One way to explain Christianity’s return to prominence is to make the now banal observation that the validity of secularization theory—particularly when understood as a theory of religious decline—has been greatly exaggerated. Starting in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, with the Iranian revolution, the rise of the Christian right in the United States, and the important role played by the Catholic church in the development of the Solidarity movement in Poland, it became clear that religion was not destined to leave the public sphere to itself in most modern states. In response, thinkers began to pay more attention to the ways religion shaped not only private live but social life more broadly. By the turn of the millennium, it was hard to ignore the force of religion in the world without coming off as naïve.

But there is more to say about the recent upsurge in intellectual interest in Christianity than that it predictably follows from the failure of the secularization paradigm to explain how the world works now. We recently edited a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled Global Christianity, Global Critique. Our motivation for the project comes from the sense that two broad fields of argument stand out among current intellectual discussions of Christianity. Although both of these fields of argument might be taken to be relevant to discussions of the failure of secularization theory, they in fact go far beyond it, by making claims about how Christianity is and perhaps should be transforming both itself and the world.

One of these fields of argument is being constructed primarily by historians, anthropologists, theologians, and popular Christian writers, and has taken shape around notions such as “world Christianity” and “global Christianity.” Those participating in this discussion hold that while Christianity has always been global in its ambitions and self-conceptions, there is something about its recent growth, particularly in the global South, that is transforming it in important ways. The scholar who has had the most success in harnessing the energy of this conversation into a single coherent narrative is the historian Philip Jenkins. In his widely read book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Jenkins deploys a knack for making dramatic demographic arguments and an eye for the telling vignette to craft a story of Christianity as a religion whose greatest growth is still ahead of it. This growth will, however, not be in its traditional European heartland, but rather in the global South. Southern Christians tend, on Jenkins’s account, to be far more theologically and socially conservative than Northern Christians, and certainly more conservative than the kinds of liberal Christians who, until recently, have been so central to elite theological debate in the West. This means that as the center of Christianity moves South, so too will its dominant ideas and expressions become more conservative, leaving many Northern Christians to reckon with a kind of global marginality that they would never have predicted for themselves several decades ago. The current crisis in the Anglican communion over issues of homosexuality—a crisis in which conservative African Bishops are playing a key role—is taken by those who follow Jenkins to be paradigmatic of the kinds of strains that will beset Christianity more generally as its power centers move South. Those who contribute to the global Christianity discussion do not all agree with Jenkins in their reading of global Christianity’s origins, shape, and probable future course. Some scholars, for example, see a growing interest in social justice and a progressive politics emerging out of the rapid growth of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity around the world—or, at least, they note the development of a set of positions that does not conform easily to a conservative/liberal frame. But all scholars who speak about global Christianity do see themselves as making important empirical claims about the changing nature of the contemporary faith.

The second current discussion of Christianity to which we draw attention is primarily philosophical and has moved to make Christian categories and materials central to new projects of philosophical and cultural critique – projects once thought to be firmly rooted in secularist (and largely atheist) assumptions. The most prominent names connected with this discourse are Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, and Slavoj Žižek. Out of this group, the contributors to Global Christianity, Global Critique attend principally to the three continental philosophers who have written on Paul: Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek. All three share an interest in reading Paul as offering a model of a subject committed to radical change, and in drawing from Paul’s story non-determinist models of how such change can come about. Peter Sloterdijk has these philosophers in mind when he writes, in God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms, of Paul as “an idol for lovers of abstract militancy to this day […] the first Puritan, the first Jacobin and the first Leninist all rolled into one.” Drawing on Paul’s abrupt conversion, and on what they understand as his commitment to making Christianity a universal religion, these philosophers have put Christian categories back at the center of debates over how to think about society and its potential transformation. Although their relationships to the truth claims of Christianity are varied, they have made it possible for philosophers and other kinds of critical thinkers, not just to think about religion, but also, in important respects, to think with it, or at least with some of its conceptual, and sometimes its narrative, resources.

