Category: Series

The church for the world to see (The Politics of Charity, Part Nine)

I first began writing this essay series way back in July of 2022, with the goal of unpacking a new vision of what a politics for the church can look like, in the wake of the destruction wrought by the Christian left and Christian right. We come, finally, to the final essay, in which, following Stanley Hauerwas one more time in his essay “The Politics of Charity”, we examine three ways the church can shape itself as a social ethic for a more just and charitable world. 

As we noted at the end of the previous essay, a more just world is also a world where that justice is paired with virtues like friendship, loyalty, truthfulness, and fairness, all of it leavened by a strong commitment to Aquinas’ greatest virtue: charity, which is the love of God and love of humanity. That all sounds good, but none of this is easy. What does it actually mean for Christians to practice a charity that is less concerned with being effective and quantifiable and just, and more concerned with just embodying that love in the world, consequences (and bottom lines) be damned? There is no coherent vision or complete political program presented by Hauerwas to answer this question, nor should there be; the nature of the charitable mindset he is commending to us precludes those kinds of totalizing systems, ideologies and answers. Instead, we are told that the church, in answer to the questions of justice and charity presented by the world, has the duty to be a paradigmatic community. In other words, when presented with examples and instances of the world’s brokenness, the Church’s answer is to act in the way that the Church should- as guided by the example of Christ as encountered in God’s revelation – in order for the world to see what it means to be a person. This is the crux of that earlier exhortation we explored, that “the first task of the church is not to make the world more just but to make the world the world.” 

However, we aren’t left to our own devices completely at the end. Instead, Hauerwas presents three questions the Church should be asking itself about who it is. These three questions aren’t the only ones churches should be asking themselves. But they are a good starting point. 

The first question is a reminder to be aware: that “the economic life of the church is…not irrelevant to how the church acts as a social ethic in the societies in which she exists.” The Church lives in a world largely defined by the economic realities of modern capitalism; everything has been given a economic value, all utility is understood in terms of dollars and cents, and we are all always evaluating decisions not in terms of virtues and values but via cost-benefit analyses, because that is the way we have been shaped by the world. Mammon is the almighty of the world, but the Church knows that Mammon’s power ends, and God’s doesn’t. Christ showed us that three days after the Cross. Thus, the Church must commit itself to evaluating value and worth in a different way, and must demand of its people that their economic lives mirror their Christian values. “This not only involves how Christians learn to use their possessions,” writes Hauerwas, “but also what kinds of economic life professions the community thinks it appropriate for Christian to participate in.” This is a key factor in being a paradigmatic community for the world to see. How we use our dollars matters, but just as important is how we acquire those dollars, because the instrumentalization required of monetary exchange doesn’t only operate in consumption; it also plays a key role in value-creation via the work we choose to do. This tells us, then, that contrary to much of the ethos of the modern church, there are definite professions and vocations that are out-of-bounds for Christians, and those are not just related to sexual expression. Should a Christian be a soldier? Should a Christian be a police officer? Should a Christian be a politician? These are all questions the Church has long contemplated. But what about these: should a Christian be a banker? Should a Christian be a venture capitalist? Should a Christian be working on fossil fuels? These are questions the Church must address with its members, and it should not be afraid to take a stand and say what is and isn’t off limits for someone who claims to be committed to being a part of this paradigmatic community representing Christ in the world.

The second question Hauerwas suggests concerns ecclesiology: “the question of how the church governs herself is crucial to what kind of social ethic she is.” This question of church governance is necessarily tied up in a question of politics. What is the politics that governs the church? How will the church make decisions and arrive at consensus together? This is a vitally important question that must be answered; to not answer what governing ethic the church engages is still to answer the question, because at the point that the answer is not thoughtfully considered, the worst habits of human organization rear their heads. “The crucial question,” Hauerwas askes, “is whether we are a determinative enough community that our politics can provide a basis for authority rather than a politics of fear?” 

