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Introduction

Disillusionment with liberal democracy is widespread throughout the North Atlantic world. What began as a series of upheavals at the grassroots level (the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, the alt-right and Black Lives Matter) has captured electoral politics in the United States (Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders) and Europe (Nigel Farage/Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon) and has generated a right-wing populist wave around the world (Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, and Jair Bolsonaro). The dream of a triumphal liberal democratic order, prophesied by Francis Fukuyama in 1989, is faltering, dealt a series of devastating blows by the events of the past several years.1 It is not only that the end of history has not arrived, but that we are experiencing a near-universal breakdown of stable political consensus with little sense of what lies ahead. The most fitting way to characterize our political situation is to invoke Antonio Gramsci’s notion of an “interregnum,” which describes a scene in which an old order is dying but a new one has yet to be born.2

In view of this scene of generalized crisis, several pressing questions emerge. What has caused this political and cultural upheaval? Does this fatigue with liberal democracy portend the emergence of populist authoritarianism as a dominant political form? Do there exist plausible alternatives to both democracy in its liberal form as well as authoritarian populism?

In the United States, this crisis was generated by the confluence of a set of mutually amplifying forces. The autopsies given in response to the rise of Trumpism have converged around two interpretative positions that offer competing analyses of its genesis.

The first interpretation posits that the recent ascendancy of authoritarian populism in the United States was driven by economic anxiety created by a series of economic convulsions and neoliberal reforms since the late 1970s. As Thomas Piketty argued in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the brief period of relative postwar equality—itself an aberration in the history of capitalism—has dissolved over the past forty years and given way to an era of extreme inequality.3 The dual processes of deindustrialization and globalization produced a new relation between capital and labor, deregulation led to the financialization of capitalism, and austerity measures restricted the state’s welfare functions. These overlapping economic-political transformations empowered capital, dispossessed the poor, and created a pervasive sense of insecurity among the working class in the United States. Trump appealed to these insecurities at a rhetorical level—and it appears exclusively at a rhetorical level—by promising his voters economic protection through the rejection of new trade deals (TPP) or the renegotiation of old ones (NAFTA), the restoration of economic security by bringing back jobs lost to globalization (coal and steel), and by building a wall at the US-Mexico border to protect (white) Americans from those who threaten their economic security (Mexicans/Latinxs).4 The data suggests that Trump’s populist pitch was effective at appealing to those communities most devastated by neoliberal restructuring over the past forty years. For example, where in 2016 Hillary Clinton won only 472 counties, Trump won 2,584 counties. However, while Clinton’s counties accounted for 64 percent of the aggregate share of the United States’ GDP, Trump’s counties accounted for only 36 percent of the GDP.5

The second interpretation, often offered as an alternative to “economic anxiety” as an explanation for emergent forms of authoritarian populism in the United States, points to racism as the primary motivation. Trump, of course, is not unique in his political appeal to racial resentments. Politicians employed the dog-whistle racism of the Southern strategy after the civil rights movement as a means of appealing to disaffected whites.6 Trump intensified the strategies of Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton by running an amplified dog-whistle—a virtual foghorn—campaign that assembled racial resentments around a renewed focus on “law and order” and the attendant call to imprison, expel, or eliminate those populations that pose security threats to the United States. Trump described the cause of Americans’ insecurity in racialized terms by invoking fear about Muslim, Latinx, and African-American populations and offered public policies to discipline these populations: a ban on citizens of certain countries from entering the United States (the “Muslim ban”), increased activity around mass deportations and the restriction of funding to sanctuary cities, and a renewed effort to combat “urban crime.”7 Trump’s bold appeal to racialized resentments was stunningly successful. Eighty percent of Trump’s support was white, and several studies have established a strong correlation between racial resentment toward minoritized populations and support for Trump in 2016.8

The narratives about “economic anxiety” and “racial resentment” both possess an explanatory power, but neither is convincing on its own. The loss of economic power and the loss of cultural status do not function as two separate stories, but rather as two parts of the same story in which some Americans feel that the America into which they were born is being replaced with another America.9 This explains the rhetorical power of Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” which simultaneously invokes the restoration of economic security and cultural power to white Americans. And while there is also some evidence that fatigue over the war on terror was a contributing factor in the United States, ultimately, as with European populism, economic anxiety and racial resentment serve as the primary drivers.10

