Jeffrey Stout and Piety II

Piety - an intriguing notion. It was precisely for lack of piety - meaning that mix of civil and religious duty - that the early martyrs were killed.

I think the accusation is still very much in play: Christians, if/when they are faithful witnesses, stand accused of impiety against the liberal secular order.

Stout describes modern piety thus:

Piety ... is not to be understood primarily as a felling, expressed in acts of devotion, but rather as a virtue, a morally excellent aspect of character. It consists in just or appropriate response to the sources of one's existence and progress through life. Family, political community, the natural wolrd, and God are all said to be sources on which we depend, sources to be acknowledged appropriately. Emersonians and Augustinians agree that piety, in this sense, is a crucial virtue, and they share an interest in clarifying the proper relationship between civic and religious piety. But they disagree over how the sourecs should be conceived and what constitutes appropriate acknowledgment of our dependence on them. ( Democracy and Tradition, p. 20)

Stout on academic theology

While I wait for my copy of Charles Taylor's book The Secular Age to arrive, I have been dipping in to Stout's book Ethics After Babel. He some very perceptive comments to make about the disconnection between seminary professors and their students (on the American scene anyhow). The problem for the seminary prof is that constituency in the classroom (ie, the fee-paying students) are on the whole embarassingly pietistic and dogmatic (from Stout's perspective). And yet they long for academic credibility - so they have distance themselves from their own students. Stout continues:

...secular intellectuals have largely stopped paying attention. They don't need to be told, by theologians, that Genesis is mythical, that nobody knows much about the historical Jesus, that it's morally imperative to side with the oppressed, or that birth control is morally permissible. The explanation for the eclipse of religious ethics in recent secular moral philosophy may therefore be rather more straightforward than I have suggested so far. It may be that academic theologians have increasingly given the impression of saying nothing atheistis don't already know.

Revolutionary Calvinism - Stout again

Stout speaks passionately about democracy, and against the anti-liberal-democratic reading of history proposed by Hauerwas and co:

The first modern revolutionaries were not secular liberals; they were radical Calvinists. Among the most important democratic movement in American history were Abolitionism and the Civil Rights movement; both of these were based largely in the religious communities. Religious colleges and seminaries provided strong support for both movements. If religious premises had not been adduced in support of them, it is unlikely that either movement would have resulted in success. The Christian majority needed to be persuaded in both cases that commitment to scriptural authority was at least compatible with the reform being proposed. If the religious Left does not soon recover its energy and self-confidence, it is unlikely that American democracy will be capable of counteracting either the greed of its business elite or the determination of many whites to define the authentic nation in ethnic, racial or ecclesiastical terms. Democracy and Tradition, p. 300

This reminder is salutary. I think a nice renaissance of religious reasoning is occurring in Australia, and it isn't just a Right wing thing. I wonder if it will bear fruit... Stout could have added Prohibitionism to his list, and that was a movement stemming from the same source but which squandered a good deal of political capital as far as religious groups were concerned.

Stout savages Hauerwas

Hauerwas is so dominant in the thinking of a generation of American theologians that is a relief to hear him challenged. But Stout does so as a non-theologian: it is a shame that it took a non-theologian to do it:

A cynic might say that the secret of Hauerwas's vast influence in the church in the 1980s and 1990s lay in the imprecision of the sacrifice he appeared to be demanding of his followers. Surely he was not proposing that the strength of one's sentimental identification with the church could by itself secure noncomplicity with the evils of the world. His favourite patristic text appears to be Origen's Exhortation to Martyrdom. [Actually, here Stout is taking a piece of O'Donovan's rhetoric in Desire of the Nations rather literalistically! - a bit of a schoolboy error. MJ] But in the absence of a clear statement of the price Christians must be willing to pay, his audience was able to indulge itself in fantasies of martyrdom without experiencing
actualy poverty or persecution at all. (p. 158)

Ouch - harsh but fair. Tenure at Duke hardly seems like persecution, now, does it? He charges Hauerwas with inconsistency over his reading of Scripture. Hauerwas wants to make non-violence thee central feature of the Christian message. But is the pacificist case really convincing on the basis of Scripture? And how come he is such a rigorist on this issue, but not on others - say, on remarriage after divorce? As Stout says:

It is hard...to escape the conclusion that his ethics rests on an extremely selective reading of the Bible. (p. 160)

And further, Stout articulates a point I had thought of but not really expressed before: Hauerwas's church, his 'peaceable kingdom', doesn't seem to exist. When he says 'the church', which church is he talking about? What does he mean? As Stout says,

The actual church does not look very much like a community of virtue, when judged by pacificist standards. (p. 161)

Jeffrey Stout asks three good questions

It's been a hard couple of weeks!

Stout challenges MacIntyre, Hauerwas and Milbank - who have harboured such resentment against modern secular democracy. He asks three good questions (Democracy and Tradition, p. 104):

is it not possible to discern the workings of the Holy Spirit, and thus some reflections of God's redemptive activity, in modern democratic aspirations?

is there nothing in the political life of modern democracies, or in the lives of those who are struggling for just and decent arrangements within them, that a loving God would bless?

if the plenitude of God's triune inner life shones forth in all of creation, cannot theology discren some such light in democratic political community?

Well indeed. I would add a fourth question: is it not the case that modern democratic community is the child of Christendom, even if it is somewhat of a prodigal?

Jeffrey Stout and Piety

Jeffrey Stout is a very interesting figure in the American political philosophy and ethics scene. For one, he is a liberal who takes theologians and theology seriously. In particular, he addresses the work of Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre as 'new traditionalists', and even adds to this company John Milbank. Stout is a finder of common ground, a man who mediates between seemingly intractable positions.

In his 2004 book Democracy and Tradition, Stout traces some interesting themes. Often, democracy is accused of 'impiety' by traditionalists: it emphasises self-reliance rather than observance of the conventions of the community and the spirit of place. Yet, in his reading of Emerson and Whitman, Stout finds that piety is in fact reconfigured rather than abandoned. He would contend then, that democracy is spiritual and pious, if not religious.

More on this anon.