78 - Beyond Sectarianism?

Beyond Sectarianism?

By Michael J. Quirk

In his collection of essays, A Community of Character, Stanley Hauerwas questioned the compatibility between political liberalism and the way of life informed by Christian belief and practice. "Liberalism" in Hauerwas' political writings signifies something quite different from "liberalism"' in common parlance: it is the belief that "society can be organized without any narrative that is commonly held to be true,"¹ or "that impulse deriving from the Enlightenment project to free all peoples from the chains of their historical particularity in the name of freedom."² Liberalism thus defined is quite close to Ronald Dworkin's understanding of it as the belief that "justice" is independent of any particular conception of "the good life."³ This sort of political individualism includes political stances which would be labeled "conservative" as well as "liberal."

I

Hauerwas' brief against liberalism-that it ignores human beings' historical rootedness, that it vainly attempts to derive material principles of justice from a formal norm, that its preoccupation with individual "interests" promotes a social order where everyone is a manipulator and no one a friend-is reminiscent of those formulated by Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Charles Taylor.⁴ These political philosophers have, in their recent work, tried to revitalize the tradition of "civic republicanism," a tradition which defines the best political order as one in which individuals share a common identity, participate in an attempt to formulate a good common to all, and jointly pursue that good. "Civic republicanism" attempts a critique of the atomistic individualism inherent in all varieties of liberalism without failing into the blind alleys of rigid traditionalism and Marxism's "dialectic of violence."⁵ Against liberals, traditionalists, and Marxists,

Michael J. Quirk teaches philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He has also taught at Fordham, Drew, Iona College, and Molloy College. He received his doctorate in philosophy in 1984 at Fordham, and has published a number of articles on ethical issues and contemporary currents in philosophy.

¹Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 12.

²Stanley Hauerwas, Against the Nations (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985), p. 18.

³"Philosophy and Politics," an interview with Bryan Magee, in Men of Ideas (New York: Viking, 1979), p. 250.

⁴See Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers, Vol. II: Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice(New York: Basic Books, 1983); Aladsair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); and William M. Sullivan, Reconstructing Public Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

⁵See MacIntyre's critique of conservatism in After Virtue, pp. 206-7, as well as his attack on Marxism, ibid., pp. 103-4, 235, and 243-44.

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civic republicans insist upon the priority of politics; they stress the public nature of the individual citizen's identity, and the indispensability of a sense of civitas, of solidarity and fellowship with others in the political community.

Hauerwas is surely aligned with this movement: he relies heavily upon its logic and its rhetoric. But Hauerwas cannot be said to belong to it. His musings do not lead to the polis but to the church, not to solidarite, but to agape. Civic republicanism is still a form of humanism. A commitment to Christianity entails allegiance to a story which is inevitably alien to all forms of secular political institutions, however "humanistic" they may be. Christianity has a distinctive viewpoint, as it has a distinctive story about Jesus Christ and his Kingdom to tell. This entails the distinctiveness of Christian ethics, and the futility of trying to sublimate that distinctiveness in such a way as to be acceptable to the secularist sensibility.

If the Christian moral perspective is distinctive, as Hauerwas insists it must be, then it would seem that some sort of "sectarianism," or withdrawal from secular politics and "the world," is called for. Hauerwas often seems to drift in that direction:

The church does not exist to provide an ethos for democracy or any other form of social organization, but stands as a political alternative to every nation, witnessing to the kind of social life possible for those that have been formed by the story of Christ.⁶

In Against the Nations, however, Hauerwas denies that the distinctiveness and irreducibility of the story-formed Christian perspective is a recipe for "sectarianism." In each of the essays, Hauerwas tackles a serious theoretical or practical problem with political overtones and tries to show how Christians can contribute to social and political discourse and action while remaining faithful to the narratives that inform and direct their lives.

