10 Re-framing the Conversation

I begin with an anecdote that highlights some of the issues I want to address. In an interesting exchange in Religion and American Culture in 2000 on “the state of public theology today,” the differing opinions of the contributors were revealing.[2] On the one hand William Dean bemoaned the collapse of public theology, charting a downward trajectory since Reinhold Niebuhr. Mark Noll, on the other hand, said that public theology is more prominent than ever, and as the most important public theologian working today, he pointed to James Dobson, leader of Focus on the Family. This disconnect between major scholars of religion’s role in public life highlights the important disconnects to which I want to draw our attention—for I fear that Lovin’s typology may be captive to a blindness akin to Dean’s.

I applaud Lovin’s proposal. But I want to do more than endorse it; I want to step back from and critique it, in order to carry it further forward still. To do that I want to challenge the analytic adequacy and comprehensiveness of the categories Lovin employs. I want to suggest that his essay puts asunder what we ought to keep together. Furthermore, there is an important blind spot on the account, caused by an intellectual captivity many of us share to a certain hothouse academic debate. We really ought to imagine the three “alternatives” not as competing voices but as complementary strategies or facets of a single strategy for positioning Christian speakers as regards the public sphere and the other participants within it.

The crucial argument for Lovin is that “theorists of public reason have little to fear”[3] from religious believers as “witnesses,” “realists,” or “prophets,” though the role of prophets, especially because of their more lively sense of proleptic eschatology, may seem more troublingly destabilizing. The reason for this sanguine conclusion as regards the first two groups seems to be related to the way they conceive the political order’s theological character, or lack thereof; while as regards the third group, the issue is not about the church or the political order per se, but rather about the character of the world as an object of Divine transformation. I think all of this is right and importantly so, and that Lovin has done us all a service by teasing apart these three voices and tracking the differing ways their theological centers of gravity shape their stance toward the public sphere.

I especially think that his discussion of the “prophetic” voice raises interesting questions about the varieties of forms and aims of public discourse—whether one works within the pre-given frame or calls that very frame into question. I don’t think we’ll get any further in thinking about these things in a more finely textured way, however, until we get under the hood of the rather bulky concept of “public discourse”—which is, thankfully, a job for another day (and another writer).

But I think also that the distinctions Lovin draws are more heuristically useful than functionally necessary. Of course Lovin recognizes that people may use more than one of these strategies, and of course there are ideal types of each of these, but there is a fourth type that combines all of them into one potential strategy. Thus one might be a prophetic realist, employing in good “witnessing” style the first-order, thickly particularist discourse of Christian life. I take it that this is in some way the project of Reinhold Niebuhr, who even in his “high realist” days emphasized the import of quasi-apocalyptic hope (“hope” is, after all, the last word in Nature and Destiny of Man); while on the other side, a “prophetic” approach remains suspicious of the more millenarian trajectories of, say, liberationist theologies, though Lovin doesn’t explore these differences in this piece. And both are “realist” enough to take to heart the suspicion of the “witness” regarding abstract and defoliating metalanguages (or what purport to be such metalanguages, but which are typically even more parochially academic languages, as adequate replacements of first-order religious discourse). Thus both share the witnesses' fundamental methodological conviction if not their material proposal (and their methodological conviction will be, I wager, their lasting contribution to theology).

(As an aside, I think there is more life remaining in the idea of the political community as a failed church than Lovin seems to believe; at least on realist terms, such a recognition can account for the longings we have which we hope to have satisfied in political life and yet which never get satisfied in that life—that is, seeing politics as a failed church is to recognize, mournfully, that even in politics there is a theological urge motivating us toward communion with one another. I think Lovin can acknowledge this but I thought that this particular throwaway line in his analysis deserved to be caught, and tossed back to him.)

But back to the main point: we need access to all three of the styles Lovin details. Why? Because if we don’t find a way to get such access, we are in serious trouble, at least as a political community and possibly also as religious believers. And I worry that the way Robin has set up the discussion, and the assumed frame of the discussion, actually makes it hard for us to feel the urgency we ought to feel today.

Let me return to the basic question driving his essay: should people with religious convictions want to introduce those convictions into public discussion, and if so, how should they do so, and what they can expect therefrom. I said that this is a refreshing and important question to ask, and I meant that. But look at what it implies with the word introduce: it implies that there is such a thing as public discourse which is properly or originally non- or pre-religious, that “Naked Came the Public Square.” But that’s not true, historically or in today’s society. It’s closer to the truth to say that the public square was stripped naked in the past half-century. And it’s even closer to the truth to say that that disrobing was never successfully accomplished at all. (I mean, when was this secularization accomplished? The 1960s? The 1970s, with the evangelical President Carter? The 1980s? The 1990s?) Indeed there’s even a case to be made that the whole idea of secularity, as we have it today, is itself a theological construct. Certain spheres of life that we inhabit as academics have gone secular; but public life, for good and ill, is not among them.[4]

For good and ill, I say: for the vibrant presence of religious arguments in the public sphere is unavoidable once you step outside the form of philosophical—not political, mind you, but philosophical—debates about the proper form of “public reason.” (As Nicholas Wolterstorff argues in his essay in this collection, there’s an important confusion we should resist and free ourselves of, the confusion of liberal political theory with our lives in liberal political polity. I think the theories currently fashionable among academic political theorists are deeply provincial and misleading guides to both the history and the present condition of our liberal polities.) The real challenge religious intellectuals must face is not from the traffic cops of discourse ethics or public reason—Ponch and John equipped with Rawls’ or Habermas’ political liberalism—but from a fundamentally different position.

