Soothing Modernity’s Combative Anxiety:

Virtue in Culture and Politics

 

 Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

Autumn 2022

 

Intellectually-cultivated, companionable reticence rather than ignorance and tribal symbols serves Providence-constructed polity in diversity. The mode of “virtue ethics” have an underappreciated value in building stakeholder consensus through interfaith partnerships and politics--for building peaceful networks across religious traditions. Social renewal and shalom emerge from ethical transformation one disciple—one ego--at a time, which includes the intellectual virtues applied to deliberation. Governing and moral authority in the United States is invested in the people’s legislative assemblies and not located in an executive autocrat or religious totem, even if that totem has the name of Jesus.

 

“Religious people who relate to a God in an uncertain or anxious manner are more likely to experience psychological distress disorders, including anxiety, paranoia, and obsessive compulsions… those who are less avoidant and those who are more avoidant in their relationship with God both have lower levels of psychological distress…These data suggest it’s only those in the middle, those who experience uncertainty in the relationship with God, and not the avoidant, that have worse mental health” (Westmont College [2022], reporting the study of Henderson and Kent [2022]).

Many consider that the culture and practices of agon (aggressive strife) offer a virile and effective path for the realization of the Kingdom of God—aggressively “contending for the Gospel.” However, many Bible passages rule out a third-way syncretism (heterodox hybridization) that blends agon with shalom.[1] Especially in its moral center, the Book of Proverbs, the Old Testament speaks of but rules out blending the dichotomy of paths—the way of the good (good and justice) and the way of wickedness (Prov. 2:20-22). In chapters 10-23, Proverbs contrasts the two ways of strife and righteous peace, death and life in B-A and A-B structures. This dichotomous structure formalizes the explicit contrast between (as opposed to hybridization of) shalom and agon. No diversion is allowed from the right path (Prov. 3:6; 8:20; Proverbs 4). The good is straight and straightaway to be followed. It is the one true way that does not admit a third-way syncretism between the truth and error, between the straight and what strays. We are to never waver from the one path of truth and peace—not “to the right or to the left” (Deut. 5:32-33; 17:11; 28:14; Josh. 1:7; 23:6; Prov. 4:25-27; 2 Kings 22:2; Cf. Prov. 10:9, 17; 12:28) by applying the techniques of agon in the attempt to deliver oneself from agon. To do so is to live inside death-dealing clouds of deception.

The findings of empirical psychologists suggest that blending strife with the pursuit of peace brings psychological distress and political neurosis. The healing of these fragmented states requires repentance and the pursuit of unfettered and unadulterated shalom. However, psychologies may instead be sublimated in the “affective polarization” (Mason 2018, 866) of tribalism that holds out the prospect of psychic relief in religion’s affiliative assurance that one belongs to the inner ring of true religion. There appears a psychic reward to being one of the few—and being with the few--that really KNOW what’s going down, on earth and in heaven. Such cultural collectives may be

define[d by] both a system of beliefs, but also a sense of connection to like-minded Others…Identity does not require values and policy attitudes; it simply requires…a sense of inclusion and a sense of exclusion [that] designate who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them.’ [I]dentity-based elements of ideology [in the current American politico-religious culture]…[g]enerate[s] social distance [from] the ‘otherness’ of ideological opponents, more than issue-based disagreement, [to] drive [political and cultural] rancor… [A] study of [religious-political] ideology argues that looking at issue positions alone is inadequate to understanding ideology… making a clear distinction between issue-based (operational) ideology and identity-based (symbolic) ideology (Mason 2018, 867-868).

 

CS Lewis (https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/) provides a description of the tribal “phenomenon of an Inner Ring…[T]he passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.” The inner ring involves an informal hierarchy that is not

even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline… There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration…

Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated…

[The impulse to seek membership in an inner ring is an adaptation and accommodation to this world’s] whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement… If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man… the makings of [agon’s scoundrels:] unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists.

[T]he choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

 

Aldous Huxley (in Brave New World Revisited [1958]) writes of “Herd Poisoning,” the intoxication of large groups with high emotion and suspension of standard consensus behavior patterns—skepticism of charismatic leaders and outlandish, illogical phenomenological claims. Inner rings as herds become “poisoned,” beguiled by the polemics of social media and enabled by its seeming anonymity and privacy:

Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords... and by…associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.

 

Symbolic identity takes on heightened performative valences and intensities in the cultural sphere. Religious groups with low commitment to formal liturgies often sublimate symbolic performances of the peaceful community and the operationalization of virtue by exercises of titular prerogatives, contentious leadership, and spectacles of dominating or hold-taking power. Politically-charged tribal identities are characterized by a particular set of moral foundations (Graham et al. 2013): 1) expressions of loyalty (and denunciation of betrayals—e.g., see Shepherd [2022]), recognition and submission to 2) authority (and denunciation of subversion), and definitions of 3) purity/sanctity of a tradition (and attribution to outsiders of degradation, disorder, and depravity). These features combine in certain high-visibility conservative Christian circles to define all other Christian ecclesiological and theological circles as “heretics.” Only the inner ring has access to saving truth.

