I’ve chosen to print the piece I wrote exactly as submitted. I had a word count that I exceeded, but which kept me from offering further qualifications or caveats. I have plenty of those in spades. I am certainly not advocating for ending peer review—or anything of that sort. But before we can figure out a solution, I think we need more honesty about the problems with the current system. What we have right now simply isn’t sustainable. Most of us have known this for a long time, but scholarly publishing is a very conservative industry, utterly resistant to change. A longer article would also need to include more positive recommendations for addressing the problem. I have thoughts about this as well, but my purpose here, as I understood it, was to reflect on the crisis.

While I did not intend to say anything about politics and postliberalism in this article, it turned out, as you will see, that I could not avoid it.

I have always had a complicated relationship with peer review—a situationship, as Gen Z might say. Like any situationship, my connection with peer review has unclear exclusivity, inconsistent communication, no official label, and talk of the future is strictly off limits.

A little backstory might help. I entered publishing while I was ABD in my PhD program at Princeton Theological Seminary. I finished my dissertation during my first year as an acquisitions editor for a trade Christian publisher, which had an academic imprint for which I acquired books in the areas of religion and philosophy. Because it was not a university press, we had no faculty board reviewing our titles. We still conducted peer review, but it did not have formal oversight. Since I was effectively the editorial board, I was required, as the editor, to have a PhD.

My peers in the academic trade publishing world of theology and religion, however, did not conduct peer review on their manuscripts. I remember speaking at a theological studies conference over a decade ago as part of a panel of editors from the top presses, and I was the only one present who required peer review. And yet, if I were honest, the academic quality of the books I was publishing was not discernibly higher than those of my peers. A couple of my peer presses, in fact, were consistently viewed as having a higher level of academic quality and prestige. What exactly was peer review accomplishing for me, other than delaying my projects and making it more difficult for us to compete?

Further compounding my ambivalence was that I published my first book, a revision of my dissertation, with one of those peer presses. That press was well known at the time for being the top American publisher of books on German theology. My book won a prestigious prize from a German university, and the academic quality was certainly no lower for not having gone through peer review.

When I joined the University Press of Kansas over nine years ago, where I am now the senior editor, I entered an academic publishing ecosystem in which a more formal process of peer review has long been standard. But even in that environment there were many deviations. Not every project went through peer review or went through approval by our faculty Editorial Committee. The rules for which books go through which process have changed, but the overall standard of quality has not.

I say all this to place my feelings about the current crisis in perspective. That we are in a crisis is not news—but what to do about it remains, like the status of one’s situationship, thoroughly unclear.

To give an example, I am, as of this writing in July 2026, currently working with my editorial intern to come up with our eighth list of potential readers (each list has had between 4-6 names) for a manuscript in the area of presidential studies—one of UPK’s specialties—that we have now pushed back two seasons due to a peer review process that is stretching into its ninth month. What’s most frustrating is that this book speaks to issues that are highly timely, even time-sensitive, so the delays are hurting the author, UPK, and a society that could benefit from reading this work. And this example is hardly unique.

Every year the peer review process becomes more unwieldy, as the slow-moving disintegration of higher education—evidenced by the closure of colleges, the hiring freezes, the politically motivated termination (and in some cases, reinstatement) of excellent faculty, the systematic class warfare by the current White House administration on the many families who need student loans, the restrictions on student visas, and so on—creates a downstream effect on scholarly publishing that forces university presses and other publishers to find revenue streams that are less dependent on a healthy academic ecosystem. With fewer faculty, fewer graduate students, fewer humanities courses, fewer academic libraries, and smaller library budgets in general, not to mention the many other social and economic changes causing stress for the publishing industry, it is little wonder that the peer review process—a kind of canary in the academic coal mine—has become so fraught.

I am regularly led to ask myself, What exactly is gained from this process? To continue using the example I introduced above, the author in question is a late-career academic who has no teaching position and does not need tenure. Peer review, in this case, is not for him but for us—a rule we follow that ostensibly guarantees a certain level of quality that qualifies us as a university press. But as my own journey as a scholar and editor has demonstrated to me, that process guarantees no such thing.

The highly idealized story of peer review—and here, as throughout, I am speaking primarily about peer review within the humanities and social sciences—is that this process generates more reliable knowledge about the world by subjecting research to a consistent standard of testing. That this standard is hardly consistent, much less transparent, has been noted by many others. I think it’s safe to say the knowledge distributed by presses that conduct peer review is not clearly more reliable than the knowledge from other publishers, a point demonstrated by the high quality of academic titles in the field of history coming from the Big Five trade publishers.

Here is a different story that frames matters somewhat cynically but not, I think, inaccurately: Peer review serves to give certain books an elite status for the purpose of conferring tenure (and weeding out faculty job applications) at R1 universities, and peer review confers that elite status by intentionally slowing the publishing process down by giving many more people a chance to impede a book’s publication. If the goal of peer review is to slow things down as much as possible, the goal of any book publisher is to speed things up as much as possible, and finding the equilibrium between these opposing forces is the task of an acquisitions department.

To be sure, slowing down the process can, and frequently does, result in books that are better for having gone through this winnowing. Slowing down is almost always a laudable practice in an accelerationist age. But we should be clear-eyed about what peer review does. It’s not fact-checking, even if some readers are exceptional at this. It’s a process of hoop-setting that forces a book to jump through more obstacles so that, ideally, there are simply fewer books that make it through—and this scarcity alone confers status.

It is, to be blunt, the same logic that compels people to oppose affirmative action under the assumption that a diploma from an elite university has less status if more people are allowed to attend. It is also the same logic that compels people to oppose birthright citizenship for the same reasons, replacing “elite university” with the “United States.”

I’m enough of an old-school academic to believe that peer review can be good and valuable. I can think of dozens of books that peer reviewers improved immensely. But we are continuing a tradition in scholarly publishing for a world that, in many respects, no longer exists. Roughly a third of faculty in the United States are tenured or tenure-track, and that number shrinks every year. If my experience is any indication, I would guess university presses are publishing nearly half as many true academic monographs as they were twenty or thirty years ago. University presses are increasingly publishing for the general market in ways that surprise many within academia, who still harbor an outdated notion that university presses solely exist to publish niche scholarship for other academics.

In such a world, how much sense does it make to continue to adhere to an increasingly dysfunctional process of peer review all to secure a chimeric elite status for the benefit of an ever-smaller number of elite faculty?

I’m not ready to end my situationship with peer review, as toxic as it has become. But I think some changes and clarifications are in order.

First, on the university side, I should clarify that tenure is not the problem, so much as the assumption that the slowness of peer review confers the status on a publication necessary to earn tenure. Given the threats to tenure and the widespread calls for reform (many of which are not in good faith), we ought to advocate for the tenure doors to be thrown open so that more faculty can benefit from the protections of academic freedom, where they still exist.

Second, on the university press side, we need to streamline the publishing process: society needs more faculty being able to share their research with the world more quickly, and university presses need to have fewer obstacles preventing perfectly good books from being published in a timely manner. Toward that end, I would recommend giving acquisitions editors more agency in the process, with the authority to have greater discretion, in consultation with other stakeholders at a press, about which titles undergo peer review or how much review they receive. The faculty Editorial Committee is probably overdue for reconsideration. Perhaps that committee ought to function more like a nonprofit advisory board that provides nonbinding strategic guidance and community connections.

Peer review and I have not broken up (yet), but rather than continue something that isn’t working, I think it’s finally time we sit down and have an honest conversation about our future.

But I also find this line of defense completely inadequate, for the same reason that people find the defenses of American evangelicalism by the #NeverTrump evangelicals—Thomas S. Kidd, Alan Jacobs, Mark Galli, Bonnie Kristian, et al.—inadequate: these defenses always posit that, at some point in history (a point arbitrarily selected by the person in question), conservative institutions and movements were hijacked by forces that perverted their mission and distorted their identity.

So Kidd can claim that evangelicalism was “politicized” at some point in the 20th century. Kidd argues this occurred sometime in the 1950s, which is a concession to the work of historians who pushed back the date to the start of the National Association of Evangelicals. Previously, defenders of evangelicalism liked to say it was politicized by the New Right and Moral Majority movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s, until historians showed that evangelical institutions had been openly political long before that.

But why stop at the 1950s? The antimodern fundamentalism of the 1910s was clearly political. So was the apocalyptic dispensationalism and the temperance movement of the late 19th century. Obviously the pro-Confederate secessionist Calvinism of the South was political, even if they claimed to be purely spiritual. And the early revivalism of the First Great Awakening was political too in myriad ways, as evidenced by the way it helped lay some of the groundwork for the later American Revolution.

Setting aside for the moment the question whether we can even speak of these colonial revivalists as evangelical in any meaningful sense, today’s evangelicals, like Kidd, claim them as part of their history—and claim them as evidence of a time when evangelicalism had not yet been “politicized” in the way that Kidd and others purport to reject.

