Bretherton: CT837 (c)
A Rationally Disorganized Temporary Witness
Stanley Hauerwas (on Politics, Theology, and Democracy)
CT837 Final Paper, April 29, 2013
Stanley Hauerwas has been called "Best Theologian" by Time magazine, but it is a title he rejects outright. His polemic style of writing would lead one to presume that Hauerwas rejects just about everything about the project of modernity into which he was born, but that belies a nuanced reading of the preeminent Texan theologian. In the paper that follows, I will outline and critically assess his political theology. Such an outline will show that for Hauerwas, politics is understood best as a "conversation necessary for a people to discover the goods they have in common."[1] Any goods common to both the incredible diversity of and in the world as well as to the universal catholic church must navigate Hauerwas' sharp church/world distinction, which I will attempt. To do so, the paradoxical nature of his theology will also be explored, including the curious commonality he shares with liberal feminism in his insistence that the public/private divide be demolished. After describing his political theology, I will develop a defense and critique of democracy as a form of political order. For any Hauerwasian defense, democracy must be a temporary phenomenon that is sustained by the memory and practices of distinctive communities. The necessary contingency of democracy plays itself out in relation to a proper understanding of time, memory, and death – which will be explored below. Furthermore, that the Christian experience has been one of being in solidarity with minorities allows for Hauerwas to appreciate the ability of democracy to be used to protect minority leverage. Finally, Hauerwas much in the way of a critique of democracy, though much of it is necessarily done through the specific context in which it is found in his time, through American notions thereof. This context is problematic because of America's superpower status, for it belies the minority impulse integral to Christian constructions of memory. In the context of immense power, time, memory, and death are reimagined not through the lens of humility, but of triumph and glory. I will show that Hauerwas insists that the church's minority status must shape our democratic political instincts so that we hedge against arrogant assumptions about power. In the end, the sharp liberal distinction between the public and private allows "Christian" politicians to go on lying, cheating, and stealing since liberal democracy assumes it can have justice without a people formed by Christian conviction to be just themselves. Ironic as it is, democracy ensures it will always keep our attention, for it is a wonderful story to tell and retell.
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Hauerwasian Political Theology
Stanley Hauerwas' emphasis on narrative and story shapes his understanding of politics profoundly. Because "politics is about relationships with people dead and alive,"[2] Hauerwas refuses to accept without qualification that modern notions of politics have more credibility that those proposed in our supposedly archaic Western past. He looks to the origins of Western political thought frequently, fan as he is of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Anything political (derived from polis, a Greek word meaning 'city-state') must have at its heart the interests of the people who constitute the body over which politicians govern. The polis has evolved over time, from the Greek city-states like Athens, Sparta, and Corinth, to modern nation-states like Germany, Canada, or South Korea. In the near future, it may develop further into increasingly expansive bodies inclusive of groups of countries, like the European Union, Arab League or the infamous Axis of Evil. As times have changed, the nature and theories supportive of the polis has also changed. Against many prominent political theories across time, which often assume that politics is primarily about formulas of power, Hauerwas tries to get to the root of the political, which he does not see as being essentially about power, but about people and the stories they hear, reinforce, and pass on. "Too often politics is treated solely as a matter of power, interests, or technique. We thus forget that the most basic task of any polity is to offer its people a sense of participation in an adventure. For finally what we seek is not power, or security, or equality, or even dignity, but a sense of worth gained from participation and contribution to a common adventure. Indeed, our 'dignity' derives exactly from our sense of having played a part in such a story."[3]
Politics, in this sense is wrapped up in the self-identity (which is to say the narrative embodiment) of those who are a part of the politics in question. Hauerwas rejects the modern instinct to attempt to universalize concepts such as politics, for such instincts fundamentally rob individuals and their communities of their unique identities. If a politic is to be functional, it must assert its ability to identify and manage those things that individuals under its care name as that affirm the good or goods they hold in common. Such goods are only discoverable in conversation. This conversation, for Hauerwas, is quite literal - we need to speak and listen to one another in order to distinguish personal goods from common goods. Therefore, "all genuine politics - that is, politics in the sense of conversation necessary for a people to discover the goods they have in common - are nonviolent. Rather than denying the political, nonviolence requires that we become political by forcing us to listen to the other rather than destroy them."[4] Becoming political is a deliberate act of hospitality toward the other (and others), it is a receptivity toward difference and a deliberate interest in identifying how disparate interests might work in tandem with one another. Real politics, then, cannot be violent, for to silence or crush the other with whom you otherwise might associate with, is to fail to discover common goods. "Politics only begins with [a disavowal of violence], for only then are we forced genuinely to listen to the other, thus beginning conversations necessary for discovering goods in common."[5] To Hauerwas, the assumption that "war is politics by any other means"[6] is shit. War, in its refusal to engage in conversation, is not genuinely political. Furthermore, units of power or coercion cannot measure politics, since that too fails to be conversation aimed at discovering goods held in common, but is in fact determinism disguised as political engagement. The difference between coercion and persuasion is the same as that between violence and politics; you cannot have one in the presence of the other, for they are mutually exclusive. To those who would insist that violence is political, or that pacifists are isolationists, he demands that, "Pacifism demands strenuous political engagement."[7] The politician is the same as the pacifist in that they rely upon persuasion and rhetoric to discover, protect, manage, and sustain goods held in common amidst a diverse polis.
