Specters of Political Theology

Could it be that what we have come, often errantly and confusedly, to call "postmodern theology" is evolving into a post-secular political theology?

Having been pushed the past month toward reading Mark Lilla's provocative, timely, and superlatively readable book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Knopf, 2007),  I began to wonder if we are increasingly recoding the passions of our respective faith commitments in the language of the political and the passions of the political in terms of faith.  Lilla maintains that is what in fact we are all doing.  He writes somewhat sardonically in his introduction: "Today we have progressed to the point where we are fighting the battles of the sixteenth century". (p. 3)

With this thought in mind I was struck in reading Jack Caputo's What Would Jesus Deconstruct? -  the soon forthcoming title in the Church and Postmodernism series - how equally theological and political it happens to be.  The two messages mutually reinforce, and are symmetrical with each other.  Not that Caputo pulls any punches with his politics.  He names names.  Speaking as a progressive Catholic, he spends a lot of time lambasting conservative evangelicals and their political minions in the "religious right" (and to a lesser extent the traditionalist Catholic hierarchy) in the name of Jesus, which isn't routinely done these days, though I admit to having done it myself.  But what makes Caputo's new manifesto so interesting - and probably infuriating to most of the old-guard evangelical establishment - is the way he asserts that "deconstructive theology," as it has been called here in this space, has a straight-line political payout.   

I will be frank and state for the record that I don't really go along with him in drawing these connections, mainly because I don't read Derrida, not to mention any kind of "Derridean" theology, in quite the same way, or because I've always had a hard time extracting any sort of politics out of deconstruction.  But they do follow elegantly from Caputo's own version of deconstructive theology, as evidenced in The Weakness of God (Indiana University Press, 2006), and his view of Jesus as first century rabb(i)le-rouser is far more accurate than earlier generation of "political theologians" (no relationship to the current crop) who tended to view Jesus as mainly a good European socialist (Moltmann) or as the pre-incarnation of Che Guevara (the liberation theologians).   That is probably why most megachurch pastors these days don't spend a lot of time exegeting for their congregation why Jesus became so enraged at the money-changers.

When deconstruction became fashionable during the 1980s in America, it was of course bashed by the cultural right, but for all the wrong reasons - mainly, the villifiers had no clue what they were talking about.   More tellingly, it was even more aggressively flayed by the old left, who had a better, though not necessarily an intelligent, understanding of it.  What they asserted was that deconstruction led to a passivity, a hyperindividualistic interiority, and a strange sort of "esthetized" (as opposed to "anesthesized") thumb-sucking that was prima facie traitorous to the cause of political revolution.  It was similar to the what "new left" said about the hippies in the 1960s or, going even further back, what the Cromwellians said about the Quakers during the English Revolution.   

What changed things?  Derrida himself - who else?  About the time of the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 Derrida really got religion, and at the same time he also got politics.  The so-called "later Derrida" is all about the mutual relationship between politics and religion.   His key writings are the essay "Force of Law" and his books Specters of Marx and Rogues, the latter of which is his response to the situation immediately after 9/11.   The fascination that Derrida himself  had with the thought of the Nazi toady Carl Schmitt remains strange to this day, though it is evident that he rescued Schmitt from obscurity to make some points in his post-post-structuralist phase he could not have done any other way.  It is even more curious that the same fascination has now spread to the new generation of political theologians who talk about the latter's pet issues - the question of sovereignty and the "state of exception." 

Every major and up-to-date "postmodern" thinker these days, in Europe at least, is About Schmitt, if I am permitted a play on the title of a famous and tragicomic movie that starred Jack Nicholson.  Why is that?  At one level Schmitt raised his own "specter" of a good democratic rationale for suspending democracy, a specter that materialized with the collapse of the Weimar Republic in Germany concurrent with Hitler's accession to power and has haunted all civil libertarians since that fateful September morn (which happens to be my own birthday) in 2001. But, more significantly, Schmitt in a stroke showed why the religious and the political cannot be separated, which is Lilla's point.  "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they are transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure."  (Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, p. 36).   

