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Rites Talk

The Worship of Democracy

Blurring the (Pen)Ultimate Distinction

Some of the confusion and muddle of our “folk” political theologies—the on-the-ground practice of Christians with respect to their civic engagement—stems, I am suggesting, from a tendency to “spatialize” political theology, carving out “church” and “state” as two realms or jurisdictions. Questions about Christian public theology are then framed as a matter of how to move between these different “spheres,” or how to negotiate our “dual citizenship,”1 or how to relate “church” and “culture.”2 The problem is that, in reality, many of these supposed borders are invisible. So it’s often hard to know when you’ve crossed a frontier. There’s no “city limit” sign to the earthly city precisely because the earthly city is less a place and more a way of life, a constellation of loves and longing and beliefs bundled up in communal rhythms, routines, and rituals. Theological wisdom about the political begins when we stop asking where and start asking how. This, I’m going to suggest, means overcoming the habit of spatializing the political.

It also means calling into question another distinction that is commonly invoked in political theology: between the “ultimate” and the “penultimate.”3 Both political liberalism and certain strains of Christian political theology like to confidently draw a line between the ultimate and the penultimate (sometimes taken as equivalent to the distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural”). Political liberalism, for example, claims to be agnostic about “ultimate” matters and emphasizes that politics impinges on “penultimate” concerns. Some streams of Christian theology effectively agree, assuming that political life is merely about temporal, “penultimate” realities in contrast to ultimate, “spiritual” realities. Both share a picture of the cosmos as being made up of levels or steps that we can walk together up to a certain point, but then beyond this point we will venture into our ultimate disagreements. And we imagine “politics” happening on this lower tier. So, according to this common assumption, let’s focus on what we can do together on the lower, penultimate levels.4

In this way, the (pen)ultimate distinction then licenses a division of labor between the temporal and the eternal, between transcendent expectations and this-worldly realities. Our ultimate beliefs and expectations have a kind of religious character about them (what political liberal John Rawls would have called “metaphysical conceptions of the good”).5 Even if you’re a naturalistic atheist, you confess something as ultimate; you’ll be committed to some macrovision of what’s good and just and right. Now, your “ultimate” commitments might not be very grand; they might be very narrow, in fact. Your ultimate, sacrosanct commitments might be to your own self-preservation and interests—an egoistic worldview. You might believe in Ayn Rand or Friedrich Nietzsche in a way that shapes your entire perception of the world and your calling within it. But if you’re honest, you’ll have to concede that not everyone believes what you believe (what Charles Taylor calls a “secular” situation, where no one’s beliefs can be taken to be axiomatic, default for an entire society). Similarly, if you’re a Christian, you have ultimate beliefs about God and transcendent expectations for the consummation of all things. But you also have to grant that not everyone believes that. And so we are in a situation where we are divided on the ultimate.6

But our ultimate disagreements, according to this logic, need not preclude our agreement on “penultimate,” temporal matters like trash collection, traffic lights, public libraries, interstate systems, and the commercial exchange of goods and services. These are mundane, banal, “worldly” realities we all have to manage, whether or not you believe in God. Whether you think human beings are created in the image of God or are just sentient meat encased in skin, we can probably all agree that sewer systems are a good thing. We might not agree on the eternal destiny of the soul, or whether we have souls, but we might all be able to agree that laws requiring child car seats are a good idea. If we would only focus on mundane, penultimate issues, we need not be bothered by the ultimate beliefs that divide us. Save that stuff for weekends at home.

Liberalism prides itself on its politics of penultimacy; that is, liberalism likes to brag about its ultimate agnosticism and parade itself as the procedural system that only asks us to work together on the penultimate. “I don’t have any specific vision of the good to purvey,” Lady Liberalism purrs. “I’m not telling you what to believe. I don’t really ‘believe’ anything. Let’s just agree to some rules to help us arrive at some consensus about penultimate matters.” It’s when we fixate on the ultimate that people get hurt, according to this story; the penultimate never hurt anyone.

Except, of course, when it does. Recall the violence and destruction occasioned by the postal system in The Postman. How does the banal matter of transporting letters turn into a war? “Merely” political and social allegiances trump religious allegiances all the time, whether in presidential primaries, under the grotesque shadow of the lynching tree, or in horrifying cases like the Rwandan genocide.7 The fact is, the ultimate/penultimate distinction is not the happy division of labor we imagine, mostly because the political is not content to remain penultimate.

Indeed, we are most prone to absolutize the temporal when our ultimate conviction is that there is no eternal. Joseph Bottum documents this absolutization of the penultimate in An Anxious Age (and a particularly incisive follow-up in The Weekly Standard).8 Rehearsing the litanies of progressive outrage and the public excommunications of the left, Bottum confirms the prescience of G. K. Chesterton’s observation that “the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad”—virtues “isolated from each other and wandering alone.” A secularized culture is not devoid of religious fervor; it just finds new outlets. “As the post-Protestant generations gradually rose up to claim the high places formerly occupied by their mainline grandparents,” Bottum argues, “what they carried with them was the mood and structure of once-coherent ideas of Christian theology, rather than the personal behaviors of Christian morality. What escaped the dying mainline denominations was not so much the old virtues as the old concepts, isolated from each other and wandering alone.”9 A secularized culture has its own renditions of original sin, its own version of sanctification (a sort of politically correct form of enlightenment), its own exercises in purification and excommunication (turns out the church of the penultimate, unlike the Christian church in America, actually exercises discipline). These are not the habits of an ethos that is agnostic about what’s ultimate.10

And you’d be hard-pressed to conclude the political is just temporal and penultimate when you visit the veritable temple mount that is the National Mall—which even the National Parks Service heralds as home to the “icons” of the nation’s capital.11 If we could teleport St. Paul from Mars Hill to the National Mall and lead him from the heraldry of the capitol, past the Washington Monument, and into the “temple”12 that houses the eternal memory of Abraham Lincoln, I would imagine his observations would be similar: “I perceive that in every way you are very religious” (Acts 17:22 ESV). Democracy and freedom are not just good ideas for the “meantime” of our earthly sojourn; they are the ultimate goods for which we die (and kill). This is reinforced by the liturgies of the stadium and arena that stage spectacular displays of national mythology and military power akin to what Augustine described as the “fabulous” civil theologies of the Roman Empire, those public rituals that constituted nothing less than worship.13 The political bleeds beyond the bounds of the penultimate; our public rituals have the force of rites.

Picturing “Fabulous” Theologies:
Visiting the Stadium with David Foster Wallace

Let me take you to a scene that is quintessentially David Foster Wallace, from his widely acclaimed novel Infinite Jest. Surrounded by the vistas of the Arizona mesa, agent Steeply meets Rémy Marathe, a member of the Quebec separatist group the Wheelchair Assassins. Almost immediately, their conversation turns to matters of love. Initially this is the romantic love that launches ships and starts wars: Agamemnon and Helen, Dante and Beatrice, Kierkegaard and Regina. Not surprisingly, given their roles, this morphs into a conversation about the power of nationalism, which only encourages Marathe to return to a common trope. Here’s the snippet of conversation that interests us:

“Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, ‘fanatic,’ do they teach you it comes from the Latin for ‘temple’? It is meaning, literally, ‘worshipper at the temple.’”

“. . . here we go again,” Steeply said.

“As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine’s grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.”

Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. “Herrrrrre we go.”

Marathe ignored this. “Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. . . .”

[“After all,” Marathe later pointed out,] “you are what you love.”14

While this conversation unfolds between government agents and revolutionaries, taking place on a political terrain, in fact this scene that evokes the religious dynamics of fandom follows immediately on the heels of a more common scene in Infinite Jest: the rigors of the tennis novitiate at Enfield Tennis Academy. This cloistered, formative community is overseen by Gerhardt Schtitt. “Like most Europeans of his generation,” the narrator observes, Schtitt has been “anchored from infancy to certain permanent values which—yes, OK, granted—maybe, admittedly, have a whiff of proto-fascist potential about them, but which do, nevertheless (the values), anchor nicely the soul and course of a life.”15 This is the inheritance of his education in a “pre-Unification Gymnasium under the rather Kanto-Hegelian idea that jr. athletics was basically just training for citizenship, that jr. athletics was about learning to sacrifice the hot narrow imperatives of the Self—the needs, the desires, the fears, the multiform cravings of the individual appetitive will—to the larger imperatives of a team (OK, the State) and a set of delimiting rules (OK, the Law).”16 It shouldn’t be entirely surprising, then, that the rituals of the tennis academy are also invested with the aura of the temple, the halo of devotion.17

But perhaps what’s even more interesting is when Wallace invokes this intersection of athletics and religion in his nonfiction. While his writing on the phenom Roger Federer has garnered much attention, let me draw your attention to a provocative essay on the little-known US tennis pro Michael Joyce. In a dense footnote, Wallace homes in on Joyce’s identity: “Tennis is what Michael Joyce loves and lives for and is. . . . It’s the only thing he’s devoted himself to, and he’s given massive amounts of himself to it, and as far as he understands it it’s all he wants to do or be.”18 Then, evoking themes of free will and determinism that were, it turns out, the focus of Wallace’s undergraduate thesis in philosophy,19 Wallace raises an interesting question about choice and devotion:

Because he started playing at age two and competing at age seven, . . . and had the first half-dozen years of his career directed rather shall we say forcefully and enthusiastically by his father . . . , it seemed reasonable to ask Joyce to what extent he “chose” to devote himself to tennis. Can you “choose” something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours?20

Joyce’s answer, Wallace comments, is “both unsatisfactory and marvelous”: “It doesn’t really matter much to him whether he originally ‘chose’ serious tennis or not; all he knows is that he loves it.”21 You can see this love in Joyce’s eyes, Wallace says, and you can feel a certain awe in Wallace’s description, and maybe just a hint of jealousy. And then this parallel: “It’s the sort of love you see in the eyes of really old people who’ve been happily married for an incredibly long time, or in religious people who are so religious they’ve devoted their lives to religious stuff: it’s the sort of love whose measure is what it has cost, what one’s given up for it. Whether there’s ‘choice’ involved is, at a certain point, of no interest . . . since it’s the very surrender of choice and self that informs the love in the first place.”22

Let’s remember: we’re talking about tennis here. But in doing so, we’ve already entered the temple, so to speak. The court and the field are terrains of devotion whose aspirations are described in religious tones, whose rituals draw temple-going “fanatics.” Is it any wonder that Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, in their postmodern effort to retrieve paganism, look to sports for salvation? In a world of flattened immanence, where else could one look for a semblance of fanatic devotion? And so they conclude their book All Things Shining with a proposal that is at once remarkable and unbelievable, yet predictable. “Sports,” they suggest, “may be the place in contemporary life where Americans find sacred community most easily. . . . There is no essential difference, really, in how it feels to rise as one in joy to sing the praises of the Lord, or to rise as one in joy to sing the praises of the Hail Mary pass, the Immaculate Reception, the Angels, the Saints, the Friars, or the Demon Deacons.”23

St. Augustine would both agree and beg to differ. He too would see the religious significance of sport’s rituals, whether it’s the liturgies of the Big 12 temple or the hushed, prayerful tranquility of Amen Corner at Augusta. But he would note a pretty “essential” difference between the rites of the arena and the sacramental rites of the body of Christ, since the point isn’t just the “whoosh”24 but who and what you love. Wallace was exactly right: “You are what you love.” Which is why what you love constitutes an “essential difference.”