Politics, in Hauerwas' view, is fundamentally about rhetoric, the art of persuasion. The most basic task of any politician, after all, is persuasion. In fact, he reminds us that, for Augustine, Satan was the original politician. This is not because Satan lies, though he does, but because lying and other rhetorical strategies are used to great effect in engaging corruptible people. The great accuser does not force anyone's hand, but uses persuasion skillfully. The most talented politician, similarly, can get people to do things they otherwise would not do, all while thinking they are doing it for their own good and by their own decision. Examined closely enough, politics may be nothing more than another word for rhetoric to Hauerwas. Training in rhetoric and conversation is a lesson in politics, in how to manage common goods and finite resources, balancing diverse and at times conflicting interests within the polis. Those unskilled in rhetoric therefore lack politics, and often must resort to violence in order to achieve their goals. They lack the finesse necessary to see the world in more nuanced tones, including the world in which they find themselves. Therefore, Hauerwas insists, "Persons with no politics become political pawns, lacking as they do the skills to grasp the shape of the involvements."[8] Violent people, including most (if not all) American politicians, are not in fact capable of seeing and therefore shaping the world in which they are immersed. In the United States, we cannot divest ourselves of war because we do not understand politics. We use violence because we do not see the goods inherent in other cultures and peoples as being held in common with our own. That this all sounds more like theology than it does politics is evidence of our own failure to have and embody a politic. For Hauerwas, after all, the distinction between theology and politics is permeable (if it exists at all). To divorce one from the other, as Enlightenment Liberalism does with its public/private distinction, denigrates them both. Any real theology is political, and any genuine politics is pacifist. With Second Wave feminists,[9] you might hear Hauerwas' voice crying out in the wilderness; "the personal is political!" It is a fallacy to assume that our Christian convictions can be tabled in public and exercised on Sundays, Christmas, and Easter. Instead, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus must shape our every decision and act. Our politics must be shaped by our fundamental beliefs, and our beliefs must transform how we speak and act in the world around us. That we speak and act instead of kill and maim is therefore significant; if politics is to accomplish anything, it does so by embrace and conversation, not by exclusion and denigration.
However, it seems to be a stretch, then for Hauerwas to go on to claim that "pacifism as a political program is effective only in the context of a specific way of life, a community which is in part constituted by a belief that no violence is ever justified."[10] By this, Hauerwas does not intend to disqualify pacifism on a national or even global scale. What is meant by pacifism as a political program is that it emerges out of concrete and articulable forms of life discovered and enacted at the lowest level, not a totalizing and therefore homogenous force from above. The polis itself determines the virtues and goods that make it distinct and therefore "good," not some external authority alien to the forms of life therein discovered. A pacifist emerges from a pacific community. Christians come from the church, which is the body of Christ. Pacifism as a program may in this case be distinct from the kind of nonviolence that marks politics and rhetoric, though the difference would be fine-grained and difficult to parse out. Hauerwas wants to maintain the difference between the church and the world, between what some organizers call "principled pacifism" and "strategic pacifism," while also holding up his insistence that the church narrates and embodies the end toward which the world moves. Though the church and the world share a common end, the world does not wish to acknowledge that such a thing will ever come. The church knows better than to believe the world will never pass away, even while it confesses that Christ makes possible the very infinitude that the world so longs for. It is by a similar paradox that Hauerwas can claim simultaneously that politics is universally pacific and yet pacifism is the mark of a distinctive community.
