November 5, 2024
[1] Something substantive on the cultural-political landscape changed on the morning after the November 5, 2024 U.S. elections. When Professor Amy Carr and I were writing Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice (Baylor University Press 2023) in 2022-2023, the political state in the U.S. seemed stuck in a holding pattern. We kept our respective eyes on the polarization between right and the left as we worked. The right was intent on reversing rights for women and LGBTQIA persons and eyeing the dismantling of DEI initiatives in public institutions; the left clung to the hope that the liberal progress narrative would assure them the ultimate victory of their vision of justice as equality for political identities policed by an anti-Black and cis-gendered heteropatriarchal ontology. The holding pattern for both right and left that had endured for almost a decade was broken that night in November when Donald J. Trump was re-elected as president of the U.S. While we as a nation might not yet comprehend the implications for this nation’s ethos of this election result for a while, something became crystal clear, namely that the liberal hope was dashed. The Dobbs decision of 2022 was not a blip on the arc of history, but a bold portent of a drastic change.
[2] I am aware that as I write this in late January 2025 many on the left are discouraged. Many who were productive during the holding pattern have stopped writing, predicting, hoping. A sort of grieving resignation has set in. Where once people on the left had carefully followed the news, participating in the collective experience of cycling through emotions caused by each morsel of information, now people are deliberately tuning out, not wanting to hear and feel. But the reality is gradually setting in: the vulnerable in our society are being targeted for explicit punishment. A politics of cruelty is becoming the “new normal.”
[3] The religio-political state of polarization is, however, the same now as it has been for decades. The culture wars concerning sex/gender are still front and center; the relentless attack on Black bodies continues in its Jim Crow 2.0 iteration. But it seems different now in January 2025. MAGA has the presidency and both houses of Congress; this victory, though not as overwhelming as claimed, is already infusing the rhetoric and content of social media posts: women’s bodies belong to men; there are only two sexes; critical race theory is prohibited in publications and educational institutions. The holding-pattern polarization that we experienced prior to November 2024 has morphed into a polarization that has real and consequential political and legal power that is being wielded. What incursions into human rights that has been the platform for the left will the right attempt? How will institutions cave to or resist the cultural ethos shaped by the MAGA win? Is democracy the lentil stew (cf. Gen 25:29-34) that America has sold for the price of eggs and gender-determinate bathrooms? The current context of polarization is not a polarized state that requires the agreement between equals as condition for its dialectic, but one in which personal power dictates the terms, and in which Christianity, in the form of charismatic evangelicalism, provides sacred sanction.
[4] As a theologian working in an analytic frame, I have seen just how conservative theologians erode liberal values. In 2014 I published a book called Theology and the End of Doctrine (Westminster John Knox Press). The question motivating this book concerned my own theological inheritance of the postliberal theology that was constructed at Yale University in the last decades of the twentieth century. The Lutheran theologian, George A. Lindbeck, had theorized a constructive theology that would facilitate the dialogue between Lutheran and Roman Catholic theologians. His model, applied to official dialogues between representatives of both confessions, resulted in the successful signing of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification on October 31, 1999, thereby ushering in a new era of reciprocal appreciation between Protestants and Roman Catholics. But Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic model was also mustered as a resource for the culture wars. Postliberal theology, or as I call its respective theological model in my book, the epistemic advantage model of theology, was appropriated as the theological framework for Christians, particularly evangelicals and Roman Catholics on the right. The model became instrumental for those Christians who were interested in solving what they considered the “crisis of modernity.”
[5] The crisis of modernity in its contemporary form has to do with a crisis of value. It is this crisis that informs the polarization as we experience it today, after November 2024. This crisis was first diagnosed by philosophical ethicist, Alasdair MacIntyre in his book, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press 1981). This text has emerged as a manifesto for Christian theologians and ethicists on the right. The problem McIntyre addresses is what he perceives a crisis in modern ethics, namely modernity has been unable to deliver a coherent ethics because of liberal values. Liberal values, such as women’s rights, erode a traditional sense of order and belonging. These compel the slippery slope into ethical relativism and destroy a unified frame of meaning provided by institutions, preeminently the “church,” an undifferentiated term meant to connote a taken-for-granted orthodoxy. The solution to this crisis is to invoke tradition as the stable meaning-making producer of values that have endured for centuries and that guarantee a social order.
