The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice, Thirtieth

By Kathryn Tanner

Thirty years ago, Kathryn Tanner put forward a daring proposal. Traditional Christian theologies, she insisted, can be a source of political transformation rather than a sponsor of the status quo. Through a rigorous analysis of Christian beliefs in their historical, theological, and social diversity, Tanner connects belief to attitudes and action and shows how doctrines can relate to each other, to social systems, and to ethical behavior.

Drawing on the theologies of divine transcendence and creation that animate and organize so much of her work, The Politics of God frees traditional theology from its captivity to unjust rulers and systems and unleashes its radical potential for liberation, empowerment, and the pursuit of a just society.

This anniversary edition includes a major new preface, in which Tanner addresses the changes in the social and political situation that have accumulated in the decades since the book's publication and resituates her argument for a new generation of theologians and activists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781506481968

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Cover Page for The Politics of God

Praise for The Politics of God

Kathryn Tanner’s exceptional analytical skill and theological acumen continue, now in the crucial theological questions of social justice. An acute and important study.

—David Tracy, University of Chicago

"The Politics of God is a superb melding of philosophy and theology . . . a substantively dense book that challenges the mind and encourages the spirit."

—The Christian Century

Tanner grounds her progressive political beliefs in traditional, rather than radical or liberation, theology. She finds traditional theology more open to self-criticism; views of a transcendent God provide correctives that views of an immanent God cannot; and traditional theology does not usurp the place of sociopolitical analysis as revisionist theology sometimes does.

—Library Journal

Kathryn Tanner has joined the company of those theologians who, like Karl Barth, recognize that in the end ‘all theology is practical. . . .’

—Theology Today

"Kathryn Tanner’s The Politics of God clearly and forcefully addresses Christian beliefs and practices about God and the world. Consistently applying the art of internal critique, Tanner offers a reconstruction of Christian tradition as a prophetic challenge to the political status quo."

—Rebecca Chopp, Emory University

"Kathryn Tanner is an immensely thoughtful philosopher of religion whose commitment to justice is evident in The Politics of God."

—Journal of Church and State

By pursuing an ‘internal’ rather than ‘totalistic’ critique of traditional Christian beliefs, [Tanner] seeks to expose their progressive potential, all while conceding that Christian theologies historically have legitimated and masked injustice through appeals to this or that ‘divinely ordained’ social hierarchy.

—The Thomist

[Tanner] shows convincingly that within the Christian doctrinal tradition there are rich and authentic resources for a radical stance in the public realm.

—Journal of Theological Studies

The Politics of God

The Politics of God

Christian Theologies and Social Justice

Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

Kathryn Tanner

Fortress Press

Minneapolis

THE POLITICS OF GOD

Christian Theologies and Social Justice, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

Copyright © 2022 Fortress Press, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write Permissions, Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA and used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover image: iStock/Nicola Patterson

Cover design: Kristin Miller

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-8195-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-8196-8

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Contents

Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of The Politics of God

Preface to the First Edition

1. Beliefs, Actions, Attitudes

2. Self-Critical Cultures and Divine Transcendence

3. Sociopolitical Critique and Christian Belief

4. Christian Belief and the Justification of Hierarchy

5. Christian Belief and Respect for Others

6. Christian Belief and Respect for Difference

7. Christian Belief and Activism

Index

Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of The Politics of God

This book was written in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the height of the culture wars in the United States, when political fights surrounding gender, sexuality, race, and class saw the Christian right’s climb to prominence. The simple fact that the Christian right was able to enter the arena of public debate and establish a powerful voting bloc was sufficiently startling to academically trained theologians like myself accustomed to irrelevance. But even more startling was the repugnance of the message promulgated for such purposes, one that targeted for moral opprobrium the most vulnerable—poor Blacks, sexual minorities, unwed mothers, and so on—in order to mobilize popular support and consolidate political influence.

Especially disturbing during this time was Christian indifference, at best, to the rampant AIDS-related suffering and death of gay men, or, more commonly on the right, outright vitriol directed against them as supposed sinners deserving of punishment. The lack of even the most basic human sympathy for gay men by Christians was simply flabbergasting; robbed of their humanity at the very time of their greatest need, gay people became nothing more than symbols and slogans to serve the political ends of others. With a seemingly complete lack of self-awareness about their own possible moral culpability in reacting as they did to the AIDS crisis, Christians, especially on the right, continued unabated in their own unfeeling condemnation of others, wholly unaware of the way they might be condemning themselves in the process.