Hauerwas' political theology is fundamentally paradoxical because he sees the relationship between church and world to be similarly marked by paradox. To illustrate anecdotally,[11] he uses the example of Mahatma Gandhi's response to a question about nuclear war. The Hindu holy man replied that he would leave his bunker and stand in an open field, looking up at the approaching planes and stare lovingly at the pilot that he could not see and who could not see him. Such an act would be the expression of a man formed by a distinctive community that refuses to silence its claim to providing a paradoxically universal politic. It would be a refusal to quiet conversation, to subordinate politics to violence. The irony is that his act would be fundamentally political in a way that a policy of violence fails to be in its insistence upon discovering goods held in common, in this case the humanity shared both by Gandhi and the pilot. The prophetic act of nonviolence would be a testament that pacifists indeed "conceive of an effective political act that dissolves the policy itself... because [they] refuse to conceive of politics except as the creation of communities whose common good excludes violence." (HR, 455) Irony and paradox go hand in hand, and it may be a part of the reason that Hauerwas insists that theology must always be fragmentary and occasional – for you never know when God will do a new thing of which we cannot make sense. After all, that Gandhi would be killed in the hypothetical scenario would be of little matter, for "politics is about relationships between people dead and alive."[12]
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Defense of Democracy
For Hauerwas, dead people are every bit a part of the community called "church" as are those people who are living. One way to see the fundamental traditions of the church, after all, is as a democracy of the dead.[13] Part and parcel to Hauerwas' overall criticism of liberalism is the ahistorical nature of politics that modern political theories espouse. He criticizes John Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" especially for its overt ignorance to the fact that we are all born with a birthright. We cannot ignore the fact that we are born with a story, a place in this world that we cannot escape. Rich or poor, male or female, we are a people with a story, whether we like the one given to us or not. Instead, a realistic vision of the polis must acknowledge it has ideas and structures laid down prior to the generation into which we are delivered. Dead people (figuratively and sometimes literally) constitute the ground upon which we walk, and we would do well to honor the traditions given us by them. If democracy is indeed the power of the people (from demos – "people" and kratos – "power" or "force"), it must be inclusive of those voices that gave shape to the forms of life we now enact. For this reason, it is important to explore what is meant by democracy and where it originated.
The first democracy we know of was in the Greek city-state of Athens. Democracy, the "power of the people," was exercised by direct vote of land-owning male citizens over the age of twenty. Women, children, slaves, and foreigners were excluded (who also, ironically, represented a majority of the population). "People" were a select few; such that the connotation that "power of the people" now has would be foreign to our democratic .[14] However, Hauerwas (and many contemporary political thinkers) can see in this irony an opportunity to take democracy at its word, by using "people" to mean not privileged few but the underprivileged many. The rhetorical nuance should not be overlooked. As we saw above, politics is conversation that attempts to discover goods held in common. In the case of democracy, many modern philosophers, (by modern I mean dating back to the 18th century) have assumed the benefit of the doubt in the case of this most ancient of political practices. By essentially reinventing demos to mean all of human kind instead of just a few who are born into privileged status, a rhetorical/political maneuver is accomplished. A new good is discovered, nonviolently and therefore politically. Moderns have taken what was a good idea and made it better by discovering an ironic etymological twist and capitalizing thereon in order to make democracy more palatable to our own context. While this may never have been intended, its effect cannot be denied. Democracy was for a qualified "people" in ancient Greece, but it has been recovered for our own time by rhetorical finesse, by talented politicians who decided to keep the baby and throw out the bathwater. The same political tactic can be found in the history of the United States, in which "We the People" was classically defined, which is to say its understanding of personhood was qualified to mean (white) land-owning male citizens (much like in Greece), even though its authors saw themselves as colonists unjustly treated by an oppressive crown an ocean away. African Americans and women in particular have had similar political effect in widening the circle of what it is to be a People. It is no coincidence that Hauerwas marched with the African American students at Augustana College,[15] for in democracy he must have seen a meaning hidden in the very language used to exclude some people from being The People.