In the face of this type of emergent political formation, what is to be done? Is the task of the left to defend the norms of liberal democracy and the dominant political order against its authoritarian critics? Or should the left view this crisis as an opportunity to push democracy beyond its liberal frame toward more radical futures? The center-left and center-right have argued that the best that can be done is to hold the center. A wave of analyses has been produced that suggest that the most urgent task is to uphold the norms of liberal democracy (despite its historical entanglement with predatory capitalism, militarism, colonialism, and racial and gendered hierarchies). Those who embrace this strategy argue that authoritarian populism is too dangerous a political threat to do anything other than to preserve the liberal political order.11

In his work on the rise of “authoritarian populism” under Thatcher and Reagan, Stuart Hall suggests that we draw an entirely different lesson from political crises of this sort. Not dissimilar from our situation, the late 1970s and early 1980s were a period of upheaval in which an old order was unraveling but a new political hegemony had yet to take hold. Similar to Trump, Thatcher and Reagan utilized race, immigration, and crime as “ideological conductor[s]” to generate a “conservative backlash” against the democratic socialist/New Deal political orders. They assembled a new hegemony by stitching together racialized discourses about crime and security threats, nationalism, and neoliberal assaults on the welfare state to reconstruct the political field. The response on the left was reactive and failed to develop a political vision responsive to shifting cultural and political dynamics. The left assumed that the working class would naturally see their interests reflected in the Labour platform and did little to contest the new political formation on the right or to build a new coalition in response to it. Thatcher’s observation that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair and New Labour demonstrates the scope of the hegemony established by the right during this period. Clinton and Blair made the judgment that working within the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony established by Thatcher and Reagan was the only winning strategy during that time. As a result, the left was reduced to airing moralistic critiques of Thatcher (e.g., “Isn’t she a cow?”12) instead of engaging in the difficult work of comprehending the cultural and political dynamics that made her brand of authoritarian populism possible. We find a similar pattern in response to Trump in which criticism often focuses on his public persona—his impulsiveness, political incorrectness, and crude bigotry—rather than the underlying structural dynamics that make his style of authoritarian populism attractive to many Americans.

As in Hall’s time, one of the central questions in our time is whether the left will continue to react to the provocations of Trump or if it will generate a substantive analysis of the dynamics of the hegemony on the right and offer an alternative to it. This task has been taken up by a variety of thinkers on the left for whom the present political task cannot be defined exclusively by the attempt to uphold the norms of the established political order. In different ways, Nancy Fraser, Wendy Brown, Chantal Mouffe, and William Connolly maintain that the left’s embrace of centrism and its attempt to manage the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony more progressively created the conditions that led to our current political crisis.13 Accordingly, they contend that the constructive political task is to offer a radical approach to democracy that presents a real alternative to both neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony as well as the mutation of this hegemony into new forms of authoritarian populism.

Radical democracy is inclusive of a number of different theoretical and political orientations that range from deliberative (Jürgen Habermas), anarchist (Jacques Rancière), agonistic (Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau), autonomist (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), and decolonial (Enrique Dussel) to fugitive (Sheldon Wolin), feminist (Nancy Fraser), pluralist (William Connolly), and grassroots (Romand Coles and Jeffrey Stout). These diverse trajectories in radical democratic theory differ in important respects but share a common set of political commitments organized around an ethos of radicalization. The “radical” in radical democracy signifies the attempt to return democracy to its “roots” (radix) and to a politics that returns power or rule (kratos) to the people (demos).

This formal ethos of radicalization is rooted in a set of overlapping concerns. First, radical democratic theorists view dominant forms of democracy in the North Atlantic world as significantly weakened by representative and constitutional systems that delimit the power of the people and disincentivize their political engagement. They respond to this situation by advocating for more egalitarian approaches to power-sharing through horizontal forms of democratic participation (Hardt and Negri), localism (Wolin), or community-based organizations (Stout, Coles).14 Second, proponents of radical democracy criticize the proximity that exists both ideologically and historically between capitalism and liberal democracy. Neoliberals defend this proximity and argue that the economic freedom guaranteed by capitalism is the prerequisite for the political freedom of democracy. For instance, for Milton Friedman, the free market represents an ideal form of democracy insofar as it represents the synthesis of the individual free choice of all participants. Against neoliberalism, radical democratic theorists argue that an inverse relationship exists between capitalism and democracy, and so it follows that economic democracy is needed to support the political project of democracy.15 Finally, radical democratic theory is committed to pluralism in two respects. For radical democratic theorists, democracy constitutes an open, unfinished project for which there exists no specific or predetermined political form. Ernesto Laclau has argued that radical democracy supports a “plurality of ways of radicalization” and so when “radical democracy” is invoked it “cannot be attached to any a priori fixed institutional formula.”16 A second area where radical democratic theorists focus on the importance of pluralism is in relation to the project of coalition building. In contrast to reductionistic forms of leftist politics that view class struggle as the exclusive site of resistance and organization, radical democratic theorists affirm the need for a plurality of sites, forms, and coalitions of resistance to the dominant social order.17

