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The Fracture of Good Order
The Fracture of Good Order: Christian Antiliberalism and the Challenge to American Politics by Jason C. Bivins Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003 211 pp. $18.95, paper |
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.
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