t seem to have his idea of “faithful presence” fully developed, and I feel like he would have a tough time defending it in debate once he got beyond the very good foundation that he has laid for it.  Toward the end, his arguments felt repetitive, and I don’t feel that he sketched out what faithful presence would really look like in academia, media, etc.  Finally, I think that his engagement with the ideas of the Christian Right was too isolated from Christian practice.  As he explained in Essay III, Chapter 5, many Christians are living in ways that reflect faithful presence.

Hunter also assumes that pluralism and secular governments are here to stay and that Constantinian ambitions of church-state cooperation are to be avoided, as Doug Wilson has pointed out in his chapter by chapter interactions with Hunter.  Wilson, as usual, has provocative critiques (most notably here, in which he turns Hunter’s biblical examples of the exiled Israelites’ faithful presence against Hunter’s own argument), but it should be said that Hunter is definitely in the majority with these assumptions.  The contrast between their positions is definitely an illustration that eschatology makes a big difference when we think about the relationship between Christ and culture.

I certainly benefitted from reading this book.  If I were making a recommendation, I would say to read Essay I for sure.  That’s where the best stuff is.  In Essay II, read Chapter 2’s description of our political culture and Chapter 7’s reflections on power, and read the rest if you have time.  Essay III is interesting, but I would say skim it if you’re pressed for time.

Abortion providers and the medical profession

At Embracing the Risk, Douglas linked to a New York Times Magazine story by Emily Bazelon that described changes that she and others hope for in the way that abortions are provided.  He has some good comments on the article, which is quite long but worth reading as a way to understand where abortions are performed and also offers insight into the culture of abortion provision.  Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s president Albert Mohler also has some good comments.

Bazelon writes that abortion and abortionists are often not integrated into or respected in the medical profession.  Doctors and hospitals rarely perform abortions, meaning that clinics do the vast majority of them.  The main thrust of the article is to chronicle how some are trying to change that and provide more linkage between abortion providers and the medical profession by impacting medical school training and encouraging the provision of abortion in doctor’s offices and hospitals.  It was especially interesting to read this in light of James D. Hunter’s theory of cultural change, which essentially states that cultures are changed more by elites and institutions than by ordinary individuals because of the importance of cultural power in shaping culture.  This institution-building aspect of the article is what I want to focus on.

Bazelon writes that an important step for the push to integrate abortion into medical curricula was the founding of Medical Students for Choice in the 1990s.  After that,

The next important moment came in 1995. With new studies showing how low the training rates for residents had fallen, the National Abortion Federation, with M.S.F.C. as an ally, began pushing for change. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education — which represents the medical establishment — decided, for the first time, to make abortion training a requirement for all OB-GYN residency programs seeking its accreditation. The anti-abortion movement tried to smother the new mandate. The following year, Congress passed the Coats Amendment, which declared that any residency program that failed to obey the Accreditation Council’s mandate could still be deemed accredited by the federal government. But the council had spoken, and medical schools and teaching hospitals listened. Today, about half of the more than 200 OB-GYN residency programs integrate abortion into their residents’ regular rotations. Another 40 percent of them offer only elective training.

To establish a secure foothold in academic medicine, abortion-rights supporters knew that along with residency programs they needed the kind of advanced training that attracts the best doctors and those who want to join medical-school faculties. A physician at the U.C.S.F. medical school set up the Family Planning Fellowship, a two-year stint following residency that pays doctors to sharpen their skills in abortion and contraception, to venture into research and to do international work. In recent years, the fellowship has expanded to 21 universities, including the usual liberal-turf suspects — Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, U.C.L.A. — but also schools in more conservative states, like the University of Utah, the University of Colorado and Emory University in Georgia.

When Salt Lake City and Atlanta are home to programs that train doctors to be expert in abortion and contraception, the profession sends a signal that family-planning practices are an accepted, not just tolerated, part of what doctors do. That helps draw young physicians. The first generation of providers after Roe took on abortion as a crusade, driven by the urgent memory of seeing women become sick or die because they tried to induce an abortion on their own, in the days before legalization. Out of necessity, the doctors pushed ahead with little training or support. “We did it by the seat of our pants,” says Philip Ferro, an 82-year-old OB-GYN at the S.U.N.Y Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. “There was no formal source of knowledge.”

