Reading is an exercise for learning how to write and vice versa. I have read myself into being a Christian, but I have also written myself into being a Christian.
—Stanley Hauerwas
It’s weird how language and ideas morph in response to developments in the political ecology. When I was undergoing—as a surprise to myself and those who had known me—my Christian conversion around 2008, my pastor, Greg Moore, was a former student of Stanley Hauerwas. Dr. Hauerwas was teaching at Duke at the time, and we lived in Raleigh, so Greg took me to Duke one day to meet the Texan theologian who had referred to himself once as “a high church Mennonite.” I’m a Stanley and Stanley is a Stanley, and, more than that, we both shared a strong interest in the greatest of all social obscenities—war. After that meeting, I proceeded for the next four years to read, study, re-read, and reflect on everything I could find that Stanley had written. He was my theological on-ramp into the faith; and you could do a lot worse, because inside Stanley Hauerwas’s head is a vast palace complex of life experience, history, philosophy, theology, and good will. In the middle of that palace is Christ. (He once said, “Jesus is Lord, and everything else is bullshit.”) And one thing that Stanley refused to put in his head-palace, and which he has continually criticized the presence of in the sanctuaries of churches, was the national flag. To the best of my memory (which is not altogether reliable), Stanley did not use the term “Christian nationalism.” What he harped on, though, was what another student of his—William Cavanaugh—called “the migration of the holy” from God to the nation-state. It’s not “Christian nationalism” exactly, but it’s within stone-throwing range of it.
Now the term is being weaponized by (genocide-apologetic) liberals to foment panic in its shrinking and ever more jaded base as a shield against Trump.
2017 (iirc), Duke University, l-r—Dr. Amy Laura Hall, Rev. Dr. Kara Slade, me, and Stanley Hauerwas
So, let’s just set aside how the Reaganite “liberals” of the DNC establishment are weaponizing the phrase “Christian nationalism” (stupidly, I might add, but they are incredibly stupid), and take a peek at what Stanley Hauerwas was on about. I’ll start by letting Stanley speak for himself.
Though claiming to represent a conservative form of Christianity, the Religious Right is politically a form of Protestant liberalism.
Get your head around it.
Stanley Hauerwas’s first big-hit book was called Resident Aliens. The title contains the thesis that Christians are called upon to be citizens of that polity called The Kingdom of God, and that we are resident aliens in those nation-states where we abide in this cosmos. As any good Pauline knows, these earthly polities are corruptions, ruled over by Archons, and they will be overthrown not by any earthly power, but by the parousia (they were in fact first overthrown in the womb of Mary). Our job as Christians is to witness to this, and part of that witness is to reject the temptations of power. Moreover, any time the church has been married to the state, the church has been subordinated to the state and its power games. This applies equally to progressive and reactionary churches (left-Constantinianism and right-Constantinianism); and modern political theologies (left and right) are essentially liberal. That is to say, at the very heart of the liberal project is the apotheosis of the state. If you die for your faith, you’re a fanatic. If you die for the state, you’re a “hero.” As Hauerwas never tired of saying, that which we truly count as sacred is that for which we are willing to die (or kill).
Before “Christian nationalism” was pulled into the politically motivated culture wars, another culture war designation-to-be applied to Hauerwas: postliberal. “Postliberal” has now come to encompass everyone from socialists John Milbank and David Bentley Hart to integralist theocrats like Adrian Vermeule to new feminists like Nina Power and Christine Emba . . . and even little ol’ me. The overlap between all postliberals is more or less Aristotelian, that is, the common lodestar is not some liberal abstraction like property or rights or individual freedom or validation or the market, but the “common good,” however contentious that might be. When Stanley Hauerwas was called postliberal, prior to the phrase’s politically motivated culture-war capture, it was as a postliberal theologian, influenced by George Lindbeck, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Frei. Hauerwas summarizes this theology thus:
The social significance of the Gospel requires the recognition of the narrative structure of Christian convictions for the life of the church.
Every social ethic involves a narrative, whether it is concerned with the formulation of basic principles of social organization and/or with concrete policy alternatives.
The ability to provide an adequate account of our existence is the primary test of the truthfulness of a social ethic.
Communities formed by a truthful narrative must provide the skills to transform fate into destiny so that the unexpected, especially as it comes in the form of strangers, can be welcomed as gift.
The primary social task of the church is to be itself—that is, a people who have been formed by a story that provides them with the skills for negotiating the danger of this existence, trusting in God's promise of redemption.
Christian social ethics can only be done from the perspective of those who do not seek to control national or world history but who are content to live “out of control.”
Christian social ethics depends on the development of leadership in the church that can trust and depend on the diversity of gifts in the community.
For the church to be, rather than to have, a social ethic means we must recapture the social significance of common behavior, such as acts of kindness, friendship, and the formation of families.
In our attempt to control our society Christians in America have too readily accepted liberalism as a social strategy appropriate to the Christian story.
