12 Liberal Democracy: An Alternative to the Idolotry of the Nation State?

It is in the construction and rendering of postliberalism that Professor Lovin’s essay rises or falls to a great extent. As the contrast position to the more privileged categories of realism, postliberalism does much of the conceptual work, albeit in a negative fashion, in this discussion.

Despite its strengths, there are a few aspects of this rendering of postliberalism that are problematic. First among them is the suggestion that postliberalism reflects a “sour grapes” development—having fallen from a position of influence in capitalist democracies, the resentful postliberals have walked off while muttering “we didn’t want to exercise cultural hegemony anyway.” At a minimum, such an argument has little to say regarding comparable currents outside the precincts of liberal white Protestantism—there are comparable movements within Catholicism, Anabaptism, white and nonwhite Pentecostalism, and other traditions which have never had “cultural hegemony” and hence have no comparable temptation to compensatory rejection of public engagement. To the extent that one version or another of the “from hegemony to opposition” story rings true, it may well be that it applies better to those mainline Protestant institutions of higher learning that have attempted to compensate for denominational declines by stocking up on well-paid, well-provisioned scholars who claim a prophetic privilege by virtue of being a member of an underclass, a historically discriminated against demographic, or a similarly marginalized social location.

A more serious problem attends to the degree to which, despite his commitment to realistic appraisals of lived reality, in this essay, Professor Lovin seems to hold a fairly innocent picture of the cultural ecology of capitalist democracies. When he says that the public square does not have “its own ultimate commitments to impose,”[1] that liberal democracy presumes that people are trying to live with integrity in communities shaped by all sorts of comprehensive beliefs, [2] one can’t help wonder whether or why he ignores the ways in which political and economic liberalism in practice corrodes, refashions, and reconfigures these comprehensive beliefs. This is a problem endemic to more than one sort of theological ethics, including those that rely on social theory built upon sphere sovereignty (e.g., Abraham Kuyper), systems (one version leads from Talcott Parsons to Peter Berger to Michael Novak), and some theories of civil society. What these have in common is a tendency to ignore or minimize the interpenetration of these spheres or systems, which enables one to discuss these as more-or-less sealed containers, thus protecting one’s privileged categories from the effects of the others. This is the rhetorical and conceptual strategy of a Michael Novak, for example, for whom a tripartite vision of society—political, economic, and moral/cultural—allows him to present capitalism as a mechanism that in itself does not cause social problems—whatever problems attend to capitalist democracies, in Novak’s view, are caused either by the political system (usually overreaching) or the moral-cultural system (perpetuating or engendering practices and beliefs at odds with the logic of capital accumulation). While Professor Lovin doesn’t offer an explicit framework of analysis for political economy in this piece, some version or another of this move seems necessary in order to suggest that liberal democracy doesn’t refashion these “comprehensive beliefs” that people have before entering the public square of liberal democracy. Were he to distinguish more carefully between “liberalism,” “liberal democracy,” and “liberal society,” one could explore the ways in which the economic processes of capitalism form people’s ultimate commitments, affections, and dispositions.[3]

Beyond the formative dynamics of capitalism in liberal societies, one ought not ignore the degree to which a central purpose of state action in the United States and elsewhere has always been indoctrination of the young (and their parents in an indirect fashion) into nationalist ideologies and identities via compulsory schooling.[4] This indoctrination has intended to diminish and dilute the integrity of particularistic communities (like the church) in order to replace it with a love of country and an exaltation of its leaders, purposes, and destiny. However much they disagree on other things, the mainstream of American leaders have agreed that “for democracy to survive, it requires the education of each generation to the ways of knowledge and active participation in the preservation of a way of life. These are not innate behaviors, they are learned. Thus the role of the school becomes paramount in preserving the Republic.”[5]

None of this came into being with the terror attacks of September 11, nor is it unique to the American version of “liberal democracy.” For the past several decades, persons committed to the primacy of state and nation in matters of allegiance and ideology have bemoaned the shortcomings of school-based civic formation in the United States. With increased ethnic and cultural diversity the norm in many parts of the country, liberals and conservatives alike began calling for new programs of civic formation and patriotism (varying to the degree that “tolerance” is idealized and inflected as an American value) in the schools in order to corrode more particularistic identities that might exist as alternatives to fidelity to America. While the U.S. Supreme Court prohibits crudely coercive measures like state-compelled participation in the Pledge of Allegiance,[6] it allows a whole host of indoctrination measures, “unofficial” compulsion, and other approaches to cultivating nation-worship. For example, teachers can be required (under penalty of dismissal for noncompliance) to start the school day with the Pledge of Allegiance or some other patriotic exercise, and the federal courts have no objection to “a history course designed to promote patriotism…by teaching only history that would tend to inspire patriotism. As long as naked compulsion is not used, government schools may seek to invade the sphere of intellect and spirit.”[7]

