It is an enormous delight to respond to Sarah Azaransky, whose work I greatly admire. That she locates Christ and the Common Life in direct relation to Sheldon Wolin’s account of the nature and purpose of political theory demonstrates her usual perspicuity. Although not explicit in the book, his work is a key inspiration, and his account of an agonistic and populist democracy informs my own constructive account of democratic politics. Azaransky is exactly right that my conception of political theology parallels his conception of political theory as contributing to the formation of judgments attuned to the “nature and perplexities of politics.”

Provoked by the book, Azaransky invites me to consider a compelling a set of concerns around the political status of children and the role of “motherwork” in democratic politics. Both relate to fundamental questions about what does and does not count as political and who is counted as having political agency. As concerns they present the challenge of how, on the one hand, to resist defining what is political over and against what is deemed private or prepolitical, without, on the other, falling into the equal and opposite trap of rendering everything political, thereby making nothing distinctive of politics. As a way of charting a pathway through the horns of this dilemma, I will explore here the proposition that children may at times act politically but not all acts of children are political.

The division between public and private is central to liberalism, while that between what is prepolitical and political is arguably one central to civic republicanism. Rather than view these distinctions in positive terms, feminist political thought points to how what is marked private or prepolitical is thereby depoliticized. When consigned to the private realm women and children do not appear in public and so lack voice, or rights, or political status. Those whose lives and bodies are judged private can be acted upon but never act in public, so are vulnerable to exploitation. Likewise, those aspects of life—sexuality, gender, etc.—judged prepolitical are thereby rendered nonnegotiable or simply don’t appear as subjects of public concern.

Conversely, as black feminists and womanists contend, there is a parallel but distinct problem of one’s very existence being denigrated, so that how one exists socially is inherently rendered a political act; for example, even how you wear your hair or dress is seen as seditious. One’s way of being in the world becomes a political struggle, but the struggle is to restore to oneself and others the freedom for much of one’s life to be simply social again—one can walk down the street without the fear of being arrested for being black—or to create enclaves where one is free to be social without being harassed, surveilled, criminalized, or brutalized on the basis of one’s skin color. This is the struggle Patricia Hill Collins invokes in her conception of “motherwork” in the essay Azaransky cites. As Hill Collins points out, for racialized ethnic mothers and their children, there is often no dichotomized existence between a public and private sphere; work and family life are interwoven. Moreover, it is the struggle of the group for power and autonomy rather than the individual that is a primary concern.1 In a different vein, also instructive is Danielle Allen’s critique of Hannah Arendt’s argument that children should be sheltered from the public sphere, which Arendt developed in response to the role of children in the desegregation of schools at Little Rock.2

In short, given the limitations of rigid distinctions between public and private, we should expect that neither childhood nor motherwork are a solely private or prepolitical matter and that both can be sites of political struggle depending on one’s institutional and structural location. I will unpack this statement further through examining the various ways in which childhood in particular can be a political matter. Let me note at the outset that I am folding adolescence into childhood, while recognizing that as a transitional period between childhood and adulthood, adolescence is a necessarily contested and ambiguous season that exists on the penumbra of full citizenship.

Childhood is a social phenomenon that is constructed through an array of social norms, institutions, and practices—parenting, schooling, diet, games, healthcare, etc.—that are also shaped in part by structural locations of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class. Changes to conventional norms, institutions, and practices through which childhood is assembled often drive societal change and so become sites of political negotiation as they inherently relate to the good of the whole and to broader conceptions of human flourishing. In other words, childhood is not a private matter. But saying this in no way necessitates seeing children themselves as possessing political agency.

Part of the Western construction of childhood that reflects a broader way of conceptualizing social and political life is the notion that children have rights. Saying children have rights makes childhood a public matter, but again, that does not necessarily enfranchise children. While the rights of children are enshrined in the 1959 UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child, the document does not necessitate seeing children as political agents.3 The rights-based discourse it draws on depends on an anthropology that emphasizes self-reflexive rational autonomy as the criteria for political agency. Such a framework must necessarily see children as prepolitical or private, as they are either prerational or dependent. John Rawls exemplifies such a view.4 This kind of anthropology is more often than not combined with a reduction of democracy to the formal institutions and processes of a liberal constitutional order: voting, parties, division of powers, etc. But a relational anthropology opens the way to a very different conceptualization of the political status of children, especially one that moves beyond a dialogic and intersubjective framework (think Buber’s account of I-Thou relations) to the kind of anthropology I work with in the book, whereby we are constituted through a meshwork of relations with human, nonhuman, and divine ways of being alive, along with material and nonmaterial forces. In such a view, agency is not indexed to either autonomy or rationality. Rather, humans are always already enmeshed in a series of interdependent relations that enable or disable different kinds of purposeful human political, social, and economic agency. When such an anthropology is combined with a view of democracy as about negotiating a common life and solving shared problems then children can be seen as exercising political agency in certain situations or institutional configurations (the school, the home, the skate park, etc.). The distinction to work with is not then between public and private or between political and prepolitical, but between political and social. And here we may desire that children can be free to enjoy a social life untroubled by political struggles, but given that the social is always latently political, it may happen at times that children, even elementary school children, become political agents as part of a fight for the ability to enjoy certain public and common goods they are being denied: e.g., decent education, housing, or somewhere to play.

A relational, meshwork anthropology also allows for attention to how children practice “intramural” forms of small “p” politics among themselves that can and do feed into wider patterns of social and political life. They cultivate or fail to cultivate a common life in schoolyards, malls, and increasingly online, and this common life both refracts and feeds into other forms of life together in which children are enmeshed. What comes into view in such an account is how children are not simply subjects of governmentality in (say) schools, or wholly subject to processes of cultural reproduction. Children can exercise agency within systems and institutions and produce their own culture (e.g., children’s games, rhymes, songs, jokes, etc.) and their own spirituality. As per the work of Ada María Isasi-Diaz that I discuss in the book, this quotidian, ordinary and everyday life can become a ground of political reflection and agency—although this is probably more likely between adolescence than younger children.

Children are not simply future citizens but are already active agents in the production of forms of social and political life that contribute to the wider meshwork of life together. But does such a view demand we see children as fully-fledged political agents who must have a say in issues that directly affect them: i.e., nothing about them without them? I think we can reject a view of children as prepolitical or private without then having to see their agency as equivalent to or the same as that of adults. But this raises the vexed question of how to conceive patterns of social authority. Unpopular as it is to say so, surviving and thriving necessarily has need, at times, of hierarchies of social authority—even if these are contingent in form and vary enormously across cultures. Examples include the doctor-patient, teacher-student, master-apprentice, and of course, parent-child relation. While necessitating a certain vulnerability that makes them always open to abuse, and fraught with misapplication by false analogy (e.g., paternalism and patriarchy), such structures are essential to the material conditions and formation in the kinds of practical reasoning through which we come to judgments about what to do and how to do it. The problem of making children of equal authority to parents (or adults in general) is that it undermines the very structures and material conditions through which children gain access to and formation within that which makes parity possible given the inherent asymmetries of agency. The parallel is saying students or patients are of equal authority to teachers or doctors: while students and patients should have agency, making them of equal authority inhibits learning and access to health. That said, such structures of authority are rightly always under renegotiation and contestation and need means of accountability: something is wrong and oppressive in the parent-child relationship when a teenager is treated the same as an eight-year-old. Or when the treatment prescribed leads to addiction yet is prescribed anyway.