Finally, the third question is about care for strangers, because “how Christians care for the stranger is an essential mark of what it means to be the church.” This third question swings us back around to that question of effectiveness that we started this series with. What does stranger care mean for a church that isn’t bound by questions of statistics and sociology? What does it mean to care for our neighbors, to be a Good Samaritan, as an institution that understands itself as the hands and feet of Christ in the world?

Historically, Hauerwas reminds us, this has been practiced simply as caring for those who need it. “[I]t was no accident that Christians have been among the first to set up hospitals.” Simply providing a place to heal is a good start. This approach certainly comes with its fair share of critics who are still on the effectiveness and policy tracks; he notes that a common critique of this practice has been that these are merely practices of charity, “not dealing with the systematic forms of poverty and ill health”, but as we’ve been discussing here over the course of eight essays, for the church, there is no such thing as “merely” charity. Charity is our calling, because “the first object of the Christian social ethic is the kind and form of care it provides for those who have no other means to defend themselves.” 

I want to end this first series of essays by focusing on that phrase “Christian social ethic.” That is what we’ve been thinking about throughout these essays: what is the Christian social ethic? This essay series has ranged far and wide, probably too much so at times to claim any real sense of coherence, but this is really the question at the heart of things in Hauerwas’ original essay, and in the reflection I have tried to do. What first grabbed me so strongly when I read “The Politics of Charity” three summers ago was Hauerwas’ biting critique of effectiveness as anything the church should ever be concerned about. I wanted that to be the central theme of this series, but again, I fear that at times I have strayed too far from that original animating impulse.

But, again, I want to use the idea of a social ethic to draw together the threads of this series and bring it to a close. Hauerwas brings his essay to close with this statement: “the church does not have a social ethic, but rather is a social ethic.” This statement is close to one I use often, which is that the church is not a social service organization. The church is the church, and when we say that, we say what it is for the world and for the hurting. It is the church. That means it is a people shaped not by social sciences or policy white papers or political platforms, but by the example and words of Christ as revealed on the Cross and in Scripture. It is “an institution that has learned to embody the form of truth that is charity revealed in the person and the work of Christ.” There is no thought given to effectiveness; as we saw in the story of the Good Samaritan, in fact, the social ethic that is the church often works counter to what the world would define as effective in the face of difficult situations. “Love God.” “Love your neighbor.” “Love your enemy.” These are the things commended to us. Love is not quantifiable, it is not measurable, it certainly doesn’t always make sense. The world would tell us that loving God is a fool’s errand, that loving your neighbor is dangerous, that loving your enemy is nonsensical. And maybe they are right about that. Let’s do it anyway.

Justice and Charity (The Politics of Charity, Part Eight)

Way back when I started this series of essays, I set up a dichotomy, in the very first paragraph:

“Contrasted against the work of social justice, charity is often viewed as simple good deeds that fail to acknowledge or ameliorate the structural issues underlying the need being met. For instance, soup kitchens do admirable charitable work, but are ultimately insufficient, as they don’t do the hard political work of discovering why people are hungry, and then wielding the power to solve hunger.”

Justice, and charity. Often, especially in more liberal or progressive spaces, they are set up as antagonists, with one often taking away from the other in some sort of zero sum game. Against that dichotomy, following the lead of Stanley Hauerwas in his essay “The Politics of Charity”, I proceeded to make an extended defense of charity as a positive and necessary virtue for Christians, and in fact as the most Christian of virtues, despite its often countercultural or ineffective practices, at least compared to the work of justice.

But, it would be wrong to make this about booting justice in favor of charity, just as it is wrong for many progressive churches to effectively do the reverse. As Hauerwas reminds us at this late point in the essay, “there can be no charity without justice.” This point is key to understanding Hauerwas’ broader point in his essay, and in drawing together the task we have undertaken here over the course of the last seven essays. So, in today’s essay, I want to work through Hauerwas’ argument about the paired virtues of charity and justice, and then move on to a broader summation of the work we’ve done so far. This will allow us to turn, in the final essay, to a vision of what the Church is supposed to, since we’ve done a lot of work to establish what it is not.