The church does not exist to provide an ethos for democracy or any other form of social organization, but stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ. (from Hauerwas’s Reforming Christian Social Ethics: Ten Theses)
The “narrative” emphasis in Hauerwas is about human nature: we are story-formed creatures. Liberalism, he points out incessantly, is the claim that we have no story (and yet this is framed in story-form). This is how liberalism (and the nation-state) phagocytically enclosed something it crammed into a box labeled “religion.”
The [liberal] story that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story produces a people who say: “I believe that Jesus is Lord—but that’s just my personal opinion.” (Hauerwas)
Hey, Stanley has a provocative streak.
And again, he criticized churches putting national flags in the sanctuary. God does not have a nationality (and flags are generally first developed for warfare). God’s Kingdom doesn’t stop at a customs station. When you’re in the sanctuary, it’s like being in the Embassy of the Kingdom in a foreign country. An outpost of our true home.
The politics of the church must be the politics of the cross, the politics of a vulnerable God, and therefore (here is where Hauerwas gets into all kinds of good trouble) the ineffective politics of peace. In his autobiography, he writes:
My claim, so offensive to some, that the first task of the church is to make the world the world, not to make the world more just, is a correlative of this theological metaphysics. The world simply cannot be narrated—the world cannot have a story—unless a people exist who make the world the world. That is an eschatological claim that presupposes we know there was a beginning only because we have seen the end . . . [C]reation names God's continuing action, God's unrelenting desire for us to want to be loved by that love manifest in Christ's life, death, and resurrection.
What people now call Christian nationalism—whether motivated by pride or censure—is decidedly not the emulation of Christ. It does not map onto Christ crucified. It does not map onto the Sermon on the Mount. It does not correspond to the stories of the prodigal son or the Samaritan or the seemingly insane command to love enemies. The state kills its enemies.
“War,” Hauerwas wrote, “is America’s central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.”
The state does not arise as the establishment of a uniform system of common good and justice on behalf of a society of people; rather, a society is brought into being by the centralization of . . . power. The agent of this change is war. (William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy)
The flag in the sanctuary is an idol.
The cross on an Abrams tank is an idol.
When the state and the church merge, the holy inevitably migrates to the state. This is the thesis that the Reaganite Democratic technocratic Wall Street servants won’t touch with a barge pole even as they are weaponizing the phrase “Christian nationalism” against Trump.
Democrats love war every bit as much as Republicans. The US is pouring money and weapons into the potential nuclear confrontation in Ukraine and the genocidal assault on Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza. (Not that Trump is some alternative; he wanted to invade Iran, threatened nuclear attack on more than one occasion, wholly backs the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, and has even warmed to the idea of declaring war on Mexico ffs.)
See who worships the flag, and you’ll locate the shared ground.
Now, I would say, as “Christian nationalism” becomes a panic slogan for Democrats that further diminishes their base and mobilizes even more hatred against them, is the time for Christians in the Hauerwasian mold to step up and force some nuance into the conversation, not as political palliative (we’re pretty much already in a no-win political shit-avalanche), but as witnesses to the true nature of the Gospels. The actual “Christian” nationalists (I call them “hard Americanists”) are going to say, “You’re damn right I’m a Christian nationalist and proud of it.” The political “traditionalists”—who want a return to religion to “restore” some imaginary past political order—will defend the hard Americanists and aim their guns at the Reganite liberal technocrats (soft Americanists), who they’ve already decided are the true enemy. The liberals will threaten us all with the specter of some Handmaid’s Tale theocracy (supposedly ushered in by a vain, amoral, libertine swindler and rapist). And as always, the political tail will wag the discursive dog. We’ll all be pressured to take one of those prefabricated sides, if I may be so presumptuous, rather than learn more about it and think this through.
I’ll save the last word for the liberals—since these are post-liberal points. Your liberal “story that you should have no story except the story you chose when you had no story” contains within it the conviction that you should have no conviction except to the conviction you chose when you had no conviction. That is, you’ll claim that it’s somehow dangerous for public officials to be “religious,” unless you can compartmentalize your “religion” away from your actions as a public official.
Any child not yet indoctrinated into this stupidity would see how utterly untenable it is. The last public official I’d trust would be that official who professes faith in a God who has handed down some pretty strong moral precepts (selflessness, neighbor-love, enemy-love, sacrificial service, etc.), and who then acts contrary to those precepts in the execution of his or her duties.
If you’ll turn your back on a God you claim to believe in, then surely you’d turn your back on us.
Now, if you say that your religion requires you to deport members of other faiths and traditions, kill people with lethal injections, support genocide, and so forth, then we’re already running contrariwise to my own convictions as a Christian (we make peace and wash feet). But I want my public officials to be confident enough in their own convictions to follow through with them. Virtue is what differentiates us from chameleons . . . and computers.
Just be aware, I’ll obey the state on matters of day-to-day order, and when the state conforms, however imperfectly, to some semblance of moral action, but my sovereign is not the state. This is not my home. I’m a resident alien, passing through as a witness.
“Jesus is Lord, and all the rest is bullshit.”
This essay is excellent. The topic is very urgent and very important. Thank you.