Postliberal Ecclesiology Learning from Islam
Sherman Jackson's The Islamic Secular (Oxford University Press, 2024)
The word “postliberalism” first “branded” a theological movement in Northern European universities and seminaries. Mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy of language contributed substantially to the task. Four British academic women corrected the WWII reductionist, liberal analytic philosophers to re-establish classical metaphysics as a background for ethics: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley. The philosophers Alastair MacIntyre followed this same route from his Marxism as did, to a lesser extent, Charles Taylor. Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas become resources for contemporary thought. Postliberal adequately defines these, and other, philosophical work.
Liberalism’s purported universal anthropology of an autonomous, interest-seeking individual has provided the entry point for postliberal criticisms. Postliberal theologies shifted academic theology from liberalism’s posited “universal anthropology” to an analysis of how language about God and all things related to God worked. The “yes and no” format of Thomas Aquinas birthed a generation of “analytic Thomists” who used the sophistication of linguistic analysis to rediscover the truthfulness of the great Tradition of the orthodox Christian church.
Recent North Atlantic political postliberalisms join the criticism but differ in approaches. Four separate strands share in the critique of liberalism. First, an evangelical Protestant form seeks to install Christian nationalism in response to cultural issues and the dominance of the progressive liberal elite. It seeks the coercive power of the state to restore a “Christian republic” much like the 1950s and looks to sustain, separate from its cultural power, the hegemonic foreign policy of the United States under a neo-liberal political economy.
Second, Roman Catholic postliberalism bears deeper and more coherent intellectual roots. It focuses on the Thomas Aquinas and the Common Good and traditional medieval political thought of the “two swords,” ecclesial and governmental power. It seeks a new aristocracy as a vanguard through the retrieval of premodern political theory and through its input into the legal system. It recognizes the malaise of the middle and working class in the United States, but offers no real political economy as a solution except to curb neo-liberalism with a concept of the common good.
A third form of postliberalism develops the criticism of liberalism, especially neo-liberalism, from the point of view of economics. It represents a post-Christian movement. Economic inequality provides its primary concern. It translates the metaphysical language of a “common good” into a secular “shared prosperity.” Prominent economists and scholars have recently produced “The Berlin Summit Declaration — Winning back the People” (https://newforum.org/en/the-berlin-summit-declaration-winning-back-the-people/). It seeks to undo the liberal market-centric policies of the past fifty years. They put forth postliberal economics, however, to preserve liberal democracies. The economists desire to undercut a reactionary “populism” and respond effectively to social issues such as climate change in order to preserve liberal democracies. Whereas the first two forms of political postliberalism emphasize political theory and leave economic practices vaguely addressed, this third form of postliberalism leaves political theory alone and embraces post-neoliberal technocratic economic policies.
The fourth form of political postliberalism again sits ambiguously in relationship to liberalism. It reacts against the faux universalism of liberalism and seeks the destruction of the liberal administrative state through its own radical libertarian impulses. It works intuitively, pragmatically, and with Machiavellian manipulations to gain control of liberal democracies to promote nationalistic causes. It rhetorically addresses the neoliberal disempowerment of small businesses and the working class. It has affinities to the Protestant Christian nationalism and Catholic political common good political theory, but little overlap with the technocratic, economic postliberalism. It riles liberal institutions with its political effectiveness, including its vulgarity and violations of legal and social norms. Progressive, globalist liberalism and its elite institutions have named it as its archenemy and a threat to all that is right and good and proper in the world. I don’t have to name persons associated with such causes.
I would like to emphasize the difference between theological, ecclesiological postliberalism and the four strands of political postliberalism. Only ecclesiological postliberalism does not seek the coercive state. Ecclesiological postliberalism stands as an option outside the power and control of the state as a place that can contest this power. Elizabeth Anscombe, for instance, attempted to stop Oxford from granting Truman an honorary doctorate because of his order to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Christian non-violence has marked ecclesiological postliberalism’s opposition to the failing liberal state-sponsored violence of the past 50 years. Its political economy looks to empower the historical faith and practice of the church catholic to absorb the shocks that liberal nation-states and alliances introduce into a system that now resists through new multipolar, non-liberal alliances. Seen globally, the majority world, for good or ill, has moved into a postliberal setting.
The church, Protestant and Catholic, in North Atlantic societies has presupposed that liberal states represent the only legitimate “public” political actors. Ecclesiological postliberalism contests this presupposition. Seen from the perspective of ecclesiological postliberalism, new allies can arise from whom we can learn.
For this reason I would like to start my Substack by asking what lessons the church in the liberal democratic setting of the United States might learn from Islam. Islam in the United States has lived under a cloud of suspicion — even governmental surveillance. It has no temptation to become “America’s team” but experiences the trials of keeping shari’ah when such practices, anchored in the Koran, become privatized — and experienced as arbitrary boundary markers for its adherents.
Sherman A. Jackson has recently published an Islamic “political theology,” The Islamic Secular. Islam, of course, has never dominated North Atlantic societies and has its own history as a colonizer — but has suffered under liberal colonialism in the past two hundred years plus. Mosques too struggle to maintain their adherents in the Western liberal secularism in which the life of a Muslim is reduced to a private “life-style choice.”
Christian ecclesiological postliberalism can learn much from such a program as outlined in The Islamic Secular. Christians cannot just think from the same social position as an Islamic thinker does. Jackson can help us think anew. We have much to learn as we look into the future to sustain our fading institutions, the faith once given to the saints, and historical Christian practices, from sexuality to concern for the poor.
So come along and reflect with me next week as we engage Jackson’s use of the word “secular.” The life of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church needs the faithful to think anew about our existence into the future.