What relevance does political theology have for contemporary, seemingly thoroughly secular, political science? In This American Moment: A Feminist Christian Realist Intervention, Caron Gentry builds on her earlier feminist reformulation of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism (“Feminist Christian Realism: Vulnerability, Obligation and Power Politics,” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 18(3), 2016) to understand, critique, and potentially transform what she argues is a moment of crisis in U.S. politics. Drawing on theologians such as Niebuhr, political theorists such as Jean Bethke Elshtain, and feminist international relations (IR) scholars such as Christine Sylvester, Gentry’s book is an important contribution to a newly revitalized strand of political science scholarship affirming the significance of religion in both politics and political thought (see, for example, Nicholas Rengger, ”On Theology and International Relations: World Politics beyond the Empty Sky,” International Relations, 27 (2), 2013; Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion, 2017).
A lifelong Christian and feminist, Gentry presents her book as an immanent critique. She writes, “As a Christian who deeply cares about this world and those within it, it is my duty and responsibility to call out harm. That’s what this book is doing. I would like to see the church do better” (p. xii). Noting that her “faith has always been behind [her] interest in politics and international relations,” Gentry calls for “an integrative approach that allows people’s moral framework to be an acknowledged ontological and epistemological framework in their scholarly discipline” (p. xiii). As such, This American Moment has relevance for politics scholars, religious or not, who wish to think more carefully about the often unacknowledged ethical and spiritual dimensions of their scholarship. Readers unaccustomed to political theology might feel somewhat nonplussed by a book that variously deploys agape, the Trinity, imago dei, and the Book of Genesis in its analysis of racism, sexism, and fascism in the United States, but Gentry makes a strong case for the power of such ideas in analyzing the roots of contemporary sociopolitical cleavages and imagining what can and should be done to address them.
Echoing Niebuhr, Gentry’s account of politics is centered on the problem of anxiety. In this framework, anxiety and the power-seeking behavior it motivates are endemic to the human condition insofar as we are fallible and, hence, vulnerable. For Niebuhr, the only hope for justice in this anxious world lies in the maintenance of security through an international balance of power. Gentry, however, comes to a different conclusion. Despite seeing much of value in Christian realism, Gentry argues that its fundamentally rationalist and masculinist orientation elides the potential of love, in the most expansive sense, for reorienting politics. Drawing on both feminist security studies and a growing feminist literature on emotion, she calls for a politics animated by the Christian idea of agape, in which “creativity, empathy, compassion, and hospitality” (p. 19) are central to the pursuit of justice and equality. Although Gentry’s critique of traditional security approaches will be familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity of feminist IR, her alternative account is particularly compelling because it offers an explicit and cohesive ethical framework for change.
Having introduced feminist Christian realism in the first few chapters, the remainder of This American Moment applies this approach to three manifestations of anxiety within contemporary U.S. politics. Each chapter uses discourse analysis to show how narratives of gendered and racialized Others are constructed as threats to an “American way of life”: “a myth dependent upon masculinist, heteronormative, raced understandings of what a proper life should be and how it should be lived” (p. 16). Chapter 3, for example, addresses police brutality against Black people and the dueling Black Lives Matter/Blue Lives Matter movements. Gentry identifies contemporary narratives of black criminality and the corresponding overpolicing of and police violence against African Americans as reflections of a white supremacist system. Likewise, the racist logic of white supremacy flows through what Gentry sees as the reactive, anxiety-ridden response to the Black Lives Matter movement embodied by pro-police organizations such as Blue Lives Matter and the Fraternal Order of the Police.
In Chapter 4, Gentry takes on the conservative “War on Women,” connecting political efforts to heighten U.S. women’s economic, bodily, and reproductive vulnerability to the rhetoric promoted by misogynist “alt-right” platforms such as Breitbart and men’s rights organizations such as the National Coalition for Men. As in the previous chapter, Gentry emphasizes the significance of anxiety and reactivity in her analysis; in this case “anxieties about the threats to men’s continued privileged postion” (p. 105, emphasis in the original).
The final empirical chapter connects the racism and sexism analyzed in the previous two chapters with the rise of neofascism and the 2016 election of Donald Trump. While acknowledging that fascism is a charged term, Gentry persuasively applies Robert Paxton’s five-stage model (Paxton, ”The Five Stages of Fascism,” Journal of Modern History, 70(1), 1998) to the current sociopolitical environment, arguing that the United States is currently in the fourth stage: the crystallization of power control (p. 131). Identifying fascism as “a political system built entirely upon Othering” (p. 141), Gentry contends that Trump-era anxiety politics finds its apotheosis in the Othering of Muslims and the conflation of Islam and terrorism.
The book as a whole is less cohesive than one might hope, because the empirical chapters struggle to fully develop the perspective presented in earlier sections. Efforts to connect racism, misogyny, and fascism to pervasive anxiety, for example, are more successful than attempts to demonstrate what a feminist Christian realist approach to such problems would entail. In the conclusion, for example, Gentry briefly discusses what a Blue Lives Matter campaign could have looked like had it heeded the feminist Christian realist call for communion, community building, and a “love-infused creativity” (p. 146). The book would have been even more compelling had it included further illustrations of this type or even an additional chapter on paths forward.
None of this is to deny, however, the importance of what This American Moment accomplishes. Gentry’s engagement with and feminist reimagining of Niebuhr demonstrate the value of recognizing religion as a resource for understanding and responding to politics. Even readers who do not share the author’s Christian faith or who are less interested in theological arguments should appreciate her insightful exploration of anxiety as a central element of politics and the need to address this anxiety in creative and constructive ways that affirm our common humanity.
