2 of 4
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.
share this page
RSS Feed