Seemingly accelerated since 2016, the tribal melding of symbolic identities in American religion into politics has prioritized political contention to the detriment of virtue and shalom. The justification for these performances of agon is “contention for the Gospel” that wins back the culture for Christ. Taking back “our freedoms” becomes a common ideological totem to construct religiopolitical, symbolic, and culturally-affiliated identity.[2]

Christian libertarians repeatedly point to their freedom in Christ as if such meant more than liberation from the contagion and chains of sin. The liberation for good works. Instead, libertarians seek a life free of accountabilities to and for others. For Christian libertarians, “socialist” government is the ultimate enemy that seeks to re-enslave them, by policy, into the “secular noesis of sin.” This flawed noesis (condition of cognitive understanding) is alleged to ground the persecution of “believers,” to be materialist and collectivizing (“Marxist”), and to deconstruct valorized traditions that introduces insecurities and disrupt “family values.”

Ideologies that valorize libertarian “freedom” (negative freedom—the impulse to be left unhindered to pursue personal preferences) above other religious and political values may be symbolically reconstructed for political and religious action. Conferences, rallies, and thematized spectacles promote peak experiences aligned with material content. Such symbolic performances risk mistaking peak experiences of politics with the Spiritual, especially when the latter is conceptualized in agonic, rather than self-denying, power. Gun culture and conventions demonstrate the pretense of negative freedom as a claim of personal security. With the ceaseless onslaught of gun-fueled shooting sprees, the metaphysics of freedom as grace—the endeavor to give life—is tragically and perversely contradicted. So-called “2^nd Amendment freedoms” function to risk taking life while falsely promising body security. They are an idol that makes a travesty of trust in the living God’s sovereignty and providence that establishes shalom. The ultimacy and metaphysics of life-giving and -sustaining grace affords no freedom to desecrate, desolate, flee, or destroy.

Symbolic identities have begun to coalesce into the strange bedfellows of vicious inner rings within American religious and political-cultural spheres. Anxious members of contemporary consumer society may be drawn to participate in mediagenic religious cultures that offer safety in numbers. The ideas, identities, and alliances of religious cultures are shaped and amplified within commercialized activity, revealing that an enclosed cultural identity became a component of modern capitalism. Capitalism historically has favored enclosure of the resource commons, and boundary-making is inherently capitalist. Enclosure historically has drawn on Biblical symbols and justifications (Attie 2011). Contemporary American religious and cultural affiliation has recently become increasingly grounded in capitalist pursuits and its adulterated and circumscribed “prosperity gospels.” These link righteousness with positive material results--personal wealth, suaging of debility, displays of spiritual “power,” and/or community affiliation and assurance. Alienated individuals who crave such are recruited by appealing to these benefits and symbols linked with messages purporting these accrue to those righteous in the Gospel. While both its purveyors and consumers may see religious tribalism’s outreach to fulfill the Great Commission of Matthew 28, it is readily being coopted to serve political inner rings. Church and para-church ministry growth become both the signal and the raison-d’etre of prosperity righteousness (i.e., that God’s favor is manifested in wealth and cultural impact) carrying forth the immodest banners of political power.

Fostered by attempts at a third-way synthesis of agon and shalom, religious neurosis recruits political malcontents by packaging the Gospel as the avenue for both eternal salvation and temporal and hierarchical power. This package promises the possibility that both eternity’s peace and temporal power are accessed by thymic striving. If the world is to be won for the Gospel by strife, some heterodox, syncretic form of spirituality is claimed to resolve the contradictions of peace won by antagonism. Some intermediate condition of shalom and agon becomes proclaimed in contentious and adversarial pulpits, the straight and soft edge of which state is not to be found because it is a Biblically-attested impossibility. The result of this destabilizing syncretism--like a blood-sucking parasite on a gentle lamb--is the discontent and disquiet of culturally affiliated actors and the collective performance of neuroses on civic and cultural stages.

Rather than cultivate the self-reflexivity of theological reflection to enable virtuous living for others, cultic warriors futilely seek to discern their power (and thus their assurance of divine acceptance) by their impact and ephemeral monuments and banners. Their need for planting standard-flags manifests their need for divine approval in an update to Weber’s (2002 [1905]) thesis—their symbols and standards manifest prosperity and power that signals to them that they are in accord with the furtherance of God’s plans. In ephemeral demonstrations of cultural sway, bombast, and thunder, these symbolic collectives seek the assurance that settles their anxieties. For them, even when absent virtue, temporal noise manifests divine favor.

