Pickles and Warsi on secularism

In an earlier post I discussed Cameron’s speech on a Christian Britain. Now Eric Pickles and Baroness Warsi have made similar noises. Pickles said that under labour ‘Political correctness replaced common sense, people were left afraid to express legitimate concerns and frustrations.’ ‘We must be unafraid to insist on the common ground and common values that we all share.’

What’s good about this is the idea of mutual criticism, dialogue and interaction. What’s bad is assuming that the common ground and common values that do exist should be based on Christianity. This conflates the holding of the same view with the deriving of the same view in different ways. Rawls’ hope was that different individuals and groups could sign up to the same values but justify them from their own point of view. Greater dialogue and mutual criticism may generate that. For instance, many, though not all, religious people would support human rights by reference to their religious beliefs. As a result of Britain’s history, its values were derived largely from Christianity but in contemporary society how, if at all, would people justify their beliefs in values that are widespread, such as fairness, honesty, the right to a fair trial? Probably not from Christianity. Thus, to suggest that a return to Christianity will ground or secure a common set of values is a mistake because it fails to appreciate the extent of secularism.

To be fair to Pickles, having a high incidence of religion in a culture does not necessarily produce intolerance or oppression, though it certainly can. The Queen’s remarks that the Church of England is supposed to ensure religious freedom for all religions is an example of religious support for religious freedom (insofar as Anglican see their institution that way, which many do). A state government that understood itself to be religious could also legislate religious freedom as part of its belief-driven policy. It is increasingly recognized, of course, that religion and politics (and morality) are impossible to separate completely. Yet they are significantly separate in Britain, and whilst it is a good idea to seek to increase religious and moral considerations within politics, it is wrong to impose religion or to be blinded to the minority position that religion is in Britain.

Pickles wants to allow prayers at the beginning of council meetings, which is a point in favour of religious freedom but it seems a confused application of his principles: how does re-instating prayer at council meetings help? That is the least bit of common ground you could find in a largely secular country. I suspect Pickles’ confusion arises from the way in which the government and the judiciary seem to regard religion as primarily about beliefs. It isn’t. It is primarily a set of practices and a belonging to a religious community. Religious beliefs, like philosophical beliefs, are difficult to understand and make coherent, and most religious believers don’t have the time or energy (or ability in some cases) to hold to anything more than a relatively straightforward account of some beliefs. Many religious believers have at least this conceptual advantage over (often more educated) government ministers and judges: they know that in religion practice matters more than belief. Whilst beliefs and values, especially moral ones, may be shared quite widely, practices tend not to be. Atheists and Muslims can agree on the value of generosity, but not on praying five times a day. Christians and Buddhists may even agree on the importance of meditation, but they will do it in quite different ways. And so on.

Now onto Warsi’s speech. Warsi wants to promote social harmony and ensure faith has a ‘proper space in the public sphere’. Fine. Her method for achieving this is doubtful however: ‘People need to feel stronger in their religious identities, more confident in their beliefs. In practice this means individuals not diluting their faith and nations not denying their religious heritage. If you take this thought to its conclusion then the idea you’re left with is this: Europe needs to become more confident in its Christianity.’

As long as the majority faith and culture still make ‘equality and space for minority faiths and cultures’ then justice is being done in that respect. Secularism can do this, and so can many forms of religion. Equally, some forms of secularism and some forms of religion can suppress minority rights. At the risk of sounding parochial or nationalistic, the current British settlement strikes me as preferable to France’s more aggressive secularism or the near conflation of religious and national identity prevalent in America. We should be able to have our identities, but also recognize that we have multiple identities. Warsi seems to appreciate the first point but not the second. In France, national identity overpowers religious identity (from a policy viewpoint). In America, religious and civic identities are conflated or get along too easily. Rather, what is needed, as Andrew Shanks has suggested, is more of a dialectical relation between identities, not just religious and national but also gender, racial, class, membership in charities or parties, etc. This is not a dialectic that reaches a synthesis, but a dialectic that recognizes that our efforts will never be perfect, but keeps trying to improve or change as necessary. Warsi is right that confidence in identity can help fuel tolerance, but it can also fuel intolerance as the 19^th century American-Christian imperialist-missionary approach shows. We need not just confidence in identity but a way of being able to doubt it and question it, too. Again, that is what Shanks suggests.

Warsi doesn’t want religious discrimination against the ‘majority religious heritage’. Not wanting discrimination against the majority religion is fine – no faith should be discriminated against. And in some cases opting for current values or practices rather than accepting the values or practices of another religion or culture is also legitimate, for instance, refusing to accept forced marriage or honour killings, or allowing abortions. In order to do that, however, we need some justification for why we prefer our cultural values and practices, and for the vast majority of people in Britain that will not be based on Christianity but on secular arguments, even if the values in question have initially come from Christianity (though they may not have). For example, autonomy and the value of the individual are arguably nascent within Christianity, but it took the 18^th century revolutions and the Enlightenment to enable Christians to see that. So does valuing autonomy come from Christianity or the secularising Enlightenment?