In the spirit of Augustine, let’s undertake a sort of liturgical analysis of the temples of sport, trying to discern what they teach us to love and how these rites shape and (de)form our devotion. Imagine we dropped a crew of proverbial Martian anthropologists in the midst of a NASCAR race, the Super Bowl, or any Texan high school on an autumn Friday night. Imagine these are alien anthropologists of religion, schooled in ritual studies. What would they notice? Wouldn’t they be struck by the rites of sport and see these as a feature of our devotion, the stadiums as temples?

We don’t need to engage in this sci-fi fantasy: we already have Augustine. In a way, Augustine gives us a kind of outside, “Martian” perspective on Rome’s rituals because he had effectively emigrated to another city. The young man whose eyes were fixed on ascending to the imperial court found his home elsewhere; his heart carried the passport of the heavenly city, and thus he could inhabit his old haunts as an alien, a pilgrim, a stranger.

In this way, his City of God can be read as a theologically inflected anthropology that doesn’t focus merely on the teachings or myths of Rome but homes in on the rites of the empire precisely because his account is ultimately about worship. Since true justice requires true worship, according to Augustine, Christian cultural criticism has to be a mode of liturgical analysis. Since, as he memorably puts it, “a people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love, then it follows that to observe the character of a particular people we must examine the objects of its love.”25 And if you want to see what a people loves, look at what they worship, what they devote themselves to. Hence a critical analysis of civic virtue is a liturgical analysis of the rituals that train a people’s loves. The liturgies of a culture are the embodied scripts that form our loves and shape our devotion.

Rome is really just one outpost of the earthly city more generally—a city whose founding is coincident with the fall, not creation. The earthly city is defined by a disordered love that manifests itself as a libido dominandi, a lust for domination that is bound up with self-interest.26 If, contra Dreyfus and Kelly, there is an “essential difference” between the liturgies of the heavenly and earthly cities, it is found by discerning their telos, their substantive—and substantively different—visions of the good.

Rome, of course, lustily embraces a libido dominandi in many ways, but it is just the latest dominant rendition of the earthly city. Furthermore, and of interest to us today, Augustine would note that the love-shaping rites of Rome are not all orchestrated by the emperor or “the state.”27 All kinds of sectors of civil society serve the same mythology, cultivating rituals that, while not “political” in the narrow sense, are nonetheless rites of the polis and its mythology of power, domination, and acquisition. Sectors of civil society don’t need to be managed or owned by the state in order to serve the state.28 The earthly city’s liturgies are not narrowly “governmental.”

A Christian cultural critique of Sports, Inc., has something to learn not only from Augustine’s analysis of the gladiatorial games in book 3 of Confessions but also from book 6 of City of God, in which he analyzes what he calls the “fabulous theologies” of civic ritual.29 His interlocutor, Varro, wants to distinguish between “mythical” (i.e., fabled, fabulous) theologies and the respectable “civil” theologies of the empire. The “fabulous” theologies are, well, mythical, fantastical, and even in Varro’s day hard to believe; civil theology, on the other hand, is the respectable, necessary civil religion of the polis. But, Augustine says, let’s look closely at these civil theologies—the acceptable gods “which should be worshipped officially and the rites and sacrifices which should be offered to each of them.” When you do so, you’ll find that the distinction becomes less tenable, that the fabulous and the civil bleed into one another: the gods of the republic demand sacrifices too.30 They demand that we love rival gods.31

If you’re looking for the liturgical rites of fabulous civil theologies today, is there anywhere more obvious than the stadium, the arena, the track? But the question to bring to these liturgical sites is not whether or not we idolize our teams or players. Granted, “sports” itself can perhaps become its own telos. Mark Hamilton is surely right when he points out that we “allow athletics to dictate to us what school districts we will live in, what jobs to hold, how to spend our leisure time, whom we marry, what activities we place our children in, how we will spend large sums of money, or with whom to socialize. It reaches into every nook and cranny of life. We give it a power over us.”32

But I want to ask the question Augustine (and Wallace) brought to those fabulous, civil theologies: what do these “secular” cathedrals teach us to love? What are they enticing us to devote ourselves to? While there’s good reason to consider the rabid, tribal devotion of team identity, that’s less my interest here. I’m more interested in how the stadium is enfolded into our civil theologies and becomes a site of what Michael Hanby has described as the “military-entertainment complex,” a powerful cultural machine that generates stories, images, and paeans to bravery, sacrifice, and devotion to the national cause, choreographed with bodily movements in contexts that are deeply affective.33 This constitutes a liturgy because it is a material ritual of ultimate concern: through a multisensory display, the ritual both powerfully and subtly moves us, and in so doing implants within us a certain reverence and awe, a learned deference to an ideal that might someday call for our “sacrifice.” This is not only true of professional sports; the rituals of national identity—and nationalism—have been almost indelibly inscribed into the rituals of athletics from Little League to high school football.34

As I’ve already suggested, it’s precisely when your ultimate conviction is that there is no eternal that you’re most prone to absolutize the temporal. When the only gods left to you are the gods of the whoosh (or the swoosh, if you’re the Oregon Ducks), then the stadium is the last sacred site, your team is the faithful remnant, game day is the last pilgrimage, and your donation to the alumni fund is as close as you’ll get to almsgiving. We are on the terrain of the ultimate here. This is no longer just something you do; it does something to you. What are you learning to love here? What are we devoting ourselves to? To see the stadium in this light is to expand the scope of what we think counts as “political.” It reminds us that the ethos of liberalism is shaped and primed by countless nongovernmental institutions.

In Adam Gopnik’s remarkable book The Table Comes First—which looks like it’s about food but is really a set of philosophical meditations35—he “goes meta,” as the kids say, and writes about food writing. There are, he points out, “two schools of good writing about food: the mock-epic and the mystical microcosmic.”36 The mock-epic enlarges the significance of the gourmand by situating him or her in a story that is as big as the cosmos, making the eater a kind of hero: eating is about life and death, longing and desire, triumph and freedom! In the mock-epic, we zoom out from the table to the level of myth. In contrast, the mystical microcosmic is characterized by poetic compression, an attention to the fine-grained particularities of a recipe or a meal as a portal to a mystical insight. We zoom in only to pass through a portal that takes us to depths below the plate, below our consciousness, into mystery. Since both end up in places of charged existential significance, it can sometimes be hard to tell the two apart.37

In an aside, Gopnik suggests the same is true of sportswriting : “We go to it for either W. C. Heinz’s tears or Jim Murray’s jokes, Gary Smith’s epics or Roy Blount Jr.’s yarns, which suggests that, with the minor arts, our approach is classical.”38 This seems exactly right and gets at something about the nature of sport as a ritual feature of our social architecture. Our relationship to sport is ineluctably “nested” in layers and levels of significance that contextualize what it means to us and how it functions in society. This echoes Augustine’s point: the mythical bleeds into the civil. The penultimate becomes charged with ultimate significance. To put it in Gopnik’s terms, the epic bleeds into the micro. The amateur imitates the professional who is invested with mythic status and power. We can’t make a neat-and-tidy distinction between the corporatized bastardization of “big time” sports and the supposed purity of the sandlot. We imitate what we see, and in an age of mutual display, where to be is to be seen, we all live as if the cameras are on us. The epic bleeds into the micro in every JV halfback who strikes the Heisman pose; the mythical bleeds into the professional when Russell Crowe’s gladiator growls “I will win the crowd” at a Nashville Predators’ hockey game. In an age of mutual display where the professionals are mythologized, our experience as spectators bleeds into our play. Indeed, we watch ourselves play, and we play as if we are being watched. (Think of players watching themselves run into the end zone on the jumbotron.) After Friday Night Lights, every high school football coach is living into the role of Coach Taylor.

The epic bleeds into the micro in the political sense as well: the anthem and color guard at high school football game are “nested” in the spectacular displays of college and professional football, crowned by the high holy day of the Super Bowl. In these repeated rites a story is lodged in our imagination.

Sport gives us scripts. So the games we watch become the games we play, the stories we enact. That means the games we play and watch character-ize us; they give us capital-S Stories to live into in a secular age, a place where we can look for Dreyfus and Kelly’s whoosh. So we become characters in those stories. That means the scripts of sport—whether played or watched—seep into us and become part of the fabric of our character. Hence, Marathe’s warning comes back to us: “Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.” What are the liturgies in these stadium-temples teaching us to love?