Even though a deep commitment to pluralism is a fundamental mark of radical democracy, the significance of religion for political struggle often has been dismissed by radical democratic theorists. For instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri observe without argumentation that “today there is not even the illusion of a transcendent God” and that “every metaphysical tradition is now completely worn out.”18 Hardt and Negri flatly reject transcendence and claim that the “multitude” has “dissolved” transcendence and “recuperated its power.”19 For them, immanent struggle among diverse constituencies represents the sole basis for an authentic contemporary politics. Accordingly, they evaluate religious belief as a backward remnant from the past that blocks the path to an emancipatory politics of immanence.20 Chantal Mouffe offers a slightly different approach to the relation between radical politics and religion but similarly marginalizes religion from participation in radical democratic projects. Mouffe observes,

Far from being an irreversible event, the democratic revolution may come under threat and has to be defended. The rise of various forms of religious fundamentalism of Christian origin in the USA and the resurgence of Catholic integrism in France indicate that the danger does not come solely from outside but also from our tradition. The relegation of religion to the private sphere, which we now have to make Muslims accept, was only imposed with great difficulty upon the Christian Church and is still not completely accomplished.21

Mouffe expresses legitimate fears about how religious extremism threatens democracy, but her approach is worrisome insofar as she groups all religious identities together and then proceeds to relegate these identities to the private realm. In this regard, the foundational commitment to pluralism and difference is extended everywhere but to the religious realm. Within Mouffe’s framework, religious persons are invited to participate in radical democratic politics only if they leave their religious commitments at the door.22

Of course, nonreligious radical democratic theorists like Jürgen Habermas, William Connolly, Romand Coles, and Jeffrey Stout have made something of a postsecular turn by contesting the secularist commitments of the left.23 In his recent work, Habermas has argued that democracy relies on pre-political and often religious sources for its vitality and that if these sources are eliminated from civil society or hijacked by dogmatic and exclusionary voices it will lead to disastrous results. He maintains that the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West is the wellspring from which the commitment to morality, solidarity, human rights, and democracy emerged and “up to this day there is no alternative to it.”24 He thus calls for a renewed engagement with religious traditions precisely because these traditions offer critical sources of moral and political formation not readily available elsewhere in civil society.

If there has been something of a turn to religion by several radical democratic theorists, there has been an analogous turn in contemporary Christian political theology to radical democracy. Stanley Hauerwas’s turn to radical democratic theory has occupied a central role in these debates. In his response to Jeffrey Stout’s criticisms in Democracy and Tradition, in which Stout argued that Hauerwas’s theology had been corrosive to American politics and fueled resentment toward public life among Christians, Hauerwas invoked the radical democratic politics of Sheldon Wolin and Romand Coles as models for political engagement.25 Hauerwas’s engagement with radical democratic theory has received a great deal of attention in recent debates, in part, because this engagement appears to represent a significant departure from his perceived aversion to non-ekklesial politics. However, it is important to note here that Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Cornel West advocated for the alignment of Christianity with radical democratic politics long before Hauerwas’s engagement with the work of Wolin and Coles. Furthermore, Schüssler Fiorenza and West’s engagement with radical democratic theory emerges out of other trajectories in American political theology, offering a very different understanding of the relationship between Christian theology and radical democracy. Specifically, where Hauerwas views American forms of radical democratic theory as well suited to support a peaceable politics of ekklesial witness, Schüssler Fiorenza and West view radical democracy as a means for Christians to witness to an intersectional approach to justice for the oppressed and marginalized.