I agree that we shouldn’t cover up our religious history but I’m  not convinced by her claim that ‘what drives us, what binds us and what inspires us is a history we are in danger of denying’. I don’t think most contemporary people are driven or inspired by the history of Christianity. Also I’m not convinced that secularism is as bad as she makes out: it’s telling that she didn’t give examples of this so-called ‘militant secularism’. But it is true that religions don’t understand themselves as private assent to a list of propositions; she does better than Pickles on that point.

The Economist, Cameron and Christianity

A couple of weeks ago the Bagehot column of the Economist (a weekly comment on Britain) carried the title ‘God in austerity Britain’. It argued that the church of England’s bishops tend to argue for specific welfare issues to the exclusion of speaking about God or faith. Richard Harries’ points that to love one’s neighbour means to question social policy and that the English tend to be reticent about religious talk were noted but not really dealt with. The bishops, Bagehot suggested, had become social democracy in a clerical collar but needed to offer a more ‘distinctive’ and ‘spiky’ message in these times. No reasons for this were given so I’m not sure why this claim was made and I was surprised to read it in the Economist. Does Bagehot care about the church and worry that if it becomes a social democracy NGO it will lose something? Or was the comment driven by annoyance at some pesky social democrats? (I don’t think it read that way).

Not long after this, Cameron gave his speech to bishops in Oxford about the King James Bible. Part of his speech was to point out that in Britain Christianity and the Bible has long been a player in politics. He pointed out some of the good legacy here: limits on royal power; the 1647 Putney debates calling for one vote for each man [sic]; the creation of the welfare state; social action groups (widening out here to faith in general). He said ‘the proportion of people in the world who adhere to the four biggest religions has actually increased from around two-thirds to nearly three quarters…and is forecast to continue rising.’ All reasonable. Now to the more contentious sections.

‘Societies do not necessarily become more secular with modernity but rather more plural, with a wider range of beliefs and commitments.’ Probably true, and that’s one reason why I favour a postsecular politics. Is this what we’re beginning to see here? Cameron thinks that by admitting our Christian heritage we can be more tolerant of religion in general, in contrast to France, so that it is ‘easier to be Jewish or Muslim here’ than there. This is why ‘secular neutrality’ should be avoided.

But what does it mean to be a Christian country? Cameron suggests it stems from the Bible shaping ‘the values which define our country’, which are ‘Responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love…pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities’. Let’s leave aside the possible contradiction of valuing pride and humility, or the effect of coalition policies on families and communities and focus on religion and state. Cameron says that these values ‘speak to’ ‘people of every faith and none.’ In which case, is being a Christian country simply a historical accident but substantially the same as having any or no faith? Or if we were secular, or of a different faith, would we have a different set of values, which perhaps may also speak to all faiths and secular people too? That is, do we need to bother with the label ‘Christian’ for Britain? Cameron seems to think we do, and the reason for this seems to be not just that it tends to create more tolerance than more avowedly secular states, but that Christianity has a ‘moral code’ which is ‘ fundamental to who we are as a people…what we stand for…and the kind of society we want to build.’

Cameron immediately qualifies this by severing any necessary link between faith and moral performance. His main interest here seems to be the idea that ‘moral neutrality or passive tolerance just isn’t going to cut it anymore.’ He blames a refusal to speak about morality as one of the causes of the riots, the financial crash, the expenses scandal, and Islamic extremism. Rather than a Millian liberalism, Cameron wants a ‘muscular liberalism’ that ‘stands up for these values’. But what does that mean?

Cameron moves immediately from the claim that ‘to belong here is to believe in these things’, to talking about the role of ‘religious leaders and their communities’. The Church of England (and the others, presumably) are supposed to help Britain maintain its moral values.

Notice the order of the values: responsibility and hard work come first. Not necessarily the impression you’d get from the Sermon on the Mount or most of the Bible, but what we might suspect a Conservative PM wished the national work force would imbibe. Perhaps Cameron would like the church and other religions to morally shape a pliable and productive workforce. Notice that charity is the third value. It would be handy if private citizens could take up the slack from all the cuts to welfare budgets. We have here, probably, a governmental attempt to use religious bodies to govern on behalf of the state; a kind of governing at arms length.