The Ultimate Bleeds into the Penultimate

So the neat-and-tidy distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate—which is taken to be roughly equivalent to the distinction between religion and politics—turns out to be blurred because the political is not content to remain penultimate. However, the distinction is blurred from the other direction as well: our ultimate visions are not agnostic about the penultimate. The ultimacy of the biblical eschatological vision is not just a prescription for a distant eternity; it is also the norm for what good culture-making looks like now in a fallen-but-redeemed creation.39 So the ultimate is not sequestered to kingdom come: it is the beacon for our cultural renewal in the penultimate present. That means our eschatology impinges on our politics.

This bleeding of the ultimate into the penultimate challenges some theological approaches in my own Reformed/Kuyperian tradition that tend to be more straightforwardly affirmative about political involvement. Trying to keep the peace between competing visions of the good, such Christian accounts of the political sometimes, it seems, encourage us to adopt a functionally agnostic stance about the ultimate in the way we organize our political and public life. Let me take up a specific proposal to get at my worry here.

In Pluralisms and Horizons, a remarkable little book that deserves much more attention than it has received, Richard Mouw and Sander Griffioen articulate an insightful, wise, and nuanced affirmation of what we might call “appropriate” pluralism as a Christian public philosophy.40 In particular, they distinguish different kinds of “public pluralisms.”

• Directional pluralism is a pluralism of worldviews, the deepest sort of “confessional” pluralism in a world where people have fundamentally different visions of the good. This includes, but is not reducible to, “religious” pluralism; it also includes what Charles Taylor would call “exclusive humanism” and the moral visions that fund political liberalism.41 To live in a directionally pluralist society is to inhabit a world where we disagree about “the ultimate.” Their point here is largely descriptive, recognizing the reality of confessional differences about “the ultimate.”
• Associational pluralism is a pluralism of institutions and modes of human interaction. We inhabit a plurality of “spheres” that include families and schools, businesses and governments. The webs of association I’m plugged into as a citizen are different from the webs of association that characterize me as a father or a teacher. On this front, Mouw and Griffioen’s point is more prescriptive, advocating for a robust plurality of institutions as reflective of healthy civil society, pushing back on the tendency of either the state or the market to swell and absorb every facet of human social life.42
• Contextual pluralism names the wide array of cultural differences that take root in regions and peoples, in languages and literatures. New York is not Jakarta; Peoria is not Seattle. Here Mouw and Griffioen’s point is both de- and pre-scriptive: recognizing such cultural diversity as a gift and positively affirming it and enabling many cultural flowers to bloom as a plurality in which God delights.

With this taxonomy, Mouw and Griffioen offer a nuanced way for Christians to sift through the challenges associated with pluralism. As they show, contrary to nostalgia for a WASPy consensus, a biblical vision affirms and celebrates associational and contextual pluralism of all sorts. At the same time, biblical Christianity will have to lament the reality of directional pluralism even as it concedes that this is to be expected in the saeculum.

But even then we still have hard questions to ask, for how are we to live in the meantime, between the cross and kingdom come? While we may not celebrate directional pluralism, we also can’t fail to recognize the reality. Then the question is, what do we do with it? Can we imagine forging collaborative relationships in the context of directional pluralism for the sake of contextual pluralism and the common good? While we might disagree on what’s ultimate, could we partner on the penultimate, fostering healthy associational pluralism in this time between times, this saeculum in which we wait?

I have reservations, however, about a specific aspect of Mouw and Griffioen’s proposal. As they rightly note, how we govern “associational” pluralism—the diversity of institutions that compose society—will inevitably be informed by some confessional “directional” perspective, some “ultimate” perspective. So the question is, “Who will decide which directional perspective will provide the appropriate integrating vision?” They suggest two possibilities: either some specific group’s vision will be “imposed” on society, or such a vision “will be generated out of the give-and-take of public debate, without granting any specific directional orientation a favored status in the discussion.”43 As you might guess, they prefer the latter option, and they articulate their rationale eschatologically: “We oppose the imposition of any specific directional vision on the public order prior to the eschaton,” going so far as to describe this as “the more just arrangement.”44 But the result, it seems to me, is a kind of macroliberalism, a feigned neutrality at a group level that ends up with a kind of “live and let live” stance that is itself a “directional” vision. Though offered in the name of not “imposing” a substantive vision, what they describe as “just” is freighted with a particular—yea, ultimate—vision of justice that deserves Christian theological suspicion and critique.45

Mouw and Griffioen stipulate: “Wherever possible, people should be permitted to live out the implications of their chosen directional visions.” Indeed, they go even further to make such a laissez-faire stance a matter of justice: “Justice requires that even people whose viewpoints we consider to be blatantly wrongheaded have a prima facie right to pursue their sincerely held convictions.”46 But what vision of justice “requires” this? And is this vision of justice “ultimately” neutral?47

Furthermore, one could legitimately worry about the effects of such agnosticism with respect to the ultimate, particularly for the poor and vulnerable. I think the recent work of social scientists like Charles Murray and Robert Putnam documents the disastrous social effects of basically “trying out” what Mouw and Griffioen advise here: for several generations now we have refrained from “imposing” any substantive visions of the good life with respect to family, marriage, and sexuality, for example. We’ve given people room to pursue both their sincerely held convictions and their passions for pleasure. We (allegedly) haven’t “imposed” a normative vision of human social arrangements except the maxim “Be autonomous.” The result? Erosion of family stability (especially for the poor) and widening inequality, exposing the most vulnerable to even more social threats, eviscerating the working class, and amplifying inequality—none of which looks very just, even if it is the result of observing a kind of procedural justice.48 Once again, what Mouw and Griffioen underestimate is the formative aspect of our public policy and political configurations. They still tend to think of this “public” space as one occupied by “thinking things” who are looking for permission to hold certain beliefs. In other words, while they take themselves to be rejecting Rawls, they still end up sharing some fundamental assumptions with Rawls. Setting up society in this way doesn’t just give permission to think what you want and believe what you will; it also becomes an incubator of virtues and vices. Every society makes a “people”; every polis breeds character. Laws function as “nudges” that are habit-forming.49

Mouw and Griffioen invoke eschatological waiting as the reason to become liberals in the meantime, as if this were counsel to adopt a merely penultimate stance with respect to justice. But in fact such a model of justice is ultimately loaded, and when it is inscribed in the warp and woof of a society, it becomes the ethos that shapes a people. A biblical passion for justice as shalom might be precisely what pushes us to refuse this merely procedural standard of justice. That is not license to confuse the state with kingdom come, but it is an impetus to bear witness to—and lobby for—substantive visions of the good for the sake of our neighbors. Our eschatological orientation should change our expectations, not our goals. We shouldn’t shrink from hoping to bend our policy and public rituals in the direction of rightly ordered love, not so we can “win” or “be in control,” but for the sake of our neighbors, for the flourishing of the poor and vulnerable, for the common good.

Democracy, Tradition, and Liturgy

I’ve tried to show that we should be skeptical of any neat-and-tidy distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate as a way to compartmentalize “religion” and “politics”—in part because the penultimate is not content to remain penultimate but also because our ultimate visions are not neutral with respect to penultimate decisions and policies that have to be made. This is another way of trying to suggest how the state and other public institutions have a kind of religious character while at the same time emphasizing that the gospel is not apolitical.

Eventually I will argue that this does not mean we have to choose between the church and the state. Although the state has its disordered liturgies, I will not thereby conclude that we can simply “check out” of the project of statecraft and public life. Indeed, eventually I will argue that it is precisely the cultural mandate coupled with the second Great Commandment—to love our neighbors as ourselves—that propels us to responsibility for the public life of the nations and communities in which we find ourselves as pilgrims and sojourners. Even when the city is Babylon, we are called to seek the welfare of the city (Jer. 29:7).

But before we get to that positive, constructive endeavor, I think it is equally important to cultivate a healthy suspicion of our Babylons. Too many Christian public theologies, rightly fending off an apolitical and anticultural pietism, end up with overly sanguine accounts of how and why Christians can embrace public and political engagement.50 This stems, I think, from a failure to see our public institutions as liturgical bodies, a failure to see the rites that suffuse the state. When we fail to recognize the liturgical nature of our public institutions, we also fail to recognize their (de)formative power.51 The state is not just a neutral, benign space I can stride into with my ideas and beliefs. The state isn’t just the guardian of rights; it is also a nexus of rites that are bent on shaping what is most fundamental: my loves. The state doesn’t just ask me to make a decision; it asks me to pledge allegiance. Governing isn’t just something you do; it does something to you. And as I’ve tried to show above, the rites of the earthly city are not only managed by the state or government; the ethos of the polis is fostered in stadiums and arenas too. The “political” is wider than the government.52

Thus it is crucial to cultivate a healthy suspicion and discerning distance from the machinations of the state and the litanies of our public institutions (which, let me note up front, is different from a stance of disengagement and withdrawal). And I think it is just this sort of suspicion about the formative power of the rites of democracy that has been cultivated by a certain school of political theology that we could identify with Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Milbank.53 While my project lands in a different place, it nonetheless was forged in and by the proposals of MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and Milbank and retains some of their DNA.

In Democracy and Tradition, surely one of the most important works of political theology in the past generation, Jeffrey Stout criticizes this cohort of “new traditionalists” for encouraging faith communities to effectively withdraw from collaborating in our common life together. While eventually I will circle back to sympathy with some of Stout’s critique, I first want to point out why Stout is wrong. As I hope to show, it hinges on the fact that he, too, misses the liturgical nature of the rites of democracy. In other words, Stout underappreciates the ways that liberalism wants to shape my loves.