For the sake of brevity here, I’ve isolated Kidd’s question about “politicization,” but of course a proper analysis of the relation between earlier iterations of American evangelicalism and today’s MAGA Christians requires a much more nuanced portrait that takes into consideration other features, including the racialization of American evangelicalism through its longstanding support for slavery, segregation, and other racist policies; the promotion of a masculine, muscular Christianity; the anti-intellectual treatment of the Bible as a dehistoricized word of God; and the apocalyptic eschatology that led evangelicals to see themselves as living in the end times. Once we take into consideration these and other factors, it becomes hard to see how anyone could not acknowledge the continuity between early forms of evangelical Christianity (if we can use this label) and MAGA.

All of this has been a thought experiment of sorts. I take it most people reading this will acknowledge the truth of this regarding evangelicalism. We’re a decade or more into the era of the new evangelical historiography that has punctured—some might say obliterated—the old narratives about evangelical history, exposing the way that evangelical institutions (Christianity Today especially) and thought leaders have been engaged in decades of brand management to burnish the image of a politically innocent and morally pure evangelicalism.

We need to apply the same lessons across the board.

If there wasn’t a time when evangelicalism was innocent . . .

. . . was a there a time when Christianity Today was innocent? Was it only when Mark Galli took over that things went astray—or can we trace its core problems back to Carl F. H. Henry and Billy Graham?

. . . was there a time when First Things was innocent? While Richard John Neuhaus was certainly better in every way than R. R. Reno, surely Neuhaus’s work with the Heritage Foundation, his founding of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, his work with Catholic New Right activists, and the like are not completely discontinuous with what is happening now.

. . . was there a time when the Heritage Foundation was innocent, or did things only go wrong with Kevin Roberts?

. . . was there a time when [insert conservative/postliberal/Christian Right institution here] was innocent?

About these and many others, my answer is unequivocally “no.”

These days my response is the same as Silvaria Lysandra Zemaitis’s argument regarding conservatism as a whole: “It was fascism all along.”

I am always willing to shake hands with a former conservative (or former postliberal) who is willing to repent and make amends. But what I will not accept is the response that “things weren’t bad back then,” that these institutions, agents, and movements were, at one point, morally innocent of what has happened since. That response is no longer acceptable, if it ever was.

I’ve been taking a much-needed break from writing about postliberalism in the wake of the attention that my Journal of Religion article received, especially from Rusty Reno in the pages of First Things. But I wanted to return briefly to the topic to address some misunderstandings that continue to swirl around my thoughts on the topic.

Defenders of postliberal theology, or what I also call theological postliberalism, engage in what I call postliberal apologetics. Those of us who grew up within the evangelical world are intimately familiar with apologetic strategies. They were the air we breathed, the water in which we swam, and some former-evangelicals-turned-postliberals continue to use the same apologetic techniques we learned in youth group.

Today I am going to look at just one of these apologetic strategies: the “no true Scotsman/Christian/postliberal” fallacy.

No True Postliberal—Not All Postliberals

By far the most common apologetic strategy is the classic “no true Scotsman” fallacy. To be fair, this one is hardly limited to evangelicals and is frequently deployed by Christians (and not only Christians) on all sides. But it was certainly a favorite among evangelical defenders of Christianity in my youth, especially when debating supposed atheist critics of Christianity’s long history of manifest hypocrisy. The evangelical apologist would often respond: “No true Christian engaged in those clearly immoral and evil behaviors. Those people were never Christian to begin with.”

I frequently encounter this very response to my article on postliberalism. Defenders of the legacy of Hauerwas and Lindbeck respond to my work by saying: “No true postliberal Christian would support MAGA authoritarianism. The conservatives claiming the mantle of postliberal theology today were never postliberal to begin with. They are imposters.”

Even without the fallacious reasoning, I find this response difficult to swallow. It’s not like Rusty Reno and Chad C. Pecknold, among others, were not deeply enmeshed in the belly of postliberal theology. These two, in particular, are second generation postliberals who learned from the original school of thought. To simply write them out of the narrative is some next-level boundary maintenance. Then, of course, there are folks like John Milbank and Phillip Blond, not to mention younger postliberals like Nathan Pinkoski. I could go on.

But apart from all that, this “no true postliberal” strategy is a crude effort at self-protection that does not adequately reckon with the legacy of these theological ideas. And Christians need to do a lot more reckoning and self-reflection.

My critics want to claim that postliberal theology is inherently antinationalist and nonviolent. They base this almost solely on the work of Stanley Hauerwas, which is a bizarre way of defining postliberalism. While I have said a bit about Hauerwas in my work on postliberalism, my critics almost exclusively talk about Hauerwas in their objections to me—as if my entire argument stands or falls on whether Hauerwas is the link between the Yale School and Rod Dreher. Obviously it does not, and I have no particular interest or need to assess Hauerwas’s guilt or innocence. (Though I do think Hauerwas deserves substantially more criticism than he has received! It is no surprise to me that Hauerwas would write a foreword for a book promoting Milbankian Christian socialism.)

The Hauerwas-stans want to corner me and force me to defend my thesis on the basis of SH alone for the simple reason that it is easy to point to exculpatory statements by SH showing that his theology “ought” to lead someone to reject Christian nationalism. But this apologetic strategy rests on a completely fallacious assumption that my argument requires every postliberal theologian to be a card-carrying Trump supporter. This is absurd. When I point out that obviously many Yale postliberals did not go on to support proposals like the BenOp or policies like those in Orban’s Hungary, their retort is the same: Not All Postliberals! (Which is often a veiled way of saying No True Postliberal.)

I am reminded of the post–Me Too debate over “not all men.” The feminist critique of toxic masculinity was wrongly (and maliciously) taken to mean that every man was toxic, that there was no such thing as a straight cis man who could be a genuine ally in the struggle against patriarchy. Obviously, that’s untrue, but it was never the point in the first place. It wasn’t an empirical claim that could be disproven by the existence of a single feminist man. It was a structural claim about the social systems into which men are socialized in much of Western society.

My argument, mutatis mutandis, is much the same with respect to postliberal theology. I am not arguing, and never have argued, that postliberal theology always and everywhere leads—as if by some Hegelian law of historical necessity—to political postliberalism. When I wrote in my Journal of Religion article that “theological and political postliberalism . . . are two different historical stages on a single ideological trajectory,” I did not mean that belonging to one stage necessarily means you must move on to the next stage, only that the move from one to the other is indeed explicable and not the result of some irrational break. The two forms of postliberalism are commensurable.

I did not think I needed to refute the notion of some historical necessity between New Haven and Hungary, since there are plenty of self-identified postliberal theologians who are clearly not part of the MAGA coalition. No historian worth their salt would ever claim that one historical moment necessarily leads to another, and if that were the bar historians had to meet in order to claim historical influence, then we would be left unable to account for any development of any kind. Nothing is historically necessary and only apologists trying to absolve their heroes engage in such sloppy claims.

This is like when an atheist critic of Christianity points to the history of Christians supporting colonial violence and enslavement and the evangelical apologist responds by saying: “Wilberforce!” As if the existence of Christian abolitionists means any support of slavery by Christians is purely accidental and irrelevant to their Christian convictions. Those enslaving Christians must have been “cultural Christians” who compromised with the world, whereas only the abolitionists remained truly Christian.

We’ve learned to recognize and refute these kinds of arguments. But unfortunately they still crop up repeatedly about other people’s pet issues, figures, and movements.

Restating the Argument

Let me try to briefly and clearly restate my position. My argument is that postliberal theology promotes a set of convictions and values that are antiliberal and antipluralist, and this antiliberal antipluralist theology cultivates a politics that will lead generally either toward separationism or imperialism. The two are very different approaches to the political, but they share an ideological root in the idea that the Christian church is a counter-polis with its own politics. We therefore should not be surprised when some who advocated for separationism switch to imperialism, or even waffle back and forth, as many do depending on the context. (Indeed, figures like Robert Dabney and Rod Dreher exemplify this waffling.)

In my original JR article I defined postliberalism in terms of intratextualism and ecclesiocentrism. In a forthcoming article (based on my AAR paper from last November), I expand the definition to include four features:

• communalism

• homogeneity

• isolationism

• supremacy

For those interested in the details of this account, I refer you to my other writings, on this Substack and elsewhere.

My point here is that political postliberalism is not some radical break from theological postliberalism, and the institutional connections between the two—First Things and Heritage being the most notable of these—serve to confirm that this historical trajectory is not merely theoretical but actual. It is a real development, and Christian theologians, among others, should reckon with it.

I am not suggesting that everything associated with Yale postliberalism is toxic and tarnished by the stain of the political postliberals. I admire and appreciate many things associated with postliberal theology, especially the writings of MacIntyre, the historical work of Lindbeck, and even many of the ethical writings by Hauerwas. Nothing exists in a binary, just as no historical event exists in a continuum of causal necessity.

As always, I welcome critique. But I also ask my critics to avoid simplistic defensive apologetics and engage in a more nuanced analysis.

Taking over as editor of First Things appears to have changed R. R. “Rusty” Reno—or perhaps exposed what he always believed.

