Reflections on Postliberalism

Part 1, Postliberal Theology Versus Postliberal Politics

I want to use these series to tease out what I think about a recent debate concerning how postliberal theology may or may not have contributed to postliberal political theory. As I’ve pondered this debate I find myself, as is often the case, “in between” the positions. So I’m going to use this series to nail down exactly where I am.

But to bring everyone along with me on this journey I’ll need to catch many readers up.

The stimulus for this particular debate was an article published by David Congdon in The Journal of Religion entitled “What Has New Haven to Do with Hungary? On Theological and Political Postliberalism.” The thesis of Congdon’s essay can be simply stated: Postliberal theology laid the groundwork for postliberal politics. Provocatively stated, Stanley Hauerwas brought us Donald Trump.

If none of that makes any sense to you, let me back up and explain.

Postliberal theology was a reaction toward what is called “liberal theology.” Liberal here doesn’t mean “Woke” or “Democrat.” Liberal theology was an attempt to reinterpret Christianity in light of modernity. Beginning with figures like Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), it grounded faith in human experience rather than in supernatural revelation or metaphysical claims. Doctrine was understood less as a set of objective truths about God and more as symbolic, moral, or existential expressions of religious consciousness. Later theologians such as Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976), and Paul Tillich (1886–1965) continued this trajectory in different ways, interpreting Christian claims in categories intelligible to modern culture.

Postliberal theology emerged as a critique of liberal theology’s reduction of doctrine to expressions of universal religious experience. But postliberal theology was not antiliberal in the political sense. It assumed the pluralistic conditions of modern society and did not seek a return to cultural dominance. Rather than translating Christianity into the categories of human experience, they emphasized learning to inhabit the Christian narrative and practices as a way of life within a pluralistic world. By doing so the postliberals sought to recover the particularity and authority of Christian doctrine, carving out space for a thick Christian community within the pluralistic order. By treating doctrine as the grammar of a distinctive way of life, the postliberals aimed to sustain Christian distinctiveness without retreating from modernity or translating the faith into its prevailing categories.

A key influence here was the work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). Wittgenstein argued that language gets its meaning from how it is used by a community sharing a common life. Words function within “language games,” patterns of speech and practice governed by rules that communities learn over time. Postliberal theologians, like George Lindbeck, applied this insight to Christian doctrine. Christianity, Lindbeck argued, is a distinct cultural-linguistic community that has its own grammar, habits, and practices which shape how believers speak about God and how they inhabit the biblical story. To be a Christian is to join this particular community, learning its language, its patterns of worship, and its way of life. Truth, on this account, is not detached from this communal grammar but is learned and embodied within it.

Stanley Hauerwas is a theologian who fused postliberal theology with virtue ethics. Drawing on the cultural diagnosis of Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue, and connecting it with the Anabaptist ecclesiology of John Howard Yoder, Hauerwas articulated a powerful vision of Christian life and spiritual formation. From MacIntyre he took the claim that virtues only make sense in light of a telos, a shared account of the good. From Yoder he identified the life of Jesus, especially his nonviolence, as the telos which defines that good. And drawing on George Lindbeck, Hauerwas argued that these cruciform virtues are formed from within the practices and language of the Christian community. The church becomes the school in which believers learn the grammar of the faith until its story and practices are embodied as habits of character.

Okay, that review should catch everyone up on the postliberal theology side of the debate. Let’s now turn to what has been called “postliberal politics.”

While postliberal politics has deeper historical roots, it rose to contemporary prominence through Patrick Deneen and his bestselling book Why Liberalism Failed, which Deneen followed up with Regime Change. Deneen, along with other postliberal political theorists, argues that liberalism has “failed” because it cannot articulate a thick account of the common good. On this point he echoes Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue: without a shared telos, a society cannot cultivate the virtues necessary for its own survival. Absent such formation, liberal democracies slide into fragmentation, moral incoherence, and cultural decay.

But here is the tension. Liberal democracies are explicitly premised upon liberty. Within broad constitutional guardrails, citizens are free to pursue diverse visions of the good. Liberalism does not arbitrate between those choices. Liberalism protects, rather, the space in which these competing goods coexist. Pluralism is the expected outcome. A feature, not a bug.

And yet, for Deneen and his postliberal allies, pluralism is the disease. Toleration tends toward decadence. Freedom leads to fragmentation. The refusal of the state to privilege one comprehensive moral vision over others inexorably brings about national, cultural, and civilizational collapse.

If so, what follows?

The answer, stated plainly, is that the state must decide. Where liberty had once been the organizing principle of America it has to be, going forward, subordinated to a thicker, state-enforced account of human flourishing. The state must privilege certain goods over others, even against the dissent of its citizens. The state must discipline the culture. In short, the state must become illiberal and authoritarian in order to secure and save the good.

Okay, do you have those two visions in mind, postliberal theology versus postliberal politics?

The key point both agree upon is the view that liberalism cannot form virtue. Which is why both groups use Alasdair MacIntyre in their arguments.

The contrast between the views might be put this way. Given liberalism’s inability to form virtue, postliberal theology, like that of Stanley Hauerwas, argues for the particularity of the Christian community. The church is the place where virtue is formed. Formed from within a community carved out from within a pluralistic culture.

Postliberal politics, by contrast, wants to turn the entire nation into the church. Basically, Christian nationalism (or Catholic integralism). Instead of “carving out” spaces within the culture, the culture itself needs to be comprehensively disciplined toward the “Christian” conception of the good. (I put “Christian” in scare quotes for a reason, because it is an open question, for me at least, whether the postliberal politics of “the ends justify the means” approach toward the good is a Christian vision.) Schematically we have:

Postliberal theology = Be the church from within the pluralistic world

Postliberal politics = Turn the pluralistic world into the church

Given this contrast, we can return to Congdon’s article. Postliberal theology and postliberal politics seem to be quite different. Postliberal theology focuses upon the church. Postliberal politics focuses upon the nation. Postliberal theology views pluralism as a mission field. Postliberal politics views pluralism as a tumor that must be removed. But if this is true, how can Congdon claim that postliberal theology created the conditions for a postliberal politics? How could the theology of Stanley Hauerwas bring us Donald Trump?

We’ll turn to that contested and controversial question in the next post.