commitments rooted in the defense of the poor (Ellacuría/Sobrino) and the witness to peace in a violent world (Hauerwas). Furthermore, Ellacuría, Sobrino, and Hauerwas only reservedly approach democratic politics, so that where Ellacuría and Sobrino offer unrelenting criticisms of Western democracy’s entanglement with imperialism and capitalism, Hauerwas evinces a staunch opposition to liberal democracy due to its association with secularism and political violence. Despite this opposition to imperialist (Ellacuría/Sobrino) and liberal (Hauerwas) forms of democracy, Ellacuría, Sobrino, and Hauerwas provide openings for an ad hoc Christian engagement with radical democracy to the extent that this alliance serves their more basic Christian commitment to the option for the poor (Ellacuría/Sobrino) and peaceable witness (Hauerwas).
The conclusion reflects on the future, specifically on the possibility of a radical democratic future in the face of political formations that not only block the expansion of democracy (neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony) but also attempt to retrench its achievements (authoritarian populism). It is argued that in response to each of these political formations Christians should enter the field of political struggle by engaging in a radical democratic politics of resistance to empire.
1. Fukuyama, “End of History,” 114.
2. Streeck, “Returned of the Repressed,” 165–66; Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond”; and Fraser, The Old Is Dying.
3. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
4. Heer, “The Populist Realignment That Never Came.”
5. Muro and Liu, “Another Clinton-Trump Divide.”
6. López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class.
7. Coates, “My President Was Black.”
8. Lopez, “Trump Won Because of Racial Resentment,” and McElwee and McDaniel, “Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did.”
9. Roberts, “Are Trump Supporters Driven by Economic Anxiety or Racial Resentment? Yes.”
10. Kriner and Shen, “Battlefield Causalities and Ballot Box Defeat.”
11. Mounk, The People vs. Democracy; Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die; and Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism.
12. Hall, Hard Road to Renewal, 273.
13. Fraser, “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism”; Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond”; Brown, “Apocalyptic Populism”; Mouffe, “America in Populist Times: An Interview with Chantal Mouffe”; Mouffe, For a Left Populism; Connolly, “Trump, the Working Class, and Fascist Rhetoric”; and Connolly, Aspirational Fascism.
14. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 2.
15. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 8.
16. Laclau, “Future of Radical Democracy,” 261, and Laclau, “Glimpsing the Future,” 295. Emphasis original.
17. Laclau, “Structure, History, and the Political,” 203.
18. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 157 and 368. See Connolly’s critique of this in Pluralism, 150.
19. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 157.
20. There has been significant work in theology that has engaged Hardt and Negri’s framework and demonstrated how it might serve as a guide for radical Christian politics. See, for instance, Rieger and Pui-lan, Occupy Religion.
21. Mouffe, Return of the Political, 132.
22. See Jones, “Liberation Theology and ‘Democratic Futures,’” 281ff. Mouffe seems to have softened her position recently in “Religion, Liberal Democracy, and Citizenship.”
23. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist; Ratzinger and Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization; Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion; Coles, Beyond Gated Politics; Hauerwas and Coles, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary; Stout, Blessed Are the Organized; and Stout, Democracy and Tradition.
24. See Habermas, Religion and Rationality, 149.
25. Hauerwas has offered several responses to Stout’s criticisms, first in “Postscript: A Response to Jeff Stout’s Democracy and Tradition” (Performing the Faith, 215–42), then in his explicit engagement with the radical democratic theory of Wolin in “Democratic Time: Lessons Learned from Yoder and Wolin” (State of the University, 147–64), and finally in the essays in Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary.
26. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza observes, “The Greek word ekklesia is usually translated as ‘church,’ although the English word church derives from the Greek word kyriake—belonging to the lord/master/father/husband. Accordingly, the translation of ekklesia as ‘church’ is misleading. Ekklesia is best rendered as ‘democratic assembly/congress of full citizens.’” Schüssler Fiorenza, Sharing Her Word, 112; see also But She Said, 128. John Howard Yoder makes a similar point in Revolutionary Christian Citizenship.
27. This book does not directly engage political Augustinians who often identify with some form of radical democratic politics. Luke Bretherton’s work in Resurrecting Democracy is a prominent example of this type of Augustinian engagement with radical democratic politics. The primary reason that we do not examine Bretherton’s work is that the focus of his ethnographic work is England and Against Empire focuses on the work of political theologians in North America.
28.
