We live in a post-September 11, 2001 world where fear of religiously-inspired violence has stoked an aggressive response by governments, including the use of torture on suspected terrorists. We also live in a globalizing economy where the ubiquitous “market” breeds consumption on an unprecedented scale, with societal and environmental impacts that seem to elude the ability of states to effectively mitigate them. While political scientists have spent much effort on unpacking these major developments in global politics, scholars from elsewhere in academia are tackling the phenomena in quite different and (sometimes) provocative ways. Few have done so with as much verve and intellectual depth as William Cavanaugh, a Catholic political theologian who has explored the Christian perspective on topics such as torture, consumerism, and religious violence. His theology has been associated with the “radical orthodoxy” movement, combining both an adherence to the traditional authority of the institutional church with a postmodern critique exposing existing political and economic power structures.

Cavanaugh's latest contribution, Migrations of the Holy, is a summation of the central focus in his writings over the past decade or so: the relationship between religion and politics or, more precisely, the dynamics between Christianity and the modern nation-state system. In fact, this book is actually a collection of previously published articles and essays, supplemented by a helpful introduction but, sadly (and fairly detrimentally to the cohesiveness of the key argument), no concluding chapter. This important weakness aside, William Cavanaugh offers here both a challenge to Christians to see beyond what he calls the “pathologies of the modern state” and an encouragement to occupy a political space outside of conventional understandings that privilege the state as the legitimate wielder of political power. To a significant extent, he succeeds at the former but on the latter, the book does not quite present a coherent picture of how the political presence of the church might manifest itself in a post-Westphalian world.

As the title of the book implies, and as Cavanaugh's other writings in the past decade have critiqued, the authority and legitimacy of the modern state has usurped and replaced the role of the church in human lives (in the West). This is no secret of course, and a number of political scientists have assessed the creation and evolution of the Westphalian state system since the Middle Ages, replacing (at least in Europe) the power of the institutional church. What concerns Cavanaugh mostly, however, is “the way the state has colonized the political imagination of Christians” (3). His key purpose in the book is to help us “unthink the inevitability of the nation-state” so that people of faith (in particular) are motivated by the attraction of grass-roots political action instead of relying upon governments to do better and a dependence upon the church's ability to influence civil power.

Where Migrations of the Holy seems most persuasive is in the first half or so in the book where Cavanaugh unpacks the origins of the nation-state and its historical construction as an alternative form of community, one in which a “nation” is invented by a centralizing, power-accumulating state. His analysis, especially in chapter one, integrates a wide array of important sources and views in history, political science, sociology and theology, including Benedict Anderson, Hendrik Spruyt, Charles Tilly, John Courtney Murray and Anthony Giddens, among others. The problem with the nation-state, he argues, is that it is not in the business of promoting the “common good” for its citizens; the state portrays itself to be a repository of sacred values, but should be “understood theologically as a parody of the church, meant to save us from division” (42). In fact, the modern state is more like a “telephone company,'” a “large bureaucratic provider of goods and services” (42.) that not only does not provide value for the money but asks us to sacrifice to false gods, “to be ready to kill and die on its behalf” (54). Moreover, Cavanaugh argues that much of the church itself (including the leadership of his Catholic Church) has bought into the belief that the nation-state can be influenced to be “good” (or at least “better”). The church has abdicated its potential to be a communal, transnational association that challenges particularistic national interests.

Particularly powerful in this vein is the chapter on the United States as a “Messianic Nation.” Cavanaugh argues that American exceptionalism has explicitly theological roots, and, more critically, is a “fundamental distortion of the Christian doctrines of election and providence” (89). Again, much of this argument is not new, but he does great justice in mapping how the different strands of exceptionalism (including that from Enlightenment thought privileging freedom and openness) in fact converge into a unique messianic zeal. Americans now essentially “worship our freedom to worship God” (96). The problem for Cavanaugh is thus again the problem of the exaltation of the nation-state over God: “the political presence of the biblical God is through the official discourse of America, and not through a distinctively Christian body that stands under the explicit authority of Jesus Christ” (104). In essence, the American experiment is portrayed here as the ultimate heresy for people of faith because when “the relationship between God and America becomes unmediated … the divinization of the state becomes difficult to resist” (108).

Lest it appear that Migrations of the Holy is entirely pessimistic about the church-state dynamic, Cavanaugh spends considerable effort in various chapters arguing theologically (from a largely Augustinian viewpoint) how Christians can in fact be political without “giving in to” the power of the state. He argues that contra the modern expectation that separates religion and politics into different spaces in which the church must approach politics (the state) from afar, the role of the church is “to embody a different sort of politics” (138) because it is “catholic, transnational, transcending the parochial borders of the nation-state” (139). But Cavanaugh never quite makes it beyond this to identify specific ways in which the church can occupy this alternative political space. For example, in a provocative chapter on globalization, he argues Christians should see themselves as “pilgrims” as opposed to “migrants” or “tourists,” accepting “the provisional nature of human government” in which our primary identity is not defined by national borders (82). Beyond actively denunciating all kinds of nationalism that impede “the Christian vision of the planet's common destiny” (86), and cautioning Americans in particular to be wary of primacing national (as opposed to Christian) identity, there is not much in the way of specifying exactly how the church might operationalize its mission outside of influencing the state. Similarly, many of the later chapters in the book get bogged down in more intricate, mainly theological debates that are not clearly linked to the implications of his principal argument. As noted above, perhaps a concluding chapter might have resolved these problems, tying together the threads of complex arguments.

Overall, William Cavanaugh has presented us with an engaging and informed discussion on the dynamics of church and state. His political theology is clearly based in a critical pessimism of the nation-state as a vehicle for the faithful to focus their hopes for political change in a globalizing yet still nationalistic world. The “state,” he cautions, is temporal but ever expansionary, idolatrous and violent. As important as Western democratic political institutions are, we should be highly skeptical of their power, or any other powers (for example, business) whose intent is subjugation for its own purposes. The alternative vision for the church Cavanaugh gives in Migrations of the Holy is an optimistic one, even though it is not really fleshed out here. It is thus best to read this contribution, this collection of essays, in combination with the remainder of his opus of work published in the past decade.