In order to understand how charity and justice go hand in hand, it is important to figure out what justice is, and what it is not. If you’ve ever taken a basic college course in philosophy, you know this is not an easy or light task. For thousands of years, people have been trying to define, understand, and enact justice, in one form or another. It is a murky concept, with contextually contingent features sitting alongside universal, eternal truths. 

So, let’s start with what Hauerwas tells us justice is not. He begins by writing, “justice is not simply what is possible or necessary for societal order.” More, justice “obviously involves more than the recent interpretations of justice that almost totally associate justice with patterns of distribution of basic values (freedom) and material goods.” In these statements, Hauerwas is taking clear aim at the conception of justice that undergirds much of the social contract theorizing that justifies societal arrangements in liberal societies. Throughout his corpus of works, Hauerwas is continuously critical of the most prominent 20th century social contract theorists, John Rawls. In order to understand Hauerwas’ critique of common understandings of justice, and the vision he places in contrast, one must understand Rawls.

John Rawls

Rawls wrote a seminal book titled A Theory of Justice, a book that has shaped political theory in the post-Cold War years unlike almost any other. For Rawls, justice is essentially fairness, balanced against liberty. In a liberal society with a democratic political order, that which is fair to free and equal people is considered to be just, and structures of power, control, and decision making must be established in order to ensure fairness and liberty. But how does such a society determine what is fair, and what is not? To answer this question, Rawls came up with two, interrelated concepts that would guide decision-making in a just society: original position, and the veil of ignorance. The original position is the idea that any member of a society should, when making decisions about the good of that society, should do so as if they were free of bonds or obligations or relationships to other people or groups. In other words, the original position dictates that the needs of society as a whole should not be influenced by or made subordinate to the needs of civil groups, identity, family, religion, or any other contingent factor. But how to do this? How would any person conceivably separate themselves from any bias or partisan favor when making judgments? This is where the veil of ignorance comes into play. Rawls instructed that every person, in order to act from original position, should imagine what answer they would provide to any question if they were to be found in the lowest and most disfavored societal position. The veil of ignorance is a thought experiment, wherein each person imagines they are making choices from behind a veil which obscures where they might find themselves placed in any society. From behind the veil of ignorance, no one knows whether they might be rich or poor, black or white or brown, male or female, Christian or Jew or Muslim, or any other identifier. Thus, any choices made should be ones that would favor the maximum amount of fairness and the maximum amount of liberty. This fairness and liberty, arrived at from the original position and behind the veil of ignorance, is justice, in Rawls’ influential determination.

Rawls’ conception of justice is any appealing one, and has much to recommend it. It has been a popular political philosophy ever since A Theory of Justice came out. But, it is also a fatally flawed framework, as Hauerwas has pointed out in his writings. I am going to quote Hauerwas at length, from his essay “The Church and Liberal Democracy” in one of his earliest books, A Community of Character: 

[T]he ‘original position’ is a stark metaphor for the ahistorical approach of liberal theory, as the self is alienated in its history and simply left with its individual preferences and prejudices. The ‘justice’ that results from the bargaining game is but the guarantee that my liberty to consume will be fairly limited within the overall distributive shares. To be sure, some concern for the ‘most disadvantaged’ is built into the system, but not in a manner that qualifies my appropriate concern for my self-interest. Missing entirely from Rawls’ position is any suggestion that a theory of justice is as much a category for individuals as for societies. The question is not only how should the shares of any society be distributed equitable, but what bounds should individuals set for themselves if they are to be just. In an effort to rid liberalism of a social system built on envy, Rawls has to resort to the extraordinary device of making all desires equal before the bar of justice. As a result he represents the ultimate liberal irony: individualism, in an effort to secure societal cooperation and justice, must deny individual differences.