At all levels of government, and involving private actors of many sorts, the reassertion of nationalism via schools after September 11, 2001, includes initiatives and proposals all designed to reinforce a determinate set of “ultimate commitments.” These include directives to increase mass recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, the use of military veterans to teach “Lessons of Liberty,” and giving new powers to the armed forces to recruit in academic settings without hindrance from local school boards or college and university officials, including those of religious affiliation.[8]

In all of this, one can see a public sphere with “its own ultimate commitments to impose,”[9] Professor Lovin’s reluctance or inability to see it notwithstanding. What one oftentimes ends up with as a result of decades of such formative processes are religions based more upon belief than conduct, of individual discernment rather than corporate deliberation willingly embraced,

It may well be that Professor Lovin’s relative unwillingness to see how capitalist democracy and modern states reshape or instrumentalize religious communities—most especially the Christian church in North America and Western Europe—forces him to see Hauerwas as paranoid, “as if the community of faith were under threat.” Hauerwas and others do indeed see the idolatry of the nation state as a primary threat to the church; Lovin, for his part, says that traditional realists are “equally aware of the idolatry of the nation state,” but that the latter believe that “liberal democracy provides an alternative to it.” But does it really? Curiously, Professor Lovin offers no operationalization of “idolatry” in this essay, an unfortunate omission given his privileging of pragmatic, practical, and lived expressions of religion, discourse, and public life.

Let me provide a suggestion, a sort of pragmatic and functional understanding of the idolatry of the nation state. The state is an object of ultimate allegiance, I would argue, to the extent that people are willing to kill for it, die for it, and pay for it. This tripartite formulation might not be a bad operationalization for functional idolatry more generally, but the prospect that liberalism—either of the traditionalist or hopeful variety—can identify it, much less resist it, I find relatively implausible.

With this in mind, it seems appropriate to revisit Professor Lovin’s take on postliberals and narrative. I shudder at the thought of an exercise in dueling Hauerwas quotations—I’m not sure anyone wins in that sort of thing other than Hauerwas. But on my reading of Hauerwas, it seems more adequate to suggest, contra Professor Lovin, that Hauerwas’ objection to liberalism isn’t really that “it lacks a narrative strong enough to sustain a community”[10]—on the contrary, liberal democracy has all kinds of strong narratives it privileges, including patriotism, love of country, and sacrifice for the state and nation. The problem is that these are the wrong narratives for Christians, for whom Christian discourse calls for something else entirely. Christian discourse, when not chain-sawed into the Procrustean bed of civic utility, is more public, more broadly accessible, and less sectarian on a global scale than the two-hundred-plus expressions of nationalist discourse that proffer the practical veneration of the political community in our day. Nationalism, after all, is far more sectarian and fragmentary than is the worldwide body of Christ—in all regions and continents, with well over a billion and a half people in various sorts of religious commonality.

Given his relative neglect of the constructed and coercive nature of political allegiance and economic agency, it is unsurprising that Professor Lovin minimizes the political significance of what Hauerwas means by the church being true to its best sense of itself and its mission. Constructing and sustaining this sort of church may be “the most that Christians can accomplish,”[11] in Professor Lovin’s dismissive summary of the significance of postliberal social ethics, but such may say more about the idealized notion of liberalism with which Professor Lovin works (and about the narrow category of “the political” which he privileges) than it does anything else.

My last few observations center on the various streams of realism described by Professor Lovin. He notes that “traditional realism should pose few problems for the public discourse of a liberal democracy,” even on those few occasions when that perspective chooses to offer “religious” reasons. It’s not a new criticism of this sort of Niebuhrian realism that what it thinks of as religious reasons doesn’t strike many people as being especially religious, at least not Christianly religious. This sort of realism builds a mighty edifice upon a theological anthropology—people are sinners—and not much more: no Christology, no ecclesiology, no pneumatology, and definitely no eschatology other than a secularized faith in incrementalism and the containment of Chaos.

