This is a timely book about the relation of theory to practice and of Christian faith to politics. Its author first crafts a case for a Christian-democratic understanding of person, polity, and justice, and then explores possible implications of this worldview for various U.S. policy issues. The book is brief but thought provoking, written in clear and engaging prose and surveying an impressive range of scholarly literature. Among the chief merits of In Pursuit of Justice are its interdisciplinary character and its breadth. The arguments advanced should interest practitioners of many fields within political science, including political theory, American politics, policy studies, constitutional law, and religion and politics.

James Skillen argues convincingly that one's theoretical or normative foundations cannot help but influence one's concrete judgments on myriad social and civic policy options, and so it is critical that those foundations be laid as solidly as possible. To this end, the book's argument comprises an implicit case for what William Galston (Liberal Pluralism, 2002, pp. 8–9) terms a “comprehensive” (rather than “freestanding”) theory of politics and justice: These cannot be well conceived without reference to other sciences and disciplines, specifically, in Skillen's view, without philosophical-theological anthropology. To probe the nature of politics as a profoundly human activity, art, and science, one cannot abstract from the critical and vexed question of what it means to be human. This question further cannot be resolved, or even properly explored, without some reference to religion and to God.

The book comprises eight chapters. The first three form a unity in their theoretical, foundational emphases, exploring the definition of a “Christian-Democratic Point of View,” the issue of “Civil Society and Human Development,” and the “Question of Being Human.” The following five chapters argue for practical implications of the author's particular Christian-democratic theory for U.S. welfare policy, racial justice, educational equality, environmental protection, and electoral reform. All these are assessed in terms of Skillen's overall goal of advancing the cause of justice within a modern, democratic, differentiated, and diverse political society. Again analogous to Galston's theory (2002), Skillen's is a comprehensive pluralist political perspective. The pluralism of his book revolves around diverse sources and spheres of human responsibility, authority, and association. The role of political life and government is to create a civic “unum” out of this “e pluribus” through a just public ordering of society, not by reducing all associations to parts or extensions of an omni-sovereign political organism.

In contrast to Galston, Skillen presents his pluralist theory of political justice as only tangentially liberal, if indeed it is liberal at all. He is one with liberalism in affirming its central insight “that the mature adult should be recognized as a responsible person and not reduced to a mere pawn of the state or to some other role or relationship”; “[a] just state … recognizes and protects the rights of individual persons as such” (p. 10). But a Christian-democratic perspective parts company with liberalism when it insists that the political community recognize that the human persons who form part of it are created in the image of God and naturally or spontaneously form societies that differentiate greatly over time. These diverse social forms, from friendships to marriages, families to trade associations, businesses to churches and other religious congregations, from towns to political communities, do not originate in and exist for the individual's autonomous choice alone or for the state as such. Rather, they and their members have diverse, virtually inalienable roles and responsibilities for the flourishing of human life.

Skillen takes issue with American liberalism (together with its Lockean theoretical antecedent) for its privatized, compartmentalized conception of religion, and for its attempts to do justice to persons only or primarily as property-owning individuals, or as citizens qua contracted members of the polity. Within this bipolar paradigm, however, it cannot do them justice. From the Christian-democratic, biblically based vantage point of In Pursuit of Justice, government must do justice to its citizens as individual persons and as family members, church members, students, professionals, minorities, or members of particular ethnic communities, and (as Skillen often stresses) as “much more.” This further involves doing justice to the various social groups and associations themselves, facilitating rather than usurping or obstructing their various abilities and social functions. The author employs aspects of Calvinist “sphere-sovereignty” and Catholic “subsidiarity” theory to argue for a broader pluralism of providers, both religious and nonreligious, of publicly supported services within a truly pluralist democratic polity. Representation likewise should be conceived in a simultaneously more holistic and more differentiated, pluralist manner. Chapter 4's exploration of “Charitable Choice” and “Faith-Based and Community Initiatives” for social welfare and Chapter 6 on American public education strike me as his strongest case studies in this regard.

Skillen sensibly cautions against taking the term “Christian democracy” to imply an “identification of the fallible political efforts of Christians with God's will” (p. 3), and yet still contends that a Christian-democratic perspective on politics is a critical component of the American public square and its deliberation concerning social justice. By recognizing the human person as an inherently dignified, social, civic, and religious being made in God's image and likeness and called ultimately to communion with God, this worldview opens up “the only way to do justice simultaneously to (1) individual freedom, (2) multiple spheres of social responsibility, and (3) civic responsibility in the political community” (p. 11). From this perspective, “equal justice for all finds its firmest basis in the creation-sustaining grace of the Creator-Redeemer, not in human reason, altruism, autonomy, or interest group power balances” (p. 12).

This last quotation raises perhaps the most pressing question in the book's argument as a whole. Skillen notes that his foundational, normative theory is a Christian one that builds often from biblical premises, and always from “a particular set of assumptions and … presuppositions” (p. 54). Those with different foundational assumptions may well differ from him in their conclusions about persons, polities, and social justice, but it is also possible that their theories may overlap or converge (p. 54). It is not clear to me whether Skillen is here embracing a form of political-theoretical perspectivism, or whether there is implicit in his foundations something like a natural law that can ground reflections on justice for citizens of varying religious persuasions and nonbelievers as well. He clearly rejects majoritarianism as an ultimate rule in democratic public policy formation (see pp. 66–68), so cannot wish his own “perspective” to be so imposed; and yet if his Christian-democratic paradigm is needed as more than one voice in a wilderness, if he sees it as in some sense an indispensable foundation for a better public order, then a deeper account of the relation between faith and reason in his normative political theory is also necessary. Skillen himself notes the need for “[a] more expansive historical and philosophical justification for the arguments developed” in the book, indicating that one may indeed be forthcoming (p. 7; emphasis added).