Abstract
Religious traditions need to ask some vital questions about their view of the civic order, especially the ostensibly secular civic order. These questions include: Is civil government legitimate? If so, what is the proper scope of its concerns and authority? How should the civic order and communities of faith relate to each other? Religious communities must also ask questions about other religions. Are they legitimate? Are they worthy of respect, politically or theologically or interpersonally? How should they relate to each other? And how should faith traditions collectively relate to the civic order?
David VanDrunen’s "Politics after Christendom: Political Theology in a Fractured World," is a rich, fine-grained, effort to grapple with the first sets of questions just outlined: the legitimacy and role of the civic state and the place of the religious order and religious believers. The book’s arguments are often compelling. Many should be reassuring to those of us in different religious traditions. They also resonate nicely with legal pluralism and with a jurisdictional view of religious liberty and religion-state dispensations. Some of the book’s insights also break new ground.
Yet there is something off here, like an appealing melody sung just slightly off key. Furthermore, VanDrunen’s book has little to say about the last set of questions, on interreligious relations. This turns out to be a problem.
This essay – a draft of a contribution to an upcoming Book Review Roundtable in on VanDrunen’s book in the Journal of Law and Religion – canvasses VanDrunen’s answers to some of the questions that every religious nomos must ask as it tries to overcome its own temptation to solipsism. The essay discusses VanDrunen’s account of the state and civil society and outlines his view of how Christian believers should understand their role in politics. It then homes in on the matter of interreligious encounter.
The essay concludes, provocatively perhaps, with a Kabbalistic coda.