A Politics of Tending and Transformation

There is a movement in recent political theology that recommends ‘refusal’ as a stance toward contemporary political life. This politics of refusal takes a couple of forms. One is the Benedict Option, a term popularized by Rod Dreher, whose bestselling book of that name recommends withdrawal from democratic publics in order to take refuge in the alternative society offered by the church. ¹ Another is what we might call the Bartleby Option. Bartleby the Scrivener, from Herman Melville’s short story of that name, has become a kind of anti-hero of the politics of refusal. Bartleby is a legal scribe, who, when the lawyer who employs him asks him to do something, replies, ‘I prefer not to’. ² The indeterminacy of his refusal is what attracts critical theorists such as Giorgio Agamben to Bartleby’s example; by answering neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’, the Bartleby Option is supposed to reject the logic of state and market. ³

There are, of course, many good reasons why political theologians might be tempted by a politics of refusal. There is much in our contemporary political life that ought to be refused, including its racism, militarism, imperialism, creeping capitalism and consumerism, misogyny, environmental degradation … and the list goes on. These diseases infect the body politic; whatever might cure them is likely to change the shape of our politics in fundamental ways.

But a politics of refusal suggests that there is nothing in this broader democratic public that is worth caring for, including those relationships, practices, and communities on which the goods of our life in common depend. The Benedict Option and the Bartleby Option each, in their own way, imply that there are no such goods to be found in our deformed democracy. The Benedict Option would have Christians abandon the polis and tend to the church; the Bartleby Option would have us all reject the determinacy and actuality of our political options, taking refuge in a stance of inoperativity (which Agamben often finds in religious practices such as Sabbath observance). ⁴

Consider the contrast, then, between a political theology framed around refusal and one framed around tending. Democratic theorist Sheldon Wolin proposes a ‘politics of tending’ in which citizens attend to a political culture that cares for the habits, dispositions, practices, and forms of life worth sharing and sustaining. ⁵ Part of what I admire about James K. A. Smith’s political theology in Awaiting the King is that it is, at its heart, a politics not of refusal but of tending. ⁶ Whatever relationships, practices, and institutions are required for good politics in the saeculum need to be cultivated and cared for. Smith looks to the church as the site of much of this cultivation and care. His is a practical, and more specifically liturgical, political theology. Like those who embrace the Benedict Option, Smith suggests that it is within the church, and in and through its liturgy, that such things are tended to. Like those who embrace the Bartleby Option, Smith suggests that the practices of the church offer an alternate logic on which to develop a politics. But unlike those who embrace one or the other politics of refusal, Smith claims that there is no sharp division between church and world and, hence, that liturgy can and should prepare Christians for work that is directed toward the good of fellowship with God while remaining immersed in the political life of this fallen world. ‘Christian worship’, Smith writes, ‘constitutes the “civics” of the city of God, forming a people who are sent out for the sake of the common good, sent to love not only their neighbors but even their enemies’ (p. 221).

The democratic theorist and erstwhile student of Sheldon Wolin, Romand Coles, in thinking about what he calls the ‘prophetic Christian discipleship’ exemplified by SNCC organizer Ella Baker, writes that ‘a discipleship of tending works at the intersection of the teleological and the ateleological—between the preconceptions and the stories of a tradition, on the one hand, and the surprising substantial textures of the world we encounter, on the other’. ⁷ This sense of discipleship as a practice of tending—not only to the church but also to the world—has affinities with Smith’s way of thinking about a liturgical political theology. But it also appears to be in tension with aspects of Smith’s vision, in ways that I aim to draw out here. In particular, I wonder whether Smith’s view of the relationship between church and politics is as dialectical as Coles’s description of Baker suggests that it can be. Smith is clear in his argument that liturgy forms Christians who are then prepared for a discipleship of tending. He is less clear about whether, or how, tending to the world might surprise such disciples in ways that may re-form them or the liturgies of the church.

Ella Baker is one of the heroes of the civil rights movement. It is important to know what made her particular genius for community building and leadership possible, and it is significant that the scene of her early education and formation was the church. But what we find in Coles’s account of Baker is a kind of ongoing formation that may have begun in the church and its liturgies but that continued on through practices of tending to the people, relationships, and goods of the diverse communities in which she found herself. These practices were themselves, in Coles’s words, liturgical:

[Baker’s] daily activity in and around co-ops [through the Young Negro Cooperative League in Harlem] functioned as a sort of liturgy: a regularized public practice in which the most crucial work done was the formation of a public in the sense of people capable of responding and tending to each other and the possibility of common goods … It was during this time that Baker came to understand transformation in terms of the effort to proliferate dialogical practices and spaces in which more hopeful selves and communities might be engendered, supported, and sustained. ⁸

In other words, Baker remained open to the possibility of transformation through practices of tending, through the emergence of goods held in common, and through dialogue with people often radically different from herself. This is the element of surprise that Coles highlights: that new ideas and ways of being emerge in our engagement with the world, and that these new ideas and ways of being can reshape what we thought we understood.

