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The literature of the movement is often dense, abstract, complex, impenetrable, out-of-reach, and off-putting. And yet as Smith and other critics note, what RO seeks to accomplish is hugely important not only for Christian academics but also (if it can be translated into more common parlance) for the life of the church, especially in the West. For what RO is after is nothing short of what Milbank describes as "an alternative version of modernity."

In the RO version, modernity, that historical moment that witnesses the rise of liberal democracy and capitalism (and the philosophies and theologies that affirm them), must be seen as a pure project of power whereby the church and its account of reality (again, in "thought, word, and deed") has been forcibly ejected from its earlier and necessary public space whereby it forms the soul according to the truth and beauty of God. As such the modern state has arisen as a device of and for liberal absolutism. Its message is individual human liberty, and it brooks no counter-version to its story.

In terms similar to those found in certain postmodern philosophers, from whom they borrow without completely buying, RO theorists and theologians (re-)describe the modern state not as "tolerant," "pluralistic," or "free" in the standard sense of those terms, but rather like Hobbes in Leviathan when he describes the state's sovereign power as that "mortal God." For them, the state has become the actual replacement for the church, replete with its own liturgies, vestments, rites, practices, saints, holy days, and disciplines. Rather than fitting us for heaven, the state and its multiple apparati (media, education, professions, etc.) form us for service and allegiance to the state and its needs. At one time, Christian subjects fought and died, they believed (perhaps mistakenly), for the sake of Jesus; now Christian citizens fight and die for the American way of life.

Some would say that this is in fact just what the state (carefully regulated and watched) should be about; and that a certain amount of material or cultural excess is well worth the price for a secured personal and religious liberty. After all, soul-crafting as the hobby of states (ancient and modern) leads almost inevitably to internal oppression and external war. But the concern for RO theologians extends beyond a critique of the modern state and its operations; it extends to why we as Christians must recognize what modernity (with its liberal state and free market) is really up to. So in the words of William Cavanaugh (the most accessible RO theologian):

The invention of religion as a private leisure activity allows people to fit into the state and market without conflict, … Private religion is meant as a refuge, a solace for tired shoppers and harried office workers. Religion helps us escape from or cope with, but not change, the frenetic pace of life in consumer society.

What Smith from his Reformed tradition, and RO theologians from their more Anglo-Catholic perspectives, seek is to re-direct Christian loyalties and re-form Christian affections away from the state (unlimited power) and market (unbounded desire), and bend them back towards the church which exists in the world, through God's Spirit, as the singular exemplary human community.

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May (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49