In Democracy and Tradition, Stout articulates a trenchant critique of what he describes as the “new traditionalism” of MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and Milbank.54 Characteristic of the new traditionalism is the sort of project that Milbank describes as “postmodern critical Augustinianism,” which tends to look for political insights in Augustine’s ecclesiology.55 The picture of Augustine yielded by this project is one of a more “antithetical” Augustine who exhibits a cultivated suspicion and antipathy toward the earthly city. This stance worries Stout because it seems to be providing theological warrant for Christians to withdraw from the practices and processes of democratic life.56

Stout’s argument provides a helpful catalyst for articulating what I will describe as Augustine’s political phenomenology. His account and response runs something like this:

1. Stout affirms the new traditionalists’ critique of secularism, which has attended modern liberal theories of justice purveyed by the likes of Rawls. With the new traditionalist, Stout rejects the notion that liberalism is a neutral, objective disclosure of “pure reason” or could otherwise remain untainted by religious, nonrational commitments.57 So in this respect he is in common cause with MacIntyre and Milbank in rejecting the distinctly “liberal” version of the political that has “endorsed a theory of the modern nation-state as ideally neutral with respect to comprehensive conceptions of the good” and proposed that deliberative reason is “free” and “independent of reliance on tradition.”58
2. However, Stout disagrees with MacIntyre and Milbank’s prescription since the target of the new traditionalist critique is not just “liberalism” but modern democracy as such. “New traditionalism,” according to Stout, entails a “total” critique of modern democracy because (a) the new traditionalists take claims to a-traditionality to be “definitive of modern democracy”59 and (b) they also take such a-traditionality to be an impossible ideal. Therefore, the only way to be “political” is to be “traditioned” (though new traditionalism recognizes a plurality of traditions operative in a pluralistic political context). And since democracy and tradition are mutually exclusive, according to these new traditionalists, democracy is a fatally flawed political project.60
3. Stout contests this final claim, arguing (a) that democracy is not essentially “secularist”61 and (b) that democracy is itself a tradition and therefore can nourish virtues and practices that contribute to political flourishing.62 Stout thinks the American pragmatic tradition, hearkening back to Emerson and Thoreau, through James, is the best way to enact democracy as tradition.63

Thus Stout sees himself fighting on two fronts: “I have tried to define an acceptable path between the liberalism of Rawls and Rorty, on the one hand, and the traditionalism of MacIntyre and Hauerwas on the other.”64

I want to briefly focus on what I perceive as Stout’s underestimation of the new traditionalist critique of liberal democracy. As Stout puts it, the reason MacIntyre and Milbank criticize democracy is not that it fails to be a tradition and therefore fails to provide the resources necessary for the formation of political virtue. Stout takes the new traditionalist critique of liberal democracy to revolve around the claim that “we simply lack the virtues required to sustain an admirable way of life.”65 And so, if Stout can show that democracy is a tradition and that it does inculcate virtue, then democracy evades the new traditionalist critique.

But this misses a more substantive aspect of their critique. The problem isn’t that liberal democracy is not a tradition; rather, the problem is something more like the fact that it is (or has become)66 an insidious tradition.67 Or, to put it otherwise, the problem isn’t that liberal democracy fails to inculcate virtues, but rather that it does, and (at least some of) these virtues are oriented to a telos that is, in some fundamental ways, antithetical to citizenship in the city of God (i.e., Christian discipleship).68

Stout seems to operate with a curious nonteleological or nonnormative notion of tradition and virtue—as if merely having a history and built-up set of “practices” were enough to qualify as a virtue-forming “tradition.”69 Or, to put it otherwise, Stout seems to focus on what’s “behind” or “before” public discourse and democratic practice as sufficient to qualify as a “tradition” of virtue, but is blind to what that supposed tradition is oriented toward—that a tradition is virtue forming only insofar as it is oriented toward a telos that defines “excellence.” Stout seems to imagine tradition and virtue without a telos—or at least his purview leads him to downplay the differences between the telos of democratic liberalism and that of Christian faith. Thus he argues that even a “secularized” democracy does not de facto exclude citizens from engaging in public discourse as religious persons, or even from invoking religious “reasons” (though, in a situation of “secularization” as defined by Stout, it would be “imprudent”).70 Democracy, Stout has argued, should not be confused with liberalism or secularism. And since democracy does not entail the exclusion of religious discourse, religious communities should not be critical of democracy.71 So democracy is a “tradition,” democracy instills “virtue,”72 and democracy does not exclude “thick” religious commitments. What’s not to love?73

Stout’s evaluation of the compatibility between democracy and catholic Christianity (of the new traditionalists) is based on too limited a purview. As I have tried to indicate, Stout’s pragmatic, nonteleological notion of tradition, practices, and virtue makes him blind to just what MacIntyre, Milbank, and Hauerwas are interested in: the competing and mutually exclusive teloi of practices that give them their identity-forming capacities. Because Stout seems to imagine practices and virtues without teloi, he misses exactly the site of antithesis between liberal democracy and Christian discipleship.

Stout is arguing for a commensurability between democracy and Christianity based on what falls within his purview: both draw on tradition for formative practices that inculcate virtue, both inhabit a similar “space” and “time,” and both share practical interests (e.g., in a neighborhood). But because of the limited purview of Stout’s nonteleological account, he fails to recognize the ultimate incompatibility of the two.74 This also means that, within a limited scope, what from a distance might appear to be intersecting or convergent lines are, when we track them out further, actually divergent.75

In a sense, then, I worry that Stout’s account remains overly formalist and procedural: he is bent on demonstrating that democracy is a tradition and that it inculcates virtue, but he is largely inattentive to questions about what kind of tradition it is and what sorts of people it forms and creates. It is formally the case that democracy constitutes a tradition, a handing-on of practices, and that such practices are formative. But that is not sufficient to deflect the new traditionalist critique of liberal democracy, because the critique is not one of a-traditionality (that democracy lacks tradition) but rather one of mis-traditionality (that democracy is a “loaded” set of practices that form people for ends that are incommensurate with the vision of the good life articulated by the gospel).76 Stout’s formalist reply ends up with the vestiges of a kind of secularism because he fails to honor the identity-forming role of these ultimate teloi—which are ultimately “objects of love.” Instead, he tries to persuade new traditionalist Christians to get over (ultimate) differences and get back into the game of a shared public discourse (as if they ever left it).

But the result is almost Rawlsian, because Stout seems to underestimate the degree to which our ultimate loves constitute our identities and shape how we participate in this public, shared space.77 Thus he advocates with “great urgency” a “general project of cultivating identifications that transcend ethnicity, race, and religion.”78 But what if religious identity is a properly ultimate identity? Would not “transcending” then amount to “trumping” such that, once again, despite all his critique of liberalism, Stout is requiring religious folk to minimize the particularity of their religious identity in order to serve democracy? And doesn’t this picture still seem to carve out a kind of functional, pragmatic neutrality—as if one could leave one’s religious identity at the door (the same requirement we ran into with the veil of ignorance)? What if it is precisely our religious identity—particularly as a people—that unveils deep (but not total)79 incommensurability even at the level of the penultimate?80

Stout’s misunderstanding of the new traditionalist critique of democracy stems from (1) his failure to adequately appreciate the substantive teleological nature of habits and practices, and hence (2) his failure to recognize the cases of fundamental incompatibility between the democratic “tradition” and the Christian tradition (“thickly” conceived).81 We might encompass both elements by saying that Stout misses the nuance of the new traditionalist project because he lacks an intentional account of political actors and communities, and more specifically misses the fundamental intentional mode of love as that which defines “citizens” and “peoples.” In sum, in order to properly appreciate the new traditionalist critique of liberal democracy, we need to articulate a political phenomenology of love.

On (Mis)Understanding the “Earthly City”

Now, what does all this have to do with Augustine? I am suggesting that considering Augustine’s account of the political as a proto-phenomenology will help illuminate the central dynamic of love in City of God, and also help to discern a fundamentally (though not absolutely) “antithetical” stance in Augustine’s account of “the political” as it is embodied in the earthly city in general and the empire in particular. While Augustine’s account of the relation between the city of God and the earthly city does not entail a withdrawal or isolation from the common tasks of political life, he nevertheless does offer a stinging critique of imperial “virtue” that calls into question the extent or posture of the Christian community’s participation in common political tasks. Or more pertinently (vis-à-vis Stout), Augustine is concerned about the formation that takes place if the Christian community is too sanguine about its involvement in the political practices of the earthly city. In sum, I will argue that a phenomenological reading of City of God points to a more antithetical Augustine.

In this respect, I will push back on pictures of a more “accommodating” Augustine, one that reads Augustine as if the distinction between the heavenly and earthly cities were a distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate, a division of labor between the temporal and the eternal, the spiritual and the political. This misreading is the fruit of two failures of exegesis: (1) it downplays or misses altogether the core dynamics of love in Augustine’s account of the political, and particularly the interplay of love, worship, and justice in his account of the “two cities”; and (2) because of this, it yields an Augustine who looks like a scholastic Thomist,82 affirming the supposedly “natural” and “temporal” ends of the earthly city but pointing up its failure as a lack or inability to attend to supernatural, eternal ends.