As Ferro wryly puts it, “That would not stand today.” Abortion and contraception have become the subjects of rigorous, evidence-based research. The younger doctors who are coming through the residency training programs and the Family Planning Fellowship “have invigorated this field beyond my greatest expectations,” Grimes, the researcher and abortion provider, says. “We are cranking out highly qualified, dedicated physicians who are doing world-class research. There is a whole cadre of people. I helped train some of them, and I’m very proud of that. In the 1980s, I wasn’t sure who would fill in behind me when I retired. I’m much more optimistic now.”

Many of the protégées Grimes is talking about are women. In the first generation after Roe, abortion providers were mostly men because doctors were mostly men. Since then, women have streamed into the ranks of OB-GYN and family medicine. They are now the main force behind providing abortion.

As Mohler’s post reminded me, there are also some wealthy elites interested in this movement, including Warren Buffett.  If Hunter is right about the way that culture changes, this new movement could make an impact.  There are still many challenges facing the abortion-rights movement, since many of the doctors impacted by this initiative do not end up providing abortions, even if they want to.  But it seems like the kind of strategy that could have an impact over time.  What will our response be?

To Change the World, Essay II, Chapter 7

The title of the second essay is “Rethinking Power,” and Hunter now wraps it up with some “theological reflections.”  Power, he writes, is intrinsic to our relationship with nature and other people.  But power is not necessarily force (“hard” power); in fact, force means that power is weak rather than strong because it has to resort to force.

Power is far more strongly and efficiently demonstrated when it is exercised symbolically and culturally [“soft power”]…. The power that inheres in culture is the capacity to define what is real in all the ways that reality presses against us….  The power to define [truth, knowledge, legitimate science, valuable goods and ideals, family, sexuality, friendship, moral and just behavior], to name them, and to describe their purpose is power of the first order for it portrays the natural and social world in ways that predispose some action versus others.  The capacity to define reality varies extensively and those individuals and institutions that have more engage in a kind of “symbolic violence” (or forms of coercion that are effected without physical force) against those who have less.  The ultimate expression of this symbolic violence is to so thoroughly define a situation that dissent or opposition becomes unimaginable. (178)

This idea of “symbolic violence,” Hunter notes, is drawn from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and his broader ideas of power are influenced by, among others, Michel Foucault.  He disagrees with postmodernists like Nietzsche and Foucault because he doesn’t think that power is the only thing that matters when looking at human behavior (as Nietzsche and Foucault do), but he does think that power is always at least present.  I think that this definition of power is really insightful, because it takes into account a dimension of power that we rarely think about.  Hunter has done well in this book in bringing out the idea that culture and power are most influential when the world that they create is simply accepted as reality.

The one thing that I don’t like about this view is his acceptance without reservation (at least as far as I can tell from having read this far) of the concept of “symbolic violence.”  My concern with it is that if a person or culture defines reality in a way that is true, the people who then accept that are not victims of symbolic violence in the same way that people who believe falsehoods are.  Good parents who teach their children are not trafficking in the same cultural “violence” that cult leaders use.  Marvin Olasky relates the story of Vietnamese schoolchildren who were told to ask first God and then Ho Chi Minh for candy, and were of course given candy only in the second case.  Olasky says that preventing people from knowing God is the ultimate injustice.  Sure, this is an amateur example of symbolic violence, but applying that term to any case of the power to define reality doesn’t leave room for the true definition of reality (since postmodernists deny ultimate reality, that’s probably not a concern for them).  I’m certain that Hunter believes this too but some kind of qualifier might have been good idea.

Hunter also identifies three other dynamics of power: it “tends to become an end in itself,” the relational character of power means that the less powerful still have some ability to resist, and power has “unintended consequences,” “act[ing] back” on the users (for example, technology helps us to exert power over our environment, but it also has its own power over us, as it changes our culture and daily lives) (179-180).  I think that an example of this would be the immense convenience of communications technologies that also put us “on call” at all times.

Given all of this, a human being cannot disconnect himself from power, and for Hunter this is a severe weakness of the neo-Anabaptist position.  The church itself has power as an institution, so how do we best use it?  He lays out “two essential tasks” (184-187):

• “Disentangle the life and identity of the church from the life and identity of American society” so that the church embodies God’s norms rather than blessing American culture in areas like education, courtship, work, leisure, and retirement.
• Make a distinction between “public” and “political” with the intention of interacting with the world in a way that doesn’t conform to the resentful political culture.  Public witness is good, he believes, but not when it’s entirely political.