[6] MacIntyre’s vision for ethics connected with how Yale theologians, particularly Lindbeck and his colleague Hans W. Frei, perceived the history of modern biblical interpretation. These theologians, like MacIntyre, were concerned with the crisis of a unified reading of the Christian Bible that promoted the unity of the church. Frei in his The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (Yale University Press 1980) had shown how pre-critical methods of connecting both testaments in the Christian Bible were eroded by modern readings that privileged the historical referent of the Bible as its meaning. Lindbeck sought to retrieve pre-critical methods of biblical interpretation, such as typology and prophesy-fulfillment, that he correlated with an ecclesial unity.[1] Modern historical methods that broke the unified biblical message into historical pieces was a crisis of meaning, they said, that required the retrieval of early church and medieval hermeneutics to solve. The unity of a tradition that stressed the soteriological meaning of the Bible and the Christological referent of the Christian Church was to be secured by an anti-modern stance. Tradition had the power to counter the effects of modern reason that had wrested the biblical message from its coherent embeddedness in the biblical worldview. Tradition would solve the crisis of modern Christian relativism by recover Christian faith as the perspective from which Christian truth would be assessed.
[7] What I discovered in my analysis of postliberal theology was that in spite of the pious rhetoric there was an insidious neo-fundamentalism that was propped up by power. I cannot go into my arguments here, except to say that the cultural-linguistic model, as I analyzed it, is a theological theory about Christian orthodoxy that is justified with recourse to theological claims about the primacy of Christ and the conversion of the Holy Spirit. This model erodes the empirical evidence-based reason that has been the consensus for truth-telling in the academy and our legal system since the Enlightenment. Faith has become the normative rationality imposed upon theology and other adjacent disciplines, including history. Alternative historiographies tell the story of “decline” since the Protestant Reformation, by which is meant the rise of the modern secular ethos of human rights, the marginalization of the supernatural, and the alleged ethical relativism of modern culture. These historiographies are, of course, constructed by situating the postliberal theological values of the unity of the tradition and a coherent ethics as their conceptual lens. Thus, the distinct theological state of polarization has arisen precisely between postliberals who retrieve aspects of the tradition that they consider central to their agenda on the right and the liberals who are committed to the academic exchange of ideas, to historical research, and to consensus-building through dialogue on the left.
[8] My theological inquiry into postliberal theology was to get clear on precisely the kind of Christianity that the postliberal theologians was advocating. What are the kinds of traditional theological and ethical values that post-liberals promote? What kind of Christianity does JD Vance since his conversion to Roman Catholicism from evangelicalism advocate? What kind of Christianity do Brad Gregory and John Milbank espouse with their embrace of “tradition” that predates Protestant Reformation? How does this recourse to a selective history determined by particular theological values legitimate the postliberal positions on issues concerning sex/gender and race? In the current post-November 2024 ethos, we must remember that the theological polarization among Christians has been decades in the making.
[9] Questions must now be posed: How can Christians on the left respond to the dominance of the postliberal theological framework that is allied with the conservative values of the alleged tradition? How can left-leaning Christians offer an alternative theological framework that takes back the right’s monopoly on Christianity in order to represent traditions of Christianity that counter the ideological conservatism of postliberal theologians?
[10] In my essay (also in this issue), “What Does Theology Have To Do With Ethics? The Signature Lutheran Consensus and A Constructive Proposal,” I explain how Lutherans on the left have contributed in some way to the polarization on ethical issues between Christians today. Lutherans have inherited a particular theological model of justification that bifurcates theology from ethics. Lutherans on the left have taken up ethics while moving theology out of the way. These Lutherans have mapped the binary onto the relation between the pursuit of justice and justification. Thy have moved justification to the sidelines and foregrounded justice, while correlating justice exclusively in political terms.