In Against Empire, we examine the relationship between radical democracy and political theology by analyzing four approaches to ekklesial politics. The approach to ekklesia adopted here is rooted in a retrieval of the original political meaning of the Greek word ekklesia as a political assembly.26 The political theologians analyzed in this work describe plural forms of ekklesia as radical democratic spaces of resistance to multiple forms of oppression that include racism, sexism, poverty, and political violence: the black church (Cornel West), the ekklesia of wo/men (Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza), the church of the poor (Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino), and the peaceable church (Stanley Hauerwas).27

In distinctive ways, West, Schüssler Fiorenza, Ellacuría/Sobrino, and Hauerwas call for the mobilization of ekklesial communities toward a politics of resistance to empire. However, because their work remains largely disconnected, a theoretical task of this work is to examine the links that exist between these diverse forms of ekklesial resistance. The work of coalition building is a central area of focus in radical democratic theory. The question of how to link diverse ideological movements—from feminists, antiracists, and environmentalists to antiwar activists and critics of capitalism—is central to the attempt to theorize a radical politics that moves beyond the class-based politics of Marxism. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe refer to this project of coalition building as establishing chains of equivalence among different social movements. They maintain that the goal of radical politics is to establish areas of commonality among diverse groups so that no single struggle takes precedence over another and each group retains its distinctive focus and autonomy. Equivalence does not eliminate difference but rather establishes connections between movements that occupy a similar position of subordination in society.28 Radical democratic theorists establish equivalence between these diverse movements by producing a common “antagonist” that generates a “we” or coalition of resistance to the dominant social order. For instance, Mouffe contends that within the contemporary economic-political configuration this “we” should take form as radical democratic citizenship.29

Against Empire argues that a chain of equivalence exists between black prophetic thought, feminist theology, Latin American liberation theology, and peaceable theology. These political theologies differ in their specific focus but share common resistance to neoliberalism, nationalism, and militarism as networks of power that intersect with racism, sexism, and neo-colonialism to form what they refer to as “empire.” In Laclau and Mouffe’s terminology, “empire” represents the common antagonist for these political theologies. The “we,” or the positive link between black prophetic thought, feminist theology, Latin American liberation theology, and peaceable theology, is established through their commitment to “radical democracy.”

This book offers an intervention in contemporary debates in political theology in three ways. First, on the face of it, it seems that there is more that divides West, Schüssler Fiorenza, Ellacuría/Sobrino, and Hauerwas than unites them. Schüssler Fiorenza famously criticized Latin American liberation theology for its blindness to patriarchy, West has publicly aired his disagreement with Hauerwas on the nature of prophetic Christianity, and if pressed Hauerwas would likely view the projects of Schüssler Fiorenza, Ellacuría/Sobrino, and West as subtle forms of “neo-neo-neo-Constantianism” that relinquish the distinctiveness of Christian witness for the sake of political relevance. Despite these tensions, Against Empire performs the task of drawing together these Christian thinkers as a diverse theo-political assemblage that prioritizes critical resistance to empire alongside a constructive commitment to the politics of radical democracy. In this regard, it fulfills the pluralist mandate of radical democracy by bringing together diverse voices based on shared opposition to oppressive political formations. Thus, while the standard narrative would suggest that the peaceable theology of Hauerwas has little to do with the feminist theology of Schüssler Fiorenza, I demonstrate that they share overlapping and strategic concerns, even as they differ over specific theological and political questions. There exist various ways of stating this point, but the argument made in this book is that ekklesia should aspire to be a site of radical democratic pluralism that affirms difference and seeks to generate commonalities amid these differences. Second, the postsecular turn has been dominated by nonreligious philosophers reflecting on the role of religion in the public sphere. Against Empire focuses on how religious thinkers, specifically political theologians, describe the contribution that Christianity makes to a radical democratic politics. Because of the central role that the Moral Majority and the religious right have played in conservative politics in the United States, it is commonplace to view religion as the exclusive province of the right. However, this judgment is entirely inaccurate, particularly when viewed within the long stretch of American history, in which the religious left played a central role in the abolitionist, suffragist, labor, and civil rights movements. The political theologians examined in subsequent chapters attempt to revive this tradition by occupying the contested ground between secular leftists and the religious right by challenging both those who wish to purge religion from the public sphere and Christians who use the gospel to support the politics of empire.

