Abstract
At one level, this ambitious book is a work of religious history. As such, it traces various efforts to identify an “essence” of Christianity, a core that constitutes “true” Christianity and makes for “true” Christians. Congdon's search for such proposals primarily focuses within twentieth and twenty-first century European and American Christian circles but also extends more deeply into church history. Congdon's finding, confidently declared based on extensive research, is that there is no agreed “essence” of Christianity, only widely varied proposals for such. Point taken, incontrovertibly.
Also at the level of religious history, Congdon wants to explore the turn to so-called “historic Christianity” beginning in late twentieth-century theology and church life and continuing today. What is most interesting about this exploration is that Congdon finds a convergence of evangelical and mainline theologians and biblical scholars making the turn beginning in the 1970s to something like a regula fidei (“rule of faith”) historic Christianity move.
More precisely, Congdon sees a convergence in this project between evangelicals like Kevin Vanhoozer and Robert Webber and postliberals like George Lindbeck and Stanley Hauerwas. Congdon helps clinch his case for this convergence by describing jointly authored declarations, beginning in the 1970s, most notably a Hartford Seminary declaration signed by figures ranging from Richard John Neuhaus to George Lindbeck to Richard Mouw, thus representing a new high-end “conservative ecumenism” with its talk of recovering “historic Christian orthodoxy.”
Then, also at the level of religious history but now with a sharply critical edge, Congdon traces what he describes as a “weaponization” of this new rule of faith as this new conservative ecumenism, together with various other participants in a viral “antimodern discourse coalition,” joined together to write opposition to various liberal moral causes, such as abortion access, transgender recognition, or critical race theory, into the regula fidei.
At this point (ch. 4 of 5) Congdon weaves together up-to-the-minute developments like the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021 and the Trumpist movement (with strong conservative Christian support) into the narrative he has been developing, claiming that our current “Christofascist” realities are connected to and in some sense a result of all the anxious efforts of modern US Christians over many decades to defend Christianity from the acids of modernity, including the apparently benign conservative ecumenism of Lindbeck et al. The Big Story Congdon narrates is that (especially white) US Christians—mainline, evangelical, and Catholic—have all contributed to our current reactionary religio-nationalism, in which a white Christian US identitarianism, laced with antimodernism, antiliberalism, xenophobia, racism, patriarchy, and cisheteronormativity, has come to dominate our politics.
Finally in chapter 5 and the conclusion Congdon switches to a deconstructive and then (wanly) constructive theological voice. He first attempts to deconstruct the very concept of historic Christianity, warns against the current attempt to turn Christianity into a “normative culture,” and, using his own Wheaton College (he is an alumnus) as a devastating example, demonstrates how the slipperiness of “orthodoxy” makes it susceptible to “magisterial authoritarianism” in its enforcement against supposedly heterodox community members. In his brief constructive conclusion, he borrows from Reform Jewish rabbi and philosopher Alvin J. Reines to propose a Freedom Covenant and polydoxy as the way forward. The former establishes the absolute primacy of personal religious autonomy; the latter, as Congdon develops it, explicitly embraces plurality rather than orthodoxy or uniformity as a norm within religious traditions.
Reviewers are supposed to disclose any connection they have with authors. Here, doing so seems especially illuminating. I knew David Congdon over a decade ago when he was helping to edit the second edition of my textbook Kingdom Ethics with Intervarsity Press. Congdon was a very fine editor and worked hard on these substantial edits. But his work was forcibly abandoned when IVP made the political decision that it could not publish anything else by me, due to my 2014 book on LGBTQ+ inclusion. Congdon, who often references anti-LGBTQ+ dynamics in this new book, had to stand helplessly by watching “historic Christian orthodoxy” swallow up his work and my own.
It was therefore a happy surprise to me when I learned through this reviewing process that Congdon is now breathing freer air as an editor at the University Press of Kansas. His new book reflects more than just intellectual interest in antiliberal Christianity and politics in the US—it is, in in my view, a major post-evangelical counterthrust rooted in the author's life experiences as a (former) evangelical, as well as very wide reading and close observation of recent theology and politics. The impressive array of endorsers at the front of the book also sends the signal that this is a serious book and that this major new voice speaks for more than just himself. In my view, both are true. Yet it is very likely that it will be received by those he criticizes as just one more entry in the culture wars, and one more piece of evidence for their current convictions.
