Disturbed by a vanishing spirit of civil discussion about difficult topics, whether it be the protracted abortion conflict or the long endeavor to make America a more just society, this book by two trained Lutheran theologians addresses not just academic colleagues but all Christian believers—those people of ordinary faith—urging them to seek new pathways to more open, measured, and reasonable debate of such topics. 

I am one of those ordinary Christians, a Catholic Benedictine Sister, with degrees in German Literature and Canon Law. I am keenly interested in the arguments Carr and Helmer make to ease the harsh conditions of conflict our society faces. They diagnose “a sickness in the body of Christ” and hope to work out a theological model for turning intense conflict into productive justice-seeking (5). At stake is the transformation of the body of Christ into an agent of reconciliation, even in a world and church as “messy” as this one. 

As the book points out, the term ‘justification by faith,” so important to Protestant churches, is central to this task: it is “the unique work of the Christian God who takes action on behalf of sinners in order to forgive them their sins.” Justification is more than a cliché—it matters today as a “forensic” public speech act that declares God’s powerful activity and forgiveness (37-39). But it needs updating, they write. The challenge is “how to make sense of God’s restorative word of life in the context of devastation, death, and disputes about how to name and address injustice” (39).

When the authors speak about “updating” justification, I as a Catholic Christian want to cite the historic 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation. As the Declaration states, Catholic and Lutheran churches are now able to “articulate a common understanding of our justification by God’s grace in Christ” as a sound basis of dialogue (8-9). Justification “always remains the unmerited gift of grace” (18). The document does not cover all teachings on justification, but it does encompass a crucial “common understanding” about the basic truth of the doctrine. Remaining differences are no longer cause “for doctrinal condemnations” (9).

To me this joint Lutheran-Catholic Declaration is a perhaps neglected ecumenical piece of the argument that Carr and Helmer make about the way justification creates a foundation for honest dialogue even in discouraging, polarized times. Mention of the Joint Declaration would sharpen their point by including Catholic Christians more directly.

Elsewhere in their book, Helmer and Carr helpfully underscore the practice of listening and discerning. Catholic Christians are familiar with the impact of this practice on ethics and empathy. Discernment can be individual, communal, or “collective and ethical,” as the authors note (10-14); it is the effort to listen to God and the Holy Spirit before we act. In Catholic tradition, attentive listening has not only shaped St. Benedict’s Rule for monastics but continues to be used by Benedictines as well as by contemporary Christians in Latin American base communities; it was used also at the 2023 Bishops’ Synod in Rome. In practice, around a table, eight or so participants take turns stating a personal opinion; this is followed by a period of prayer before the next person speaks. Discussion takes place only after all table participants have spoken. This ensures mutual listening before any discussion. Remembering our baptism—honoring personally our initial belonging to Christ—is the first step toward a larger, mutual listening as we seek to learn how we can serve our neighbors best in our justice-seeking.

Identifying barriers to mutual listening and mutual discernment, the authors revisit the dynamics of heresy and idolatry. It is a useful reminder. They define heresy as “selectively attending to a particular truth to the exclusion of others” (61), and idolatry as “mistaking the finite for the infinite” (211)—for example, taking one particular attitude toward abortion as the ultimate mark of any Christian stance. Idolatry shows up “in our viscerally holding on to partial truths”; it can be found in the refusal to honor the other, or in a stubborn doubling-down in the name of justice (241). I hope the work of Carr and Helmer serves to induce us to use more care and precision when we deploy a word like “heretical” against someone else.

Of special interest in this regard is the authors’ attempt to reframe the abortion debate. The abortion conflict in the last 30 years has degenerated into a war of words in which an ever more rancorous anti-abortion camp claims that their defense of the unborn is the only “Christian” position. The authors talk about “incommensurable ontologies”: the “right to choose abortion” vs. the right to insist on the life of the unborn (108-116). Legal access to abortion and the right to choose abortion regard the pregnant woman as capable of dealing with the complex moral dilemma raised by an unplanned pregnancy. Or as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg stated: a “feminist worldview implies that navigating reproductive rights is integral to women’s social and political rights” (114). While Christian anti-abortion groups often call their opponents “heretical,” they seem to me to be practicing heresy themselves, “selectively attending to a particular truth to the exclusion of others.”

