Hoping Against Hope in American Democracy

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Collin Hansen: When I met James Davison Hunter, it was 2016. I asked him about politics. He waved me off and told me to think less about the weather and more about the climate. And it was a lesson that I’ve never forgotten. When Dr. Hunter’s newest book, *Democracy and Solidarity on the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis*, published by Yale, Hunter gives us a climate report that explains why our weather has been so severe.

Hunter is the LeBrosse-Levison Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory and Executive Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. As usual, Hunter gives us a detailed exploration of the deep structures of culture, by which he means the tacit assumptions and latent frameworks of meaning embedded within the structures of social life. That’s really an academic way of saying that we don’t share common political ground because we no longer share a common view of a good society. When we look back on the founding of the United States, we find no legal religious establishment, but Christian faith and morals still provided a cultural establishment that gave solidarity to democracy, but no longer. But neither does the Enlightenment give us that solidarity today. Without solidarity from Christianity or the Enlightenment, we can’t assume the vitality or longevity of liberal democracy. We don’t have the cultural resources to work through what divides us, Dr. Hunter argues. The left wants justice, the right wants nostalgia, but their intensity of longing for an ideal world is redirected, Dr. Hunter argues, into fury against the present, a fury channeled into the demand to purge, dismantle, deconstruct, and negate. Thus, the only moral authority left is rage against injury and its perpetrators. Dr. Hunter joins me now on *Gospelbound* to see if in this environment we can still hope against hope. Dr. Hunter, thank you for joining me.

James Davison Hunter: My pleasure, Collin. Thanks for having me.

Collin Hansen: Now, how would you say that your story about the crisis of American democracy differs from others? Because certainly in many ways, especially since 2021, we’ve heard a lot about this. How is your work different?

James Davison Hunter: So, a simple way of putting it is that most people who are trying to read the signs of the times and especially the signs of our political moment and the crisis that I think is apparent to everyone see that crisis and the crisis of democracy, not only in the United States, but in the Western world and beyond. They see it through the lens of political science.

Collin Hansen: Right.

James Davison Hunter: They see the problem as a problem of access to voting, to how one counts votes, to the gerrymandering of congressional districts and the politics behind those kinds of things. They see it, in other words, in technical terms that if we just fix this part or that part of our political institutions, our political practices, our political rituals that take place every two years, every four years, in a presidential cycle, if we can just fix those things, then we can fix the crisis of democracy. If we can just fix some of the institutions and how they run and their tendencies toward corruption, then we can solve the problem. Another version of this, of course, and a more simple version of this is that there is no crisis of democracy other than the one that the other side has created. And so if we just eliminate the other side, disempower the other side, the crisis disappears. I think this view that the heart of the crisis of our political moment is a problem that’s best seen through political science is naive. What I’m arguing essentially is that there is a history and a sociology that our political science, that there are other factors that a narrow technical political science view cannot grasp. And in particular, I argue that there is a culture that underwrites American democracy, it underwrites Western democracy, though it varies in different national contexts. And until we understand the cultural antecedents that our politics and the crisis taking place at that level, we’re not going to really grasp the full measure of the crisis that we’re in. That there is no really simple technical solution to the problems we face. The problems that we face are actually far deeper and far more rooted in our political culture and in the culture of American society more broadly.

Collin Hansen: This book, *Democracy in Solidarity*, is the bookend to your landmark 1991 book, *Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America*. What do you mean by calling it a bookend?

James Davison Hunter: Well, when I wrote *Culture Wars*, I wrote it somewhat naively. Even after the book came out, I didn’t really fully understand the implications of the analysis that I had offered. For most of the 20th century, the concepts of left and right and the conflict between left and right spoke to a conflict that was mainly operating within the framework of social class. It was primarily about political economy. It was a conflict between the working class and the corporate class, a corporate and managerial class. It was a conflict between business interests and the interests of labor unions. For most of the 20th century, that’s how we understood the concepts of left and right. But in the last third to the last quarter of the 20th century, we began to see this change, conflicts that we actually had never seen before over family values, over sexuality, over issues of gender, conflicts over church and state. Though church and state issues had been alive for a long time, they were intensifying. Conflicts over the public funding of the arts.