In "On Taking Religion Seriously: The Challenge of Jonestown," for example, Hauerwas takes issue with the dominant liberal consensus that Jones and his followers were crazy or deluded. This suggests that a religious commitment as intense as that made by the citizens of Jonestown is simply insane-that no one should take religion that seriously. But, Hauerwas insists, the depth of conviction evidenced in Jonestown is one which all Christians should display. The true tragedy of Jonestown is not that its members died for a mere religion, but that they died for a false one-that they failed to use their imagination and show attentiveness to the Christian story (and its proscription of suicide), which would have exposed Jones as a fraud. Liberal presumptions--doctrinal "truth" is not a matter for public debate but one of private preference-which undergird arguments against cultism actually encourage repetitions of tragedies such as Jonestown.

Hauerwas tackles more theoretical issues in other essays. In "On

⁶Community of Character, p. 12.

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Keeping Theological Ethics Theological," he reiterates the conviction voiced by MacIntyre⁷ that theology, in its attempt to remain intelligible within modern culture, has actually emptied itself of its distinctive theological content, as modern intellectual culture is deeply antagonistic to its presuppositions. Hauerwas argues that the quest of moral theologians to recast the moral sensibility of Christianity in terms that are philosophically neutral has failed, since it constitutes a reduction of moral theology to moral philosophy. Hauerwas traces a short history of moral theology, from Rauschenbusch and the Niebuhrs to Paul Ramsey and James Gustafson, and notes that each attempt to fit a distinctively moral stance within the prevailing liberal culture has succeeded only in producing a new variant of "culture-christianity"-a tacit underwriting of moral and political assumptions that are ultimately foreign to Christianity. Instead, Hauerwas suggests, Christian theologians should stop trying to square their distinctively Christian moral viewpoint with that of secular culture, and instead proclaim it as a true alternative.

Hauerwas' antipathy to any attempts at reconciling church and Christianity with any version of the secular state is strongest in "The Reality of the Church: Even a Democratic State Is Not the Kingdom." He takes issue with Richard Neuhaus' conviction that Christianity and (liberal) democracy are mutually supportive, and that Christianity can and must ground American-democratic institutions in their present-day struggle against totalitarianisms of the left and right.⁸ Hauerwas, while as vigorously opposed to totalitarianism as Neuhaus, contests the correlation between Christianity and democracy on the grounds that American democratic institutions, like any other secular institutions, do not enjoy a "privileged" relationship with God, and that aspects of the American polity-its liberalism and individualism, for example-are quite out of tune with Christian suppositions. In fact, Hauerwas argues, liberal democracy is the "mirror-image" of totalitarianism, in that "each individual can be his or her own tyrant,"⁹ and that even democratic polities can be imperial in their claims for loyalty and ruthless in their use of coercive power.

"Power" is the central theme of the last three essays, all of which have to do with nuclear warfare and deterrence, and in which Hauerwas formulates an uncompromising case for Christian pacifism. Violence, for Hauerwas, is always an admission that our trust in God's agency is not complete, that humans must rigorously take charge of and control their destinies. For this reason, Hauerwas is critical of many modes of resistance to nuclearism and the arms race. Just war theorists such as

⁷In his Bampton Lectures , The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).

⁸Richard Neuhaus, "Christianity and Democracy," Center Journal (Summer, 1983). See also Neuhaus' The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984).

⁹Against the Nations, p. 125.

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Paul Ramsey, advocates of minimal "sovereign states" deterrence such as Theodore Draper, and apocalyptic survivalists such as Jonathan Schell all base their critiques of the current nuclear miasma on "false eschatologies"-views which insist that "the fate of the earth" is in our hands, rather than God's.¹⁰ Schell's antinuclearism is particularly bothersome to Hauerwas, inasmuch as it assumes that the survival of the human species is the condition sine qua non for the perpetuation of value. Hauerwas feels that this is ludicrous from a Christian perspective, which subordinates the status of the human species to God's will. Hauerwas' critique of the U.S. Catholic bishops' pastoral is less sharp but nonetheless strong. Instead of speaking for the church, in hopes of influencing policy in a more moral direction, they should have spoken to the church, questioning its past willingness to subordinate its nonviolent convictions for the sake of worldly politics, and perhaps mustering up some resolve not to go forth placidly to kill upon request in the future. Hauerwas' antipathy toward the nation-state is at its edgiest in his discussions of war. The church must recognize that, whatever its surface attractions, the history of the nation-state is

the history of godlessness.... Our desire to protect ourselves from our enemies, to eliminate our enemies in the name of protecting the common history we share with our friends, is but the manifestation of our hatred of God.¹¹

