Bronwyn Leebaw, in her post, notes that I seek to stave off the fate of Sophie Wilder, a character in a novel who converts to Catholicism then becomes estranged from her friends and family. Mirabile dictu, unlike Sophie Wilder, my book has met with great efforts to understand it, absorb it, and engage it thoughtfully, this at the hands of six reviewers each of whose own scholarship has contributed crucially to the contemporary conversation about the justice of dealing with past injustice. I am grateful. I am heartened, too, that each reviewer fundamentally “got” the book, grasping and in many ways finding sympathy with what I strove to argue.

The disagreements, though, are more interesting in a forum like this one so herein I focus on them. Two main criticisms appear in the reviews. Both concern the application of the ethic to the real world. One has to do with the overlapping consensus I have sought to construct among four schools and traditions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the restorative justice movement. Leebaw, Colleen Murphy, Leslie Vinjamuri, and Alex Bellamy question whether this consensus leaves out many other traditions and perspectives in the realm of transitional justice. Mark Freeman states a different version of the criticism in asking whether I stretch the terms of the argument too widely in trying to accommodate multiple perspectives. The second has to do with the ethic’s aspiration to holism. Is it not utopian? Murphy, Leebaw, and Vinjamuri each ask this question in different ways, worrying that the ethic is unable to provide guidance, resolve dilemmas, or handle backlash, adverse effects, political manipulation, and other problems of politics as usual.

Let us begin with the question of consensus. Murphy doubts that the ethic will receive the endorsement of secularists who do not subscribe to restorative justice, while Vinjamuri believes the same is true for a range of “local traditions and customs,” “many faith traditions,” some liberals, the Burmese, and communities that have mediated human rights in locally particular ways.

Consensus, however, is not the first or most important criteria by which my ethic—or any ethic—ought to be judged. As Murphy recognizes, my ethic has two tasks, the first of which is prior to the second. This first task is to set forth and defend a concept of justice. This concept, like any other ethic, whether that of Confucius, Kant, or Averroes, should be accepted or rejected, endorsed or argued with on its merits, not on whether a given set of people agree with or disagree with it. A valid criticism of this first task would be, “this is not an adequate notion of justice because it omits, contradicts, fails to specify,” and the like, and not simply “this or that group thinks differently.” The purpose of an ethic, after all, is to judge, practices, actions, and other concepts of justice. This would not be possible if the ethic found “agreement on every side of a multifaceted argument,” to use Freeman’s phrase. Just as we would not expect advocates of racial equality to seek agreement with segregationists or religious freedom with defenders of blasphemy codes, so we should not judge an ethic of restorative justice inadequate because it fails to find agreement with, say a consequentialist or a balance retributivist (two of the competing conceptions that I outline in the book). Now, the disagreement between my ethic of political reconciliation and its interlocutors is not as sharp as in these examples; some of the reviewers remark upon my efforts to find common ground with other points of view. I make these efforts indeed. Still, disagreements there are—with liberalism, consequentialism, balance retributivism, opponents of forgiveness, “agonistic” theorists, and other points of view. Whether the zone of disagreement with these other views can be reduced depends, as with any argument about ethics, on what sort of persuasion takes place in conversation among the viewpoints, not on whether the ethic converges with positions that exist prior to the conversation.

It is only once the substance of the ethic has been developed—the job of the first task—that I am interested in trying to show that it can command widespread endorsement. Because the ethic is generated from particular religious traditions and a school of justice, and because I hope that it will have wide applicability around the globe, I am interested to show that it might achieve endorsement beyond any one of these traditions. Leebaw argues that I draw from the Christian tradition more than any other. She is right; I do. I then try to show that the core commitments of the ethic—its notions of justice, peace and mercy—find resonance in the Jewish tradition, the Islamic tradition, and the restorative justice school of thought. Restorative justice is important because it has secular articulations and thus shows that the ethic is expressible in secular terms—an important trait if the ethic is to travel to the United Nations or organizations that typically operate in secular terms.

It is not my aim, though, that the ethic will be practiced only among these traditions. For the sake of realism I choose to develop this group of traditions. The framework of overlapping consensus, though, is one in which other traditions might join. In my travels in Africa, I have discovered numerous tribal traditions whose rituals and practices of reconciliation deeply resonate with the ethic of political reconciliation. They are holistic and involve several interconnected practices, many of which are the same as those in the ethic. One of the greatest theorists of restorative justice, Australia’s John Braithwaite, argues that restorative justice is the approach to dealing with the past that resonates with the vast majority of the world’s cultures and religions over the course of history. This is a big claim whose validity I am unable to evaluate. But if Braithwaite is even close to being correct, then the potential for overlapping consensus is strong.

None of this is to deny the challenge and the likelihood of partial results in finding resonance on the ethic among traditions. Traditions themselves contain internally conflicting schools; in the book I note these in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as dimensions of the ethic in which convergence between these entire traditions will fall short. It is difficult to say ex ante, prior to the hard work of searching for mutual resonance,how much convergence between the ethic and any given tradition will be possible. No tradition will converge fully. As Murphy and Vinjamuri rightly note, many ethics will not sign on given their currently extant beliefs, prior to a conversation in which mutual persuasion is attempted. Most importantly, the pursuit of consensus, the object of the second task, is a pursuit based upon a fixed set of commitments, those developed in the first task. Given these commitments, given that they will converge and diverge with the range of views out there in the world, how wide can the zone of agreement be extended?

The real world is also the subject of the other major concern raised in the symposium. I do not account adequately, the criticism runs, for what will likely happen when the practices hit politics: backlash, backfire, manipulation, strategic use on the part of the powerful, and breakdown in moving from practice to product. The ethic’s notion of justice is too encompassing of everything to make hard choices and resolve dilemmas about anything and is unable to show in what sequence practices ought to be adopted. My response is threefold.