So all of these kind of discrete conflicts were emerging and I saw these things taking place and I was trying to understand where did they come from and what was at stake and certainly on the surface it was a conflict between left and the right but it didn’t resemble anything like the left and the right of most of the conflict of most of the 20th century. It was around these cultural issues. And so it all came together for me in a particular moment early, and I talk about this early in the book *Culture Wars*, where I read about a protest at an abortion clinic in Midtown Manhattan.

And in attendance at that protest were a dozen or so evangelical ministers. There was a monsignor, a bishop, several priests, and several nuns. And there were Orthodox rabbis. And if you know anything about Western history, you know something about the importance of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism in shaping our politics. It was violent, it was persistent, and yet here on the streets of New York, rabbis, priests, and nuns, and evangelical ministers were locking arms in common cause against abortion.

Collin Hansen: It signified something really interesting and something new and something that no one had ever seen before. It almost sounds like a joke, the beginning of a joke, Protestant, Catholic, and Jew,

James Davison Hunter: But what was interesting was not just that they were coming together in common cause, they were coming together in ways that they showed greater solidarity, greater unity than they did with those in their own tradition, but on the other side of the cultural divide. So liberal Protestants, progressive Catholics, and reform and secular Jews also shared more in common with each other than the conservative members of their own traditions. And this represented a new axis of conflict. And what I realized was that what was uniting the conservative members of each of these traditions and the progressive members of each of these traditions was the issue of moral authority. How do we know what is the good society? How do we know what is the good life? And the Orthodox tradition in Judaism, the conservative tradition in Catholicism, and the evangelical and fundamentalist tradition in Protestantism all came together in a recognition that the source of the good, the source of the standards by which we measure a good society and a good life are transcendent. They may have distinct sources, but they are all recognized as coming from above. And what all of the progressive members of those traditions shared in common was a belief that moral authority, spiritual authority is something that is generated within our society or within ourselves, our subjectivity. It was culture that was dividing people in these, on these various issues. And indeed, when you look at the data on those people who are strongly pro-life across the board, it is people who are from these conservative theological traditions. So this was something new and I was just trying to get my hands around it. And I spent 15 years engaged in debate with colleagues in political science and sociology who said, listen, there is no culture war. It’s just some fringe extremists who are protesting. Well, they’re not saying that now. The conflict has continued for many decades now and it will continue into the future.

Collin Hansen: But even as it’s continued, it has evolved. So a big part of this book is, or one part of this book is to try to tell the story of what has happened since that first book, how it’s evolved, why it has evolved in the ways that it has evolved. And most importantly, in light of the larger picture of this book, what are the political implications of this? One of the interesting conclusions that I make is that the problem in American society today and the problem of our politics is not polarization, at least not polarization per se. I would argue that one of the major problems that we face today is simply the absence of cultural resources that would bind us together in spite of and across our differences. American society has faced conflict, internal conflict before, but there was always something like a glue that would hold us together and that’s largely been lost.

James Davison Hunter:

Well, I think that it describes so well what many people feel but can’t articulate. They can’t describe exactly how things have changed or why things have changed even though they feel what they’ve changed. And part of because of the gradual evolution. Let’s talk about another evolution in here. Fifteen years ago, you published another landmark book, *To Change the World*.

Collin Hansen: Yes, that’s right. Has anything evolved since you published that book? I’m wondering specifically whether or how your central thesis of faithful presence holds through everything we’ve seen in those last 15 years. In particular, what I have in mind would be the rise of social media, more broadly, the spread of adoption from the internet and smartphones and related to that, a resurgent political populism that seems to be connected in certain ways. So help us to see how things evolved the last 15 years, how does *To Change the World* apply in this cultural moment.

James Davison Hunter: Well, I wrote the book in To Change the World for many reasons, but one of them was that there were many Christian leaders speaking authoritatively about how to engage the world and change the world. And they were writing with a great deal of authority from positions of great prominence. And it was clear that they didn’t know what they were talking about. They didn’t understand the nature and dynamics of social, cultural, and historical change. And so one of the motivations was to provide clarity about those very elusive, almost invisible dynamics of change. But another motivation, of course, was to try to speak into the moment in ways that would provide clarity about the political dimensions of this. So many Christian leaders, prominent Christian leaders were in response to the culture war believed that the best way to engage the culture and to change the culture is to become, well, it is to mobilize the church as an actor within the culture war to become culture warriors. And I wanted to show that this is exactly how not to change the culture that in fact, the kind of political engagement that Christians, especially evangelical and fundamentalist ministries were engaging the culture would probably have the exact opposite effect. Since I published that book in 2010, I would say that the descriptions I offered then are even more true today. I don’t think that the church has now and its public witness in any case has really dug its heels into a kind of political antagonism toward the left.