[11] What is left by the left’s preoccupation with a political determination of justice is precisely the abdication of all responsibility for theology. With this abdication, the significance of theology for the thinking and acting of Christians is eradicated. It is no wonder then that Christians on the right dictate what Christianity is and monopolize theological and biblical discourse. The left is left with the ethical crumbs that have fallen from the liberal ruler’s table. Politics, not theology, frames ethics.
[12] The crisis of modernity, pace MacIntyre, is not when modernity fails to deliver a coherent ethics by thinking beyond one selective take on Christian tradition. Rather the crisis is the polarized state when Christian on the right explicitly and exclusively take up the talk of one Christian tradition—orthodoxy–that entails one set of values for ethical practice–orthopraxy, while the left cedes Christian theology to the secular language of justice. When the theological question of what it means to be a person is identified solely and exclusively with politics in its various iterations, then the Christian left has left Christianity. The right can thus easily solve this crisis by coopting Christian theology for its agenda. The crisis of meaning that is endemic to modernity can be easily solved with recourse to the alleged Christian tradition. Christianity in this determination is set up against the secular world such that the terms of polarization are Christianity against the “secular left.” And this binary has been extremely successful in marketing postliberal theology as the sole theological option advocating for Christianity.
[13] I am intrigued by the polarization of effort by Christians on the right who are aggressively pursuing tactics to arrogate Christian theology in such a way that they succeed in pitting Christianity tout court against the secular left. Why has the Christian left been rather nonchalant about this aggressive tactic on the right to speak for Christianity? This nonchalance might have to do with the smug confidence in the linear progress narrative that has shaped the liberal ethos. This meta-narrative narrative views the progress of history along the metaphysical lines of the advancing kingdom of God. The kingdom is itself propelled by the liberal fires of freedom. The origins of this narrative rest with Martin Luther, who, in his “here I stand” mode initiated modernity with his own call for Christian freedom.[2] This story of modern progress is so compelling that Christians on the right have been advancing what they call “alternative modernities.” The use of the term “modernity” admits that modernity is the default narrative, yet “alternative” insists that there are other ways of construing modernity by rewriting it from the perspective of traditional values.
[14] But liberal confidence in the linear progress of history has been a fatal error. The story of modern progress has been called into question for a while. Climate change and populism, backlashes on a number of fronts against civil and women’s rights, and the rise of conspiracy theories that erode confidence in a public consensus about evidence for truth have all been real happenings that have thrown the proverbial wrench into the arc of history. The sign of the times is more and more akin to how the critical theorist and Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin described the angel of history’s gaze on the “single catastrophe” of history.
[15] The left has missed key signals of apocalypse threatening its complacent confidence in the linear progress narrative. The crisis of modernity has to do with the modern vision itself, its crisis being the contestation of modern values as the antimodern backlash, which is no longer a backlash but the winning ticket. Modernity in crisis, and we were just in the holding pattern of a polarized religio-political culture, enduring the ricocheting between modernity and its opposite. Yet now that postliberal Christians are unequivocally in the driver’s seat, modernity is in the hands of the anti-modern, and critical theory, the important analytic tool for theology on the left, is on the chopping block.
Ordinary Faith and the Christian Left
[15] Now that Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times has been published, it is time to offer a revisionist reading in the contemporary context of polarization that is dictated by a postliberal theological frame. How can ordinary faith be practiced by Christians on the left? Professor Carr and I make the bold claim throughout our book that theology is integral for Christians to think about how beliefs and how they navigate their beliefs in a polarized world. We addressed our plea for robust theological thinking to all Christians, justifying our claim on the basis of the doctrine of justification that pertains to all Christians. But I now think that Christians on the left must be much more intentional and strategic about the discipline of theology. Left-leaning Christians must reclaim the practice of thinking theologically about Christianity—its beliefs and morals—in a way that powerfully counters the polarized binary imposed on the “secular left” by the Christian right. The current map that dictates the terms of theological polarization must be redrawn. The polarization must be between postliberal theology and Christian theology. The terms of the debate must be theological.