First it is all true! That is, politics is replete with all of these dynamics. I might add to my interlocutors’ litany the constraints imposed by the balance of power between rivals during a transition as well as the effects of time, over which possibilities for justice expand and contract. Here it is worth quoting a passage from the book:

Commending reconciliation does not deny the difficulty of reconciliation any more than advocacy of human rights or economic equality denies that both of these values are massively violated in the world today. One practice but not another will occur in one country while another combination of practices will occur in another country; any practice will occur in pieces and in parts and will remain imperfect and fragmentary. While the justifications for the practices will show how, in principle, they might be restorative, none of these rationales warrants assurance that these restorations will be successful where citizens have suffered colossal injustices. Political reconciliation will be compromised by the obstructions of the powerful, the destruction of institutions, the chaos of the aftermath of war and dictatorship, and by the simple complexity of the practices. (61)

I might add that I argue for political reconciliation, the kind that applies to citizens in the political sphere, and not comprehensive reconciliation, relevant to all of life. Political reconciliation is more circumscribed and limited and less ambitious.

I suspect, though, that my interlocutors will not be satisfied by my admission that the ethic will be partially achieved. They seem to be asking that my theory predict, explain, and provide guidance through these complexities. I am doubtful, though, that this is possible, precisely because of the utter complexity and variability of these factors. Let me add to the above litany of breakdown a further complexity: the real world is also replete with breakthroughs. Though all of the six practices in my ethic are fraught in their application, all of them have taken place abundantly all over the world in the past generation: truth commissions, reparations settlements, apologies, acts of forgiveness, trials, and so on. In my reading of the cases, I discovered that along with unintended effects and perverse incentives, there are truth commissions for which polls show victims approving, cases of victims whose demand for revenge is dampened by effective acknowledgment, acts of forgiveness that victims report as healing and that sometimes change the hearts of perpetrators, and so on.

Once the range of malfunctions and successes alike are factored in, it becomes an extremely ambitious task to account for what sort of dynamic is going to obtain in what sort of situation. I do make some limited claims about sequence. For instance, I note that practices like forgiveness and acknowledgment best take place after a war has ended or a dictatorship has fallen. This is a weak claim, though, and even it is too simple. The anti-apartheid movement in South Africa espoused reconciliation even during the struggle against apartheid, a theme that would have great effects after the transition. Even the premise behind sequencing—that events are discrete phenomenon with a clear beginning and end—may prove questionable.

It is really social scientific knowledge that is needed to understand these dynamics of application, not ethical reasoning, which is the sort that I take on in the book. Perhaps social scientists will make progress in offering strong and useful generalizations about what sort of dynamics obtain under what sort of conditions. In that case, ethics and social science could be complementary. Vinjamuri, for example, has done valuable comparative case study work showing that trials undertaken during war rarely facilitate and often hinder the achievement of piece—a useful thing to know. Still, my sense of the potential of social science to yield broad generalizations—a sense that I have developed in over two decades in political science—is that even the best empirical work will not yield laws and patterns that are strong and robust enough to tame the vastly situational judgment that decisionmakers must bring to their choices. Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but this is my strong sense.

Does this mean, then, that the framework is so vague, abstract, and removed from political reality that it provides no guidance? Such a conclusion would be disappointing, for one of my hopes for the book is that it would reduce the gap between theory and practice. My second response to my interlocutors is that the ethic does in fact provide significant guidance for just action. It cannot and should not supplant the zone of choice in which a decisionmaker must apply prudential judgment but it does point the way to some approaches rather than others. What the ethic does for the justice of dealing with the past is much analogous to what the just war theory does for war. Its norms definitively rule out some courses of action like the intentional killing of innocents and preventive war and offer other criteria for action like proportionality, last resort, and right intention. Even these criteria, especially the latter ones, leave substantial room for judgment as to whether they are fulfilled, while no criterion can substitute for strategy, battle plans, or the likely effects of choosing one course of action over another. Even if a given attack is just in principle, will it likely inflame the enemy population into a debilitating counterattack? Even if a plan secures a just victory, will its losses so harm the morale of the troops that the war will be lost and its just cause defeated? No ethic can answer such questions. I follow Aristotle and Aquinas in bequeathing them to the virtue of prudence. Still, though, the ethic provides criteria that will rule out some choices and narrow down others. It certainly provides far more criteria than Realism’s open-ended notion of the national interest.

So if my ethic of reconciliation provides concrete guidance, of what does this consist? Here are eleven illustrative resultant conclusions:

1) We should reject a “cheap reconciliation” that lacks human rights, the rule of law, accountability and other values. This stands as a sharp critique to numerous leaders who have advocate reconciliation in just these terms.

2) The ethic has an answer to the question of amnesty and the dilemma of peace vs. justice. It says that amnesty is always a sacrifice of justice but one that might be justified (though still as a second best) if necessary to secure peace or a transition to democracy and that ought to be accompanied by other restorative measures.

3) We should reject the dichotomy of punishment vs. forgiveness that has been deployed by a wide range of practitioners in the international community, usually to the detriment of forgiveness. Showing how these practices are compatible opens the door to a wider practice of forgiveness (judicial punishment already has strong support).

4) The ethic also addresses numerous other objections to forgiveness that stand in the way of its advocacy and practice.

5) Community justice forums as a mode of practicing punishment ought to be expanded and improved (while less ought to be expected from the International Criminal Court).

6) Apology and reparations are complementary. One ought not to be practiced without the other. Examples show victims rightly complaining when one appear in isolation.

7) Reparations ought to focus less on restoring victims to their status quo ante and focus more on acting as a symbolic communication. This has implications for determining reparations’ magnitude and mode of delivery.

8) Acknowledgment is at its best when it involves victims in an active, personal way. Local community forums perhaps perform this best. A commission that offers a report in which victims are little but statistics performs this worst.

9) Collective apology is ethically justifiable but ought to respect the right to dissent from it.

10) Collective forgiveness, a practice that is rare, is justifiable and might become more widespread.

11) It is entirely appropriate for religious actors and religious actors to be involved in transitional justice; the record shows that they have much to offer in terms of leadership and resources. They should not be sidelined by secular arguments for “public reason.”

Again, none of these conclusions can tell us, say, when a leader should agree to amnesty rather than continue to fight and pursue prosecution, what to do in the face of backlash and denial, and the like. The conclusions do offer judgments, though, that favor some courses of action and disfavor others and that ally with some existing paradigms and stand opposed to others.