One can find such a reading of Augustine in Todd Breyfogle’s critique of Milbank’s “postmodern critical Augustinianism.”83 Breyfogle, who wants to contest Milbank’s more antithetical reading of Augustine, does so by reading Augustine’s distinction between the two cities as if it were a distinction of “levels”—a neo-scholastic distinction between nature and grace, temporal and eternal, philosophy and theology. Breyfogle is critical of Milbank’s rejection of “secular reason” precisely because Breyfogle thinks this forfeits the ability to have an “autonomous” account of the political—which, of course, is exactly what Milbank wishes to critique (“That’s not a bug; it’s a feature!”). But Breyfogle, who (like Wayne Hankey) can only imagine philosophy as autonomous and basically secular, suggests that “the political” can only be affirmed insofar as it is affirmed as the truth of a rational, “natural” sphere.84 And he seeks to attribute this to Augustine by suggesting that Augustine distinguishes between that which can be “rationally discerned” about the political and that which can be “discerned by faith” regarding salvation.85 This then translates into a picture of Augustine as affirming the earthly city as a proper custodian of “natural ends”86 and attributing to Augustine a tidy carving up of the world into “spheres”—as if the distinction between the two cities were a relation of subsidiarity.87

Similarly, David VanDrunen reads Augustine’s two cities as a “precursor” of later “two kingdoms” theory. VanDrunen rightly notes that Augustine distinguishes the city of God from what he variously describes as the “city of this world,” the “earthly city,” and the “city of man.”88 For Augustine, these two cities or societies89 or “peoples” are marked by the standards by which they live: the earthly city lives by the standard of the flesh, whereas the city of God lives by the Spirit.90 And while in the opening of City of God he distinguishes them by their animating virtues and vices (humility and charity vs. domination and pride),91 he later emphasizes that what ultimately distinguishes the two cities are their loves:92 “We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self.”93

VanDrunen rightly notes that Augustine’s analysis here is starkly antithetical, that there is no dual citizenship for Augustine.94 “Each individual member is a member of one city, and one city only.”95 But then VanDrunen quickly begins to elide what Augustine distinguishes. In particular, the city of man increasingly becomes identified simply with “broader society” and (anachronistically) “the state,” which are then identified with “the world” and “this life.”96 It is just such elisions that lead to strange translations when Augustine is invoked by two-kingdom theorists. Thus when VanDrunen expounds Luther’s doctrine of two kingdoms, he claims that it “closely resembles key features of Augustine’s two cities.”97 Indeed, he reads Luther as an extension of Augustine: “Luther’s doctrine clearly must be distinguished from a straightforward Augustinian two cities doctrine, not so much in contradicting it as in supplementing it with certain significant ideas. To some degree, Luther’s adding the nuance of two governments to the two kingdoms template accounts for this constructive development of Augustinian thought. For example, Luther’s two governments framework gives the two kingdoms an institutional expression—in church and state—that lurks just below the surface in the City of God.”98 Describing this reading as a “supplemental paradigm,” VanDrunen sees Luther as simply extending Augustine, going “beyond” him by complexifying the picture and thus giving Christians permission, even encouragement, to “embrace their roles in the civil realm” and see themselves “genuinely as citizens of an earthly domain.” In short, they’ve been granted permission to hold “citizenship.”99

But is this really just a “supplement” to Augustine? Is Luther just adding another layer of complexity to Augustine’s account? If so, this is strange math, because the sum undoes key aspects of Augustine in the process. So what looks like a gradual, incremental translation is actually a transposition: notice that Augustine’s earthly “city” (civitas) has now been spatialized into a “civil realm” and “earthly domain.”100 But whence comes this spatialization? And what gets lost in such a “translation”? By the end of this supplement, we’re back to the notion of “dual citizenship” that Augustine clearly rejects—but now in the name of Augustine!

In a similar vein, in popular discourse it is increasingly common to hear calls for Christians to be invested in the “earthly city,” or to hear that we are simultaneously citizens of both the heavenly city and the earthly city. These affirmations of the earthly city are rightly meant to displace our lingering otherworldliness, pushing us to see that God is not only interested in saving souls from the city but desires to see the flourishing of the city. The invocation and affirmation of the earthly city is meant to reflect Scripture’s robust theology of creation and affirm our embodied, material, social, and cultural life. This is sound, biblical theology—and a much-needed corrective to our otherworldly ways. However, because the history of the term means something different, talking about the “earthly city” in this way can be confusing.

As we’ve noted, for Augustine the earthly city begins with the fall, not with creation. The earthly city is not coincident with creation; it originates with sin. This is why Augustine sets the city of God in opposition to the earthly city: they are defined and animated by fundamentally different loves. So the earthly city should not be confused with the merely “temporal” city or the material world. It is not identical to the territory of creation; rather, for Augustine the earthly city is a systemic—and disordered—configuration of creaturely life. However, this does not mean that Augustine cedes material, cultural, creaturely life entirely to the evil one. The city of God is not just otherworldly; it is that “society” of people—that civitas—who are called to embody a foretaste of the social and cultural life that God desires for this world.

Augustine doesn’t invoke the earthly city in order to motivate Christians to care about this-worldly cultural life. His theology of creation already does that. The analysis of the earthly city is instead cautionary, pressing Christians to recognize that cultural systems are often fundamentally disordered, in need of both resistance and reordering by Christian labor in all streams of culture. And as we can see from his letters, Augustine involved himself in such work. There you’ll find the bishop invested in the concrete realities of politics and civic life.101

Augustine doesn’t use the term “earthly city” to carve up reality into a “heavenly” second story and an “earthly” first floor. No, both the earthly city and the city of God are rival visions of heaven and earth. So the “earthly city” is more like Babylon than the Garden. But even this fundamental antithesis doesn’t give us permission to retreat into holy huddles or simply castigate the earthly city. Citizens of the city of God who find ourselves exiled in the earthly city (in Augustine’s technical sense) are called, as Jeremiah counsels, to seek the welfare of the city precisely because we are called to cultivate creation. We will seek the welfare of the earthly city by seeking to annex it to the city of God, thereby reordering creaturely life to shalom.

Misreadings like Breyfogle’s and VanDrunen’s try to account for Augustine’s tempered affirmation of the earthly city through the register of a kind of reified “Thomistic” distinction between nature and grace.102 On this reading, the earthly city is affirmed as that which properly administers “temporal” goods oriented toward “natural” ends, whereas the city of God is concerned with eternal goods and supernatural ends. But this fails to do justice to the radicality of Augustine’s critique of the earthly city, and Rome in particular.103 We can see this in two ways:

1. The earthly city, for Augustine, is not merely “temporal”; it is a decidedly postlapsarian phenomenon (see City of God 11.33–34, 14.4). The “temporal/natural” reading of Augustine makes the earthly city coincident with “the political”; or to put it otherwise, it makes the earthly city coincident with creation. But Augustine traces the genealogy of the earthly city to the fall, which permits him a nuance that makes it possible to affirm the political as inherent to creation (and so rightly embodied in the city of God) but also to criticize the misdirection of the political in the fallen earthly city.
2. Augustine’s critique of the earthly city is not merely that its love is insufficient, falls short, and thus doesn’t reach “far” enough; rather, the love that animates the earthly city is disordered and misdirected (by loving creatures as if they were the Creator).104 It is precisely the “intentional” account of love in phenomenology that will highlight this aspect of Augustine’s critique.

So the “accommodating” Augustine, we could argue, is the fruit of a reading that misses the central dynamics of love; that is, it misses what I will describe in the next section as the “phenomenological” framework of Augustine’s notion of love. There we will note that his picture of the individual subject (which I’ve explored in more detail in Desiring the Kingdom) mirrors his account of a “people.”

Augustine’s Political Phenomenology

Augustine suggests a social, communal, political correlate to the erotic phenomenology of the person I’ve sketched in Desiring the Kingdom. In the same way that the individual “soul” intends105 the world “in love” and thus is identified by the object of that love, so too we find that Augustine, not surprisingly, says that a “people” or “commonwealth” is defined in the same way: by the objects of their love. As already noted, Augustine defines a people as “the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love,” so that in order to “observe the character of a particular people” we must examine “the objects of its love” (City of God 19.24). Now, it is important that Augustine takes up this “intentional” definition of a people as an alternative to Scipio’s definition of a people as “a multitude ‘united in association by a common sense of right and a community of interest’” (19.21). On Scipio’s definition, Augustine contends, there never was a Roman commonwealth because there was no “true justice,” since true justice requires true worship, and that is impossible for any configuration of the earthly city. “Justice is found where God, the one supreme God, rules an obedient City according to his grace, forbidding sacrifice to any being save himself alone” (19.23).

To Think About: A Stance for the Journey

Anyone who has ridden a subway standing up will appreciate how important one’s stance can be. Whether it’s the Tube in London, the Metro in Paris, or the subway in Toronto, the standing rider faces a universal challenge: to remain upright despite the jolts and shocks of the typical train ride. And we can all recall scenes from film or television of the benighted bumpkin from the provinces who steps on the subway for the first time: harried and hurried, crushed then ignored, losing the race to secure a seat and hence left standing in the middle of the car as it lurches forward, our protagonist finds herself on the floor, flustered and embarrassed. (If it’s a rom-com, at this point Hugh Grant reaches down to help her up and, well, you know how the story goes.)

Contrast this with the seasoned veteran who glides through the crowd, assumes the position, and nonchalantly braces himself for the journey without missing a beat on his smartphone. The difference is his stance, one he now assumes without thinking about it. Feet shoulder-width apart, slightly staggered, our urbanite is ready for whatever the jarring track might throw at him. This posture grants a kind of 360-degree strategy of resistance: it is one that is ready for the lurches of starting and stopping as well as the side-to-side sway of twists and turns.

In a way, we might say that the wisdom of Augustine’s City of God is like a stance lesson for the church as it journeys through the saeculum toward its destination, kingdom come. Augustine doesn’t advise us to stay at home; he counsels us to buy a ticket for the journey. To be a subject of Christ the King is to be on the way. Neither does Augustine advise that we look for “safe” ways there, only traveling with “our own” in holy huddled packs of pilgrims who walk on some hidden “spiritual” path above the fray. His admonition is to learn how to share the terrain with others as we’re on the way. Indeed, for Augustine, the saeculum—the age between the fall and kingdom come—is one that is essentially permixtum, an age where church and world are thrown together, intermingled and mixed up in overlapping territory (City of God 19.26). What Augustine offers, then, is not a secret map or some Harry-Potter-like floo-powder network that excuses us from mingling with Muggles. Instead, he offers wisdom about how to cultivate a good stance and posture for the challenges of the journey. This is how to stand if you’re a pilgrim.