Consider his choice of book publishers. Before assuming the position in 2011, he published with well-respected Christian publishers like Baker, Eerdmans, and Westminster John Knox, as well as one university press. Since then, he has published two books with Regnery, the premier right-wing publisher in the country, famous for being the home of works by Robert Welch (founder of the John Birch Society), William F. Buckley Jr., and especially Russell Kirk, whose The Conservative Mind—published by Regnery in 1953—became one of the most important conservative books of the twentieth century. Since the 1950s, they have been the publisher for the likes of Ann Coulter, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Sarah Palin, a sign of what political conservatism has become.

Put simply, Regnery exists to provide a platform for high-level conspiracy thinking, fantastical claims about the greatness of Christianity and conservatism, and “owning the libs”–style rhetorical bombast. So it’s no wonder Reno would publish with them. His books with Regnery, and especially his opinion pieces in First Things, amply demonstrate the same qualities.

Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

Reno’s first book with Regnery was his 2016 work, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, a throwback to T. S. Eliot’s 1939 lectures published as The Idea of a Christian Society. Much like Eliot, Reno sees liberalism as inherently unstable and destructive of society, and he similarly frames the options as either paganism or Christianity. Eliot wrote: “Our choice now is … between a pagan, and necessarily stunted culture, and a religious, and necessarily imperfect culture.” Picking up where Eliot left off, Reno states: “We face a similar decision today. Will we seek to live in accord with the idea of a Christian society, or will we accept the tutelage of a pagan society?”

Reno’s central thesis is that American liberalism leads to a kind of totalitarian freedom, in which freedom runs amok, destroying any vestiges of nature and tradition. His alternative is a “genuine freedom” that is constrained by transcendent values and goods as defined by classic wisdom traditions, including and especially Christianity. If this account sounds painfully familiar, it’s because virtually every postliberal makes the same diagnosis of liberal society. The postliberals wager the persuasiveness of their positions on the assumption that their readers will largely agree with this diagnosis of our present ills.

Postliberals like to tell grand narratives about Western society—narratives that purport to explain both their rise and decline, that build on the past and prognosticate about the future. But these narratives crumble upon even the slightest investigation.

Consider the story of American freedom that Reno tells in his 2016 book. Democracy, he argues, promotes an “individualistic view of life” that “distinguishes between me the individual and me the member of a community,” the latter defined by “my ethnic, class, and racial identity.” Reno seems to accept that democracy was a worthwhile advance over medieval aristocracy, but he goes on to say that this American emphasis on freedom became

something unprecedented in human history: a culture of, by, and for the people. The resulting cultural revolution has, like the Civil War, destroyed and driven to the margins the culture-shaping power of traditional forms of social authority that have been organized around race, ethnicity, religion, and sex. (16)

The emphasis on culture is an especially important concept and is a central piece in my argument for the connection between theological postliberalism and political postliberalism. You can read more about this argument in my previous writings. Here I want to stick with Reno as a representative of political postliberalism. He goes on in this chapter to construct a “domino theory” of liberalism. By giving freedom free reign in society, democracy becomes a slippery slope into a “totalitarian nightmare.”

First, democracy promotes racial equality, the “most successful front in this revolution” (17). According to Reno, the success of interracial marriage “encourages us to imagine even more dramatic transformations. If the power of the peoples can no longer limit our most intimate choices, why should our bodies?” In other words, Loving v. Virginia (1967) apparently opened a Pandora’s Box that led liberals to pursue radical new forms of freedom.

Second, democracy promotes gender equality. Here is where things go off the rails for Reno. Feminists, he claims, “feverishly teach young people not to adopt sex-based expectations about anything.” Men can stay at home with the children while the women go off to work. This “unisex” society may be “logical,” but it is “unnatural” (18). What exactly is unnatural about stay-at-home dads, we might ask? Reno’s answer is a complete non sequitur: “We’re powerfully inclined to sort human beings into male and female categories, an inclination that evolutionary biology suggests is wired, unlike racial or ethnic or religious sorting, into our brains.” Setting aside the absurdity of just field-dropping evolutionary biology without any citations, as if cognitive science were a single idea that could provide a simple STEM thumbs up, notice that Reno doesn’t remotely provide an answer to our question. He seems to think that sorting people into male and female categories must show why a SAHD is an oxymoron.

Here we have postliberal brain rot in action. Any person should be able to comprehend that having male and female sexual categories does not determine in advance what people sorted into those categories ought to do. Gender norms are not written into our chromosomes. You don’t have to have a PhD in critical theory to grasp this. Even a cursory look at the diversity of human history would give us ample evidence that people categorized as “male” have had vastly different norms over the millennia. Reno, like other Catholic and postliberal conservatives, engages in a dishonest blurring of nature and culture so that he can draw on the social authority of STEM while promoting a patriarchal ideology rooted in religious values and norms.

In the same paragraph, Reno criticizes President Obama for “putting boys’ toys into the girls’ bin” in a charity drive. Reno sees this as evidence of liberalism’s unnatural belief that “nothing determines our destiny, not even our biology. Our futures must be ours alone to make” (18). The absurdity of implying that “our biology” determines which toys are for boys and which are for girls never seems to cross his mind. It is surely possible that Reno has always had such pronounced brain rot, but the difference in his pre–2011 work from his post–2011 work suggests that something has deteriorated. The condition appears to be terminal.

The Case for Christian Nationalism

While I could spend this entire piece on his Christian Society book, I want to turn now to his recent First Things article, “The Case for Christian Nationalism.” This article is built on such utterly fanciful claims that a standard analysis will not suffice, because that would give the air of credibility to what is a truly un-credible essay. I will instead opt here for a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary, not of the whole essay—that would be cruel and unusual punishment—but enough to get a sense of the whole.

Let’s start at the beginning:

Recent polling paints a disturbing picture: Fewer than half of Gen-Z Americans are extremely or very proud of their country. There’s little doubt that relentless indoctrination in anti-American ideologies at school and in the media contributes to their lukewarm patriotism. But there’s another cause: They’re not stupid. The country shows signs of disease. Each year, a shocking number of people die of drug overdose. Marriage rates have declined. The rate of mothers without husbands has risen. Homeless encampments dot the landscape. A storm surge of pornography and other internet sewage drowns many souls.

Right off the bat Reno drops a humdinger of a claim—namely that Gen Z’s lack of patriotism must be partially the result of indoctrination in anti-American ideas. But let’s set that aside and look at the evidence Reno provides of the country’s diseased condition: drug overdoses, decline in marriage rates, increase in single motherhood, homelessness, and internet pornography. Reno claims to speak on behalf of young Americans, and yet he could not be further from reality.

Take a look at the Harvard and Yale youth surveys from fall 2025. These polls of Americans aged 18–29 (Harvard) and 18–34 (Yale) show pretty much exactly what we would expect. The reason American youth think the country is headed in the wrong direction is because of economic insecurity, lack of housing, unequal access to healthcare, threats to jobs due to AI, and the decline in democracy. The AEI’s summary of the Yale poll puts it nicely: “For many young adults, the central political question is not which side prevails in a cultural dispute but whether adulthood itself—homeownership, family formation, economic independence—remains attainable.”

We’re already off to a bad start. Reno doesn’t have the slightest grasp of why young Americans are critical of their country. By misdiagnosing the problem, he has set himself up to offer the wrong prescription for fixing the problem.

Let’s say you’re an intelligent and reasonably observant young fellow. You would ask: How did things get so weird, empty, and pointless? Who let the country become so vulnerable and dysfunctional? The answers are many, but in the broadest terms, diagnosing the diseases that debilitate the body politic is not complicated. America in the twenty-first century was not engineered by evangelical pastors or Catholic bishops. On the contrary, the diseases have festered as Christian influence has receded. An intelligent person surveying today’s unhappy landscape ought to come to a straightforward conclusion: America’s best hope is Christian nationalism.

Talk about a howler of a paragraph. Reno may think it’s easy to diagnose the problems with the country, and yet he has already failed that task. Only his insular bubble of far-right Catholics and evangelical culture-warriors would say that the decline of marriage and the prominence of internet porn are the pressing issues facing society today. But that misdiagnosis leads him to an even more outrageous misunderstanding of their cause—namely, the decline of Christian influence in American society.

The historian in me wants to press Reno to say, with a straight face if he can, that the world was better off in the 1930s or the 1850s than it is today. Who, exactly, was that world better for? Certainly not for Black Americans or Chinese Americans or Mexican Americans. Certainly not for LGBTQ+ Americans. Certainly not for many women. Moreover, as historians like David Hollinger and Gene Zubovich have demonstrated, the liberal advances of the mid-to-late 20^th century were not the result of Christian decline but of Christian influence. Ecumenical mainline Protestantism, dominant in postwar America, promoted a vision of equality and human rights that led directly to the transformational policies around race, gender, and sexuality.

Conversely, if we were to ask, with Reno, “who let the country become so vulnerable and dysfunctional,” we have a very clear answer: conservative evangelicals and Catholics! Some of them, like Jerry Falwell and Richard John Neuhaus (Reno’s predecessor at First Things), were indeed evangelical pastors and Catholics priests. Because Reno completely ignores the issues most people are concerned about—such as the political dominance by the donor class, the class warfare by the wealthy against the working and middle classes, and the loss of job security—he is unable to recognize the culprits of our current malaise, namely, the Reagan administration (and the subsequent administrations that reinforced his “revolution”) and the conservative Christian coalition that supported these politicians and policies.