Third and finally, we do well to remember that the purpose of ethics is not simply to prescribe specific courses of action. One of its purposes is to guide judgment and assessment, whether or not one is directly involved in the action. Again, a passage from the book, this one from the conclusion, helps to make the point:

What does justice consist of in the wake of its massive violation? I chose this as my framing question for a deliberate reason: because justice matters for its own sake, as an end in itself, even apart from whether or how often it is enacted and with what results. To hasten to results is to ignore this intrinsic importance or else to adopt, perhaps unreflectively, an ersatz consequentialism. Two friends sit in a café hotly debating the death penalty. Neither is an employee in the criminal justice system, an activist, or a friend or relative of a victim or defendant. Their country’s death penalty laws are not about to change; each of their votes matter infinitesimally. Still they argue, cajole, and rejoin, ever more heatedly. It matters to them a great deal what sort of justice their government renders, what sort of society in which they live. Conversations like this one take place continuously, ubiquitously, over innumerable issues. To the people who engage in them, justice matters. Justice matters all the more if one believes, with philosopher John Rawls, that it is the first virtue of social institutions. (286)

In countries confronting past injustices and seeking to move forward, too, thousands of ordinary people simply want to know how to think about justice. They turn to their frameworks, religious, cultural, and philosophical. So, the frameworks are important.

Even for those involved in the action, though, ethics is not simply a matter of making hard choices and confronting difficult dilemmas, though it is importantly that. It is also a matter of reconceiving the field of possibilities, of thinking creatively and expansively so as to open up pathways that might not have been conceived otherwise. Thinking of justice, peace, and mercy in a new way does not merely show us what move to make within a game but also helps to restructure the game—that is, the ends and means of politics. As Nukhet Sandal recognizes most directly, this is what I believe religious traditions can help us do.

Not without reason, then, Daniel Philpott starts from the assumption that war leaves behind wounds of injustice. These are not just physical bodily wounds—though they are paramount—but are wounds in the form of violations of human rights, wounds of ignorance about the source and circumstance of injustice, wounds derived from lack of acknowledgement, and what Philpott describes as “the standing victory of the wrongdoer’s political injustice.” Taking a somewhat Kantian line, Philpott notes that wrongdoers are also themselves wounded by their acts, a view that also finds strong resonance in the religious traditions that he examines.. Their wrongdoing creates a moral sickness that inhibits fulfilment and happiness. As Philpott reminds us, the technology of the gas chamber was first developed as a way of saving German firing squads from the trauma caused by their deeds.

When all the wounds of war and oppression are taken into account, it is perhaps unsurprising that so many peace processes—as many as half by some calculations—are doomed to fail. Sometimes, the victory of the wrongdoer is allowed to stand. Those, who like I, have visited post-war Srebrenica understand the palpable sense of injustice felt by the mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of the more than 7,600 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who were massacred when that town was “ethnically cleansed.” Today, Srebrenica is an almost 100% Serbian town. The victory of injustice was allowed to stand. Other times, victims of rights abuse may resent the absence of acknowledgement or reparation; perpetrators may be reluctant to acknowledge their wrongs or relinquish their gains. Whatever the precise nature of the tension, the social bonds and contracts that knit societies together will have been destroyed; trust broken; resentment amassed. No matter how much effort and how many resources are dedicated to the rebuilding of institutions, infrastructure and homes, peace is unlikely to be durable unless it rests on the firm foundation of genuine reconciliation. This is why Just and Unjust Peace is such a welcome, and important, read. It makes both a well-reasoned argument in favor of a politics of reconciliation in the face of war and oppression and sets out six principal methods for achieving that goal: building socially just institutions, acknowledgement of past wrongs by the perpetrators, reparations, punishment, apology, and forgiveness.

At its heart, this book is a passionate and compelling defense of political reconciliation written in the spirit of some of the great peacemakers of our time. Desmond Tutu and some of the controversies he has aroused is a frequent point of reference, but the tenor of the book also reminds us of the logic behind Ramos Horta’s decision to privilege the normalizing of relations with Jakarta above retribution and punishment after the bloodshed in East Timor. The central points—and the tools for restoring societies to balance—will be familiar to students of peace studies. Mark Amstutz’s work on political forgiveness springs to mind. But what this book adds—brilliantly to my mind—is a deep and well-argued account of why communities, states and international organizations should pursue this path, and an account firmly rooted in political philosophy and religious tradition.

Naturally, there are points that could be quibbled with in terms of the logic of some of Philpott’s argument. As other reviewers have pointed out, reconciliation is not necessarily a prerequisite to peace—if we understand that term to mean “the absence of war.” There are plenty of cases where peace has prevailed without reconciliation. North and South Korea, Japan and Russia, and Bosnia are conflicts where there has been little evidence of reconciliation of the sort espoused by Philpott but also no resumption of armed conflict—yet. However, I am less worried than others about this possibility because whilst what Johan Galtung described as “negative peace” (i.e. the absence of war) may prevail without reconciliation, “positive peace” (i.e. the absence of fear, the fulfilment of human rights) almost never will. Without reconciliation and the forging of positive peace, communities will always be wary, always insecure, always unsatisfied and—for the utilitarians among us—will always misdirect precious resources and energies away from productive and fulfilling activities and towards their own protection from future threats. As scholars in International Relations know only too well, this can in turn create “security dilemmas” in which one group’s preparations for self-defense appear aggressive to another, sparking that group to step up its own preparations. Herein lies one of the ways in which negative peace can degenerate back into violent conflict. What is more, peace without reconciliation is much easier when the unreconciled parties have an international boundary or ocean between them. Where the lines of dispute are communal and fuzzy, as they often are in the aftermath of civil war (by far the most common kind of war today), the day-to-day necessities of engagement make reconciliation all the more pressing.

Another source of criticism has been that Philpott grounds his ethic of reconciliation in three major religious traditions—Christianity, Islam and Judaism—and a secular ethic he describes as the “liberal peace.” The cornerstones of the politics of reconciliation he sets out are derived from what Philpott claims to be an “overlapping consensus” across these traditions. Of course, though, this remains a decidedly partial account of justice principles, none of which originate from Africa for example. This problem worries me less than it worries others primarily because most of the ethical traditions I’m familiar with embrace most of the values that Philpott includes within his account of reconciliation and because Philpott himself acknowledges two key caveats to his argument—that reconciliation will never be complete or perfect and that the precise form that it takes should differ according to the context. Philpott is right, in my view, to recognize that religious traditions have ethical content that can be useful to reconciliation. We need to recognize, however, that the application of religious arguments and concepts may be more helpful in some circumstances than in others, and that Philpott’s own reading of the essential aspects of those traditions is itself partial and downplays elements that are antithetical to reconciliation. As Norwegian diplomats engaged in the Oslo peace process in the Middle East would attest, contested claims to ownership over sacred sites rooted in a theological epistemology that knows no compromise are one of the few utterly impenetrable obstacles to reconciliation.