James Davison Hunter: Since then it is no longer even trying to justify theologically its engagement. Back in the early, in the late 1980s, well during the 1980s and 1990s, Christians were very eager to try to justify their engagement with the culture, political culture, in ways that were biblically sound. They’re not even trying to do that now. Populism has always been a part of American evangelicalism, a distrust of authority, a distrust of hierarchy. And I think that tendency has continued to intensify since I published that book over 30 years ago. And I think the other thing that has really changed quite a bit, not only since I wrote *Culture Wars*, but also since I had published *To Change the World*, is that in the early years of the culture war, it was mainly about culture. Since the Great Recession in 2008 and ‘09, the culture war has now become a class/culture war. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are not only marginalized culturally, theologically, they’re also marginalized economically. And it is that marginalization, that comprehensive marginalization that I believe Donald Trump has understood very well and whose resentments I think he has articulated in ways that average evangelicals can’t articulate. He has a platform that very few evangelicals have.

James Davison Hunter: And as a consequence, evangelical and fundamentalist ministers, as well as Catholics, see great hope in the message that he delivers, even if that hope is rooted in anger and resentment and bitterness.

Collin Hansen: You observe that in the mid-19th century, evangelical Christianity was the center of public culture. One of the things I wrote about in my recent book on Tim Keller was trying to help people to see that it was only so long ago as the early 20th century. Well, first of all, the 19th century, where New York City was the evangelical capital, the early 19th century, where, 25% of people on the Upper East Side of Manhattan were evangelical Christians. So that seems like a long time ago to people. It really isn’t. But jump forward to our day, it feels quite different. You’re speaking of claims on public and political life of our nation. You say that explicit Christian faith and ethics have been absent. Quote, it’s most serious theologians and most thoughtful pastors silent. They found themselves outside the boundaries of the cultural mainstream for the first time. End quote. What would you say faithful presence looks like then today for theologians and pastors?

James Davison Hunter: Well, there are at least two things that come to mind. The first thing to say by way of background is that we are definitively living in a post-Christian world. And the reason why I want to emphasize what I think is just obvious is that I don’t think that is obvious. I think many conservative Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, want to believe that the culture war is really about the possibility of re-establishing Christianity as the cultural heartbeat of the nation and that’s not possible. And I could go into some detail about that but it’s simply not possible. What’s even more interesting to me is that we’re not just in a post-Christian world right now, never to be to return to, because sacred history is never repeats itself. But we’re also in a post-enlightenment world, increasingly post-enlightenment world.

James Davison Hunter: And that means that in a post-enlightenment world there is no agreement, not only on what is true, but that there is such a thing as the truth. We, a post-enlightenment world, we not only disagree about the nature of the good, we even dispute whether there is such a thing as the good. The same with beauty, and so the consequence of being both post-Christian and post-enlightenment, I believe we are increasingly in a world that is post-liberal. And I mean that philosophically, not in a political and partisan way. That liberalism is a tradition, a political tradition that valorizes freedom and the sovereignty of individuals and the public to rule their own affairs democratically and to do so through reasoned argument and reasoned debate. That’s what liberalism is in terms of a political philosophy.

And all of those hallmarks are rapidly disappearing if they haven’t already entirely disappeared. And so the question about what does faithful presence look like? Well, for one, it means that politics is not going to provide a solution to the problems that many Christians see are hurting the world.

James Davison Hunter: It’s a false solution. It’s simply you cannot power your way to a place of justice, to a place of care and of love, which of course is what the gospel is all about. It’s not that there aren’t legal battles worth having, but we’re not going to fix the problems of the world through politics.

And so faithful presence, I think, means that we should hold politics at least at arm’s length. It’s not that we shouldn’t be engaged responsibly in politics, but recognize that at best it has limited benefits, even if you’re wildly successful.

And there again, are just copious number of illustrations of why this is the case. I think the second thing that faithful presence means in this context is a recognition that public life and political life are two different things, that there are ways in which Christians can gauge the world around them publicly and that reflect the best practices of the Christian faith and of the Christian church through history that are not merely reducible to power politics and then politics if it is anything it is about the administration of power and the power of the state is a power of coercion so it is by its very nature if not corrupt, it is corruptible. So recognizing that the church has ways of engaging the world that are faithful to its own tradition.