It would be naive to assume a speech like this could be anything other than ambiguous. On the one hand, I welcome the possibility of greater freedom for religious discourse within politics, if it grants more space to institutions that mediate between the state and individuals, and if it begins to recognise a communal and cultural aspect to generating ethics. That could lead to a renewed civic life too. I hope this will happen but I’m far from confident. Perhaps the temporal proximity of Bagehot’s and Cameron’s text has made me overly sensitive here. On the other hand, Cameron didn’t recognise much of the critical (or prophetic) nature of religious groups (though, to be fair, there was a brief reference to the Archbishop). Some church of England bishops have been outspoken over the last few years about the problems with government policy. I think that is a more useful role for religious institutions than encouraging people to work hard.

Towards the end of his speech, Cameron mentions that his political interest in religion is that its institutions affect society ‘in the vital areas of equality and tolerance.’ Now I think religions should promote these values, but we have to be honest and say they stem more from the Enlightenment than Christianity, even if the seeds were there in Christianity (contentious). But should religions recognise these values? Cameron seems to be saying that if they don’t they are not welcome here, and again he wants to c0-opt religions to do that for him, presumably by applying some sort of public moral pressure in that direction. If religions didn’t recognise these values, that could make contemporary society more fractious, but I suspect most do, and they do so by trying to adduce their own theological reasons for these values (though these are debates that continue within religions). What is interesting here is the dialectical relation of politics and religion. Religion contributes towards values of equality and tolerance, but they really take off with the Enlightenment. After initial resistance, religions begin to take on board the importance of these values and reform themselves accordingly (partly through arguing these values are true to their traditions).

At the same time, this is part of a history of a changing relationship between religion and government. Religion now has no power based on violence, no strong political power. This can free it up to be critical of rather than slavish to the government; though at the same time it should look to the common good, which it must realise the state has the most power to influence. Religious attendance is in the minority in this country, and in that sense we remain very much a secular country. But religions are organised and do have a wealth of reflection on what makes for the common good and good life together; and they have as a result a voice that others lack. Of course, on some issues they actually slow down moral progress. That is why religions should be opened up to a dialectical relationship with the Enlightenment and its values.

Ambiguity all round then, as we might expect. But it will be interesting to see where this goes in the future. The Anglicans used to be known as the Tory party at prayer but recently they have had mostly left-leaning outspoken bishops. Perhaps Cameron is trying to win them back on side.

Kahn’s political theology again

I very much enjoyed Paul Kahn’s Political Theology but Lars Vinx was less impressed. Now you can decide for yourself, because Immanent Frame have posted the introduction and are going to be discussing it.

Response: guest post from Vincent Lloyd

Vincent Lloyd, soon to be at Syracuse, has kindly written this post in response to the series of posts on his recent book The Problem with Grace.

1. It’s troubling when nearly everyone thinking about an academic topic is a white male. This is largely the case for discussions of political theology, and to some extent also for discussions of secularism. It should make us suspect that the there’s something wrong with how the topic is being approached. Indeed, we should worry that there is something about the topic that maintains white male privilege, and consequently that scholarship on the topic has the potential to give legitimacy to, and so entrench, this privilege. But there are topics so central to who we are that they cannot be abandoned; rather, they must be re-imagined in ways that challenge the privilege which they have long supported.

Of course there’s a long tradition of considering women, non-whites, and poor people as in some sense naturally religious, preempting questions of secularism. Similarly, religious and political vocabularies are often thought to blend much more easily in such communities (e.g., Martin Luther King, Gandhi, etc.). If secularism is a problem peculiar to elite white men, you would think it would be natural to turn to poor people, people of color, and women for an antidote – but that hasn’t happened. In part there’s a concern that the religiosity of such communities is derivative, or, on the flip side, that it ought not to be fetishized as authentic. In response, we might think of political theology as co-constituted, created in the relationship between the center and the margins (as Jared Hickman has argued).

The Problem with Grace explores the political significance of religious concepts by focusing neither on the center (the political or religious canon) nor on the margins (as authentic or derivate) nor on a constructive dialogue between center and margins. Rather, the book “reconfigures” political theology by exploring figures of failure: two women and two men who were both part of and alien to their communities. As such, Gillian Rose, James Baldwin, Franz Kafka, and Simone Weil were acutely aware of the contingency of community custom, but also of the ruses used by power to conceal itself, to make grave injustice seem perfectly natural.

2. Power is concealed and naturalized through ideology, and religious concepts and practices play a crucial role in ideology. It is religion, not God, that is the opiate of the masses, but too often the richness of religious vocabulary is forgotten. This richness is what makes the hold of ideology (and so the interests of the wealthy and powerful) so strong, but it also provides openings to challenge ideology. This richness involves concepts and practices including love, faith, hope, liturgy, sanctity, and revelation. The project of The Problem with Grace is to explore how those concepts function to support ideology, and to explore how they might be understood differently, so as to challenge ideology.