Both the debates over contemporary changes in Christianity and those over the political potential of Christian models of change have contributed to the new prominence of Christianity as a focus of intellectual discussion. But to this point, those involved in these two conversations have spoken little to each other. The philosophers (and some theologians) who consider the resources Christianity offers for rethinking trajectories of social and political change often disregard the discussions of existing forms of Christianity carried out by those participating in the discussions of global Christianity. Similarly, those studying Christians around the world often set aside the kinds of broad arguments about the social and political import of the Christian heritage laid out by the philosophers and those in dialogue with them. Our contention is that these parallel emerging discourses could benefit from some cross-fertilization. Global Christianity, Global Critique aims to initiate a conversation toward this end, bringing together essays by social scientists who study existing Christian communities (represented in the SAQ volume by those from our own field of anthropology) with efforts by theologians, philosophers, and historians of religion to reconsider the critical potential of Christianity.

In bringing these two conversations together, we ask some new kinds of questions. For example, is the philosophical shift to Paul only contingently related to what is happening among Christians both inside and outside the West? Or, might the global Christian discourse help make the philosophical one seem important or plausible? Put otherwise, is it the currently very evident global reach of Christianity that makes it a reasonable candidate to provide the foundation of what we gloss in our title as the philosophical effort at “global critique”? Looking from the other direction, does the new global organization of some forms of Christianity require of those who study it a different kind of attention to the political and broader social stakes involved in the transformations they track? Might a deeper engagement with philosophical discussions of Paul, and of Christianity more generally, help to sharpen debates that unfold along these lines?

In this forum, we invite discussion of these and related questions raised by the contributors to Global Christianity, Global Critique. The forum will feature posts by some of the contributors to the SAQ project, but provides an opportunity for others to join in, too. Some of these posts will respond to the SAQ essays, but we will also welcome the exploration of new issues, questions, and problematics alongside those already broached—ones that push forward the effort to understand and shape the public intellectual discussion of Christianity in the contemporary world.

—Phillip Blond

This past November, a new think tank called ResPublica was launched in London, in the opulent surrounds of the Royal Horseguards Hotel. It’s not every day that a think tank appears, of course, but even so this one attracted an unusual amount of attention. The meeting room in which the launch took place was overflowing. David Cameron, the Conservative Party Leader, modernizer, and hopeful Prime Minister, provided the opening remarks, and introduced its director, Phillip Blond. In the lead-up to the launch, Blond got prime coverage on television, in the broadsheets, and throughout the blogosphere, building on what had actually been almost a year’s worth of buzz over his rise to the top.

ResPublica’s signature approach is what Blond calls “Red Toryism,” which he outlined in the February 2009 issue of Prospect as “the tradition of communitarian civic conservatism,” and about which we’ll soon hear more. (Blond’s book, Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It, is set to be published in London this April, just before the British general election.) As Blond once described them in an interview, these communitarian Red Tories are “rather lovely people who say: ‘I’m a little bit Red, I’m a little bit Tory. I’ve been a conservative all my life, but I want to look after poor people.’”

Blond has been described by the New Statesman as the Conservative Party’s “philosopher-king,” but it is probably more accurate to say he’s part of Cameron’s scholastic stable—something like Tony Blair’s Tony Giddens. He is not every Tory’s Tory, to be sure. But his “progressive conservatism” has been useful as Cameron and his allies (the Cameroonians) try to erase the Conservative Party’s lingering image of being the Nasty Party.

Perhaps not surprisingly, media portraits of Blond have often been built around a few talking points, some glib, others intriguing. Firstly, and for fun, that Blond is the step-brother of the actor Daniel Craig (with much being made of the Blond/Bond pun). Secondly, and more seriously, that, in his capacity as a Red Tory, Blond doesn’t much like Tesco and other monopolist corporations; he wants a return to the butchers and bakers of yore, rooted in community networks. Blond talks up the virtues of society and talks down any and every liberal tradition of individualism (including Thatcherism). And finally, that Blond is an Anglican theologian who left his job at a provincial university to make his mark in the Westminster Village.

It’s this last point I want to focus on here, as a way of reflecting in part on Blond’s political vision as it has been set out thus far, and in part on how that vision relates to the secular arrangement in early twenty-first-century Britain. To date, what has grabbed the most attention in terms of Blond’s faith (other than the fact that he has one in the first place) are his opposition to abortion and his lack of enthusiasm over gay couples being able to adopt. These are important issues, but in and of themselves they do not get to the heart of the matter. What is most notable about Blond’s foray into the public square is the extent to which his theology would seem to demand the radical transformation of the public square itself. It is not just that Blond is fed up with New Labour and Conservative complicity in fostering neoliberalism, and it is not just that he wants to bolt cultural conservatism onto an economic progressivism. It is that the very language of politics, as well as that of culture—and thus the very terms of the secular system in which they operate—have to be reconfigured at the ontological level. This, at least, is what one would expect on the basis of his theology.

