A friend brought a debate between Miroslav Volf and Daniel Bell to my attention this week. Having read through the respective comments they both put forward in volume 19 of Modern Theology, I thought I would post my comment here as well. This is not a detailed point by point account, but more a meta comment about what I perceive to be the nature of the debate.

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In the recent Journal of the American Academy of Religion issue 76 volume 3, Jeffrey Stout's 2007 Plenary Address on the "Folly of Secularism" has been published. Here Stout provides a helpful response and engagement with the accounts of radical secularism which can be found in Richard Rorty and Sam Harris. It's an insightful investigation into the problems which arise when either secularist or theocratic utopias are thought through, while nonetheless projecting a vision of democracy that goes beyond them both. It's well worth reading and can be found here: http://jaar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/76/3/533?rss=1. Here's an excerpt to get you started:

Many people who care about democratic practices and institutions are worried by the power of the religious right in the United States and the rise of militant Islam elsewhere. They fear that democracy will give way to theocracy if these forces triumph,and they want to know how to prevent this from happening. One increasingly popular answer to this question is secularist. It says that striving to minimize the influence of religion on politics is essential to the defense of democracy. My purpose in this essay is to raise doubts about the wisdom of this answer.

And, after citing the fall of apartheid in South Africa and communism in Poland, Stout goes on:

What these examples suggest, it seems to me, is that democratic reform may indeed be achievable by democratic means in places where the majority of the citizens are religiously active if citizens are prepared to build coalitions of the right sort. If major reform is going to happen again in the United States, it will probably happen in roughly the same way that it has happened before. It will not happen because of secularism, but in spite of it. And it had better happen, because if it does not, our political life will cease to be democratic in anything but name.

Updated on Friday, August 8, 2008 at 10:34AM by Timothy Stanley

There is a profound need today to  re-investigate religion's relationship to a public political sphere of authority. Whether it's the media row over Rowan Williams' suggestion that Sharia law might play a part in the British legal system, or when a woman working at a public marriage registrars office is allowed to abstain from granting marriage licenses to gay couples, we are constantly made aware of the need to continue to think through the role of religion in the public sphere today.  In this sense, institutions like the church must continue to reflect upon their relation to institutions like the state.  What's interesting about this suggestion is that it often uncovers the manner in which both sets of institutions are inherently political and both institutions cohere according to a set of cultural values and beliefs. The social theories best suited to investigate political authority structures, therefore, often go beyond the standard political science emphasis on institutions themselves in order to uncover the cultural conditions and dispositions which animate them and justify their existence.

Could it be that the public political sphere depends upon values which it cannot provide in and of itself?  Can religious communities like Christian churches foster social solidarity in a western culture that is increasingly "bowling alone?" These questions are raised most acutely in the work of Juergen Habermas. In the coming months I have an essay on Barth and Habermas coming out in Political Theology, and recently gave a presentation on Habermas to some colleagues here at the Centre for Religion and Political Culture at The University of Manchester.I wanted to take a moment to explain a little about this essay and respond to a common question regarding Habermas's response to religious violence.

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Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends is probably not Coldplay's best album, but it doesn't really have to be. As usual the band has produced a number of ingenious anthems which have made it into my weekly playlist. Having said that, the song which takes its name from the title and has been played around the iTunes advertisements has some interesting lyrics which, it seems to me, deserve further comment. 

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Errol Morris has been working on a documentary about the photographs of Sabrina Harman smiling over a dead body at Abu Ghraib. It's an important and interesting investigation into what he argues is a miscarriage of justice aided and abetted by the horror evoked by this picture. Horror, he argues, which plays on some of our most primal human understandings of the meaning of Harman's smile. Morris's argument is based on his investigations and many interviews with the people involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal, and are all well footnoted in the blog article he wrote for the NY Times this week. The heart of Morris's argument goes something like this: 1) The institutional military system at Abu Ghraib was corrupt; 2) the deceased man in the photo was murdered, most likely, by interrogators; 3)the photo of Ms. Harman was taken largely out of curiosity and in a series intended to document the murder and its cover up; 4) Harman's smile is not genuine joy, but camera cheese. As Morris concludes:

"And so we are left with a simple conundrum. Photographs reveal and they conceal. We know about al-Jamadi’s death because of Sabrina Harman. Without her photographs, his death would likely have been covered up by the C.I.A. and by the military. Yes, at first I believed that Harman was complicit. I believed that she was implicated in al-Jamadi’s death. I was wrong. I, too, was fooled by the smile. Abu Ghraib is all about the blame game. M.P.’s blaming M.I. M.I. blaming the civilian contractors. And everyone blaming the 'bad apples.' Harman didn’t murder al-Jamadi. She provides evidence of a crime, evidence that this was no heart attack victim. She took photographs to show that 'the military is nothing but lies.' At the very least, to show that she had been lied to by her commanding officer. It is now our job to make sure that her photographs are used to prosecute the people truly responsible for al-Jamadi’s death."

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Today the NY Times has posted an insightful and helpful article by Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard University. Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/magazine/16Shariah-t.html. And here's the first paragraph to give a taste of what he's trying to do in this article.

"Last month, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, gave a nuanced, scholarly lecture in London about whether the British legal system should allow non-Christian courts to decide certain matters of family law. Britain has no constitutional separation of church and state. The archbishop noted that “the law of the Church of England is the law of the land” there; indeed, ecclesiastical courts that once handled marriage and divorce are still integrated into the British legal system, deciding matters of church property and doctrine. His tentative suggestion was that, subject to the agreement of all parties and the strict requirement of protecting equal rights for women, it might be a good idea to consider allowing Islamic and Orthodox Jewish courts to handle marriage and divorce... Needless to say, the outrage was not occasioned by Williams’s mention of Orthodox Jewish law. For the purposes of public discussion, it was the word “Shariah” that was radioactive."

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In an op-ed piece in the New York Times this week, Sarah Vowell comments on the beginnings of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States. Reagan signed this holiday into law which seems fitting given that his political ethos shared a common text with Dr. King. For both men, the Sermon on the Mount provided vital inspiration for their understanding of political activism. Whereas Reagan focused upon revitalizing the American image of a city on a hill, King emphasized the radical love Jesus calls all his disciples to. As Vowell puts it:

Here’s what Dr. King got out of the Sermon on the Mount. On Nov. 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the “loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you: ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”

Go ahead and re-read that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

If there is a test for whether love is real, this is it. Love must surpass our likes to include our dislikes. Love must go beyond our friends to include our enemies. Does this degrade what we mean when we say we love? No. Rather, Jesus punctuates all our self-satisfied notions of love with a question mark. You think you love people? Consider those snide comments about those you disagree with, or those who have hurt you. Consider whether you could honestly say King's words: "I would rather die than hate you." King so internalized Jesus's words that they became embodied in his own life and political practices, and Vowell helpfully reminds us that this radical love is what Martin Luther King Jr. Day is about.