The neurotic attempts third-way adaptations of Christianity with pagan agon to promote order and assurance: “what happens when you just stop relying on God—you don’t trust that God will be there for you, so you learn to rely on yourself” (Henderson and Kent 2022). Tragically, this lack of divine trust and allegiance pulls instead toward practices of agon—strife, contention, violence, domination, and manipulation.

Inside anxiety’s unresolved questions and discontents are the foundations of authoritarianism that promises to restore order without the necessity of prior establishment of interior peace and the virtue of accountability to justice. However, by instilling the virtues of patience and courtesy that is tolerance, order may result providentially and organically in shalom that dispels neurosis. Through mirrored virtue, we can assuage our neurotic neighbors, helping them live in an increasingly crowded and challenging society. Democracies, by assembling the gamut of citizen stakeholders, more optimally foster the civic virtues of accountability to justice than autocracies (see below).

On the religious right, syncretism and commercialization promote heterodox totems. At the same time, the cultural left subordinates cultivation of virtue to techniques and practices of exotic inwardness and relational detachment—the various detachments of “spiritual but not religious.” If the self is discovered and absolutized inside its spontaneous and unevaluated urges, spiritual formation inside an agonist tradition becomes nihilistic, nominal, and idiosyncratic. Inwardness tends to “find oneself” in one’s sexual and antagonistic inclinations (“nature”) rather than submitting to the great tradition of virtue that continually announces Christ’s supra-historical existence and enduring power to shape our actions and guide our thinking towards shalom. The Church may lose focus on moral cultivation when pursuing self-determination and -awareness inside crafty narratives of identity, autonomy, sexualization, and deconstruction--the kind of academized nonsense and empty self-display, willfulness, and prejudice for inventions of glitz, spectacle, and celebrity. The neurosis of the right is in repressive tribal inner rings that pull and orient toward narcissistic, immodest, thymic, and ruthless (“spiritual badass” [Du Mez 2020]) temporal leaders. Neurosis of the left manifests in tendencies of ostentatious identity derived from self-gratifying sensuality that too is narcissism. Both sides tempt egotism in authorities by celebrification based on the performative attractions of narcissism.

Neurosis conflates the attributes of God with itself while formally and informally repressing its own faults (Matt. 7:5). The conflation that attempts to synthesize agon and shalom is culturally--not theologically--performed and proposed, marked by the bald assertion that agon represents a side of God that is hastening by agon to drive forth the eschaton of peace. This putative, divine agon is often portrayed through a violent and earth-bound reading of the Book of Revelation. In their tribal inner rings and neurotic forms, dispensationalist readers of the Bible (Vlach n.d.) seek assurance by trying to shape and participate in this supposed ultimate cause of eschatological violence. They misattribute their culturally broadcast agitations for Kingdom-building. They seek to predict the next temporal world order (2 Tim. 4:3) rather than living here and now in the eternal world of truth and shalom.  Conflating God’s fearsomeness with its own ruthless nationalism (Isa. 8:12-13; 25:3) is a hallmark of agon’s neurosis, particularly when accompanied by the fetishes of the anxiously fragile--the gun and symbols (bromides and “camo”) of the military. In no way are violence, compulsion, and contention—and their symbols--representations of and trust in the Holy Spirit.

From Here to Modernity: Virtue and the Public Square

Philosophically grounded in the Enlightenment, American Constitutional structures have come under populist assault by various identitarian, libertarian, and religious symbolic actors (Rose 2021). Church-state separation, one-person-one-vote elections, and the establishment of the voice and venue of moral policy-making inside a representative body (rather than by a divinely-ordained hierarch) are being questioned and attacked by domestic groups as at no time since the Civil War.

The opponents of Enlightenment liberalism have various ideological commitments and beliefs.  Still, as the symbolic images at the assault on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 manifest,  these opponents include both religious actors and those who more cynically have tied their cause to the symbolic power of religion’s forms and claims. The violence acted out on that date demonstrates the vicious tribalism of agon applied toward an anti-progressive set of objectives.

Because of the human propensity to mirror and emulate what we admire of others in close proximity, political communities are training grounds of both vice and virtues. Do our politicians reveal virtues that promote shalom? Or is it the violent virtus of classical traditions of agon? In the latter case, we would expect tribes to form in space around traditions and “heroic” (thymic) powers of anatomy, virility, and patriarchy (see Du Mez 2020). In the former case, we would expect collectives to be more socially diverse because both space and power are shared. We would expect each tribe or collective to have varying degrees of syncretism with pagan, agonistic traditions. The dichotomous phenomenology of agon and shalom set in relief with the witness of empiricism and history proposed earlier provides a taxonomical frame to relate commitments to past traditions compared with relative openness to what is prophetic and peace-making in modernity.

