Awaiting the King (Cultural Liturgies Book #3)

Reforming Public Theology

Smith, James K. A.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781493406609
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In this culmination of his widely read and highly acclaimed Cultural Liturgies project, JamesK.A. Smith examines politics through the lens of liturgy. What if, he asks, citizens are not only thinkers or believers but also lovers? Smith explores how our analysis of political institutions would look different if we viewed them as incubators of love-shaping practices--not merely governing us but forming what we love. How would our political engagement change if we weren't simply looking for permission to express our "views" in the political sphere but actually hoped to shape the ethos of a nation, a state, or a municipality to foster a way of life that bends toward shalom? This book offers a well-rounded public theology as an alternative to contemporary debates about politics. Smith explores the religious nature of politics and the political nature of Christian worship, sketching how the worship of the church propels us to be invested in forging the common good. This book creatively merges theological and philosophical reflection with illustrations from film, novels, and music and includes helpful exposition and contemporary commentary on key figures in political theology.

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Rites Talk

The Worship of Democracy

Blurring the (Pen)Ultimate Distinction

Some of the confusion and muddle of our “folk” political theologies—the on-the-ground practice of Christians with respect to their civic engagement—stems, I am suggesting, from a tendency to “spatialize” political theology, carving out “church” and “state” as two realms or jurisdictions. Questions about Christian public theology are then framed as a matter of how to move between these different “spheres,” or how to negotiate our “dual citizenship,”1 or how to relate “church” and “culture.”2 The problem is that, in reality, many of these supposed borders are invisible. So it’s often hard to know when you’ve crossed a frontier. There’s no “city limit” sign to the earthly city precisely because the earthly city is less a place and more a way of life, a constellation of loves and longing and beliefs bundled up in communal rhythms, routines, and rituals. Theological wisdom about the political begins when we stop asking where and start asking how. This, I’m going to suggest, means overcoming the habit of spatializing the political.

It also means calling into question another distinction that is commonly invoked in political theology: between the “ultimate” and the “penultimate.”3 Both political liberalism and certain strains of Christian political theology like to confidently draw a line between the ultimate and the penultimate (sometimes taken as equivalent to the distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural”). Political liberalism, for example, claims to be agnostic about “ultimate” matters and emphasizes that politics impinges on “penultimate” concerns. Some streams of Christian theology effectively agree, assuming that political life is merely about temporal, “penultimate” realities in contrast to ultimate, “spiritual” realities. Both share a picture of the cosmos as being made up of levels or steps that we can walk together up to a certain point, but then beyond this point we will venture into our ultimate disagreements. And we imagine “politics” happening on this lower tier. So, according to this common assumption, let’s focus on what we can do together on the lower, penultimate levels.4

In this way, the (pen)ultimate distinction then licenses a division of labor between the temporal and the eternal, between transcendent expectations and this-worldly realities. Our ultimate beliefs and expectations have a kind of religious character about them (what political liberal John Rawls would have called “metaphysical conceptions of the good”).5 Even if you’re a naturalistic atheist, you confess something as ultimate; you’ll be committed to some macrovision of what’s good and just and right. Now, your “ultimate” commitments might not be very grand; they might be very narrow, in fact. Your ultimate, sacrosanct commitments might be to your own self-preservation and interests—an egoistic worldview. You might believe in Ayn Rand or Friedrich Nietzsche in a way that shapes your entire perception of the world and your calling within it. But if you’re honest, you’ll have to concede that not everyone believes what you believe (what Charles Taylor calls a “secular” situation, where no one’s beliefs can be taken to be axiomatic, default for an entire society). Similarly, if you’re a Christian, you have ultimate beliefs about God and transcendent expectations for the consummation of all things. But you also have to grant that not everyone believes that. And so we are in a situation where we are divided on the ultimate.6

But our ultimate disagreements, according to this logic, need not preclude our agreement on “penultimate,” temporal matters like trash collection, traffic lights, public libraries, interstate systems, and the commercial exchange of goods and services. These are mundane, banal, “worldly” realities we all have to manage, whether or not you believe in God. Whether you think human beings are created in the image of God or are just sentient meat encased in skin, we can probably all agree that sewer systems are a good thing. We might not agree on the eternal destiny of the soul, or whether we have souls, but we might all be able to agree that laws requiring child car seats are a good idea. If we would only focus on mundane, penultimate issues, we need not be bothered by the ultimate beliefs that divide us. Save that stuff for weekends at home.