One fruit of an array of hierarchies of social authority—when they are functioning in just and loving ways—is that children have the freedom just to be children. But this then begs the question of what we think the meaning and purpose of childhood is—which in addition to being a theological and philosophical question is also in part a political question. Part of what is at stake here is the specifically modern way childhood came to be understood as a domain divorced from the world of work and economic production (even as childhood increasingly became a key site of consumption). This is not to say childhood is a solely modern phenomenon—Nicholas Orme’s wonderful book on medieval children makes that clear—but there are specifically modern constructions of childhood.5 The ways modern childhood is separated from the world of work is the fruit of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, but also of the struggles to free children from industrial labor: i.e., children did not have to work plantation fields, or be sent down the mines or up chimneys. The freedom of all children—not just those of the elite—to be nonproductive members of a household is an ongoing political struggle that at times involves children.

Alongside the ongoing need to free children from the Moloch-like grip of capitalist modes of production, there is a need to uphold the freedom of children to enjoy the common good of childhood over and against their conscription into various state-driven ideological programs. As exemplified in Soviet, Fascist, and Maoist regimes and that of the Khmer Rouge, state- and party-driven deployments of children as agents of revolutionary change were part of a wider politicization of every area of life within totalitarian systems, and the destruction of social life through making it wholly subject to state or party imperatives.

We may not live in a totalitarian system, but one way childhood is politicized problematically in contemporary Western societies is through its romanticization and instrumentalization as a site of innocence to hold the adult world accountable. (One could interpret the reception of Greta Thunberg in this way.) Here children are no longer members of a shared body politic. Instead, they become an “other” or a collective identity, or, at worst, enemies deployed to shrive the adult world for their sins. On my account, childhood should be characterized as both part of and a distinct experience within a shared realm of meaning and action that helps constitute the body politic. But for this to be possible, the political and economic conditions necessary for the good of a childhood—e.g., clean air to breathe, roads that are safe to cross, not being shot at, food that will not poison you, parks to play in, schools that teach rather than act as a pipeline to prison—must be secured through politics. As part of creating the conditions that ensure our common life is a realm of mutual flourishing, children (particularly adolescents) can become mobilized. But their mobilization cannot be required or expected of them (as it can say of mothers) and like adults, they should never be exploited and instrumentalized as tools of social control. Nevertheless, while the condition of being a child should not have to entail politics, if it does, then this is not always a deformation of politics. Rather, it can reflect a deformation of society when childhood is, of necessity, a realm of political struggle. This contrasts with motherhood, which on the logic Patricia Hill Collins’s argument, always entails a certain political obligation. I would also point to the work of Jane Addams and her emphasis on the political obligations entailed by motherhood in democratic societies.6

If the freedom to enjoy childhood as a common good requires resistance to certain political and economic forces “from above,” it can also entail resistance to forces “from below.” Hill Collins conception of motherwork is directly relevant here, as is bell hooks’s conception of “homeplace,” and Iris Marion Young’s argument for a positive, feminist valuation of home as a site for the “materialization of identity” and “homemaking” as a means of building and preserving the kinds of meaning vital to generating agency, sustaining dignity and fostering resistance.7

Extending these arguments, I contend that under certain conditions the home becomes a site of formation in a form of political subjectivity to fit children for the ability to enjoy some measure of childhood in a world that refuses to recognize them as persons either capable of or in need of simply being children. They are harassed by one set of forces as putative criminals or delinquents (e.g., by the police), and by another as recruits for gangs or sex workers. Both are refusals of childhood, while the latter exploits the condition of childhood for brutal ends.

This is a rather longwinded way of saying we should put people before programs and, yes, the kids are part of the polity. But the focus on how to conceive the political agency of children also lays out more directly some of the logic of my underlying position. I am very grateful to Azaransky for the provocation to do so.

I am deeply grateful for Gustavo Maya’s nuanced reading of the book. It is a great gift to an author to be read in this way, especially given the length of the book in question! Out of his close reading Maya asks some extremely insightful and critical questions that I hope to do justice to in my response. Before addressing them, I need to clarify some points in relation to Maya’s account of the book. It is not so much that I am not offering a framework for political theology—I am; it is rather that I refuse certain kinds of what I call “one-size-fits-all blueprint” approaches for conceptualizing the relationship between Christianity and politics (4). As Maya rightly notes, my alternative framework focuses on beginning with practical reason; a particular conception of the church-world relation (that challenges certain ecclesiocentric conceptions of this relation); and envisaging political relations through the prism of my account of neighbor love. Alongside this is my theological anthropology, which is not just about intersubjective relations between God, neighbor, and self, as Maya suggests, but conceives humans as mutually vulnerable, finite creatures, whose flourishing is dependent on being entangled in a life with God, neighbors, and other-than-human ways of being alive. This is an important point as modern political theology has paid little to no attention to creation as having agency. More often than not creation is treated as a mere platform that humans make use of for their moral lives and extract from for their political economies. In the book I try to attend to how, as creatures, humans are inherently political animals who must cultivate a common life with various nonhuman others.

Maya worries that at certain points I become over-invested in Augustinian talk of two cities and common objects of love as constitutive of a people, and that this undermines my normative account of the mutually constitutive, dyadic relationship between church and world (120–21). Let me try to assuage this concern. Contrary to what is often assumed or how I am labelled, I am not or at least do not identify as an Augustinian. In relation to the question of church-world relations, I see Augustine as developing a paradigmatic and hugely influential framework for conceptualizing this relation through his argument about the saeculum as an ambiguous time, a field of wheat and tares, neither wholly profane nor sacred. However, it is not the only account of church-world relations I discuss, and I am by no means bound to it. Instead, I contend that Augustine’s is a central one to think with even if one rejects it, and while Augustine’s approach informs my own, I do question its adequacy both in this book and elsewhere.1 This is why I turn instead to the New Testament uses of the term kosmos/world to conceptualize this age before Christ’s return (233–35), to a pneumatological and missiological conception of church-world relations (128–43), and to a theological anthropology that emphasizes the need for attention to and reception of a lifeworld we did not make and do not control, in order to heal and convert our own forms of seeing, hearing, and talking about the world around us (291–322).2 Thus I would argue that, combined with my account of democratic politics, my approach fosters forms of active listening to the world around us and generates a way we can discover just and loving forms of common life with and for others. It also enables recognition that the church can look very much like the world and the world can look and feel more church-like than the church (130).