So-called "fundamentalism" of necessity has its politics, as does deconstructive theology.  Derrida was pre-occupied with something he called "democracy to come," a term that annoys Zizek, the romantic Marxian, to no end.  But the democracy to come could not be disentangled from Derrida's uniquely Jewish construct of the "messianic," which historically has always been avenir, "to come."    Do we decode these "political theologies" in terms of  their politics or their theologies, or is that impossible because of their "systematic structure"? 

The Brit magazine The Economist, perhaps the best weekly window and most informed site of commentary on the new global postmodernism,  which my new book in this series explores, proudly calls itself a "liberal" periodical.  But it is a different sort of liberalism from much of America's current trendy kumbaya liberalism which increasingly also styles itself as "postmodern," or vice-versa.  It is a liberalism that whistles past the graveyard and shares a few of anxieties that tragically turned both Schmitt and Heidegger into fascist fellow travelers (the latter far more than the former) because they knew liberal democracies, even on today's globalized scale, could easily succumb to the "Weimar syndrome" of pluralism without conviction, leading to the "strongman" reimposing the "will of the sovereign".   

This week it has a "special report" with the chilling title "The New Wars of Religion" (See the link to the first article at http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10015219).  The thesis of the series, which takes a global perspective with many local case studies, is that what Derrida called the "return of religion" means we are in for a stormy ride during the next decade or so.   Forget your leftish prejudices about the "evil theocrats" on the Christian right who want to turn America into a new Geneva that sends gays and abortionists to the gallows or your rightish biases about the clear and present need for the defenders of democracy to fight jihad with, er, jihad.   If you've got religion, you've got a political struggle you're going to throw in your lot with.  In other words, you're going to be operating with some sort of postmodern political theology.  Political Islam is not a peculiar sort of "postmodern challenge."  Nor is militant fundamentalism.  It's the new norm, even if it doesn't seem normal. 

What does a postmodern Christian do?  It all depends on how you read Scripture.   Or the tradition.  Or what theologies you choose to link the two.  I myself like the "my kingdom is not of this world approach," but I don't think that occasions any obvious politics.  Just because we've seen the fraudulence in the premise "follow Jesus, vote Republican," we don't have to turn it upside down and say, "follow Jesus, vote Democrat."   Or "follow Jesus, become a green."  I myself have done all of that, including being a Christian Yippie in Berkeley.  Does anybody remember the Yippies?   Been there, done that.

But Lilla's premise really bothers me.  Are we really back in the sixteenth century?  Well, maybe we are.  But that was also the period of the Reformation.  Maybe the "next Reformation" is really now, which is what I would not at all term "the pretty postmodern." 

The "real" (in Zizek's sense) postmodern is messy as hell. 

Comments

[Tim McGee]

The quote about the return to the 16th century is interesting. I haven't read Lilla's book, so I am not sure the perspective he takes on it. But I'm wondering what light it sheds on the current situations if one reads the "war of religions" in light of Cavanaugh's article ("A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House"), namely, that the wars of religion did not cause the birth of the modern (liberal) state as the ideal mechanism to adjudacate peacefully between the competing, irresolvable "religious" disputes. Instead, the so called wars of religion were the birthpangs of the state, especially as the formation of the state involved a privatization of beliefs that would compete or undermine state sovereignty. In other words, the wars were about the very creation of the modern state and the accompanying notion of religion; which means that calling the wars "religious" in a modern sense of the term is anachronistic and is part of the state's own soteriological myth (the state's sovereignty as only mechanism capable of ensuring peace in a world torn apart by private, local, "ir / non rational" loyalties).

Perhaps a new "religious violence" is precisely what the liberal state needs so that it can both mask its own participation in the very creation of these violent fundamentalisms as well as renarrate its own soteriology to justify its continual imperial spread ("democracy and freedom [meaning neo-liberalism] are universal human ideals, and the state is the only way to secure these longings").

Regardless, I guess what I'm driving at, is that there are a whole bunch of political and theological questions involved in even narrating the current conflicts as "religious."

[JOhn]

Every action we take is a political action. The political extends in our lives and in our society extends far beyond simple "follow Jesus, vote Republican," or "follow Jesus, vote Democrat," type formulations. Indeed the claim that religion is separate from politics, or the summing up of religion and politics into the formulations above are both deeply political actions in themselves.