Yet these strike me as issues that present themselves in particular contexts. Of course—as Philpott acknowledges—the politics of reconciliation must make sense in the time and place in which it occurs; it must be rooted in the locale. Tutu’s use of religion during his time as chair as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was right in that time and place. It was right, precisely because it was Tutu. It may not be right in other settings. Whatever the configuration, however, it is clear that the politics of reconciliation should be front and center of any attempt at building peace in the aftermath of war and grave injustice.

Philpott suggests that the ethic of political reconciliation can succeed on two grounds where the liberal peace, and its alternatives, has failed. The first is in its ability to generate widespread consensus, and the second to deliver a more robust peace. Here Philpott is on to something. Undoubtedly, there has been significant domestic opposition in multiple cases to the incursions of the International Criminal Court, the international ad hoc tribunals, and other practices associated with liberal peacebuilding. Sometimes opposition has been grounded in the claim that international justice does not resonate with local understandings of justice or domestic traditions. But Philpott’s efforts at generating consensus may err in assuming that a prescribed ethic which is compatible with that “zone of agreement” between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and also restorative justice can surmount this critique. In one sense, this is a minimalist approach that recognizes the need for bringing on board followers of a small number of major traditions with considerable global influence. In another sense, though, the basis for consensus is quite thin. Local traditions and customs as well as many faith traditions remain excluded or at least not explicitly included in justice and reconciliation efforts. At the level of practice, an ethic that embraces human rights as central to reconciliation may also be more problematic than Philpott acknowledges. Much attention has been devoted to the crucial role of agents in negotiating norms and introducing practices that resonate locally. Brokers, norm entrepreneurs, vernacularizers, and the like, who are capable of adapting, translating, negotiating, and articulating norms and practices into local contexts, are not part of this account any more than, perhaps, a negotiated consensus among stakeholders.

Scholars and practitioners cast their gaze on transitional states in the Global South when they think of peacebuilding. But, in the current international environment, generating consensus on the value of Philpott’s six practices among leaders in the North may be difficult, even when these practices sit comfortably within the zone of agreement that Philpott identifies. The liberal peacebuilding that Philpott critiques includes practices that liberal democratic states in North America and Europe have frequently shunned. Only weeks ago Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe threatened to withdraw Japan’s apology, one of the ethic’s core practices, for its World War II sex crimes. Whether naming, shaming, persuasion, or some other tactic by proponents of reconciliation and justice will be enough remains to be seen. Tougher sanctions from the international community may also prove crucial to generating consensus, as they did when softer efforts by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and its NGO supporters to persuade the Serbs to deliver Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague failed.

More important than consensus, for Philpott, political reconciliation aims to generate a more robust peace, one that goes considerably beyond simply ending violence and delivers restorations for the injustices incurred. The restorations that reconciliation strives for are important on their own terms, and so Philpott rejects the sparse frame of a consequentialist ethic. Consequentialism is not problematic, he claims; it is just incomplete. But Philpott does not attempt to articulate a causal theory for how to bring these restorations about, which is problematic, since the political context and the sequence in which his six practices are deployed may affect the outcome. For example, the relationship between socially just institutions and the use of punishment is hotly debated by consequentialists and liberal peace advocates. Consequentialists have argued that in the absence of robust institutions that can contain spoilers, punishment may trigger adverse effects that are harmful to any form of peace, let alone reconciliation. As another example, human rights are central to the political ethic of reconciliation, but forcing human rights into the conversations about reconciliation too early in a transition may well backfire. In Burma, civil society advocates have been reluctant to embrace the language of human rights for fear it will undermine their efforts to engage constructively in fostering a democratic transition. They also fear that premature engagement with human rights initiatives led by the state will lead to co-optation.

In many cases, peace and democracy have flourished without the kind of restorations Philpott refers to. Philpott may claim that the ethical conditions for political reconciliation have not been satisfied in such cases, but the relationship between practices (apology, for example) and product (a restored relationship, for example) cannot be assumed, and many things intervene along the way—a fact that Philpott will be painfully aware of given his extensive fieldwork and engagement in the real world of peacebuilding. Still, restorations may sometimes be settled through the satisfaction of democratic participation, may require renewed violence, or may be best settled through the apologies and reparations that Philpott prescribes. There are also fundamental sequencing questions that force us to look beyond the six practices of political reconciliation and toward preconditions that may determine their effectiveness. For many, reconciliation has been prescribed by the powerful as a means of co-opting revolutionaries and putting out rebellions. A just peace may depend on rejecting reconciliation until those who reject repression have succeeded in the violent overthrow of a repressive regime. Even those with benign intentions may seek to negotiate a peace that mitigates violence in the short term only to generate protracted repression and subsequent outbreaks of violence. The robust peace that Philpott’s ethic of reconciliation aspires to achieve may well presuppose a just war fought to a decisive end.

Political reconciliation sets the bar for post-conflict peacebuilding high. It encompasses much of what the liberal peace does, but asks for far more. At the same time that its efforts to generate consensus may not be ambitious enough, it may also simply be too ambitious. Just and Unjust Peace gives us a highly sophisticated, careful, rich, and persuasive conception of justice by which to evaluate post-conflict peacebuilding. Few works have attempted such a daunting task, and those that have do not compare. If, however, one accepts its aspirational—even utopian—qualities, Just and Unjust Peace articulates a vision for post-conflict states that will undoubtedly generate important debate and raise our expectations.

One of Philpott’s goals in Just and Unjust Peace is to challenge both sorts of reactions to the role of religion in debates on ethics and justice: the polite, but perhaps patronizing, stance of detachment, as well as the presumption that religion is essentially incompatible with democratic freedoms. He proposes bridging the two as a way to broaden and better ground an ethical debate on the central question that animates the book: What does justice consist of “in the wake of its massive despoliation?” (3). This is the question that has been at the center of ongoing debates on transitional and international justice, but Philpott goes about addressing it in a wholly original way. Instead of grounding the inquiry in a preliminary engagement with prevailing international legal standards, he begins by articulating a general theoretical approach to justice and reconciliation, and then uses it to examine contemporary institutions and practices.