Finally, this work contributes to the postsecular conversation between political theologians and radical democratic theorists by exploring the distinctively Christian forms of radical democratic politics generated through this engagement. The political theologians examined in this work creatively refigure their approaches to politics based on their dialogue with radical democratic theory. But a productive postsecular dialogue should result in mutual transformation. Accordingly, it is essential to attend to the process by which theologians challenge and reconfigure radical democracy based on their retrieval of the radical politics of the Christian tradition. For example, radical democratic theorists have tended to focus on the economic dimension of empire and have deemphasized or, at the very least, failed to foreground concerns about structural racism and militarism. In relation to these issues, political theologians challenge and supplement secular forms of radical democratic theory. Cornel West develops a distinctive approach to radical democratic politics by challenging secular radical democratic theory based on his extensive retrieval of the antiracist politics of black Christianity and the black prophetic tradition. Similarly, Hauerwas’s retrieval of the peaceable politics of the Christian church serves as a corrective to radical democratic theorists’ failure to confront adequately the political violence of the nation-state. Constructively, each political theologian examined produces a distinctive approach to radical democracy drawn from the resources of the Christian tradition: prophetic-pragmatist (West), feminist-transnational (Schüssler Fiorenza), liberative-populist (Ellacuría, Sobrino), and peaceable-postliberal (Hauerwas).

The argument of Against Empire unfolds in six chapters. The first chapter analyzes two political formations—neoliberalism and neoconservatism. In the introductory comments, we emphasized the unique challenges posed to democracy by the ascendency of authoritarian populism, but it is important to emphasize that the emergence of this political formation was made possible by the antidemocratic effects of the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony. This chapter aims to analyze the underlying logic of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, to describe the complicated relationship between them, and to trace the mutation of neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony into new forms of populist authoritarianism.

The second chapter provides an overview of significant trajectories in contemporary radical democratic theory by charting how radical democratic theorists have conceptualized their approach to politics. We focus on two dominant approaches in radical democratic theory: an institutional-reformist approach that calls for the need to radicalize existing democratic institutions (Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Jeffrey Stout) and a withdrawal-radicalist approach that advocates for the need to create political movements and communities that exist outside of traditional democratic structures and institutions (Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Sheldon Wolin). The chapter serves two important purposes within the overall argument of Against Empire. First, it offers an introduction to the radical democratic theorists that influence the political theologians examined in subsequent chapters. Wolin is by far the most significant conversation partner for these theologians, but Hardt and Negri, Laclau and Mouffe, Stout, and Coles also influence their approaches to Christian politics. Because the tendency in North American political theology has been to reduce radical democracy to Wolin’s criticisms of liberalism, it is important to broaden our understanding of the politics of radical democracy and the diverse ways in which it has shaped Christian political engagement. This chapter, then, seeks to provide a thicker description than is often offered in theological commentary by contextualizing important currents in contemporary radical democratic theory.

In addition, chapter 2 focuses on the withdrawal-engagement debate in radical democratic theory and traces how it plays out in post-Marxist and postliberal discourse. A central debate in radical democratic theory is whether politics should emerge in civil society at a distance from liberal democratic structures that have been captured by neoliberalism and neoconservatism, or if it should attempt to reform these democratic structures and push them beyond their liberal frame toward a more radical space. This withdrawal-engagement debate plays out among political theologians as well, with some locating their politics at a distance from traditional institutional forms (Latin American liberation theology, feminist theology, peaceable theology) and others advocating for a more direct, but no less critical, engagement with existing political institutions (black prophetic thought).

We organize the next four chapters into two subgroups. The third and fourth chapters examine the relationship between political theology and radical democracy as a pluralist form of coalition building. Black prophetic thought and feminist theology approach ekklesial politics by examining the interconnection between racism, sexism, capitalism, and militarism. Cornel West and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza adopt a pragmatic and praxis-oriented approach to the relation between Christianity and radical democracy that focuses on the retrieval of radical resources in the Christian tradition as a means of cultivating a broad-based, pluralist form of political resistance to empire that includes Christians, members of other religious traditions, as well as nonreligious persons.30

The fifth and sixth chapters examine the more focused confrontation with capitalism and political violence in the work of Latin American liberation and peaceable theologians. Although the primary object of criticism differs, Latin American liberation theology and peaceable theology share the common diagnosis that capitalism (Latin American liberation theology) and political violence (peaceable theology) represent forms of idolatry that demand the sacrifice of victims to subsist. In contrast to the work of West and Schüssler Fiorenza, Ellacuría, Sobrino, and Hauerwas approach radical democratic politics by way of a robust set of christological and ecclesiological commitments rooted in the defense of the poor (Ellacuría/Sobrino) and the witness to peace in a violent world (Hauerwas). Furthermore, Ellacuría, Sobrino, and Hauerwas only reservedly approach democratic politics, so that where Ellacuría and Sobrino offer unrelenting criticisms of Western democracy’s entanglement with imperialism and capitalism, Hauerwas evinces a staunch opposition to liberal democracy due to its association with secularism and political violence. Despite this opposition to imperialist (Ellacuría/Sobrino) and liberal (Hauerwas) forms of democracy, Ellacuría, Sobrino, and Hauerwas provide openings for an ad hoc Christian engagement with radical democracy to the extent that this alliance serves their more basic Christian commitment to the option for the poor (Ellacuría/Sobrino) and peaceable witness (Hauerwas).