[don't eat alone]

When I hear the term religious, I think of the institution, so seeing the religio-political connection is not difficult. When I think of how we are to live as Christians, faithful is a more helpful word for me than religious. Living faithfully also means living politically since ethics, morality, and integrity are all part of the mix in our world. But in this sense, "political" takes on more the sense of looking at the ramifications of my choices and the nature of true community than it does dealing with institutional labels (religious or political) or power structures.

My introduction to deconstruction came as a high school English teacher. For all of the interesting theory and commentary, I still had to figure out how to get my kids engaged in reading the books on a daily basis. So, now I find myself in a similar position: how do I live in community and with integrity on a daily basis?

Peace,
Milton

[Carl Raschke]

Faith not only seeks understanding (fides quaerans intellectum), as Augustine said, it also seeks community, as Milton (not John, the Milton above) said. The "political" dimensions of faith are not prior, but posterior. To "be faithful" means one must live and work within some kind of "intentional community," which is the rough and broader meaning of the Greek word polis.

The faith stance of historic Christianity has always sought a different kind of polis, however, than that of "tribe", "city," "nation", or "nation-state." It has always been the "global community," the cosmopolis. What does it mean to be "political" in the postmodern cosmopolis?

Right now there are two basically "cosmopolitan" faiths - Christianity and Islam. As Philip Jenkins (in THE NEXT CHRISTENDOM)and Olivier Roy (in GLOBALIZED ISLAM) have noted famously, it is the promise (shall we use Derrida's trope and say "the gift"?) of cosmpolitan identity, agency, and purposefulness that are driving, particularly outside the West, the expansion of these two religions.

Yet because these two religions start from two radically different faith premises, they have radically different "political" strategies. Islam ultimately seeks an immanent social and religious "justice" in the sense of stripping away all finite loyalties, affiliations, and mental or conceptual "associations" (shirk) that complicate the world unity of a faithful people (ummah) who have "surrendered" to the one true God,(Allah). Christianity seeks the personal authenticity of all believers in loving and self-giving relationship to each other for the sake of God's kingdom, inaugurated in the life of Jesus and confirmed through his resurrection from the dead. Unlike Islam, justice is not a political end, it is a means to what ultimately is beyond the political. Love cannot establish justice, nor justice love; the latter point is ignoredn by conservatives, the former by liberals, as Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out.

The politics of Christian faith points beyond the political, though it demands we do not shrink from the political.

[Tim McGee]

I think it might be necessary to add, to the two "cosmpolitan" faiths, a third: the capitalist state. The colonization (uh, i mean, exploration) of the world occured alongside the development of the nation-state, and thus, both the state and capitalism are ever expanding [witness the spread of american "democracy" and capitalism occuring presently]. The church in America (and the West in general) has a long history of failing to see that loyalty to the state and market might actually be loyalty to a vision of the cosmos incompatible with the Christian story. [I think it is also helpful to make the dispute one about narratives, which allows us to escape the narrow confines of the word religion and see how something "non-religious"--the neoliberal state--raises a whole set of theological concerns].

[Donn Downing]

Let me inject one new thought. The religious wars of the 16th century were enabled by a new communication technology - printing. Without printing Luther et. al. would not have had much effect. So, could it not be that the enabling technology of the present troubles is digital communication, i.e. the ability to reduce all voice, image and text to binary code. If approached in this manner, then religion as a political issue is one of identity, not truth.

[Donn Downing]

Let me inject one new thought. The religious wars of the 16th century were enabled by a new communication technology - printing. Without printing Luther et. al. would not have had much effect. So, could it not be that the enabling technology of the present troubles is digital communication, i.e. the ability to reduce all voice, image and text to binary code. If approached in this manner, then religion as a political issue is one of identity, not truth.

[Carl Raschke]

Donn says "religion as a political issue is one of identity, not truth." That is absolutely correct. The new communications technology allows "religious consumerism" on a global scale. One can shop for God online as well as books and digital devices. One can also get easy access to militant ideologies, as Al Qaeda has shown. It is now estimated that most jihadist recruiting and motivation is done online. However, one picks a religious identity based on one's "choice of religious truth." Choice - or as Alvin Toffler put it decades ago "overchoice" - is the engine of global consumer capitalism.