However, Augustine revises his definition of a people from Scipio’s more static conception to a more dynamic, intentional one that makes love central to that which constitutes a people as a people. His next question is whether, under this new definition, Rome will qualify as a people or commonwealth. Here the result is quite different: on this new definition, “the Roman people is a people and its state is indubitably a commonwealth” (19.24). Some tend to hastily conclude from this that Augustine offers a basic affirmation of Rome.106 But this is certainly not the case, precisely because Augustine’s proto-phenomenology is interested in the intentional objects of this animating love. And here the conclusion is similar but more nuanced. If we follow the static categories of Scipio, we’ll conclude that Rome was not a people because it was not just. If, instead, we take up this more intentional and “erotic” definition of a people, we will have to conclude that, indeed, Rome is a people. However, Augustine still concludes that, while Rome (and other empires of the earthly city) can be formally described as “peoples,” they are nevertheless unjust. As Augustine puts it,

By this definition of ours, the Roman people is a people and its estate is indubitably a commonwealth. But as for the objects of that people’s love . . . for all this we have the witness of history. . . . And yet I shall not make that a reason for asserting that a people is not really a people or that a state is not a commonwealth, so long as there remains an association of some kind or other between a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of its love. However, what I have said about the Roman people and the Roman commonwealth I must be understood to have said and felt about those of the Athenians and of any other Greeks, or of that former Babylon of the Assyrians, when they exercised imperial rule, whether on a small or large scale, in their commonwealths—and indeed about any nation whatsoever. For God is not the ruler of the city of the impious, because it disobeys his commandment that sacrifice should be offered to himself alone. . . . And because God does not rule there the general characteristic of that city is that it is devoid of true justice. (19.24, emphases added)

To these imperial configurations of the earthly city Augustine grants the formal status of “peoples,” but substantively he judges them to be “generally” or basically unjust precisely because they are not (and cannot be) animated by a rightly ordered love aimed at worship of the Triune God. Augustine recognizes the perduring structural aspect of a people animated by love and even suggests that such an erotic orientation of a community is ineradicable. But what’s at issue is not whether a people loves but what that people loves. Augustine is interested in the objects of love as that which indicates the “character” of a people (19.24). It is the telos of a people’s love that defines a people, and thus Augustine’s political phenomenology, while recognizing a common, formal, intentional structure of a people, zooms in on what distinguishes them—namely, the intentional objects of these communities. It is what-is-aimed-at, the teloi of the communities, that distinguishes them. It is in their different intentional objects that Augustine locates the antithesis.

The only proper object of love for a rightly ordered political community is the Triune God (just as the only “thing” that is to be enjoyed is the Triune God).107 This is just to say that the rightly ordered political community must be oriented by right worship; and insofar as the earthly city is essentially idolatrous (recall that it is not just the “temporal” city), it cannot be so ordered. The earthly city’s different political configurations qualify as “commonwealths” but fail to be just because they are aimed at the wrong objects of love (that is, they wrongly constitute objects of love). Augustine’s phenomenology of love enables him to be attentive to this difference precisely because it yields a sufficiently complex account of subjects and communities that allows him to distill and focus on the intentional objects as constituted by different communities.

It is this kind of Augustinian sensibility that is at work in Hauerwas and Milbank, who are suspicious of liberalism (and democracy) not because it doesn’t form virtue but precisely because it does. More specifically, the concern is that liberal democracy is a repertoire of rites that quite successfully form a people to love certain ends and goods. It is a theological evaluation of those specific goods—the telos of the rites of democracy—that engenders their critique and hesitation. In this respect, it is Augustine’s political phenomenology that enables him to be attentive to an antithesis that Stout’s limited purview does not recognize: that at stake in participation in the political configurations of the earthly city are matters of worship. The public practices of the empire are not “merely political” or “merely temporal”; they are “loaded,” formative practices aimed at a telos that is often antithetical to the goods of the city of God.108 The public practices of the earthly city (including its modern outposts that find expression in liberal democracy) are idolatrous practices because embedded in them is a telos that is other than the Triune God. However, as we will see below, this is not a recipe for dismissal or retreat.

This now propels the next two chapters. First, if it is the substance of the telos that distinguishes the heavenly and earthly cities, then we need to attend to the substance of the ekklēsia’s telos. In other words, it is not merely the “formal” reality of having rituals, liturgies, and tradition that distinguishes the church; what distinguishes the church is the substance of the telos that is carried in those rituals and liturgies. So in chapter 2 we will revisit the church as a polis and unpack the substance of that telos and tease out why the eschatological orientation inherent in Christian worship is essential to the “politics” of the church.

Second, we need to consider whether this antithesis between the earthly and heavenly cities is total or absolute. As I hope to show in chapter 3, a fundamentally antithetical critique of the earthly city (including liberal democracy) need not—and should not—entail a wholesale rejection, dismissal, or withdrawal. Once we appreciate what Augustine calls the permixtum of the church and our political heritage—that all of our attempts to tidily distinguish church and world are fraught—and couple this with a historical appreciation of the gospel’s impact on even the rites of democracy, we’ll then consider how we can collaborate in the public sphere for the common good, which will be the focus of chapters 4–6 and the conclusion.

  

1. As I will point out in a moment, this notion of dual citizenship (in the heavenly city and the earthly city) is not an Augustinian idea, despite many claims to the contrary.

2. A question itself further derailed by H. Richard Niebuhr’s framing of the question as one of “Christ and culture.” For a critical discussion see James K. A. Smith, “Thinking Biblically about Culture,” review of Christ and Culture Revisited, by D. A. Carson, in Discipleship in the Present Tense: Reflections on Faith and Culture (Grand Rapids: Calvin College Press, 2013), 81–86.

3. Note how this contrasts with the biblical distinctions, which are more temporal than spatial: the time of the saeculum versus the time of the eschaton (if “time” is even the right word for the eternal city). Michael Horton has often pressed this point that the biblical distinction is chronological rather than spatial, a matter of asking “What time is it?” rather than “Where are we?” For discussion, see Michael S. Horton, “Participation and Covenant,” in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition, ed. James K. A. Smith and James H. Olthuis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 107–32, and Horton, “The Time Between: Redefining the ‘Secular’ in Contemporary Debate,” in After Modernity? Secularity, Globalization, and the Re-enchantment of the World, ed. James K. A. Smith (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008), chap. 3.

4. See, for example, David VanDrunen, “The Importance of the Penultimate: Reformed Social Thought and the Contemporary Critiques of Liberal Society,” Journal of Markets and Morality 9 (2006): 219–49.

5. In A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), Rawls famously argued that in a liberal society, public deliberation about justice and fairness should be conducted as if everyone inhabited an “original position” that leveled our differences and hence displaced the influence of “interests.” Most notably, he said that in the original position, political actors would have to set aside their ultimate beliefs about the good since these were a source of fundamental difference. We will return to this theme when we consider Jeffrey Stout’s critique of Rawls (see “Democracy, Tradition, and Liturgy” below).

6. Or on what’s “fundamental,” if you want to flip the picture to a more “ground motive” sort of orientation where what’s ultimate, and what divides us, is our most fundamental, taken-for-granted starting points, the beliefs and commitments that are the bedrock of everything else. (This tends to be the formulation in the Neocalvinist tradition after Herman Dooyeweerd.) The claim remains the same: while our fundamental beliefs might divide us, we can come to pragmatic agreement on “mid-level principles.” For a classic articulation of this from the field of bioethics, see Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). For a trenchant, somewhat MacIntyrean critique of this project, see H. Tristram Englehardt Jr., Bioethics and Secular Humanism: The Search for a Common Morality (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1991).

7. See James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2013), and Ephraim Radner, A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012).

8. Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America (New York: Image, 2014); Bottum, “The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas,” Weekly Standard, December 1, 2014, http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-spiritual-shape-of-political-ideas/article/819707.

9. Bottum, “Spiritual Shape.”

10. What Tom Wilson describes as Irving Kristol’s “great religious obsession” bears on just this point:

[It is] the belief that secular liberalism breeds a valueless individualism that necessarily progresses toward moral disorder and even nihilism. Kristol feared that without religion, society would witness a growing discontent with what democratic capitalism can realistically provide. Stripped of any belief in the kind of higher consolation that makes sense of life’s inevitable injustices and humdrum frustrations, the demands that people place on the political system “become as infinite as the infinity they have lost.” Eventually the democratic regime is no longer able to justify or defend itself against the expectations of a citizenry that experiences no spiritual nourishment. Indeed, those expectations become unappeasable in the limitless material improvement that they insist government must provide and that capitalism promises. Without a religious culture, the slide into statism, if not authoritarianism, seems to become irresistible. (Wilson, “Irving Kristol’s God,” First Things, March 2015, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/03/irving-kristols-god)

Oliver O’Donovan offers analysis of a similar phenomenon in The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 309–12. Modernity inherited Christian introspection but lost/rejected the God encountered in this interiority. Therefore new (transcendent) expectations are thrown on society/government, the result of which is despair (311), since modernity inherits the Christian burden to “judge for yourself” without the good news of God’s judgment in Christ. Hence we spiral into self-conscious despair and cling ever more tenaciously to “secular” institutions—that is, institutions that are passing away and cannot save us.

11. “National Mall and Memorial Parks,” National Park Service, accessed March 18, 2015, http://www.nps.gov/nama/index.htm.

12. As the inscription in the Lincoln Memorial explicitly reads.

13. Augustine, City of God 6.5–12.

14. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996; repr., Boston: Back Bay Books, 2006), 107.

15. Ibid., 82.

16. Ibid., 82–83.

17. See, e.g., ibid., 117, 168–69.

18. David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1997), 227–28n24.

19. Recently published as David Foster Wallace, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, ed. Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

20. Wallace, Supposedly Fun Thing, 228n24. The scare quotes and italics every time Wallace talks about “choice” are, I take it, a kind of latent Augustinian intuition and are just right. Note also that for those Christians raised in catholic traditions that practice paedobaptism, the question Wallace poses here is a familiar religious question.

21. Ibid. This, by the way, turns out to be exactly the narrative arc of Andre Agassi’s remarkable memoir, Open (New York: Knopf, 2009), which begins with him loathing a game that his father has “forced” him to play and closes with him wanting to stay on the court just a little while longer because he has come to love the game.

22. Wallace, Supposedly Fun Thing, 228n24.

23. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011), 192–93.

24. Dreyfus and Kelly rather notoriously call this experience of transcendence a “whooshing up”: “If we had to translate Homer’s word physis, then whooshing is about as close as we can get. What there really is, for Homer, is whooshing up: the whooshing up of shining Achilles in the midst of the battle, or of an overwhelming eroticism in the presence of a radiant stranger like Paris. . . . And whooshing up is what happens in the context of the great moment in contemporary sport as well” (ibid., 200–201).

25. Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984), 19.24.

26. Ibid., 1.preface, 14.1, 14.28.

27. Though I do think Augustine would have more than a passing interest in those widely circulated salary maps that show that the highest-paid public (i.e., government) employees across the United States are athletic coaches. See Reuben Fischer-Baum, “Infographic: Is Your State’s Highest-Paid Employee a Coach? (Probably),” Deadspin, May 9, 2013, http://deadspin.com/infographic-is-your-states-highest-paid-employee-a-co-489635228.

28. Though payments from the state are obviously an enticement. See confirmed reports that the US Department of Defense paid millions of dollars to NFL teams for tributes to soldiers: Jared Dubin, “US Defense Department Paid 14 NFL Teams $5.4M to Honor Soldiers,” May 11, 2015, CBSSports.com, http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/25181085/nfl-teams-received-54-million-from-defense-department-in-last-4-years.

29. For a relevant discussion of Confessions, bk. 3, see Mark Hamilton, “An Augustinian Critique of Our Relationship to Sport,” in Theology, Ethics, and Transcendence, ed. Jim Parry, Mark Nesti, and Nick Watson (London: Routledge, 2011), 25–34. My thanks to my student Jason Zeigler for pointing me to this article.

30. Augustine, City of God 6.6–7.

31. It might be relevant to note that bk. 6 of City of God could be read as Augustine’s demonology—that this is akin to Augustine’s account of “principalities and powers.”

32. Hamilton, “Augustinian Critique,” 29. We might also consider the seemingly innocuous way the rhythms of youth sport take over the hum of households and families. For a relevant discussion, see James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2016), chap. 5.

33. Michael Hanby, “Democracy and Its Demons,” in Augustine and Politics, ed. John Doody, Kevin L. Hughes, and Kim Paffenroth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 129. For a fuller account and phenomenology of the rituals of the stadium, see James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cultural Liturgies 1 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 103–10.

34. It might be interesting to consider how “extreme” sports are an exception to this rule. (Do they play the national anthem at the X Games? It would be tricky to have “Anarchy” scribbled all over your skateboard and then pause for the national anthem.) However, it seems to me that there is an individualism characteristic of extreme sports that is problematic in a different way.

35. He is a throwback for whom “gastronomy” is “an unexpected way to get at everything.” See Adam Gopnik, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food (New York: Vintage, 2011), 6.

36. Ibid., 222.

37. Ibid., 223.

38. Ibid.

39. And it is here that we will need to push back on certain Reformed accounts and affirmations of pluralism, which we’ll do below in chap. 4.

40. Richard J. Mouw and Sander Griffioen, Pluralisms and Horizons: An Essay in Christian Public Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).

41. Charles Taylor coins the term “exclusive humanism” to describe a worldview or “social imaginary” (as he calls it) that imagines a life of meaning and significance without any reference to transcendence or the divine—a “self-sufficing humanism.” Taylor discusses this in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 19–21.

42. This is a classic principle of Kuyperian social philosophy regarding the sovereignty of each “sphere.” For a succinct contemporary restatement, see Gideon Strauss, “Market Economy? Yes! Market Society? No!,” Comment 23, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 5–6.

43. Mouw and Griffioen, Pluralisms and Horizons, 118.

44. Ibid.

45. O’Donovan’s observation is relevant here: “Much Christian enthusiasm for ‘pluralism’ has less to do with a relation to the state than with the church’s yearning to sound in harmony with the commonplaces of the stock exchange, the law-courts, and the public schools. It is simply the modern Western version of ‘Water-buffalo theology’” (The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 226). In chap. 4 I will address the challenge of pluralism directly. Here my interest is in the way Mouw and Griffioen’s proposal exhibits a common Reformed tendency to be “directionally” agnostic at the macro level of society.

46. Mouw and Griffioen, Pluralisms and Horizons, 118. “Prima facie” appeals are always a bit of a weaselly move, a way to say “obviously” when you don’t have an argument.

47. Ironically, their proposal brings to mind an important critique of neutrality by a fellow Neocalvinist philosopher, Roy A. Clouser, in The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories, rev. ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).

48. See Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America (New York: Crown, 2012), and Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).

49. I have in mind here the important work of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler on “nudging.” For a relevant and recent articulation, see Cass Sunstein, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For a “hits-the-ground” discussion of similar themes, see David Halpern, Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference (London: WH Allen, 2015). I hope to take up these themes in more detail elsewhere.

50. I’m thinking primarily of arguments in my own Reformed tradition, which is why the subtitle of this book is Reforming Public Theology.

51. My neologism “(de)formative” is trying to honor the fact that the rites of the earthly city are not always and only deformative. Even earthly-city liturgies can run with the grain of the universe in such a way that they are conduits of what Abraham Kuyper liked to call a “common” grace. In this context, however, I will tend to highlight their underappreciated deformative capacities.

52. I take it this is why, especially in the United Kingdom, critics talk about “neoliberalism” as something that encompasses the configuration of both the state and the market, which have been, as it were, captured by the logic of capitalism. In her provocative book Market Citizenship: Experiments in Democracy and Globalization (London: Sage, 2007), Amanda Root tries to leverage this “market-ization” of society in order to improve democratic participation. Thus her project confirms the way in which “the political” as we experience it in late modernity involves much more than government or the state.

53. For a fuller account, see James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), esp. chap. 7.

54. See Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2, for the first reference to “new traditionalism.” I would prefer not to adopt Stout’s term, since it is so clearly loaded. Nonetheless, I will adopt the phrase because it has worked its way into the literature. In what follows I will tend to focus on Stout’s critique of Milbank, since Milbank is most explicit about situating his project in an Augustinian tradition.

55. See John Milbank, “‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’: A Short Summa in Forty-Two Responses to Unasked Questions,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 265–78. This alternative “postmodern” Augustine is suggested in John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), chaps. 10–12; Graham Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000); Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003); and many of the studies collected in Doody, Hughes, and Paffenroth, Augustine and Politics, esp. contributions by David C. Schindler, Michael C. Hanby, and Eugene McCarraher. One could include here Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom: How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), in which he engages Augustine at key points.

56. It is interesting to note, however, that in this project of looking to Augustine’s ecclesiology as a resource for politics, the “new traditionalists” are very close to one of Stout’s heroes in Democracy and Tradition, Sheldon Wolin. Wolin suggested that early Christianity’s contribution to political thought was not in its direct attempts to address “the political” but rather in the “new and powerful ideal of community” it articulated in its vision of the ekklēsia. See Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 97.

57. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 294–96. Nevertheless, Stout affirms that there is a kind of therapeutic value to going through a “Rawlsian” exercise: “It is a very good thing for such people to spend a few weeks of their young adulthood imagining themselves behind ‘the veil of ignorance’ in ‘the original position.’ . . . But as Rawls gradually came to realize, the egalitarian arguments of A Theory of Justice were themselves expressions of a comprehensive view of life not widely shared by the general population” (294–95).

58. Ibid., 2. For a similar critique of the alleged neutrality of Rawlsian liberalism (at least as articulated in A Theory of Justice), see Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Role of Religion in Decision and Discussion of Political Issues,” in Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 67–120. See also Wolterstorff, “Engagement with Rorty,” Journal of Religious Ethics 31 (2003): 129–39.

59. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 2.

60. One can see starker, more animated versions of such a thesis in more recent books. See Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (New York: Encounter Books, 2016), which has found enthusiastic reception in Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel, 2017). Cf. also Patrick J. Deneen, Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2016).

61. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 11, 130.

62. Ibid., 3: “Democracy, I shall argue, is a tradition.” He later continues: “Because traditionalists see democracy as an essentially negative, leveling force—as the opposite of a culture—they tend to underestimate the capacity of democratic practices to sustain themselves over time. . . . Democracy is a culture, a tradition, in its own right” (12, 13). In chap. 4 below we will note an irony in Stout’s later book, Blessed Are the Organized—namely, that it is churches, in fact, that do the most work of forming citizens for liberal democracy.

63. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 13: “To put the point aphoristically and paradoxically, pragmatism is democratic traditionalism.”

64. Ibid., 296.

65. Ibid., 118.

66. On this point, Oliver O’Donovan regularly distinguishes between what he calls “early Christian” liberalism and “late” (contractarian) liberalism. See his discussion of George Grant’s “modernity criticism” in Desire of the Nations, 271–84.

67. On this point, I think Milbank’s critique is more nuanced than MacIntyre’s.

68. Stout’s confusion of Richard John Neuhaus and Milbank is illustrative here. Stout tends to simply identify the two as coming from the same camp. But he concedes that “Neuhaus is more favorably disposed toward modern democracy than Milbank is.” What Neuhaus bemoans is “a religious evacuation of the public square” (Democracy and Tradition, 92). But this is precisely the crucial difference: Neuhaus does not really contest some of the core features of liberal, capitalist society; he just thinks those features require the nourishing resources of “religion” (cf. Elshtain as discussed by Stout [307]). In other words, Neuhaus doesn’t see any deep antithesis (or at least not in the “temporal” sphere); instead, he is out to source democratic capitalism. Milbank, on the other hand, is more critical of liberal democracy precisely because he sees the fundamental antithesis of teloi. But that is also why Milbank is not out to revive Christendom. In other words, Stout seems to think that Milbank isn’t a pluralist; but this is clearly mistaken. In fact, Milbank would accept what Stout describes as a situation of “secularization” (vs. secularism): “What makes a form of discourse secularized . . . is not the tendency of the people participating in it to relinquish their religious beliefs or to refrain from employing them as reasons [that would be secularism]. The mark of secularization, as I use the term, is rather the fact that participants in a given discursive practice are not in a position to take for granted that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions they are” (97). Stout’s definition, we might note, is a tad stipulative and arbitrary; why not just call this a situation of pluralism? Cf. William Connolly’s antisecularist account (that resonates in important ways with Stout) in Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

In any case, a truly “nostalgic” stance (Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 115) would lament not just secularism but secularization as Stout has defined it. But that is true of Neuhaus, not Milbank. Milbank is protesting secularism as a ruse and wants to call it into question precisely in order to call into question the supposed “neutrality” and de facto status of the capitalist organization of late modern society. Stout seems to have missed the fact that Milbank is a socialist but not a statist socialist. To sum up, Milbank’s “postmodern critical Augustinianism” does not “resent” secularization (as defined by Stout); to the contrary, it argues that such is always the situation of pluralist public discourse. Both theocracy and secularism resent secularization.