Hauerwas is willing to defend democracy to an extent, but his defense must be qualified in order to make sense. For as we have seen, democracy can and has meant different things to different people over different times of human history. Indeed, "democracy can only succeed temporarily as a witness to a political mode of existence that exists through memory."[16] Democracy succeeded in ancient Athens only temporarily. It was transformed from service to the Greek city-states by the Romans to fit a nation-state. In each case it succeeded for a time, but it did not last. In the modern era as well, democracy seems to have thrived only within a limited context, carried by memory of its potential to diffuse the power dynamics of oligarchies[17] and empires. But each and every time, as memory fades or is reimagined by the few, democracies too frequently devolve back into oligarchies. The privileged few had the power and freedom to do as they wished and kept the many in bondage. The structurally democratic, subversive instincts of the church frequently provided the language and the vision for the agitation necessary to buck the few from the necks of the many. Hauerwas agrees with John Howard Yoder in his observations that "'civil freedoms... arose out of religious agitation"[18]
However, freedom is not what democracy is ultimately about for Hauerwas. With Augustine, he insists that freedom is not equivalent with autonomy. Indeed, as before, we see that human flourishing is not as much about "power, or security, or equality,"[19] as it is about knowing one has a part to play in the story of the community. The common problem with Athenian democracy and modern oppression is that each requires the participation of agents that it effectively casts as non-beings, namely women, children, slaves, and foreigners. In so far as democracy protects the agency and full membership of these segments of society, then Hauerwas can agree with modern notions of democracy, if not the rhetoric about freedom. However, the measure of a just society must not be merely the presence of freedom, though that is an integral part of a healthy community, for "freedom is an abstraction that can easily direct our attention away from faithfully serving as the church in democratically social orders."[20] That the church is a democracy of the dead means that it is not one that favors individual autonomy as a measure of freedom, but the contribution of supposed non-agents like Augustine (who is dead) or illegal immigrant workers (who sustain our economy). The idea that "democracies are intrinsically more just because they provide more freedom than other kinds of societies"[21] is a "misleading assumption"
If democracy is not about freedom, then what is it about? As we have identified above, if the meaning of demos is understood to sympathize with all human beings irrespective of race, class, gender, ability, and age, then it might be something the church can endorse. The implication of rights language is not helpful, for too often it reinforces misleading assumptions about freedom as individual autonomy. Instead, agency is something more amenable to the Christian community, for we have a preferential option for the poor embedded in a narrative about God addressing the least of the world, affirming and protecting their "participation and contribution to our common adventure."[22] Democracies, in the sense Hauerwas can agree with, "understood as an arrangement for minority leverage can be a form of government Christians can rightly prefer."[23] And we have, as the witness of Quaker abolitionists, Puritan pilgrims, and Franciscan mendicants attest. Such democratic religious agitation suggests that democracy might best be summarized "the idea and practice of rational disorganization."[24] The witness of Christian agitators before us[25] is most authentic to our common faith when it was endeavored upon with patient prayer and liturgical diligence. Prayer and liturgy is constitutive of our faith, forming us in patience in order to give us a long view of history - one rife with injustice, oppression, and evil - from within as well as without. We recognize in our history both the part of the oppressed and the oppressor, a gift that enables us to seek not glory but justice. "What the church contributes to radical democracy is therefore a people who seek not glory but justice... formed through liturgical action to be for the world what the world can become."[26] We are for the world because we recognize we have come therefrom. That we are grafted onto the root of Judaism[27] ensures that we can understand what it is like to be narrated into non-existence. We know precisely what it is to be both oppressor and oppressed, because we have done and suffered both - we are sinner and saint at once. Finally, Hauerwas recognizes that "democracy worthy of that name requires that people exist who have been shaped by... patience-determined knowledge."[28] It is remembering the church's own history, listening to the voices of the living and the dead amongst us, that produces a politics worthy of democracy.