II

Although I am much in sympathy with Hauerwas' critique of liberalism, his suspicion of modern politics, and his dissatisfaction with the various "eschatologies" of the antinuclear movement, I do not think that Hauerwas' analyses leave us where he thinks we should be. Hauerwas disavows the belief that an acknowledgment of Christianity's ethical distinctiveness and its antagonism to the modern liberal world implies any sort of "sectarianism." But I don't see how Hauerwas himself can possibly avoid sectarianism of some sort.

"Sectarianism," in its usual sense, entails the impossiblity of any rational dialogue with those outside the "sect," on the grounds that their episternically and morally central convictions are corrupt and diametrically opposed to those of "insiders." Attempts at forging a consensus would, then, be not merely futile but dangerous, since arguing the point on "their" terms would only serve to undermine "ours." Sectarians are then faced with the options of either proclaiming their confession to "the world" and having it fall upon deaf ears, or articulating only among themselves the truth to which they bear witness. Surely, this is not a particularly comforting situation. This sort of sectarianism inevitably

¹⁰Paul Ramsey, The Just War (New York: Scribners, 1968); Theodore Draper, "How Not to Think About Nuclear War," New York Review of Books XXIX (July 1982) 12; Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982).

¹¹Against the Nations, p. 196.

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falls back on fideism and voluntarism. Like the theology of Barth, it is an "in-house" affair, culturally marginal, and worst of all, lacking in any sort of robust rationality.¹²

Hauerwas is quite aware of the dangers in this sort of sectarianism, and moves to counteract them by embracing an antifoundationalist religious epistemology. Drawing upon George Lindbeck's brilliant book, The Nature of Doctrine,¹³ Hauerwas distinguishes an "experientialexpressivist" perspective on religious belief (proposed by liberal philosophers of religion such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith) from a "postliberal" cultural-linguistic viewpoint. Experiential-expressivists assume some universal content to religious experience that is differently expressed in various religious texts. The task of the theologian is to read those texts into contemporary experience, which breathes intelligibility into them.

Experiential-expressivism relies upon a moribund epistemological foundationalism: no experience is "pure" and presuppositionless enough to serve as a faultless touchstone for interpreting texts.¹⁴ Furthermore, experiential-expressivism ignores the possibility that the "experience" dominant in a culture may be false and distortive.¹⁵ If canonical texts are to be accommodated to it, then they will inevitably be denatured. If the dominant assumptions of our culture are as hostile to Christian precepts as Hauerwas thinks, this task of "accommodation" can only signify a disguised theological retreat.

A cultural-linguistic model, however, avoids these traps. It views "experience" as in need of subordination-to and interpretation-inlight-of religious texts and traditions. In contrast to experientialexpressivist theologians, cultural-linguistic theoreticians see religion as the attempts of faith communities to incorporate the world into their scripture. Belief and practice are extended and revised from within this narrative-formed perspective, rather than by reference to an experiential standard from without.

The "textualist" orientation of the cultural-linguistic model saves a religion from the contagions of modernity while precluding a slide into rigidity and irrationalism. The absence of a "framework-independent language" does not necessitate fideism and relativism, according to Hauerwas:

All that is called into question is the idea of a foundational discipline that can determine the standards of rationality in every field.... Religious and theological claims are thus not immune to challenge, though they may be, like

¹²See Alasdair MacIntyre, "God and the Theologians," in Against the Self-Images of the Age (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), pp. 15-16.

¹³Philadelphia: The Westminister Press, 1984.

¹⁴Antifoundationalist epistemological treatises now are abundant. Two of the best, one from an analytic and another from a continental perspective, are Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Hans-Georg Gadarner, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1975).