There are two key critiques of Rawls’ theory of justice that I want to draw out here, because they are relevant to our larger project in these essays. The first has to do with moral relativism, the second with alienation. As Hauerwas says so well in this passage, Rawls’ justice depends on leveling the playing field of what is and is not considered good, in both an aesthetic and a metaphysical sense. What this means is, a society operating in the just way Rawls describes is not a society capable of saying what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, as long as that behavior is arrived at in a way that maximizes fairness and liberty. But, this very obviously goes against the entire project of Christianity, and other religions. All moral systems make firm declarations of what the good is, and what it isn’t. Not all choices are equal; some are more desirable than others, even if they may be just as fair or free as all others. Moral systems like Christianity take it as their duty to make judgments on what is good, true or beautiful, but this stabs at the heart of Rawls’ theory. In Rawls’ conceptual world, to make a statement on whether we should do something or not is to tread upon the right of others to do as they please. Thus, any question of moral good inevitably becomes beside the point, and an “anything goes” ethos reigns.

Related to this lack of moral good is the question of alienation raised by Hauerwas, which I think is the most important of these two critiques. In order to imagine oneself in the place of the original position and the veil of ignorance, one must necessarily shed all ties that one may have to any community or tradition they are a part of. But, even the most honest and removed of actors cannot fully extricate themselves from the context in which their character was shaped. The veil of ignorance can only ever be a thought exercise, and human beings can only ever approximate its effects in the best of situations. But, even given the limited way in which any person can separate themselves from their own context, the larger question arises of whether we actually even want people to do that. What does it mean to remove all ties of belonging and being from our decision making and judgment? Is that really a desirable way for a human to ever operate? 

For Christians, the question is even more important. Should Christians ever actually enter situations where we would want to completely remove and set aside the new life we take on at baptism? Doesn’t doing so undermine our identification as disciples of Christ? Wouldn’t the presence of Christian principles in a person sharpen their decision making, not make it more dangerous? None of these questions are asking if Christians should in fact impose their views on the world – our earlier forays into the anti-Christian nature of coercion forbids that. But, Christians in all spheres do and should bring the way of being that Christianity demands into all of our contexts, not as a form of power to exercise over others and society, but as a way of seeing the world that cannot be set aside, due to its all-encompassing and paradigm-shifting nature. 

So what does all of this have to do with our broader purpose in these essays? It is this: justice, in the words of Hauerwas, “must also involve a view of the good that will necessarily form how any distributive criteria work.” Justice must involve more than just fairness and maximal liberty; in its best form, justice is so much more than optimizing distributive decisions and material concerns. Justice necessarily incorporates a conception of the Good, a notion that has become superfluous in a liberal society. There can be no definite understanding of what the Good is for society, because pluralism means every single individual gets to define it for themselves. But, if justice is to mean more than ensuring I get mine and you get yours, it must include a vision of what it means to be good, and not just narrowly for myself, but for society as a whole. This is why Hauerwas’ critique of Rawls is so important: the pursuit of justice demands a vision for the world, and that vision is shaped by our attachments, our communities, our traditions. When our conception of justice is broadened in this way, then the idea that charity and justice must be in opposition to one another begins to fade away. Instead, we begin to see that they are interdependent, that justice requires the virtue of charity, and charity presupposes a holistic vision of a just world. 

Here’s the problem many churches have run into about charity: it has been misunderstood and wrongly defined. We’ve tainted the word charity as about giving people free stuff or undeserved ends, and not about what it is, in the original sense of the Latin caritas: the love of our fellow human being. It is the greatest of the virtues, according to Aquinas, that which unites us to one another, and thus, unites us to God. When we are able to understand charity in this way, we begin to see justice as its complement, as the other side of the coin. You cannot have one without the other. “There can be no charity without justice,” writes Hauerwas, “for justice involves those basic obligations we owe others and ourselves that charity presupposes.” Charity requires of us love, and justice prescribes what that love looks like in public. 