The result is an impressive and rewarding discussion that addresses debates on transitional justice, as well as debates on the role of religion in international politics. Philpott’s theory of justice emerges as a grand synthesis of traditions and goals that are routinely taken to be in conflict with one another. He rejects the opposition of forward-looking and backward-looking approaches to justice, calling for practices that are “Janus-faced, peering in both directions” (6). He dismisses the persistent view that the pursuit of justice is in tension with the goal of political reconciliation, insisting that justice must encompass reconciliation and that any ethically grounded conception of political reconciliation must also entail a commitment to justice. At the same time, Philpott proposes a theoretical approach that aims to bridge the gulf between religious and secular responses to injustice.

Philpott addresses claims asserting the incompatibility of religion and rights by suggesting that such claims tend to be premised on the view that religious believers invariably identify their ethics with a kind of argument by fiat, such as, “policy X is ordained by the Lord and that is that!” (111). This kind of logic, insists Philpott, is typical of bad religious arguments, but not religious arguments per se, adding that “we do well to remember that there are secular forms of these arguments too” (111). He reminds readers that the international humanitarian legal tradition emerged out of Christian theological writings on just war theory and that religious activists have played an important role in various struggles to expand civil and human rights.

At the same time Philpott takes on the claim, prominent in liberal political thought, that political argumentation must be expressed in a secular “public” language. To exclude religious rationales from the process of public justification, he argues, implies that people should offer rationales other than the ones that actually motivate them in efforts to defend their political views. As an alternative, Philpott proposes an approach to integrating religious and secular ethics that is grounded in what he calls “rooted reason”—one that invites those motivated by religion to present their full rationales, but also insists that they remain open to alternative views and be capable of re-expressing their ethics in a secular language. The goal he envisions is a “mutual resonance, involving a reciprocal back-and-forth process of comparison and efforts at mutual understanding” (21).

From this starting point, Philpott seeks to ground his approach to justice in an “overlapping consensus” between the liberal tradition and ideas drawn from ancient texts in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions. In a series of chapters dedicated to examining ideas from each tradition, Philpott relies primarily on ancient texts for guidance, with less attention to the way that living traditions and contemporary religious practices might inform responses to the specific problem of political injustice. The theoretical framework that emerges seems to be organized around a discussion of reconciliation that is drawn largely from the Christian tradition, while works from the other traditions are mined for potentially compatible ideas. It seems to me that the kind of mutual understanding Philpott calls for in his preliminary chapters would benefit from greater attention to what might be learned from unique and conflicting approaches to framing the problems that he sets out to address. Nevertheless, these chapters make for interesting and evocative reading.

Just and Unjust Peace advocates a restorative approach to justice that addresses the “wounds of political injustice,” conceived broadly as encompassing violations of human rights, harms to persons, lack of knowledge about political injustices, and the absence of acknowledgment from officials. In keeping with restorative justice principles, Philpott’s approach encompasses harms or damage experienced by the wrongdoer as well. To this list, Philpott adds the wounds inflicted by the “standing victory” of the wrongdoer’s injustice. Philpott argues, given that political injustices are associated with a particular political order or program, the failure to effectively oppose or defeat that political order will continue to be experienced as a wound by its victims.

Philpott grounds his theory of justice in ethics and principles, but articulates it as an array of practices aimed at ameliorating these various wounds. Such practices, he argues, ideally ought to include efforts to build socially just institutions, acknowledgment, reparations, apologies, punishment, and forgiveness. Philpott’s discussion of these practices offers an interesting counterpoint to scholarship that has sought to measure the impact of individual transitional justice through statistical analysis of cross-national data. “The practices complement one another, complete one another, and weave together,” he argues (174). The implied critique of a certain emphasis on isolating and measuring the impact of individual transitional justice mechanisms reminded me of Michael Pollan’s response to nutrition science. The problem with the kind of approach, Philpott suggests, is that it can blind us to the complicated and dynamic ways that various strategies work together synergistically.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book is on the theme of punishment, which makes an important theoretical intervention in ongoing debates on restorative justice and legalism. These debates have tended to position restorative justice in opposition, not only to prosecution, but also to retributive rationales for punishment. Philpott rejects this opposition. He offers a compelling case that retribution is a dimension of restorative justice and one of its most important moral responses to political injustice. At the same time, he takes on those who have attempted to analyze the role of war crimes trials only in relation to their impact on goals such as improvement in human rights practices, stability, democratic change, or deterrence. The fundamental problem with this essentially consequentialist approach, Philpott observes simply, is that it “does not deal with the past” (91). Indeed, it is a strange thing to consider that the literature on transitional justice, an arena of study and practice that emerged in connection with the goal of “dealing with the past,” has increasingly identified “success” with achievements that have very little to do with the quality of their response to past wrongs. Philpott counters this trend by making the case for the integrity of retribution as a moral response to political injustice, while also rejecting the “inordinate focus on incarceration,” characteristic of Western criminal justice systems (65). He does so by situating the role of punishment in the larger context of efforts to pursue reintegration and repair.

Philpott’s theoretical approach is so holistic that one gets the feeling that many of the questions or potential criticisms that one might raise for him would likely be acknowledged and then swallowed up into his grand theoretical framework. This quality enriches the book, but is also one of its vulnerabilities. There is integrity in the way that Philpott engages his theoretical interlocutors. In presenting his own arguments, he takes care to identify and acknowledge what is most compelling in the strongest opposing view. In making the case for forgiveness as a practice of justice, for example, he begins with the voice of Francine, a victim of the Rwandan genocide, whose narrative immediately reveals how absurd—even obscene—appeals for forgiveness can appear to those who have survived atrocities. Such passages model the kind of “ethic of engagement” that he takes to be integral to the goal of establishing dialogue across lines of conflict and belief.