And that brings me to the above comment about "neo-liberalism" as a third "cosmopolitan faith." That sentiment is also true in an important sense. But it makes it easy for Christians to condemn, or at least to oppose "morally" in a vaguye way, the overwhelming global trend toward market economies - which is what neo-liberalism simply means in an historic sense; the collapse of communism and the adoption of market economies by former socialist countries, especially China - when in fact they are condemning the generic trend of the world economy since the Dark Ages.

The issue is not really capitalism, which today bears little resemblance to the kind Marx, or even Lenin, criticized. Phenomena like "petro-socialism" in Venezuela (which is really more akin to national socialism, i.e., fascism, such as occurred in Germany and Italy and Louisiana under Huey Long in the 1930s than historic Marxism)or the increasing favoritism in the US toward socialized medicine are only regional adjustments within a giant capitalist sea change. China is not going back to Maoism any more than America is going to be repopulated with family farms.

The real moral challenge for Christians is the shift from what Max Weber termed the "worldly ascetcism" of Reformation Protestantism, which gave rise to producer capitalism, to the new "worldly experientialism" of postmodern culture, which reinforces the new consumer capitalism. We buy more and more and we consume more and more. We do less and less of the "laying down our lives" thing that Jesus demanded. Consumerism is as much an addiction of "progressives" as "conservatives." It's just an issue of what is consumed. We among the "chattering classes" just tend to be more glib in our moral self-righteousness. Now and then certain Christians, like St. Francis, tend to take vows of "voluntary poverty". But I don't see a lot of exhortations to live more simply in say RELEVANT magazine. What I see is a lot of ads to buy more concert tickets.

[Clark West]

Thank you, Professor Raschke, especially for this last comment. What you call the glib moral self-righteousness of the chattering classes is something I have been deeply troubled by. Lately I have seen wild-eyed attacks on what some are calling the 'liberalism' of thinkers like Caputo, attacks which sounds the same self-indulgent tone you are describing. They forget that Christians like Reinhold Niebuhr, even after the marxist strains of Moral Man and Immoral Society, called himself a certain kind of chastened social gospel liberal at the end of the day.
Apocalyptic, ever more muscular rhetoric of despair combined with consumeristic indulgence and a reluctance to get into the trenches gets us nowhere. By contrast the Christian socialist tradition of Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, MLK and Sojourners is alive and well if not as flashy as the rhetorical carpet bombs of some of the so-called radicals.
Thank you again for your words.

[Jason Hesiak]

Along the lines of the recent thread here, you guys might enjoy the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altar_Boyz

:)

[Tim McGee]

I doubt that those uncomfortable with Caputo's liberalism would identify themselves with Niebur (unless they simply haven't read him). Obviously "apocalyptic rhetoric" with a refusal to do anything will get us nowhere, but again, obviously, not all those criticizing liberalism (and neo-liberalism) are so disengaged.

I think our consumerism is a big problem, but I'm hesitant to identify it as THE problem (racism, nationalism, reading our wealth in terms of blessing instead of justice, etc).

The problem with neo-liberalism is similar to the problems with the nation-state: they describe historical situations as well as ideologies, and I think that the criticisms directed against nationalism or neo-liberalism are often aimed at these doctrines, not the mere historical shifts.

But, all that said, I do see alot of utterly futile condemnations of these historical transitions (e.g., globalization is bad). The transitions have been made, and by the nature of them (global capitalism) there isn't a space outside (Hardt and Negri's Empire does a great job of making that clear). The point isn't just to say we don't like it.

[Clark West]