The model that he offers as a substitute is drawn from his observations of Jesus’ social power during his earthly ministry.  He describes four characteristics of Jesus’ social power:

• It was rooted in “his complete intimacy with and submission to his Father.”
• Jesus refused “status and reputation and the privilege that accompanies them.”
• His refusal of status and privilege was motivated by his love for people and creation.
• He did not coerce those who did not believe in him.

The third essay will look at how these things can be lived out by American Christians today.

To Change the World, Essay II, Chapter 6

In this short chapter, “Illusion, Irony, and Tragedy,” Hunter argues that the Christian Left and Right’s strategies are based on the illusion that political engagement is the best way to solve problems, when the problems actually have no political solution.  No political solution exists, he argues, for the decreasing cultural power of Christian morality or the decline of consensus in society.  In fact, the political arena is a very bad place to address these concerns:

But because the state is a clumsy instrument and finally rooted in coercion, it will always fail to adequately or directly address the human elements in these problems; the elements that make them poignant in the first place.  As a rule, when the state does become involved in such matters, its actions can often create more problems through unintended consequences, not fewer. (171)

The ironies of the stress on political involvement, Hunter writes, is that “for politics to be about more than power, it depends on a realm that is independent of the political sphere” (172).  This is an interesting and important point.  I would interpret it to mean that when the political culture is allowed to judge itself, expediency and maneuvering can become the standard for what should be done.  This environment, Hunter argues, leads to the reduction of both values and Christianity itself to solely political ideas.  Furthermore, he writes, the emphasis on voting can be so great that voting can become a substitute for actually doing something that would address a problem in a non-political way.

The tragedy is the way that Christians are transformed by the political culture of resentment and negation of enemies in order to win battles against their political enemies.  As he explained in the last chapter, the neo-Anabaptists participate in this culture as well.  Few of the leaders of the three movements that he profiles, he says, celebrate current Christian academic or artistic achievements; instead, all participate in the culture of denunciation.

This seemed like a fairly good look at things.  One good counterpoint was made by Doug Wilson (no surprise), who argued that one very important problem that can be solved by politics is the ever-increasing reach of the state.  In fact, there is only a political solution to that problem.  That’s an interesting point, especially in light of Hunter’s assertion that the increasing power of the state is part of the reason for the movement toward the politicization of all of culture.

Humanistic conservatism

Doug Wilson, reflecting on Glenn Beck’s novel The Overton Window and Beck’s view of humanity:

Our problem is humanism, and we cannot effectively counter radical leftist humanism with apparently milder right wing forms of it. The humanist believes that mankind is basically good and, going back to Socrates, the explanation for evil is ignorance. If man is basically good, where does all this evil come from? It has to come from ignorance, and the solution to ignorance is education. The solution to the political pathologies we see in Washington today is to get involved and “get informed.” But the biblical answer is repentance, and repentance all the way down. Our solution is not to get angry at what “they” are doing to us, but rather to be grieved at what we have done to ourselves. One of the basic things we have done in this regard is flatter ourselves — and Beck’s approach here is part of the problem.

Wilson’s not anti-Beck; in fact, he liked the book.  At least in the sense that so much (liberal and conservative) activism is about the egregious harm committed by some outside force against the innocent common people, Wilson echoes James Hunter’s critique of our political culture.

To Change the World, Essay II, Chapter 5

The neo-Anabaptists get their turn now.  Neo-Anabaptists, like the original Anabaptists, oppose any church and state cooperation and believe that the church is always capitulating to the demands of worldly society, including the market economy.  They seek to form a Christian community that is a radical Christian alternative to society.  They root this in the example of Christ and the early church, and believe that Christ’s nonviolence requires pacifism on the part of Christians.  Hunter gave a helpful explanation of the neo-Anabaptist notion of “principalities and powers”: “institutional or systemic patterns of thought, behavior, and relationship that govern our lives and the spiritual realm that animates them” (157), including government.  Although they were meant to “mediate the creative purposes of God in the world,” they are fallen and oppose God, even though He uses them to keep order in the world.  The church is the alternative community that stands against these powers, proclaiming Christ’s victory over them.  But the church does not seize power in this world.