Nevertheless, what Augustine’s account does help bring into focus is the threefold challenge of: (a) cherishing the particularity of Christian beliefs and practices, while (b) cultivating a just and loving relation with various non-Christian others, and at the same time, (c) agitating and rendering accountable everyone, especially Christians, given the fallen and finite conditions of life in this non-eternal age. My account seeks a way of honoring one’s own tradition while at the same time hallowing others among whom one lives—while also recognizing everyone is frail, fallen, and finite. For Christians, as I argue in the chapter on hospitality (and in my first book), our encounter with strangers is more often than not a means of grace for the healing and renewal of our institutions and traditions, so that they remain conduits of creaturely flourishing and bearers of faithful witness to the lordship of Christ. It is through encounter with others not like us and with whom we disagree that we not only forestall the church from becoming an idolatrous and oppressive repristination of a dead faith, but also encounter the new work of Christ and the Spirit in creation. In seeking the welfare of the “earthly city” not only do we find our own welfare, but also we encounter God in new and surprising ways. I take this formulation to be Jeremianic rather than Augustinian. Conversely, what “the Benedict Option” and Integralism offer in denouncing plurality and circling the wagons is a program for the euthanasia of Christianity.

My account of consociational democracy is an attempt to show how churches as bearers of a specific tradition of belief and practice are vital qua churches to the cultivation of a just and loving common life with and for people of other faiths and no faith. As I state in the book (443), the church’s involvement in forms of participatory democratic politics as one consociation among others enables local churches to recognize their need of others and to own in practice that their welfare is intricately bound up with the welfare of the demos. Conversely, the congregation, as part of a moral tradition with an eschatological vision of the good, brings a wider horizon of reference and relationship to bear upon the immediate needs and demands of the demos. This mutually disciplining and reciprocal relation helps ensure that congregations, along with numerous other consociational bodies (unions, professional associations, universities, etc.) are themselves directed toward building a common life rather than toward authoritarian and anti-democratic ends—a concern Maya rightly highlights—and enable democracy itself to be democratic rather than mutate into a form of majoritarianism, technocracy, or plutocracy. My earlier detailed ethnographic work on community organizing portrays how this is not idealistic speculation, but operates on the ground in ways that can be touched, tasted, seen, and smelt.

I turn now to each of Maya’s other critical insights, the first being why the war on terror was not an explicit point of reference in the book. Certainly, the war on terror is a key contextual factor that informs the current concerns of, and (in many ways) the widespread interest in, political theology. Indeed, it is an explicit point of reference in my three previous books and a tacit point of analysis here in the chapter on secularity and secularism, even if it is not discussed directly. In this book I try to excavate the ground from which the plausibility and possibility of something like the war on terror grows; namely, libertarianism, white supremacy, an absolutization of friend-enemy relations, particular formations of sovereignty and conceptions of the secular, along with anti-democratic forms of populism and binary conceptions of church-world relations. But I could have made the connections more explicit.

On the question of the relationship between domination and freedom I fully endorse the kind of account shaped by Philip Pettit’s conception of freedom as non-domination that Maya sets out with great clarity; and in Resurrecting Democracy, I discuss Stout’s deployment of this framework appreciatively.3 But the account is not free of shortcomings and thus needs supplementing and extending. Like liberal conceptions of freedom conceptualized in terms of negative and positive liberty, freedom as non-domination not only fails to capture certain kinds of domination but renders them licit. In Resurrecting Democracy, I focus on debt bondage as a widespread mode of domination that is either entirely justifiable or rendered invisible within liberal and civic republican frameworks. In this book I extend that analysis to think through how addressing white supremacy, classism, and the “slow violence” of extractivist approaches to creation needs a different kind of anthropology from those that undergird civic republicanism and liberalism. It also requires refusing the ways civic republicanism and liberalism operate with public-private and political-prepolitical sets of distinctions so as to enable proper attention to the subjective and cultural, not just the objective, dynamics of domination. One place this last point comes to the fore is in the chapter on Black Power and my account of how citizenship is not just a matter of rights but also identity and performance. Overall, as I say in the book (46), questions of freedom pertain to both the oikos (the private and prepolitical) and the polis or public sphere, premised as it is, at least in my account, on the ecological, structural and interpersonal capacity to inhabit relations of dependency, intimacy, and care more justly and lovingly. Interdependency and mutual care are a condition for the possibility of autonomy, understood as purposeful agency; equality, defined as parity, not sameness; and freedom, conceived of as the liberty to act with and for others as fellow participants in a creation humans did not make or control but must receive as a gift to share and bless others with (even though, as fallen creatures, we insist on thingifying and exploiting it).

Lastly, as Maya notes, central to my framework is a conception of politics as a way we pursue a common life. Maya rightly challenges me to clarify what I mean by “common life” given its centrality to my account and how it connects to normative conceptions of human flourishing. My account of a common life does depend on a normative commitment to understanding humans as inherently social, a commitment that also has an empirical warrant and is shared by many traditions of moral and political thought. A commitment to a common life is a commitment to pursuing and upholding the social, political, economic, and ecological conditions for the good of association. As a moral good it is not simply the aggregation of individual choices. The individual’s ability to survive and thrive (and thereby have a choice to make) depends on participating in this social good. Pursuit of this good both enables and is enabled by pursuit of particular common goods, which are also irreducibly social since they can only be achieved and used by participating in some form of association (e.g., health, education, citizenship). Common goods have a moral end, as participation in and fulfillment of these goods are constitutive of human flourishing. I do hold that we can pursue the common good of a family, university, hospital, small to medium-size business, or small-scale community. But beyond that scale, a claim to know the common good of a conurbation, region, nation, or the globe is antipolitical. It denies the plurality and contestability of moral visions in complex societies and the conflicts that arise in pursuit of divergent moral goods, all of which must be negotiated through politics (32).

Democratic politics, and the dance of conflict and conciliation it entails, is a means through which to foster shared worlds of meaning and action across different traditions, institutions, and forms of life, and their respective normative commitments, even as these traditions share a commitment to the good of association. But democratic debate and deliberation alone does not generate the norms and institutional forms needed to sustain a common life over time. Its own deliberative norms need testing against those of particular religious and moral traditions even as the norms of these traditions need testing against the practices of democratic politics. Likewise, democracy cannot produce people with the virtues necessary to cultivate or sustain it. Here we meet the democratic paradox.

Democratic politics presumes the existence of, and depends on, people and institutions committed to respecting the dignity of each individual; suasion not violence as a means of resolving conflicts; cultivating a sense of shared humanity; and the participation of people in the decisions that affect them. Yet democracy is forged out of immoral people, hierarchal and often authoritarian institutions, and divisions of faction and identity, and it is plagued by the despotism of either the one, the few or the many. But if human and other-than-human life—and their entangled ways of surviving and thriving—are to be put before a top down procedure or ideological program, then some combination of an agonistic democratic politics, as a means of distributing power as widely as possible, with forms of life that cultivate just and loving people, is vital for ensuring humans and the environment are neither reduced to administrative and abstract units of the state, nor commodified as a resource for extraction and exploitation. Moreover, if freedom and justice are achieved first and foremost through the quality and character of relations between people—rather than through a legal or bureaucratic procedure, market mechanism, historical dialectic, revolutionary vanguard, or the implementing of an ideological program through a process of social engineering—then “communities of character” are needed to foster the people capable of such relations. Yet, as I argue here and in the book, those same communities equally need something like democratic politics if faithful, hopeful, and loving relations with others are to be fostered and sustained.

