So as to avoid other-worldliness, on the one hand, and tyranny and barbarism, on the other, the secularist entreats us to own up to what we all secretly know already: there is no transcendence grounding the temporal flux, no world of Forms outside Plato’s cave. All we have are the shadows on the wall, and it is our task to arrange ourselves as harmoniously as possible in relation to them.

Of course, the critiques of this secularist perspective are manifold. Through the work of Connolly, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, to name a few, we have learned that the secularist cave is neither the universal nor the neutral playing field that it pretends to be. Just like whiteness and maleness, secularism claims to speak for the whole world by effacing the particularities of its genesis—specifically, Protestantism, colonialism, and capitalism. One could write full-length books undertaking any of these critiques, but for the purpose of this forum, I would like to bring another perspective briefly into focus, primarily because it does not get quite as much attention in discussions of secularism among religious studies scholars, anthropologists, and political theorists.

This position is the one advanced by the increasingly political Christian theological circle known as Radical Orthodoxy (RO), and it goes more or less like this: secular political theory is doomed from the outset because it cuts itself off from any outside—that is to say, any order of things that is truly different from the ordinary order of things. Christianity offers the only viable socio-political configuration for two reasons: first, it alone is truly universal; and second, it alone offers a truly peaceful vision of the world. I will not discuss the issue of RO’s claims to universality here; rather, I refer the reader to the critiques I have offered here and here. More important for the moment is RO’s conviction that Christianity guarantees peace because Christianity ontologizes peace; that is to say, Christianity tells a story that grounds our being-together in a fundamental harmony with other beings and our creator.  This horizontal and vertical harmony is tied up and secured by means of the doctrine of the Trinity, which draws difference into loving identity without canceling out the differences it relates. So, it’s peace all the way down, and anything less than peace is a denial of the way things actually are.

The problem with secular political theory from RO’s standpoint is that it starts the story too late. Rather than grounding our being in a fundamental harmony and then accounting for our fall into violence and greed, secular political theory assumes violence and greed from the outset. Hobbes, Weber, Mill, and, to a certain extent, Rousseau—all of these thinkers begin from an irreducibly agonistic state and then devise ways of managing the violence they’ve enshrined in the first place. In short, secular political and social theories are hopelessly lodged in violence because they assume that the way things look “down here” is the way things fundamentally are. Secularism, in other words, divorces the shadows in the cave from their sunlit originals, abandoning us to a parodic world of simulacra simulating nothing, with all of us taking meaningless bets on which shadows might prance across the wall next.

Now, I must confess, part of me finds this critique quite convincing—not because I am wedded to a Platonic metaphysic, but because it seems to me that secular political theory, insofar as it assumes the inescapability of violence, cuts itself off from what Derridean shorthand would call the possibility of the impossible. By insisting that this is all there is, the secularist position forecloses the emergence of anything other than this. Since people are violent, we must manage violence with violence as responsibly as possible—any other option is just foolish. What troubles me is that by sticking to what is probable and practical, secularism misses that which from our perspective seems impossible—say, peace, justice, compassion for all sentient beings, swords into plowshares. . . . These sorts of promises, it seems to me, are only held by something like transcendence—even if only the possibility of transcendence—the possibility that things might genuinely be otherwise.

Sympathetic as I am to the Radically Orthodox critique, however, I do not at all agree with their solution, which is, in short, to make the whole world Christian (specifically, high Anglo-Catholic) insofar as the whole world already is, at bottom, high Anglo-Catholic. To be sure, one massive stumbling block for me is the neo-imperialism at work in this insistence on Christian universalism. But there is a theological problem too—namely, the demand for transcendence, coupled with the claim to know what that transcendence looks like. This is a problem because, to risk a tautology, transcendence is not transcendence if it doesn’t transcend—if it just confirms our vision of the way the world really is. If transcendence were genuinely to transcend, it seems to me that it would not ground our political convictions so much as unground them, for the sake of reconfiguring the political terrain itself. To deny this discomfiting truth and attempt to lay claim to transcendence would be to confirm the secularist’s justifiable fear of theocratic tyranny and barbarism. But, again, to cut off transcendence is to close off the space of something genuinely new.

So as far as I can see, the question becomes not whether we’re “for” transcendence or “against” it, but how we might conceive of transcendence differently. Rather than confining it to some static realm outside the world, to which a privileged few have access, how might we think of a transcendence that opens dynamically through the world, surprising and unsettling us each time? How, in other words, might we rethink the topography of the cave?