In other words, it is precisely the ones promoting Christian nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s who produced the world that people now widely criticize. It’s a fairly small segment of the population that actually cares about the advances in rights for LGBTQ+ persons. A survey of Miami voters in 1977 found that most people had no problem with their gay and lesbian neighbors, and so Anita Bryant had to cast the “homosexuals” as a dangerous threat to children—a group of groomers seeking to recruit kids for their perverse cult—in order to convince enough people to change their minds. The same strategy is used today by Christian conservative activists against the trans community. If it weren’t for constant antitrans propaganda by Trump and his allies, I’m positive the whole bathroom furor would disappear virtually overnight. People generally do not care how their neighbors identify or what they do in the privacy of their homes. They only care because they are told by their political (and religious) overlords that they should.

Karl Popper was an influential exponent of anti-nationalism, which he adumbrated in his influential book The Open Society and Its Enemies. He criticized what he called a “tribal” and “collectivist” mentality. On its face, the criticism seems reasonable. The unity and ­well-being of the collective should not be the sole good we pursue. We honor God above any nation, and we rightly guard the freedom of individuals. But Popper went much further. In his view, an approach to governance that accords any moral weight to shared identity, whether a religion, culture, or ethnos, invites totalitarianism.

Reno is here taking a page out of his 2019 book, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West, the book that solidified Reno’s membership among the National Conservative postliberals. In that book, and again here, Reno turned Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies into a symbol of everything wrong with liberalism, similar to how Yoram Hazony uses John Locke in The Virtue of Nationalism and Patrick Deneen uses John Stuart Mill in Regime Change. It would seem that entrance into the postliberal club requires finding their liberal familiar—a strawman toy that the postliberal can caricature and abuse for the purpose of making their own argument appear serious and significant.

Our problems flow from the triumph of the open society, which has eroded our shared prosperity, fragmented our nation, and dispirited our fellow citizens. We are in a season of disintegration and polarization, not hyper-consolidation and dedication to collective purposes. Our historical moment calls for nationalism. We can (and should) debate how to serve the nation’s needs, how to repair the nation’s wounds, and how to renew the nation’s confidence. But I think that only those who are atavistically wedded to the open-society consensus can be blind to the need for nationalism.

For Reno’s argument to make any sense whatsoever, he needs Popper’s book to provide a grand causal explanation for all the changes that took over American society in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. It’s a savvy choice on his part, since Popper’s title provides a near-perfect symbol and stand-in for everything the NatCons hate. I say the title because the book itself is a close reading and critique of Plato and Marx, and while the book does make a profound case in support of a democratic-egalitarian society, it does not remotely function as a causal explanation of LGBTQ+ liberation and neoliberal economic policies. Reno has read these back into the concept of “open society,” as if anything that pertains to openness and freedom can be traced to Popper.

All of this is effectively a pseudo-intellectual conspiracy theory—a grand theory that purports to make sense of multiple unrelated phenomena as if they are all part of a secret plot to control the world. Whereas members of the old Christian Right coalition, including Paul Weyrich and Connie Marshner, liked to point to the left-wing figures of the Frankfurt School, the postliberals place the blame on the philosophers of liberalism, like Mill and Popper. But it amounts to the same thing in the end.

Perhaps the reader concedes that, yes, we need a bit of nationalism these days. But why Christian nationalism? Short answer: Because it’s the best kind. Christianity frames the nationalist project—which can go wrong, as history reminds us—with timeless truths. There are advantages to an approach to national reconsolidation that is guided by capital-T truth. Let me count the ways.

At this point in his essay, Reno turns to the virtues of Christian nationalism—which is to say, this is where his essay wanders into fantasyland. Reno imagines the best possible version of Christianity and so concludes that Christian nationalism would be the virtues of Christianity write large. It’s an account that is so disconnected from reality one cannot ascribe it to ignorance; it is instead the result of an intentional misinformation campaign, an effort to narrate a version of Christianity that has rarely if ever existed in history and subsists instead in the minds of Christianity’s boosters.

It is also important to keep in mind that the rest of what follows trades on an ambiguity. Reno talks of “Christian nationalism” as an alternative to “American liberalism,” and thus it seems at times as if he is promoting a kind of Catholic integralism. At other points, however, the essay only makes sense if “Christian nationalism” does not name an alternative political regime but merely a kind of Christian activism, a coordinated effort by conservative Christians to influence state policy. For instance, sometimes he’ll say that Christian nationalism is superior to other forms of nationalism because it places a limit on itself, whereas other times he’ll suggest that Christian nationalism is needed because it places a limit on the liberal state.

I won’t bother quoting the rest of the essay in full, since it is largely just variations on the same theme, designed to support Reno’s claim that Christian nationalism would be the best possible future for America—and for the world. Even so, I will highlight and comment on some of the key points.

Christian nationalism is­ self-limiting.

Reno claims that, because Christian nationalism is defined by the transcendent—“truths not of our making”—it is restrained in a way that apparently liberalism, which lets individual freedom spread like COVID at CPAC, is not. It’s a nice story, except that Christian history should lead us to precisely the opposite conclusion. The transcendent does not limit Christians in positions of power but rather provides them with a justification for amassing and exercising unlimited power. The history of Christianity—from Christian emperors to megachurch pastors—shows the truth of this in abundance.

What’s ironic is that if it’s self-restraint Reno wants, he ought to be an advocate for liberalism, not Christian nationalism. Liberalism, not Christian nationalism, is a self-limiting political theory designed to prevent too much power accruing to any one person or branch of government, under the assumption that individuals are bound to disagree with each other and those with more power may use it to oppress those with less. To prevent this, liberalism establishes limits through a variety of mechanisms, including representative democracy, the rule of law, judicial independence, separation of government functions, international organizations and nongovernmental bodies, and constitutionalism. These are tried and tested ways to prevent totalitarianism, and if Reno were remotely interested in actually limiting government overreach, he would work within liberalism, not against it.

But Reno has no interest in restraining government as such. He only wants to limit the kind of government he doesn’t like—the kind that grants equal rights and dignity to individuals who pursue forms of life that he, as a conservative Catholic, finds abhorrent. The whole point of liberalism is that a pluralistic society is always going to include people who find each other repulsive, and the challenge facing any theory of government is how to maximize peace in the face of such disagreements. Liberalism thus presupposes that society will be diverse and heterogeneous. It is at this very point that the postliberals demur. They don’t want a pluralistic country, and thus they encourage the massive aggrandizement of power to the executive branch so that the new Christian monarch can restrain, not the state itself, but the liberal state.

Christian nationalism tempers the native idealism of America.

Oh it does? Seems to me we have centuries of evidence that it does exactly the opposite—turning America into a chosen land providentially guided by God.

In a society animated by Christian nationalism, a vigorous and self-confident Church restrains the state from above.

The church sure did a great job restraining the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Republic, and the British Empire, among others. In case someone thinks only Americans are properly restrained, sure doesn’t seem like that there was much restraint in the Confederate States of America where enslaved people are concerned.

At the same time, Christ instills in his followers a respect for the natural order of life, which is rooted in marriage and the family. Here again, bonds of loyalty engage the heart against the intrusion of the state. As we have seen in recent elections, parents are roused to resist the ideological capture of their children by progressive teachers and school administrators. The natural family, rooted in marriage, restrains the state from below.

Reno returns to the topic of nature that appears whenever gender and sexuality come up. I will not repeat that discussion here, other than to point out that, because he has misdiagnosed the problem, his proposal of a conservative Christian nationalism solves a nonexistent problem that only those who already agree with his position could possibly find compelling.

Instead, I want to linger for a moment on the notion that the family “restrains the state from below.” This is where Reno’s ambiguity over what he means by Christian nationalism becomes apparent. If he’s imagining a future regime in which his version of Christianity has been in some sense established by the state, with policies designed to favor Catholic norms regarding the “natural family,” then it is hard to know what restraints a family would need to exercise in this utopian scenario. It seems instead that Reno is referring to the Christian family’s restraint on the liberal state. But the force of his argument depends on his claim that Christian nationalism will not be a theocracy because it is restrained from within, and passages like this one do not obviously support his case.

The greater the influence of Christianity over the future of American society, the more it is likely that we will see a restoration of decency, to say nothing of virtue.

By now I hope it is unnecessary to say anything more about this. Let me close with a theological reflection on the sorry state of Rusty Reno.

The Protestant Reformers accurately grasped the truth that there is no more virtue and goodness within the Christian church than in the wider world. As Luther said, each person is simul iustus et peccator and justification is always an alien grace (iustitia aliena) that never belongs to the person but instead always and only to Christ. Christian faith does not make a person magically better than their neighbor—an insight that history has proven a million times over.

As a former Episcopalian, Reno perhaps once knew this truth. But he and the other Christian nationalists have strategically forgotten this lesson. Many of the Catholic postliberals, however, seem never to have learned it in the first place. Reno’s entire case is built on a theological error that he has compounded into a political error.