The conclusion reflects on the future, specifically on the possibility of a radical democratic future in the face of political formations that not only block the expansion of democracy (neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony) but also attempt to retrench its achievements (authoritarian populism). It is argued that in response to each of these political formations Christians should enter the field of political struggle by engaging in a radical democratic politics of resistance to empire.

1. Fukuyama, “End of History,” 114.

2. Streeck, “Returned of the Repressed,” 165–66; Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond”; and Fraser, The Old Is Dying.

3. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

4. Heer, “The Populist Realignment That Never Came.”

5. Muro and Liu, “Another Clinton-Trump Divide.”

6. López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class.

7. Coates, “My President Was Black.”

8. Lopez, “Trump Won Because of Racial Resentment,” and McElwee and McDaniel, “Economic Anxiety Didn’t Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did.”

9. Roberts, “Are Trump Supporters Driven by Economic Anxiety or Racial Resentment? Yes.”

10. Kriner and Shen, “Battlefield Causalities and Ballot Box Defeat.”

11. Mounk, The People vs. Democracy; Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die; and Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism.

12. Hall, Hard Road to Renewal, 273.

13. Fraser, “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism”; Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond”; Brown, “Apocalyptic Populism”; Mouffe, “America in Populist Times: An Interview with Chantal Mouffe”; Mouffe, For a Left Populism; Connolly, “Trump, the Working Class, and Fascist Rhetoric”; and Connolly, Aspirational Fascism.

14. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 2.

15. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 8.

16. Laclau, “Future of Radical Democracy,” 261, and Laclau, “Glimpsing the Future,” 295. Emphasis original.

17. Laclau, “Structure, History, and the Political,” 203.

18. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 157 and 368. See Connolly’s critique of this in Pluralism, 150.

19. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 157.

20. There has been significant work in theology that has engaged Hardt and Negri’s framework and demonstrated how it might serve as a guide for radical Christian politics. See, for instance, Rieger and Pui-lan, Occupy Religion.

21. Mouffe, Return of the Political, 132.

22. See Jones, “Liberation Theology and ‘Democratic Futures,’” 281ff. Mouffe seems to have softened her position recently in “Religion, Liberal Democracy, and Citizenship.”

23. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist; Ratzinger and Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization; Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion; Coles, Beyond Gated Politics; Hauerwas and Coles, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary; Stout, Blessed Are the Organized; and Stout, Democracy and Tradition.

24. See Habermas, Religion and Rationality, 149.

25. Hauerwas has offered several responses to Stout’s criticisms, first in “Postscript: A Response to Jeff Stout’s Democracy and Tradition” (Performing the Faith, 215–42), then in his explicit engagement with the radical democratic theory of Wolin in “Democratic Time: Lessons Learned from Yoder and Wolin” (State of the University, 147–64), and finally in the essays in Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary.

26. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza observes, “The Greek word ekklesia is usually translated as ‘church,’ although the English word church derives from the Greek word kyriake—belonging to the lord/master/father/husband. Accordingly, the translation of ekklesia as ‘church’ is misleading. Ekklesia is best rendered as ‘democratic assembly/congress of full citizens.’” Schüssler Fiorenza, Sharing Her Word, 112; see also But She Said, 128. John Howard Yoder makes a similar point in Revolutionary Christian Citizenship.

27. This book does not directly engage political Augustinians who often identify with some form of radical democratic politics. Luke Bretherton’s work in Resurrecting Democracy is a prominent example of this type of Augustinian engagement with radical democratic politics. The primary reason that we do not examine Bretherton’s work is that the focus of his ethnographic work is England and Against Empire focuses on the work of political theologians in North America.

28. Mouffe, Chantal Mouffe, 140.

29. Mouffe, Chantal Mouffe, 140.

30. Importantly, both Schüssler Fiorenza and West maintain that democracy is an internal norm of Christianity. See Schüssler Fiorenza, Power of the Word, 7, and West, Prophesy Deliverance!, 18ff. and 91ff.