Tim, I put liberalism in quotes in order to indicate my unease at the way it is used rather indiscriminately and as a bogey word to dismiss thinkers whose positions are not necessarily well-understood (I think the same could be said for the use of neo-liberalism). Certainly Niebuhr cannot be accused of being a neo-liberal, and even his relationship with liberalism is one of nuance and tension, in spite of Hauerwas' recent attempt to paint him as a mere 'liberal' versus the hero of his story, Barth. That is the kind of thing I object to. I appreciate Steven Webb's article noting how close Hauerwas' positions are to Niebuhr. So why the broadside toward Niebuhr's 'liberalism' in Hauerwas' Gifford lectures (a broadside Milbank also makes use of in The Word Made Strange)? It rests on a completely inadequate reading of Niebuhr. I suppose one could forgive folks for worrying about Niebuhr due to the right wing readings of him by folks like Neuhaus, but I certainly think they've got him wrong here, which is why I pointed to his later words claiming more of a fidelity to the Social Gospel and Christian Socialist tradition. He's not a pure Marxist, but who is anymore? A certain spirit of Marx, a la Derrida, needs to haunt us (as it clearly did Reinie in Moral Man and Immoral Society) but its the apocalyptic sounding dualisms of some that trouble me. We need to make common cause agains the evils of Empire (here I agree with Hardt and Negri to the extent I can understand them), but that is not done by trashing the liberal tradition in toto. If there is no outside, then we damned well better work hard from inside its parameters to do the work on the ground that needs to be done. That is what the Christian socialist tradition of Niebuhr, Rauschenbusch, King, and Sojourners has been about. I don't yet see any concrete alternatives to that kind of humble yet prophetic resistance to empire that don't draw heavily from those traditions, if sometimes they do so unawares.

[Tim McGee]

The question is, though, whether liberalism provides those resources of resistance or whether it has already given up too much of the gospel to make it "social." I'm not saying there are easy answers to this question, but it does seem like a legitimate question, and as such, the critique of various liberalisms [admittedly a vague term] is neither just an empty rhetoric nor does it entail a lack of praxis.

In reading Caputo, I was quite disturbed (and made those thoughts known here) at the sloppy way his theology handled questions of election (Jews became THE example of a refusal to be schooled by his gospel) as well as his ideal believers as nomadic parasites on the actual structures of the church. Again, I bring this up not to return the discussion to Caputo, but to point out that those are real questions, and questions not detached from the way we ought to glorify Christ with our lives.

On a completely different point: thinking about Empire again made me remember a suggestion the book had, that we think of postmodernism and fundamentalism is two sides of the same coin: both are reactions to the formation of Empire, one (p/m) by the winners and the other (fundamentalism) by the losers. What do you think of that claim?

[Clark West]

Tim,
I can't seem to access the posts from the archive to see what you wrote about Caputo's reading of the figure of the Jew, so I'm afraid I'm not sure what you are referring to.
I am currently a grad student of Jack's at Syracuse, and am going to be giving a short review of his new book on this site later, so maybe we can defer questions about his theology til then.
As for postmodernism and fundamentalism, I guess I am with Derrida on the former--I am not sure what the term means and worry that it becomes a trope for all kinds of things, some of which are wholly incompatible with one another. I actually feel the same way about fundamentalism. One of my favorite stories from theological history is when Niebuhr had a meeting with Barth. Barth had read Niebuhr's rather roughshod attacks on Barthian theology, in which he accused Barth, among other things, of being a fundamentalist. Apparently, after a heated exchange, Barth said, exasperated, "Will you please STOP calling me a fundamentalist." and I think expressed the sense that this was a peculiarly american phenomenon. The fact that many of those who we in America might label fundamentalists rejected Barth for being a LIBERAL only shows how problematic such labels are! (Oh, by the way, I am fairly sure Niebuhr apologized to Barth and said he would refrain from using the big F word in the future!) Philip Thorne's Evangelicalism and Karl Barth gives an accessible account of the North American evangelical communities' reception to Barth, which is fascinating.
Anyway, I look forward to continuing the conversation with you, Tim.
Yours,
Clark

[len]

"But I don't see a lot of exhortations to live more simply in say RELEVANT magazine. What I see is a lot of ads to buy more concert tickets..."

In one sense "the enemy is us." We all struggle with compromise, not least because we participate in compromised communities. But thank God this isn't the final word. The movement described as "new monasticism" is tending in a very different direction. True, it won't be widely embraced, but that isn't why we embrace it. We embrace it because our concern is faithfulness to Christ and the gospel. The few days I spent at Seabeck with the ALLELON crowd have given me hope for a different future. The missional order inaugurated by Fitch and crowd at "Life on the Vine" is the same kind of response.