Sutton and Carter belong to a new generation of historians of American Christianity—with which I am in full agreement—that rejects many of the old assumed narratives about Christianity, like the false notions that mainline Protestants were all liberals, evangelicals form a throughline of Protestant orthodoxy, and evangelicals only became political in response to liberal radicalism in the 60s and 70s. Against these and other stale accounts, Sutton and Carter observe that the mainline or ecumenical Protestants in the early to mid 20th century were the “Christian nationalists” of their day. This is a point that I make at some length in my own book, and I fully agree with their correction of the historical record on this. If you go back and read the key modernist figures who supposedly “won” the fundamentalist-modernist battle (itself a rather stale and outdated narrative), they were across the board invested in Christianizing America and establishing Christian values and beliefs in the nation. In that sense, I welcome Carter’s effort to reset the story about American Christianity, and Sutton’s work shows how far back Christian nationalism (CN) goes.

(For the record, I teach a course at the University of Kansas on CN and American politics, and I start the story with the Protestant Reformation and take students up to the present day. I look forward to using Sutton’s work in the future, and I will probably have my students read Carter’s essay in class.)

But I do have to demur at this point.

Carter’s takeaway from this revisionist history (in the best sense of the term) is that we should “retire the label Christian nationalist as a term of political combat.” Carter asks: “Are the MAGA faithful at fault for using political structures to advance Christian values? Or does the problem lie, rather, in the specific content of their values, some of which contravene a foundational democratic commitment to pluralism?”

Some have pointed out some slippage in Sutton’s or Carter’s argument, because at one point Carter quotes Sutton quoting President Obama, who said in a speech, “Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King—indeed, the majority of the great reformers in American history—were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause.” Only the most uselessly abstract definition of CN could possibly construe the mere use of religious language as CN, though Obama is probably not the best source on this point. It’s fair, I think, to read some of MLK’s speeches as tending toward a kind of CN. What is undeniable is that many of the mainline, liberal Protestants in the early 20th century were clearly Christian nationalists in a more robust sense of the term, and that played out especially in their anticommunist activism.

So for the sake of argument, let’s be a little clearer here. When we’re speaking about CN, we’re not talking about the mere use of Christian language and beliefs to motivate political action. We instead are referring to the belief that the United States is or ought to be a Christian nation and to the corresponding effort to use American political institutions to enshrine Christian values in the nation and empower explicitly Christian positions and policies.

On this definition, there are, without a doubt, both liberal and conservative versions of CN throughout American history—though even the distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” is anachronistic and probably misleading. Still, on this point, I think Carter and I are largely on the same page.

Where I demur is that I don’t think any version of CN is good and laudable. Full stop. The problem does not lie only in the specific values that MAGA wants to promote. The problem lies also in the very effort to “us[e] political structures to advance Christian values,” to use Carter’s words. To be sure, a CN that prioritizes feeding the hungry and housing the homeless is far better than the MAGA alternative—but that doesn’t mean it should be held up as a legitimate option in a pluralistic society.

Again, I want to be clear that simply using Christian language cannot possibly count as CN, and if that’s the rejoinder from Sutton and Carter, then I would call for more conceptual clarity. To riff on the Federal Council of Churches example that Carter uses at the start of his article, any plan to “Christianize” society is certainly CN, but promoting New Deal policies because one is inspired by the example of Jesus is not CN in any sense of the term.

But assuming we are on roughly the same page, I want to be emphatically clear that we should not accept any effort to “Christianize” society—whether in the conservative garb of MAGA or the liberal garb of Christian New Dealers. The term “Christian nationalism” should continue to be a term of political combat, precisely because it represents an effort to use government to advance Christian ideals.

I understand that many, especially those who count themselves as postliberals, will bristle at my claim and accuse me of privatizing faith. So be it. The privatization of religion is a good thing, something that liberal Christians, among others, should be rightly proud of promoting. As any scholar of secularity would acknowledge, this post-Westphalian compromise has “never fully worked,” as Adam Kotsko has pointed out recently. But it’s also the best option available. The alternatives are far worse.

To reiterate, I deeply appreciate the work of Sutton and Carter in reminding us that CN is not only a problem on the Christian Right; it has also been a problem on the Christian Left. (Whether there are both right-wing and left-wing versions of CN is a separate matter, on which point I am skeptical. I tend to think any form of nationalist thinking is inherently right-wing, but that’s a topic for another day.) But just because Christians on the Left have sought to Christianize the nation does not make it something worth supporting. We should stand against every form of Christian nationalism, even the ones that support the policies and agendas we hold dear.

The latter includes the likes of R. R. Reno, who has published a piece in this month’s First Things responding to my article.

What Does (Post-)Liberalism Mean?

Before turning to Reno’s critique of me, we have to look first at his earlier article, “What Does ‘Postliberalism’ Mean?” (December 26, 2025). In this essay, Reno argues that the postliberal theologians at Yale, where he studied under Lindbeck, were criticizing liberalism long before the political postliberals arrived on the scene. As Reno puts it, “Long before Patrick Deneen penned his influential book, my teachers judged that when it came to theology, liberalism had failed.” I completely agree with this, which is no doubt why a friend of his sent him my Journal of Religion article. My thesis is largely the same as Reno’s—except that what Reno sees as the great hope for America, I see as one of the causes of our current fascist crisis.

There’s one line in Reno’s earlier piece that I want to highlight, because it captures a reoccurring theme in his writings, especially on the topic of postliberalism. Reno writes:

I began to see a larger context for postliberalism. God alone deserves our uncritical love and devotion. But the promise of obedience applies to many aspects of life. If we will but give ourselves to what we love, we will enter more deeply into its life-giving power. That’s true for marriage, it’s true for our vocations, and it’s true for the life of the mind.

For Reno, arguably the central theological (and political) problem with liberalism is the way it cultivates a critical distance from the objects of our inquiry and affection. In theology, this leads to a freethinking rejection of rote adherence to orthodoxy, a readiness to criticize the tradition and construct new ways of thinking about God. In ethics, this looks like a refusal to assume the authority of supposedly natural or divine law and a corresponding willingness to develop forms of moral reasoning that are not tethered to any given tradition. In politics, this looks like opposition to established hierarchies and political boundaries as inherently authoritative, and thus a readiness to develop more rational and more egalitarian forms of social existence.

Reno sees all of this as a threat to a certain religio-political order—and he is right to think so. Liberalism does represent, at least ideally, a challenge to longstanding authorities and hierarchies that collectively go under the name of Tradition. Liberalism proposes that each individual has the capacity and the right to judge for themselves what beliefs, practices, and forms of life are meaningful for them. This is, as Charles Taylor observes, the meaning of modern secularity. As much as I abhor the political program of today’s postliberals and find much of their work intellectually vacuous, I agree with them on the fundamental threat that liberalism presents to their desired social order.

In an Orwellian move, Reno uses the language of love to describe the postliberal alternative, but love is here merely a synonym for obedience. To love something means, as he says, to “give oneself” over to it, to submit to its tradition and authority. In the case of doctrine, it means to submit to the authority of the Magisterium. In the case of ethics, it means to submit to the authority of the ethical tradition of one’s culture—in this case, Western European Christendom. In the case of politics, it means to submit to the authority of the nation and its assumed norms and values.

The latter is the most controversial in the present moment, since for Reno and his fellow National Conservatives, this means that only those who agree to assimilate into the norms of Americanism should be allowed into the country. Those who do not speak English, who don’t adhere to the moral norms of Western Christianity, who maintain cultural rites and traditions from lands outside of Western Europe—all such people should be kept out. They do not share the nation’s authorized culture, and thus they do not love the nation. They have not given themselves to America. Some of them, heaven forbid, may not have given themselves to the Christian God either. For the postliberals, therefore, the mass migrant and the “illegal immigrant” are the paradigmatic examples of those who lack love. Reno, Vance, and others further draw on the concept of the order of love (ordo amoris) to argue that Christians have more duties to their “near neighbors” (i.e., people more like them) than to their “far neighbors” (i.e., people less like them).

Liberalism, I suggest, provides a radically different account of what love means. Love is not submission to the other but rather consent to the other. Consent involves rational deliberation and choice, an act of will by which one opens oneself to the other without losing or denying their own agency. It is not love, therefore, to submit to the teachings of ecclesiastical leaders without testing their claims against reason and experience. It is not love to submit to the norms of an ethical tradition without evaluating whether those norms are conducive to a meaningful life. It is not love to submit to the norms of a nation without examining whether those norms produce a society of equality and justice.

Reno wants to claim the value of love as the exclusive property of the postliberals, but this is a tendentious claim that lacks any rational basis. Other accounts of love are available to us, whether Reno likes them or not.

Now, having said all that, let me turn to his response to me.

Postliberalism and Theology

At the outset, I want to acknowledge again that Reno and I generally agree that postliberal theology and postliberal politics have a great deal in common. Lindbeck and Deneen, for all their differences, are connected, genealogically and otherwise. On this point, Reno and I are on the same page. We disagree, however, on how to understand this connection and its political implications.

Reno’s brief essay, “Postliberalism and Theology,” begins by restating the nature of liberalism, drawing on Ernst Troeltsch as a model. According to Reno, Troeltsch reframes Christianity “in more universal terms,” by which he means Troeltsch constructs a vision of Christianity that is translatable into new cultural forms and is not bound to a particular ecclesiastical tradition. Simply put, liberal theology does not submit and therefore does not love.

