Providence was founded nearly a decade ago partly to counter the influence of Stanley Hauerwas.
As a pacifist neo-Anabaptist theologian, Hauerwas and his many disciples were profoundly influential in the 1980s-2000s. His perspective allowed young Christians and others to retain orthodoxy while rejecting conservative American Christianity. They professed to have a very high view of the church and its separateness as a called-out community. Chiefly this separateness was defined by rejecting all violence and, more widely, conservative Christian political and cultural shibboleths.
That Hauerwasian school of thought is now fast receding in influence. Chiefly it appealed to younger baby boomers and older Gen Xers. It seems to have little cachet among Christian thinkers under the age of 40 or perhaps even 50. I will boast that Providence, by gathering serious Christian thinkers who uphold the Just War tradition and accompanying historic church teaching, helped to accelerate the decline of the Hauerwasian school.
But we cannot claim all the credit! The receding tide of the Hauerwas perspective is also generational. Its chief acolytes often were reacting against the Religious Right of the 1980s, compounded by conservative evangelical support for George W. Bush, which included the War Against Terror and the Iraq War. America for them was a militarist empire that faithful Christians must oppose. These preoccupations are less common among younger Christian thinkers living amid different threats. A young student at Messiah College, an evangelical school with a strong pacifist history, told me several years ago that her generation believes they don’t have the luxury of pacifism. Certainly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, along with Hamas and Hezbollah, plus the rise of China, have contributed to the seeming demise of dogmatic absolutist Christian pacifism.
The rise of postliberal evangelical populism, in which even some non-religious Americans now culturally identify as “evangelical,” potentially could have reignited the Hauerwas perspective. But then again, perhaps not. Hauerwas was an early postliberal who vehemently rejected American exceptionalism and described July 4, 1776, as his most despised day. For Hauerwas, liberal democracy, especially as understood in the Anglo-American tradition, was just another contemptible idol to be smashed by the faithful. The “liberal” perspective ascribing inalienable rights to all individuals was just another evasion of the Gospel. In this sense, Hauerwas foreshadowed the current postliberal moment, in which tribalism is prioritized over universal rights and equality.
Hauerwas’s recent Plough essay on Edward Abelard, an early 20th century German pacifist and cofounder of the Bruderhof, illustrates the fading and yet partly vindicated perspective of Hauerwas. Reviewing Abelard’s book God’s Revolution, Hauerwas enthuses that his hero “takes no prisoners” and leaves the reader thinking, “I have never seen a church like the one he describes.” Abelard is “radical,” which is a favorite adjective for Hauerwas and his followers. Abelard’s vision will strike many as “unrealistic,” which Hauerwas likes. The more unrealistic the better. And, according to Abelard, “The only way the world will recognize the mission of Jesus is by the unity of his church.”
It’s a strange quote for Hauerwas, who self-identifies as a sectarian fideist, to herald, since his emphases are hardly unifying for the church. He celebrates Arnold as a pacifist with a “profound critique of capitalism,” which distracts Christians from appreciating their need for each other. Christians without possessions must rely on each other.
Hauerwas notes that Abelard affirms the traditional Anabaptist view that God gave the state the “temporal sword,” from which Christians must abstain, since the “one executed on the cross executes no one.” Christians cannot participate in violence in defense of the vulnerable, but they can share in the suffering. Hauerwas, a former bricklayer, also likes Abelard’s affirmation of physical labor for all Christians. He describes Abelard as touting a kind of monasticism for married people.
This glowing review of Abelard’s book encapsulates Hauerwas’s perspective nicely. The church is a very small, called out community of semi-monastics who live communally and reject violence, performing acts of charity where possible. Such small communities, like the Bruderhof, or the Amish, of course are admirable in many ways. But by definition they include a tiny percentage of the population and of Christianity. Are they the only faithful Christians? And isn’t their way of life possible thanks to millions of others who do participate in government and make the engines of capitalism hum? (Much of the Bruderhof understandably escaped Nazi Germany for armed Britain in the 1930s.) Most of Hauerwas’s fans over the years have not lived in such communities but rather were academics who treated their campus life as a form of elitist monasticism. Such forms of Christianity, by effectively excluding nearly all practical people in the world who aren’t academics or living on communes, cannot represent the universal church. But they can be a part of it, a part that should be performed of course with humility.
The popularity of Hauerwas’s particular neo-Anabaptist perspective for academics and select clergy seemingly is concluding. But his view of the church as a narrow tribe without wider binding duties to society has been corrosive. In our current postliberal epoch, in which many Christians now participate, “liberalism” as a universal value is rejected in favor of perpetual cultural war among contending tribes. Hauerwas and presumably his now aging followers do not like this new epoch. But they may have more in common with it than they would prefer to admit.