That one should avoid conversations of a political nature in polite company is something of a bromide in rural Indiana, the part of the country Taylor University calls home. If one is looking to keep relationships intact, the thinking seems to go, it is best to avoid discussion of “political” issues wherever possible. Considering the variety of conflagrations raging on university campuses in recent years over just these “political” issues—from the now-familiar quarrels over the exact nature of free speech on a university campus to the on-going reckoning with racial and gender hegemonies—the cliché begins to look increasingly like sagacity. Why, then, when attempting to re-examine and renew the unique calling of a Christian Liberal Arts institution like Taylor University, would we choose to introduce the stumbling block of “politics” into the discussion?
To answer that question, it is important to understand the thrust of James K. A. Smith’s Cultural Liturgies Project, of which the volume to be reviewed, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (2017), is the third and final installment. In the first volume, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (2009), Smith—the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview at Calvin College—sought to re-envision Christian education in light of an anthropological insight; namely, that humans are primarily lovers—creatures of desire—rather than thinkers or believers. Given that humans are fundamentally desiring agents, with desires that are shaped by the various liturgies in which they participate, Christian educational institutions should be intentional about the liturgies forming their common life and ultimately shaping their students.
Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (2013), the second volume in the series, contained a closer examination of the formative mechanism of these liturgical practices. Here, Smith focused on how rituals—because they are attentive to the bodily, visceral aspect of humans—are effective in shaping the desires of those who participate in them. Rituals both implicitly tell and are in turn shaped by some vision of reality, a narrative that “scaffolds” human experience. Smith again turned to the practical, suggesting that Christian worship, if it is to be effective in shaping people, must make use of embodied, liturgical practices that capture the imagination and inculcate the Christian narration of reality.
If Smith was, in part, addressing Christian education and Christian worship in the first two books of this series respectively, he shifts to focus on Christian engagement in public life in this third volume, Awaiting the King. Smith takes the anthropological insight and liturgical analysis of the first two volumes and works out the implications of his previous work for the relationship between Christians and the pluralistic societies in which most Western Christians find themselves.
Smith (2017) begins by arguing that common paradigms for Christian engagement in political life are based upon a misleading “spatialization” of Christianity and politics into two “spheres” or “realms,” between which the power dynamics and boundaries must be delineated and defended (p. 8). Accordingly, this spatialized paradigm has led to a number of deficient Christian accounts of politics, including a divvying up of “penultimate” matters to the sphere of “politics” and “ultimate” concerns to the sphere of “religion,” resulting in a withdrawal from the sphere of “politics” by religious peoples a la a certain version of the so-called “Benedict Option.” Drawing on the analyses of the first two volumes, Smith suggested that politics is not so much a “sphere” as “a repertoire of formative rites … a nexus of habit-forming practices that not only govern us but also form us” (p. 10). If Christianity is, at least in part, a particular narration of reality inculcated through a set of habit-forming practices—as argued by Smith previously—then the politics of the earthly city, he suggested, should be seen as an alternative set of practices, which are formative for those who participate in them and at least implicitly animated by an alternative narrative about reality and virtue.
In Awaiting the King, Smith argued that the “political” realm is not neutral in relation to “ultimate” concerns (Chapter 1), and that the Christian church inherently involves a “social imaginary,” a vision of the good that is inescapably social. Therefore, church involvement in public life flows naturally from that vision of the Kingdom of God inculcated by truly Christian worship (Chapter 2). Given that, according to Smith, “the state is religious and the church is political,” the relationship between the two cannot be a “division of labor” but must be a kind of “contest and rivalry” (p. 16). Therefore, the church must be engaged in public life, but cannot uncritically adopt the political institutions of the day. Rather, Smith encouraged an “engaged but healthy distance rooted in our specifically eschatological hope, running counter to progressivist hubris, triumphalistic culture wars, and despairing cynicism” (p. 16).
The rest of the book is dedicated to “discernment about how exactly to negotiate the collaboration and tensions between the heavenly and earthly cities” (p. 16). Chapter 3 examined specifically Christian contributions to liberal Western societies, and Chapter 4 tackled the thorny issue of Christianity’s relationship to Pluralism. “Natural Law” accounts of politics are the subject of Chapter 5, and Chapter 6 addressed the all too evident examples of the failures of Christianity in the public square. Smith concluded by offering some guidelines for Christian public engagement, suggesting that the specific character of the Christian social imaginary must be maintained through participation in Christian liturgical practice, but there may be times and places where temporary collaboration with non-Christian movements, peoples, and policies might be possible, though on specifically Christian grounds.
If Smith is right about the central argument of Awaiting the King, then our earlier question (why drag the nasty topic of politics into a conversation about Christian calling?) is revealed as misguided. Christian institutions of education, if they are to be faithful to the gospel and the inherently political vision of the Kingdom of God, will be unable to avoid discussions of the political. In the first instance, universities are themselves a sort of polis, or a people. As Smith noted:
…what unites a “people,” an “us,” is a project, something we’re after together. We collaborate in a common life insofar as we find goods to pursue in common; and we establish institutions, systems, and rhythms that reinforce the pursuit of those goods (pp. 10–11).
Thus, Christian higher education institutions reckon with the political whenever they seek to shape their common life, and especially when they do so by defining the common vision of the good—to be pursued in community—as outlined in the essays above.
More importantly, the vision of the good which Christian higher education institutions pursue involves the formation and preparation of students to engage in public life. If Christian colleges and universities are to be effective in their formation of students (another goal of Smith’s project), then these institutions will need to reckon with the type of engagement in public life for which they intend to prepare students. Are Christian universities hoping to produce students who resist the world of “politics” or students who convert the realm of the “political”? Or perhaps the aim is to produce the kind of engaged, yet alien residents Smith described. Clarity about the nature of Christian public engagement will be critical for effectively pursuing the goals of Christian higher education.
Finally, Christian higher education institutions are not removed from the political, whether they discuss politics or not. Christian colleges and universities both are shaped by the liturgies of politics and secular culture and act as agents of Christian engagement with the wider culture. Too many Christian colleges and universities lack a sense of their relationship to the earthly city, to use Smith’s (or rather Augustine’s) term. How are the cultural liturgies of political society competing to shape our students? How should Christian colleges and universities engage in the political realm? These questions are critical components of any Christian university’s understanding of its unique calling, and Awaiting the King is designed to help these institutions think carefully and clearly about these issues. What better book, then, to include in this theme issue?
Although we have made a case for the importance of this discussion in general and Smith’s book in particular, we leave the reviewers below to wrestle with these issues at greater depth. These reviewers come from a variety of locations, institutions, traditions, and positions. They engage Smith’s book from an array of perspectives, but each with the goal of gaining a clearer understanding of the calling of a Christian university in mind. Stacy Hammons is the University Provost and Chief Academic Officer at Indiana Wesleyan University. Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen serves as the Director of Faculty Development as well as a Professor of Psychology at Messiah College. Brad A. Lau is the Vice President for Student Life at George Fox University. Finally, Burt Burleson serves as the University Chaplain and Dean of Spiritual Life and Missions at Baylor University. Each of these reviewers offers their perspective on Awaiting the King, after which Smith has offered a response. In many circles, “politics” has become nearly synonymous with “divisive.” We hope the reader finds a discussion that is thoroughly political but nonetheless, or perhaps as a result, moves toward greater clarity regarding the eschatological vision of the good which ultimately unites us.