Carr and Helmer further show that the anti-abortion view of women only as birthing and child-rearing is based on patriarchal and essentialist views that exclude women’s actual experiences of complex life situations (113-114), their pain of having been raped or sexually abused, or their dire poverty making it virtually impossible to raise another child besides those they already have. The anti-abortion argument’s exclusive focus on bringing a fetus to full birth effectively denies women the possibility of dealing responsibly with their complex situation, which can include the mother’s own precarious health, her impoverished condition, or her own call to serve society as a mother and a professional woman.

The reversal of Roe vs. Wade exposes what was lost when legal access to safe abortions was discontinued in many states—consider the 64,565 women who were raped in 2022-23 in the 14 states that don’t allow abortions (Internal Medicine research letter, Jan. 24, 2024), or the 50-60 percent of women who get pregnant after their contraceptive malfunctioned (139, n. 49). The latter group includes many women who feel it would be financially and/or emotionally irresponsible to add another child to their family.

The authors’ constructive solution to this bitter impasse is to turn to narrative concepts that involve ideals, icons, archetypes, and other sacred imagery. Community storytelling can become a “search for something akin to a capacious orthodoxy” (153) that leads people on both sides to “a capacity to listen to the full range and register of pregnant women’s lives” and resist on the basis of justification by faith any one-sided positioning—those absolutist, heretical judgments—on either side. In this sense, the authors rescued for me the word orthodoxy, which I had regarded in mostly negative terms. They show how early Christians in a time of high conflict practiced listening, found common elements of agreement, and so were able to find a formulation in the Nicene Creed that was—after a long time of searching—acceptable to both sides.

The book’s last two chapters deal with “political justice-seeking … as a practice of Christian freedom” based on the spacious freedom of the Christian’s baptism into the Body of Christ. The “spiritual discipline of ordinary faith” frees the believer from centering Christian identity on political ideology left or right. Justification by faith decenters all such finite and divisive identities. Then a recentering becomes possible to correct the imbalance: a recentering that “calls out for divine aid to rectify the injustice of our own self-quarantined thinking and action” (230). Jesus himself moved back and forth between the rough-and-tumble world and his prayer in solitude (229-230) Moves between decentering and recentering help to avoid the danger of one-sided ideological faith concepts and support a non-idolatrous search for true justice.

Once again, I find various points of contact between Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times and Pope Francis’ approaches to the problem of conflict. He said recently, “A society without conflicts is a dead society. A society that hides conflicts is a suicidal society. A society that takes conflicts by the hand is a society of the future,” In his book Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future (2020), he shows how an “isolated Christian conscience” can end up in rigid heretical thinking because of the temptation to a pride that makes them feel superior to the Body of Christ, the Church (69), or any Christians of different beliefs. Christ did not found the Church “as a citadel of purity” but rather as a “dynamic school of conversion, a place of spiritual combat and discernment where grace abounds along with sin and temptation” (72). Rather than flee from polarization, we, as concerned Christians, are “to engage with conflict and disagreement in ways that prevent us from descending into polarization” and so allow “new thinking that can transcend division” (77-78). To Pope Francis this requires practicing the “art of civic dialogue that synthesizes different views on a higher plane” (78). 

To me, this is “mutual listening” as Helmer and Carr would have it—a process that integrates insights from many conversations and includes “taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s own positions.” In this way one can create “new measures, new formulations” that enrich orthodoxy (209). As Francis put it in Let Us Dream, the success of this mission depends on “the humility to dispense with what we came to see as wrong,” and the courage to accept views other than our own that “contain elements of truth” (78).

Thus we can find rich parallels between Francis’ analysis of polarization and that of our two Protestant theologians. In his epilogue, Pope Francis declares: “Open yourself … decenter … transcend” (137). Carr and Helmer state on their final page: “aware of our decentering, we need the recentering that comes with being reminded of our primary belonging to the Beloved Community conjured in Christ” (256). This is the great hope in the power of justification by faith to make Christians—all of us—agents of healing in a fraught political era.