Indeed our intellectual captivity to the challenges of Rawls and Habermas and their various devotees reveals how blinkered we are in academic religious studies, in two different ways. First of all, as members of the academy, we are blind to the realities of religion off campus, both within and without the U.S. Second, as members of the academy safely ensconced in religious studies, theology, and divinity faculty, we are too easily seduced into believing that the contours of our present disciplinary conversations map accurately onto the actual major issues of the day. In fact, something like the opposite is the case: our conversations are always growing increasingly inward-looking, increasingly narcissistic, and we risk suffocation in the mines of methodology or asphyxiation in the airy realms of metatheory. We need to ventilate our discussions by frequent trips “to the field,” or at least out of our offices (and not just to our libraries or our seminar rooms).

Once we have freed ourselves from a Rawlsian or Habermasian over-fastidiousness with epistemological etiquette and actually look around and see, we discover that the real interlocutors with whom we must engage as regards religion’s role in public life are those many people actually already making religious arguments in public life—and to my mind, they often make bad arguments, and they make them badly. (Examples of such arguments are arguments for support of Israel not because it is a democracy or for other grounds, but on a dispensationalist reading of the Bible; or arguments against homosexual rights not from Burkean social scientists or Natural Law thinkers, but from a literalist interpretation of select Biblical passages; or the astonishing popularity of the Prayer of Jabez or Left Behind series of books, which provide models for living for many people in recent years.)[5] These are the real interlocutors who need to be confronted, both directly to their faces and—and perhaps more importantly—ndirectly, by offering a better model of religious discourse than they do.

The real challenge scholars interested in “religion in public life” must address is that, in the ecology of contemporary public discourse, bad theology drives out good: secularist philosophers see people making what they see as terrifying and bad religious arguments in public life, and the philosophers respond by arguing that such religious arguments are inappropriate in public life, but the only religious people who heed them are precisely the sorts of religious people who could contest the bad religious arguments which currently occupy so much of the high ground in public life.[6]

I have to be careful here. It will be unsurprising that, in my opinion, typically today those bad religious arguments eventuate in a politically conservative direction—in favor of (what I would describe as) repealing much of the “rights revolution” of the past half-century, for economic libertarianism, committed to a brutally realist foreign policy (whether interventionist or isolationist). But I want to make a distinction between the badness of the arguments and the potential legitimacy of the positions for which they argue. These political positions are ones that I (largely) do not share, but intelligent and considerable cases can be and are made for each of them. My complaint—again, perhaps typical for an academic—is with the poor form that theological arguments in favor of these positions normally take. They are not so much arguments as bits of ideology, soundbites for people who are already convinced and do not need to defend the positions yet again. (In this way, they are similar to much of what passes for argument among many politically involved individuals, whether conservative or liberal.) It is unclear whether those who assent to such pseudo-arguments are actually thinking at all. What is clear, however, is that even they stand to benefit by having vigorous challenges put to them in their theological vernacular; for, if nothing else, it will force them to think more deeply about the structure and content of their beliefs, and thus lead them toward an ever more articulate possession of their convictions.

All this is overstatement, of course, but even the counter-evidence it overlooks speaks indirectly for its essential validity. For while there are such theologically conservative but politically “progressive” thinkers, the main sites of religiously thick public discourse—that is, those places that could welcome their contributions—are almost uniformly politically quite conservative, and thus are not easily able to resist the basic drift of bad religious arguments in public. What I mean is this: theologically sophisticated intellectuals find that the only people typically willing to countenance their religious language will often not share much but an openness to theologically “thick” discourse, and so they find themselves making odd (strategic) alliances due to linguistic (tactical) necessities; think here of thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas and Paul Griffiths, both more “politically progressive” in many ways, and Gilbert Meilaender, more “politically conservative” (though that language is really not adequate anymore), all finding a suitable forum for their work in the quite “politically conservative” journal First Things. From both sides, that is, there is pressure on politically “progressive,” religiously serious intellectuals: one side wants them to speak in a different manner than they do, while the other wishes them to speak a different message. Were these “progressive” intellectuals to give into the pressure and become either thoroughly “conservative” or thoroughly “liberal,” it is not only “progressive” religious discourse that would suffer—all religious discourse, and all religiously serious individuals, would suffer as well.

Two caveats here. Obviously, I am over-drawing the problem, but I do think it is a real problem. Second, I do not mean to imply that conservative believers are bad and liberals are good; no mainline group could have gotten President Bush to commit $15 billion to AIDS in Africa—we all have the evangelicals to thank for that, and they do deserve everyone’s thanks. (And mainliners and Roman Catholics deserve some embarrassment in explaining why they don’t care, or do, more about it.) But the problem is that this epistemological fastidiousness affects liberal religious voices far more than conservative ones—perhaps because of their deeper captivity in the academy. So there is no necessary alignment of liberals with silence, but only a contingent one. But that does not make it any less of a problem.

If it is true—and I think in important ways it is true—that “the pathos of modern theology is its false humility,” this is only true for liberal theologies, among whom I include most post-liberals, as well as myself.[7] But this pathos should make all of us sad. For the key issue today and for the foreseeable future is not whether religion should be in public life but whether there will be enough religion in public life—or whether only the most simplistic and often theologically dubious voices will thrive there, or whether others will step up to challenge them. Culture, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and some theological voices will be heard in public life; the question is which voice or voices those will be. I think Lovin’s essay misses this because he still understands his major conversation to be within academia. That is not an uninteresting conversation of course—that is where we all are, after all—but I think it threatens to continue to deflect our attention from the realities of actual public discourse to academic accounts of an idealized public discourse. And for a paper about “real people,” I think we need above all to avoid that.