We’re drawing in on a concrete vision of how the church can practice both charity and justice in the world. The next and final essay of this series will do that, but before we can get there, we need to flesh out this interplay between charity and justice. As we’ve seen so far in this essay, modern liberal notions of justice have narrowed the scope of what we understand justice to be. As per Rawls, justice becomes fairness and liberty, balancing against one another. The forms justice takes, then, are all centered around questions of distribution: who gets what, and how much do they get, and who do they get it from? Like so much of the world under capitalism, the once rich concept of justice becomes about numbers, dollars and cents we owe to one another. 

But, when we recognize that justice depends on charity – on love for one another, regardless of the economic or distributive worth of that love, regardless of just how effective that love is in the world in a policy or economic sense – we begin to understand that justice is so much more than fair and free distribution. A truly good society is one in which “fellowship, friendship, loyalty, and truthfulness are equally important marks” as justice in the making of decisions. And we know this to be true, because we can look around at a culture that has been steeped in the language of justice, often to the detriment of all other considerations. Are friendship, fellowship, loyalty, and truth something we see much in the public sphere anymore? The question answers itself. The institutions and ideals that shape us as a people are intensely focused on a shallow, market-based understanding of justice- and concepts like truth get left behind. Justice can be quantified and measured. Fellowship? Loyalty? Not so much. 

Forming a society that integrates all these things – charity and justice, and also friendship, loyalty, trust, fellowship, fairness, and liberty – is no easy task, obviously. And it is not something that can be implemented from the top down. Instead, it requires the forming of people, and those people must be formed by the communities and traditions from which they hail. The Church, in particular, has historically been a community of people who have a vision of the world to share and embody. Too often this gets twisted in a political program or an ideology; that danger must be acknowledged and warned against. But it should not scare Christians off from having a clear and coherent answer to the question of “what does it mean to be a good and just society?” The Church can and should posit an answer to this question, not as a policy platform or an ideology, but as a way of life modeled on that of Christ and embodied in the everyday lives of people for two thousand years. Instead of trying to put together a political platform for others to endorse, the church should “pioneer those institutions and practices that wider society has not learned as forms of justice” – those values and virtues we just named as companions to justice. “The church, therefore, must act as a paradigmatic community in the hope of providing some indication of what the world can be but is not.” The question of the things that the church in particular can do to embody this vision is where we turn in our next, and final, essay.

The tension at the heart of existence, or, why Peter Thiel is not a Christian prophet (The Politics of Charity, Part Seven)

Meekness. Foolishness. Weakness. Humor. Fun. Stupid. These are just a few of the words I used in the previous essay to describe the way of the Christian in the midst of a world that is just taking itself all too seriously. But what about injustice? What about suffering? How can we laugh in the face of so much hurt? And, even more acutely, how can we embrace an ineffective weakness knowing as we do the depth of human suffering, and the shamelessness of the evil that perpetuates it? The Cross, after all, was not a humorous sign. The disciples did not laugh those three long days. Believing as we do, at the urging of Matthew 25, that Christ is present in all those who hunger and thirst and are trapped, how can urging the church to be a foolish institution address the real needs of those Christ draws our attention to?

These questions turn us back to the concept of effectiveness, and most importantly, force upon us the question that we have been grappling with throughout this series, albeit in the background so far: how can a church called to something as ineffective as Christian charity live into its calling to be the Good News to the poor, the hungry, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant? This is the real rub of the Christian way: we confront a world thrown off its axis by injustice and pain, and the tools we are given by God in the life of Christ are submission and weakness and humility? 

Hauerwas identifies this as “the tension created between church and world brought about by how Christians have been taught to take the form of Christ.” Because Christians are presented with such a countercultural way of existing in the world, that tension is naturally opened up, at least in the spaces where churches are not trying to be a part of this or that culture (conservative, hipster, suburban, wealthy, or whichever prevailing cultural norm is seeping into any particular church.)

