The unintended consequences of Dixieland Postliberalism

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2006 by Robert P. Jones, Melissa C. Stewart

Introduction

Postliberalism, as the name implies, is a critique worked out in relationship to a presumably waning dominant world view. Its rhetorical power and its concepts depend on the reality of liberalism as a prevailing social and cultural reality and common assumptions about the nature of liberalism. But what happens when a critique crafted for one context (northeastern liberal Protestantism) is adopted by others in a different context (white Southern Evangelicalism)?

In this article we argue that the current dominant forms of "Dixieland Postliberalism," the product of the migration of postliberal theology from North to South, may embody unintended and largely undesirable consequences. First, we sketch the tenets of postliberal theology as a critique of liberalism. Second, we outline briefly some continuities and shifts in southern politics and culture over the last 50 years. Third, we examine the inroads postliberal theology has made among the largest Protestant denomination in the country and the largest single religious group in the South, southern Baptists. We argue that postliberalism's southern context threatens to transform it from a valid critique of northern liberalism to a sectarian ideology of dominance among white southern Evangelicals.

This analysis provides a lens for seeing how George Lindbeck's and Stanley Hauerwas's longstanding insistence that their positions are not "sectarian" and James M. Gustafson's charge that postliberalism threatens to turn God into "a tribal God of a minority of the world's population" (Gustafson 1985, 92) may both contain kernels of truth: the former in postliberalism's original context of the disestablished North, the latter in the new South. We argue that the vacuum created by the absence of an established liberalism in the southern evangelical context brings out a latent tendency within postliberal theology; southern evangelicalism works as a solvent to erode the already tenuous bonds between a hermeneutics which defines the church against the world and any substantive commitments to pacifism and anti-nationalism. Once weakened, this hermeneutical framework becomes viciously self-justifying and permits white southern evangelicals to marshal a persecuted identity as a means of wielding power. If postliberals are indeed serious about their substantive commitments, they will need to do a better job than they have hitherto at defending against these tendencies.

Postliberalism as critique

Postliberalism arose as a response to the decline and cultural disestablishment of the mainline denominations that began in the middle of the twentieth century. The postliberal critique of liberalism is that it promotes isolated individual selves endowed with rights but few responsibilities, universal truths independent of particular narratives, and an almost-blind optimism about progress and the promise of human reason; above all it is a tradition that has lost a distinctive theological voice through cultural accommodation. Postliberalism resists each of these and emphasizes community, narrative, skepticism about human reason, and distinctiveness. If the motto of modern liberal Christianity was to "Christianize the social order" through work for social justice, the motto of postliberal theology is "to let the church be the church" (Hauerwas 1983).

The major voices of a postliberal theological movement in Christianity have been Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, and most of all, Stanley Hauerwas. For example, Frei argues that seventeenth-century liberalism precipitated a complete "reversal" in how people read the Bible. Before that, the Bible was read to give shape to the "real world" of Christians. Readers adjusted their lives and experiences to fit the forms of life rendered through Biblical narratives. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the European male became an individual self with unalienable rights. This European male "learned a new way to read the Bible: not as a character in the world structured by the text, but as an individual to whom the text had to speak," (Frei, 318; Tilley: 1995, 94). Liberals reject the view of humanity as grounded in scripture, and instead seek a foundational worldview. Religious truth becomes something that can be abstracted from the text, and therefore universal spiritual truth can be known independently from a narrative. The Bible is no longer seen as normative, but rather as a source which supports the modern narrative of reason and progress. Frei instead argues for reading the scriptures as a narrative with their own linguistic rules and integrity. This intratextual approach presents the Bible as a story in which contemporary Christians dwell.

George Lindbeck develops Frei's narrative criticism into a systematic theology whereby he promotes ecumenical unity for all Christians through a cultural-linguistic understanding of religion. While Frei emphasizes the primacy of the biblical narrative, George Lindbeck expands the metaphor and emphasizes the primacy of language over experience. To support his turn from the subject to language, he proffers a theory of religion as a cultural-linguistic complex. Religion is like a language or culture into which a member is born and subsequently trained. Sociality precedes individuality.