Maya asks how we can know when we have gotten a moral or political matter right. We can’t. Moral and political judgments are always a risk, and politics as action in time is necessarily contingent. There is no final solution, only the ongoing work and vocation of being a creature with and for others. But we can know that pursuit of a common life through democratic means is better than killing or coercing others we disagree with or find threatening. In these dark times, let’s just start there. It seems like enough of a challenge in itself.

It is a great honor to have Lisa Sowle Cahill respond to the book. Her wide-ranging writings have featured regularly in my courses over many years, so on my part this feels like taking up an ongoing conversation. Although Cahill has a different set of philosophical and theological reference points than I do, I see a deep sympathy and resonance between my own approach and hers, as set out in her book Global Justice, Christology, and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Cahill’s wonderfully lucid opening formulation of the three challenges facing moral and political theologians is exactly right, as is the source of perplexity she ends with—namely, how to keep open the possibility of “pneumatological transformation” within the brutal realities of history. As Cahill discerns, I don’t think there are neat solutions to these challenges, but the challenges as she identifies them are angels to wrestle with, and wrestling with them ensures we think better about political and social questions. To put this another way, writing about politics in a theological key requires kneading the smooth, hard abstractions of moral and theological concepts with the rich loam of human particularity and historical complexity in order to generate tentative yet specific judgments sufficient to live by in a fallen and finite world. This is a difficult task, and it is easy to either get lost in a maze of description or obsessed with building a clear conceptual scaffold which provides no actual shelter in the storm. In the book I try to combine conceptual frameworks and distinctions with sufficient description of contexts and practices, so as to display processes of theological reasoning that are both open to the Spirit’s leading and aid wily wisdom regarding political judgments.

A central argument of the book is that the attempt to cure or overcome contingency in politics is extremely dangerous and should be resisted. The very messiness of acting faithfully, lovingly, and hopefully in politics is something to be embraced. To deny or control for it means we deny politics as a way of acting with others not like us in and through time, which is, in effect, to deny the possibility of a common life. At stake here is theological anthropology. To be the kind of good but fallen creature open to redemption that we are is to begin in the middle, never getting to act by starting at the beginning or at a point of our choosing. With a nod to Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante, a properly Christian conception of our condition is that we are a viator—one on the way—rather than a comprehensor—that is, one who has arrived or who comprehends. As a viator—whether in the form of a pilgrim or a fugitive—we are always already having to act in a world we did not make and do not control. The implications of being a viator are firstly, that theological reflection on politics must wrestle with what it means to act together with others in a context shaped by the violence and brutality we inherit from ages past, whether that is the legacies and ongoing impact of patriarchy, the Atlantic slave trade and its afterlife in white supremacy, antisemitism and the holocaust, or the destruction of ecosystems through the depredations of an extractivist capitalism. As the inheritors of various brutal histories that determine the world in which we act with others, we must also wrestle with the dilemma of how to balance the pursuit of justice with the need for some kind of order if the world around us is not to collapse into random violence through the settling of scores. This tragic orientation involves a certain realism about what can and cannot be achieved through politics.

But we also find ourselves in an eschatological middle ground, living between Christ’s ascension and return when the Spirit is poured out on all flesh. An eschatological orientation to politics means Christians must trust that history is open to change, that a new creation is coming, and that the Spirit can bring into being a radical, surprising, and unanticipated newness in the midst of history, often in response to the cry for justice and love by those on the underside of history. So alongside a tragic register, political theology must have an apocalyptic one as well. An apocalyptic register is born out of a revelation of what is really happening from a heavenly perspective and a discernment of the active and living presence of God on earth. An apocalyptic register also sounds a note of judgment on the present order of things, making clear that the world as it is, is not the world as it should be, and so we should repent and humble ourselves. Political theology must reckon with how we live in a time when the kingdom of God is present, creating moments of transformation and rupture; in a place where new beginnings are possible, and so established ways of doing things need reevaluating; and in a season when it is not good enough to simply go with the flow, because the messianic age is dawning and lives are subject to the judgment to come. This apocalyptic orientation must stand alongside a tragic one.

Lastly, we always already find ourselves in the middle of the quotidian, everyday world of ordinary life that must be cultivated if children are to be raised, crops planted, and life is to go on. Thus, political theology must also have a georgic or pastoral register.1 The Old Testament / Hebrew Scriptures are awash with pastoral imagery and concerns (e.g., the laws around land and Sabbath keeping, and divine rule envisioned in creational and pastoral terms). Likewise, Jesus’s teaching and parables are suffused with agricultural and pastoral imagery, populated as they are by shepherds, sowers and vine keepers. But alongside the world of work through which we cultivate shared realms of meaning and action, the pastoral also refers to the everyday world of family life, another stream of scriptural reference: sons run off and return, children are healed and nursed, food is prepared and eaten. The pastoral encompasses the mundane joys and everyday struggles that make up the ordinary time of our lives. These too are crucibles of divine disclosure and constitute part and parcel of political life. A georgic register, no less than the tragic and the apocalyptic one, is vital for a faithful, hopeful, and loving political theology.

One way to read the book is as an attempt to hold in tensional relation the tragic, apocalyptic, and georgic registers needed to make sense of humans as political animals. My broader contention is that political theology goes wrong when one or other register is deployed to the exclusion of the others. Political theology must have a tragic key, bringing to light the way human sin, folly, and frailty—and the oppression these breed—shape political life. But suffering and injustice are not the whole story of political life. In and through politics there can be moments of prophetic insight, repentance, healing, and transformation, as well as disclosures of the living and active work of the Spirit here and now, making all things new. So political theology must synthesize tragedy with an apocalyptic note. It must find ways to speak of hope cradled in grief, love swaddled in death. But to only speak of hope and grief or feasting and fasting, without being able to consecrate and bless the common joys and hallow the everyday activities that make up a life, then Christian political theology will be disconnected from and irrelevant to the realities of how humans survive let alone thrive. The tragic highlights immanent and visible historical, cultural, and structural dynamics (e.g., the state, capitalism, etc.); the apocalyptic emphasizes divine agency and unseen principalities and powers; while the georgic foregrounds human and nonhuman agency and their entangled possibilities.

I turn now to some of Cahill’s more specific comments. She poses a contrast between her conception of Catholic social teaching (CST) and the one I set out. It may well be a failure of understanding on my part, but I see neither a contrast nor a tension. As Cahill notes, I draw out the consociational and pluralistic conception of the body politic that Maritain and Yves Simon helped articulate. Specific judgments regarding such matters as gender and sexuality, for example, are in no way entailed by this consociational account, which is to say that such an account is neither “conservative” nor “progressive” on a range of contemporary social questions. I do contend that the account I give is a pathway into the more explicitly “solidaristic and liberationist” ways of interpreting CST that Cahill gives voice to. What I try to do is lay out some of the conceptual hinterland from which Laudato Si’ emerges, and foreground why democracy becomes a central commitment in CST—a focus that is often missing from general overviews. I worry that driving a wedge between the account I give and her own creates an unnecessary bifurcation. The real contrast I think is with the kinds of account of CST she and I articulate and those regnant in North America, as exemplified in the work of Michael Novak and George Weigel on one side, and those by exponents of the New Natural Law theory on the other.