That the Christian right had no monopoly on such a posture regarding gay people—that similar controversies over gender and sexuality roiled even mainline Protestant denominations and educational institutions like Yale—made the situation all the more intolerable. Disgust with the whole spectacle threatened to discredit—and not just in my own eyes—the Christianity to which I had so far dedicated my academic life. If this was what Christianity stood for—or what it could so easily be taken for by so many—then maybe it was best to keep it out of the public square altogether and eviscerate its influence there. Why help the Christian cause, in even a meager way, by dressing it up in academic finery? Academic theology would rightfully go down, then, with its disreputable object of study. How could one claim in good conscience to be above the political fray while endeavoring to show (as I had so far) the beauty, the coherence, the intellectual respectability of something currently being employed for monstrous purposes?

The Politics of God was my attempt to enter the fray and demonstrate that the sociopolitical ramifications of Christianity are other than what those on the Christian right think they are. Underlying all the intricacies of academic argument was the more fundamental effort to engage in a theological fight with them over what Christianity stands for in the world, over how it should be properly lived out. Contrary to the opinions of those on the Christian right, basic Christian beliefs, I argued, should lead Christians to be both self-critical and critical of the wider society; they should take an activist stance against social injustices that violate a Christian-backed demand for unconditional, universally shared positive rights to self-determination and well-being.

One important feature of the book was, indeed, just this assumption that there was a genuine theological disagreement here (and not simply a sociopolitical one). I didn’t presume, for example, that those on the Christian right were swayed in their political judgments by something other than their Christian commitments (although that is probably true at least in part, in that most Christians, almost inevitably, make their judgments about proper behavior on a variety of grounds, some having nothing to do with religion). I didn’t charge, in other words, that Christianity was being distorted here by something outside it—a political agenda—so as to become warped and inauthentic. That would be hard to argue in any case given Christianity’s rather dismal historical record on issues of race, gender, and sexuality. The positions of the Christian right are hardly a historical anomaly; if anything, they are in the statistical majority and in that sense as authentically Christian as anything could be.

I gave those on the Christian right, in other words, the benefit of the doubt: they were trying to be true to what they believed as Christians. And I assumed the posture of a Christian theologian due the same respect; my Christian commitments were similarly genuine and unfeigned. Indeed, to prove the point and thereby thoroughly repudiate the oft-lobbed right-wing charge that left-leaning Christians were simply accommodating themselves to progressive sociocultural trends, I sought to make my case on much the same theological grounds as the Christian right. Rather than coming at the religious beliefs of the Christian right from a standpoint outside them, I engaged in what I called internal critique, meaning I argued from Christian beliefs shared with my opponents, notably very basic, uncontroversial Christian claims about God’s nature and involvement with the world. I simply claimed to be making a more convincing case on the same Christian grounds for my sociopolitical positions than they could make for theirs. I was consistent where they were inconsistent, coherent where they were incoherent, less idiosyncratic in my understanding of taken-for-granted Christian affirmations than they were, and so on.

In short, by drawing very different conclusions on much the same grounds, I was implying that the theological arguments on the right were bad. Indeed, so egregiously bad, given the strength of my own arguments, that one might wonder what was really behind them—and I left the reader to make their own judgments on that score. A procedure like this—uncovering the right’s weakness of argument in comparison with my own—would, I hoped, force those on the Christian right to shine the spotlight of disingenuousness and prejudice back on themselves.

This, indeed, has always been my tactic as a theologian against Christian opponents of this sort: I try to seize the ground out from under them, beat them at their own game, out-Christian them, so to speak, and in that way take back from them what I view as just as rightfully mine. This is the Christianity of my loved ones, now gone, and I will not let others claim it for their own, only to see them malign and destroy its moral and intellectual credibility. I may not be able to bring my opponents around to my own sociopolitical views by way of theological argument, no matter how cogent my arguments are—people’s minds just aren’t changed by arguments in that fashion anyway. But it will at least have become clear in the process that they don’t believe what they believe for theological reasons, now that those reasons have been effectively demolished by me without effective rejoinder.

