The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology is a candid contribution to an interdisciplinary debate that often harbors obfuscation and disingenuousness. Its subtitle heralds a constructive project that never becomes more than a suggestive outline, but the book's overarching critical message is a strikingly sensible warning against much of political theology's current — and perennial — allure. Vincent Lloyd's work presents itself as theological, but it claims independence from traditional religions; its argument draws on several thinkers “too Jewish to be Christian and too Christian to be Jewish” (21), foremost among them James Baldwin, Franz Kafka, Gillian Rose, and Simone Weil. Lloyd ably puts these figures in conversation with mainstream political theorists and philosophers in both Anglo-American and Continental traditions, and, revealingly, makes his main theoretical points tangible with examples from film, beginning with a novel interpretation of Lars von Trier's Manderlay.

Manderlay's protagonist, an idealistic young woman named Grace, attempts to free and empower the slaves on a benighted plantation in Alabama, supplanting the harsh law that had previously governed the community. Disaster is the result. The former slaves are not inclined to democratic self-governance, and Grace's liberal regime quickly collapses into violence. The film allegorizes the pernicious intellectual tendency of supersessionism. (The term originally refers to the opinion that New Testament grace makes Old Testament law obsolete, but Lloyd gives it a wider application.) Supersessionist logic generically “suggests overturning one world and replacing it with another” (11). It is a form of “enchantment” found in political theologies right and left, in Carl Schmitt's transcendently grounded statism as much as in the immanentist Christian triumphalism of John Milbank (15, 21).

Supersessionism also enchants secular political theory. It is at work in Mark Lilla's view that the modern West has definitively abandoned political theology. In fact, a supersessionist political theology is the animating core of liberalism, which is an attempt to “redeem the fallen world through reason” (13). And liberalism's critics — whether agonists, pragmatists, or putative partisans of either Athens or Jerusalem — hold equally supersessionist hopes for freedom from liberal rationalism and universalism. Lloyd would therefore problematize liberalism without succumbing to another form of supersessionism, advocating a “politics of the middle” that “toils in the ordinary” (187).

To that end, Lloyd develops an anti-supersessionist political theology rooted in the mutually potentiating and reinforcing “theopolitical” virtues of love and faith. These dispositions of character, Lloyd's reading of Rose suggests, fit us for engagement in political life, enabling us to see past existing social practices, and norms (Chapters one and two). Provocatively, Lloyd denies that hope is a virtue in its turn; rather, it is a “rhetorical technique” (71) that can be employed for good or ill (Chapter 3).

To the faithful and loving, Lloyd recommends a set of specific “theopolitical strategies.” Reading Kafka through Walter Benjamin, he advocates tradition, understood as “the ordinary reduplicated not to expose its own fundamental truth but advance quite ordinary interests” (107). Following Weil, Lloyd argues that liturgy can become “a critique of history from within history” with “a necessarily subversive effect on social norms” (121). The book's most adventurous chapter, interweaving Weil and Lacanian psychoanalysis, investigates sanctity (personal holiness), “a strategy that harnesses the psychic structure of perversion” (131), challenging the status quo with “a glimpse of what it is like to live as if there are no norms” (136). Revelation — an “event” in Alain Badiou's term — is found in Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, and explicated through Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of the gift. Finally, citing Michael Walzer as well as Baldwin, Lloyd argues that prophecy guided by faith and love, exemplified by the work of Cornel West, is political rhetoric par excellence.

These “theopolitical” virtues and strategies are correctives to the distortions that supersessionism imposes on the “textured, messy, viscous, difficult” (13) world of “the ordinary.” However, discernment of “the ordinary” is a task for political philosophy, not political theology. Theology is the language of enchantment, while philosophy is the Socratic encounter with reality denuded of ideology. Ultimately, Lloyd's project is rhetorically but not substantively theological. Political theology is the “guise of enchantment” (216) in which skeptical philosophy can become politically effective. Of course, guises remain guises only until they are perceived as such. The Problem with Grace does not conceal its own skeptical underpinnings, and so fails to provide an example of effective, enchanting political-theological rhetoric. By the same token, however, Lloyd's philosophical advocacy of religious rhetoric is of interest to, and holds potential appeal for, secular as well as religious readers.

Given this book's ambitious scope, some of its limitations are understandable; treatments of several intricate thinkers, for instance, are thoughtful but abrupt. More problematically, its major premise — the thesis that supersessionism surreptitiously governs secular political theory — is unsubstantiated. (It echoes Eric Voegelin's blanket critique of modernity as “gnosticism,” which Lloyd might have done well to discuss.) Why liberalism must be supersessionist is unclear, especially when its modus vivendi variants bespeak recognition of the world's messiness hardly unique to the “too Christian,” “too Jewish” thinkers Lloyd invokes.

Most puzzlingly, Lloyd neglects many sources relevant to his project. The idea of using theology to undermine political theology has a classic precedent in Erik Peterson's “Monotheism as a Political Problem” (in Theological Tractates), yet Lloyd mentions neither this text nor Schmitt's landmark rejoinder to it, Political Theology II. Seminal Jewish thinkers like Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Jacob Taubes are likewise absent. Lloyd approvingly cites some orthodox Christians like Marion and Søren Kierkegaard, but ignores Catholic liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez, and the Protestant Reinhold Niebuhr, whose political realism is based in an explicit rejection of theological supersessionism.

The Problem with Grace is nevertheless a noteworthy contribution to contemporary debates about political theology. Since the ubiquity of supersessionist logic is still unproven, the book is unlikely to influence the broader field of political theory, as it aims to do. However, what Lloyd calls supersessionism is a genuine problem that crops up whenever political theorists flirt with the redemptive promise of Judaism or Christianity (or Islam — also not mentioned). Insofar as Lloyd's work focuses on the problem of grace, it offers a valuable warning against the seductive idea that God, or religious discourse, or post-secular thinking can save us from the difficulties and frustrations of mundane political life.