The title sounds impressively visionary, but this is really a book about disappointment – disappointment that the Christian right in the USA allowed a false idealism to divert hope for change into a political attempt to reclaim ‘America for Christ’ (p. 127), that the Christian left uses scripture selectively to justify political interests and fosters a subculture which prizes conformity (p. 142), that neo-Anabaptists engage the state only negatively as a ‘this-worldly power’ thereby embodying a ‘passive-aggressive ecclesiology’ (p. 164). According to Hunter, each group has variously delimited its response to the creation mandate ‘to cultivate’ the garden and ‘to keep it’ (Gen 2:15, p. 3). Each has variously made engagement with politics the framework for witness to the Gospel, thereby delimiting its witness, with the ironic effect of reducing Christian faith to a political ideology (p. 172).

Hunter's lament is that: ‘With the conflation of the history and identity of America with the life and mission of the church (for the Right and the Left), there is a fundamental distortion of theological truth and historical reality’ (p. 173). It is a tragedy, he says, that recent Christian witness has picked up the worst characteristics of the culture and politics which it seeks to challenge, whether through the adoption of a victim mentality or by demonising its opponents. Rather than trying to ‘save Western civilization’ or ‘winning the culture war’, American Christians should opt now for a better understanding of ‘faithful presence’. Like Joseph S. Nye Jr's notion of ‘soft power’, Hunter wants believers to find new persuasive tactics such as those instantiated in a not-for-profit housing corporation in central Michigan, an art gallery in northwest Washington DC based on the premise that people need beauty, an automotive company which rethinks capitalist practice vis-à-vis employees and customers along the lines of covenant rather than exchange and contract, and more (pp. 266–9).

One could spend a lifetime discussing the extent to which Hunter's caricatures of the three political theologies mentioned above as ‘defensive against’, ‘relevant to’, and ‘purity from’ cultural/political engagement are warranted. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that there is a grain of truth (albeit not the whole truth) in Hunter's analyses, the question is what to make of his constructive proposals, first, ‘to disentangle the life and identity of the church from the life and identity of American society’ (p. 184) and, second, ‘to decouple the “public” from the “political” in order to extend the range of possibilities within which Christians engage American society, notably through more incarnational theologies of work and vocation, the arts and commerce, scholarship and so on’ (p. 251). What should we make of his suggestion that believers should ‘be silent for a season and learn how to enact their faith through acts of shalom rather than to try again to represent it publicly through law, policy and political mobilization’ (p. 281)?

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, ‘it depends on what the meaning of the word “politics” is’. If Hunter means by politics the worst aspects of what Richard Sennett calls ‘consuming politics’ or the merchandising of political leaders and policies like cut-price products such that the crux of politics becomes marketing, then I am sympathetic to his objectives. If, however, one understands politics to be more like Aquinas’ sense of a form of unifying social action rooted in the commonality of human nature and entailing reasoned orientation towards the common good of a just and mutually beneficial society, then Hunter's plea for post-political Christian witness (p. 184) is nonsensical. My suspicion is that Hunter holds a vaguely Augustinian notion of politics as a consequence of sin and comprising checks against violence; humankind is naturally sociable but not naturally political. Hence the seeming acceptability for Christians to want to decouple the ‘public’ from the ‘political’. Hence, perhaps, the minimal state ideology which shows itself throughout the book:

The Americanness of Hunter's subject-matter must be appreciated. Yet the issues raised cross borders. As a UK citizen, I welcome Hunter's recognition of perennial tensions in Christian witness – not least the tension between attempts to direct and clericalise the world and seeming indifference to the affairs of national and international law. I welcome the urging of Christian people to live out their faith imaginatively and creatively in the everyday. But I refute vigorously the supposition that Christian people may ‘care more for the poor and the elderly’ through post-political modes of engagement rather than through state-mediated action. In the UK, this kind of claim is highly political (and to my mind, dangerously so) not ‘post-political’. Of course it is oftentimes wise, as Hunter says, for Christian people to be silent and to enact their faith without words. Of course it is beneficial for Christian people to think through their witness in institutional rather than individualised ways. But Hunter's interpretation of what it means to be ‘faithful in this generation’ translates in my context into faith-based welfare provision which would contribute to the undermining of the National Health Service (NHS), government-funded education services and more.

I am wary of the fashion these days to separate ‘public theology’ from ‘political theology’ because the latter has somehow neglected the local. In Thomist tradition, good political theology begins with the social impulses which are mediated through family, community associations, diverse institutions, and yet, to borrow Mary M. Keys words, ‘still require political society for their completion’. Now is not a time to be silent politically about labour-market conditions, increasing poverty, threats of job losses and the contested meaning of social justice. While no one is likely to object to Hunter's plea for ‘a theology of faithful presence’, the political reality of his proposal is far from benign.