The opiate metaphor suggests a structure of fantasy. Infinite value is placed on something otherworldly, skewing perception (and so action) in this world. The difficulties and failures of the world are concealed by the blinding light of the object of fantasy – and so the world is enchanted. This structure of fantasy takes many forms. The object of infinite value may be represented as transcendent, or immanent, or a mixture of the two. Such a fantasy is relatively easy to identify when it is labeled God, but when it takes the form of secularized concepts that seem inextricable from our everyday lives (love, faith, hope…) they appear perfectly natural – and so function all the more strongly to secure ideology, to advance the interests of the wealthy and the powerful.

3. Ordinary people naturally do the right thing, ethically and politically, but their actions are always already distorted by ideology. It is trendy to say that the subject is constituted by ideology, but it is only the middle class white male subject who is constituted by ideology, and even in that case only imperfectly. In contrast, for the vast majority of people ideology drips down from elites, infecting the language and perceptions of ordinary people, but still obviously artificial and incomplete. Challenges to power come from two complementary directions: the critique of ideology and mass movements of ordinary people. Academics concern themselves with the former, and they ought not aspire to say anything about the latter (they ought to simply follow). Anything else academics do supports the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Theorists and theologians don’t have anything to teach ordinary people; their job is to critique ideology and idolatry. That’s what The Problem with Grace attempts.

Of course things are a bit more complicated. Through social movements ideology is wiped away, but purity is never reached. Recording best practices of social movements, historically and cross-culturally, is another important task. Moreover, without organization, ideology gains strength. Organization fills in “the middle”, makes “complex space” – the rich texture of neighborhood associations, labor unions, sports clubs, and other groups that is opened once the fantasy of sovereignty is abandoned, and through which the fantasy of sovereignty is abandoned.

The task of academics is to open this space for organization, this space of “the middle,” rather than to fill it in. Too often political theorists, philosophers, and theologians purport to be interested in the ordinary, but for them the ordinary secures rather than undermines ideology: the ordinary as object of fantasy. They fill in the middle with theory instead of practice, and so absorb it in fantasy, and so quash it.

4. The Problem with Grace explores ways of talking about the ordinary that are grounded in practice, and accountable to practice. It suggests that the ordinary is not composed of just what there is, or the commonplace. Rather, the ordinary is composed of what one does and what one ought to do, of practices and norms. Ideology (enchantment) makes it seem as though norms and practices do, or could, fit together well: it’s possible to do what we ought to do. That’s what religious concepts are used to reinforce. The Problem with Grace proposes alternative ways of understanding religious concepts that acknowledge the constant mismatch between norms and practices – and so aspires to shear the ordinary of fantasy.

The self-preservation of the wealthy and the powerful depends on convincing us that norms and practices coincide, that doing what one ought to do will lead to success. It is blatantly obvious to poor people and people of color that norms and practices don’t match, that doing what one is supposed to do, what is socially acceptable to do, doesn’t lead to success. Tragedy is not fully concealed. Ideology trickles down unevenly, incompletely. The Problem with Grace aspires to offer a repertoire for ideology critique, vocabulary and practices that combat regnant enchantment, opening space for political organizing in “the middle” and for political imagining beyond the pragmatic (pragmatism, after all, is the approach that best preserves the interests of the wealthy and powerful – or second best, behind “prophetic pragmatism”).

5. The critique of ideology has two aspects: immersion in tradition and transformation of tradition. Neither is possible without the other; attempts to do one without the other lead to further entrenchment of ideology. Asceticism without revolution is empty; revolution without asceticism is blind. Ideology depends on its control of desire: it depends on fantasy. The asceticism of tradition, doing what is done not because it is desired but because it is what is done, deprograms the desires of ideology and makes possible entirely novel configurations of desire. The asceticism of tradition is oriented towards the eschaton.

Just as the task of academics is to critique ideology and to record best practices of social movements, the task of theologians is to critique idolatry (immersion in tradition and transformation of tradition) and to record best practices of social movements. Religious communities that are not social movements are idolatrous. Idolatry controls desire, conceals the eschaton.

Sin has become taboo. Idolatry cannot stand talk of sin (ideology is antithetical to humility). The Problem with Grace makes sin central: the world is fallen and the world cannot redeem itself. Theologians purporting to represent women, people of color, and poor people shun talk of sin, claiming that sin is part of the vocabulary of oppression. But it is just the opposite: acknowledging sin makes redemption possible. It is the powerful and wealthy who depend on concealing the reality that the world is fallen – and who fear redemption the most.