And that provide, if you will, a cultural apologetic, even before a biblical and soteriological apologetic, is those opportunities are wide open to the church. So at the very least, it means those things.

There’s a third area that I’ve been thinking about a lot since the book came out in 2010, and that has to do with vocation and the ways in which not just individual vocation, but collective vocational spheres can engage the world in ways that reflect the flourishing promised in the coming kingdom. And so to me, this is a moment of opportunity for the church. I think it is an opportunity for the church to become the church again. I do think that politics is a distraction. I think that politicization of the church’s grievances is deeply corrupting. And I also think that it will accomplish very little of what Christians and the churches that support these agendas actually aspire to. I think it’s counterproductive.

Collin Hansen: I think in case viewers and listeners are not aware, the work that we do at the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics is deeply indebted to your work, not only through your longtime friendship with Tim Keller, our namesake, but also through my own work as the executive director over the years. You frame very well exactly how we’re trying to help so many pastors and other ministry leaders to shift, to focus on those deeper cultural apologetics and not those weather reports of our political engagement in there. Indeed, in part because many times that political engagement is superficial, but many times the damage it does to the church is far deeper. And again, endless historical examples of this. And also, there’s a temptation to misunderstand exactly what’s happening in our moment by fixating on the post-Christian element of it. As you said earlier, we missed the post-Enlightenment version of it.

And you describe in Democracy and Solidarity the Enlightenment this way, that the standards of truth, justice, and rationality were universal and therefore generally available to all reasonable persons.

One of the things that we talk about often at the Keller Center is how one of the major problems with the transition from Christian to Enlightenment to post -Christian, post -Enlightenment, is how Christian values were rewritten as naturalism, or as you describe it in the book, as a secular hope. Now, there’s a warning in Democracy in Solidarity, and amid a lot of high-level, highly engaged, highly informed academic discourse, you’ll have these very bracing short statements. For example, in the book you write, quote, if solidarity cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed coercively. And Dr. Hunter, do you see that coercion already happening or is this a warning?

James Davison Hunter: Yes, it’s already happening and it is very likely to intensify. But let me just unpack that statement very briefly. All institutions require solidarity. A family requires agreement. requires a glue that holds the family unit together. And in dysfunctional families, what holds it together is often fear. hopefully in most families and in Christian families, the hope is that what will bind a family together is love and mutual care and the common project of raising children and so on. But that’s just an obvious case. A church requires solidarity, requires some common agreements, certainly over issues of creedal truth, theological truth, but also the practices of the Christian faith of how a church is going to deal with dissent and so on. Otherwise, a church is not possible. It’s not governable. This is true all the way up, a corporation, a business. It’s also true in a nation state. It is reflected in the nation’s motto, e pluribus unum, that out of many, there is one.

That was not just a description of the empirical reality. It was an aspiration. The founders of the American Republic recognized that the nation would evolve. It would become more complicated. They’d never imagined in a million years how diversified it would become, how complicated it would become. But the aspiration was that out of all of that complexity, there would still be something that binds the nation together. you know, in the founding documents, you would hear, read and hear the language. We hold these truths to be self-evident. They were so obvious to everyone.

They would form the foundations of some common understanding. That is, I tell the story, the largest part of this book tells the story of how that common culture rooted in what I call the hybrid enlightenment has evolved over a period of a couple of centuries, but also how in the last 40 to 50 years, how it is also disintegrated and why there is such little adhesive left to bind us together. So, in the absence of any coherent way of binding a society together, and it’s not just, you know, formal, rational agreements about the nature of the Constitution. It’s about the love of a nation. It’s about the commons, the sense of a common project and so on. Yeah, a common story. Without that, a nation is ungovernable. So without an organic solidarity that is cultivated generation after generation, solidarity will be imposed coercively.

In the current moment that we live in, we are in a stalemate and I don’t see any end to that stalemate in any time in the near future. In fact, given that, I would say that faithful presence, to answer, to wrap around to an earlier question that you asked Colin, I think faithful presence calls us to lean into the imaginative resources of Scripture as well as historically orthodox theology and the practices of the church and its best moments, for ways forward that reflect not only the love and worship of God, but also the uncompromising love of our neighbor. And I think that requires imagination.