69. One finds a similar nonnormative, nonteleological notion of “practices” in Joseph Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). The common denominator to both Stout and Rouse is Robert Brandom’s pragmatist account of practices; see Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) and Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Thus it seems that it is the commitment to pragmatism that precludes a more robust teleology. But is a noncommunitarian account of community viable (cf. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 301)? Stout seems to think that it is sufficient for a group to have “shared activities” in order to qualify as a “community” (301). This is because he holds a minimalist definition of community as “a group that holds something in common” (300; cf. Augustine’s definition of “a people”). But when he begins to explicate this a little more, he falls into teleological language: talking about his neighborhood, he concludes that “what we hold in common, what we have going for us as a community, are valued social practices and the forms of excellence they involve” (302, emphasis added). But talk of excellence requires the articulation of a telos.

70. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 98.

71. There is another, loaded layer to this, which is Stout’s general presupposition that democracy is the only way to think fruitfully and generously and justly about the common good. So whenever new traditionalists oppose some injustice, Stout claims that they are operating with “lingering democratic sentiments” (ibid., 119)—as if only democracy can oppose injustice.

72. “I am making for the conclusion that democratic culture is best understood as a set of social practices that inculcate characteristic habits, attitudes, and dispositions in their participants” (ibid., 203).

73. Thus Stout suggests that Milbank, who wants to claim “fidelity to Augustine’s City of God,” runs into trouble and “finds himself struggling against Augustine’s evident ambivalence toward pagan ‘virtue’” (ibid., 103). But Stout seems to take Augustine’s “ambivalence” as if it were a ringing endorsement of pagan “virtue,” and thus a precursor of what Stout wants from religious communities in their affirmation of democratic virtue. But as we’ll note below, Augustine’s “ambivalence” can be read along the lines of Milbank’s suspicion rather than Stout’s affirmation.

74. Augustine describes the two cities as “different and mutually opposed” (City of God 14.4); these are not Gouldian “non-overlapping magisteria.”

75. Or, alternatively, as MacIntyre points out in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), depending on the telos of the tradition, the same habit can be described as either a virtue or a vice; the identification of virtues is tradition dependent.

76. At least, this is the critique articulated by Milbank and Hauerwas; MacIntyre could be read as a different case.

77. At times Stout seems to suggest that the new traditionalist account simply precludes any interest in or concern with a shared, public space. This takes on a remarkable caricature when he suggests that “many of Hauerwas’s readers probably liked being told that they should care more about being the church than about doing justice to the underclass. At some level they knew perfectly well how much it would cost them to do justice” (Democracy and Tradition, 158; cf. 115). But this is just false, and irresponsible, since Hauerwas’s point is clearly that the church will only “be” the church to the extent that it is hospitable to the underclass, by welcoming all into the body of Christ. See, for example, his contributions to Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008). This is, once again, an indication of Stout’s assumption that only democracy can motivate interest in the common good. Aquinas, I think, would be surprised to hear that.

78. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 302. In what follows it becomes clear that this means one’s identity should be conditioned by a commitment to “the Constitution” (303). But what if, from a religious perspective, the Constitution is seen as unjust? Or could one worry that such constitutionalism could become its own kind of nationalism or tribalism?

79. That is, the new traditionalist project need not require a “total” critique of modernity or liberal democracy. It can offer an ad hoc evaluation of particular elements. Here I think the new traditionalist critique is well “disciplined,” we might say, by the insights of Oliver O’Donovan, whose work is engaged in more detail in chaps. 2 and 3 below. My thanks to Hans Boersma for several conversations on this point.

80. Against Stout’s rather rosy assumptions about the commensurability of democracy and Christian discipleship, I find William Connolly’s agonism or deep pluralism to be more nuanced (and more Augustinian)—despite what I take to be Connolly’s misreadings of Augustine in both The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality, new ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). For a discussion along these lines, see Kristen Deede Johnson, Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

81. There is a third element that we cannot pursue here—namely, Stout’s lack of attention to the “conditions” of the agents who inhabit a political community and what is required for them to be able to live justly. Here there will be a marked contrast between an Augustinian account of “virtuous” agency requiring grace as a necessary condition and Stout’s continued confidence in the resources of immanence (“That stream is in us and of us” [Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 308]). For a relevant discussion, see James K. A. Smith, “Formation, Grace, and Pneumatology: Or, Where’s the Spirit in Gregory’s Augustine?,” Journal of Religious Ethics 39 (2011): 556–69.

82. I use the qualifier “scholastic” to indicate that this common picture (caricature?) of “Thomism” is not necessarily to be identified as the position of Aquinas. Rather, it is a picture that emerged from “manual” Thomism and continues to have influence today, particularly in the political revival of natural law ideologies in the United States. In contrast to this bifurcated Thomas, cf. Henri de Lubac.

83. Todd Breyfogle, “Is There Room for Political Philosophy in Postmodern Critical Augustinianism?,” in Deconstructing Radical Orthodoxy, ed. Wayne J. Hankey and Douglas Hedley (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 31–47. I will not, in this context, attend to Breyfogle’s numerous and sometimes stunning misreadings of Milbank.

84. When Breyfogle asks whether there is any room for “political philosophy” in Radical Orthodoxy, what he means is, Is there any room for a neutral, autonomous, and secular account of the “natural” realm of politics? This is because he continues to cling to a widely questioned picture of Thomism as affirming an autonomous realm of “natural, un-aided human reason”—which he then attributes to Augustine! At least Wayne Hankey, who also continues to cling to this vision of a universal, secular reason, has the good sense to recognize that this is exactly where Augustine and Aquinas differ. See Hankey, “Why Philosophy Abides for Aquinas,” Heythrop Journal 42 (2001): 329–48. For a critique, see Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, 48–60. Because of this lack of nuance and imagination, Breyfogle and Hankey think that any critique of the autonomy or supposed secularity of philosophy constitutes a rejection of philosophy per se. Thus Hankey has described me as an “anti-philosophical theologian.” For a brief reply, see James K. A. Smith, “Remythologizing Heidegger: A Response to Hankey,” in The Influence of Augustine on Heidegger: The Emergence of an Augustinian Phenomenology, ed. Craig J. N. De Paulo (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2006).

85. Breyfogle, “Is There Room?,” 35. Granted, one could perhaps find fodder for this reading in De libero arbitrio, but it does not seem to be a persuasive account of Augustine’s more mature thought. My thanks to Steve Wykstra and Christina Van Dyke for discussions on this point.

86. Breyfogle, “Is There Room?,” 44.

87. Ibid., 41. This picture seems to emerge from Breyfogle’s curious distinction (again, attributed to Augustine) between “ontology” and “history,” and more specifically between an “original creation” and a “historical creation”—as if the “original” creation were not historical (35–36).

88. David VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

89. By describing the city of God as a city, a civitas, Augustine has already made it political (note his reference to Phil. 3:20 in City of God 14.1). And though two-kingdom theorists often emphasize that the city of God is not identified with the church, in fact Augustine does suggest this in 16.2: “Christ and his Church, which is the City of God.”

90. Augustine, City of God 14.1–4. It should be noted that in City of God 14.2–5 Augustine strenuously distinguishes “flesh” from the body and materiality per se.

91. Ibid., 1.1, 14.3.

92. Ibid., 19.24–26.

93. Ibid., 14.28.

94. It is perhaps important to clarify that Augustine means there is no dual citizenship between the earthly and heavenly city. This shouldn’t be confused with him suggesting that citizens of the heavenly city (i.e., Christians) cannot be citizens of states and nations. My Canadian citizenship, on Augustine’s reading, is something different from being a citizen of the earthly city.

95. VanDrunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, 22.

96. Ibid., 22, 27, 28.

97. Ibid., 59.

98. Ibid., 60.

99. Ibid., 60–61.

100. Ibid., 61, emphasis added.

101. For a representative sampling of Augustine’s letters and sermons that intersect with political life, see Augustine, Political Writings, ed. E. M. Atkins and R. J. Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

102. For a helpful discussion that distinguishes Aquinas and Augustine on this point, see Jesse Covington, “The Grammar of Virtue: Augustine and the Natural Law,” in Natural Law and Evangelical Political Thought, ed. Jesse Covington, Bryan McGraw, and Micah Watson (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 167–93. My thanks to Micah Watson for reminding me of this helpful essay.

103. Breyfogle contends that Milbank “undervalues Augustine’s assessment of the earthly peace” (“Is There Room?,” 39). I would suggest Breyfogle—like other advocates of the “accommodationist” or “liberal” Augustine—overestimates Augustine’s assessment.

104. This is why the “essence” of the earthly city is intimately linked to idolatry.

105. As outlined in Desiring the Kingdom, 48–49, we are using “intends” in the phenomenological sense of Husserl and Heidegger. To intend (from intentio) is to aim, to “mean” the world in a certain way. When I see the object on the desk before me as a coffee mug, the phenomenologist would say I “intend” it as a coffee mug.

106. For a critique of such tendencies, see Timothy P. Jackson, “Prima Caritas, Inde Jus: Why Augustinians Shouldn’t Baptize John Rawls,” Journal of Peace and Justice Studies 8, no. 2 (1997): 49.

107. See Augustine, Teaching Christianity [De doctrina christiana], trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1994), bk. 1. This is why I think Wolin rightly suggests that the church is not apolitical but alternatively political (Politics and Vision, 99–100). For those who would quickly contend that this confuses the church with the city of God, see Augustine’s identification of the two in City of God 16.2. We also need to recall that the “earthly city” is not simply to be equated with “the political.”

108. “Often” is a key qualification. We will expand on this point in chap. 3 below.