In addressing various critics, however, Philpott never seems to name or fully confront what is perhaps the most significant challenge animating various debates on the theme of addressing political injustice: the threat of backlash. Political injustices are defined here as violations or deviations from international norms, but they are also, importantly, crimes of obedience. Despite all of the various forms that they take, political injustices share certain features as a result. These are abuses that have been rationalized, normalized, or legalized by officials under a prior order, and actively or tacitly supported by a significant portion of a population. Efforts to acknowledge such wrongs as wrongs, let alone punish those who committed them, are invariably met with backlash and denial to varying degrees.

Most, if not all, of the positions that Philpott engages here, most theoretical debates on transitional justice, have taken shape in response to this particular challenge. The potential threat of backlash and denial is the main reason that scholars have perceived the goals of peace, or reconciliation, and justice to be in tension with one another. The “peace versus justice” debate, in all of its many forms, is premised on the view that peace requires some form of preliminary effort to address the potentially volatile forces of denial. The persistence of efforts to deny or rationalize past wrongs is one reason that so much attention is given to truth commissions as a mechanism for addressing political injustice. It is also the reason that many scholars and policymakers have suggested that forward-looking responses to the past may be in tension with backward-looking responses. Calls for retribution, acknowledgement, and apologies in response to past wrongs are blamed for stirring up conflict and destabilizing the peace precisely because they aspire to challenge persistent forms of denial.

Philpott’s assertion that these debates are positioned around false dichotomies depends on his having set such problems aside. As it is elaborated, the model seems to envision a world in which those who supported the political injustices in question have already come to appreciate that they were in the wrong. In such a world, the message of censure associated with punishment or acknowledgement should not be rejected as illegitimate “victor’s justice” as long as these responses are conducted in accordance with established norms and certain procedural guidelines. Although Philpott recognizes that any remedy for political injustice must begin with efforts to establish just institutions, the theory says little about the fact that it is due to the persistent threat of backlash that such efforts have often been associated with compromises on backward-looking responses to political injustice. The model also sidesteps the question of how transitional justice practices may be manipulated, limited, and utilized strategically by those in power, or how they have been in many of the exemplary cases that he discusses.

How, then, should the forces of denial and backlash be addressed in efforts to remedy political injustice? If Just and Unjust Peace avoids a direct response to this question, it offers three indirect responses. First, the broader logic of the argument presented in Just and Unjust Peace seems to suggest that the most promising way to resolve such conflicts, as well as conflicts regarding the role of religion in politics, is to begin by focusing on points of possible convergence rather than difference, and that from this starting point, a foundation for common understanding might be established and deepened over time. There is wisdom in this suggestion, but it raises a difficult question. When does such an approach provide a foundation for bridging differences and when does it function instead to avoid conflict or mask compromise? Second, Philpott sometimes seems to suggest that, working together synergistically, the various practices of justice that he enumerates will function to effectively neutralize those who continue to deny or rationalize past wrongs. For example, punishment conducted in the restorative mode advocated here, situated in the context of broader measures aimed at advancing reconciliation and repair, might be less likely to trigger hostile backlash than punishment conducted with the goal of stigmatizing or excluding. This is a useful suggestion, but I think it minimizes the intensity of backlash that often accompanies even minor forms of acknowledgment. Ultimately, if they are to function as he suggests they should, Philpott’s practices of justice must be accompanied by significant political struggle and transformation.

The third way that Just and Unjust Peace addresses the problem of backlash is the most interesting to me. In a larger sense, the book may be read as insisting upon the value of articulating an ethic of justice and reconciliation that is held at a remove from calculations regarding backlash, power dynamics, or ongoing rationalizations of abuse and violence. Like Socrates in his response to Thrasymachus, the book insists on the importance of disentangling our discussions of what justice might mean from the manner in which it has been institutionalized, and hold such discussions at something of a remove from our assessments of what is possible or practical at a given time. For all of its attention to empirical studies and professed pragmatism, Just and Unjust Peace is, in that sense, a visionary exercise. It outlines an ethic that is “not so much a solution to evil as it is a response…that in the political realm will always be partially achieved” (5).

Newness is a fascinating, and very loaded concept.  It expresses ideas of innovation and progress, as well as rupture and substitution.  Whether presented in the form of prophetic revelations, revolutionary ideologies, or consumer branding, “the New” is always wrapped in a combination of promise and threat – it promises to improve upon the old, while threatening to eclipse and even replace it.  Newness inspires hope as well as fear, with a provocative power that sometimes borders on the messianic.

It is hardly surprising then that evangelical Protestants, for whom “authentic faith” is all about radical rebirth and regeneration, have historically placed so much stock in things new and improved, often against heavy resistance in their own ranks.  There were the “New Light” evangelicals, whose religious enthusiasm inspired mass conversions in the eighteenth century, but also led to historic schisms. In the nineteenth century, Charles Grandison Finney promoted “new measures” of revival, generating celebrity while drawing his own share of detractors. The 1940s saw the emergence of the “new evangelicalism” (version 1.0), a self-conscious effort by the likes of Carl Henry and Billy Graham to recover the evangelical brand from fundamentalists.  The “New Christian Right” of the 1970s was a reactionary juggernaut that redefined the arena where evangelical political and cultural activism took shape.

The point is not to downplay the actual newness or significance of growing evangelical centrism—or as I prefer to call it, plasticity—in contemporary US politics and public culture, but rather to think about this shift in relation to evangelicalism’s long and fraught history of constant renovation. This is important because every new movement and shift in the field of evangelical engagement stands in tension with its densely layered past, and this tension can be felt most acutely by participants on the ground. Exacerbating the tension further is the fact that virtually all known varieties of evangelical religiosity, whether they are branded as “new” or “old,” rely on the common (but conflicting) belief among participants that what they are doing is closer in spirit to the ministry of Jesus, and truer to the letter of biblical law.

Several years ago I did fieldwork among socially engaged evangelicals who sought to mobilize popular support for social outreach initiatives in predominantly conservative congregations. The resulting book, Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches, focused on individuals who would likely gravitate toward, or at least be sympathetic to the current “new evangelical” agenda. Yet my research also showed that socially engaged evangelicals occupy very complex positions in the wider milieu of white evangelicalism. They engage in ministry activities that many churchgoers admire and even valorize, but their efforts also bring out lingering disagreements, fears, and doubts about the future of evangelism, and intensify longstanding debates about whether the mission of the church is ultimately meant to be a proselytic or social one.