And I believe that faithful presence calls us to that kind of imaginative work and ultimately translation into practice.

Collin Hansen: An alternate proposal that has gained quite a bit of momentum you talk about in the book would be the Catholic integralism as well as Protestant theocracy. I was just doing a recent show on NPR and this was one of the questions that I received. Some of the readers of your book may or may not, I’m not sure if they know that there are very highly placed elites, professors at the top schools who are advocating these views.

Help us understand the appeal of those offerings at this moment when we’re in a post -Christian environment. That was part of the question that I received was, well, if in such a post -Christian environment, why are people calling for a Christian takeover of the government? My response was, that’s exactly why they’re calling for it, because it’s not plausible. But perhaps you could explain more of the appeal.

James Davison Hunter: That’s right. I describe the culture war. I know it can sound very academic and I hope it isn’t too academic, it’s… I try to use language very carefully in everything that I say and write. And a word that is important is the word hegemony. And hegemony essentially just means domination. A comprehensive domination.

And I describe the culture war as competing hegemonic projects. Each side of the culture war strives and aspires to total comprehensive domination.

And once again, if one can’t generate that from the ground up, then the only alternative is to impose it from the top down. And so in the strategies that have been employed by many Christians in the culture war for the past 30 to 40 years, who believed that Christians could win the culture war simply by mobilizing voters on behalf of the Republican Party or on behalf of conservative social issues like abortion or gay rights and so on , which is a bottom up strategy. It’s an organic strategy. I think there has been the recognition that that won’t work. We are locked in a stalemate between these two hegemonic projects. And so if that’s the case, then how do you win? How do you gain domination? And the Catholic integralist project, as well as the Protestant theocratic project are very similar projects insofar as they believe in elite takeover. And particularly takeover of political institutions, but also of cultural institutions as well. 

The Catholic integralists are very, very smart people. I mean, these are really sharp, well -educated people and they make very careful arguments.

And I admire the quality of their thought. I don’t admire their agenda because it’s an agenda that is only about power and it doesn’t speak to the complexity of the church itself. It’s basically the role of the church is to simply get behind Christian elites in the effort to take over the dominant institutions of our society.

Collin Hansen: So, that would not be faithful presence.

James Davison Hunter: It would not. Because the call of faithful presence is to everyone in the church, whatever their station is, or whatever station they are being called by God to. And that could be the construction site, it can be the home, it can be the community parish, it can be the law office, the business office, the hospital. It is everywhere.

Collin Hansen: Yeah.

James Davison Hunter: And the call of faithful presence is a call upon all Christians to be faithful within whatever sphere God has called them to be and not just to the political sphere in a bid for

Collin Hansen: My own preferred agenda plan and a political vision is localism, deeply influenced by Tocqueville. Sounds like you’ve got quite a bit of skepticism toward that view. But in terms of the ability of small cultures to be able to resist the larger assimilation. So, you know, I tend to commend people that in light of these major challenges, we should be focusing on being faithfully present in vocation, church, community, family. Help the listeners and viewers understand why you think localism is, don’t know, try to summarize you perhaps maybe naive about our ability to hold out. How would you, what would you say?

James Davison Hunter: Well, I’m for localism as well, actually. I think that’s where most of the action is. Because I don’t believe that the call of the Christian is to take over the country or to take over the West. I think that the call of God on Christians and upon the church is to be broken on behalf of a broken world and to care and love our neighbor as acts of love and worship to God himself. And so I don’t think that, I think that mainly manifests itself in local settings. So I’m all for the local. 100% behind these initiatives.

I do, however, believe that local initiatives have a very difficult time.

in our historical moment, scaling up in ways that in fact can be transformative of the nation as a whole. And the reason is that the cultural logics that are at play in local environments, face -to -face interaction, the time to listen, the time to provide for, the time to care for our neighbors, this hard work, it’s slow work. It’s work that may not see success in some kind of worldly way. In the public realm, at the national level, and at the level of national institutions, There’s a very different cultural logic at play. Social media, which did not create the culture war, but it has intensified it, operates on profit motive.

It operates on a kind of cultural sensationalism, the desire to titillate your audience. And these are used as tools to mobilize anger and rage and to deepen frustration. They are not oriented toward deep understanding, towards nuance, towards complexity in which the local environment requires. I’m all for the local, but we should be careful to imagine that it will be easy to scale up those initiatives at a national level. There’s just too much money at stake and too much sort of celebrity power that’s involved at that national level to compete. 