Liberalism prides itself on its politics of penultimacy; that is, liberalism likes to brag about its ultimate agnosticism and parade itself as the procedural system that only asks us to work together on the penultimate. “I don’t have any specific vision of the good to purvey,” Lady Liberalism purrs. “I’m not telling you what to believe. I don’t really ‘believe’ anything. Let’s just agree to some rules to help us arrive at some consensus about penultimate matters.” It’s when we fixate on the ultimate that people get hurt, according to this story; the penultimate never hurt anyone.

Except, of course, when it does. Recall the violence and destruction occasioned by the postal system in The Postman. How does the banal matter of transporting letters turn into a war? “Merely” political and social allegiances trump religious allegiances all the time, whether in presidential primaries, under the grotesque shadow of the lynching tree, or in horrifying cases like the Rwandan genocide.7 The fact is, the ultimate/penultimate distinction is not the happy division of labor we imagine, mostly because the political is not content to remain penultimate.

Indeed, we are most prone to absolutize the temporal when our ultimate conviction is that there is no eternal. Joseph Bottum documents this absolutization of the penultimate in An Anxious Age (and a particularly incisive follow-up in The Weekly Standard).8 Rehearsing the litanies of progressive outrage and the public excommunications of the left, Bottum confirms the prescience of G. K. Chesterton’s observation that “the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad”—virtues “isolated from each other and wandering alone.” A secularized culture is not devoid of religious fervor; it just finds new outlets. “As the post-Protestant generations gradually rose up to claim the high places formerly occupied by their mainline grandparents,” Bottum argues, “what they carried with them was the mood and structure of once-coherent ideas of Christian theology, rather than the personal behaviors of Christian morality. What escaped the dying mainline denominations was not so much the old virtues as the old concepts, isolated from each other and wandering alone.”9 A secularized culture has its own renditions of original sin, its own version of sanctification (a sort of politically correct form of enlightenment), its own exercises in purification and excommunication (turns out the church of the penultimate, unlike the Christian church in America, actually exercises discipline). These are not the habits of an ethos that is agnostic about what’s ultimate.10

And you’d be hard-pressed to conclude the political is just temporal and penultimate when you visit the veritable temple mount that is the National Mall—which even the National Parks Service heralds as home to the “icons” of the nation’s capital.11 If we could teleport St. Paul from Mars Hill to the National Mall and lead him from the heraldry of the capitol, past the Washington Monument, and into the “temple”12 that houses the eternal memory of Abraham Lincoln, I would imagine his observations would be similar: “I perceive that in every way you are very religious” (Acts 17:22 ESV). Democracy and freedom are not just good ideas for the “meantime” of our earthly sojourn; they are the ultimate goods for which we die (and kill). This is reinforced by the liturgies of the stadium and arena that stage spectacular displays of national mythology and military power akin to what Augustine described as the “fabulous” civil theologies of the Roman Empire, those public rituals that constituted nothing less than worship.13 The political bleeds beyond the bounds of the penultimate; our public rituals have the force of rites.

Picturing “Fabulous” Theologies:
Visiting the Stadium with David Foster Wallace

Let me take you to a scene that is quintessentially David Foster Wallace, from his widely acclaimed novel Infinite Jest. Surrounded by the vistas of the Arizona mesa, agent Steeply meets Rémy Marathe, a member of the Quebec separatist group the Wheelchair Assassins. Almost immediately, their conversation ...