There’s much to like about David Congdon’s Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture. The writing is energetic and often powerfully articulate. The ambition of the project feels inspiring and its scope is impressive. Congdon seemingly has read everything and makes elegant use of (though never getting bogged down in) a startling number of sources. The stories he tells and the histories he recounts – all in service to the book’s thesis about the dangers of a Christianity overwrought with toxic anxiety – are educational and engaging. I learned a lot and enjoyed learning it.
Yet, I found myself largely unmoved by the book’s thesis about the dangers of a moralising Christianity. The idea seems to be something like this. Modernity opened up a bunch of anxieties in Christianity that then needed to be compensated for, and Christian theology has been reeling ever since. Even those moments you thought Christianity had achieved some semblance of peace – those moments when Christianity finally came into its own – actually turn out to be the opposite. Much that is wrong with Christianity – from the Reformation to Vatican II, from John Locke to N. T. Wright and from neo-orthodoxy to Radical Orthodoxy: each continuous with and culminating in the White Christian nationalism ushering in the terrors of the present political moment – finds its sources in this overcompensating anxiety. The book’s chapters are meant to detail this and move earnestly across modern theological history in order to explain Christianity’s moralising ways. What one learns, or is supposed to learn, is that in the face of secular modernity’s many challenges, Christianity repeatedly turns to a familiar playbook: establish a rule of faith that bespeaks essential commitments able to first secure and second ‘weaponize’ essentialist identities, all this as shelter from anxious times (p. 181).
Whom, according to Congdon, is this Christianity speaking to as it establishes its regula fidei, to whom is it providing answers to the question ‘Who is a true Christian?’? Itself, of course. Moderns don’t care. It is only those who assigned themselves the task that actually think it matters. Like any culture war, the fight is an internal one: a fight between oneself and others for whom one speaks. And like any culture war, the stakes couldn’t be higher or lower. No higher because it feels like a fight for one’s life. No lower in that one fights oneself, one’s inner demons. It’s a predicament where Christians make everything of something no one else cares about – that is, until things get out of hand. For Congdon, the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, like the Trump presidency generally, is things getting out of hand, and both get their marching orders from a mantra Congdon apes throughout the book: make Christianity great again.
As said, I found all of this interesting, educational and engaging; each page offered new lessons and fascinating insights about this, that or the other. Congdon knows his history. But less so his moral theory. For it never seems to occur to him that morality, and hence moralising, might work differently than he assumes, which has the effect of cornering him into interpreting things with a sideways glance.
Congdon’s thesis that much American Christianity amounts to overcompensating anxiety presumes that moral concerns are driven by external circumstances, such that the best way to understand moral speech is to examine the broader circumstances in which it is uttered. These external factors are the ones to pay attention to. What one cannot do if one wants to understand some stretch of moral behaviour is take moral actors at their word that they mean what they say, something that would require examining internal (what philosophers call ‘ordinary’) conditions of speech. Hence for Congdon, when Christians articulate a rule of faith about what they believe about who they are, they can’t be doing anything other than overreacting to a culture they’ve unwittingly allowed to determine their course of action. It doesn’t seem a real possibility for him that these Christians might – or could – be doing something else. No matter what they say about themselves, Congdon thinks, they can’t mean it; so, they can’t be trusted to explain it. Rather it is up to others to explain to the rest of the world what’s going on, especially when the behaviour has gotten so dangerously out of hand that the world needs some explanation for what is happening, which Congdon sees himself as providing.
Surely, there are moments, perhaps many, when a reactionary Christianity overcompensates to the detriment of others, and I felt chastened by Congdon’s helpful history of my own postliberal theological heritage and its culture war likeness. But to read all of modern Christianity through Congdon’s ‘quest for the essence of Christianity’ lens is to claim too much to be analytically useful, and in a way that renders Congdon’s own constructive proposal itself a piece of weaponised moralizing. Christianity is most dangerous not when it anxiously overcompensates and loses sight of its ‘polydox’ ways, but rather when it is not anxious enough, when it undercompensates for others and itself, and hence answers the question, ‘Who is a true Christian?’ in dangerously self-interested ways. Congdon is surely right about Christianity’s many dangers, but wrong about their nature.