Collin Hansen: I wonder, Dr. Hunter, if perhaps a good paradigm of what you’re commending would be the work of one of your longtime colleagues at UVA. That would be Jonathan Haidt and his work on smartphones. Because that is both a grassroots effort recognizing that he had to focus on convincing families, parents to protect their children. But at the same time, then he had to broaden that to be able to get school districts to come together around this and communities. And he worked very closely with religious communities, including us at the Gospel Coalition on this work, which was work of unimpeachable scholarship in terms of the very careful studies. And then finally, pushing for what we’re seeing this year, a very successful national media blitz engaging with the highest levels of elite media.

James Davison Hunter: Yeah, that’s right.

Collin Hansen: Looking for solutions that will come in part through political support of the local initiatives that are already being in play, put in place. Am I off base in that description?

James Davison Hunter: Yeah, you’re not off at all. No, this is a bottom up and a top down strategy. You know, and to change the world, I emphasize the importance of leadership and the top down and why that matters so much.

It has the hope and the possibility of success where other initiatives don’t precisely because it’s operating not only from the bottom up, but also from the top down. And it recognizes the power of these institutions and it’s well known. You know this, many Americans do know this, that the titans of these social media companies and the leadership of these new communications technologies protect their own children from the use of smartphones and social media because they understand precisely how destructive it is not only to society but to the child’s formation. And it’s not just children. Sociologists will tell you that formation is something that happens throughout the course of life.

James Davison Hunter: And adults are not any less immune or more immune than children. So, you know, a former student of mine by the name of Felicia Wu Song has written a spectacularly important book called Restless Devices. And she is a very thoughtful Christian person, she wrote this for a Christian audience, but she too, like Jonathan and you at the Gospel Coalition, understand just how destructive these technologies can be. Yes, they do some social good, we know that, but most of the things of modernity are this required. And we’ve lost some of that. We just think that the new is the better. But that’s a book I would highly commend. If you haven’t interviewed her, I hope you do sometime soon.

Collin Hansen: I have that book somewhere in a pile and now I need to go retrieve it over a year. I appreciate

James Davison Hunter: Yeah, yeah, she’s really, really smart about these things and thoughtful in ways that your audience, think, would appreciate.

Collin Hansen: I have just a couple more questions here with James Davison Hunter talking about his book, Democracy in Solidarity on the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, published by Yale University Press. We could go, I mean, in a book like this, and my interest that our viewers and listeners are familiar with at Gospelbound, they know that we could talk forever about this. We’re grateful for the time that you’ve given. let’s just cover a couple quick things here. This is a big concept, but you talk about and you go through so much of history. But I thought you were especially insightful talking about the linguistic innovations of progressives in recent years. Politically correct speech codes, how they undermine solidarity in our democracy. Could you describe briefly the shift from framing politics as ideology to identity?

You’ve alluded to it earlier in this conversation, but I think it’s such a major concept that people overlook. But in some of the recent work I’ve been doing on Tim Keller’s engagement with politics, I think it’s vitally important for people to understand how he pushed back against these identity-based politics. But it’s how he became so criticized, in part because of how identity -based politics have captivated the right. Not just the left, but also the right.

James Davison Hunter: Yeah, that’s right. Well, all politics today and not only nationally and of course across the cultural divide, not only is that dominated by identity politics. But it’s also true internationally. What Vladimir Putin is doing and his justification for his incursion into the Ukraine is a manifestation of identity politics, as is so much of what is going on in Israel and in the Palestinian territories that surround it. So identity politics is the dominant form of politics in our age. It’s also, identity politics is also present in the American past. In the middle of the 19th century, feminism found its roots within evangelical Christianity. The leading feminists were very thoughtful, serious biblical Christians.

And of course, the politics of race, the politics of the African American minority was a form of identity politics. But here’s the difference. The identity politics of the past was always oriented toward being enfranchised into the larger American project. Even when women politically were disenfranchised and blacks were disenfranchised, their grievance was about that they were not being included in the larger American project. It was all oriented toward being enfranchised into the unum of American society.