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Critique of Democracy:
That modern democracy has come to protect the few from the many might imbue the church with a false and unhealthy assumption that we, who are now the many, have a responsibility to protect the few. Such a patriarchal assumption belies the church's historical minority status. Hauerwas takes issue with any Christian political theology that assumes the mantle of power as though it is constitutive of the Christian story, for it is not. We protect the few and the weak because we were the few and the weak, not because we are now the many and the powerful. However, too often improper "assumptions function as an ideology for sustaining some Christian's presuppositions that their societies... are intrinsic to God's purposes."[29] Quite the contrary: God works through weakness, leads by humility, and is most attentive to the ignored people among us. We are assured of God's favor not by successful election campaigns or legislative victories, but orientationsuffering and captivity.[30] Though God may be above, the church is empowered from below, by distinctive communities formed by specific Christian virtues.
The problem with liberal democracy is that it imagines a city unbound by things like embodied virtues and political practices, each of which emerges necessarily from a people bound by time and space. The polis from which they spring cannot bear the weight of the universe, cannot translate its virtues to the cosmopolis, literally the universal city. The cosmopolitan nature of enlightened modern thought bulldozes over the specific context that give birth to the politics borne of particular communities. After all, democracy in its genesis was fashioned after the Greek city-states, each of which was more or less equivalent in size and strength, with none of overwhelming power or influence. In the world after the Cold War, with the United States the reigning superpower, democratic impulses amount to very little. Just as Athenian city-state democracy gave way to the republican nation-state democracy of Rome, nostalgic imagery of revolutionary democracy has also been overwhelmed by triumphalist impulses of post-Cold War Americana. Christians cannot authentically narrate their story from positions of power, for that was never our tale to tell. We have been grafted into a set of experiences that emerged from a minority people within the context of oppression. The adventure we have in common with Judaism is simply not one of glory and victory. The reinvention of the Judeo-Christian narrative into one through the lens of glory was the effect of the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire, a shift he refers to throughout his writings as the Constantinian Shift.
However, we cannot forget that democracy is necessarily a "temporary witness to a political mode of existence that exists through memory."[31] The memory of Rome was not the same memory of the church, for 'Roman politics depends on memory secured by military or political glory.'[32] Democracy-sustaining memory will not be found in the halls of congress or your local city council. The politics of liberal democracy as we know it in America is one that not only denies history but also refuses to leverage memory properly. Instead of hearing the blood of our dead soldiers as a reminder against violence, we commemorate our war dead in a cheap ploy to perpetuate war. Just like Rome, which depends upon military glory for sustenance, American democracy has lost its memory, disenfranchised its religious agitators, and insisted upon the easy, apolitical act of violence. Democracy as it is imagined today does not have time to do the work of politics, opting instead for violent avoidance of goods that we might hold in common with other nations or cultures. The politics of the church is constituted not by the war dead, who apparently usher us off to war with as little dwell time as possible, but by "The memory of the martyrs [which] makes possible a patient people capable of the slow, hard work of a politics of place."[33] As we have explored above, the polis exists within and is bound by place and time. The goods we discover are likely similarly dependent upon the time and place in which "We the People" find ourselves. Liberal democracy denies the contingency of time and place, focusing on the illusion of a cosmic polis, one falsely assumed to be free from particularities created by the place we call America.
The rhetoric of America is profoundly ironic, especially in its self-depiction as a melting pot in which the poor and downtrodden can find unparalleled individual self-actualization. For Christians this comes head to head against our rhetoric of being one holy, catholic, and apostolic body of believers. Liberal democracy insists on this melting pot ideal, as though difference can be assimilated into homogeneity and yet retain its diversity. The particular virtues Christians seek to form in their communities (like courage, wisdom, patience, or self-restraint) are only tolerated in so far as they align with those virtues identified by the American project (like freedom, survival, happiness, or ownership). The great irony is that democracy "is a social order that thrives on difference and dissent, and so the peculiar courage of Christians can be tolerated, or even welcomed. Yet this response will not work, for inherent in such an account of the church's relation to democracy is the distinction between public and private, which… cannot but marginalize courage of any sort."[34] In modern democracy, courage, wisdom, patience and self-restraint are welcomed only privately. After the towers fell, many a patient, wise, and moderate Christian voice was angrily silenced.[35] In the face of death, liberal democracy in America made clear that it would disown politics in favor of violence. To satiate the tyranny of the majority, democracy required vengeance, pettiness, impatience, and self-gratification.
