Against Empire
Ekklesial Resistance and the Politics of Radical Democracy
Matthew T. Eggemeier
Against Empire
Ekklesial Resistance and the Politics of Radical Democracy
Theopolitical Visions 25
Copyright © 2020 Matthew T. Eggemeier. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-5786-3
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-5787-0
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-5788-7
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Names: Eggemeier, Matthew T., author.
Title: Against empire : ekklesial resistance and the politics of radical democracy / by Matthew T. Eggemeier.
Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2020 | Series: Theopolitical Visions 25 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-5786-3 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-5787-0 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-5788-7 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Christianity and politics. | Democracy—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Christianity and politics—United States.
Classification: br115.p7 e50 2020 (print) | br115.p7 e50 (ebook)
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 09/03/20
Theopolitical Visions
series editors:
Thomas Heilke
D. Stephen Long
and Debra Dean Murphy
Theopolitical Visions seeks to open up new vistas on public life, hosting fresh conversations between theology and political theory. This series assembles writers who wish to revive theopolitical imagination for the sake of our common good.
Theopolitical Visions hopes to re-source modern imaginations with those ancient traditions in which political theorists were often also theologians. Whether it was Jeremiah’s prophetic vision of exiles “seeking the peace of the city,” Plato’s illuminations on piety and the civic virtues in the Republic, St. Paul’s call to “a common life worthy of the Gospel,” St. Augustine’s beatific vision of the City of God, or the gothic heights of medieval political theology, much of Western thought has found it necessary to think theologically about politics, and to think politically about theology. This series is founded in the hope that the renewal of such mutual illumination might make a genuine contribution to the peace of our cities.
forthcoming volumes:
David Deane
The Matter of the Spirit: How Soteriology Shapes the Moral Life
Steven J. Battin
Intercommunal Ecclesiology: The Church, Salvation, and Intergroup Conflict
Michael L. Budde
The Killer Christ: Notes toward a Disarmed Christianity
Acknowledgments
This book has been in the works for some time and I have acquired many debts along the way. Thanks are due to my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies at Holy Cross for their enthusiastic support and encouragement: Alan Avery-Peck, Bill Clark, SJ, Caner Dagli, Gary DeAngelis, Peter Fritz, John Gavin, Karen Guth, Mary Hobgood, Caroline Johnson Hodge, Alice Laffey, Mahri Leonard-Fleckman, Todd Lewis, Benny Liew, Joanne Pierce, Mary Roche, Ginny Ryan, and Mathew Schmalz. A special thanks to my colleague and co-author, Peter Fritz, who read and offered suggestions for improving several of these chapters. I’m grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with such a brilliant theologian and dear friend. Thanks also to Tom Landy, the Director of the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics, and Culture, for his friendship and ongoing support of my teaching and scholarship at Holy Cross.
Thanks to my colleagues in the Class Dean’s office who with tireless support and good humor created the space for me to work on this project while welcoming the class of 2023 to Holy Cross: John Anderson, Robert Bellin, Loren Cass, Tina Chen, Francisco Gago-Jover, Lynn Levesque, Pat Kramer, Shawn Maurer, Patricia Ring, and Stanzi Royden. Thanks as well to the administration of the College of the Holy Cross, especially Philip L. Boroughs, president, and Margaret N. Freije, provost and dean, for granting me a sabbatical during the 2017-2018 academic year and a Batchelor-Ford summer fellowship in 2017 to work on the manuscript. Thanks also are due to the Committee on Faculty Scholarship for funds that paid for professional indexing.
Thanks to Charlie Collier, editor of theology and ethics at Wipf and Stock Publishers, for his enthusiasm for this project; to Jacob Martin for his keen editorial eye; to Matthew Wimer, Calvin Jaffarian, Mike Surber, and Zechariah Mickel for all the work they did to bring this manuscript to press; and to Thomas Heilke, D. Stephen Long, and Debra Murphy for welcoming this book into the Theopolitical Visions Series.
I’d like to express gratitude to my family for their interest in my scholarship, their steadfast support, and for the ways both large and small that they bring joy to my life: my parents, Tom and Judy Eggemeier, my brothers and their families, Tom, Katie, Libby, and Will Eggemeier and Chris, Sara, Jonah, and Bea Eggemeier. Finally, my deepest appreciation and most heartfelt thanks go to Alice Cheng. Along with our beloved four-legged friend, Libby, Alice has accompanied me with extraordinary patience and boundless compassion as I juggled the demands of being a class dean with several long-term scholarly projects. For this and the countless other graces she bestows upon me daily I am forever grateful.
Introduction
Disillusionment with liberal democracy is widespread throughout the North Atlantic world. What began as a series of upheavals at the grassroots level (the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, the alt-right and Black Lives Matter) has captured electoral politics in the United States (Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders) and Europe (Nigel Farage/Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon) and has generated a right-wing populist wave around the world (Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, and Jair Bolsonaro). The dream of a triumphal liberal democratic order, prophesied by Francis Fukuyama in 1989, is faltering, dealt a series of devastating blows by the events of the past several years.1 It is not only that the end of history has not arrived, but that we are experiencing a near-universal breakdown of stable political consensus with little sense of what lies ahead. The most fitting way to characterize our political situation is to invoke Antonio Gramsci’s notion of an “interregnum,” which describes a scene in which an old order is dying but a new one has yet to be born.2
In view of this scene of generalized crisis, several pressing questions emerge. What has caused this political and cultural upheaval? Does this fatigue with liberal democracy portend the emergence of populist authoritarianism as a dominant political form? Do there exist plausible alternatives to both democracy in its liberal form as well as authoritarian populism?
In the United States, this crisis was generated by the confluence of a set of mutually amplifying forces. The autopsies given in response to the rise of Trumpism have converged around two interpretative positions that offer competing analyses of its genesis.
The first interpretation posits that the recent ascendancy of authoritarian populism in the United States was driven by economic anxiety created by a series of economic convulsions and neoliberal reforms since the late 1970s. As Thomas Piketty argued