In his timely, provocative, but disappointing new book, Jason Bivins examines Christians who have broken or frayed their allegiances to a liberal democracy which, in their view, is an adversary of the kingdom of God. Especially in our imperial moment, we need reminding that our loyalties in the earthly and heavenly cities are not easily or finally reconciled. Yet if Bivins provides an informatively sympathetic account of these witnesses against the liberal order, his reluctance to engage a theological critique of American democracy suggests an imaginative impoverishment in Christian criticism today.

An assistant professor of religion at North Carolina State University, Bivins collects three case studies of antiliberalism: the evangelical Sojourners community, headquartered in the Columbia Heights district of Washington, D. C.; the New Christian Right (NCR), especially the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA); and the Jonah House community in Baltimore, home to the renegade Jesuit Daniel Berrigan and his late brother (and ex-priest) Philip. While this alignment might seem unlikely, it's a shrewd combination, the very incongruity of which has an oddly persuasive effect. You have to pay attention to a scholar who puts Jim Wallis, Tim LaHaye, and Elizabeth McAlister in the same book.

However motley, Christian antiliberals denounce what they consider the corruption and illegitimacy of contemporary American liberalism. Tracing their immediate discontents and methods to the 1960s, Bivins follows their roots back through the New Deal and the Populist and Progressive eras to the birth of modern America during Reconstruction. While their common enemy is the triune Leviathan of federal bureaucracy, corporate capitalism, and secular culture, Christian antiliberals are responding to a broader "legitimation crisis" in Western democracies occasioned by the decline of the welfare state, the globalization of capitalism, and the subsequent inability of Western societies to guarantee security, prosperity, and belonging.

Bivins also claims but never demonstrates that Christian antiliberals reject the entire liberal intellectual tradition of Locke, Smith, Mill, and Rawls. Laying aside this assertion to focus on Leviathan, he thereby confuses the issue of what "liberalism" means to his subjects. If, for instance, the NCR is "antiliberal," what should we make of its solicitude for property rights and unfettered markets? If it's so mistrustful of "big government," how does Bivins explain its fondness for the military? Bivins might also have used these quandaries to illuminate the connection between individual freedom and the expansion of centralized power, an irony noted by students of liberalism from Tocqueville and Brownson to Nisbet and Lasch.

The liberal Leviathan poses three dangers to Christian antiliberals. Like the New Left and New Right of the 1960s, they contend that the growth of state power, especially at the federal level, narrows and even forecloses democratic participation. For the Sojourners community, this tyranny appears in the police brutality and apartment evictions endemic to Columbia Heights. The NCR sees state repression in the erasure of religious imagery from public institutions, especially the courts and schools. Jonah House discerns Leviathan primarily in the military-industrial regime contracted by corporate munitions makers and the Pentagon.

Christian antiliberals also protest the exclusion of moral and religious concerns from American politics and culture. Sojourners condemns the unashamed and celebrated avarice that obscures the misery of the urban poor. In legalized abortion, the secularization of public schools, the hedonism of mass culture, and the liberalization of laws against sodomy and pornography, the NCR sees the demise of a "Christian America" and the victory of a "secular humanism." Since the Vietnam War, and especially since the Reagan era, the Berrigans have rued the growing militarism of American popular culture and foreign policy.

Antiliberals also challenge the stigmatization of religious language in the name of "pluralism" and "tolerance." The attendant relegation of religion to a "private" sphere, they maintain, is actually a consignment to terminal irrelevance, a way to disarm and emaciate the critical power of religious faith. Here, Bivins and his subjects perceive (rightly, in my view) that the policing of religion in this way results, not in a more open and vibrant democracy, but in the hegemony of professional and managerial expertise.

Convinced that liberalism is unredeemable, antiliberals create their own forms of "identity politics" that resemble the activism of racial and sexual minorities. Deliberately cultivating what the political theorist James Scott calls a "political illegibility" that eludes the comprehension and control of the liberal order, they foster communities that are "legible" only in terms of theology, Scripture, and ritual. Hence in Sojourners magazine and in Wallis' books, we find a "prophetic politics," patterned after the Hebrew prophets and early Christians, which upbraids the "principalities and powers" in biblical, not professional, cadences. The home-school movement's pedagogical practices—direct parental control, explicitly religious (and patriotic) textbooks, overtly Christian moral training—embody the NCR's attempt to construct a "parallel educational culture" based, they believe, on biblical imperatives. Finally, the Jonah House radicals exemplify the most dramatically illegible politics of symbolism, from burning draft cards and berating judges to hammering and splashing blood on the nosecones of nuclear missiles. (Father Berrigan once told me that the sound of those hammers was like the tolling of church bells.) As Bivins realizes, Jonah House antiliberals intend, not to Call America To Its Best Ideals, but rather to build "a new church and new community through ritual and sacramental action."