[Tim McGee]

I have a similar response, although I think postmodernism can be filled in a bit more clearly than fundamentalism, esp. when 'fundamentalism' is used as if it clearly covered both christian and islamic varieties. I like Alvin Plantinga's definition of the term; it humorously captures the fact that it mostly functions as a term of abuse (sumabitch whose opinions are to the right of mine). That being said, I was interested in Hardt and Negri's attempt to see some kind of connection with the experience of global capitalism (Empire), especially as it affects formation of identity.

I look forward to reading your review.

[Carl Raschke]

Hardt and Negri have it right to a certain extent. As post-Marxists they recognize that global capitalism with its ever accelerating flows of capital and increasingly intricate dymanics of financial exchange is now the determining political and social force in the world. They also have the developed intuition, without using precisely these terms, that postmodernism is indeed, as Jameson told us twenty years ago, the "logic of late capitalism." They also recognize that the logic of late capitalism tends toward the formation of ever nuanced personal identity as well as the hypertrophy and complexification of desire, resulting in the triumph of global consumerism and leveraged personal finance as the new "dark engine" of exchange.

That is a prospect, of course, Marx never could forsee, and it begins with the Keysian revolution of the 1930s which sought to "save capitalism" by transforming producers into consumers, the ideology of "worldly asceticism" (as Weber described the relationship between early Protestantism and capitalism) into an increasingly narcissistic pursuit of personal happiness. Consumer capitalism has also, particularly in the West, fostered generations of consumer-oriented Christians who no longer can separate the quest for personal experience from faith commitment. Churches offer spiritual products marketed to reach demographic niches. The emergent or postmodern church is no exception.

Hardt and Negri's "empire" is truly the empire of desire and consumption. Like all empires, they are built on force and fear, but also the deep longing for stablility and peace (in this case, the social peace guaranteed by the consumer life style).

What Hardt and Negri get totally wrong is their "revolutionary politics," which is in my mind nothing more than a funhouse mirror image of the consumerism and hyperindividuam they critique. There is a reason why they are so in vogue these days. They appeal to the rising class of today's "bobos", or bourgeois bohemians (David Brooks' term for the urban life-style elites, which includes most academics and opinion-makers, the proverbial "knowledge workers"), who can rattle on about the evils of "capitalism" while remaining blissfully ignorant of how completely indentured they are to it.

As political scientist Alan Hertzke documents in his book SAVING GOD'S CHILDREN, Christian commitment and activism can be a true revolutionary force to strike "blows against the empire," particularly when it comes to the vast collateral damage of consumer capitalism that we see in such "injustices" as human trafficking and social corruption resulting from the wealthy world's appetite for narcotics and commodities.

But for Christians to mobilize politically in a serious way would require great self-critique and a refusal to stop buying into the latest fad of market-driven politics, where it is always "someone else's fault."

I like the idea of the "new monasticism," which I've seen working (and totally not working) in various contexts. But we're going to need a postmodern St. Benedict.

[Geoff Holsclaw]

Dr. Raschke,
I totally agree with your assessment of Hardt/Negri's proposal. It is the consumer capitalism's reflection...nothing more.

Are they wrong because they read Deleuze wrong, or is Deleuze wrong in his assessment of desire?

Also, what do you envision by a postmodern St. Benedict?

[steve long]

I'm intrigued by this claim about the liberalism Dr. Raschke finds in the Economist: "they knew liberal democracies, even on today's globalized scale, could easily succumb to the "Weimar syndrome" of pluralism without conviction, leading to the "strongman" reimposing the "will of the sovereign". It seems to me this points to something significant. Liberalism without any conception of the good falls prey to Sovereignty as pure power. Rowan Williams arges something similar in his intro to Theology and the New Political. If this is true, then the political task for Christians and other persons of faith might be less to establish alternative intentional communities (an answer that falls prey to the Zizek piece -- resistance is surrender) and more to subordinate power to the good without fascism. Liberalism can always absorb one more resisting intentional committee but cannot find a place for those who think what they believe is fundamentally and unviersally true. But where does Dr. Raschke find the "liberalism" of the Economist allowing for anything like this? After all, its recent discussion of religion assumes that Adam Smith's principles of competition can account for the rise of religion in those places where it 'flourishes.' And it assumes that -- like the policies of the IMF -- it will flourish where churches are lean, shorn of bureacracies like the episcopacy and offer a simple message. To that extent the report acts as if Catholicism has already given way to Rickwarrenism. Moreover, I'd like to know how the Zizek proposal Jamie Smith pointed to in the Fitch proposal fits with the new kind of liberalism Raschke seems to find in the Economist, and if I read him rightly points to as a way forward for a theological politics.