I affirm Cahill’s suggestion that my consociational account of CST feeds directly into advocacy of networked forms of governance. This way of reading the social encyclicals shows how they can make a vital contribution to breaking the stranglehold of the Westphalian order of nation-states on our collective political imagination. But it also tempers the kind of transgovernmental and technocratic approach to networked governance that Anne Marie Slaughter’s work exemplifies. In place of Slaughter, I point to the work of Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize–winning economist. Her empirical work on polycentric governance provides a point of reference for the non-state-centric kind of consociational conception of economic democracy and sovereignty I develop (341; 393).

A consociational approach is also crucial to how I approach the question Cahill poses about whether my account is compatible with social democracy and the pursuit of social justice. The short answer is yes, but this affirmation needs unpacking. I see a role for the market and the state in securing and delivering public goods and pursuing social justice (understood in the technical, CST sense of that term). But the question of the limits of state and market is a crucial one that political theology must address as it seeks to articulate a vision of creaturely flourishing in which each gives according to their ability, and each receives according to their needs. Attempts to articulate such a vision in the twentieth century oscillated between state-centric and market-centric approaches. Both state and market centric solutions to issues such as slum housing or the need for potable water see the primary problem as one of scarcity, and either the state or the market is then positioned as the most efficient, effective, and just means of allocating scarce resources. But what this does is ignore another aspect of the problem: the distribution of power. States concentrate power in hands of bureaucrats (the problem of social democracy), while markets concentrate power in the hand of plutocrats (the problem of what Novak calls “democratic capitalism”), while both concentrate resources in the hands of technocrats, thereby deskilling and stripping citizens of the agency through which they can solve their own problems. A much underrated but important North American Catholic critic who saw this clearly was Ivan Illich.

So while I answered “yes” to whether there is a role for the state and the market, I am not a fan of simply repristinating social democracy. Indeed, a tacit backdrop to the book is a set of debates among left-wing thinkers about the relationship between democracy and socialism, and their attempts to articulate non-state centric and non-vanguardist theorizations of socialism. Forgive me if what follows is a bit too “inside baseball” on these debates, but it gets at something important to the challenges confronting political theology that Cahill articulates, and at her concern as to whether my account of CST is indexed to the pursuit of social justice.

The first set of thinkers who inform my thinking is the British New Left (notably, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor).2 I would situate a number of British Catholic intellectuals and theologians in these debates as well, notably Herbert McCabe, Brian Wicker, Denys Turner (and arguably, Terry Eagleton).3 While it has parallels in Germany, France, and Latin America, the kind of engagement with Aquinas, on the one hand, and Marxism and socialism, on the other, that this group of British Catholics undertook does seem almost entirely absent in the US context. From the 1950s onwards, the British New Left wrestled with how to take forward a radical emancipatory politics when the primary agents of emancipation had proved to be deeply oppressive. These thinkers read the collapse of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism not as a historically unfortunate turn of events, but as a direct outcome of Marxist-Leninist conceptions of revolutionary vanguardism. They developed a critique of forms of social democracy driven by Fabian and other technocratic programs that envisaged the state as the sole locus of emancipatory agency, emphasizing instead the role of everyday life and popular cultures as sources of radical insight. They were suspicious of positing any single or singular revolutionary subject such as the proletariat or the stigmatized as inherently bearing within itself an emancipatory consciousness. They wrestled both with the place of culture as a form of domination and the multiple vectors of identity beyond class. They questioned whether socialism was the progressive superseding of capitalist relations or a harking back to an idealized agrarian moral economy centered on the commons.4 All this was done alongside a critique of bourgeois liberal capitalism as constituting a realm of freedom and, crucially, a focus on the vital importance of moral agency in all political struggles.5

The second, earlier set of debates was that between the “Johnson-Forest tendency” and the “Shachtmanites,” who were groups that split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940 in the wake of Stalin’s terror. The Johnsonites were led by C. L. R. James (who, as Cedric Robinson notes, is a key figure in the development of the modern black radical tradition) and Raya Dunayevskaya (a former colleague of Trotsky’s), and included Grace Lee and James Boggs, who went on to be a major influence in the emergence of Black Power in Detroit. The two debates were connected. For example, in 1958 MacIntyre reviewed Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, which critiques Stalinism and Leninism; more recently, he has written a deep appreciation of C. L. R. James as a moral exemplar.6 The British New Left echoed the critique of Stalinism and Leninism that James, the Boggses, and Dunayevskaya generated, and like them sought a non-statist, cooperative, and humanistic alternative. Grace Lee Boggs, who eventually broke with C. L. R. James, came to advocate a humanistic socialism, radical democratic politics, and the need to attend to the personal moral and spiritual dimensions of political struggle (see especially her important biography, Living for Change).7

These concerns are picked up on in some strands of postcolonial thinking. As David Scott puts it:

With the collapse of the Bandung and socialist projects and with the new hegemony of a neoliberal globalization, it is no longer clear what “overcoming” Western power actually means. Moreover, with the weakening of the cognitive-political vocabularies of nation and socialism in which oppositional Third World futures were articulated, it is no longer clear how alternatives are to be thought, much less defended. In short, there is now a fundamental crisis in the Third World in which the very coherence of the secular-modern project—with its assurance of progressive social-economic development, with its dependence upon the organizational form of the nation-state, with its sense of the privilege of representative democracy and competitive elections, and so on—can no longer be taken for granted. This crisis ushers in a new problem-space and produces a new demand on postcolonial criticism.8

The heart of the challenge that David Scott, the British New Left, and the Johnson-Forest tendency wrestled with was as follows: if one cannot turn to the state, the nation, representative democracy, the market, a revolutionary vanguard, or a singular subject of history as the means of ushering in emancipatory change, where does one turn?

One option, emerging from debates within Continental Philosophy, is to take a catastrophizing (rather than apocalyptic) turn, renouncing any kind of real existing politics as inherently reinscribing systems and cultures of domination. This is a move that Slavoj Žižek, among others, has made and is, more broadly, one direction of travel in political theology. This generates despair and pessimism as a positive political good and calls into question the merits of any and all movements for social justice.

Another and very different kind of response is to turn to virtue and traditions of belief and practice. Outside of the context of the debates I have just summarized, such a move sounds conservative. It is not. The call for a more moral and humane political economy necessitates wrestling with the situatedness and historicity of thought, and so demands recognizing that there are a plurality of traditions with different conceptions of freedom, justice, and visions of the good. The debate is then not about means (state, vanguard, market or revolutionary subject)—all of which end up treating actual people as means rather than ends—but about ends or teloi, and what normative vision of the good or human flourishing politics and economics are seeking to embody in pursuit of that good. As well as raising questions about which traditions of belief and practice can sponsor a just and loving vision of human flourishing, such a move also raises questions about virtue: freedom and justice are not achieved through a procedure, historical dialectic, or implementing the correct ideological program through a process of social engineering, but through the quality and character of relations between people. Tradition and virtue become the means, then, of discovering and inhabiting freedom and justice under conditions of finitude and fallenness.

