The Politics of Discipleship (The Church and Postmodern Culture)

Becoming Postmaterial Citizens

Ward, Graham, Smith, James K. A.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781441206473
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

Internationally acclaimed theologian Graham Ward is well known for his thoughtful engagement with postmodernism. This volume, the fourth in The Church and Postmodern Culture series, offers an engaging look at the political nature of the postmodern world. In the first section, "The World, " Ward considers "the signs of the times" and the political nature of contemporary postmodernism. It is imperative, he suggests, that the church understand the world to be able to address it thoughtfully. In the second section, "The Church, " he turns to practical application, examining what faithful discipleship looks like within this political context. Clergy and those interested in the emerging church will find this work particularly thought provoking.

SECTION 1

THE
WORLD

1

Democracy

Crisis and Transformation

The domination of “capital” behind the scenes is still no form, though it can undermine an existing political form and make it an empty façade. Should it succeed, it will have “depoliticized” the state completely.1

Washington

The complexities, ambiguities, and downright paradoxes in the relationship between the people and sovereign power are nowhere more evident than in that shrine to modern democracy, the Lincoln Memorial. Ascending the tiers of steps, one enters the darkened portico, on the left wall of which is incised an excerpt from Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, ending with “That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” But who are the people? One looks around at a heterogeneous crowd of tourists—American, British, Japanese, Mexican, Chinese, Indian, and so on. Who claims to be the people? Who legitimates that claim? And there, towering grandly above everyone, Lincoln sits, for all the world like a Roman deity, an Augustus Caesar soliciting worship for the miracle of Pax Romana—not exactly one of the people, one of the crowd of diminutives swooping, like flocks of birds, in and out of the temple to democratic freedom. It seems that some people are more powerful than other people, for they are people makers. From the steps, one searches across the civic space below, Constitution Gardens. The object of Lincoln’s gaze is not the Capitol, which is occluded from this perspective, but the Washington Monument. Lincoln, as the symbol of American democracy, democracy as a republican religion, gazes reflectively at the inauguration of presidential power that occurred with Washington. The state buildings stretching down Constitution Avenue to the invisible Capitol reinforce this sense of an imperium, a democracy upheld by patricians. And the people? One has to descend the steps to that public space made so famous in the civil-rights marches. The people are found here on the plain; they cover the ground from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. The people are either the tourists, the venerators with their camcorders, or the remembered dead—the Vietnam dead, the Korean dead, and those four hundred thousand who died in the Second World War. Freedom, one is reminded in a terse paradox, demands a cost. Democracy, it seems, requires sacrificial bloodletting and the piled-up flesh of the people, by the people, for the people. And in a profound expression of these tensions in the relationship between the people and sovereign power—civic space surveyed and surrounded by imperial might—one discovers Friedrich St. Florian’s National World War II Memorial. The memorial stands at the center of the park and beneath the Washington Monument, at the confluence of Constitution Avenue and Independence Avenue. It celebrates the American triumph in bringing an end to the Second World War, the American victory that reestablished the new pax mundi. And how strikingly close the design of the circle of pillars is to the work of Albert Speers for the Munich Olympics of 1936, the stage set for Hitler’s first great international demonstration of power. Only it was opened officially May 29, 2004, by George W. Bush.

The introduction drew attention to a distinction between micro-and macropolitics and to a trend away from the former toward the latter. This first of three chapters delineating the context within which the call to political discipleship for Christians is announced will examine the implications of this trend with respect to liberal democracy. The history of democracy is a fragile one, as we will see, with some now calling our present condition “postdemocratic.” I will argue for the need, in such a condition, to revisit the theological foundations of sovereignty.

“Today the concept and practices of democracy are everywhere in crisis. . . . And the constant global state of war undermines what meagre forms of democracy exist.”2 So say Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. But democracy is and has always been a slippery term. The CIA World Factbook, defining democracy as “a form of government in which the supreme power is retained by the people, but which is usually exercised indirectly through a system of representation and delegated authority periodically renewed,” lists several types.3 Parliamentary democracy (United Kingdom), federal democracy (Australia), federal republic (Austria), parliamentary republic, multiparty democracy, confederation with parliamentary democracy (Canada), constitutional republic (Iceland), and constitutional monarchy (Sweden) are the most prominent.4 The starting point for the investigation here, however, is not some abstract definition but the fact that the countries constituting the West (the context in which I am most immediately implicated) define their government practices as democratic. The functioning of these democracies differs. Some have proportional representation and others a “first passed the post” electoral system; some have a two-tier system (the House of Commons, the House of Lords) and some do not; some give greater powers than others to local governments (the German Bundestag and the sixteen federal states composing the Bundesrat). Each country would view the practices of its government as democratic despite the Greek origins of the word (“rule of the people”) and although democracy in these countries is not the exercise of power by the people, whose mandate has frequently been questioned, even feared, by political scientists from Aristotle to Tocqueville on the grounds of “mob rule” or the “tyranny of the majority.” The exercise of power by the people in these democracies is indirect—that is, conducted through systems of representation and delegation. This is why democracy in these countries is called “liberal democracy,” for “liberal” here signals the withdrawal of state power so that individuals might exercise their maximal freedoms as long as they do not injure or infringe the freedoms of other individuals. So in liberal democracies, government issues through open public discussions between representatives elected by the private balloting of individual subjects. We will see why, because of this association of liberalism and democracy, “liberal democracy” remains a slippery term, a term always under negotiation.