Kahn’s political theology

Paul Kahn’s new book Political Theology is a fascinating riff on Schmitt’s earlier volume. It’s very interesting on the differences between the US and Europe, as well as on its critique of liberal political theory.

Kahn aims to show how much political theory, and especially its liberal form, fails to appreciate the way in which the state has become the site of the sacred for many citizens; that politics is not only a matter of reason and discussion but also of decision, will, faith and imagination; and that the modern political imaginary is still related to theological notions of faith, creation and sacrifice. Kahn uses Schmitt to pursue the question of freedom in politics: the sovereign’s freedom in deciding on the exception; the judge’s freedom in applying the legal norm; the philosophical freedom of thinking. In each case the decision is related to but not decided by norms. This last point has interesting similarities with Lloyd’s philosophy of norms and practices I’ve been blogging about recently.

Also recommended, Anthony Bash has an excellent article on forgiveness, in the new edition of Studies in Christian Ethics, as do Thomas Brudholm and Arne Grøn.

Lloyd’s Problem with Grace (5)

Lloyd’s conclusion speaks of a politics of the middle. ‘There are two kinds of politics’ that of law and grace and that of the middle. The politics of the middle refuses transcendent authority, whether from beyond the world or inside the person – what matters is reasoning and negotiation. The point is to stay with the everyday instead of going beyond it; explanations just occlude. There is no secret, all-encompassing explanation. ‘But sometimes things do need to be said.’ It is not that there is no normativity and only practices. Against the beautiful soul and against quietism we must commit ourselves, we must act. The alternative to quietism is ‘to represent the ordinary rhetorically.’ To be aware of and speak to one’s audience. This must be done strategically, at certain times. It cannot be done all the time because it is trying to make the audience aware that how they live needs to be changed. This politics will use various strategies to represent the ordinary (the ordinary ‘cannot be accessed directly. It can only be represented.’) This representation is somewhat free of enchantment and so needs protecting. ‘This deliberative, Socratic moment must be separated from the political moment, the moment when politics is packaged in the language of enchantment in order to persuade.’ We shouldn’t neglect this moment altogether, nor try to use it too often. It requires faith and love.

Is this elitist? How does the rhetorical packaging of politics work? If we know it is rhetorical persuasion doesn’t that make us less likely to be persuaded? Who is the audience here? The original socratic philosophers were clear that they were a class above the polloi but I think Lloyd would be uncomfortable with this. I think Lloyd imagines that the moments of critique can only be sporadic because we have to get on with the everyday running of politics, but equally that the institutions generating critique and the political class’ ability to hear critique need to be nurtured.

The appendix on ‘political theology as a rigorous science’ grapples with the problem of how political philosophy can be both thorough and efficacious. It needs to go beyond the ordinary and yet rooted in the ordinary in order to persuade most people. The key move is to refuse any transcendent source of normativity so that norms and practices are open to change. Here’s the difference Lloyd’s approach could make. To advance a political goal people normally think of the actors and their motivations and how they could be persuaded to change their minds or do a deal. But this precludes other options, it precludes surprise. It operates only within the normal logic. Political philosophy as a ‘rigorous science’ is a way of calling forth ‘the invisible unpredictable possibilities. It is political theology.’ So political philosophy is especially important in moments of deadlock or impasse. But political science and political theory don’t really allow for this.

This seems to suggest that political philosophy needs practitioners who practice the philosophical virtues and strategies Lloyd has named so that they can be ready with imagination and discernment when moments of impasse happen. If this suggests more dialogue between politicians and political philosophers that’s probably a good thing. But are political philosophers the best people for moving past an impasse? Perhaps NGO workers or the equivalent are better at coming up with practical solutions.

Political philosophy is the root of political theology. Done rightly political philosophy makes visible the invisible, and it does so through rhetoric. A particularly efficacious rhetorical technique is to use the language of religion, a language that has wide cultural resonance in the contemporary context. It is, after all, the quintessential language of enchantment. The language of theology can be used sophistically or philosophically; almost always it is used sophistically.

But political philosophy can use theological language as its own rhetoric to achieve its own ends. This is not an attempt to fool people but speaking to them with reasons that anyone can assess in order to persuade them to change. It is representing the ordinary to side-step the enchantment of the obvious. In other words, it is representing the everyday in a way that puts it under question whilst suggesting another possibility. This is partly a please for political theologians and philosophers to use religious concepts more flexibly and widely. Is this also a call for politicians to use religious rhetoric to mobilise sections of the population? The former seems wise, the latter dangerous.