We know that democracies are fragile. We also know that U.S. democracy has faced a number of grave threats over the past two and a half centuries. But many of us believe that the current moment is the most dangerous in the nation’s history. U.S. democracy hangs by a thread. I am writing this days after the presumptive Republican candidate for the office of President of the United States, Donald J. Trump—the same man who cheered on an uprising in January 2021 against the U.S. government to seize power after he was beaten at the polls—referred in a Memorial Day message to anyone who disagreed with him or believed him to be accountable to the rule of law as “human scum.” This is the sort of language white Americans have long used to refer to people of color; now it is a common feature of our public life, underwritten by a nebulous but powerful resentment that is the MAGA movement’s oxygen. That it has come to this reaffirms the prescience of Malcolm’s X’s comment about chickens coming home to roost. It is no surprise that Americans are on edge these days, ready to lash out against each other at the slightest provocation. In these circumstances, it is impossible to imagine a book more necessary and urgent than Amy Carr and Christine Helmer’s Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times.

I admire the authors’ confidence and courage. In the way they literally wrote the book, Amy and Christine practiced together the kind of intersubjective freedom they argue is still possible for U.S. democracy, premised on an “open-spirited attentiveness” to the other. I know this because Christine is my spouse and she was sitting at the dining room table during the pandemic year as she and Amy held regular Zoom sessions for the book. It is not incidental that Ordinary Faith comes from two Lutheran women theologians—Lutheran, women, theologians: each of these descriptors is significant—writing in daily conversation in the time of national grief and rage following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in a Minneapolis gutter and against the backdrop of public brawls over mask mandates. All the while Amy and Christine were talking and writing, the meanings of democracy and freedom were being fought out in the streets. I think of the “wall of moms” standing with unfurled umbrellas between heavily armed (and unidentified) federal police and BLM protesters in Portland, Oregon, in mid-summer 2020. It was in such conditions that they wrote their book, deeply mindful of the times. 

Ordinary Faith has broad implications for U.S. democracy and democratic theory, as well as for other modern democracies contending with public spheres bitterly divided religiously and politically. But it is addressed, first of all, to American Christians. This is not because the U.S. is a Christian nation (it is not), but because Christian theologies, metaphysics, and ontologies have been so deeply entwined in U.S. history with the most urgent political questions, explicitly and implicitly; because Christians continue to play such an important role in politics; and, most of all, because a considerable percentage of U.S. Christians, mostly white but not exclusively, in all the churches are doing so much damage today to U.S. democracy in alliance with the alt-right MAGA movement explicitly in the name of Christianity.

It has always been this way: the deepest fault lines in U.S. history are religious, the most fundamental being the division between the saved and the damned—between the elect and the rest, between Christians and Jews, Catholics and Protestants—that the theologies underwriting settler colonialism and anti-Blackness mapped onto race and indigeneity. Whiteness is as much a religious as it is a racial category. The paranoid style of American politics was first of all a religious paranoia. The obsession with borders goes back to anxiety over church membership in the colonial era and the imperative to guard the communion table from the unregenerate. By the early 20th century, conservative and liberal Protestants were no longer able even to recognize each other as fellow Christians; conservative Catholic prelates excommunicated liberal priests and congregations. “Shall the fundamentalists win?” the great liberal minister Harry Emerson Fosdick asked in 1922. “Can the fundamentalists win?” the prominent conservative evangelist Harold John Ockenga countered 25 years later. The answer to the first was a tentative no; to the second a hopeful yes. But the same message was evident in both: the divisions among liberal and conservative Christians in the United States is a zero-sum game, a matter of victors and losers, winner take all. Saved and damned: this metaphysical and ontological absolutism is the original sin of American culture. 

In the interests of winning, mainline liberal and conservative Protestants and Catholics at various times have made common cause with corrupt political powers and colluded in horrors. Think here, for instance, of most white Protestants’ opposition to the labor movement; or of the alliances between Catholic pastors and rapacious urban machines; or of the post-Civil War competition between Roman Catholics and Protestants to participate in federal efforts to deprive Indigenous peoples of their human rights by “Christianizing” them in religious schools. Yes, there has always been Christian dissent—I have my own beloved and sustaining pantheon of Christian heroes of the resistance—but it would be a dangerous mistake to let these transcendent outliers, for this is what they were, obscure the realities against which they contended, in the public sphere and within religious institutions. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” after all, was addressed to the very many good-hearted white Christians who continued in their sanctified complacency not to do the right thing. What makes today’s political situation unique and especially dire is that millions of Christians seem prepared to burn the whole house down to get their way.  