¹⁵For an update of the ideological critique of experience, see Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973).

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many other activities, not susceptible to definitive refutation or confirmation; they can nevertheless be tested and argued about.¹⁶

Thus in theory, at least, religion in general and Christianity in particular need not collapse into sectarianism for consistency's sake. Christianity is as rational as any other way of life, and can rationally defend itself and enter into dialogue with "the world"-perhaps even a liberal "world."

Yet Hauerwas gives every indication that such dialogue is fruitless, because of liberalism in particular and the coercive nature of secular politics in general. When Hauerwas claims "I have no interest in legitimating and/or recommending a withdrawal of Christians or the church from social or political affairs. I simply want them to be there as Christians and as church," he is neither bluffing nor contradicting his epistemological principles. But bow can one interpret remarks such as these:

[The] church's social task is first of all its willingness to be a community formed by a language the world does not share.¹⁷

[The] church's social ethic is not first of all to be found in the statements by which it tries to influence the ethos of those in power, but rather... in its ability to sustain a people who are not at home in the liberal presumptions of our civilization and society.¹⁸

[The] call for the church to be the church means that the church is the only true polity that we will know in this life.¹⁹

They can only be indications that Hauerwas believes "the world" of liberalism and nation-states to be so far gone that the only posture the church can honestly adopt toward it is one of antagonism and opposition. Isn't such a position simply a wholesale rejection of the claims of secular civilization? And isn't this "sectarianism" in different dress?

III

Hauerwas' position can be improved in either-or both-of two ways. First, it can be supplemented by an understanding of the ways in which the history of Christianity has affected the fortunes of the secular world. Hauerwas sometimes writes as if church and Kingdom stand in sempiternal opposition to the world of nation-states and their violent politics. The Christian "text" thus is a bracing and invigorating jolt in the face of corrupted modern "experience." But modern "experience" has a history, and its origins may have more than a little to do with the twists and turns of the interpretation of Christian narrative. Indeed, Jeffrey Stout has argued in The Flight From Authority that liberalism, as subversive of and antithetical to Christian ethics as it may be, emerged as the

¹⁶Against the Nations, p. 6.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 11.

¹⁸Ibid., p. 12.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 130.

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unanticipated result of a religious crisis of authority in the seventeenth century.²⁰ Hauerwas gives the impression that although "experience" is currently in disarray, the textual language of Christianity is in perfect order. This needs to be examined rather than assumed; if examined and disconfirmed, the chasm between church and world may not loom as large as Hauerwas indicates.

Second, Hauerwas' position can be augmented by an awareness that moral particularism does not require that public moral argument be conducted in exclusively particularistic terms. If particularistic Christian convictions foster a distinctive Christian ethical perspective, insofar as that perspective is an ethical one its content cannot be utterly unintelligible in principle to the non-Christian "world" or to the civic polity. It must posess enough intelligibility and persuasive rational force to make its presence felt even among those who inhabit the secular world."

Richard McCormick has criticized Hauerwas on the grounds that his moral stance confuses the origination of Christian moral values in the stories of its particular tradition with their justification-an enterprise in which rational non-Christians can presumably participate. Hauerwas thus unwittingly argues Christians out of public moral controversies "by presenting their convictions in terms of particular and often unsharable warrants.²¹ A moral sensibility informed by a distinctive story does not entail only one form of moral discourse-that drawn from the story itself. Christians may be required by their story to take public moral stands which reflect their story-formed convictions, but these convictions need not-maybe should not-be argued in exclusively Christian modalities, Christian witness does not require Christian rhetoric.