Rather than representing one side of that debate, the socially engaged evangelicals I observed often found themselves caught squarely in the middle of it, seeking to draw both inspiration and institutional legitimization from multiple strands of Protestant tradition, from the defense of strict biblical orthodoxy and personal pietism to the millennialist optimism of nineteenth-century social reforms and the prophetic justice orientation of Martin Luther King.

All of these influences make up an intriguing mélange of ideals and sensibilities that animate the moral universe inherited by today’s evangelicals.  They are the reasons we perceive evangelicalism as a field in constant flux, oscillating between paths of engagement and separatism, progressive reform and reactionary protest.  The reality is that much of the time these apparently polarized impulses are actually coexisting and overlapping throughout the evangelical subculture, even within the same denominations, churches, and small groups.

For those evangelicals who stand committed to one path of engagement over another, the matter of newness is often unambiguous—in with the new, out with the old, the only way forward.  But for others, perhaps a more reserved majority of non-activists, newness is a motivational framework that is at once extremely attractive and problematic.  This is because any tradition that thrives on newness must also seek to protect the continuity of tradition, paradoxical as all that might seem. As we evaluate the potential long-term effects of evangelicals gradually (and partially) moving away from the religious right, we should remain mindful of the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that will fuel their movements and at the same time restrain or subvert them.  This is not just about a pendulum swinging back and forth from right to left, though this will almost undoubtedly occur over time. In a grander sense, it is about agonistic and heroic quests for newness, and evangelicalism’s enduring struggle to be continually reborn.

As Pally notes in her essay, this isn’t the first time evangelicals have hoisted the banner of social reform. Recalling the activism of nineteenth-century American Protestants, she sees the “new evangelicals” as their contemporary successors.

You don’t have to go back to the nineteenth century to find evangelical progressives. Like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider, many got their start in the 1970s, building institutions that are still around today (Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, Bread for the World).

The grandson of a Moral Majority supporter, I wasn’t exposed to this part of evangelicalism.  Like grandma, I assumed that most evangelicals “prayed Republican.”

This began to change during my young adult years. Blessed with a well-stocked church library, my congregation owned a copy of The Cross and the Flag (1972). Edited by a trio of Christian historians, it featured a who’s who of reformist evangelicals, including Paul Henry, Ozzie Edwards, and Nancy Hardesty. Reading its indictment of Christian nationalism, I felt connected to a new kind of evangelicalism. Chapters on poverty, ecology, racism, and militarism outlined a different agenda from the one found in my grandmother’s Moral Majority Report.

As David Swartz documents in Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, the autobiographies of other evangelicals reveal similar stories of inter-generational influence. More than any other book, Carl F.H. Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) inspired the evangelical activists of the 1960s and 1970s. While David Allen Hubbard kept a copy under his pillow at Westmont College, Samuel Escobar read about it as a student in Peru.

It is easy to see why. Calling for greater social engagement, Henry ridiculed evangelicals for debating the morality of the card game Rook “while the nations of the world are playing with fire.”

Henry’s generation called themselves the “new evangelicals.” By using the same label to describe today’s evangelicalism, Pally hints at this religious lineage. While grateful for her research, I wish she had done more to explore these connections.

Many journalists and scholars believe that the evangelical left was a reaction to the religious right. So do many evangelicals.

Like other religious communities, evangelicalism has experienced a break in its “chain of memory.” Suffering from historical amnesia, millions of evangelicals have forgotten about their tradition’s social witness.

By telling the stories of “evangelicals who have left the right,” Pally’s book may help them to remember.

Increasingly, many of these non-American evangelicals have begun to speak back to the United States, revealing American conditions not only as anomalous but also as subject to influence from abroad. Scholars are recognizing that despite the imperial nature of the “American Century,” influence flows in both directions. People of the two-thirds world have, in fact, shaped American evangelical missionaries and Cold Warriors.

This global reflex often takes progressive shape. Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, my history of the small, but energetic, American evangelical left of the 1970s and 1980s, chronicles the activism of just one of many international sources of non-rightist politics. Figures within Latin American Theological Fraternity (FTL) are obscure outside evangelical circles, but they have voiced trenchant critiques of American consumerism and social injustices. As Samuel Escobar, a native of Peru and FTL’s first president, told thousands of delegates at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974, “Christians in the Third World…expect from their brethren a word of identification with demands for justice.” Institutions such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the World Evangelical Fellowship, Christianity Today, Wheaton College, and World Vision have listened to a surprising degree. For example, under pressure from international evangelicals, World Vision de-Americanized in the 1970s, a move that resulted in adding economic development to the organization’s agenda of disaster relief and personal evangelism.

Escobar and World Vision represent the leading edge of what will almost certainly become a larger and stronger global reflex. To be sure, the reflex seems uneven in the context of current North American political orthodoxies. African critiques of libertine sexuality, Asian critiques of American techniques of evangelization, and Latin American critiques of North American consumerism combine in ways that defy the imaginations of most Americans. Indeed, the exotic melody from abroad is rich and complex, and international voices likely will swell to a chorus in the next century as the Global South demographically overwhelms northern and western centers. In a world where 60 percent of all Christians now live outside the North Atlantic region, and in a nation increasingly opened to nonwhite immigrants since the Immigration Act of 1965, global influence will only intensify. As that happens, contemporary manifestations of right-wing evangelicalism may seem even more anomalous.

First, in the movement Marcia Pally describes, evangelicalism is no longer synonymous with white evangelicals. Conservative black churches have long held a pro-life, pro-marriage ethic in balance with energetic social activism. Immigrant churches, the fastest-growing segment of Christianity, tend to be conservative theologically while progressive on issues like poverty and immigration. The increasingly influential Hispanic community naturally aligns with this movement. As Samuel Rodriguez puts it: “Where Billy Graham meets Dr. King, that’s where you will see the Hispanic Christian community emerge.”

Second, this movement represents a dynamically different process of connecting faith and social engagement. Instead of a checklist of correct stands on selected issues, many evangelicals seek a consistent ethical framework rooted in core beliefs. Conservative blogger Eric Teetsel comments, “Rather than valuing other issues alongside life, Millennial emphasis on life explains their interest in other social issues. Caring for the poor is born from a foundational valuation of life.” Indeed, while young evangelicals remain solidly against abortion, two-thirds (63 percent) agree that poverty, disease and torture are also pro-life issues.