[16] The left does not have the luxury to abdicate the Christian practice of thinking theologically. Christian theology and ethics cannot be handed over to one branch of Christianity that claims it alone can solve the crisis of modernity. Rather, Christian theologians on the left must enter the fray in thinking theologically about ethics. I advocate for a turn to the left that is an about-face to theology in relation to ethics, one in which Christian commitments are upfront and clearly spelled out. I advocate that the left focus deliberately on retrieving and reimagining the theological fundamentals of faith and justice, Christ and the Spirit, justification and justice.
[17] To sum up: when I co-wrote Ordinary Faith with Professor Carr, I had assumed that polarization between Christians in America was dictated by the culture wars. We advocated strategies for story-telling and listening, for discursive and affective reciprocal recognition between right and left. Our theological basis was the doctrine of justification by faith that we connected to Christ’s creation of the Beloved Community. Christian identity was grounded in justification, not on one’s political identity or ethical position. We then used theological tools to open spaces for reciprocity that were intended to orient Christians on the right and left to both their common belonging to the body of Christ and to discussion of how visions of justice could be actualized. Depolarization is a theological concept, and its practices have theological justification having to do with the identity of the “new person” who Christ creates through the gift of faith. Theology has to do with the question of what it means to be human and how Christ’s work is person-forming. Thus, we argued that theology is important for thinking about how Christians who disagree can come to appreciate their mutual belonging in the Beloved Community and on that basis exercise the person-forming action of Christ in their lives in order to become more human to each other.
[18] The polarization around sex/gender still rallies the right against the left. And I continue to be committed to the main idea in Ordinary Faith that justification by faith grounds the Beloved Community and thereby interrupts the reigning ideology of a polarized Christianity that identifies Christianity with a particular political position. But since November 2024 I now think it imperative to add another dimension to the conversation about polarization and depolarization, one that explicitly takes postliberal theology’s politics into account. I argued above that postliberal theology has been successful in monopolizing Christianity for its own political positions, while denouncing the left as secular. How will the Christian left respond to this twist in the polarization debate? The left needs to chart a theological comeback and this must be done with explicit appeal to the rhetoric that it has tended to regard in critical terms, namely tradition, Christ, transcendence and faithfulness. The Christian left, in other words, must recover terms that it has regarded with suspicion, and invigorate them as theologically and spiritually significant. Depolarizing will require theologically robust commitments that will open new spaces for discussion about the essence of Christianity and its relation to justice-seeking.
Strategies for Retheologizing the Christian Left
[19] The task of Christian theologians on the left begins with telling the truth. I imagined this task in a recent book I edited, Truth-Telling and other Ecclesial Practices of Resistance (Lexington/Fortress Academic 2021). The authors of the book agreed that as theologians and church leaders it was our responsibility to resist the lies of our “post-truth” era by offering theologically robust accounts of truth-telling. We were concerned that institutions traditionally devoted to truth-telling, like churches, the press, and universities, were either guiding or being guided by an ethos that surrendered truth to other powers, like money, pandering to a particular constituency, or giving up on truth in small ways. Scholars who contributed to the book, for example Professor Carr, considered various traditional practices in the church, like the sacraments, that could serve as truth-telling instruments. They offered theological reasons for practices of truth-telling, thereby retrieving theology as critical and constructive tool for Christian discussions about ritual, preaching, and prayer. My decision to orient the book on truth, rather than on justice, was my attempt to provide an alternative conception from the explicit connection that Christians on the left were making with justice issues. In my judgment, I thought that this focus on justice, while important, tended to elide theological discussion of justice with an exclusively political one. While justice should always be at the forefront of theological and ethical inquiry, justice discourse can also benefit from theological discussion of other topics, such as truth. Theologians have been concerned with truth for centuries. The truth of justice should be the subject of theological inquiry today, as it has in the past. The book thus offered theological theories about why justice matters and how churches can understand the nature of theological truth as central task in justice work. This represented an important step in gathering the theological expertise of Lutheran theologians interested in working out Christian theological theories of truth-telling with political praxis in mind.