Modernism’s project of increasing subjectivity of agency exposes the virtues that manifest inside a polity. These virtues structure the design of liberal government enacted in the U.S. Constitution and thus would be most relevant and practical in its political spheres. Among other innovations, the U.S. Constitution:

•           Establishes (democratic) accountability to non-tyrannical justice in a robust separation of administrative, legislative, and judicial powers.

•           Establishes moral voice and policy inside a representative, deliberative body rather than in the will of a divinely ordained autocrat.

•           Recognizes that political conscience in the embodied electorate is served by free speech, allowing a domain for moral claims—not just self-interest--to change hearts and minds toward diversity, sharing, and tolerance.

•           Separates Church from State as spheres for the former’s modeling of egalitarian grace to be recognized by, mirrored, and extended to the material and political economy of the latter.

•           Processes in history by rights-granting amendments sensitive to social developments, including those that extend the voting franchise to originally disenfranchised groups (now under the threat of rollback).

Wholeness includes eternity and infinity, so diversity and pluralism must be primary and desired features in God’s Kingdom--where grace is spread and shared. Wholeness consists of the spaciousness in time and space given to wonder and tolerance. Wholeness is relational in its fullest human sense and representations. Hospitality of diversity celebrates the distinctives and particularities of God’s human creation, including of plebiscites. Racial identification and exclusion can never be wholly relational in this eternal sense of shalom.

It follows that democracy is a worthy Holy Spirit-enabled arena for governance. It reflects the Bible’s critique of monarchy, particularly in the tradition of the critique of kingship in Deuteronomic History (see Chapter 2).  The precepts in the Law of the King (Deut. 17: 14-20) radically—in its ANE context--limit the monarch’s autonomy and prerogative. These limitations fit the more general theme in the Hebrew Bible of Israel’s adaptation to vassalage (subordination of sovereignty to another monarchic power [Ska 2015, 429]) than with hierarchy and domination (Wright 2015). Laying out its demerits, the prophet and judge Samuel robustly decries the people’s demand for a king (1 Sam. 8:4-20). Earlier, contextualized by Abimelech’s leading question to the people in Judg. 9:2, Jotham’s tragic parable of the bramble king in Judges 9 clarifies that autocracy has less warrant for the Israelites than polyarchy.  The qāhāl (קָהָל) was Israel’s cultic—God-ordained and therefore morally (and theologically [Neh. 13:1]) concerned—collected assembly “of the people” (Jer. 26:17; Ps. 107:32; 89:6; Judg. 20:2 etc.). 

While disorder results from the situation in the Book of Judges where everyone acted as they saw fit (Judg. 17:6; 21:25), the failure of autocracy to adhere to the virtues of humility and loyalty leads to the alienation and estrangement of God’s people from their historical milieu labeled “the land.” The Bible thus illustrates antipathies to both libertarianism and autocracy. Representative democracy, as the American founders recognized, coheres with Biblical wisdom that promotes polyarchy. It becomes the governing resource for the revolutionary as opposed to the autocratic spirit condemned by the Deuteronomic Historian. 

As a political ideal, democracy valorizes the gentle acceptance of defeat, allows for calculations of acceptable compromise, and ensures human rights to participation, free speech, and bodily integrity. Democracy institutes the progressive aspect of modernity—the location of intrinsic value in the individual and the individual conscience represented in an assembly—the Torah’s קָהָל qāhāl—carried forth into history by the Holy Spirit. Once established in history, support for the people’s assemblies—as opposed to that for executive autocrats--is warranted by Rom. 13:1, Titus 3:1; 1 Pet. 2:13; and Prov. 8:15. Using these texts blindly to support an American administrative autocrat is a misapplication because the Constitution structures the ruling authority in this country on the people’s moral authority invested in legislative and polyarchic assemblies.

In light of these historical and Biblical warrants for assemblies, the formation of a wise political actor is the possession and prudent exercise of both deliberative and moral virtues. The mission of political deliberation in representative bodies agreeing to policies representing the people’s collective will has become the standard of modern governance. Like all collaborative endeavors, these bodies solicit and reward virtues that accord with the shalom and grace which is God’s will. To the extent that political actors can deliberate virtuously, they transform disordered spaces into ordered and relational places. The more deliberative microcosms seek to accommodate and serve the Providentially-constructed plebiscite, the broader the scope and scale its representative, political, and civic virtues transmit to the social macrocosm. Representatives are civic models especially accountable to God’s justice and shalom.