Christ and the Common Life should be read as an attempt to articulate what a Christian vision of democratic politics that is alive to the challenges not only that Cahill sets out in her response, but also to the challenges wrestled with by the likes of Scott, the British New Left, C. L. R. James and Grace Lee Boggs. A consociational conception of sovereignty and economic democracy is a crucial next step in connecting a turn to tradition and virtue to a meaningful democratic politics, and it is a move that is intrinsic to the development of Catholic social teaching. Or at least, that is the case I try to make in the book.

It is a delight and honor to respond to Megan Black’s meditation on the book from her perspective as one doing the often grueling work of democratic politics on a daily basis. I’ve been asked a number of times who I wrote the book for, and certainly one set of folks I had in mind are those involved in community organizing and related forms of faith-based social and political engagement. That Black welcomes the book as a helpful contribution to that vital work means a huge amount to me.

Black’s opening story is a powerful and profound one, which I will take the opportunity to reflect on here. I had a very similar experience in London a number of years ago. The participants of the workshop I took part in were engaged in innovative charity, mission, or political work, yet the visions of the future they produced were remarkable for how conventional they were. Black names the tension at the heart of such visions with great acuity. On the one hand, people’s desires for a living wage, for a decent home, for security, for basic services such as education and health to be accessible and of a high quality, and for stable communities that feel familiar need to be honored and respected. Such aspirations are rooted in some of our most basic needs. We can even coordinate such aspirations with Jeremiah’s advocacy for the people of God to “build, plant, marry” (Jer 29:5–7) in a land that is otherwise hostile. It is the temptation of political vanguards and cultural and economic elites to despise such aspirations as either petit bourgeois, reactionary, kitsch or plebian, and thereby dismiss them. But in the fight to move from the world as it is to the world as it should be, the battle is often for more and better versions of what we know and love. Subjecting such attitudes to derision is often a prelude to subordinating those who express them, the places they live in, and the realm of ordinary affections and loves that make up their way of life to an ideological blueprint, the demands of corporate capitalism, or a technocratic program of social engineering.

At the same time, the articulation of such aspirations in terms of an American Dream dependent on and inured in environmentally destructive modes of production, consumerism, individualism, racialized and patriarchal cultural norms, and massive concentrations of economic power evinces a distinct “absence of a theologically-informed and socially relevant political imagination.” It brings to mind a line from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “The only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.”1

Morrison’s line can be parsed in the following way: we cannot act in a world that we cannot see. How we describe, name, imagine, and narrate our world makes a difference. Our descriptions situate us in space and time and in relation to others in distinctive ways. For example, if we envision ourselves as autonomous individuals, we situate ourselves in a particular kind of moral and political relation to God and our human and nonhuman neighbors. By contrast, to name ourselves as creatures—and thus as always already in relations of mutual vulnerability, dependency, and care—situates us very differently. How we describe and imagine the world around us is thus a condition of moral and political agency: the ability to act and the kind of action that is called forth depends in part on the description and vision of the world we see. More often than not the ways we describe and imagine the world are shaped by hegemonic points of reference or scripts. But as Morrison lyrically lays out in the rest of the passage I quoted from, a process of reimagining and renaming must be rooted in loving the actual flesh and life together that is so often disrespected, brutalized, and oppressed.

Black rightly points to the difficulty in changing hegemonic frames of reference or scripts. Today, the influences of capitalism and consumerism are perhaps the hardest to see let alone reimagine. To put a twist on Frederick Jameson’s famous quip that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, even alternative universes are imagined in such terms: the political economies of both Star Wars and Black Panther are forms of extractivist capitalism that concentrate power in the hands of an economic, cultural, and political elite.

Community organizing, and I would say democratic politics more generally, is always caught between a conservative need to tend and defend existing ways of life against their destruction or exploitation, and the need to radically reconfigure the world as part of cultivating a more just and loving one. It is thus caught between the need for continuity and change, and so situated, undertakes the work of both binding up and setting free (44; 131). One way organizing has squared the circle of the need to honor an ordinary realm of affections with living into dreams of a better world is through popular education. Alongside building relationships (organizing people and money) and direct action, popular education is the third leg of the organizing stool. But, in my experience, it is the leg that is too often left off, so the stool tips over.

As those familiar with it know, popular education aims to sensitize those involved about their political, economic, and social conditions, and to help them imagine and move towards alternative ways of seeing themselves and their situation.2 Crucial to this process of sensitization (or what Paulo Freire called “conscientization”) is helping people critically reflect on their conditions through broader frameworks of analysis. This is vital for generating an alternative community of interpretation that has the agency to undertake the identification and analysis of a shared problem and thence to develop the ability and strategy by which to act in relation to that problem. It can be contrasted with modes of “consultation” that use polling and focus groups, where both the interpretation of the results and the range of possible policy options presented remain entirely in the hands of the bureaucrats and “experts.”

Crucially, popular education is contextual learning that begins with real world problems. For example, Septima Clark, one of the saints of North American popular education, taught literacy and arithmetic in relation to voter registration or filling in a social security form. As Clark puts it when describing the workshops at the Highlander Folk School:

We have devoted most of our thought and activity at Highlander to the posing and solving of specific problems. We have indulged in considerable theorizing, I must confess, but we have always tried to boil down the theorizing to practical solutions of definite and very pressing problems. And sometimes the solution for one problem spills over to solve a larger one, or one that embraces a larger area.3

While popular education takes seriously the agency of those involved to solve their problems, it can draw on expertise and broader theories. It is just that credentialed knowledge does not have a monopoly of wisdom or insight. The work of Clark in popular education, along with that of Myles Horton and Ella Baker, speaks to the place Black ends: that democratic visions don’t begin with either existing visions of the future or simply defend what already exists, but reimagine the future in ways that are accountable to the realities of life together among these people, in this place, at this time.

Popular education also speaks to the divisions Black names within organizing work and the way the crosswinds of identity and loyalty fragilize shared political endeavors. While it is vital to put lived experience into dialogue with broader frameworks of analysis if parochialism is to be overcome, the converse is also true. It is equally crucial to interrogate interpretative frameworks against the lived experience of those present, and to wrestle with how that experience refines or challenges broader theories and how these theories establish certain lines of interpretation about such matters as racism, sexism, the environment, or Brexit. To build on what I said in response to Lisa Cahill, theoretical and theological abstractions must be kneaded with the soil of human particularity and historical complexity if judgments sufficient to live by in a fallen and finite world are to be generated. In the process of such kneading, the finitude and fallenness of our loyalties and identities can be reflected on and reconfigured so that we might begin to, in the words of Angela Davis, base our “identity on politics rather than the politics on identity.”4 I recognize this is a controversial view at present, when any deviation from certain deeply felt frames of reference can only be heard as treachery.