Spearheaded by such current theological controversies over political matters, the broader intellectual challenge of the book is to explain, in general, how Christian beliefs are translated into forms of action in a way that helps make sense of the historical diversity of Christian opinion about the latter. Christians may believe much the same basic things about God, creation, sin, and salvation while they differ substantially about the way of life those beliefs require from the faithful. Christian beliefs are meant to be lived—that’s clear. But how does one get from one to the other? That’s the intellectual puzzle, given the fact that the Christian beliefs at issue are not themselves normative claims about proper Christian behaviors. They are claims about what is the case—God is good, the world is fallen, and so on—and not explicitly recommendations about what one should do—love one’s neighbor, for example. Once one figures out, as I try to do in the book, the broad contours of the relationship between belief and action and the variables that are at play within it in the Christian case, one has the chance to interrupt the way conservative, right-wing Christian political stances have been tied to those beliefs, to disconnect those beliefs from those policy stances and show the propriety of a different manner of enacting them in real life.

As I argued in chapter 1 of The Politics of God (with much greater complexity and detail), beliefs and actions are interrelated in the Christian case in the way they usually are: in general, beliefs make certain actions seem reasonable and help motivate them. For example, if I believe a nuclear holocaust is imminent, it makes sense for me to stockpile canned goods in an underground bunker. And I would be motivated to do so the more destructive I believe the nuclear fallout would be for all that I hold dear. I am really going to want to live down there when the time comes, so best to make all the necessary preparations now. The same sort of relationship between belief and action holds in explicitly Christian cases. To use a version of a scenario popularized by Max Weber: If I believe God is just as likely to damn as to save me, I am very concerned to figure out which camp I’m in—everything rides on that. If I believe upstanding behavior is a sign of salvation, in that only saved people can lead such upright lives, then it’s reasonable for me to make upstanding behavior my goal in life and for me to be highly motivated to try to live that way.

The variability in Christian proposals for appropriate living stems from the vague and disjointed character of the beliefs that fund them. Different proposals for Christian living may be starting from the same beliefs, but because those beliefs are so vague and disjointed, Christians are faced with the tasks of interpreting those beliefs, putting them together, and applying them to the relevant circumstances if they are to become the basis for a way of living. Christians perform those tasks differently—they develop the meaning of their beliefs, organize them, and apply them differently—and that is why their proposals for living differ as well, I argue. There are underlying theological disagreements here, which should be addressed as such, and they are simply endemic to the sort of sociocultural phenomenon that Christianity is.

Thus, in keeping with the inherent difficulties in understanding a transcendent God, it is commonly the case for Christians to hold the same beliefs while failing to agree on their meaning. It’s often indeed never entirely clear what those beliefs mean; a variety of possible senses circulate without consensus ever being reached. At most, an out-of-bounds limit is drawn by something close to universal assent, while the range of positive possibilities remains indeterminate and potentially vast. Jesus is not merely human and not merely divine—there might be universal agreement on those negative limits to what Christians can properly say about Jesus. But what positive sense can be made of the belief that Jesus is both? That’s where the trouble starts and, again within certain limits, the trouble might continue without final resolution, in that no one theological viewpoint ever carries the day.

Moreover, because of the push and pull of interpretation by differently situating social actors over the course of history, the extant interpretations of various Christian beliefs are unlikely to naturally line up with one another. What does one’s understanding of God’s creation of the world have to do with God’s salvation of the world through Christ? That’s not entirely clear even when those two beliefs have specified senses. Because Christian beliefs typically circulate in this relatively disarticulated way, they need to be actively turned into a consistent whole, potentially by each and every theologian, often through processes of selective attention and emphasis. In other words, Christians organize the various things they believe according to the beliefs they deem most important, and they often disagree about that. For example, beliefs about Christ can form such an organizing center. Thus, the humanity of Christ may determine what’s distinctive about human beings as creatures; theological anthropology in that case takes shape according to one’s Christology rather than the reverse. But none of that is a given; it remains a contestable matter of often ongoing theological dispute.

A final complicating factor is that Christian beliefs don’t very obviously direct their own application in situ. If humans are sinners, who exactly are we talking about here and now, and why? The belief that all human beings are sinners does something itself to specify the range of that belief’s application—it applies to everyone—but how, and to what extent? Might the ubiquity of sin minimize, for example, the degree to which the powerless can claim to be damaged by the powerful? Might both be equally sinful?