Saved and damned: this inheritance with all its political accruals has given a particular cast to the U.S. public sphere. The United States is a democracy of plural “ontological belongings,” in Amy and Christine’s phrase. The citizens who meet each other in the public sphere do not simply hold different “beliefs,” they live in different worlds. To say religion is essentially about “beliefs” is normative modernity’s sleight-of-hand, but as a description of U.S. civic culture it is deeply misleading, religiously, legally, and politically. “Religion” so defined has been a powerful tool of religious and social discipline, but it does not help us understand the lived religious landscape of the United States. These diverse worlds are generally coincident with kinship networks rooted in genealogy and geography, memory and story, what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild refers to as “special cultures of governance tying politics to geography.” The critical issue is that in a democracy of plural ontologies, people act in the public sphere out of what they experience as the imperatives of divine command—in other words, out of the compulsion of the real—in defense not simply of the moral good, but of the always fragile really-realness of their worlds. This is the way the world is; this is what God wants. The result is civic intransience representing itself as integrity or virtue. Instead of regarding politics as “a theater of deliberations, powers, actions, and values where common existence is thought, shaped, and governed,” a phrase I take from political theorist Wendy Brown, in a democracy of the saved and damned it is the practice of ordained outcomes, what Brown calls “authoritarian moralism.” The ground between worlds—a third space that ought to belong neither to the one nor the other, but to both together as a field for the creative exercise of the democratic political imaginary—becomes the domain of raw power. The contemporary politics of abortion is an example. Dissenters are cast as intolerable others; they must be prevented from living as they wish to live. How do we change this?

Amy and Christine chart a path forward for Christians and on behalf of democracy. Their argument is necessarily theological because MAGA is essentially a religious movement, not only because it has the enthusiastic support of so many conservative Christians but because without Christianity MAGA is nothing. It has by itself no ideological foundation, no ideas or values; this ostensibly political movement almost completely lacks political content of the usual sort. Proposing that the Ultimate Fighting Championship conscript migrants from the southern border into televised cage matches, as Trump did at a recent gathering of conservative evangelicals (who greeted the suggestion enthusiastically) is not really a policy but an expression of the sort of lascivious cruelty in which Trump revels (and some part of his base seems to enjoy). What policies there are, such as deep and immediate tax cuts for the rich, are actually at odds with the interests of his working-class supporters. In its dependence on a particular religious vision, MAGA is like most virulent, far-right anti-modern and anti-democratic movements in the 20th and 21st century: it craves a metaphysics to elevate its ambitions for power and domination to the level of ontological conflict. This is what Christianity gives MAGA. 

Christian nationalism is a protean and frustratingly diffuse term, but it names something real: an anti-modern nationalism of self-identified “orthodox” Christians gathered into a pure and redeemed folk that sets itself apart within a corrupt modern nation. Today, these Christians are galvanized by the pernicious, endlessly reiterated lie that their leader has been morally wronged by agents of the modern state, which makes him into a political and religious victim, and transforms the present moment into a state of exception, which calls for a suspension of the rule of law in the context of political emergency. Alt-right conservative evangelical writer Eric Metaxas has compared Trump favorably to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was imprisoned and then martyred for his participation in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Christian nationalists are provisionally and strategically anti-statist, until the time comes when the state has been refashioned into the instrument of their Christian values and ideas. MAGA, in other words, is less a political movement than a mysticism of righteous alt-right Christian rage and retribution. Trump did not script this; he has been scripted by it, and over the past four years he has more explicitly assumed the mantle of sacrificial suffering offered him by his Christian base, to the extent that he now speaks of the wounds inflicted on him by what he sees as judicial persecution that he bears for the redemption of his people. Eventually U.S. citizens will have to break the spell of this deluded morality play and rebuild their broken public sphere. Christine and Amy’s theological argument, with its emphasis on the freedom of the Christian, provides an opening wedge for beginning this work. 