Hunter argues that the neo-Anabaptists are actually quite captive to politicization themselves: by their harsh criticism of the powers, they draw their identity from opposition to them.  Thus, their witness becomes political as well.  Hunter also notes that they look at the landscape of American Christianity and conclude that “the majority of American Christians and the churches they attend … are mostly corrupted by neo-Constantinianism and/or an unthinking rapprochement with global capitalism” (164).  This view of the church and church history is unfortunate, because it ignores the fact that many of the people that they criticize have been doing their best to be faithful in quite confusing and difficult circumstances.  The neo-Anabaptists, in contrast to the original Anabaptists who were unfortunately persecuted by other Christians, by and large live in a society that gives them the freedom to advocate these views.  The medieval Christian who took up the sword to help his lord defend against the invading Vikings was making his choices in a less comfortable environment.  I agree with Doug Wilson that Hunter seems to agree more with the neo-Anabaptists than the Christian Right or Left.  Hunter’s criticisms are quite penetrating, too.

To Change the World, Essay II, Chapter 4

The Christian Left comes under Hunter’s scrutiny in this chapter.  Progressivism in general finds its anchor in the French revolutionary demand for “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” with the primary concern being for justice, which progressives tend to think of as economic equality.  There is also “a tension between the communitarian wing and the social libertarian wing, and the dividing line between them is far from clear-cut.  Christian progressives often talk about systemic economic injustice and tend to be critical of war as driven by elites to expand their power and wealth.  The Christian Left often draws from the Hebrew prophets’ calls for justice and criticisms of injustice.  While progressivism was often identified with mainline Protestant denominations and supporters of Catholic liberation theology, Hunter believes that these movements have lost much of their steam.  A new evangelical progressive movement has come on the scene recently, with leaders such as Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo and organizations like Sojourners.  They have come into the news especially following the 2004 election again showed that Democrats had difficulty reaching religious people.  Hunter believes, accurately in my opinion, that the Christian Left has been used by the Democrats for votes just as thoroughly (though for a shorter time) as the Christian Right has been used by the Republicans.

Hunter notes that the Christian Left often shows great resentment, which, you may recall, he believes is a major characteristic of American political culture.  The target of this resentment is often the Religious Right, who the Christian Left (echoing their secular counterparts) blames for taking over the faith and supporting the unjust practices of American capitalism.  While they often criticize the civil religion of the Christian conservatives, they really want the same “righteous empire” governed by their own interpretations of the Bible (147).

I felt that Hunter characterized the Christian Left well.  The usual refrain is about social justice, usually through government programs that echo the Democratic platform.  There’s rarely much challenge to the Democratic policies that protect abortion rights from almost any challenge, and the Christian Left, from what I can see, doesn’t want to make too many waves on homosexuality issues either.

I should say that there was a time that I had higher hopes for the Christian Left as a genuine challenge to the Christian Right’s support for Republican policies that I didn’t like.  Of course, there’s a lot to dislike about Democratic policies too.  That said, some of the people that he lists as Christian Left leaders – Tony Campolo, Ron Sider, and John Perkins – have been important in my growth as a Christian, I think.  Some of the criticisms that the Christian Left makes of our political and economic systems are important to grapple with, even if the solutions aren’t right.

(Note: I think that Hunter misplaces John Perkins as a Christian Left leader.  I’m actually going to see Dr. Perkins later this summer, Lord willing, and one of my goals is to ask him about how his experiences have confirmed or altered his political outlook.  His book And Justice for All is mostly about nongovernmental solutions to poverty.  Perhaps time has changed his point of view.  You can see my review of two of his books here.).

To Change the World, Essay II, Chapter 3

Describing and analyzing the approach of the Christian Right is the task of this chapter.  Certain commitments lie at the heart of Christian conservatives’ engagement with American culture:

• America belongs to religious people by virtue of its Christian history.  Some see this history as explicitly Christian, others as a general sense of the recognition of a religious sphere over the government and people of America.  This Christian character resulted in the blessings and greatness that the United States has enjoyed.
• American culture is changing for the worse, something often blamed on powerful liberal elites and interest groups.  The groups are hostile to Christians and promote the mockery and discrimination against Christians.  The word “persecution” is sometimes used.
• Christians must take action, including in politics.  This is the context of much of the world-changing rhetoric that he looks at in the first few chapters of Essay I.