Now, the source I find most helpful and most frustrating for re-thinking this infamous allegory is Martin Heidegger. In his two interpretations of Plato’s cave—one in a 1931 lecture series on Plato and the other in an essay written in 1947, after Freiburg University’s denazification committee had forbidden him to speak in public—Heidegger’s great insight is that truth does not reside in the brilliance of the Forms, but rather in the transitions from the cave to the sunlight, and from the sunlight back down to the cave. This is to say that truth and shadow open through one another, or to push Heidegger a bit further than he allows himself to go, the cave and the sunlight are not two separate spaces at all. They are, rather, different modes of seeing the same world. (I discuss this point at length in Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe.) The sunlight opens through the cave. I think this is a fair extension of Heidegger because it echoes one of the central claims of Being and Time, which is that authenticity is not some realm set apart from the everyday—it is merely a modified way of apprehending everydayness itself. The true, the authentic, the space of freedom is folded into and only emerges by means of the ordinary, untrue, and unfree state of things.

So, where are we? Weren’t we talking about secularism? We will recall that the Euro-American secularist construes “the religious” as an escapist or tyrannical privilege of the space outside the cave over the cave itself. As a remedy, she offers the space inside the cave as the only space there is, leaving us, as far as I’m concerned, cut off from anything that truly differs from the rather intolerable way things are. The pseudo-Heideggerian interpretation I have offered here weaves itself somewhere between the religious other-world and the secular this-one, not only refusing to privilege either over the other, but, more radically, reading them as thoroughly interwoven. So, if the religious standpoint lodges itself in the extraordinary as such, and the secular perspective roots us in the ordinary as such, I am pressing here for some way of seeing the extraordinary in and through the ordinary.

To remain a bit longer with Heidegger, there is a name for this attentiveness to the extraordinary in and through the ordinary. Plato called it thaumazein, a word most often rendered in English as “wonder.” In his reading of Plato’s Theaetetus, which claims wonder as the origin of all philosophy, Heidegger explains that unlike curiosity, amazement, or stupefaction, wonder (Erstaunen) wonders not at the extraordinary as such, but rather, at the strangeness of the everyday. As Heidegger puts it, “precisely the most usual whose usualness goes so far that it is not even known or noticed in its usualness—this most usual itself becomes in and for wonder what is most unusual.”

So, if the “religious” standpoint loses itself in some other world, and the “secular” accepts this one too uncritically, wonder’s relentless between looks for what’s shocking about the ordinary. This shock can give way to all sorts of different value judgments—wonder might expose the ordinary as suddenly beautiful, or inexplicable, or as thoroughly unacceptable. Thus its political promise: wonder neither allows us to claim access to a fixed order no one else can see nor to remain content tinkering with a patently broken set of ethico-political configurations. Rather, to put it in totally ordinary terms, wonder reveals that the way things are need not be the way things are. And it could be just this sort of denaturalization that might allow us to begin to think the secular—otherwise.

—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.

*  *  *

NS: You write of Slavoj Žižek, “In an important sense, he bears a theological witness.” How can a self-described atheist bear a theological witness?

JM: In Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils, one character, Kirillov, speaks of both the necessity to believe in God as the reality of infinite goodness and the impossibility of doing so. His resolution of this dilemma is deliberate, meaningless suicide on the grounds that, in an atheistic world, he himself is now God, as possessor of a sovereign will, and that suicide is the highest demonstration of this will. Žižek tries to escape this dilemma in another way—by pointing to the figure of Christ, whom tradition has taken to be the incarnation of God in a single human life. Although, for Žižek, God is only present in incarnate guise and otherwise does not exist at all, he still insists that outside this Christian legacy we would not have had the sense of an absolute demand, exceeding all human law and custom. Indeed, the notion of incarnation sustains for Žižek the idea that this absolute demand, which orients our humanity, is more than human, even though it comes, he says, from “nowhere.”

NS: Against Žižek, you insist on the necessity of theism. What do you think are the prospects for a philosophical encounter with theology that doesn’t assent to a transcendent deity?