Throughout the book there’s a focus on the political actor. This is partly due to the focus on political virtues and partly the importance given to the Roseian phenomenological method, which is existential as well as intellectual. Lloyd is not writing about political strategies in the sense of policy mechanisms or electioneering. He is writing about forming political agents through the virtues and practices, e.g., forgiveness, attention, dispossession, etc. but this is also about a type of political discourse, one that remains in the middle rather than speaking with a supersessionist accent. Is this sort of discourse only able to find a home in civil society or could governments work this way too? Lloyd seems to suggest that only at certain Socratic moments could governments enact a Roseian phenomenology; otherwise they must depend more on their usual logic and rhetoric. This is not a critique so much as a fact.

This is a fascinating book that deserves wide debate. Tune in next month for one more post: a response from Lloyd himself.

Lloyd’s Problem with grace (4)

Section II of The Problem with Grace is about theopolitical strategies, the main aim of which is to thin out our enchantment, which means to make us aware of the necessary gap between practices and norms. Tradition is used as a strategy when the mismatch between norms and practices is taken as a chance to interpret and develop the tradition, perhaps in surprising directions, or even ‘a direction inexplicable by analysis of practices alone.’ Here the person (rhetorician, novelist, politician) plays with norms to reconfigure them, they don’t just refer them to/from practices.  There is no one account that will explain everything and make sense of all our practices. When we accept this, i.e. that norms are only fictions to live by, then both norms and practices lose a sense of mystifying authority and we become free to change them.

Liturgy should be distinguished from ritual. Ritual must follow precisely the set norms; liturgy (as understood by Vatican II thinkers) is primary and it is the job of theological norms to catch up. Lloyd argues that liturgy is, in one sense, self-authorizing, if its practices are taken as primary and the norms of theology have to catch up with it. This means that it can be treated, at least for a while, as practices free from norms. This leaves space for play and experimentation, even if only in putting the norms and practices back together again. The result may be something unexpected. Liturgy can function this way without the ‘rhetorical flourish’ of calling it a foretaste of the world to come. More recent enthusiasts for liturgy who suggest it opens the way to ontological peace are hiding the violence we always enact because of the intrinsic gap between norms and practices. Simone Weil’s concept of attention offers ways of becoming aware of our own violence and our institutions’ violences.

Lloyd also turns to Weil in discussing sanctity. He understands sanctity as another strategy for loosening our normal understanding of the obvious. Sanctity acts ‘as if there are no norms’ so that ‘new practices can be born that are unpredictable from the perspective of norms.’  How can we gain the leverage on ourselves to create this new perspective? Through some of Weil’s disciplines: attention, dispossession, affliction, forgiveness, abandonment of reward. These are not things we do all the time (that would be to instate a new norm). They are strategies employed from time to time in order to question the link between practices and norms and develop practical wisdom in the light of that. This helps when we encounter practices without norms and have to develop them.

Encountering a practice without a norm is an ‘event’, a way of understanding revelation. Not revelation as a conversation stopper because of its authority and transparency, nor a Badiouian event requiring a total Gestalt switch, but a more hermeneutic event that requires re-thinking norms and creating new ones. Excellent writing can also help here because it works through tensions instead of giving answers; it is ‘equivocal all the way down.’ James Baldwin serves as the example for this, and for prophecy. Prophecy is rhetoric that attempts to name and highlight the meeting of the ordinary and the invisible: it tries to make us aware of what we do and how that doesn’t quite fit our normative schemes, so that we may change them. The prophet is interested in the ‘systematic violence of norms’. Another of Lloyd’s exemplars here is Foucault who both questions anchorage points (e.g. ‘sex’) and underlines the tensions between norms and practices (through genealogical critique). The prophet does not speak from some otherworldly realm but is persuasive because she gives reasons and arguments; hers is public speech. The prophet wants to change things, she calls for faith, a ‘total commitment never fully justified.’

Lloyd takes a series of religious practices and loosens them from their traditional, theological context without reducing them to secular terms. Some of them could be re-described in secular terms, I think, but some of them not (say, revelation and sanctity respectively). The point for Lloyd is to avoid equating religion with transcendence and the secular with immanence, so that a range of (suitably defined) religious concepts and practices can be used to shed light on politics.

Lloyd’s Problem with Grace (3)

The first section of the book is called ‘theopolitical virtues’ and covers love, faith and hope. Love and faith are interpreted as virtues (always beneficial) and hope as a rhetorical strategy (ambiguous). Love is interpreted as an embodiment of the Hegelian speculative identity, a learning to live in and by negotiation. This is most obvious between two lovers but it helps us understand love as a political virtue (it says something about the state of the agent). Loving political actors are willing to stake themselves in their political negotiations; they accept the constant pulling and pushing required by common life, that we cannot always get what we want, that we must make room for others. This has parallels with William Connolly’s work. Faith is the virtue of carrying on in engaging the ordinary world after the realisation that all normative worlds fail. (For more on this see the introduction to Secular Faith edited by Lloyd and Elliot Ratzman).