Their argument comes out of the Lutheran tradition, itself a third space in American Christianity, adjacent to but separate from both Roman Catholicism and Reform Protestantism. From Lutheranism they derive a profound “opposition to a theologia gloria[e] according to which the visible Church was a safe ark of salvation if only one climbed aboard and obeyed the captain’s rules,” as my old mentor, Sydney E. Ahlstrom, once wrote, summarizing the third of Martin Luther’s 1520 reforming treatises, “The Freedom of a Christian,” in which Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times is so deeply grounded. To Christians, Amy and Christine say: you are members of the Beloved Community, not because of your adherence to what you take to be required doctrines or moral imperatives, but by Christ’s grace; it is by Christ’s grace that you are redeemed, your trespasses are forgiven; and by Christ’s grace that you are free. This Christ-given freedom is “determinative of Christian existence” (161). It empowers Christians to attend to the needs of their neighbors for their own sake rather than “to prove” themselves “worthy before God,” and it allows them to pursue “justice-seeking” in the political sphere with those “with whom one disagrees” (168). 

The gerund is important, justice-seeking: this is a ceaseless challenge. Taking what they call “an Augustinian reading of human political history,” Amy and Christine call on Christians in the U.S. to resist “conflating any vision or practice of a nation-state with the Beloved Community or the kingdom of God itself.” Social and political communities of all sorts are marked and limited by the reality of human sinfulness; citing Reinhold Niebuhr, they emphasize the provisional, approximated nature of all human projects (188). Not to recognize this is to incapacitate oneself from developing a capacious and creative social imaginary. Amy and Christine call this failure heresy. In the final chapter of Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, they suggest practices by which Christians might prepare themselves to act freely in the public square. Theology belongs to this repertoire, as does self-critique, repentance, “a spirit of play,” and an open and fearless heart.

It is important to understand that Amy and Christine aim to reorient Christians theologically to democratic political participation. This marks the true contribution of the book: among many segments of the Christian left, there has developed an ethos that rejects ordinary political action in favor of protest, dissent, and critique, driven by a belief in the failure of the liberal state; on the right, the same apprehension of the failure of the liberal state leads to the determination to take its functions over for its own ends. These two political orientations and the theologies on which they are based feed off each other: the abandonment on the left of ordinary politics—in state houses, for example, or on school boards—opened the space for the domination of the political sphere by the right. Amy and Christine propose an ordinary faith for ordinary politics, and if readers on either side of the political spectrum bristle at the use of the word “ordinary” here, they might want to query what this says about their politics. Amy and Christine reject the idea of a state of exception which today in one way or another fuels the political theologies of the Christian right and left. Yes, this is a time of polycrisis, but this is not an invitation to abomination but to democratic engagement. 

As I wrote these sentences, I found myself thinking about an incident I happened to see on the news one night during the pandemic: somewhere in the western U.S., a Christian woman, sobbing uncontrollably, stood up before a panel of public health officials to protest mask mandates. Her face, she cried, was made in the image and likeness of God. By requiring her to wear a mask, civil authorities were demanding that she hide what God had created, “God’s beautiful creation” is the phrase I remember. This violated her religious freedom. She didn’t make this explicit, but in her terror and despair I heard the implication that by requiring masks it was as if public authorities were masking God’s own face. I wondered how this woman might respond to Amy and Christine’s saying that her life as a Christian was not determined by mask mandates, but by what Christ had already done, so that she was free as a Christian to consider her neighbors’ well-being. Even wearing a mask, she was free. Would she be able to hear this? 

I don’t know this woman, of course, and so I can’t anticipate how she’d respond. I hope that, if asked this question in theological language that bridged her world, she would feel recognized, listened to, and acknowledged. There were so many lies raining down on her, many of them calculated for the ends of political power; her ideas of religious freedom were closing her hopelessly in upon herself in fear and rage. “Freedom without society is a pure instrument of power,” to quote Wendy Brown again, “shorn of concern for others, the world, or the future.” Are Amy and Christine being realistic? The likely 2024 Republican candidate proclaims, in the language of Christian eschatology that has so recently discovered, “2024 is the final battle.” The current Speaker of the House, for whom no lie is too egregious for him to repeat on behalf of Donald Trump, flies the Christian nationalist flag of the New Apostolic Revolution outside his Washington, D.C., office. At least one member of the Supreme Court has all but publicly declared himself a Christian nationalist. This is what the country is slouching towards now. Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times offers a theologically robust account of freedom that holds the promise of restoring our social world to a place where it is possible to think and act across differences for the common good. 