Though this may make it sound like liberal democracy has fetishized death, the opposite is actually true. The hasty response to 9/11 was a refusal to properly honor those who died in the towers with any amount of honesty. We could not bear to look at our own weakness, consider our own finitude. Modern accounts and justifications of democracy have avoided the subject of death, rendering recent political theories "insufficiently political."[36] Even the death of our enemies is glossed over and not given a voice in this perverse democratic "politic." Our relationship with the dead (and the living) is predetermined and is therefore not truly political. In so far as "politics" with our neighbors and our own dead are scripted and decided in advance, it really only serves our own egos. Hauerwas' emphasis on eschatology, borrowed from Yoder, insists that the church and the world grapple with the reality of their own demise as part and parcel to their politics. Such a view guards against the arrogance of believing that our democracy will live forever, that it is a god. On the contrary, "the ability to sustain a local politics... requires an orientation toward death that grounds humility."[37] Paradoxically, the survival of democratic ideals requires an acknowledgment that it may not live into perpetuity. When democracy stops being our god it might just prove sustainable, but only as a temporary witness. Put another way, democracy properly practiced will continue to evolve and adapt to the occasions in which it is needed.
That our politics be eschatologically realistic is one of Hauerwas' fundamental convictions and oft-repeated refrains. Inherent to a realistic eschatology is the recognition of the immanency of death as well as the presence of wrongdoing. In other words, politics and its practitioners are not immune to judgment. Hauerwas' critique of modern democracy includes the suggestion that the majority is not immune to being wrong and to committing grave injustices (in the name of justice, no less). If Christians believe that Jesus is Lord over all, then it follows that the state cannot escape the judgment of God, for it too is under the Lordship of Christ. Indeed, "The church believes that it is always under the judgment of truth. The ideology of democracy believes that somehow truth is discerned and carried by the majority. But we must never forget that the most democratically elected leader of modern times was Adolf Hitler."[38] That the church embodies the ethic of a minority acts as a counter balance against collective ignorance borne of an orientation toward self-worship. Christians must always remember that God transcends the trivialities of national identity and politics. The "we" of the church is not the "we" of our national identities. The hopeful idealism embedded in the overt claims of liberal democracy can distract us from an orientation toward where our true hope must lie, which is with God. Indeed, "too often appeals to democracy underwrite accounts of time that seduce Christians to forget that we believe we live in a quite different time constituted by the worship of God."[39] Modern democracies have done a splendid job of framing the way we see the world in terms of justice and freedom and diversity, but ultimately democracy cannot provide these things in a society made up of infinitely self-interested individuals.
Hauerwas will concede that there is a certain tyranny about Christianity, that one's individuality must be involuntarily subordinated to the whole. Christianity, after all, demands that the distinction between public and private be permeable, that the virtues into which the church privately forms its members in turn shape their public politics. Likewise, what we call vices in private remain so in public, such that our "Christian" politicians be held to account for the lying, cheating and stealing so characteristic of supposedly "political" activity. Tragically, "modern democratic theory has been an attempt to give an account of democracies as just, without the people that constitute such a society having the virtue of justice."[40] Though he would only begrudgingly admit it, that one is a Christian does not necessarily preclude them from public office. The church does have something the world may value. Christian values are not antithetical to democratic practices at all; in fact perhaps we need more Christians in office. For "rather than being the denial of radical democracy, orthodoxy is the exemplification of the training necessary for the formation of a people who are not only capable of working for justice, but who are themselves just."[41] If liberal democracy is to be just at all, it certainly could stand to have more Christians taking their faith seriously, instead of less Christians taking their politicians too seriously.