Third, evangelicalism is revising its strategies of social influence. New evangelicals tend to hold progressive opinions on some issues and promote (private-sector) social justice initiatives while maintaining a conservative political identity and voting GOP. Their activism deemphasizes top-down political strategies in favor of incarnational engagement on the local level. This makes the political and cultural influence of evangelicals less centralized, less coordinated, and more unpredictable. Whether it is ultimately more effective remains to be seen.

While a significant change is undeniably underway, it should not be overestimated or overgeneralized. New evangelicals are not on a journey toward becoming liberals; they are not likely to swell the ranks of Democratic voters; they have not abandoned abortion as a core issue. As sociologist John Schmalzbauer cautions: “While dreaming of what evangelicals might become, we must take a hard look at who they are.” What is clear is that “who they are” can no longer be captured by old labels and simple polarizations.

As she suggests, the real surprise of the recent presidential election was a move back toward the Republican Party among evangelical voters. This perhaps suggests that many of them were morally ill-at-ease with Bush’s wars and culturally ill-at-ease with his anti-isolationism. At the same time they are not very persuaded by Obama’s lower-key perpetuation of the same, nor by attempted healthcare reforms that they may regard both as ineffective and insufficiently mutualist.

The remaining issue to my mind concerns whether the “new evangelicals” are simply reverting to type—since the entire political history of evangelicalism in the US has favored the left more than the right, as Pally points out. I would suggest, however, reasons why this may not be the case.

In the US, as to a degree in the UK, evangelical, like religiously dissenting (i,e., non-Catholic or Episcopalian, though Christian) opinion has largely aligned with liberalism, because of a shared focus on the individual actor. Now that contemporary “conservatism” has itself embraced liberalism, it may well appear more congenial to evangelical opinion, which from William Wilberforce onwards has tended to combine the capitalist market with voluntary—if very systematic—charity. The abortion issue is not the only explanatory factor here. It therefore follows that, if younger evangelicals are deserting “the right,” one has to ask whether they are also deserting traditional liberalism. My encounters with evangelicals on both sides of the Atlantic suggest that this is indeed emphatically the case.

Evangelicals are deserting the right because they are deserting liberalism. And they are doing this because they are deserting, or at least redefining, evangelicalism as traditionally understood. This is witnessed by the modification or sometimes abandonment of the central defining feature of traditional evangelical doctrine, namely, the penal substitutionary theory of atonement. Historians such as Boyd Hilton have shown how this thoroughly economistic and contractualist account of Christ’s death have often aligned in modernity with an embrace of capitalist market economics. Equally, evangelicals have been influenced by the charismatic movement, which has accentuated a stress on the emotive and the communal. Again their scripturalism is leading them into a “post-protestant” questioning of the Reformation reading of the Bible and an increasing worry that the Reformation may itself be responsible for the secularization process. Finally, the making of common cause with Catholics over abortion and other issues has led to a steep decline in traditional anti-popery. Both the new opening to Rome and the charismatic influence involve a heightened sense that being a Christian involves being a member of the body of Christ or the Church: this is after all writ clear by St. Paul.

This new emphasis leads in turn to a heightened appreciation of the social as relational rather than as a mere field for individual pious heroism. It is here striking that the new evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, cites Catholic social teaching as the major influence on his thinking tout court, and has a Benedictine spiritual director. Within the British Labor party, young evangelicals are newly to the fore, attracted by the Catholic social teaching-driven agenda of Jon Cruddas, key policy adviser to Ed Miliband, current head of the Labor Party. This is, for evangelicals in the UK (though not for non-evangelical Methodists) a largely novel embrace of Christian socialism. Exactly parallel new leanings are evinced by many of the younger American evangelicals whom I have taught, who all witness a new sense that they are first and foremost Christians who see the formation of a spiritual and just community as an integrally religious task. In consequence, they are now much more bothered than any of their forebears by the modern dominance of the idol money that tends to subvert human relationality and reciprocity.

Thus while Pally is wholly right to say that evangelicals continue to be suspicious of the State as the main locus of social and economic justice, evangelicals are now tweaking this in a rather more associationist and rather less individualistic direction that makes it more and more converge with the Catholic outlook on these matters. As Pally points out, 65 percent of evangelicals ages 18-30 favor more governmental aid to the needy. Therefore, I submit that the “leftward” shift among some evangelicals is a new phenomenon both theologically and politically, and not simply a reversion to type or a different expression of a perennial American Protestant repertoire.

Back in the late 1970s, a group of ambitious Southern Baptist pastors launched a culture war on two fronts—against the moderates in their own Southern Baptist denomination and against the liberals they feared were contaminating America culture. Their goal was to take both back for God. As leaders of the largest Protestant group in the US and the dominant faith group in the South, those Southern Baptist leaders were one of the driving forces behind the rise of the religious right, which helped created the Republican dominance in the South.

Yet some of these Southern evangelicals are also among the “new evangelicals” described by Marcia Pally. And they are not easy to pigeonhole.

Younger Baptist leaders like Platt still vote Republican. They still want to restrict abortion and continue to believe that gay marriage is wrong. They believe their view of faith—that Jesus is the only way to salvation—is the only true way. But they have no interest in becoming the new leaders of Red America or in building denominational kingdoms. These pastors and their follower are less likely to aspire to political power and personal gain, because they’ve found those things wanting. Instead they really do aspire to change the world—by volunteering in orphanages overseas, starting charities, drilling wells, adopting orphans from overseas, establishing churches, and setting up Bible study groups to draw their peers closer to faith.

They are suspicious of government programs, preferring hands-on approaches to dealing with issues such as poverty, homelessness, and the lack of clean water. They are willing to support some unexpected programs—for example, pressure from evangelicals led former President George W. Bush to spend more money on fighting the AIDS epidemic than any of his predecessors. And while they do want people to have access to health care, they are uncompromising in their refusal to go along with policies that they feel violate their principles. A clear example of this was the legal challenge to the so-called contraceptive mandate. A number of evangelical colleges, which would otherwise support health care reform, have sued to block the Obama administration from enforcing that mandate.

How these new evangelicals fit into today’s red state blue state, culture war divide, remains to be seen.