Today, identity politics takes shape in the opposite way. Identity politics emerges in opposition to anyone who is not in 100 % supportive of the agenda and the identities of those who have their grievances. so identity politics is now rooted in what I call the cultural logics of resentment or ressentiment more technically. It is a narrative of injury that is in its form is the same among conservative Christians as it is among feminists or among many gay rights groups in which it’s a story of injury, it’s a story of woundedness and that that woundedness is caused by an abstract enemy and that the ethics that emerges from that is an ethics of revenge against that enemy. So it’s not oriented toward forgiveness. It’s not oriented toward resolution or reconciliation. It’s oriented towards sustaining an image of an enemy. Sustaining that image of the enemy as an enemy and therefore maintaining a culture that only has one outcome and that is revenge toward that enemy. That’s a recipe when you have so many groups that are defining themselves over against the oppressive forces of one’s enemy and there’s no outlet, there’s no mechanism by which to move beyond it.

James Davison Hunter: It’s a recipe for essentially a kind of cultural anarchy. You cannot find any kind of common ground. is ultimately oriented toward… Well, I’m not sure it’s ultimately oriented. I’m not sure it’s intended this way. But its outcome is the destruction of any notion of a common project. And, you know, so…

What it really means is that the only way in which one can resolve one’s grievances is through the destruction of those who caused that grievance to begin.

Collin Hansen: Now, similarly to a lot of the things that are mitigating against solidarity, I just wanted to add that you talk about social media as epistemic anarchy with nearly infinite multiplication of sources of information. I gotta say, that’s probably the thing that more than anything else keeps me up at night, because as you’ve been saying here, it’s not simply an ideology, but also a technology and then a profit motive that are pushing against solidarity from the highest levels. And no wonder then our politics is really downstream from a lot of those bigger, bigger forces. I think about all this and I conclude, and I’m wondering, how do you hope against hope? I would say much of the book feels dark. I don’t mind that because I think that there’s light in seeing reality.

You do call for a paradigm shift in the book, and I wanted to give you a chance to conclude on that note, and I’ll read a quote from you in the end. You say that this paradigm shift would, recognize that the most serious culture war we face is not against the other side, but against the nihilism that insinuates itself in the symbolic, institutional, and practical patterns of the late modern world, not least its politics. So, Dr. Hunter, do you still hope against hope?

James Davison Hunter: Well, I believe that despair is a sin. what is a Christian believer, one must always hope. But I also make a distinction between optimism and pessimism on the one hand and hope and despair on the other. And I believe that there’s ample justification to be pessimistic about our moment and the dynamics that are at work in our moment and the hope that we could find a way forward. We are not going to find a way forward though through the kind of pitch battles of the culture war. They are animated on each side, left and right, by, by a nihilism to simply diminish, marginalize, or eliminate the opposition. I think both sides have come to that conclusion that there is no way forward unless the other side is marginalized, diminished or eliminated altogether. So how do we move beyond? I think that we live in a moment in. Again, the imaginative resources of the biblical tradition and of Christian theology and Christian practice need to be tapped and worked through to help us imagine a way forward. And I think that in a way, faithful presence is a biblically serious, theologically serious response to the culture. 

James Davison Hunter: But one of the things that I think is most discouraging right now, and it’s a term that I use throughout the book, it’s a German term called Dorschwerbheiten, and it means working through, a willingness to work through our differences. Democracy, whatever else it is, is a commitment not to kill each other over our differences, but to work through them in serious and substantive discourse and conversation. We don’t do that anymore and I don’t see that Christians are any more willing to do that than anyone on the progressive side either. And so it’s important that we not give up what is a nonviolent strategy that is entirely in keeping with the biblical tradition to engage those who we see as opponents. so that’s a very simple step. A second step, it seems to me, is that we need to reimagine leadership. Our leadership class in so many of our leading institutions is third rate, and they are not providing. It’s generally predicated on a celebrity model of leadership. It’s about clicks, it’s about views. Again, it’s motivated by certain market incentives. And at the end of the day, that’s not the kind of leadership we need. We need a leadership that is courageous and thoughtful. And that’s the kind of leadership that I think Tim Keller not only advocated but embodied himself. So there are a few, in our, again, in most of the institutions that we inhabit, it’s the exception to the rule.

Collin Hansen: Something we can certainly take to the Lord in prayer after reading this book, and I trust that many people will, that they will read, reflect, pray, and act in accordance with what they’ve learned here. My guest on Gospel Bound has been James Davison Hunter. The book is Democracy in Solidarity on the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, published by Yale University Press. Dr. Hunter, thank you very much.

James Davison Hunter: Thanks, Collin.