Deliberation’s principal virtues are openness to compromise and discernment activated by the love of and pursuit of truth and its animating and morally-directive power of persuasion. Its “chief ancillary virtue is studiousness – assiduous, open-minded, objective, consistent and well-tempered application to the pursuit of new knowledge. Studiousness is earnest, ardent deployment of intellectual faculties, powers, and talents, resisting premature satisfaction of intellectual appetite, and continuing to study until the desired [attributes and dispositions] are acquired” (Webster 2016, 176). Studiousness recognizes that even the most worldly of knowledge offers some aspect of communion with neighbors and enemies, and thus with God.

Next are deliberative virtues which open us to discerning the moral claims of others:

These virtues include attentiveness (steady, observant direction of the mind to that which lies beyond ourselves [Prov. 8:5]); humility (awareness and acceptance of intellectual [and material] limitations); modesty (temperate estimation of one’s own excellence and resistance to the desire to be conspicuous); and docility or teachableness.

There are those virtues which fit us to contribute to and [benefit] from common [deliberated] life: intellectual benevolence (the disposition to promote the…good of others);…generosity (sharing [moral and material] goods); affability (friendliness and approachability in [political] exchange); impartiality ([accountability to] justice in .... conduct towards others); gratitude (glad recognition of intellectual [and political] indebtedness)[and loyalty towards our benefactors].

There are those virtues which ready us to deal with difficulty in the pursuit of [moral] goods [and justice]. These include magnanimity (the largeness of purpose which causes us to attempt demanding tasks); [political] courage (firmness of mind in enduring what is outstandingly difficult); and, finally, patience (Ibid.).

Magnanimity and openness to compromise combats agonism’s psychological tendency to extremism and intransigence, the hardening of one’s position that claims material and public goods and constructs exclusionary politics.

Schismogenesis is a “conscious cultural inversion” where groups in geographical (or religious) proximity define themselves in contradiction to their opponents.  Schismogenesis results in an us-them framework of historical and demographic identities and national mission operating under cultural duress and the threat of political marginalization and displacement (See Pally in Telos Group 2022). Schismogenesis amplifies Schmittian politics (Schmitt 2005 [1934])—the coalitions of friends and the animosities against enemies to locate the source of all duress in the political neighbor. The resort to radical separation and cultural divergence is self-defense in extremis. It breaks traditional or aspirational relationships under conditions of existential vulnerability preoccupied if not obsessed with socio-cultural threats, including threats to group (white patriarchal) autonomy, normative definitions (of freedom as negative without general obligations to include), and nostalgia (for hierarchical traditions and idealized social order).

Holiness may become a religious resource that relates to outsiders by contradicting prevailing secular and cultural norms (tragically losing sight of the Apostle Paul’s warning in Eph. 6:12). The rage of agon in cultural proximates is quick to demonize, reducing the humanity of their political peers. In such dehumanizing rage, the virtues of deliberation are swallowed up by unholy culture war and the false claim that the level of anger and loudness of denunciation proportionately reflects the level of righteousness held by “truth’s” inner circle.

Patience and hospitality, by contrast, lays the groundwork for agreeing to worthy ends. Patience puts a rein to anxiety—that jailer of reason--and allows parties in a deliberative process to breathe inside the Spirit. Patience resists stifling the legitimate moral claims of others that our undisciplined aggrandizement and ruthless willfulness would otherwise bring on.

The list of deliberative virtues includes tolerance, which allows and mutually reinforces equity applied to heterogeneous interests arising in modern, postcolonial polities. Tolerance of stakeholder diversity and its varied moral claims promotes deliberative wisdom and morally-sensitive policies: toleration works toward both the diverse membership and morally inclusive society and its protection and enablement of free speech. It follows that the political virtues of democratic norms counter environments of intimidation characteristic of authoritarianism.

Constituted in major part by colonialism and immigration, the United States is structurally pluralist in culture and polity, and its governing institutions have heretofore fitfully but directionally established juridical pluralism as both a norm for extending rights to previously excluded groups and interests as well as distributing legislative (moral policy-making) powers according to the principle of subsidiarity in Constitutionally-negotiated federalism.

Constitutionally-ordered assemblies of democratically elected representatives—and their modern genius for efficiency and equity—host and allow for a broad polity’s deliberative knowledge structured by virtue to secure more accountable and just ends than can be achieved by a constricted, unaccountable, homogeneous, or vicious autocracy.  This explicit intention to locate ruling and moral authority in the people’s assemblies is found in the Preamble to the United States Constitution  valorized by the conclusion to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  The deliberative and legislative power of the people to make moral policy is located in the assemblies of Congress. The People are in covenantal relationship because they have been established in and by God’s providence within the Constitutional polity.

