Postscript
Jonathan Chaplin, Jodok Troy, Vassillios Paipais, and Andrew Bolton each generously engaged with my work. They highlight that Security After Christendom (2024) is a work of apocalyptic thought.
Over the last year, I have been summarizing my book Security after Christendom. By reading the fifteen posts on this blog, you can consume the argument for free in about two hours at your leisure. Or you can go to this single post for a talk which made the argument in Washington DC. The alternative is to pay US$44 (UK£36) for two whole days of reading with all kinds of intellectual digressions and personal anecdotes. Like most authors of niche books, I won’t make anything more than pennies from your purchase, but I’ll be happy if you think this is worthwhile. If you want to read about my experience of the UN sending refugees back to a warzone in the 1990s or my work in the anti-corruption industry in the 2020s, buy the book!
Security after Christendom is somewhat biographical because its argument is especially personal, interwoven with my faith and career. I embarked on this process because I am convinced that, whether we are Christian or not, we cannot understand our present insecurities and prospects for greater security without understanding Christendom and its legacies. I have become convinced of this through a life story of practical engagement in politics as an official and aid worker, campaigner and advisor, as well as in my study of history, politics, and theology. I am certain that the present international order of sovereign states – especially in the “liberal” or Western guises that have been paramount in the modern age – is in an advanced state of decomposition.
But unlike many others, I am not afraid of this change, nor do I think its signs (increasing asylum seekers, the decline of the just war tradition, the failure of markets to address climate change) are threats about which we should worry. What confidence I have that the direction in which we are headed is not “apocalyptic” (in the violent and popular sense) is found in my apocalyptic theology (in the Christian and biblical sense) that an unjust world is in the process of giving way to a new heaven and a new earth. Post-Christendom is to be preferred to Christendom. Neo-Christendom – of the kind favoured by some supporters of both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump – is mere delusion and idolatry.
In making and defending this argument, I must nevertheless admit that it is one that sends many hares running. The argument is more of a project than a book. That’s why I’ve been interspersing my summaries with blogs on topical issues where I try to be as specific as possible about how we can’t fully grasp Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, Trump, the UK’s defence, globalization, and countless other questions of security without reference to Christendom and its end. And we can’t become more secure unless we recognize the decline of the Christianised state and the return of the church to being, as it was in its early centuries, the locus of Christian political life.
In the eighteen months since publication, I have received many encouraging and critical comments on Security After Christendom. Unlike the three other books I have published in my main academic field of International Relations, I never expected the book to be seen as significant by the academy. (And I wasn’t surprised on that point!) It is a scene-setting book which lays the groundwork for a broader project in political theology which is ongoing. I am now halfway through my doctorate in Divinity which seeks to write a new political theology of violence. I will continue to apply the argument to contemporary issues in occasional posts on this blog.
However, before proceeding to the world after Security After Christendom, I would like to address four specific comments from four constructively critical reviewers of the book. I am appreciative to each for the time they have taken and the seriousness of their engagement. If you have questions or comments about the book, please add them below or to any of the posts. I will reply!
First, an argument made by Jonathan Chaplain is that the book lacks a post-Christendom ethic of the state. Jonathan takes issues with the ecclesio-centrist framing of the book and notes correctly that my perspective which is heavily influenced by Anabaptist thought. He put it like this in the excellent blog Religion in Praxis:
Even in a ‘post-Christendom’ age we still want governments to ‘secure’ the church, in the sense of protecting its civil freedom to advance its own mission – alongside that of many other religious or secular organisations. And we also want a church that ‘ministers to’ government, not in the sense of securing the privileged ear of the state, but rather of offering prophetic testimony against the state’s injustices and excesses.
I agree with Jonathan both that the book lacks an ethic of the state and that the task of the church in this regard is “prophetic testimony”. The Christian political vocation is to bear witness to the state from the outside not for the church to be formally or informally part of the state or government.
Where we may disagree is in our desire for, and our assessment of, the capacity of the state to secure the church and whether that is desirable. Jonathan advocates post-Christendom constitutionalist and pluralist programmes that have been articulated in Western liberal democracies. The problem with this tack is that the political conditions for them are largely absent (with democracy in terminal decline across the world). Most of the world’s population lives and has always lived in places where the state has no interest in securing the church in anything more than the basic sense of its bare right to exist (but not to flourish, not to engage in mission, etc.) The security of the global church – in the sense of inclusion, protection and provision – is primarily but not exclusively an ecclesial task.
Second, Jodok Troy’s concern is similar but less with the ethic of the book and more with its political theory. His reasonable concern is that the book is too quick to dismiss the Christian realism of Niebuhr and over emphasises the influence of the neo-Christendom thinker and Nazi apologist Carl Schmitt on the realists. Jodok is correct – and is not the only one to point out – that I have taken an especially critical reading of twentieth century Christian realism and that this is odd when the book eventually circles back to it in the form of what I call “apocalyptic realism”. He may also be correct that our globalized world is not so different from the overlapping empires and sovereignty claims of the past with which Christian realists grappled. My reply would merely be that they struggled with these realities from a Eurocentric perspective and, in a secularising age, by laying their eschatology to one side.
Third, Vassillios Paipais tackles the fundamental argument regarding apocalyptic realism and questions whether Security After Christendom sometimes “reproduces a rigid dualism between history and eschatology”. In this sense, the book reproduces the dichotomy of the realists by asserting eschatology against history in a manner which is common among apocalyptic thinkers. He goes on:
the spiritual and the practical do have to work in tandem but not as separate domains that are subsequently brought together but as the experience of an already graced reality that leaves nothing outside its redemptive power transforming politics into a practice of hope.
This is an insightful critique of the book. By confining eschatology (how we understand the ends and purposes of humanity) to the future (beyond or after history), I risk understating the capacity of God’s grace to inaugurate security on earth.
Fourth, Andrew Bolton’s summary of the book is a peace-loving one which lacks any explicit critique. However, his remark that the book will “annoy” atheists and secularists highlights that this is a grand narrative from a Christian perspective. We may also add that my argument that the big debate must happen in “decolonized” form hardly detracts from my position of privilege and exclusive Christian argument.
I think my response to this concern is that I see my efforts, and indeed anyone’s, as far less significant than the dialectical process which is driving history towards its end. Here I reveal myself to be a methodologically structuralist rather than individualist thinker. From this perspective, relations between government and church cannot settle on an ethic or covenant (Noahic, as David van Drunen argues, or otherwise). We must work with not against the dialectical tension for it is that tension which drives history forward in an apocalyptic manner. No political covenant or centre can withstand it. We should not scramble like Canute to hold back the tides. The true Noahic parallel is that arks that can and should be built.
Security After Christendom sits within the Christian apocalyptic tradition as a witness to the (in)security of the world. As Vassillios says, this evangelical position requires that “the always already political (and therefore agonistic) nature of Christian witness” is “unapologetically foregrounded”. It seems to me this is a more viable position than either the temporary democratic fixes of much liberal secular thought or the ethnocentric civilizationalism of many religious grand narratives. Although critical and agonistic, it at least offers hope which is both theological and political.