Reno then turns to my article:

Congdon offers an accurate summation of the postliberal approach in theology: It “rejects the attempt to account for humanity in general or to speak in global terms.” But he goes on to draw a false corollary: “It is a consistently localist project that views each particular community as essentially incommensurable with every other.” Postliberalism leads to “sectarian ecclesiocentrism.”

Reno judges me to be correct in my assessment that postliberal theology, in rejecting apologetics and intercultural translation, opposes the liberal effort to speak of Christianity in global or universal terms that are not bound to specific cultures or traditions. Strangely, though, he denies my claim that this leads to a sectarian ecclesiocentrism. Based on the rest of Reno’s essay, it’s clear he does not understand what I mean by this, but first let’s read on.

George Lindbeck was one of the major postliberal figures at Yale. He was also one of the most influential ecumenical theologians of the late twentieth century, a role hardly consistent with “sectarian ecclesiocentrism.” Lindbeck recognized that concepts take on meaning within a language system. As a consequence, we should beware of presuming that seemingly divergent or contradictory statements are in fact divergent or contradictory. The 1999 Lutheran–Roman Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification demonstrated a Catholic–Protestant commensurability that few had imagined possible, and the ecumenical document discerned convergence using Lindbeck’s postliberal methods rather than relying on a supposedly more comprehensive and universal frame of reference.

Congdon makes the same false claims about political postliberalism. He is correct when he observes that political postliberalism, like theological postliberalism, rejects “transcultural universalism.” But it is not true that political postliberalism rejects “the apologetic effort to find common ground with cultural ‘outsiders’ and instead [recommends] protecting the walls that distinguish one’s own community from others.”

Liberals recoil at the mention of Adrian Vermeule, whom Congden [sic] ranges among the postliberals. Yet the Harvard Law professor and proponent of Catholic integralism has coauthored Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State (2020) with his decidedly non-Catholic and liberal colleague Cass Sunstein. One need not rely on “transcultural universalism” to discern common ground. History was full of cooperation, alliances, and common causes long before the advent of Enlightenment universalism and liberal political theories.

It’s remarkable to me that someone who studied under Lindbeck should have so weak a grasp on Lindbeck’s actual theological project. Perhaps we should take Reno at his word when he says, in his “What Does ‘Postliberalism’ Mean?” article, “I’m not someone who reliably remembers a great deal of what he reads.” Fair enough.

To adequately address Reno’s claims here requires that I do some remedial instruction on what Lindbeck’s postliberalism aimed to accomplish. Reno is quite right that Lindbeck was one of the great ecumenical theologians of the twentieth century. Indeed, we cannot understand his book The Nature of Doctrine without setting Lindbeck in the context of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. Lindbeck astutely recognized that, despite all the efforts to come to a consensus on matters like justification or eucharistic presence, church unity was never going to come through doctrinal agreement. His novel insight was that the concern for doctrinal or propositional unity was a modern problem that missed the deeper grammar of Christian doctrine. The real purpose of doctrine was not primarily to describe what people rationally believe but to regulate the cultural-linguistic community. Doctrines are rules for regulating the use of the Christian language game, rather than truth claims about what is or is not the case.

This may seem an arcane philosophical point, but it has profound theological and political implications. In effect, Lindbeck’s program redefines the nature of Christian unity—replacing propositional unity with cultural unity. The other alternative, experiential unity, was the liberal option, and Lindbeck roundly rejects it. The concept of cultural unity (or cultural-linguistic unity, to be more precise) remapped the contours of global Christianity: the question was not whether people agreed on doctrine but whether they belonged to the same culture, whether they spoke the same religious language. Suddenly, in that sense, Catholics, conservative mainliners, and evangelicals were now all part of the same cultural-linguistic community, despite having serious doctrinal and ecclesiastical disagreements.

In effect, Lindbeck laid the groundwork for political coalition-building across denominational and confessional lines. A conservative Catholic and a conservative Protestant were part of the same religion/culture, on Lindbeck’s terms, while a conservative Lutheran and a liberal Lutheran were not. There is a reason why so many disciples of Lindbeck converted to Rome: they had more culturally in common with the Vatican than with their fellow mainline Protestants. They were merely putting postliberal theology into practice. One result was a partisan divide within American Christianity—partisan loyalties reflecting different cultural commitments.

We’re now in a position to understand why Reno’s critique makes so little sense. Of course Lindbeck’s work demonstrated “Catholic–Protestant commensurability.” That was the whole point of his project! Catholics and Protestants, so long as they belonged to the same traditional culture, were part of one and the same Christian community. Catholics and non-Catholics working together is hardly a challenge to my interpretation.

Having said that, Reno and others have misunderstood what I mean by sectarianism—along with related concepts like the rejection of apologetics and incommensurability. On this point, I recommend that others read my response to David Fitch regarding the sectarianism of Hauerwas. Most people hear “sectarianism” to mean a literal refusal to engage with outsiders, and that is not at all what I mean by this term. It’s not a refusal of engagement, but a certain kind of engagement that does not permit intercultural translation (because Christian is a cultural grammar, not a universal idea). I’ve already explained, drawing on Lindbeck’s work, how his alternative involves catechesis and assimilation, but I will endeavor to explain this further.

First, it is important to point out that the concept of incommensurability is not mine but comes directly from Lindbeck himself. Here are some passages from Nature of Doctrine:

The difference between religions may in some cases be analogous to that between mathematical and nonmathematical—e.g., quantitative and qualitative—descriptions of reality. They may, in other words, be incommensurable in such a way that no equivalents can be found in one language or religion for the crucial terms of the other. (48)

The cultural-linguistic approach is open to the possibility that different religions and/or philosophies may have incommensurable notions of truth, of experience, and of categorial adequacy, and therefore also of what it would mean for something to be most important (i.e., “God”). Unlike other perspectives, this approach proposes no common framework such as that supplied by the propositionalist’s concept of truth or the expressivist’s concept of experience within which to compare religions. (49)

This is not the place to examine the details of Lindbeck’s argument. I merely wish to point out that I was not treating Lindbeck unfairly by using the concept of incommensurability; it is his own chosen way of describing the difference between cultural communities.

Second, my choice to describe postliberal theology as a program for “protecting the walls that distinguish one’s own community from others” was a bit polemical and designed to highlight the connection to the current political postliberalism of MAGA and the NatCons, I stand by the phrasing. Lindbeck’s program is quite clearly a form of cultural boundary making, with his opposition to universalism and his emphasis instead on the cultural particularity that shapes each tradition and religion. Having firm walls does not preclude dialogue with others, but it certainly shapes how that dialogue will occur.

For Lindbeck, there is no way to externally validate or assess the rightness of one culture vis-à-vis another. Instead, he argues that we can only evaluate different cultures by assessing how successful each is at “assimilating” the views of others. To demonstrate this point, we need to turn to a 2004 essay where Lindbeck revisited chapter 3 of The Nature of Doctrine for a conference (this is published as the afterword to the 25^th anniversary edition). In part 4 of this essay, Lindbeck addresses the dangers of “isolationism, relativism, and fideism” that are associated with his postliberal proposal. Lindbeck does not dismiss these dangers as a misunderstanding but rather acknowledges that they logically follow. He says, however, that there is “one way” that religions or cultures can avoid isolationism and engage each other:

There is, however, one way in which opposing claimants to comprehensiveness can be reasonably evaluated against each other despite the absence of universally agreed upon standards of comparison. Some of them visibly vary—perhaps in the long run all of them do—in their ability to assimilate others without losing their own distinctive identity, that is, ceasing to exist. This is the solution proposed in The Nature of Doctrine to the problem of evaluative comparisons. . . . [The ability to assimilate] is an internal “value,” the treasured source of all cultural-linguistic forms of life that seek to be all-embracing. Because it is internal, its meaning differs in each of these comprehensive forms of life, yet there is enough commonality to make possible open-ended arguments over which forms of life have the most assimilative power. (136–37)

I view Lindbeck with a great deal of respect, but I stand by my claim that his position essentially sees Christianity as superior to other religions/cultures because it has the most assimilative power, meaning it is a more successful colonizing force. Lindbeck views a religion’s capacity to subsume other cultures into its dominant worldview as a mark in its favor, whereas I do not.

Put simply, I see Lindbeck’s postliberalism as providing the intellectual scaffolding for a theological rejection of pluralism. A cultural-linguistic community, as Lindbeck defines it, cannot contain multiple cultures without imploding in on itself. Homogeneity is necessary, at least as an aspiration. To be sure, that community will engage with outsiders, but those outsiders will have to be assimilated and become insiders. Religious “migrants” cannot continue to practice their own cultural values; they must submit to the authority of the assimilating community. That is the projected outcome of such engagement. The alternative is to remain separate, each community carrying on in its own way, acknowledging the other while remaining distinct from the other. What Lindbeck’s vision cannot accommodate is the possibility of cultural diversity being internal to Christianity—and that, to me, is the poisonous root of what is otherwise an impressive theological tree.