Let me close by addressing Black’s concern that I don’t “grapple with the costs of organizing on those who engage in it from marginalized communities.” This is a fair critique. By way of addressing it let me point to the work of the feminist virtue ethicist Lisa Tessman, whom I do reference, particularly her very important book Burdened Virtues.5 She does grapple with these costs in ways far more insightful and eloquent that I ever could.

I greatly welcome Nimi Wariboko’s response. I have found his work enormously challenging and enriching and engage it directly in the book. In directing attention to how life in many parts of Nigeria is subject to “governance-as-trauma” that generates a “necropolitical” and “merciless becoming that never comes,” he raises fundamental questions about how to conceptualize chaos, and whether order should be an underlying value in political theology. And in doing so, he touches on the place of violence in the pursuit of emancipatory ends.

Wariboko rightly points to how Christ and the Common Life is self-consciously beholden to Western academic protocols and primarily addresses the North Atlantic world. But the characterization of my constructive proposal as advocating for the “virtue of tolerance and efficient administration and coordination of interests all as undergirded by a Christian commitment to democracy” is not an accurate one. At the risk of sounding overly defensive, I consider it important that I refute this characterization, because it obscures how the account of politics I develop does address Wariboko’s concerns and context.

Contrary to Wariboko’s contention, disruption and conflict are central to my account of democratic politics, which I envisage as a tension-filled dance of conflict and conciliation.1 Indeed, the need for often radical change and how to imagine and narrate such change undergirds my conception of conversion—one of the organizing concepts of the book. Moreover, I explicitly expand politics beyond statecraft so as to account for contexts where a common life can be constructed in the face of state actors who are the primary agents of disorder and trauma—this is a key focus of the chapters on Black Power and Pentecostalism.

Wariboko charges that I, along with the rest of Western political theology, overvalue order. He is right insofar as conceptualizing the nature and proper form of political order is a central concern of Western political theology, a point made with great force by Eric Voegelin in his magisterial, multivolume work Order and History. But I think that no form of political theology, whether Western or not, either can or should avoid addressing how order understood in terms of right relation (love, justice, and communion) connects with or disrupts order as determined by sovereignty, structure, law and governance (with their cognate significations of stability, organization, hierarchy, sequence, regularity, classification, discipline, and institutional arrangements). I am critical of political theologies, notably Anglican political theology, that presume a givenness to the existing order, never questioning who has power and why (e.g., 177; 195–96). Such approaches wrongly presume an identification between order as right relation and order as sovereignty, structure, law, and governance. Conformity to the former can entail the derangement/chaos of the latter. Likewise, I consistently critique the reduction of order to a conglomerate of self-interests, and the associated ways of trying to order and stabilize the world through top down state administration, technocratic procedures, and market mechanisms that subvert a common life. This is part of my overarching account of how, more often than not, existing forms of order are the “sleep of Behemoth”: that is, an unjust tranquility and deranged quiescence that generates order and invulnerability for some by displacing fragility and vulnerability on to others. Rule is often misrule, and those taken to be paragons of virtue frequently need naming as whitewashed sepulchers.

The question of the precarity of life and how to generate the kind of politics Wariboko calls for—that is, an “antifragility” politics through “agonistic struggle” that promotes “freedom and human flourishing”—animates my project as a whole. Indeed, my conception of a common life politics is precisely an attempt to articulate a theological account of what he identifies as vital, namely, “a Wolinesque ‘politicalness’” that creates and energizes a “workable, livable order” amid the depredations of state and market. As part of my account I directly address the Nigerian context (and a parallel one in Guatemala) in the chapter on Pentecostalism, reading what Wariboko calls the “Pentecostal incredible” as a response not only to governance-as-trauma but also to a brutalizing form of capitalism. That said, one does not have to go to Nigeria or Guatemala to experience kleptocratic and exploitative economic regimes and modalities of governance-as-trauma: they are present in the detention centers along the US border, the labor camps in the fields of North Carolina, the streets of Baltimore, and toxic devastation left by mountain top removal in Appalachia. All of which is to say that I don’t recognize the contrast Wariboko draws between the case I make in the book and what he says political theology needs to do. Whether successfully or not, I try to do what he asks for.

This brings me to Wariboko’s constructive suggestion concerning the need to talk of a “chaosmosic” life rather than a common one. This is fertile ground to explore, but much depends on how the relationship between order and chaos is conceptualized. In his account, Wariboko seems at times to operate with a binary between order and chaos, so that each is perpetually divided and opposed to the other in a zero-sum game. More of one equals less of the other. This is a common frame of reference in both ancient and modern political theologies, and one that envisages the order-chaos relation in spatial terms. As I note in the book, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Sumerians all saw themselves as the bearers of a civilized order, in contrast to various “barbarian” others who exist in a realm of chaos outside of the bounds of civilized order. Their creation myths inscribed this distinction into the cosmos. The civilized were children of the gods—and so masters by divine inheritance—whose social and political order was an analogue of the cosmic divine order, while those outside the boundaries of that order were savages in a permanent state of war with the civilized, and thereby naturally fitted to be slaves of the civilized (300). Western colonialism operated with an analogous political imaginary.

Another way to think about the relation between order and chaos is to see the relation as dialectical. As with the binary relation, chaos and order oppose each other, but the conflict is dialectical rather than a zero-sum game, so that it generates a new development that supersedes and sublates the existing forms of order and chaos. Each new settlement generates its own undoing, which in turn generates a new dialectic. Here the relation is not spatial but temporal and takes either a cyclical or progressive form. In the classical Roman and Greek cosmology at work in Hesiod, Virgil and Ovid, there is a golden age from which subsequent ages decline. History cycles through the rise and fall of ages (or empires) and politics is mostly read through a declension narrative. An echo of this can be heard in the use in early modern political thought of an Arcadian state of nature, against which to read either the corruption or civilization of the current order (e.g., Rousseau). There are also contemporary versions of this trope, the current spate of liberal declension narratives being a case in point. In Marx’s historical dialectic, each political economy generates its own undoing and the conflict between the status quo and its “gravediggers” generates a new, better settlement: the chaos of revolution gives birth to a new, better order. Or in libertarian versions, the demand is to “move fast and break things” in a permanent technological and economic revolution of creative destruction where chaos is the price of progress.2 Rather than decline, an ascension narrative of ongoing development towards a final end of history is the dominant frame of reference.

A third way to read the relation between order and chaos is as a dyad: they are mutually constitutive rather than opposed. Conflict can arise between them, but it serves to reestablish a harmony of forces. In the ancient Chinese cosmology associated with both Zou Yan and Daoism, this is symbolized by the yīnyáng symbol. Here the concern is not with order or chaos per se but with the harmony of the whole. A very different, bleaker conception of the mutually constitutive, dyadic relation between order and chaos is increasingly apparent in contemporary political theology; the recent work of Giorgio Agamben is but one example. Such approaches contend that there cannot be freedom without domination, the livable without the unlivable; that order for some is always premised on chaos for others; that a kernel of abjection and horror necessarily lies at the heart of civilization, anarchy at the heart of governance. There is neither progress nor decline, only ever changing, always becoming assemblages of chaos and order. There are times in Wariboko’s response where he seems to draw on this kind of conception.