JM: I think that, in the end, the prospects are non-existent. Dostoevsky saw further then Žižek, because he dramatized the alternative existential stances in the face of nihilism, even a Christological nihilism. Kirillov tries self-assertion, but logically concludes that the only irrefutable act of “divine” self-assertion is self-slaughter. Stavorogin, in the same novel, adopts instead a malicious indifference, which he deploys seductively to derange the lives of others. But in the end, this leads to a suicide of mere despair. Žižek’s Christ is merely a clown, the excreted everyman, the dross of the world. “The Good” is here reduced to the instance of that which exceeds reality, which finds no home. This places love beneath being, even if in a sense it is beyond being for Žižek, as the impossibility of realized desire. But at the end of The Devils, Dostoevsky suggests through the mouth of the dying Verkhovensky that love exceeds being in the sense that the real is orientated by the Good. Here, loving faith alone closes the circle of the ontological argument. The highest, which would include existence, must indeed exist. Without this idea of a perfect happiness for all of reality, which the most extreme misery cannot perturb, Dostoevsky contends that human beings lose their defining orientation. The final episodes of the novel try to depict scenes of disclosing recognition and forgiveness between people, which show how we can authentically participate in this infinite perfection and thereby transfigure the world.

Atheistic philosophy still finds itself caught in a theoretical version of the nihilistic aporia depicted by the 19th-century Russian novelist. Either, like Kirillov, it can assert human reason or freedom against the power of the void—but then this seems like self-vaunting wishful thinking; or else, like Stavrogin, it can deny the final reality of any human suppositions against the background of an indifferent nature. But in that case, the reality of reason itself is threatened. The atheistic logos will always lack either being or reason, without which there is no philosophy, no exercise of the love of wisdom.

NS: Now you have a forthcoming book, again with Creston Davis and Žižek, on Saint Paul, who has been a popular subject for Continental philosophy in recent years. Do you think it is legitimate for secular theorists to take Paul as a model for political action?

JM: Certainly, in the sense that Paul provoked the first Western enlightenment, the first ideas for a universal humanity, not just for an elite. He also suggested that the norms of human life lie in excess of any customary law-code. It is to their credit that secular thinkers are seeing that Paul erected the paradigm for all later revolutionary gestures. At the same time, they sometimes underplay his paradoxicality and the way in which he was also a conservative figure, who did not mean to overturn the truth of Jewish election by God, nor of Jewish law, but rather to appeal to its deeper foundation. There is some danger of a Marcionite reading of Paul, denying the God of the Old Testament, as in the renderings of Ernst Bloch and Alain Badiou, for example. Paul, by contrast, appeals at once to tradition and yet to the hidden basis of tradition, which allows one respectfully to exceed it. To be fair, both Žižek and Agamben allow for this far more. But then, they are also gnostic in their suggestions that Paul is caught between the aspiration to escape the somewhat sinister domain of law, on the one hand, and the impossibility of doing so, on the other. Yet because of his belief in the possibility of mediation, Paul did not just make radical gestures; nor did he, like Marx, propose the necessity of the present order’s destruction. Instead, he systematically established a new sort of international community within and alongside—and yet beyond—the state. This community was at once democratic and hierarchical, at once radically new and cosmopolitan, and yet archaic, because it returned to the pre-legal basis of a gift-exchanging order.

NS: Why do you think this renewed interest in Paul is happening now?

JM: It coincides with a new sense of tragic futility. If I were an atheist, I think I might ultimately condemn this interest as betokening despair. Yet Paul himself was eminently practical. It is, ironically, his mode of praxis that the atheists cannot grasp or embrace, because it is based on the possibility of imagining faith and trust in infinite goodness on earth. Paul does not ascribe to a dialectic of law and desire, nor to one of death and life. Rather, he believes, by insisting on the resurrection, that life is infinite and deathless. His politics of resurrection are the only possible politics of unrestricted hope in the coming of harmonious coexistence through the incarnation of love and justice.

NS: Do you see your participation in this dialogue as evangelization? What do you hope to accomplish?

JM: Yes. Victory.

NS: Adam Kotsko, in Žižek and Theology, argues that Christians have something to learn from the likes of Žižek. Do you think that the conversation could go both ways?