In the first two chapters, Lloyd takes an understanding of a religious concept and, by freeing it from being overburdened by thick traditional description, enables it to cast light on politics. First, the whole idea of virtues in politics is marginal in current discourse. Second, the virtues chosen come from the Jewish and Christian traditions rather than secular political analysis, and it speaks both ways through its use in this new context. This is how Lloyd fleshes out the middle way he refers to in his introduction (see part (2)). We can also see this in his use of hope as a strategic, rhetorical tool, used to generate political momentum. Hope is certainly important in politics and probably deserves more discussion that it receives, but it shouldn’t be handled in a naive fashion, and this is what Lloyd avoids.

Lloyd’s Problem with Grace (2)

I can finally start to blog about Lloyd’s new book The Problem with Grace. It helps to outline an important part of Lloyd’s thinking first. Lloyd thinks there are only practices and norms (‘Law’ is the symbol for this). What else could there be? Norms are related to practices but are always mismatched. We can’t help but give reasons, arguments and justifications for our norms – in other words, get involved in metaphysics and ethics. Norms have no ontological ground in an ultimate sense, but they are they are real and have social force: they are fictions we live. There is no principle or scheme that would make everything make perfect sense, that could ground all morality and from which everything could be derived (‘Grace’ is something like this). If we assume this then we distract from our own violence and prevent ourselves from changing it [e.g. assuming the church or America is the paradigmatic society]. When we attempt to redeem the world as a whole through some scheme, we refuse to accept its tragic and messy nature. We need to accept and mourn this, not get fixated on it in melancholia. We need to focus on what we actually do, not some ideal scheme of ‘if only everyone would…’ Supersessionism is replacing one thing with another: dismissing the actual world for some hoped-for melancholic object. Lloyd is against utopian thinking, in favour of dialectical thinking that starts in the middle of the messiness and works to improve it. (For more on norms and practices see his Law and Transcendence).

The subtitle of the book is Reconfiguring Political Theology and this is about removing a supersessionist logic from political theology and philosophy, by which Lloyd means that the ‘world is amiss, fallen; some redemptive force, with its origins both inside and outside the world, is needed to make it right.’ One way Lloyd will go about this is broadening the number and scope of theological ideas used to understand politics and political philosophy. Rather than simply relating political structures to transcendence and immanence he draws on the theological virtues and some practices such as tradition, liturgy and sanctity. A major claim is worth quoting in full.

I take religious language seriously, and I do so in a way that retains the rich legacy of Jewish and Christian reflection on and refinement of religious concepts without subordinating those concepts to an overarching theological narrative. We gain something of value when concepts like tradition, liturgy, and sanctity are made available for political theorizing, but we lose something of value when such concepts are stripped of their religious heritage. We also lose something of value when every mention of concepts like tradition, liturgy, and sanctity brings with it unwarranted commitments that are specifically theological. Some middle path must be possible: it is precisely the task of this book to identify and traverse that path.

On key question, then, will be how well these concepts function outside of their larger theological context and how much of their ‘rich legacy’ can be maintained without it. This is what the following chapters must display. This is intended to be a ‘postsectarian, postsecular political theology’. Each chapter focuses on a religious practice but tries to understand it in relation to social norms and practices, ‘detaching it from an overarching theological narrative’, in order to help us understand the political and social norms and practices, rather than to mobilize the affect of these concepts for apologetic purposes.

