William Cavanaugh's latest book is a masterful exercise in counter-ethnography. Hoping to ‘resist the colonization of the Christian imagination by a nation-state’ (p. 5), Cavanaugh shirks efforts to reconfigure the political space inhabited by the church in favour of directing our attention towards time: it is less about the kingdom (as a domain over against other domains) and more about the coming (an anticipatory liturgy to end all liturgies). Thus, Christian worship – especially the celebration of the eucharist – proffers critical loci for engaging the powers.
To set the stage for his alternative imaginary, Cavanaugh tackles a question implicit in debates over secularisation. Most theorists, he contends, assume religious belief went into hiding until its recent global ‘resurgence’, when in fact the core cognitive and affective habits associated with religion remained unchanged in the transition to modernity. What mutated was direct object of such habits: the nation-state replaced the Christian God. So beyond exerting significant explanatory power, the narrative of sanctity's migration also discloses a threat to the church's authentic practice. Cavanaugh proposes to disrupt this threat with two tactics.
The first is largely critical. Chapters 1–5 aim to expose the machinations of the secular Weltanschuuang. Chapter 1 overturns various assumptions about the nation-state, including the packaging of modernisation as a peacemaking process that ‘saved’ antagonistic religious sects from themselves. Conversely, Cavanaugh's telling reveals the bellicose intentions of Western European states. This chapter and the next, which proposes to ‘complexify’ political space along the lines of Augustine's two cities, illustrate well Cavanaugh's wrestling with twentieth-century theorists. While the spectre of John Courtney Murray looms large, Cavanaugh materialises as a thinker both sympathetic and brutally incisive towards his own tradition.
Chapter 3 is the most creative in the first half of the collection. The author correlates a pair of iconic by-products from globalisation (tourist, migrant) with a pair mined from ecclesiastical history (pilgrim, monk). His strategy is to show how the former pair typify the shallow and border-crazed global agenda, then hint at possible antidotes in a reclamation of the latter. The next two chapters are shorter and narrower in scope: chapter 4 critiques a particular belief, American exceptionalism, and chapter 5 critiques a specific practice, torture.
The second tactic, generally constructive and executed throughout chapters 6–9, turns the ethnographic pen towards the church. Cavanaugh points to concrete doctrines and practices which defy the ‘liturgies of the state’, but have been diluted by a pressure to privatise religious belief (chapter 6). Next, he issues a tentative call for the church visually to ‘embody a different sort of politics’, a sort informed by salvation history in all its historical particularity (chapter 7). Perhaps the most properly theological essay, chapter 8, sets out to take seriously the dictum ‘all ecclesiology must be Christology’ (p. 154) with reference to another – that Christ was ‘made sin’ (2 Cor 5:21). The final chapter constitutes a defence and modification of Hauerwas' work in light of Jeffrey Stout's criticisms. Each chapter, with some exceptions, concludes with practical examples of the faithful activism Cavanaugh deems essential to combat an encroaching statism.
Cavanaugh's elegant prose suffices to guide the unfamiliar reader through most of the canons of theological tradition he brings to bear on contemporary debates. But at a few junctures (for instance, the digest of contemporary scholarship on the genesis of the modern nation-state in chapter 1), he beckons the reader to tread dense waters for a peripheral insight. Such discussions approach unwieldy proportions. In another scholar, these limitations might provoke frustration; in Cavanaugh, however, they generate anticipation of a different order – for a longer, more comprehensive project of which the essays in Migrations give only the slightest hint.