Deliberative diversity of interests is the impetus behind modern democracy. The investiture of ruling authority (ἐξουσίας exousias) in the people’s representative deliberative assemblies optimizes policy beyond entrusting decisions to a single leader’s solipsistic perspective.  While all authority may come from above and not from below, the establishment of people’s assemblies may be seen (as did the American Founding Fathers) as the reflection of the ultimate cause (God) inside secondary agencies (people). In this, God is becoming all in all. Contrary to some post-liberal claims, representative democracy is not destructive but a way station in the unfolding Kingdom of God operating from the ground of Christ’s immanent power inside people seeking justice and peace absent monarchy. By this, “the people” invested with common grace may repudiate their fascinations and desire for King Saul.

The U.S. Constitution invests the Executive agency with carrying out the ἐξουσίας of the people’s moral and deliberated will. However, with the recent, regional disestablishment of civics classes in secondary education, many American religious leaders lack the knowledge to make the connection between these developments of modernity and American Constitutional ἐξουσίας. They instead misapply scriptural texts to rally behind and unquestioningly support the government’s executive leader. Tragically, pastoral leaders ignorant of history and suspicious of Enlightenment modernity feed religious inner ring tribalism’s neurotic impulses for order, control, and security to make accommodations with—and blind and unquestioning support for—the Executive prerogative as the seat of administrative compulsion. This accommodation conflates temporal leaders with Jesus. It also enlists OT verses and symbols (like the display and blowing of shofarim—ram’s horns—at the nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021) to valorize violent political struggle. Protestors re-enacted ancient biblical rituals, ratcheting up their political significance. Such actions associate political objectives with biblical symbols, transposing them into a totemic amalgam with seeming divine endorsement.  These symbols integrate personal experience with ideological concepts to produce an overly-determined significance for these displays. Their integration consequently normalizes (because of their religiosity) increasingly extreme political action—especially of compellence and assaultive ruthlessness as representing God’s warrior will. Political factions—even the non-religious--try to harness the power of eternity for their shameless spectacles by allying themselves with commercialized religion. The Christian Right in the U.S. has an especially accommodating, fearful posture for political alliance with mammon. Both desire social order as ultimate ends though they differ in what that order looks like. Those ends would surely reflect the harmonization of means--of fear aligned with greed. But they will not come about. Another kind of eschatological order will surely come forth within the metaphysics of grace.

Pluralistic societies that move toward fascist, absolutist conformity are corrupted by dichotomous thinking of God’s inner circle vs. totally depraved outsiders. This dichotomous thinking is decadent and rigid, not the relativism that grounds deliberative tolerance or extends the value of recognizing common grace.

Because most traditions in a pluralistic interfaith society have a program for virtue, such can become the common grounding for deliberative policymaking. Building institutions that instruct and reward virtue and assess a political cost to oppositional ruthlessness can be the ecumenizing (bridge-building) principle for politics rather than turning inner circle conservative Christianity into the institutional banner of the coalition overseeing material allocations of public goods. Popular Christianity’s cooptation with thymos has all-too-frequently manifested the promotion of mammon (Matt. 6:24): libertarian economics, consumer symbols, and immodest, affluence-signaling and -seeking lifestyles.

            Rather than virtue, consumerist elements and contentious and selective applications of the written word of God become adapted to signal who is inside the polity and who is outside. Tragically, Biblical elements are syncretized with traditions and practices of agon in the attempt to gain the victory for their battle standards—their Christian flags, their denominational or mega-church brand, their heroes of contemporary faith, their urgent seeking of personal safety and national security.  Their militarized and authoritarian syncretism in service to cultural influence and “freedom”-securing power is predictably but tragically seen by outsiders as hypocrisy to the Gospel grounded in the orthodox ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. Christian syncretists have replaced the Sermon on the Mount as the center of their social message with a violent reading of Gen. 1:28 “dominion” and the Book of Revelation that manifests their own neurotic anxieties regarding their relationship with living inside God’s promises and steadfast love. Church order and mission realized in syncretic blends of features and practices of agon do not correspond to the Sermon on the Mount. Instead, they operate in conjunction with secularized will-to-power, grotesquely distorting ethics through religious violence and blasphemous politics. Agon is not a feature of human ontology.  Those who, by reasons of fear, syncretize Christianity with violence lack concord with the assurance of Hebrews 2:15.

Any hypocrisy of violence and abuse abrogates the social influence that these culture warriors crave. Their syncretic accommodation with agon and thymic culture has created a new cadre of political actors and consonant alignments, but the data seem contradictory in terms of advancing the Gospel. The rise of religious “nones” in American society, Christian disaffiliation, and turning away from Christian institutions among younger generations (PRRI 2021a) suggests that syncretist narratives to program the blending of hierarchies and violence with the Gospel are, except for reaching fellow neurotic worriers and graspers, a misdirection of effective evangelism. Packard and Rusert (2022) report that members of Generation Z have turned away from their parents’ Christian institutions in favor of a “spiritual” identification alongside a more “dynamic” set of non-traditional religious practices.