Meditations on Redcrosse

Redcrosse is part St. George celebration (and so celebration of England) and part Anglican liturgy. It is a liturgical meditation on English identity and history based on Edmund Spenser’s (c.1552-99) The Faerie Queen and the mythology of St. George, the patron saint of England. It allows for public meditation on what England and Englishness are in a way designed to stimulate thought and counteract propaganda; in a way removed from any party political agendas or racism. It is not accidental that St. George is also the patron saint of Aragon, Catalonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Lithuania, Montenegro, Palestine, Portugal, Russia and Serbia [Ewan Fernie, Michael Symmons Roberts, Andrew Shanks and Jo Shapcott, Redcrosse liturgy, 3. All further references will be paranthetical in the text. The liturgy was celebrated at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 17/03/11 and at Manchester Cathedral on 08/08/11.]. Or that he is ‘honoured by Muslims, as ‘Al Khidr’, and by Jews, as ‘Eliyahu ha Navi’.’ (3) Nor is accidental that the giant Catalonian figures created for the liturgy have George as a black man in a football shirt. The symbolism is meant to reclaim Englishness from its associations with football hooliganism and to subvert racist nationalism. Its thoughtful nature, which includes significant amounts of apophatic theology (unusual in public liturgy), is meant to undermine the dangerous forms of religious nationalism that the secular modus vivendi so rightly wishes to contain and curtail. Any kind of linkage of national identity and religion could seem prima facie alarming, precisely because of the reactionary social conservatism or outright violence it can so often involve. So this is a risk, but a risk worth taking for at least three reasons. First, it is extremely unlikely in secular Britain 2011 that any form of Christian religious nationalism will gain sufficient social or political power to cause any actual violence. Second, to the extent that socially conservative Christian religious forces do gain political traction it is all the more important for there to be an alternative Christian voice speaking up for thoughtfulness and against propaganda. Third, the issues of religion, civic life and national identity cannot be separated and so must be thought about. How should religious people think of their national identity? And why shouldn’t this be addressed in religious liturgy?A good example of the anti-propaganda nature of the liturgy is the elaboration of Blake’s critique of the Establishment in the introduction: ‘The Church of England being part of the Establishment, he would have seen this event as taking place within such a [satanic] ‘mill’.’ (3) The liturgy’s introduction therefore explicitly invites critique of Christianity. It is, furthermore, a newly composed liturgy, which includes not just new poetry but new music and art. [The music was primarily jazz, the improvisational musical form par excellence, which, whether intended or not, symbolizes nicely the improvisational nature of any understanding of Christianity and civic identity. (For an interesting reflection on the relationship between jazz and the Christian notion of tradition see J. Kameron Carter’s comments here: http://jkameroncarter.com/?p=787. Accessed 09/05/11). Tim Garland, the composer, composed both new music and music that incorporated subtly altered hymn melodies and the liturgical phrases ‘Lord have mercy,’ and ‘Kyrie eleison’.] The Catalonian giants were built by homeless people working with a charity in the Cathedral itself, which symbolizes the liturgy’s focus on a passion for renewal in places of urban deprivation, its openness to other cultures, and its recognition of the rightful multivalency of St. George (and symbols in general). Writing new liturgies itself embodies a certain ethos and theology; in this case one that attempts to be open to the lessons of history (it is dialectical) and open to the involvement of people of other confessions (including atheists) as having something to teach the church. In short, writing new liturgies is a way of recognising that the church is not and has not always been right, that it needs to learn, and that the Christian task is not simply to repeat past behaviours and linguistic formulations but to take up the responsibility of creating new meanings and praxis.

Andrew Shanks has written in Civil Society, Civil Religion of the need for liturgy to be indigenous in the sense of working through those historical memories that are most live for a particular culture or nation. One of the ways Redcrosse tries to build on English history is by incorporating the elements of the forest, air, water and fire into its symbolism. The four elements could be seen to echo the Celtic Christianity that existed in Britain before it was replaced by the Roman form. This Celtic Christianity was more in touch with nature, understood as creation. Indeed, the forest section of the liturgy and its corresponding canticle could be seen as beginning to recuperate some of what was lost when Druidism, with its sacred groves, was marginalised by Christianity. Air (wind/breath/spirit/pneuma), water and fire all have Christian resonances as well, of course, whilst wood principally recalls the cross within the Christian imaginary. By having four elements, the authors are able to make a link between them (as perhaps encompassing all of life) with the four sections of the English flag. This in turn is connected to the red cross of the flag, which is taken to symbolize blood: ‘our own lifeblood, not earned but given us; and of God’s blood’ (15). This blood refers as well to St. George’s wounds in the fight with the dragon, based on one of Spenser’s wounded knights falling into a pool of water but thereby gaining the strength to fight on.

The use of Spenser’s poem enables a vital conceptual and political shift. ‘Spenser’s particular contribution…is to make St. George…a symbol of spiritual life as an unceasing, restless, troubled yet hopeful, quest for holiness’ (3). Following Spenser, the quest is a major theme of the liturgy, which is physically enacted in travelling around to the four elemental stations. Yet what is most significant, in my view, is the re-fashioning of holiness into a form of spirituality concerned with national and civic life, with the attempts to counter propaganda and ideology through thoughtfulness and an apophatic sensibility. Holiness has often been seen as an individual concern with an inward morality, and it is not surprising that ‘holiness churches’ have not always avoided sectarian tendencies. Redcrosse seeks to avoid this danger by understanding the question for holiness (which is in fact an important aspect of Jewish and Christian scripture) as a quest for maximum thoughtfulness and engagement with civic life.

The quality of writing was very high. The musical composition and performance (by Acoustic Triangle and the Choir of Royal Holloway College) was excellent. Redcrosse was a very affecting experience that I will continue to reflect on. I would appreciate comments as an aid to further reflection and conversation.