On Love and Postliberalism

I will skip over Reno’s discussion of autonomy for now and turn to his conclusion, where he writes as follows:

I return to my observations about the promise of liberal theology. Liberal theology dreamed of reflection unhindered by inherited authorities. As I noted last month, my teachers at Yale came to doubt that promise. Instead of a richer and more relevant Christianity, they saw navel-gazing subjectivism and capitulation to passing fashions. Because they cast doubt on the promise of theological liberalism, they were postliberal.

Political liberalism harbors a similar dream, one in which the weakening of old social forms—hierarchy, marriage, borders, boundaries, traditional morality—will allow for cramped and limited lives to open up. The upshot of this new freedom will be the emergence of fuller and deeper, more tolerant and more accepting ways of being human. My friends, many of whom Congdon discusses in his essay, have come to doubt this promise. They see a demoralized and dispirited society, an irresponsible and self-serving elite, and an intellectual culture that is functionally nihilistic. They see, too, self-proclaimed liberals who police public discourse, quick to hurl charges of authoritarianism. Because we refuse to prop up liberalism’s promise, for all our substantive disagreements, we are rightly deemed postliberal.

One need not proclaim that liberalism has failed in order to be ranged among the postliberals. It is enough to say that liberalism is not enough; that freedom is not enough; that pluralism, which will always be with us, is a challenge not a blessing; that universal truths about the human condition, though real, do not provide sufficient bases for a fully human life. Liberalism prunes but does not plant. It does not speak the language of love and devotion. Men can live in bondage and be human. But they cannot live without love.

Reno again claims that liberals don’t know love, whereas the postliberals do. What he means by love, however, is devotion to the “old social forms—hierarchy, marriage, borders, boundaries, traditional morality.” Reno claims he is not antiliberal, but I will not return the favor. I am decidedly anti-postliberal, and I think his vision of society is cruel and malicious, hardly reflective of an order of love.

Reno and I disagree on our assessment of liberalism and postliberalism. But we nevertheless agree that Lindbeck’s postliberal theology, however nuanced in its origins and aims, helped pave the way for the emergence of this postliberal order.

One of my central claims is that postliberal theology’s concept of the church as a cultural community set in contradistinction to the world (e.g., the church as “resident aliens”) maps on to political postliberalism’s concept of the nation as a culturally distinct community set in contradistinction to other nations (e.g., the nation-state as an ethnocultural tradition). The sectarianism that characterizes postliberal theology corresponds to the nationalism of the postliberal Right. Both are versions of antiglobalism: they reject the political philosophy of universalism and advocate instead for a kind of localism or communalism. Some on the MAGA New Right translate the local communalism of the church onto the separate structures of the nation-state; others conflate the two communities and aspire to a state that, in some sense, is the church writ large. Either way, I suggest, we have a state that is designed to look and function like the church as described by the postliberal theologians.

When I used the word “sectarian” in my essay, I did so knowing it would infuriate the Hauerwasians. I signaled as much by acknowledging in my essay the dispute over James Gustafson’s 1985 charge that Hauerwas’s work represented a “sectarian temptation.” As I point out, Hauerwas responded to the charge by arguing that his liberal critics were the true tribalists, since they had identified Christianity with Enlightenment liberalism.

I don’t spend any time rehashing this debate, mostly because I think it is beyond dispute that Gustafson was right. The Hauerwasian attempts, including those by Hauerwas himself, to rescue him from this charge are unpersuasive in the extreme. I’m not even sure why Hauerwasians try to defend him when their work otherwise only confirms the accuracy of Gustafson’s observation. But none of this is in the article itself; I simply report this dispute to acknowledge the contention over this interpretation.

Even so, enter David Fitch to fight the good fight in support of Hauerwas’s honor.

Fitch has written a long substack post in response to my JR article where he goes after me for my portrayal of Hauerwas. There are some things odd about this piece, including its meandering, almost stream-of-consciousness style that makes discerning any actual argument difficult at best. But I will try to distill what I take to be the central claims and address them.

Before starting, though, I have to point out some general problems with Fitch’s entire piece. As far as I can tell, Fitch provides a single citation from Hauerwas’s writings, and that one quote, as I’ll point out below, supports my reading, not his. The entirety of his “argument,” if one can even call it that, is based on assertion—and assertions that are not corroborated by Hauerwas’s actual writings. With that, let’s dig in.

1. “It’s not separatism if it engages the world.”

Fitch’s first and most important claim is that I, and others, are simply wrong when we see Hauerwas’s project as sectarian, because, in his words, “Hauerwas is not clarifying the church-world distinction for the purposes of withdrawing the church from the world. … It is actually to do the opposite. It is for the express purpose of engaging the world.”

Already I’m beginning to wonder if Fitch has actually read Gustafson’s essay. Certainly he has not grasped my argument about postliberalism, and I would encourage him to read my book, Who Is a True Christian?, especially chapter 3. Sectarianism as I and others use the word has nothing to do with literally withdrawing from the world. Indeed, one only needs to read the first paragraph of Gustafson’s essay (pictured above) to see the problem. As Gustafson says, he calls this project sectarian “not because it is always associated with classic Anabaptist ecclesiologies, though in part it is, but because the separation of theology from other ways of construing the world in the culture is somewhat similar to the sharp separation of the Christian community from the world that has always characterized sectarianism.”

For Gustafson, and for my own work, postliberal theology is sectarian because of the way it understands Christianity as a distinct cultural community that has to be defined in opposition to other cultural communities, usually grouped together under the rubric “world.” Fitch does not dispute this point and repeatedly uses “world” in this exact way. The one time he quotes Hauerwas is in support of this very framework: “The first task of the church is to be the church and thus help the world understand itself as the world” (The Peaceable Kingdom, 100).

To be sure, this way of speaking about the world is biblical and derives especially from the Johannine literature, though as historians point out, kosmos in the NT refers to a metaphysical totality that includes the celestial and terrestial realms, both the visible and invisible domains. What the postliberals did is to turn this concept into a cultural category. It no longer referred to those who were doctrinally heterodox (as in the old cognitive propositionalism) but instead referred to those who were culturally alien, those who did not share the norms, rituals, and language of the genuine Christian community.

Nowhere do I say that postliberal sectarianism leads to a withdrawal or retreat from the world. I certainly do connect Hauerwas’s work to the formation of intentional communities and house churches, and I associate his framework with Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. These aren’t controversial claims. The house church networks I know personally explicitly appeal to Hauerwas in support of their efforts. Resident Aliens was a decisive influence on 1990s-era ex-evangelical millennials who sought to be radicals for Christ.

The BenOp and intentional communities are ways of engaging the world—precisely in their sectarian separatism. Being “separate” does not mean cutting oneself off from others. It means drawing firm, clear lines between oneself and another, lines that demarcate who is “one of us” and who is “one of them.” If Fitch thinks Hauerwas does not have lines of demarcation, then he has not said so or remotely made a case demonstrating this. All Fitch has done is claim that engagement with the “world” absolves Hauerwas of the sectarian charge, and all I can say in response is, “No, it doesn’t. Not in the least.”

2. “The church is a political strategy.”

I’ll keep this part brief. In the context of defending Hauerwas from the sectarian charge, Fitch says that the “church is a political strategy.” This is a classic Hauerwasian claim, and it is exactly the kind of statement that I am saying lends support to far-right political postliberalism.

For the postliberals—following the lead of Alasdair MacIntyre, as well as Hauerwas and George Lindbeck—politics is a reflection of one’s culture, or one’s “story,” to use another classic Hauerwasianism. The story you inhabit shapes the politics you live out. Hauerwas argues that Christianity is a story, a culture, and thus Christianity has its own politics. This politics necessarily stands over against the stories and politics of the “world.” Liberalism is a storyless politics because it is rooted, as he says in Resident Aliens, in the individual. It has no community and thus no culture. Such a politics is rootless. It is only destructive of the social order. (Anyone who has read Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed will immediately see how similar the arguments are.)

Hauerwas’s claim sounds exciting and radical to the evangelical Protestant who grew up in the late 90s world of seeker-sensitive megachurches. But a postlib former evangelical can only go so long on that path before they tire of seeing a “world” devolving into ever-deepening disorder. It should not surprise us that, after the Bush wars and Obama’s drone program and Obergefell, among other things, these Hauerwasians would wake up one day and decide they just can’t take it anymore.

If the church is a political strategy, then that strategy ought to be embodied in the nation’s politics.

Of course this change didn’t occur overnight, and not everyone was radicalized by the same things or in the same ways. But if we want to understand why evangelicals went so hard for Trump and for a postliberal politics of national conservatism, we have to take into consideration the way that so many were told, year after year, that Christians alone have the right politics, the right vision for society, and the liberal order is a wasteland of rootlessness and ungodliness.

3. “Lindbeck was anti-colonialist to the core”

Perhaps the most outrageous part of Fitch’s post is his attempt to defend George Lindbeck. Now don’t get me wrong, Lindbeck is a very important and respectable thinker in many respects, certainly more theologically compelling than Hauerwas. And Fitch is right to recognize that defending Hauerwas requires defending Lindbeck as well, so his detour to Lindbeck, while odd in the context of his post, makes a certain amount of sense.