JM: Of course there are things to learn from Žižek—he reminds us that the logic of the God-Man is more universally human than the logic of God alone. In this way, he, as an atheist, refuses the lazy relativism of so much contemporary Christian theology, which betrays the Incarnation by seeing the God-Man as just a kind of optional add-on to the idea of God. This add-on might, for them, equally well be the Torah or the Koran. But to think this is also to betray the specificity of the Western legacy. Žižek is a crucial corrective here. However, the posturing of someone like Kotsko can only produce a wry smile in someone of my generation. This is exactly the sort of pusillanimous theology of some in the 1960s that we have long sought to escape from. Why? Because it is bad faith. If you are going to be an atheist and nihilist, then be one. Only second-raters repeat secular nostrums in a pious guise. Such theology can never possibly make any difference, by definition. It’s a kind of sad, grey, seasonal echo of last year’s genuine black. All real Christian theology, by contrast, emerges from the Church, which alone mediates the presence of the God-Man, who is the presupposition of all Christian thinking. Kotsko fears that the Church is an institution, but of course it isn’t—or isn’t primarily—as Graham Ward has well pointed out. It’s rather the continued event of the ingestion of the body of Christ. This fact provides a critical self-correction, well in excess of any outsider criticism of all the Church’s shortcomings and abuses, which I would hope to be among the first to recognize and denounce.

NS: You’ve noted theology’s shift toward secularization, through its adoption of the methods of the secular social sciences. How does one undertake genuine theology in a secular age?

JM: I’m critical of theology deploying social science when this means taking over theological or atheist positions uncritically and in disguise. Theology in a secular age has to give an account of the secular and of why secularization has occurred. This should include recognizing how Christianity secularizes (in a good sense) by desacralizing politics, law, and nature to some degree—but without total disenchantment. At the same time, I think we need an account of why secularity (in a bad sense) has left the West with realms autonomously indifferent to the sacred. Persons, land, and money without reference to God become, as Karl Polanyi pointed out, either idols or else mere instruments to be exploited—or both at once. Charles Taylor, I think, has part of the answer for why this happened; the West became over-disciplinary and the ethical displaced the religious. Another part of the answer is the way in which bad theology paradoxically invented a “pure nature,” so that a rather simplistic notion of God as something supernatural and intervening could all the better stand out. Defending mediation, by contrast, is once again crucial here.

NS: Do you think an atheist has any business in a theology department?

JM: I recommend departments of mixed theology and religious studies in secular universities, and the appointment of able people of all religious creeds and none. But, of course, if one respects knowledges linked to traditions, then adherence to those traditions can sometimes be relevant to making appointments. It’s a matter of tact, not of scandal.

NS: Increasingly, people are coming to describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Do you think, however, that there is value—perhaps even potential for political movements—in the growing detachment of people’s religious lives from traditional authorities, and in this newfound autonomy?

JM: It is good that people can no longer so easily be coerced into faith; faith itself has to welcome that, for faith-based reasons. In a way, we have returned to the situation of the first few Christian centuries. At the same time, though, autonomy and freedom from tradition can never be real. One has to come to terms with one’s own legacy, and children have to be taught something. The idea that they might be offered only “choice” is of course crazy. Before we choose, we are inducted into an habitual way of life.

NS: Another aspect of modern liberalism—and liberal religion—that you’ve been critical of is so-called sexual liberation. Why do you call this, which many people consider an advance of liberty, fascism?

JM: In one sense, the freeing of sex from the law has always been implied by Christianity; the 1960s’ “liberation” remains an event within Christian history. At the same time, what one saw here was a kind of democratization and commercialization of “bohemian” morals, which had themselves earlier been newly legitimated and normalized for an elite, as Phillip Blond has pointed out. The problem here is that self-pleasure can become either explicitly or tacitly a goal in itself. When the romantics earlier spoke of the importance of marriage being “free,” that seems to me nearer the mark, as a goal. Human fulfillment lies more in the direction of faithful love and inserting oneself in the continuity of generations. Marriage and the family, for all their corruption and misuse, are at base democratic institutions. Fascism for me comes into the picture because I think (following Adorno, amongst others) that the gradual separation of sex from procreation is regarded naively if we do not realize that this is what the state wants. Covertly, it wants to secure “Malthusian” control over reproduction and to deal with the individual directly, rather than through the mediation of couples. Much of liberal feminism is actually, in practice, on the side of economic and political neoliberalism. It is too rarely noticed that sexual permissiveness has today become a kind of opiate that covertly reconciles people to the loss of other freedoms—both in relation to the state and to the workplace.

NS: Does this mean that the progress of feminism, as well as of sexual minorities, should be rolled back?

JM: What we need is not a return to former legal coercion and social ostracism in the sexual field, but a change in ethos, which will promote both relational fidelity and the encouragement of human creativity and participation in the workplace and in civil life. As part of this, I think it is important both to support gay civil partnerships and yet to oppose the idea of “gay marriage.” Many more gay people in Europe approve of this combination than do in the US.