References

My thinking in this essay has been deeply informed by historian Fritz Stern’s classic, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961). Stern’s work is all too relevant today.

For an expansive introduction to the distinctive religious and historical consciousness discussed here, see Kathryn Gin Lum, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Gin Lum’s excellent study is broader in its implications than the title suggests.

On the reference to “human scum,” see Kaitlin Lewis, “Donald Trump Blasted for ‘Human Scum’ Memorial Day Post,” Newsweek, May 27, 2024; updated May 28, 2024, https://newrepublic.com/post/181983/trump-memorial-day-rant-carroll-fraud-hush-money.

The story of Portland’s “Wall of Moms” is an interesting footnote in itself to our times; see Jager Blaec, “The Complicated Rise and Swift Fall of Portland’s Wall of Mom’s Protest Group,” Portland Monthly, August 3, 2020, https://www.pdxmonthly.com/news-and-city-life/2020/08/the-complicated-rise-and-swift-fall-of-portland-s-wall-of-moms-protest-group.

Fosdick’s and Okenga’s dueling sermons are available online. A good introduction to the U.S. Christian alt-right’s adoration of Vladimir Putin is Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022).

On the political efficacy of “religion” equated to “beliefs,” see Tisa Wenger, We Have A Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and Michael D. McNally, Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 

I quote Arlie Russell Hochschild from Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016), 14. Also cited here is Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocractic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 56, 59.

For Trump’s plans for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, see Chris Cameron, “Donald Trump Said He Proposed a ‘Migrant League of Fighters,” New York Times, June 22, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/22/us/politics/trump-migrant-fighters.html.

On Eric Metaxas’s view of Donald Trump as Bonhoeffer, see Bob Smietana, “Eric Metaxas on Trump, Bonhoeffer, and the Future of America,” Religion News Service, September 27, 2019, https://religionnews.com/2019/09/27/eric-metaxas-on-trump-bonhoeffer-and-the-future-of-america/.

The comment on theologia gloria[e] is from Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 75. Wendy Brown’s reflection on “freedom without society,” is from In the Ruins, 45. 

I pose two questions to the authors, and then extrapolate my concerns in the paragraphs that follow. What is the role of “power” in “the decentering of going out into the world”—a crucial phrase in Ordinary Faith for the work of transgressing the boundaries of “us vs. them”? Specifically, what does it look like in the face of the seemingly intractable conflict and resistance that met the marches and organizing for Black lives, or, conversely, in the attempt to engage the people that attend Donald Trump rallies and support the Jan 6th march on the U.S. capital? Second, what role does “reconciliation” play in the practices of shaping and forming the “Beloved Community”? I pose these questions because I think the book speaks importantly to those of us who study social movement building for justice and democratic transformation.

Love, justice, and power

The authors orient their appeal to the aspiration of the Beloved Community both as an ideal, but also as emergent traces of that community in the here and now—in the uses made of that concept by Martin Luther King Jr. (26, n 21). What practices, what kind of community and social movement organizing, does this take? And where, from the authors’ perspectives, does power fit into this account? I ask, because King himself came to realize later in his life that any appeal to the public, political transformational capacity of the sacrificial love of Christ that manifests through nonviolent direct action would have to reckon with—to account for, and subsume and transform—power.

For example, by the mid-1960s King’s agape-driven account of nonviolent resistance and change was running headlong into a wall of refusal of many younger civil rights activists who believed it to be simply self-deprecating, and ultimately self-destructive—precisely because it failed to realistically come to terms with forms of power they were up against, and which were out to destroy them.1 King responded by mediating the terms of the opposition. He argued that the subsumption and transformation of both love and power in agape transforms both—by mediating them through the lived, cultivated practices of pursuing justice.2 For King, this is one way to put into practice the “works of love that strive to establish justice for the neighbor” (as Carr and Helmer phrase it). As a result, the ensuing nonviolent direct action is neither pacifist nor passive. It is, rather, strategic, forceful, powerful, persuasive, disruptive, tension-generating, and, when appropriate, confrontational—all in the service of pursuing and sustaining the end goal of the Beloved Community. 