Christian political theology has drawn on all the above approaches at one time or another. But I contend that normatively a christocentric cosmology is required, even while it echoes and can include elements of those cosmologies just sketched.3 In the New Testament, the term “world” (kosmos) is a synonym for the universal order of things. Before the day of judgment, this order is coterminous with a worldly system opposed to God’s creative energies. New Testament usages of the term kosmos resist a strict dualism between order and chaos (234). In the New Testament, the kosmos is envisioned as a single creation that is at once good but corrupted, and subject to nihilistic forces yet open to its healing and participation in God—and thence open to change. Christ’s rule liberates the kosmos to be the world (an arena of human flourishing to which the church can contribute) rather than worldly (the world turned in on itself so that social, political, and economic relations diminish and desecrate creation). So while I argue in chapter 4 that the church-world relation should be understood as dyadic, the relation between chaos and order should not. Order and chaos are both present within the cosmos, both are subject to Christ’s rule, and each may or may not generate conformity to Christ. What is in question is not chaos and order—as if these are settled matters—but what gets named as chaos and order and by who. Paradigmatically, crucifixion is on one, Roman view a reassertion of order, and on another, theological one, an act of violent chaos that paradoxically points to a deeper order of love (20–21; 195).

Contrary to dialectical notions, history does not bear within itself its own resolution, and there is no inherent direction to history: things will not always get better or worse. To be faithful, Christians should resist both ascension and declension narratives about the direction of history. An eschatological view of history challenges both cyclical and progressivist views. The noncyclical and nonprogressive nature of history means that the fulfillment of the whole is not realizable within history, so any human system or ideology that claims to provide the means of bringing about a final solution is a denial of the fallen and contingent nature of historical existence. Change and redemption are always possibilities, and good and bad are present in all political systems. Theologically understood, this noneschatological age is a deeply ambiguous and paradoxical one in which the world is complexly faithful and unfaithful, loving and idolatrous, chaotic and ordered.

The New Testament language of “empire,” “anti-Christ,” and the “principalities and powers” reckons with the capacity of political, ecclesial, or any authority to act in wholly malevolent ways. It articulates how idolatrous cultural patterns and political systems are something more than simply a distortion: they are evil. A Christian conceptualization of the world as kosmos—a good creation that, after the fall, simultaneously contains the possibility and moments of its own inversion and dissolution—helps capture the ambiguity of our participation in this world. To enable the world to be a place where the gift and vocation of being a creature can flourish, the prevailing social, political, and economic orders must neither be sacralized nor nihilistically divested of all meaning and purpose (236).

The implications of such a view for politics in the kind of sacrifice zones of extreme precarity that Wariboko highlights can be indexed to the history of community organizing. To do so, it is important to realize that someone always benefits and derives value from chaos. This was a central insight of Saul Alinsky when working amid the abjection of the Back of Yards neighborhood in 1930s Chicago, where both animals and humans were treated as commodities to be exploited on an industrial scale, until nothing was left but waste to be discarded. As I document in Resurrecting Democracy, community organizing arose in this context.4 The approach it developed contrasted with numerous other approaches that looked upon such a context and saw only chaos and no basis for political agency. But to see only chaos and victims in such contexts is an anti-democratic fallacy born out of a failure to do a robust power analysis. Alinsky made no such mistake. He saw multiple forms of organization: arrayed on one side were the capitalist corporations of the meat packing industry, the gangs, and big-man machine politics, while on the other were religiously, ethnically, and racially hostile groups, and ideologically opposed factions, with each organized against all. In such a context, the first task of organizing is disorganizing. As Alinsky puts it:

There is no such animal as a disorganized community. It is a contradiction in terms to use the two words together of “disorganized community.” . . . Call it organized apathy or organized non-participation, but that is a community pattern. They are living under a certain set of arrangements, standards, accepted modus operandi and a way of life. . . . Here I would like to state my first proposition; the first function of community organization is community disorganization.5

In other words, the existing assemblage of chaos and order—both always being present—needs redistributing so that a common life in which all might flourish can be pursued. Beside the eighty-plus-year history of community organizing, evidence for the salience of Alinsky’s insights comes from populist, democratic work around the world to reorganize slums and other sites of precarity so that they benefit those who live in them not those who extract from them. Wariboko advocates for taking seriously the kinds of pragmatic political agency already present within such contexts. I wholeheartedly agree and suggest that the kind of theological anthropology, Christian cosmology, and conception of democratic politics I outline in the book contribute to identifying and valuing such agency.

It is precisely my desire to hallow this pragmatic political agency, and to advocate for the kind of christocentric cosmology just outlined, that makes me rule out revolutionary or what Wariboko calls “emancipatory” violence as a form of politics. Contrary to what he suggests, I do not avoid discussing it. Rather, I make the point that the bullet and the ballot box are two incommensurable ways of solving shared problems (35). I also contend that there is no room for being coy or evasive by using a vague term like violence. What is being advocated is the use of beatings, bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, and the like to achieve political ends. Like Hannah Arendt, I see the use of such measures as inherently anti-political.6 That said, I distinguish self-defense of one’s home or immediate community when legal authorities don’t act, or refuse to act, or are the source of intimidation or domination, from the proactive use of violence by nonstate actors to achieve political ends (35). The former can be licit within the framework I develop, while the latter is not. In reference to the book, the Black Panther Party advocated the former, and the Weathermen Underground and the Black Liberation Army, while tiny in number, advocated the latter. The influential work of Franz Fanon can be heard in the background of calls for the latter. However, Fanon’s frame of reference is very different from the long tradition of resistance theory within Christianity that I discuss in the book, and from how it sets up when, where, and how recourse to physical violence may be morally required (417–18).7 Resistance theory feeds into framing such a move within Christian ethics in terms of just revolution/just war theory.8 Such justifications still entail the recognition that in resorting to violence one is stepping outside of politics. While the line between them is blurry and full of grey areas, revolutionary violence is a different moral and social terrain from that which the book addresses. As an aside, it is important to say that even if justification can be made, advocates of revolutionary violence must still contend with the pragmatic and empirical matter of whether it ever actually delivers emancipatory ends (the evidence suggests it does not), and the ways it inherently destroys democratic life with and for others.

To move beyond just revolution / just war theory and consider the possibility of “divine violence” (Walter Benjamin’s phrase) as Wariboko does, demands reckoning with how, in the contemporary context, ISIS/Daesh, al-Shabaab, or any number of other related groups are the paradigmatic form of decolonial messianic violence. We are a long way from the postcolonial nationalist struggles of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s that Fanon’s work spoke to. In light of this, if Wariboko wants to advocate for “emancipatory violence” then the question of whether or not Boko Haram in Nigeria exemplify what he calls for must be engaged with.

Let me close by acknowledging Wariboko’s unique and creative voice in contemporary political theology. He brings an important perspective to bear upon debates mired in the parochial concerns of Europe and North America. I consider it an honor that he would be in conversation with me and I sincerely hope we might find opportunities to talk further in the future.