Bivins cozens most clearly to Jonah House, but in doing so he underscores not only the problems of Christian antiliberalism but also the deficiencies of his social-sciency approach to religion. Because Jonah House leavens its politics with an "incarnational, sacramental worldview" rooted in Catholic theology, it poses an alternative to American liberalism far more radical than the Protestant religious cultures of Sojourners or the NCR. Indeed, Bivins himself seems to realize that Protestant antiliberals shake up but do not fracture liberal order. For all its "prophetic" declamation about "values-centered" politics, Sojourners is handicapped, Bivins asserts, by "a frustrating lack of specificity about [its] own vision." Warm and fuzzy "values" talk indicates an atrophied social imagination—in Sojourners' case, a failure to recognize that prophets quickly become tiresome without scribes who flesh out vision with programs. Otherwise, "prophetic politics" merges with Clintonism, a fusion personified (as Bivins notes without comment) in the unctousness of Marian Wright Edelman and Tony Campolo.

The NCR is comparably deluded. True, home-schooling inculcates the decidedly antiliberal maxims of creation science and moral conservatism. But Bivins also notes that the NCR frequently resorts to the liberal language of "rights," and that its most vocal partisans, like Richard Viguerie, affirm the oldest liberal verities of "'private property, private initiative, [and] private education.'" The social and demographic base of the NCR finds its balm in a suburban Gilead.1

But Jonah House isn't immune from criticism, though Bivins only hints at the most incisive kind. He suspects, for example, that the Berrigans' prophetic talents can curdle into righteous self-indulgence: "the jailbird sings sweetest of all," as Daniel writes. While Bivins charitably considers this "devotional poetry," I'd submit that it's misleading doggerel. Some jailbirds don't sing sweetly—recall that Hitler composed Mein Kampf with a splendid view of the prison yard—and many voices are throttled by torture and murder. Jailbirds sing with powerful effect when they have an audience ready to sing along—something that the Catholic Left, from Dorothy Day to the Berrigans, has never cared to imagine or cultivate. "What is the new creation for which they work?" It's a question the Berrigans have never answered.

Nor, for that matter, could Bivins, given the intellectual and imaginative boundaries of most academic culture. Like so many books spawned from dissertations, Bivins' tome is marred by long patches of graceless prose, repetitive exposition, and needless citations of the Learned (and the Tenured) to support the most commonplace observations. ("As so-and-so writes" is usually the preface to some nugget of banality.) We're assaulted by ugly words and phrases like "contestatory," "identity enactment," and "multiple valences." We learn that "human intersubjectivity is embodied; social reality can neither be reduced to linguistic patterns nor seen as mere supplements to other cognitive acts." You don't say. Of course, it's his first book, so Bivins' advisors and editors must also answer for these infelicities. I'll pass along a friendly reminder of Auden's great commandment: "Thou shalt not commit a social science."

But, as I have already suggested, the problems with this book go deeper, to its most basic presuppositions. It's clear throughout that Bivins sees antiliberalism primarily in terms of its impact on democracy. "The dangers posed by political religion" of this sort, he concludes, arise from their being "detrimental to the causes of democracy." Thus, Bivins implies, democracy must be the normative principle of any political religion. But does this not simply assimilate religion to the liberal order, making Bivins' own enlightening study a primer in liberal "civility"?

To his credit, Bivins calls for a "radical democracy" that would encourage religious language in the public square without enabling religious establishment. (Jeffrey Stout has written a brilliant forthcoming book on this very subject.) I'm heartily attracted to Bivins' hope, but I fail to see how it addresses the most intractable issues raised by antiliberals, especially by the Berrigans.

To put the matter pointedly: Is liberal capitalist democracy now the horizon of the Christian political imagination? For secular and religious intellectuals, "socialism" once named a vision of freedom and equality conceived in a radically different (and in my view inspiring) way. I would contend that the demise of that hope is the condition, not only for antiliberalism, but for the reformulations of liberal order now known as "neo-conservatism," "compassionate conservatism," or "democratic capitalism." Founded on proprietary individualism and the legitimacy of market competition, none of these oxymoronic constructions is a real alternative to liberal order. While Bivins might counter that "radical democracy" provides such a counter, I would respond that "really existing" democratic theory has always rested on a conception of individual freedom without warrant in Christian theology.

That's why Bivins would have to turn to theology for a fundamental critique of liberal democracy—one which, I'd wager, also allows us to imagine a radical alternative. In the work of John Howard Yoder, John Milbank, Oliver O'Donovan, and William Cavanaugh, we see the outlines of a political theology through which Christians could express and critique their political practice, not in the language of liberalism, but in that of ecclesial life and tradition. There, the body of Christ becomes a distinctive form of political agency and imagination, and ecclesiology becomes a spiritual formation that doubles as political education. While these writers don't prescribe a Christian politics in a liberal order, they do insist that faith, hope, and charity are prior, not parallel, to democracy, and that democracy itself cannot survive or flourish without the sort of people crafted by sacred text and liturgy. Liberalism has lived off the moral capital of the Christian virtues, and Christians, right and left, have rendered them unto Caesar all too readily. Ironically, the reminder that democracy is not divinity is the most salutary service Christian antiliberals provide, not only to the church, but to democracy.

Eugene McCarraher is professor of humanities at Villanova University. He is the author of Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Cornell Univ. Press).

1. Bivins would have profited from perusing Lisa McGerr's Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), where McGerr demonstrates that, far from holding a bastion of "traditional values," Christian conservatism represents a distinctive version of consumer culture and technological modernity—a liberalism that dares not speak its name.

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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