If we think both within and beyond the bounds of Christian theology and Christian community, there are many ways to conceptualize analogous forms of love. The revolutionary social justice and civil rights activist Barbara Deming mediated love and power in her response to Frantz Fanon’s increasingly influential account of the indispensability of violence in order to adequately confront one’s oppressor (and, more specifically, the violence intrinsic to settler-colonialism). Deming affirmed Fanon’s diagnoses, but mediated love and power in a way analogous to King (though without relying upon agape per se). Indeed, Deming’s might be called a secular love in the sense that she did not derive it from a particular religious tradition or background. So, power in the form of pressure of which Deming writes, infused by love, is mediated through practices of justice-seeking.3 In my view this captures in a not-explicitly Christian way the kind of “permeability of boundaries” and boundary-crossing and interaction with those we are inclined to feel that we must oppose by default (contravening inclinations toward purity), that Carr and Helmer urge us toward in their book. 

The writings and work of figures like Gandhi, King, and Deming have gained significant new attention in recent years. This contemporary attention celebrates the nonviolent force (power) by which they vied for justice while separating those efforts from the specific vocabularies or mandates of love. Recently, this has been confirmed most influentially through Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth’s Why Civil Resistance Works (with article-length updates to that book).4 Political scientists began to pay attention when the authors’ statistical analysis demonstrated that, across 100 cases in the twentieth century, nonviolent civil resistance achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with a 26 percent success rate for violent resistance campaigns. But the purpose of these actions was to achieve one’s goals, to win, and to do so with the use of nonviolent weapons and instruments because those are more likely to succeed. This is nonviolence as strategy, or “strategic nonviolence.” Chenoweth and Stephan do not see love as informing their view of nonviolent power in pursuit of justice. And, arguably, because they do not factor in love, you find no account of what can and ought, and must, happen on the far side of the nonviolent use of power. 

Nevertheless, in recent years of research and activism I have come to be persuaded that some version of love is really indispensable for nonviolent direct action to be transformational in the long-term (and not just be a different, statistically more likely way to win). I am persuaded of this for two reasons that Carr and Helmer’s account of conflict powerfully illuminates, on one point explicitly, on another point, more subtly: explicitly regarding the role that love must play in promoting and expanding the Beloved Community, and more subtly in what their account implies for the indispensability of reconciliation between opponents on the far side of conflict. 

Reconciliation 

When positioned within the context of the Beloved Community, as Carr and Helmer have it, reconciliation is best understood in terms of what peace and justice studies scholars call conflict transformation. In such an account, the Beloved Community is not void of conflict, but rather recognizes conflict as surfacing life-giving opportunities to transform the elements of conflict, to participate in conflict in ways that are productive and constructive and, if you will, healthy (healthy conflict). This contrasts with engaging in conflict in ways that degenerate into destructive forms of relationship.5 “Reconciliation” here means that the resulting state of affairs, including the pursuit of justice, has to embody a multi-directional dynamic of working through conflict. It cannot simply be a form of getting what one wants from one’s opponent—of winning—even if by nonviolent means. Nor, by contrast, can it only entail the moral and spiritual self-inventory of “turning the searchlight inward” in ways that respect one’s opponent. The seeking, striving for, and pursuit of justice must mediate power and love. In so doing, as Gandhi said, it must seek to “Bring one’s opponent to his senses rather than to his knees.”6 This striving cannot present itself with the hubris of vindicating a pure and holy righteous cause—not in practice, at least. And thus, from time to time, we must expect to be brought to our senses as well. 

Why? Carr and Helmer offer a theological answer to this question that speaks to the very heart of nonviolent social organizing and conflict transformation. Namely, it is because these are real causes of real people. This means the causes, like the people, are complicated and shot through with partiality, fallibility, and imperfection. Even at the same time that the work of justice may be pursued and even successfully achieved, it will also, inevitably, be shot through with partiality, fallibility, imperfection. It is precisely for this reason, Carr and Helmer tell us, that Christians must practice trespassing the boundaries and borders of “us and them,” and remain open to—and teachable in the face of—traces of wisdom and the mysteries of God in whichever territory they are traversing.   

