Is Christianity Theocratic?

Danny Jenkins raised an interesting point in his response to the Badiou quote about identity politics and capitalistic territorialization I posted last week. His comment was that the Hauerwasian system, “refuses to allow the Christian narrative to capitulate to a standard of rationality foreign to it.” In other words, for Hauerwas (and others of like mind) the narrative of the church is prior to and more fundamental than any narrative “the world” has on offer, which in the west is primarily the narrative of the secular.

I agree with Danny’s appraisal of the “Hauerwasian system,” and because I agree with it I find the relationship between Christianity and the wider public sphere to be a most interesting issue. Because America is a secular nation it is assumed that there is something prior to and more fundamental than any particular religious tradition that allows diverse groups of people to come together and achieve a common good. In the case of the West, that something prior is “rationality.” In his book, Democracy and Tradition, Jeffrey Stout argues that,

Central to democratic thought as I understand it is the idea of a body of citizens who reason with one another about the ethical issues that divide them, especially when deliberating on the justice or decency of political arrangements. It follows that one thing a democratic people had better have in common is a form of ethical discourse, a way of exchanging reasons about ethical and political topics. The democratic practice of giving and asking for ethical reasons, I argue, is where the life of democracy principally resides.

~ Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), p. 6.

Key here for Stout is that we, as a diverse members of a democratic society, need to come together and reason with one another about the ethical issues that shape our political life together. There are two important things to note in Stout’s argument:

First, unlike other liberal democratic theorists like John Rawls and Richard Rorty, Stout believes that particular ethical convictions, which are derived from particular socio-linguistic traditions, ought to play a part in America’s democratic deliberation. In this regard, Stout is acknowledging that a person’s conception of the good is, perhaps more than anything else, shaped by their religious convictions. Furthermore, he is acknowledging the merit of “traditionalists” like MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and Milbank who argue that each particular tradition has its own unique rationality inherent to the tradition itself.

Second, despite giving this nod to what Stout refers to as the “New Traditionalism,” he maintains that there there is a form of reasoning prior to and more fundamental than these particular religious traditions. Thus, while seemingly affirming the argument of the Hauerwasian system — that ethical convictions are not derived from universal reason but from particular traditions — Stout goes on to posit a base-level rationality that is large enough to encompass all other traditioned particularities.

Stout’s positing of such a base-level rationality is seen most clearly in his chapter addressing the claims of John Milbank. Milbank, who rejects the narrative of a secularity more fundamental than Christianity, does so on the basis that the secular narrative inherently works to police the narrative of Christianity into a posture of submission. In response to this Stout counters that,

[Secularism] entails neither the denial of theological assumptions nor the expulsion of theological expression from the public sphere. And it leaves believers free to view both the state and democratic political culture as domains standing ultimately under divine judgment and authority. That believers view the political sphere in this way does not entail that others will, of course. But this just means that the age of theocracy is over, not that the anti-Christ has taken control of the political sphere (Democracy and Tradition, 93).

But what is Stout here advocating other than the basic separation of church and state? In the land of religious freedom all are welcome, and even encouraged, to worship in their own manner, so long as they don’t expect any one else to have to share in their religious convictions… of course. And this is where Stout really belies his ideological convictions, for by adding “of course” he is essentially saying “duh!” It is just common sense that no one should have to accept as reality that God is in control. But what this means is that, even though you can believe what you want, it will not have real purchase in the political sphere, at least as a discourse-shaping narrative. Rather, the political sphere requires a narrative that supersedes all religious and traditional particularities, a proposition that, for the radical Christian, is unacceptable. Radical Christianity must reject the “common sense” of Stout’s democratic deliberation, because it requires a subordination of the Christian narrative to the narrative of the state.

Stout claims that this subordiation of the Chrisitan narrative to the narrative of the state does not mean the anti-Christ has taken control. Instead, he argues, it simply means we’ve moved beyond the age of Theocracy. However, I’m wondering if there is a difference. If we have to subordinate our narrative to that of the state or some other form of rationality, thus relegating Christian conviction to the realm of the private, are we not abdicating Christ from the public sphere? Is this not anti-Christ?

It seems that Christian convictions require that we refuse to be just one voice among many within a neutral or secular public sphere. We must refuse a rationality or narrative that is prior to or more fundamental than Christianity. If this makes us Theocratic, then so be it.