NS: And finally: capital. What does the current economic crisis mean to you, theologically? How far do you think an atheist thinker like Žižek can go toward a meaningful analysis of it?

JM: Not very far, because he tends to combine refusism with Stalinist nostalgia. The current crisis is not final, but reminds us of what happens when one wrenches the meaning of things apart from things themselves, which is a consequence both of over-abstraction and of individualism running riot. I think we need a new sense of the sacredness of land, people, and even money as real goods, though not things to be worshiped in themselves. We also need to realize that humans are gift-exchangers seeking mutual recognition before they are self-seekers. Not only are more ethical market procedures viable, but they would also permit a freer market, run more by trust and tacit understanding. It is actually the neoliberal market that needs the titanic, interventionist state.

NS: What do you think the prospects are for a theologically-informed political movement in today’s secular world?

JM: Red Toryism is an old current in Canadian politics, which has now been transplanted and revived in Britain by my former pupil Phillip Blond. Through him and others, including the Blue Labourites headed by Maurice Glasman, a “politics of paradox” is emerging and is making some headway in the UK. (In the UK, as in Europe, “red” denotes left-wing and “blue” denotes conservative. Hence ‘red Tory’ indicates the paradox of a Toryism blended with a non-statist associationism and distributism—with ‘socialism’ in a certain sense—and  “blue Labour” indicates the paradox of a non-statist Socialism with a Tory tinge.) Basically, what we have here is an attempt to work out in practice a Communitarian politics, but one which fully includes the economic dimension. A Communitarian versus Libertarian polarity is starting to disturn the dominance of the Left-versus-Right polarity at the heart of British politics.  The new thinking concentrates around Phillip’s think-tank ResPublica, and—make no mistake about it—this is something big. Already, both major parties have adopted aspects of Phillip’s ideas for an “ownership state,” which would involve more decentralized professional control of the public realm—but with non-profit, social purposes in view. To complement this new mode of state, the new “paradoxical” position also advocates a “moral market,” in which contract must itself have a social purpose, and businesses will often be partnerships of owners, workers, and consumers. This is influenced by Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, who helped draft Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI’s recent social encyclical. One can link this also to a blending of elements in Polanyi and Marx. The argument is that an even freer market (more so than the neoliberals want) is also a moral market (as they don’t even pretend to conceive). Yet many arguments about the exact role of government in all this are yet to be played out. In any case, it has turned out that the only thing that can break with both Thatcherism and Blairism is a new fusion, and yet recreation, of both Old Labour and Old Toryism.

NS: Of what exactly, in terms of politics, does this “paradox” consist?

JM: It is threefold. First: in the UK today, as in the US, we see that a “liberated” market has in fact augmented the role of the state—in saving and upholding big banks, in remedial welfare, in policing individualist anarchy. Moral trust is required by the market, but neoliberalism never theorized the firm as involving such trust and has failed to avoid substituting for it mere incentives and surveillance. Second: it’s a cliche that the right has won economically and the left culturally. But this is actually the victory of one force—liberalism. To this we oppose an associationist communitarianism, which combines left egalitarianism with conservatism about cultural and ethical values. It is pro-high culture and pro-excellence in education, but wants these things to be democratically available. Ethically, it is pro-family but by no means wishes to reverse the gains of female equality and the tolerance of homosexuality—the point is rather that stable marriage is the best way for most people. It is also critical of the technologization of medicine and the increasingly calculative approach to the lives of the old; it takes for granted that all decent people are opposed to voluntary euthanasia. The third paradox is that an egalitarian democracy actually requires a hierarchy both of values and of persons of excellence. Otherwise, money and sophistry co-conspire to destroy it, as they have in recent years. Democracy can only be sustained when there is a parallel, non-democratic concern with paideia—the formation of good character—which links talent to virtue and both to positions of appropriate social influence. Without the extra-democratic inculcation of character, democracy cannot enter into the debate about the good, which is the only legitimate and non-corrupt debate that can be held.

NS: What are the sources of this character? Are they necessarily Christian ones?

JM: Red Tories and Blue Labourites reject both the deontology of the right and the utilitarianism of the left in favor of the view that state, society, and economy must all see their role as the building up of individual and relational flourishing—of honor and virtue. The mediating role of religious bodies in all this clearly must be crucial. We hope that many Muslims and Jews, as well as Christians, will embrace a return to the politics of the Good, rooted both in the Bible and in classical antiquity. It is this legacy, re-thought and democratized (in keeping with biblical impulses), which alone can now save Europe, America, and the world.