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I have shown that Hauerwas has a complicated political theology, rife with paradox and irony. That politics is theological (and vice versa) means not only one cannot separate out public persona from personal conviction, but also that the peaceability which marks the church must also mark genuine politics. The polis precariously balances common goods amongst a diverse people, a task that is inherently nonviolent, for violence marks the failure of any such balance, the refusal to be truly political. For lives to share common goods must furthermore share a sense of adventure, must embody a common narrative, one that cultivates the participation of its own minorities. Therefore, I tried to articulate how Hauerwas can endorse a democratic politic as long as it expects and absorbs the contribution of the least of us. Democracy, if it is such a politic, may only survive via constant reinvention, the wineskin of a people who themselves constitute the wine. Goods will be frequently discovered and rediscovered; meaning the democratic-ness of a people will not look the same in different contexts and cultures. Instead, democracy is a practice that is always evolving in order to fit the particularities by which it is formed and for which it is called, contingent upon the memories of distinct communities made up of finite human beings. Hauerwas therefore correlates democracy to time, death, and memory, insisting that democracy must be a temporary phenomenon, the witness of a people stubbornly committed to discovering goods they might have in common. I have shown that Hauerwas' critique of democracy is really a critique of modern liberal democracy, especially as the United States of America espouses it. The triumphalism of the world's sole superpower is fed by enlightenment self-congratulatory assumptions about human infallibility, which cuts against the grain of Christian convictions about the persistence of sin and the virtues produced by suffering and captivity. A democracy constituted by a memory of glory and military victory, besides just not being the Christian story, cannot sustain a democratic politic which relies on ever-changing context in order to protect against the tyranny of the majority. Liberal democracy requires a distinction between private and public that forces particularities under the rug so that the public is as universally accessible as possible. The irony of the situation this produces is that not only do "Christian" publicans allowed to go on lying, cheating and stealing in the name of politics, but it also narrates subversive Christian virtues like courage as intolerant. Hauerwas appreciates the deep irony of democracy, and his theology testifies frequently to the ironic nature of politics. It is only by acknowledging the paradox that he can, as an ardent pacifist, declare that he is also "a violent son of a bitch." An essayist who refuses to write systematically and is quick to acknowledge his own finitude, Hauerwas may himself be a rationally disorganized temporary witness, testifying to transient nature of politics, theology, and democracy.
Footnotes
[1] Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary; Conversations Between a Radical Democrat and a Christian, (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2008), 2. Here forward abbreviated CDR.
[2] "A Story-Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down," in The Hauerwas Reader (Durham, NC: Duke, 2001), 172. Here forward abbreviated HR.
[3] "A Church Capable of Addressing a World at War: A Pacifist Response to the United Methodist Bishops' Pastoral In Defense of Creation," in HR, 454. Emphasis added
[4] "Why the 'Sectarian Temptation' is a Misrepresentation: A Response to James Gustafson," in HR, 105. Emphasis added.
[5] Made famous by 18th century Prussian general and philosopher Carl von Clausewitz, but repeated ad nauseam by military theorists thereafter.
[6] "Sectarian Temptation," in HR, 105
[7] "Self-Deception and Autobiography: Reflections on Speer's Inside the Third Reich," with David Burrell, in HR, 215.
[8] Originally attributed to Carol Hanisch, in her 1969 essay of the same name. Curiously, this was right about the time Hauerwas would have completed his doctoral work at Yale University.
[9] "A Church Capable," in HR, 455.
[10] To be fair, this anecdote comes from the introduction to CDR that he co-wrote with Romand Coles. I cannot imagine Hauerwas investing much attention in Gandhi of his own accord.
[11] CDR, 2
[12] G. K. Chesterton - "[Tradition] is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." ("The Ethics of Elfland," Orthodoxy [1908], p. 85)
[13] Hannah's Child; A Theologian's Memoir (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's 2010), 81.
[14] State of the University; Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2007), 163. Here forward abbreviated SU.
[15] Literally, in the Greek, oligarkhia; the arkhein, "rule," of the oligos, "few." See note 12 above as well.
[16] SU, 153. Emphasis added
[17] HR, 172. See note 2, above.
[18] The Peaceable Kingdom; A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1983), 111. Here forward abbreviated PK.
[19] Ibid.
[20] HR, 172. See note 2, above.
[21] SU, 156
[22] SU, 163
[23] CDR, 26
[24] Romans 11
[25] SU, 10
[26] PK, 59
[27] SU 163, see note 9 above.
[28] CDR, 25, paraphrase.
[29] CDR, 26
[30] "Courage Exemplified" with Charles Pinches, in HR, 305.
[31] CDR, 2
[32] Nowhere is this more clearly displayed than in the interaction between Bill O'Reilly and Iraq veteran Jeremy Glick, who lost his father on 9/11. Viewable at http://youtu.be/3BAFb97L3KU
[33] CDR, 24
[34] "Christianity: It's Not a Religion: It's an Adventure," in HR, 527
[35] SU, 9
[36] SU, 56
[37] CDR, 30