[Carl Raschke]

Two replies:
1) A "postmodern St. Benedict". I use the phrase more as a trope than as a profile. We might say it's similar to the Derridean "democracy to come," which is anticipatory rather than representational. The "monasticism" to come?

Terms like "monasticism" (the classic descriptor) or "intentional community" (the contemporary political locution) or "polities of resistance" (an even more contemporary version) have their value, but what limits them is not only their historical or sociological specificity, but their lack of utility to deepen the eschatological vision. Original monasticism was not so much a pragmatic response to social collapse as the creation of micro-societies that could articulate the radical ideal of agape in times of turmoil which seemed to presage the "end times." The Marxist and hippie communes of the 1960s (which frequently had pictures of Jesus, Mao, or Maharishi Mahesh as their motivational icons) were experiments in "alternative living," not micro-societies. They were aimed primarily at restructuring work and family relations with an emphasis on new definitions of property and sexuality in the hope of inspiring new kinds of human relationships while providing protection from the predations of the dominant order.

All true Christian communities are eschatological communities, as were the earliest ones. That means they are not trying to figure out an answer to the hackneyed question of "how then shall we live?" Christian communities are not essentially "political," even though obviously their way of being generates certain political strategies in certain contexts. They are not trying simply to "re-educate" people in how to pursue the public as opposed to the private good. The question of the good is ultimately a political question, which is why you can't really read Aristotle's Ethics separately from his Politics.

An eschatological community is a realized messianic community where the "to come" (avenir) is but the imminent expectation of the full experience (parousia) of the incarnate one's transforming presence in the "now" (maintenant). That's what the Book of Acts is all about. It's also what faith is all about.
2) A note on Deleuze and Zizek. Hardt and Negri aren't really Deleuzians, even though they claim to be, because they recode Deleuze’s semiotics of difference into Foucault’s hermeneutics of “biopower”, then take this strange brew and revive an old “cultural Marxism” which they use to theorize a new “revolutionary struggle” against global capitalism. Like so many on the New Left (now the Old Left) they can’t let go of their Sixties-style utopias. They try to be good “dialecticians”, even though Deleuze rejected the dialectic. Hardt and Negri, of course, have no clue about the role of the “religious” in the rising pushback against globalization. They romanticize the Seattle protests at the beginning of the decade and pay no attention to radical Islam or “next Christendom” Christianity. Zizek is another story. He is writing more and more about religion – see his New York Times op-ed pieces. I think too much is made of Zizek as a “religious thinker”, however. He can’t really shed his skin of Lacanianism, which works well when you take an ironic view of pop cultural Christianity or defending EU irenism and pluralism. I think Zizek is a brilliant cultural theoretician, but his lingering Marxist sympathies for a kind of fashionable “atheistic materialism” won’t work for what is really happening with respect to globalization. French thinkers like Olivier Roy have a better idea.

I would challenge those who seek to “postmodernize the church” to disabuse themselves of the project of trying to find the latest fashionable fit between specific Continental philosophers and whatever we nominally term “Christianity” , then to reflect seriously on what the “postmodern moment” portends in terms of our own radical faith legacy. There is no postmodern “method of correlation” (Tillich’s famous term). A postmodern “crisis theology” might be more appropriate. All these thinkers arm us with a certain “critical theory.” But theory is not theology, and theology is not faith.

To go back to my original point. Faith does not bracket politics. It makes our “political” choices even more epochal and weighty. But a Christian cannot re-engineer some sort of Hardt and Negrian “multitudinism” or Foucaultian “biopolitics.” We need to work out a language of pisteo-politics, faith politics. Given the complexity and pluralism of previous Christian efforts at pisteo-politics (from Constantianism all the way to liberation theology), there are no simple “ideological” rubrics under which to shelter ourselves.