Today I’m glad to post a second response to Graham Ward’s Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens. This reflection comes from Luke Bretherton, a theologian, organizer, and activist who is Senior Lecturer in Theology at King’s College London. Luke is the author of two important books: Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (Ashgate, 2006) and most recently, Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Blackwell, 2010)–a book that deserves a lot of attention from both scholars and practitioners.
In addition to engaging the theoretical issues at hand, Bretherton begins to broach concrete questions of practice and strategy. Here’s a slice of his response:
As an archaic tradition
Christianity also keeps in play fundamental questions about what human life is
for. And religions do this not
just at an abstract level of intellectual debate. They do this by creating alternative institutions, forging
new practices, and sustaining different regimes of life. So for example, in debates about
euthanasia and what is a good death, hospices present an alternative vision of
what the good death consists of to that embodied by, on the one hand, euthanasia
and on the other, technologically driven interventions that refuse to let a
patient die. We may not like the
alternative religious groups present us with, but by presenting liberal
polities with contradictions religious groups interrupt the bypassing of
public, political deliberation through legal procedures, managerial techniques
or leaving it all up to the market to decide: i.e. they are a primary cure for
depoliticisation. They open up a
space for the political by making a demand for genuine deliberation about what
constitutes the common good. So
far from faith and citizenship being in conflict, religious traditions,
especially in poor urban contexts most acutely affected by processes of
commodification (e.g. the selling off of school playing fields) and
instrumentalisation (e.g. the co-opting religious groups to deliver social
welfare) are the bearers of moral notions of the person that re-present to
modern liberal polities questions about the limits of money, the limits of the
state and the importance of faithful, committed and mutually responsible social
relationships.
A central focus of Ward’s
work is the urban and urban politics is a vital context for the recreation of
politicalness. Within urban spaces
a common life has to be negotiated and common goods protected by multiple faith
traditions and those of little or no faith. And while there are certain things that must be done alone –
for example, determining how to order the worship and leadership structures of
a particular tradition – there some things religious groups must do together or
lose the ability to do at all.
Bringing accountability to the market and the state, enabling a
genuinely political space and protecting the possibility not of social cohesion
but of fully social relationships are just such activities.
So the question arises as to what kind of civic
practices enable such common action.
I propose three: the first is listening (which ties in with and draws
out Ward’s account of prayer); the second is a commitment to place; and the
third is building institutions. The
latter proposals enhance and directly address Ward’s analysis of the postmodern
City as a site of contestation and flows by pointing to the kind of practices
that can aid the church in faithfully negotiating such a space.
To continue reading, download Bretherton’s reflections (pdf), and be sure to contribute your questions, comments, and criticisms as part of the conversation. And watch for Graham Ward’s response to both papers next week.