This tension then opens up an expectation, among Christian and non-Christian alike, that the Church, driven as it is by moral and ethical concerns more stringent than those presented by worldly cultures, must be an example or template for the way Christians hope to make the world to be. In this view, both of these groups of people expect Christians to begin trying to reshape the world in the image of the Church, not realizing that all too often, those churches are just microcosms of the culture, and thus incapable of even contemplating real, lasting cultural change. Foolishness is not something the church practices very often, even if some churches and Christians like to pride themselves on rejection of “the world” and popular culture. No rejection is actually happening for most Christians, They are still inevitably shaped by the world, even if they can’t see it in themselves. What many view as rejection is just political or social posturing, taking on an image of “good Christian” or “compassionate follower” or “devout evangelical” over and against something else. This is not a form of kenotic emptying, as we talked about in an earlier essay. This is exercising a form of power and trying to impose something on the world.

But I’m getting sidetracked, because that’s not even the real problem being confronted here by Hauerwas. Instead, he is trying to get us to understand that the “tension is not between realized and unrealized, but between truth and illusion.” At its best, the Church is not trying to present an ideal to the world, nor is it trying to shape it. Remember Hauerwas’ maxim that the goal of the church is to make the world remember that it is the world? This is where that comes into focus in a real way. The Church is not trying to change the world. The Church is trying to make the world see itself more clearly for what it really is – namely, that it is not the Church, and cannot ever be, no matter how hard it tries.

That seems like a harsh judgment, and in some ways it is. But I have put the endpoint much earlier than expected. There is a method to work through to get to this conclusion.I want to wrestle through that reasoning here. Let’s back up. Hauerwas identified the tension created by our earlier question –  how can a church called to something as ineffective as Christian charity live into its calling to be the Good News to the poor, the hungry, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant? – as the tension between truth and illusion. The Church is “that community that trusts the power of truth and charity,” that is not built on the lie that power comes from strength, or wealth, or violence, but instead understands that power is found in the Truth and the love that testifies to that truth in every act of charity. 

The world, on the other hand, is built on a need for power borne out of a rejection of truth – namely, the truth about ourselves, about our mortality, our smallness, our sin, and our pride. We cannot stand the fact that in the end, we are all human beings who will grow old and die. We cannot stand this because we look at the others around us, and we see all the things in them that bug us, and we cannot face the fact that we are no different than them. And so, the way of the world is to build structures of power and violence and domination, lies that deceive us into thinking we are immortal, we are pure, we are better than the others. 

Obviously, it has been very easy for this worldview to infect Christians and the churches they build. I am reminded of this by a recent piece by Damon Linker, about the billionaire Peter Thiel, who incorporates a Christian veneer into his transhumanist, hyper-capitalist vision of the world he is trying to build through his wealth and the political and cultural power it commands. Linker writes, 

In Thiel’s view, recapturing civilizational greatness through scientific and technological achievement requires fostering a revival of a kind of Christian Prometheanism (a monotheistic variation on the rebellious creativity and innovation pursued by the demigod Prometheus in ancient Greek mythology). This is the subject of a remarkable short essay Thiel published in First Things magazine in 2015. Against those who portray modern scientific and technological progress as a rebellion against medieval Christianity, Thiel insists it is Christianity that encourages a metaphysical optimism about transforming and perfecting the world, with the ultimate goal of turning it into “a place where no accidents can happen” and the achievement of “personal immortality” becomes possible. All that’s required to reach this transhuman end is that we “remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.”