[20] I continue to think that theological truth-telling is a task that the Christian left must explicitly adopt. The new theological imperative of the left must get clear on the true fundamentals of Christian faith and morals. This is not a time for “faith-busting” or for excessive theological deconstruction. Rather, the truth of Christianity must be told in a way that is understandable. Justice must be done to the public nature of the gospel by a communication strategy on the left. Communication of truth into the public is integral to the essence of Christianity. The missio dei is a theological term that denotes how God sends the Son and the Spirit to the world in order to accomplish the reconciliation of the world with God. The church takes up the divine missio dei, communicating the gospel to free persons from their respective captivities to wealth acquisition and small-mindedness, poverties and lusts for power. The terms mission and missionary are derived from the theological idea of deity’s communication to the world. The communication of deity’s mysteries to the world is the theological claim that Christians on the left must operationalize in the current age. The Christian left must claim the inheritance of the Protestant Reformation, its emphasis on taking up effective communication strategies in tell the truth about Christianity. Luther and his allies mustered the new social media of pamphlets and published treatises in their favor and used these modes of communication in the vernacular to disseminate their message. In the U.S. today, however, the Christian right has been more successful in communicating its Christian message. Thus version of Christianity has come to represent Christianity as a whole for many people. When newspaper articles mention Christianity, they more often than not mean Christianity on the right. The term “theology” is almost univocally used to identify positions on the Christian right. Effective and strategic communication is key—and this requires recovering the language that Christians have used in the past, and infusing it with a theological truth-telling that advocates the justice of God in the world.
[21] Another strategy for retheologizing the Christian left is to build coalitions and communities. Liberal theologians have for decades derided common belonging to the church. Theologians critical of the institution have done so on the basis of their inordinate reliance on critical rather than constructive reason. Liberal theologians were the “faith busters” of the 1980s and 1990s, disabusing people of their faith by confronting them with historical critical claims that Moses never existed and that the New Testament was written after Jesus had disappeared from his earthly life. Some captured this liberal trend with the biting motto: seminaries are cemeteries where faith goes to die. Where are the voices on the Christian left that articulate theologically robust arguments for ecclesial belonging? Christians on the right have got this task right. Community is key. They have built coalitions and institutes designed to study and disseminate Christian values. They organize Bible study groups. Church is a place to talk explicitly about one’s faith. Online websites and publishers are connected to these coalitions. The Christian left must now take up the responsibility for building the sort of coalitions and communities that they desire. They cannot complacently rely on the linear progress narrative to be oriented to justice without explicitly exercising the missio dei to create disciples, to feed the sheep with meat not milk, and if one is a vegetarian with a robust garlicky stew of beans and potatoes to give them the foretaste of belonging to the Beloved Community that is grounded in justification by faith in Christ.
[22] The word of life—this is what being a Christian communicator is all about. Being a Christian means keeping faith alive in a theological awakening to a constructive reclaiming of a powerful inheritance that marries truth and justice, wisdom and love, grace and mercy. Being a Christian means to embody ways of communicating these deep theological truths. Communication has to do with both speech and practice. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy are at their best when thinking is attuned to the multiple perspectives that make up the glimpse of truth that we as humans are given but never to have; when the language of faith that keeps the word of life living within speaker; when the ways of acting that embody the living faith are intentional about creating a reality that is attuned to the spirit of Christ; and finally when the one who comes with the power of the one who gave up the divine power communicates the final word that creates abundant life.
[1] George A. Lindbeck, “The Story-Shaped Church: Critical Exegesis and Theological Interpretation,” in Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, ed. Garrett Green (Philadelphi: Fortress Press, 1987), 161-178.
[2] For the early twentieth-century German Lutheran construction of the “here I stand Luther” see Christine Helmer, How Luther Became the Reformer (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2019).