Similarly, Professor Lovin’s hopeful realists—the prophets, he calls them—lodge their hope in the state rather than in the church, which suggests an ecclesiology and eschatology more akin to the old-style realists from whom he wants some degree of separation. Professor Lovin suggests that his brand of hopeful realism, to be “realistic,” presupposes that the constitutional system of liberal democracy be open to radical revision and renewal; if it is instead “an ordered whole,”[12] closed to its own historicity, then hopeful realism presumably is less realistic or more thoroughly subversive. To me the openness of the liberal state to this sort of revision needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed; one starting point for conversation, I suggest, would be the declassified document updating U.S. National Security Doctrine, released in December, 2002, in which the existing economic and political arrangements of the United States are now seen as a closed subject, opposition to which abroad is seen as a threat to U.S. national security—and opposition to which from within presumably seems to be subversive by definition.[13]

Additionally, Professor Lovin hopes that the traditional realist consumes his or her postmodern mix of news “with what one hopes is a lively memory of having read the Bible at some point,”[14] and he is confident that his sort of prophetic realist can proclaim that “some prevailing values are clearly wrong and urgently in need of rejection.”[15] For both, one has to wonder: from where do these Christian realists get their Christianity? Absent what Professor Lovin calls “the Christian narrative”—what many plain old Christians still call the Gospel—how is a Christian to know what prevailing values are clearly wrong or urgently in need of rejection? In what ways will these Christian realists have read the Bible “at some point”; will they have read it alone or as a process of mutual discernment and formation? Will they incorporate their reading with a catholic community of believers and interpreters, in order to guard against a parochial or self-interested reading that blesses their privileges and ambitions at the expense of others, including other Christians, outside the narrow borders of their political community? Without the church—largely absent from Professor Lovin’s essay—people are left only with the intellectual and affective resources of the culture from which to discern what is wrong and in need of rejection, creating a far more circumscribed, and in fact more consistently conservative, field from which to derive prophetic or transformative impulses and visions.

Let me illustrate the limits of Professor Lovin’s prophetic realism by looking more closely at one of his examples of this tradition in action—the 1986 pastoral letter by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the United States, entitled “Economic Justice for All.” This document and the processes of its drafting are important enough for Professor Lovin to refer to them on two separate occasions in his analysis, the bishops’ prophetic action reflected in their call for “a new cultural consensus” on basic economic entitlements, rather than simply tinkering incrementally with the existing economic policymaking machinery.

A closer look at this document, however, suggests that its prophetic realism in the end is far more “realist” than “prophetic.” The first sections of “Economic Justice for All” work to strike a prophetic tone—generous quotes from Scripture, including the Hebrew prophets, and from those Church fathers whose biblically formed worldview thundered against the violence inherent in accumulated wealth and economic privation. The bulk of the pastoral letter, however, abandons a scriptural methodology in favor of natural-law discourse when it moves into discussing matters of policymaking and contemporary issues—a perfectly reasonable move on “realist” terms, but one that removes wholesale anything of a prophetic or radical nature from the result. The document demonstrates that one cannot expect the “prophetic” qualities of the Hebrew prophets and the Gospels to pass through the disciplinary filters of natural-law discourse without being cut down, domesticated, and made palatable on least-common-denominator terms. Wanting desperately to be taken seriously in the public square of economic debate in the mid-1980s, the bishops arrive without much of anything new to say and certainly nothing that would put them at risk of being unpopular, at risk, or on “the margins.”[16] It is not uncharitable to suggest that, judged by the “realist” criteria so loved by the intellectual heirs of Niebuhr, “Economic Justice for All” has had little discernible effect on the practices of Catholic Christians in the United States, nor as a counterweight to the aggressive advance of economic liberalism in the United States and worldwide. At a minimum, it is not obvious that the bishops’ approach, as an example of Professor Lovin’s prophetic realism, will ultimately be seen as more effective—even in the narrowly instrumentalist terms stipulated by much Christian realism—than a more thoroughgoing ecclesiocentric process might have been.

It seems that the best one can expect from “prophetic realism,” as the bishops’ letter demonstrates, is something akin to the Democratic Party wing of traditional realism, which seems to be a far cry from the high claims that Professor Lovin makes on behalf of his preferred strain of realism.

I applaud Professor Lovin’s attempt to bring some order to what seem oftentime to be interminable discussions on this topic, but I fear that yet more discussion is both unavoidable and necessary.