Highjacking Jesus in support of nationalistic and compulsory agendas and personalities alienates many who claim no adherence to Christianity but instinctively recognize—and turn away from--these overly-determined propagations of malice and false ethical narratives inside Christian symbols. Those outside the Christian faith expect its Sermon on the Mount witness of peace and justice. Likewise, those progressives living in union with Christ expect that the sum of political virtues and deliberative faculties are directed by the Church toward creating a polity that is the harbinger and pull of the just society—the Kingdom of God.

Political virtues enable powers to be exercised in a morally and providentially optimal way. God reveals and contrasts the pattern of wise and unwise rule and virtuous and vicious governance in the Psalms (especially Psalms 2; 7; 9-11; 21; 45; 58; 82, etc.). Their themes of the basis, purpose, and virtues of human rule keep the focus on “returning to God as model for the perfect realization” (Adam M. Carrington @carringtonam 5/9/22) of politics and governance. In the psalms concerning political leadership, deliberative virtues like humility and discernment are portrayed as an optimizing means to just and shalom-building ends. These ends include their social recognition and mimetic emulation for the sake of moral justice.

Recognition of virtue operating inside public deliberative and political spaces may be more effective to evangelization of those spaces than proclaimed and broadcast dogmas, particularly in those modern contexts that have formalized the separation of Church and State. The recognition of virtue in the neighborhood sphere and assembly promotes shalom, while in the deliberative spheres of moral suasion and policymaking, their recognition can sway debate to mitigate deprivation of the kind outlined by Matthew 25.

Christian deliberative virtue and conduct is that by which all may recognize the processive Spirit—insiders and outsiders alike. As stated earlier, recognition is no less a theological resource than the traditional quadrilateral of Bible, experience (of which it may be a subset), tradition, and reason. One kind of politics deals with others from considerations of their merit, and another which does so with respect to the others’ need. One of these is Gospel. One of these is radical grace. The Church distinguishes itself from the culture of its age by the politics of grace. It does not distinguish itself by ethical subordination to or accommodation with the reward systems and appetitive and thymic strife and hierarchies of capitalist agon.

Virtue Ecumenism: the shared lived values in mixed-faith society

Reconsidering the polity along the lines of lived values—of which virtues its varied faith traditions hold dear—may break the yoke of material identity and oppositional symbolic propaganda to bring forth a more fruitful political discourse and policy regarding the common good. Toward this end, Christians ought to refrain from the lens of disparate demographic identifications that have been instead transformed into spiritual community articulated by Paul in Galatians 3:

Early Christian thinkers drew inspiration from the New Testament’s vision of a world in which differences of race, class, and sex would be healed. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, male and female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” Saint Paul instructed the church in Galatia. This early Christian universalism also insisted on the primordial unity of the human family, arguing that “God has made of one blood all the nations of the world.” (Rose 2021, 149).

God restores territories and histories of mutual hostility into a new and united people in Christ. Rather than making up an ethnicity or race, the blood that circulates to make one world—one people—is that of Jesus’ love. Shalom is accomplished in and by the one blood:

[T]his [blood] pedigree included not only Jesus and the patriarchs of Jewish scripture, but the wisest philosophers of antiquity, who sought the truth about God with a sincere heart. All were part of the “race of the saved,” as one scholar has put it, because they had rendered sincere worship to God.

Religious universalism may be derived in and from the blood—in that love of God for the material creation of blood that God extends toward all people--and from which all are intended to mirror and reflect back to God and to neighbor:

Christian thinkers were aware of the extraordinary nature of their genealogical claims, and they invoked scripture to defend them. They drew on Paul’s idea, understandably shocking to Jews, that Christians acquire Abraham as an ancestor, becoming descendants of Israel through faith. They imagined that Christians were reborn by being grafted onto a new family tree, exchanging the traditions of their earthly fathers for those of their forefathers in faith. But was it only a spiritual lineage that early Christians imagined they shared with faithful Jews and noble pagans? Astonishingly, no. For some theologians, since the humanity of all believers…was included in the flesh of Jesus, Christians had a kind of sacramental kinship with all those united in his mystical body. The Christian …genealogy boasted of saints, sages, and heroes with whom they were related through God.

Christians need not call this community [in love’s blood] a “race” to make stronger claims about the way it binds them together across time…[Christians] might be more willing to bear witness to an ideal of ethnic solidarity that is open to transcendence, rather than closed to it (Rose 2021, 151-152).