But what Fitch has to say is, I’m sorry to say, patently absurd.

Let me step back and rehearse the context here. One of the claims I make in my article is that Lindbeck’s concept of “intratextual theology” provides the key theological link between theological and political postliberalism. Intratextual theology is the name Lindbeck gives to the epistemological method of sectarianism that Gustafson criticizes above, according to which Christianity can only be understood on its own terms. Sources and methods of rationality outside of the church are alien to the culture of Christianity and thus unable to provide any insight into the internal norms and values of the Christian community.

But that doesn’t mean Christians are to cut themselves off from other knowledge sources! Once again, sectarianism does not preclude but in fact necessitates engagement. Indeed, Lindbeck argues that intratextual theology absorbs knowledge from the world and brings it into the domain of the church. Theology “redescribes reality within the scriptural framework rather than translating Scripture into extrascriptural categories. It is the text, so to speak, which absorbs the world, rather than the world the text” (Nature of Doctrine, 118). I don’t quote that last sentence in my article (though I discuss it at length in my book), but it hovers over the entire essay as the underlying theopolitical theory of imperialism—ecclesial or national.

(Parenthetically, those who argue that this theory is only interpretive and not political have not read Lindbeck’s later writings from the late 1990s and early 2000s where he makes the sociopolitical nature of his program clear. All of this is found in my book.)

To iterate, postliberal theology is a theory of world-absorption. Postliberalism’s intratextual method is the opposite of disengagement; it actually requires that Christians plunder the “world” to reinforce the church and empower its political program. This is why I am completely unmoved by Fitch’s claim that “engagement" with the world somehow means postliberals are not authoritarian. On the contrary, postliberalism’s own stated method of engagement is authoritarian. Lindbeck says as much explicitly. The postliberals and their defenders don’t call a spade a spade because when Christians do it, it’s okay.

Fitch sidesteps all of this by providing an alternative account of Lindbeck’s theory:

“Intratextual theology” refers to the Lindbeckian idea that rationality, and ways of putting things together (coherence) in the world, are developed within histories and languages within particular cultures. One should not therefore automatically expect to transfer one’s own rationality learned within a Euro context to an African context or an Islamic context, or another cultural context. You get the point? Intratextuality actually cultivates a sensitivity to other cultures that counteracts colonialist instincts. It actually trains you to first enter into a culture, listen and learn the rationality at work, learn its language, its grammar, its ways of thinking, before making the translation, before rushing to assume you know what they mean.

The problem is that Lindbeck says none of this. Fitch concocts a wholly fictional Lindbeck who is a postcolonial thinker of cultural pluralism. It’s a nice portrait, if only it had any relation to reality.

Let’s look at what Lindbeck actually says:

Postliberals are bound to be skeptical, not about missions, but about apologetics and foundations. To the degree that religions are like languages and cultures, they can no more be taught by means of translation than can Chinese or French. What is said in one idiom can to some extent be conveyed in a foreign tongue, but no one learns to understand and speak Chinese by simply hearing and reading translations. (Nature of Doctrine, 129)

According to Lindbeck, if religion, being a culture, is like a language, then it cannot be learned by translation. Grammars cannot be translated; they can only be learned from actual use. This largely rules out apologetics, except in the most ad hoc form.

How, then, does one prove the reasonableness and rightness of Christianity to those outside the church? (Lindbeck assumes this is the purpose of Christian mission and something the Christian is commanded to do.) Lindbeck rejects the method of liberalisms, which involves translating the gospel into terms and forms that the non-Christian can understand.

Let me make this really clear: What Fitch describes above as intratextual method—entering into another culture and learning its language so as to make an effective translation—is what Lindbeck rejects as liberalism. Fitch has completely misunderstood Lindbeck at the most crucial point.

So what does Lindbeck advocate instead?

The postliberal method of dealing with this problem is bound to be unpopular among those chiefly concerned to maintain or increase the membership and influence of the church. This method resembles ancient catechesis more than modern translation. Instead of redescribing the faith in new concepts, it seeks to teach the language and practices of the religion to potential adherents. This has been the primary way of transmitting the faith and winning converts for most religions down through the centuries. In the early days of the Christian church, for example, it was the gnostics, not the catholics, who were most inclined to redescribe the biblical materials in a new interpretive framework. Pagan converts to the catholic mainstream did not, for the most part, first understand the faith and then decide to become Christians; rather, the process was reversed: they first decided and then they understood. More precisely, they were first attracted by the Christian community and form of life. The reasons for attraction ranged from the noble to the ignoble and were as diverse as the individuals involved; but for whatever motives, they submitted themselves to prolonged catechetical instruction in which they practiced new modes of behavior and learned the stories of Israel and their fulfillment in Christ. Only after they had acquired proficiency in the alien Christian language and form of life were they deemed able intelligently and responsibly to profess the faith, to be baptized. (Nature of Doctrine, 132)

Conversion—that’s the solution. People have to convert to the “alien Christian language and form of life,” the foreign culture of the church, in order to understand it. Understanding comes after one is inculturated into Christianity.

Lindbeck sanitizes the history here for his modern readers, but we cannot whitewash the underlying explanation for how this happened, namely, through Christian imperialism and colonialism. As sovereigns abandoned paganism and adopted Christianity, their subjects were forced to convert, since there was no such thing as religious freedom or individual autonomy. They were not convinced to become Christian. They were told to become Christian and then had to learn how to understand it later. This was intratextual theology in practice. For Lindbeck, this is the proper, indeed only, way of grasping the truth of Christian doctrine.

Lindbeck’s postliberal theology is colonialist to its core, pace Fitch.

Assessing Hauerwas in the Age of Trump

I can appreciate how difficult this may be for Hauerwasians and other postliberals to swallow. I don’t want to be misunderstood as claiming that every postliberal is a closet Christian nationalist, frothing at the mouth for world domination. Not at all. And this is where I think Fitch has most profoundly misunderstood my article.

I do not claim that Hauerwas was a Christian nationalist, much less a proto-MAGA Christian. I don’t dispute Fitch’s observation that Hauerwas broke with First Things and, like other postliberals, has been very critical of the political postliberals. I acknowledge this explicitly in my article, where I point out that many postliberal theologians signed a manifesto opposing the MAGA postliberalism of Reno and others.

But Fitch seems to think that this absolves Hauerwas and others in his camp, and I’m sorry to have to say this, but it absolutely does not. When you put ideas out into the world, you don’t get to control how they get received and interpreted. Hauerwas spent decades railing against liberal democracy as foreign and alien to the Christian gospel. I am quite willing to read him charitably as being opposed to crass forms of Christian nationalism, but he didn’t just oppose the idea of America as a Christian nation. He argued that the root problem of Americanism was its grounding in liberalism, in democracy, in pluralism.

I don’t think Hauerwas is uniquely to blame for the rise of MAGA Christianity, but he certainly contributed, as one of the most widely read theologians in the country, to the notion that liberal pluralism is antithetical to Christian discipleship, and he ought to take responsibility for that. I’ll accept repentance on his part, but I won’t accept claims that he was only advocating for people to be culturally sensitive. Don’t gaslight me.

My argument is not that Hauerwas and Lindbeck caused MAGA Christianity, nor that they were MAGA in disguise already in the 1990s. I have instead argued that they contributed decisively to creating a theological environment that greased the wheels for the transition to political postliberalism. Their intratextual church-world binary, with its politics of world-absorption and cultural conversion, laid part of the intellectual foundation for the MAGA New Right to emerge. Fitch acknowledges that some in their orbit, like R. R. Reno, have embraced postliberal politics and explicitly made the connection to Lindbeck. I readily agree that Hauerwas is not Reno, but that does not mean his theology did not also contribute to this new political reality. Putting our fingers in our ears and refusing to grapple with this fact will not make it go away.

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Really? Another Substack?

Trust me when I say I’m as annoyed about this as you are.

Some of you may remember my old theoblog, The Fire and the Rose, where I first built online community before Twitter. When I finally abandoned that space in 2016 I vowed not to go back. By that point blogging was dead and microblogging sites like Twitter had fully dominated the attention economy. When Twitter turned into a deepfake porn site and right-wing echochamber, I happily left it for the blue ocean of Bluesky, where I continue to post regularly.

But Bluesky hasn’t successfully replaced Twitter as a place to post long informative threads—effectively a blog post split up into 30+ tweets/skeets. As my work over the past year has gained a larger audience—especially my analysis of postliberalism—I’ve increasingly felt the need to have a place to address questions and criticisms. Hence, this site.

The title of the site—Postpostliberalism—is the name of a book I hope to write. Whether I ever do is another question, but it names my vision for a theological and political theory beyond the current postliberal era we’re in. Postliberalism sees itself as an eschatological vision for a utopian society beyond the dystopia of liberalism. I see postliberalism, however, as a deeply dystopian vision that needs to be countered—not by reasserting liberalism, which is deeply flawed, but by something new, something that translates liberalism into a postpostliberalism.

I don’t know how frequently I’ll post on here, but I welcome you to follow along if you’re interested. (I guess this is where I’m supposed to encourage you to subscribe.)