In all of these ways, fights about what Christianity stands for are similar to fights about what America stands for; they have a kind of culture-war quality in that a fight about otherwise ill-defined fundamental beliefs and values underlies them. Every American presumably believes in the freedom, equality, and pursuit of happiness enshrined in the Constitution, but an argument about what any of that means—and about what takes priority in cases of conflict—is necessary to determine the actual shape of a polity on that basis. Fights over political policy often, therefore, end up devolving into fights about those fundamental American beliefs and values in much the same way that disagreements about properly Christian ways of living often lead back to theological disputes over basic Christian beliefs and how to understand and interrelate them. In the American case, can one really be free without economic security or without the arms to defend oneself against the government? Should political freedom—as a voter, for example—be extended to economic freedom, the freedom, for example, to determine the character of one’s working life? Does equality mean equality of opportunity or outcome? When freedom and equality conflict, which takes precedence? And so on.

Like the U.S. case, what holds the Christian community together (as I argue in a later book, Theories of Culture [Fortress, 1997]) is a commitment to the task of figuring out the implications of such fundamental claims for life together rather than an agreement about what those implications actually are. Absent such consensus, community amounts, indeed, to an ongoing, very extended historical argument about what those implications are, with each member of the community engaging with every other, past and present, in a shared effort to figure it out. Beliefs and values to which everyone is committed (but that are relatively undefined and disconnected) become the basis for what I call in Theories of Culture a Christian community of argument. What joins people together is a shared commitment to arguing over the import of those same beliefs and values for life together. Given the vague and disjointed character of those beliefs and values, such a shared task more often than not results in a contest, a fight, with other members of one’s own community, the very sort of disagreement I was having thirty years ago in this book with the Christian right.

In keeping with the extended character of the Christian community of argument over time, in preparation for The Politics of God, I canvased as much of the history of Christian thought as I could, looking for cases where sociopolitical conclusions seemed to be grounded in basic Christian claims, claims that usually concerned, it turned out, God’s nature and influence on the world as creator and providential guide. Many of these historical cases figure as my theological interlocutors in the book. Even where I disagreed with both their theological and sociopolitical stances, these cases helped me see how sociopolitical conclusions could be drawn from basic Christian beliefs, the theological reasons behind variations in those conclusions, and the manner in which the cogency of such arguments could be assessed. These historical cases, I hoped, strengthened my own arguments for contrary conclusions—by at least showing me what shouldn’t be done, the weaknesses of theological argument to be avoided, the sort of pitfalls that I thought the Christian right had fallen into.

My own arguments were not, of course, without their own theological weaknesses. Christians might disagree with my account of God’s transcendence, upon which I based a posture of self-criticism and distanced suspicion of established sociopolitical orders. My account of what I called God’s universal providential agency and the noncompetitive way I related divine and human agency, both in support of an activist agenda against social injustice, might also be thought controversial. I developed all these theological positions and showed the way they hang together in a previous book, which I commend to the interested reader: God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Blackwell, 1988; repr., Fortress, 2004).

The biggest weakness of my argument, as it stood, was a weakness of omission. While I referenced quite a number of theological topics—God, creation, sin, providence—I didn’t talk as much about redemption—grace, the cross, incarnation, justification and sanctification, the eschaton, and so on. This was in part a function of the theological work I had done previously—what I knew best—but also reflected my judgment about the sort of theological positions that figured most prominently in the sociopolitical disagreements among Christians that I was most interested in: those that concerned, for example, the propriety of unequal treatment and sociopolitically engrained power disparities.

In any case, I rectified the problem in two later works of systematic theology that put redemption in Christ front and center: Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity (Fortress, 2001) and Christ the Key (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010). My earlier positions on God and God’s relations with the world were now bound up with an account of the incarnation and its salvific effects. They were all of a piece with Christ at their center to form mutually supporting planks holding up the same recommendations for Christian living. It was no longer possible to suggest that the strength of my earlier arguments in The Politics of God was a function of everything I’d left out—indeed, all the specifically Christian bits!