In seeking to worship and embody transcendence, society as created by God progresses toward the unity in diversity marked with shalom. Many if not most traditions that recognize transcendence have a program for virtues—Buddhist, pagan, Muslim, Stoic, Jewish, and Christian. The key to forming community inside this religious pluralism is training our children and ourselves to recognize the organic, common grace virtues in and of our neighbors. Universal grace is found in conduct rather than simply in beliefs. But Christians, in their sacraments, are constituted as the vanguard for the waves of communion with neighbors that bring forward God’s Kingdom shalom. The blood we share with neighbor is circulated in the love that neighbor has as God’s creature. Because we share in the one blood, we seek its health and proliferation wherever it is found.

Shalom is promoted by the wisdom of others with whom we live in proximity. While the unforeseen will arise, it is never entirely unprecedented. The wisdom of our elders and our traditions prepare us to weather the shocks of novelty.

Deliberative wisdom is proffered without expectation of the self’s advantage (Phil. 2:4). Working for the good of others without considerations of self-advantage or reciprocity is the practice of saints. The free grace of wisdom is the mirror and gesture of recurrent experience given for the benefit of others in community. It follows that diversity of both elders and of the community as training grounds for wisdom recurs in God’s eschatological plan. Diversity in the social structures and pedagogy of wisdom includes sound principles for interfaith networks and networking. These networks tend, in part, toward the centrifugality of boundary-making parochialism. But this book argues that interfaith deliberation is “perichoretic” --it centripetally processes to solve problems by gracious, mutual deferral serving commonly agreed virtues, especially honesty and accountability to justice. A functioning community of diverse interests is most optimally centered on shared lived values common to humanity.

Classicist Martha Nussbaum and Development Economist Amartya Sen propose that Aristotelian virtues have the broadest potential for identifying and making concrete socially unifying capabilities and functionings toward health and safety (Nussbaum 2008; Olds 1997) toward the common good of shalom inside a pluralist society. From thence, the particular Christian vanguard of social virtues may take hold.

Deliberative pluralism founded in an educated public represented by wise and virtuous elders is the means for a people’s good ends and moral policymaking, not an authoritarian system. By this, the social location and diversity of learning and experience serve the common good less bound by material totems and solipsistic biases. Toleration and diversity of wisdom advance in interfaith recognition and implementation of virtue.

Virtues discourse is the singular praxis of deliberative wisdom applied for the common good. It counters neoliberalism’s elevation of market transactions and utilitarian productivity to the summum bonum of human existence. Decoupling from the utilitarian and financial nexus of reciprocity instead to work for the benefit of others by the free grace of virtues is both redemptive and radically reconfiguring. Virtues resist established, antagonistic political economics but instead seek solidarity with those most deprived. Shalom has the whole community participate in material sufficiency and spiritual freedom. Freedom, it needs always to be emphasized, must be tempered by virtue and structured by the Golden Rule.

 

 

---

[1] Agon is physically competitive and compelling strife, valorized in pagan epics like the Homeric as the arete (excellence) of combative cultures. Shalom is the Hebrew Bible’s alternative to pagan agon—it is the state of a cultural collective living with secure attachment to its God and God’s gracious provision. The state of shalom is thus peaceful, with its civilian constituents living with a wholeness of body, soul, and God’s spirit.

[2] Totemism is marked by “affiliat[es that] share certain general attributes of physical conformation, substance, temperament, and behavior by virtue of a common origin localized in space. Now, these attributes are … derived from … the name of an abstract property” (Descola 2014, 275). The American term “evangelical” has become abstracted and relativized to serve the ends of a cultural amalgam of unfettered freedom-seeking, nationalism, libertarian economics, and traditional and commercialized household images and symbols in addition to an identity marker of those of the “inner ring.” These social inner circles broadcast and proclaim the Gospel’s call for individual repentance as the prelude to salvation but increasingly have moved into the political economic sphere.

            The collectivizing totemization of the figure of Jesus without following his ethics is discerned in the concern with membership (loyalty, authority, and purity) and the physical (“racial,” not spiritual) “essence.” Because of the radical disparateness of interiorities, assurance is sought in the continuity of materialities (Ibid., 277). When totems combine religious identity with a non-religious ideology, they amplify in-group loyalty and prejudice against outsiders. By this combination, totemic communities sacralize biases, attributing them to the ultimate, cosmic, and transcendent. Rather than advancing the Spirit, it serves instead to protect the material order.

Tribal religion offers seekers ritual spaces of belonging, comfort, concern, and matters of meaning more than of fact. The increasingly totemized coalitions in American society manifest the seeking of assurance inside majoritarian identity and “racial” essence. For some “believers,” the growth of religious tribes may reveal assurance as it is marked by material (demographic or economic) attributes as well as spiritual affinities. For others, political and material objectives may be sought and become psychically assured by participation in the totemic collective.

            A consequence of dichotomizing the essence of people as either fully saved or totally depraved is that it risks slipping into naturalism that privileges the “beliefs,” subjectivity, moral conscience, hermeneutics, and identity pertaining to one form of human culture and deeming others unable to image God.