When Smith discusses the civil rights movement in Awaiting the King, he does so in the context of his chapter ‘Redeeming Christendom’, and he argues that the movement ought to be understood as ‘a kind of twentieth century Christendom project’. Smith continues:

Bearing witness from the specificity of the gospel’s injunction to love, informed by the specifically christological exemplar of nonviolence, fostered by the practices of the Christian church, the civil rights movement in its animating impetus was an endeavor that refused to imagine that society was impervious to the rule of Christ but instead imagined that it could become ‘a beloved community’ (p. 163).

This way of characterizing the civil rights movement raises a couple of questions. First, how does Smith understand the diversity of the movement, which did indeed depend for its existence and success on the relationships, practices and virtues fostered by black churches, but which also relied on the solidarity of people outside the church, including Jews and secular citizens? Second, and more to my point here, how does Smith understand the movement as itself formative and transformative for the church? He implies that the movement emanated outward, uni-directionally, from the church, but leaves unaddressed the question of whether and how the movement changed the people who participated in it or how it changed the significance of the liturgies of the church.

Smith would be the first to admit that political practices are formative; it is a fundamental claim in this book that politics ought not to be thought of as a space in which people express beliefs, but as a project in which people are formed and goods are pursued. But I would have liked to hear more from him about the possibility of a dialectical relationship between the liturgies of the church and the practices of tending to the world that characterize the political engagement of someone like Ella Baker. How did the civil rights movement change the people—say, the Christians—who participated in it? ⁹ And how, if at all, did the movement change the significance of the liturgies of the church itself?

The first question is, I hope, clear enough. Let me say a little more about the second question. In his chapter ‘Contested Formations’, Smith discusses what he calls the Godfather effect—a reference to the final scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s film, when Coppola cuts back and forth between Michael Corleone renouncing Satan at the baptism of his son, and the blood-soaked executions taking place on Corleone’s command. The Godfather problem is this: how, in the terms of Smith’s political theology, can Christians be immersed in the liturgies of the church and emerge as vile and vicious human beings?

Smith’s answer to this question has several parts, but one of the most important, it seems to me, is what he calls ‘liturgical capture’, the idea that the meaning of Christian worship can be coopted by other (read: secular) stories. Smith writes that ‘this often seems to be a dynamic of domestication whereby the ultimacy of the Christian vision is demoted to a penultimate or subultimate ritual serving some other ultimate good—The Nation or The Market or Our People or even The Family’ (p. 205). But I am not sure that this entirely gets at the problem, because it implies that there is some uncontested and undomesticated view of the significance of Christian worship that might be discovered and then vouchsafed in the church. I suspect that the challenge posed by Willie Jennings, in his account of the church’s long enactment of racial injustice, is more radical than that posed by the Godfather, and that it cannot be fully accounted for in terms of ‘liturgical capture’. As Smith himself writes in response to Jennings’s argument, ‘the seeming magic of “the liturgy” did nothing to prevent or even temper this descent into inhumanity. To the contrary, the rituals of church simply enfolded such injustices into the narrative’ (p. 172).

Here, I think it is worth thinking about something that Smith talks about elsewhere in his work, in particular, in Who’s Afraid of Relativism?, where he describes Robert Brandom’s pragmatic semantics, according to which (following Wittgenstein) the meaning of a concept is determined by its use. Concepts are applied to cases, and connected to other concepts in inferential patterns that are licensed or rejected by other concept users. The way that concepts and inferences become meaningful is through the ongoing social practices of concept application, inference, and discursive accountability. ¹⁰

Although liturgy is not merely expressive (in the way that declarative sentences might be described as expressive of commitments), it is meaningful and its meaning ought to be understood, likewise, in the context of its use. Its significance depends on uses and meanings that cannot be held in place. For example, when a person bows her head in prayer, the significance of that gesture in the formation of a virtuous habitus surely depends on ideas and practices of power, authority, humility, deference, submission, piety, and so forth that are already at play inside and outside of the church. Change the available ideas and practices of power, and you change the significance of the gesture. To bow one’s head in a society in which slaves must defer to masters, or wives to husbands, or subjects to tyrants, is to enact a gesture the meaning of which is at least in part determined by cases characterized by domination. New social formations—including non-dominating social roles, relationships, and practices—enable the possibility of new significance for liturgical formations.

So to return to the example of Ella Baker: I wonder whether Smith thinks that it is the case that Baker’s democratic organizing, or the civil rights movement more broadly, made it possible to imagine roles, relationships, and practices that gave new significance to already existing liturgical formations, and, if so, what that might tell us about the relationship between church and politics. How might Christians be surprised by their engagement in politics in ways that transform them and reform the church?

Finally, this way of thinking about the significance of liturgy as being shaped by the ideas and practices that are available to us, and the surprise that can lead to new ideas and practices—and hence to new (re)significations—suggests to me that contestation about that significance has to be at the heart of a liturgical political theology. And so the crucial next task is to think through what such contestation might look like, how disagreements about the significance of liturgy might be coped with or resolved, and with which values and ideals in mind.