Those recommendations became, moreover, more substantive and extensive, coming to encompass, for example, the economic at the very time when that side of human existence began to engulf the whole of people’s lives, both in and outside of work, especially lately. In a way that would disrupt the present economic system, the principles for the production and distribution of goods that God abided by, as creator and redeemer of the world, could be extended, by way of Christ, into human existence, so as to transform it. The result would be an economy marked by unconditional giving and open access; it would form what I called in my Economy of Grace (Fortress, 2005) a universal community of mutual benefit.

Christianity, moreover, as I argued in Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism (Yale Univ. Press, 2019), should resist the current finance-dominated capitalism’s attempts to colonize the whole person for profit-making purposes. Despite the almost overwhelming cultural influence of the economic, Christianity retains, I suggested, the resources to construct resistant subjects, subjects who refuse, for example, the competitive way capitalism demands that they relate to others, subjects who refuse to give their total commitment to companies dedicated to generating maximum profit thereby, subjects who think of themselves as able, with God’s help, to make a break with the world as it presently exists in hopes of another one.

In formulating such a Christian understanding of economy, my primary opponents were not especially Christian ones. There are, of course, upholders of free-market capitalism on the Christian right, but I don’t think their political influence, at least on a national stage, is doing much work to keep that free market afloat. Politics are in any case held hostage to economic interests without the need for religious help. This is simply, as I understand it, the meaning of the sort of neoliberal economic regime that is currently in place; contrary to the liberal demand that the state not interfere in the economy, the economy now co-opts the state so that it actively promotes economic interests. Austerity policies, for example, exist to placate the holders of government debt. Welfare policies in the United States push people to take even the most low-paying work. And so on.

My strategy on economic matters is to show the way in which Christianity can work as a counterculture, undermining the mainstream culture of which it is otherwise a part. In Theories of Culture, I argued that Christianity was not a freestanding culture in its own right but something more like a subculture or a form of popular culture in relation to elite culture, in that it makes do with what it doesn’t itself create, turning that cultural material shared with others into something distinctively its own by twisting or warping it in surprising ways. If there is a fight here, then it is not with other Christians but with the wider society’s understanding of many of the same cultural materials. So, for example, in Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, I suggest how Christians can talk company-speak—about their being totally committed to a project in which they find meaning and purpose. But doing so has a subversive point once God rather than one’s job becomes the focus of such a project, a project that is now one of witness and discipleship to God’s own intentions for human life rather than a project of self-realization through work. Because its object, God, is so odd, this Christian way of talking about a life project has the effect of undercutting the usual use of much of the same language for economic ends. Being totally committed to God, in short, is just not to be totally committed to one’s job or to anything else.

In The Politics of God, I’m doing something similar by taking over rights language and the language of toleration. While it would be hard to argue that they develop without reference to Christianity, these are not specifically Christian terms, essentially dependent for their basic sense on continuing Christian foundations. By using basic Christian beliefs to develop their meaning further, I am therefore potentially twisting them free from their current associations in the wider culture, maybe even pushing them in hitherto unexpected directions. For example, once based on simple creaturehood, rights or entitlements might extend much further than usual—without regard for national boundaries or even species differences. And what one has a right to—the substance of those rights—might follow what God lovingly intends for the whole world as its creator, guide, and redeemer; those rights might include, consequently, positive rights to full flourishing on an utterly unconditional and inclusive basis. Just as it was at the time I wrote this book, it is hard to imagine a sharper contrast with current cultural sentiments, in which one has the right, it seems, only to sink or swim according to one’s own best efforts, absent social supports with even the slightest potential to foster a so-called culture of dependency rather than individual self-reliance. Then as now, an open community dedicated to the full flourishing of all might seem a distant mirage. In The Politics of God, I try to show, appearances to the contrary, that this is a reasonable dream for at least Christians to pursue with a fervor born of their most fundamental convictions.

Preface to the First Edition

Our theological discussion has . . . been divided into a conservative insistence on the dogmatic tradition, and a liberal repudiation of dogmatic content in exchange for an ethic of shared humanity. We are thus falling back into the worst tradition of the nineteenth century, in which conservative theologians were wont to be conservative in politics also, and the liberals believed themselves obliged to discard dogma in exchange for humanism. But this means tearing asunder things that belong together. Every article of the Confession of Faith has explosive and aggressive significance for the status quo of the old world, and an article that leaves our relationship . . . to society as it was, is not worthy to be an article of the Christian Faith.

