Liberalism, race, and Stanley Hauerwas

Cross Currents, Wntr, 2006 by James Logan

Attack Upon Liberalism

Stanley Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University, has achieved something like celebrity status in academic and public arenas focused on understanding the relationship among religion, ethics and politics. Hauerwas's celebrity has primarily to do with his unyielding attacks upon "liberalism" or "liberal democracy" over the course of many years. His academic and public profile was enhanced significantly in 2001 with the publication of the Hauerwas Reader, his selection as Time magazine's choice for America's best theologian of 2001, and his delivery of the highly regarded Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The Gifford Lectureship placed Hauerwas in the company of a long line of prominent twentieth-century religious and philosophical intellectuals, a short list of which include William James, John Dewey, and Reinhold Niebuhr. (1) In addition to all this, Hauerwas's book, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic, is widely regarded within religious circles as a twentieth-century classic.

Indeed, Hauerwas is arguably one of the exemplary Christian theologians of our time. He advocates for a recovery of the moral skills (or virtues) that enable a proper understanding of social reality and practice from the perspective of the Christian narrative of Israel as Jesus Christ presents it. Viewing the theologian's task as that of calling into question distortions in the grammar of the Christian faith, and theology itself as occasional discourse in response to particular historical difficulties, Hauerwas's work aims at a recovery of virtues based in the alternative narrative of Christian life before its compromise with Christendom.

I think it would be fair to say that Hauerwas's primary Christian aim in the public square is not to transform liberalism, rather the aim is to call Christians back to a peaceable faithfulness that only makes sense inside the set-apart community of Christian "resident aliens." In Hauerwas's view, the first responsibility of the church is to be itself against the encroachment of the dominant liberal moral ethos in contemporary American society. According to Hauerwas, American liberalism, at its base, holds that the best or only moral community we can have is based on guaranteeing the principle of the freedom of each individual citizen to do as he or she pleases, so long as he or she does not violate the legitimate equal freedom of others. Liberalism celebrates toleration, pluralism, and respect for personal autonomy. Hauerwas takes very serious exception to the liberal claim that personal freedom and individual consent can be "truthful" bases from which to arrange our moral and political lives. (2) Since "truthful" social arrangements represent the only social condition through which necessary virtues can be adequately developed in the service of right human desiring, liberalism (as a non-tradition in Hauerwas's view) cannot pass the litmus test for what is truthful: "Liberalism presupposes that society can be organized without any narrative that is commonly held to be true. As a result it tempts us to believe that freedom and rationality are independent of narrative--i.e., we are free to the extent that we have no story." (3) Indeed, it is essential in Hauerwas's view that church and society understand that truthful social arrangements emerge out of common lived "narratives," "traditions," or "stories." Hauerwas does recognize that liberalism as a bases for human social-political arrangements comes in many complex and competing varieties, which he aims to take on one by one. He takes them all on because what all the varieties of liberalism have in common is a lack of memory associated with stories.

Hauerwas views the church (i.e., the Body of Christ) as devoted not to the principles of memoriless liberalism but, rather, to a particular God and a particular way of life that follows Jesus. The members of the church know themselves not in the first instance as autonomous and free individuals but, rather, as bound to God, to their tradition/narrative/story, and to one another. The fundamental category for ensuring human agency is not freedom but narrative. (4) Being rooted in "a story formed community," the particular story being that of Jesus' Kingdom, (5) church members know themselves as they are known by a merciful and faithful God. Living within a distinctively Christian narrative, Christians come to embody the virtues of trust, patience, hope, gratitude, hospitality, and forgiveness, seeking not to control history but to witness to God's rule within history as established (by God's self-unveiling) in Jesus Christ. In trying to control society and history Christians have mistakenly accepted liberalism as a social strategy appropriate to the Christian story. Hence, Christians have forfeited the moral skills that enable a proper description of reality as the Christian narrative of Israel as Jesus presents it.