Although I take issue with the moral foundationalism lurking under McCormick's critique (he describes Hauerwas' program, not inaccurately, as a denial of a lex naturalis available to all rational agents independent of particularistic "stories" and paranetic discourse), his words hit their mark. If Christianity is informed by a distinctive story, a story which makes rational claims concerning conduct and character, its story cannot claim to speak or to be important only for those who are "part" of the story. McCormick incorrectly believes that Christians, engaging in moral discourse, can abstract themselves out of their story

²⁰Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Stout understands liberalismindeed, modernity in general--as a futile attempt to form a coherent sort of public discourse in which appeals to moral and religious authority played no part. The attempt was precipitated, however, by a genuine crisis of authority in the 17th century: authorities made conflicting statements, and possessed no shared authoritative means to resolve them. Liberal politics-with its skittishness about making religious and moral matters publicwas a welcome solution in an age of suspicion and religious warfare. Stout's book is certainly not an apology for liberalism, but it makes it a historically intelligible phenomenon in a way that Hauerwas' does not. It suggests that although the language of theism is in bad shape after the; modern liberal compromise, it was not in perfect health before it.

²¹Richard McCormick, Notes on Moral Theology: 1981 Through 1984 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984), p. 25.

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and formulate principles from rationality-as-such. But McCormick is correct when he notes that a story that includes Romans 1 has something to say about persons as persons, and not merely Christians as Christians.²² If Christian morality is a priori available only to a prophetic minority, and unintelligible to "the world," then "what goes for moral theology will increasingly become sectarian exhortation," which is "inherently isolationist.²³

Fortunately, Hauerwas' and Lindbeck's postmodern religious epistemology need not germinate this sort of relativistic isolationism. As long as church and world share at least some beliefs in common, a dialogue between them can take place. And Stout's historical reconstruction of the nexus between Christianity and modernity indicates that church and world have a great deal to talk about. Thus there is no a priori restriction against the sort of "fusion of horizons" present in all true understanding. A quantum of incommensurability between the Christian and secular paradigms does not preclude the possibility of their rational comparison and practical judgment about their comparative worth.²⁴

But neither does it insure this possibility. "Sectarianism" is not necessarily vanquished through hermeneutics. Even if rapprochement between those "inside" and those "outside" the Christian story cannot be ruled out in principle, it may be true that in fact such reconciliation is impossible. It might be the case that the degree of dissensus between church and secular polity is too great to secure any substantial moral community. This can not be known a priori, but it can be discovered in the practical efforts to reach some sort of consensus. And if this is the case, then perhaps "sectarianism" is not a bad idea. If modern politics in fact is as pervasive and corrupting as Hauerwas maintains, "sectarianism" may even be an idea whose time has come. A "sectarianism" informed by a flexible, antifoundationalist outlook would not be plagued by the hidebound dogmatism that has made past sectarianisms so unattractive; and such a sectarianism would embrace the only powerful political alternative for a community utterly at odds with "the world"-turning its back on it.²⁵ Therefore, Hauerwas' nod toward secular political involvement seems to be at best an example of "gestural" politics. How effective can the church's "worldly" political presence be if its first commitment is to speak a language that the world does not presently share?

Alasdair Macintyre, in the concluding pages of After Virtue,

²²Ibid., p. 126.

²³Ibid., pp. 23-24.

²⁴See Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), pp. 79-92, on the Kuhnian notion of "incommensurability" and its compatibility with the rational comparison of competing paradigms.

²⁵One thinks of the Amish, or the agrarianism championed by Paul Hanley Furfey. This is not to suggest that sectarianism of this precise sort is the "only way." It is, however, to suggest that whatever sort of sectarianism is appropriate must resemble the former in "style" if not substance. Hauerwas' political rhetoric disappoints precisely because it suggests this "style," but refuses to acknowledge the dimensions of the political posture of being an "outsider" that it entails.

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discounts the possibility that a social blueprint for reversing the damage wrought by liberalism and its progeny is feasible. It would be just one more example of the politics of manipulation that his civic republican viewpoint proscribes. Instead, what is important is "the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.²⁶ This sounds suspiciously like "sectarianism." Perhaps this is the task facing Christianity and Christians today: not how to avoid sectarianism while remaining faithful to their distinctive forms of life, but to choose the right kind of sectarianism, while being open to the possibility that previous failures of nerve and acts of bad faith on the part of Christians precipitated the crisis wherein sectarianism has become such a doleful necessity.

²⁶After Virtue, p. 245.