—Helmut Gollwitzer¹

This book concerns the political import of Christian beliefs about God and the world. These beliefs and the political practices of the Christians holding them have taken many different forms over the course of the last twenty centuries. This book tries to bring a little analytical clarity to the complex connections between them. Efforts at clarification are subordinate, however, to a normative concern. I hope to show how Christian beliefs about God and the world may be disentangled from a history of use in support of a status quo of injustice and reconstituted as a resource for commitment to progressive social change.

The analytical task of the book is marked by an interdisciplinary focus. I combine philosophical and sociological approaches to the general question of how belief and comportment are related in an effort to make sense of the complex history of Christian action. In a fashion that might remind some readers of Max Weber, I break down the multifarious, ever-changing particulars of Christian history into types of beliefs and types of ethical stances in order to make clear how and why certain forms of beliefs and ethical stances might be found together.

The sophistication of this interdisciplinary perspective naturally informs my normative agenda, giving it an almost hyperconscious feel and, perhaps to some, an oddly distanced air. Direct exhortations to Christian social action come as a reward to patient readers in later chapters. Reflexive or self-conscious thinking about patterns of Christian thought and behavior is offered here in the hope that, having seen those patterns, Christians will no longer be able to say and do with a good conscience what they have so often said and done in the past.

Particularly in its attention to the history of Christian thought, the normative and constructive project of the book shares a concern of the early Reinhold Niebuhr. The constructive project revolves around the question of whether Christian action might not combine a more radical political orientation and more conservative religious convictions than are comprehended in the culture of our age.² Or, in the terms I use later in the book, one could say the constructive project of the book explores the possibility of an internal rather than totalistic critique of traditional Christian beliefs. Instead of being rejected outright, Christian traditions that lend support to a status quo of injustice are turned against themselves. The diverse and complex beliefs about God and the world that have been passed down as Christian traditions are not radically reconstructed to fit a particular political agenda but are at most sifted, shifted, or realigned to reveal their own progressive potential. Should Christians balk before that potential, one may simply counsel them to take the political import of their own beliefs more seriously. Should they accuse one of tampering with the faith for political ends, one can claim to be at least as conservative of that faith as they are.

Internal critique is a tactic in a fight over the forms of action that Christians think it reasonable to display. The activity of describing what reality is like is always politically loaded, since the limits of what one can think also set limits on what one can think of doing. This book shows that the activity of theological description is no exception to this general principle: one’s understanding of God and the world influences one’s understanding of the rights and responsibilities one has toward others. In the fight over the political import of beliefs about God and the world in which I am engaged here, I try to conserve as much as possible of mainstream Christian beliefs. I choose to engage these beliefs not because I view tradition as a good in itself—to be carefully guarded against dissenting voices and heretically innovative opinions—but because an effort of that sort allows one to charge opponents with hypocrisy and a failure of nerve while countering insinuations that political purposes are dragging one’s own Christian convictions in tow.

Indeed, internal critique is more than simply a good tactic in a fight over the politics of belief in God. It is a way of resolving a conflict of personal loyalties that commonly afflicts Christians of good will today. One might not like the genuinely disturbing political associations of Christianity that history so amply exhibits. The beliefs at issue may nevertheless seem an essential part of one’s Christian identity, their influence over one’s daily life not easily shirked. The religious turns of one’s personal history, one’s formal intellectual training, and the Christian sensibilities of those people who have decisively shaped one’s life may converge, as they do for me, to make rejection of these traditional beliefs and the search for creative alternatives to them seem shallow, loss-filled pursuits. One simply finds oneself believing as one does, despite the horrible history of actions perpetrated in the name of those beliefs, and one is pushed thereby to hope that such a history is not their necessary effect. In this book I attempt to show that such hope is well-founded and not an act of personal cowardice or deluded trust.

As Niebuhr’s own shift from socialist to official establishment theologian demonstrates, the danger of a theological program like mine is its tendency to drift from a radical politics to a qualified affirmation of the status quo.³ The common sense of established politics at any particular time fills in the implications for social action that theology itself leaves vague or undercuts by too exclusive a focus on the dispositions of individuals. I hope to prevent this sort of drift by deriving substantive principles for the evaluation of institutional life from clearly defined starting points in Christian belief. Application of these principles does not have cautious reformism as its end. Like other similar efforts in a North American or