This is a terrifying bastardization of the Christian worldview, wielded in pursuit of a decidedly anti-Christian world: one where our mortality is denied, where progress and consumption has no end, where wealth solves the world’s hurts, where ideas like meekness, humility, foolishness, and humour have no place. This is a vision of God’s kingdom being achieved not through the work of God and the humility of humans, but through thoroughly human means. To quote Hauerwas again, this “world is exactly that which knows not the power of truth and thus must support its illusions with the power of the sword” – or the microchip, or the dollar, or the marketplace.

Thiel’s techo-Christianity is one that tries to deny the tension we began this essay talking about. Progress and growth requires the elimination of all tension and friction, in order to grease the rails for unlimited expansion and consumption and to maximize human potential, as potential is understood by modern capitalism. There is no room for tension, and in pursuit of this world that can be tightly controlled and shaped and predicted, all institutions that stand in opposition – or even who try to stand aside and not get on board – must be swept aside or be assimilated. The Church is too old and venerable an institution to eliminate, as well as too popular among the masses who our overlords like Thiel depend on for clicks and likes and views. Thus, it has to become part of the world they are shaping in their own image. So, as Thiel describes, the Church is no longer a place for us to confront human frailty and limitation, but as another arena for the pursuit of techno-perfectionism.

This is heresy. The Church is not a tool of Silicon Valley, or of American capitalism, or of nationalism, or of social justice, or of suburban amnesia. All these structures require a wiping away of that tension between Church and World, because that tension convicts them. The tension must be eliminated, and the Church must prove its effectiveness, its utility, its fealty to the powers that be.

But, as Hauerwas reminds us, “this is a tension that is not overcome, but rather is a characteristic of our lives.” The tension exists because, despite the best efforts of folks like Thiel and the dollars and powers they wield, humanity is flawed, and limited, and mortal, and weak, and there simply is no way to overcome that. It is a fact of reality. It is a Truth of existence. And it is a truth these powers cannot handle, for it undermines their pretensions of control and stability. “For none of us desire the truth about ourselves, and we will do almost anything to avoid it”, says Hauerwas. He goes on,

“Our social orders are built on our illusions and fantasies that are all the more subtle because they have taken the appearance of truth by becoming convention. Our only recourse, when such conventions are revealed as arbitrary, is to assert the absoluteness and protect them through the power offered by the state.”

So, people like Thiel sink innumerable wealth and influence into trying to take control of the state, in the hopes that the illusion of the people’s will can maybe protect and justify their flailing about in denial of their own impending death. Christians have no place in this farce. We cannot, and should not, give it the imprimatur of our approval by allying with these forces of evil, no matter what promises they make about protecting the Church, or our way of life, or America as a Christian nation, or racial purity, or whatever abstraction they seize on this week.

The inescapable reality of this tension between the church and world, however, does not mean Christians should all withdraw from the world and leave it to figure out its own hurts and injustices. Christ, after all, went into this world, and made clear declarations with his words and his deeds about it, and about how to live in it. What Hauerwas is doing with his ongoing critique of effectiveness is “attempting to remind us just how radical the Christian demand of charity is in terms of the Christian’s learning how to embody it in such a world.” What it means to be a Christian is so much more strange and radical than any of these worldly powers could ever conceive. They simply lack the imagination to envision a way of being that embraces brokenness and frailty and foolishness, and that turns those values into strategies for pulling up the weak and the forgotten and the disenfranchised. Again, the Church’s role in the world is to remind the world what it is by being what the Church is meant to be- namely, “the community that is shaped by the story that sustains charity in a world where it cannot be effective.” Thiel’s techno-utopianism sustains itself on maximal effectiveness. The Church rejects that strategy completely – not for the sake of ineffectiveness itself, but “because we must never delude ourselves that the justice of the state is what is required of us as people formed by God.”

I still haven’t answered that question we began this essay with: how can a church called to something as ineffective as Christian charity live into its calling to be the Good News to the poor, the hungry, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant? And I’m not going to here in this essay. Next time, we tackle justice and charity, and in those things, maybe we start to get a roadmap towards the How of this whole ineffective Christianity thing.