As many readers will know, Blond is not just any Anglican, or any theologian. He is a student of and advocate for Radical Orthodoxy, the Anglo-Catholic (yet ecumenical) “project” that came in part out of Peterhouse, Cambridge in the 1990s, and is perhaps best known through the work of John Milbank (who taught Blond at Peterhouse). In recent years, Milbank has garnered attention outside theology through his regular sparring with such continental atheist philosophers as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. But his most important achievement to date (which, incidentally, has not received nearly enough attention from social scientists), is Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. In that book, Milbank took a swipe at almost every theological and social-theoretical tradition stretching back to the days of Duns Scotus. The framing argument is that theology should not accept social theory’s terms of debate: religion (God) cannot be understood in terms of the social, but only in terms of itself. Inasmuch as theology has accepted a secular arrangement, it has ceased to be true theology. Secular social science—indeed, any secular norm—is, we might say, abnormal and, ultimately, a failure in its own terms because it harbors metaphysical impulses. “The secular episteme is a post-Christian paganism,” he writes. Theology has to become the master social science, the channel through which all social thought passes. “It is theology itself that will have to provide its own account of the final causes at work in human history, on the basis of its own particular, and historically specific faith.” The importance of this account, in Milbank’s view—and why it both must be and deserves to be universal and encompassing—is that it will allow us to replace an “ontology of violence” with an “ontology of peace,” the latter being the true position of Christianity. Secular reason, as expressed in social theory and the compromised theologies that it tolerates, is always ultimately nihilistic, always based on this ontology of violence.

Blond’s take on this all is expressed quite passionately in his introduction to Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology. It is worth quoting the first paragraph at length:

We live in a time of failed conditions. Everywhere people who have no faith in any possibility, either for themselves, each other, or for the world, mouth locutions they do not understand. With words such as ‘politics’, they attempt to formalise the unformalisable and found secular cities upon it. They attempt to live in the in-between and celebrate ambiguity as the new social horizon, always however bringing diversity into accord with their own projections. Always and everywhere, these late moderns make competing claims about the a priori, for they must be seen to disagree. Indeed such thinkers feel so strongly about the ethical nature of their doubt that they argue with vehemence about overcoming metaphysics, about language and the dangers of presence. […] Blind to the immanence of such a world, unable to disengage themselves from whatever transcendental schema they wish to endorse, these secular minds are only now beginning to perceive that all is not as it should be, that what was promised to them—self-liberation through the limitation of the world to human faculties—might after all be a form of self-mutilation.

In transforming this theological manifesto into a political one, Blond has had to “formalise the unformalisable” to a certain extent. He cannot move in the think-tank world by talking about metaphysics and presence, still less—this being Britain—by talking about God. So what has not appeared in the Red Tory rendering of his work is a clear sense of whither the secular city, or, for that matter, whither the church. Indeed, what struck me most at the ResPublica launch, since I attended with his theological work in mind, is that neither Blond nor anyone else (during the Q&A session) made mention of religion, or even faith in the most generic, banal of ways. The closest Blond got was to say things such as:

A capitalism based on trust does not require external regulation or control. A capitalism based on reciprocity—free, open, honest exchange—has little bureaucracy or state power associated with it. A civil economy drives down the cost of suspicion that self-interest creates and crowds in good rather than bad behaviour. A culture of internal ethos rather than external regulation creates a whole new model of social capitalism that radically reduces the barriers to market entry that suspicion creates, and it prices in the very things that human beings most value and like about each other: trust, human affection, and open and honest behaviour. We can create a civic economy based on trust, sustainability, and reciprocity.

Sounds great! And as an anthropologist, it was hard not the hear echoes of Marcel Mauss in his words. Indeed, in a perverse way, Red Toryism does not seem all that far off from David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, which also wrestles with the legacy of Mauss. The anarchism is actually not surprising. What it means in a radically orthodox sense is not no governance but no state, a point made by the American exponent William T. Cavanaugh in his essay in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. In a radically orthodox view, the problem with the state is that it leads to an “atomization of the citizenry.” The state is elemental to an ontology of violence (think Hobbes, think Rousseau), but anathema to an ontology of peace.