In the case of King, a refusal of claims of the purity of one’s cause and a recognition of the humanity of one’s opponents meant that he had to treat the sneering white supremacist that he nonviolently fought against as a person who was sick rather than evil. This was a person inestimable in value, deserving of love, and, as such, not someone to be simply defeated and cast aside. But in order to give meaning to love, the ends and the means of resistance had to be consistent—that is, loving in both character and kind, and driven by hope for the Beloved Community and thus, some form of reconciliation. 

Does refusing to ascribe purity to either side of the conflict—that is, does agreeing with Carr and Helmer that “the kingdom is near and trespasses borders of Jew and Gentile, oppressor and oppressed” (226)—mean that those who fight to transform injustice may have something to learn from (or reasons to be open to) those who they struggle against, including those who oppress them or are beneficiaries of their oppression? This is yet another question that Carr and Helmer force us to confront, and I think this is one of the most challenging points they make (230). The authors write of this in terms of “decentering from group identification on matters of justice.” It is a powerful move precisely because it complicates the distinct, dichotomous accounts of oppressor and oppressed. It points out that these are complex, shifting identifications. And this means that those who fight for justice and those who seek solidarity with those fighting for justice must do so in a way that does not seek to simply vanquish or banish those they position as their opponents, however nonviolently.

If, as the authors recommend, we take an approach of integrating theological discernment with social scientific investigation in the form of a justice-seeking orthopraxis (247), what example of empathy for “oppressors” comes to mind? Such empathy requires listening to them, working to understand and thickly describe the full depth of their circumstances and contexts, and, learning newly about them, learn about ourselves in relation to them, and learn about the nature and character of the justice that we must envision and seek in relation to them. 

One example might be Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness.7 Here, through social scientific studies of white peoples’ responses to healthcare policy, public education, and 2nd amendment policy, we find that countless lower and increasingly middle socio-economic class whites are devoutly if unwittingly committed to supporting politics and policies, and participating in social movements that shorten their lives, damage their health, lower their overall quality of life and standard of living, placing them at greater risk for self-harm and death by accident and by suicide—sinking them deeper in actual suffering. Yet the politics and policies exert the power they do by appearing to lift them out of despair—it generates the experience of (it feels as though) it lifts them out of despair. It promises a symbolic wage of respect, meaning, value, esteem, and a sense of agency in putatively retrieving something that has been/is being lost. 

Metzl’s analysis recognizes, on one hand, that the people in question are key supporters—indeed the populist engine driving—an ethno-religious nationalist ethos and politics, a regime manifest in Trumpism. It is a regime of symbol and meaning that defines itself over against and, in effect, targets and marginalizes minority communities, immigrants, and so forth. It plays on the fear of a group’s withering away and being replaced. But Metzl shows his readers that this group is not simply “their own worst enemies” or “stooges” or “victims of false consciousness.” They are in search of respect and significance, in search of some hope for the future. Very often, they are persons and communities who are suffering. Those of us who work in the study of religion might say that their embrace of ethno-religious nationalist sensibilities are efforts to make and sustain meaning and generate agency. Moreover—and here Carr and Helmer’s analysis can be read so as to converge with Metzl’s to generate a synergy between theological discernment and social scientific investigation as a form of a justice-seeking orthopraxis—any attempt to engage them in the ways the authors prescribe (that is, in ways that “trespasses borders of Jew and Gentile, oppressor and oppressed” (226)) will have to pass through empathetic understanding (as opposed to demonizing dismissal). On that basis it will attempt to connect with them and perhaps alter them—to “bring them to their senses rather than to their knees” in ways that are, likewise, respectful and open to possibilities for moving together with them in the direction of the Beloved Community. But the latter means that all sides will be altered and changed through the kinds of charitable, but demanding, encounter this requires. 

Metzl portrays these people as ordinary, everyday people. At the same time, some of the folks in question mean business when they celebrate, for instance, their AR-15s. Some of them occupy the Michigan state capital, or storm the U.S. capital. Justice seeking through the mediation of power and love might entail resistant opposition to them. However, if conducted in the spirit of King and Deming, this would be an encounter that seeks their well-being, and ultimately, a mode of engagement that would envelop all of us in the practices of the Beloved Community. How could this be possible? I will leave that question for the authors. But this kind of deliberation—which Carr and Helmer urge us toward—is necessary for the “theocentric piety in which Christians continue to ask how we are seeking and holding together all the relevant truths in our picture of justice in and through the Beloved Community” (248).