It is appropriate here to make a distinction between democratic polity and democratic culture or ethos, without suggesting one is prior to, and the cause of, the other. The distinction relates directly to that between macropolitics and micropolitics. “Polity” here means, after the Oxford English Dictionary, a particular form of political organization, a form of government. Democratic culture or ethos, however, refers to the political values (freedom of the individual, equal opportunities, the right to property, human rights, tolerance, etc.) and practices (freedom of speech, open debates, equality before the law, even sanctioned resistance on critical matters, etc.) that are lived out and fostered by the societies governed by such a polity. It is not a simple case of the polity creating the culture, for democratic polity has evolved with the rise of the modern nation-state and the development of public law from the sixteenth century onward. Certain cultural changes (the rise of the bourgeoisie, who constituted early civil society; the development of natural law and its correlate public reasoning; the turn to the subject; etc.) fostered what Charles Taylor has termed the “modern social imaginary”—ideas about how we should live and how we should organize ourselves.5 Democratic polity and democratic culture exist as a complex interaction and at times can call each other into question. Culture can be said to question polity when the police break up a peaceful protest or when a documentary exposes the suspension of habeas corpus for certain classes of people detained in a democratic country. Policy can be said to question culture when laws ban the right to smoke in public areas or the government demands the distribution of identity cards.

The distinction between democratic polity and democratic culture maps on to the distinction between the public and the private. As the Italian political scientist Norberto Bobbio observes, the origins of the distinction between public and private lie in the difference between public law and private law in Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis.6 It has a checkered history, for until the rise of the state there was no public law as such, only private contracts between particular parties. But Bobbio shows that the distinction between public law and private law is not simply formal but evaluative: there are times when the private is viewed as having primacy over the public and vice versa. Liberalism’s demand for a minimal state and an extensive civil society is the modern face of the primacy of the private over the public.7 Alternatively, “practically speaking, the primacy of the public means the increase of state intervention in the coercive regulation of individuals and sub-state groups.”8 In the terms employed above: there are times when polity seeks to dictate particular social and cultural mores, and there are times when social and cultural forms of behavior challenge the perceived incursions of polity.

Why do these distinctions between polity and culture, public and private, become important for our present analysis? They correlate with macro- and micropolitics and with the trend away from the latter to the former. In order to understand this correlation and its implications for the current political situation, which some scholars have begun to call “postdemocratic,”9 we need to appreciate the fundamental tension that is at the heart of what we call liberal democracy and that continually calls its identity into question. Bobbio has explored this tension, noting that there can be democracies that are not liberal and forms of liberal government that are not democratic. The moral and political virtue paramount in liberalism is liberty, understood negatively as the maximal freedom of the individual from harm or coercion by another, and the moral and political virtue paramount in democracy is equality, understood as the maximal extension of the franchise and equality of opportunity (to education, to ownership of property, to career advancement, etc.). These two ethics rest on two understandings of what it is to be human:

Libertarianism and egalitarianism are rooted in profoundly divergent conceptions of man and society—convictions which are individualistic, conflictual and pluralistic for the liberal; totalizing, harmonious and monistic for the egalitarian. The chief goal for the liberal is the expansion of the individual personality, even if the wealthier and more talented achieve this development at the expense of that of the poorer and less gifted. The chief goal of the egalitarian is the enhancement of the community as a whole, even if this entails some constriction of the sphere of individual freedom.10

The liberal state is older than modern democracy. It flourished on the ground of natural human rights as distinct from the divine and absolutist rights of kings, trumpeting both religious and economic freedom for self-expression and development. It safeguarded these rights and freedoms in legislation (constitutional and juridical), further limiting executive power by fostering a climate of diverse and conflicting opinion. The epithet “laissez-faire” may have described the liberal view that economic progress arose through competition, but it also described the mechanism for progress in liberal culture more generally. “A free market in some opinions became a free market in all opinions.”11 Freedom of conscience finds expression in freedom of opinion, and both enjoy freedom of the press. But competition and conflict are both inegalitarian. The extensiveness of civil society, championed by liberalism, looked upon government as a necessary evil, an artifice constructed on the basis of a common and contractual consent. Liberalism demanded from the state only one thing—one very important thing as we shall see: security.

Democracy, by contrast, views the individual as part of a more important whole, reconciling “individual and society by making society the product of a common agreement between individuals.”12 It fosters cooperation and seeks not only equality before the law (that the liberals concede) but also a wider cultural equality that includes the redistribution of wealth. This requires a more extended notion of government, for the state must intervene to ensure the movement toward maximal equality and a culture of interdependence. Freedom of individual choice is curtailed on the bases of public necessity and the common good, a government’s executive power now being viewed as positive and socially beneficial. The universal extension of the franchise developed forms of democratic participation in terms of public and accountable electoral systems and government through representation. But democracy challenges liberalism most strongly in its implicit affiliation with socialism and a welfare state.

Historically, the liberal states advocated by figure...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Preface
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Proviso
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1: The World
• Section 2: The Church