But as with any lovey-dovey statement about how wonderful we can be, the question to put to Blond is, how do we engender such trust? How can we create such a civic economy? The point is that Blond is not spouting empty rhetoric. Unlike many politicians, who are compelled to just sound inspiring and optimistic, Blond actually does have an answer: be radically orthodox.

I want to make a couple of things clear. First, I’ve never spoken to Phillip Blond, and I certainly don’t have the ability to read his mind. Second, I’m not a conspiracy theorist; I do not claim that Blond is covertly trying to foist a radically orthodox social arrangement on us through a political proxy set up in the secular city. What I am saying is that this double register of Radical Orthodoxy and Red Toryism is a near perfect encapsulation of the paradoxical location of religion in British politics: best hidden in plain view.

It is difficult to have a discussion or debate about the place of religion in British politics these days without someone bringing up the famous remark by Alistair Campbell (Tony Blair’s spin doctor) that “we don’t do God.” Campbell said this to a reporter from Vanity Fair who asked Blair about his faith; Campbell did not wait for Blair to answer. Since that time, “we don’t do God” has circulated as the a priori aperçu in all discussions of religion and politics: political talk cannot be religious talk. One problem with such a summary, though, is that British politicians do talk about religion—even if not in the same way as, say, their American counterparts. Blair did on occasion, and he made no secret of his strong faith.  In his first Labour Party Conference Speech as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown stressed that he got his values from his father, a minister in the Church of Scotland, and at one point quoted the Gospel of Mark.

Don’t get me wrong: too much public religiosity in politicians makes most Britons uneasy. It was only after he stepped down that Blair could openly be as Christian as he in fact is. And yet, what I think makes Britons more uneasy is the thought that religion is shaping things behind the scenes. Indeed, it’s not public religiosity in their politicians that bothers the British, but private religiosity, or, perhaps more accurately, the possibility of a “covert” religiosity at work. In my view, the key exchange on religion in politics in the past ten years is not that between Campbell and the Vanity Fair reporter. It’s one between the BBC’s bulldog Jeremy Paxman and Blair himself. It was February 2003, in the run-up to the Iraq War, and Paxman was chairing a question and answer session with Blair and an audience for Newsnight, the program he hosts. Paxman asked several questions, too, including one about Blair’s faith:

Paxman: … I want to explore a little further about your personal feelings about this war. Does the fact that George Bush and you are both Christians make it easier for you to view these conflicts in terms of good and evil?

Blair: I don’t think so, no, I think that whether you’re a Christian or you’re not a Christian you can try perceive what is good and what is, is evil.

Paxman: You don’t pray together for example?

Blair: [Blair smiles] No, we don’t pray together Jeremy, no.

Paxman: Why do you smile?

Blair: Because – why do you ask me the question?

Paxman: Because I’m trying to find out how you feel about it.

Blair: Possibly.

Smile. “Possibly.” What the transcription of this exchange cannot fully relay is the extent of Blair’s annoyance, the extent to which Paxman’s not-so-innocent question cut Blair to the bone. It is this exchange, in which Paxman and Blair almost square off on the question of whether the world’s leaders seek answers to the world’s issues by appealing to the divine, that captures a more central tension in how politics in Britain should or shouldn’t work. In this imagination of the secular, Politics has to be separate.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Blond has found favor in the political world with a politician who is, at best, what I referred to earlier as “just an Anglican.” Blair would surely be more interested in discoursing on theology with Blond than would Cameron. The most explicit David Cameron has gotten about his faith is to say that it’s a “fairly classic Church of England faith, a faith that grows hotter and colder by moments… If you are asking, do I drop to my knees and pray for guidance, no… But do I have faith and is it important, yes. My own faith is there, it’s not always the rock that perhaps it should be.”

When Cameron introduced Blond at the ResPublica launch, he said it was the largest such launch he’d ever been to, and that ResPublica would be “very important.” He also said that he did not agree with all of Blond’s positions, and would doubtless not agree with all of ResPublica’s platforms. But with that, Cameron left, apparently unable to stay for Blond’s speech.

Blond has maintained the public stance of an admiring outsider with a critical eye. He is not a full blooded Cameroonian. “We live in a time of crisis,” Blond begins in “Rise of the Red Tories,” his article for Prospect that provides the outline of his public-policy political vision. A time of crisis set within a time of failed conditions. What will be interesting to see is if and how Blond brings these times into synch, and in which res publica.