To Change the World, Essay II, Chapter 2

Hunter here looks at the assumptions that lie under contemporary American political life, arguing that the major trend is toward the politicization of more and more of life: increasingly, every question is a political question.  As cultures lose their consensus, he writes, laws must multiply in order to force cooperation, and the increased number of lawsuits is a reflection of this trend.  This makes the state the center of cultural gravity, and other institutions and groups begin to get their privileges and limitations from the state, and political ideology becomes an important identity marker for people and media.  Interest groups intensify their political activity.  In thinking about the roles of interest groups, I’m reminded of Marvin Olasky’s observation that although Democrats promise to break the power of lobbyists, their desire to increase federal programs actually strengthens the lobbyists as Washington now has more money to spend, and I’m also reminded of Tom DeLay’s K Street Project that sought to set up a new alliance between Republicans and lobbyists.  In sum, “this turn toward politics means that we find it difficult to think of a way to address public (by which I mean collective, common, or shared) problems or issues in any way that is not political” (105).

This trend leads much political action, he believes, to be defined by the Nietzschean “will to power.”  Partisan groups seek to impose their domination, based on “ressentiment” (another Nietzschean term, French for resentment) that flows from a sense of victimization.  He argues that this now defines the culture of politics in the United States, using culture in the same way that he used it in earlier chapters: a system that provides an often unspoken way of looking at the world.  Thus, this does not mean that every person engaged in politics is resentful, but instead that the political culture is built on the will to power and resentment.  In his next chapters, he will look at the Christian Right, Christian Left, and neo-Anabaptists and try to show how their political thought goes along with this political culture.

As far as causation, Hunter traces the trend of politicization to the New Deal.  He now believes that conservatives and liberals are equally caught up culture of politicization.  Doug Wilson makes the point that true small government conservatives (which he distinguishes from believers in “compassionate conservatism, big government conservatism,  bombs away conservatism, telegenic conservatism, and other forms of unconservative conservatism”) are fighting the good fight against the state, which as Hunter describes, is politicizing everything.  That’s a fair point, I think, but from where I sit conservatives who really are arguing for small government in the way that Wilson talks about are marginal in the modern spectrum of conservative political thinkers.  Those who expressed concerns about the expansion of government powers under the Bush administration were sometimes given a platform in the mass media, but seemed to me to be pretty marginalized in the conservative movement.  So Hunter can be forgiven for not addressing them, I think, because they aren’t one of the major trends in American politics (unfortunately).  But I think that Wilson’s point needs to be incorporated too.

I think that Hunter’s characterization of the political culture is really good.  The fracturing of the broad consensus in American culture in the 1960s is one of the major facts of life.  It blew up the political coalition that had sustained the New Deal and gave political voice to conservatives who dissented from it.  Perhaps paradoxically, not only was the liberal political consensus broken, but so was the traditional cultural consensus that assumed a general version of Christian morality.  As Hunter notes, political solutions to national problems are usually interpreted through the matrix of conservative and liberal (although liberals rarely call themselves that).

The last two elections seem to resonate with Hunter’s view of culture too.  Bush and Obama both won victories that were hard fought and extremely emotional and satisfying for their supporters, who hoped that this would be the time that they could strike the blow against their enemies.  Both elections were followed by questions of how the defeated party would survive in the new political landscape (to my embarrassment, I thought that these were credible explanations both times).  Both moved on their agendas, Bush with social security reform and Obama with a huge array of programs.

But a funny thing happened: American culture wasn’t actually transformed.  Neither Bush nor Obama had really built a coalition that would back them on everything; they had merely, in my interpretation, gotten their base and others who found them better than the other candidate.  The opposing party, whose candidate had gotten over 45% of the vote in both cases, marshaled its considerable resources, now augmented by fear of the power that the victors had gained, to “take America back.”  We don’t know how the 2010 elections will turn out, but we can tell that the Republicans have done anything but wither and die.

After Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate election, I posted my thoughts on Facebook, saying that there are two laws of American politics today, which were roughly these:

• Politics is getting mad at the other party for what you did two years ago.
• It doesn’t take long for one of our two major parties to be in power before the public gets sick of them.

I think that’s because the two parties can’t really capture the “center” of American political culture that it needs to satisfy the demands of its base, perhaps because there is no real center in American life because of cultural fragmentation.  Or perhaps it’s because of the sense that government’s job is somehow to make our lives easier and better, but not in ways that cost us any money.

I like that Hunter takes a look at American political culture.  I think that we need more systematic approaches if we want to understand what really ails the political process.  Usually, analysis focuses on the problems that other guys are causing.  What about the problems that we are all participating in?