With this book, Luke Bretherton responds to a vexing question: How should a Christian living in an urban context of “overlapping multiple modernities” faithfully respond to the totalizing realities of the state, the market, and civil society? Bretherton’s answer, which is particularly germane to the UK, challenges all Christians of the West to find ways to cooperate with those unlike themselves in the pursuit of common goods (he eschews the notion of “the common good”), for in seeking the welfare of others, one’s own welfare is found (Jeremiah 29:7). Using case-study analysis, Bretherton maps a course of Christian witness that rests upon “the constitutive political act” of the church: listening (p. 100).
At the outset Bretherton considers the nature of the church’s relationship to the state by reviewing how the state has funded faith-based organizations. He argues that the church “should be extremely wary about partnership given the current terms and conditions of cooperation on offer” (p. 32). For Bretherton, the state’s terms are nothing short of a Rawlsian political liberalism, which fails to aid in the detection of common goods because it excludes religious discourse from political life, it constrains the basic reasons for people’s actions, and it denies non-rational and non-verbal engagement in public considerations. Bretherton wants to move beyond political liberalism, to a post-liberal, post-secularist theological politics that “presumes a liberal constitutional order, the rule of law and a self-limiting state” (p. 48). In this paradigm, a means of cautious cooperation with the state can be discerned, in order to avoid co-option.
For Bretherton, engagement with others in the pursuit of common goods occurs on three planes—the local, the national, and the global. On the local plane, common goods are secured when churches participate in broad-based, local, community organizing. To illustrate, Bretherton turns to the strategy of Saul Alinsky, an influential American community organizer of the mid-twentieth century. Alinsky’s approach required disciplined formation and fostered common life in the midst of injustice to ensure that those excluded from decision-making processes in urban centers had the power to act in defense of common goods. Bretherton argues that Alinsky’s approach has many affinities with Christian theology, particularly Augustine’s understanding of politics in the saeculum—that ambiguous time in between Christ’s ascension and return, when both Christians and non-Christians exist in a single reality and negotiate an earthly peace. Accomplishing this demands a community of listeners.
Listening at the local level, however, extends to the national reality of human migration and the treatment of refugees. Here Bretherton develops an account of a Christian cosmopolitanism. The crux of his vision rests on a sense of “bare life”—the refugee’s minimalist existence—which animates the church’s response to all who exist outside the rule of law due to their political status. Through worship Christians move beyond the ties of place and kinship to include all who need God’s help because even bare life is to be hallowed. Bretherton views the Sanctuary Movement in the US as a tangible example of this in action, where churches extend the benefits of law to refugees, even and especially when the state fails to do so.
In the global realm faithful witness takes on the form of political consumerism, by which Bretherton means a consumption that is circumscribed by Christian desire. Such consumerism challenges the structures, organization, and priorities of today’s global market. Through fair trade, for instance, goods are produced in more environmentally sustainable ways, patterns of consumption are recast, and claims are made upon states, corporations and institutions. Political consumerism also cultivates virtue by concretizing neighborly love, the pursuit of justice, and humanizing capitalism. Bretherton is seeking ultimately a hospitable political witness that can withstand every totalizing force impeding democracy and the securing of common resources.
Though the book is a learned and stimulating work, it is not without its shortcomings. First, Bretherton is overly occupied with an almost too immanent reality. He assumes that the systems and structures of this world constitute the foundational and immovable loci of Christian politics. His eschatology is thus insufficiently realized, rendering his ecclesiology penultimate to the greater “space” in which common goods may be discerned, shared, and defended. Second, Bretherton’s attempt to redeem the notion of consumption reveals a profound underestimation of the insidiousness of capitalism. I wonder, then, if he is not unlike those “humanitarians” who, as he puts it, fail to address the structural nature of injustice, “so that while the symptoms may be ameliorated, the causes of the problem are at best ignored and at worse legitimated or colluded with” (p. 141). Third, while the book is clearly concerned with questions of missiology, Bretherton’s argument that the legal-constitutional, liberal-democratic nation-state can be critically aligned with Christian existence undermines the church’s radical witness. In the end, Bretherton’s proposal requires little risk, and without risk, there can be no martyrdom.
These criticisms do not diminish Bretherton’s skills and gifts as a theologian. He confronts his readers not simply with theory and abstraction, but with on-the-ground, practical approaches for living an authentic Christian existence. While I remain unconvinced by his project, I would recommend the book to all theologians, priests and informed laity interested in the contemporary relationship between church and state.
