Post-Liberalism: RETVRN, Retrieval, or Revolution?

Post-liberalism has escaped the internet and entered mainstream politics—but what does it actually mean? Derek, James, and Alastair map three competing visions: nostalgic return to pre-modern order, retrieval of Christian liberalism, or genuine revolution forward.

 

 

 

 

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SPEAKER_02 0:02

Hey, this is Ian. I'm the producer for Mere Fidelity. Here at Mere Orthodoxy, our mission is to create thoughtful media for the renewal of the church and culture. That includes this podcast, along with other podcasts, daily articles, a print journal, an online community, and more. Mere Orthodoxy and all of our projects are supported by readers and listeners just like you. 2026 is looking like it will be the most exciting year in Mere Orthodoxy's 20-year history. But we need your help to make it happen. If you enjoy this podcast, want to see it continue, and partner with us to create even more resources like this. You can make that happen by becoming a member. Go to Mereorthodoxy.com slash member to partner with us. That's Mere Orthodoxy.comslash member. Let's renew minds and restore hope for the good of the church and the culture. Go to Mereorthodoxy.com slash member today.

SPEAKER_03 1:33

Now I'm joined today by Alistair Roberts and James Wood, and we're going to have a fascinating and fantastic conversation about the question of postliberalism. Now, we've talked about this before in various forums. We've had different different guests on to discuss issues adjacent to it, but there's been a recent kind of welter of discussion on postliberalism with current events in the political sphere where it seems like the discussion has escaped containment from the blogosphere and the and the province of nerds online into actual potential political players. And so the conversation's reinvigorated again. And so, James, I wanted you to kind of frame up for us what's the what's the issue? What's the question we want to wrestle with today? Essentially, why should we have questions about whether or not folks should call themselves postliberals?

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Yeah, thanks. Um yeah, this has been a funny, ongoing conversation for me in lots of different channels because it's been quite a little bit frustrating for me as someone who's identified as a post-liberal since really the beginning, I think, of my Christian walk pretty early by largely inspired by reading people like Stanley Howerwas, Alistair McIntyre, John Milbank, kind of the radical orthodoxy figures who were at a theological, kind of philosophical level, really pressing some important questions about kind of just common assumptions at the foundation of our political imagination and trying to wrestle with those to challenge them, to help us think kind of beyond a lot of the liberal political um frameworks that are uh perpetuated and handed to us. And there's various tribes, there's various responses to that. At root, I think post-liberal political theology has just been a set of challenges and questions that have then sparked various answers, disparate ones, uh sure, and at various levels of specificity and development. But the the term really, in a sense, picks up a lot of steam in the public eye kind of post-2015. You have a few things that coalesce that now are associated as the predominant forms of expressions of post-liberal politics in the public imagination. You have, first of all, you have Brexit is a big one. And so Alistair could talk about that and we'll get him to identify where he stands on that contentious issue. Uh, but you have kind of a certain populist nationalist fervor taking over various Western nations, and they're challenging liberalism for a specific set of reasons that are related to that, and especially focused on kind of immigration and kind of cosmopolitanism, et cetera. Like, do we have to, do we need to at this stage retrieve a kind of a thick collective identity that's worth defending, et cetera, et cetera? And also kind of retrieving kind of political agency again from kind of supranational bureaucracies that aren't accountable to the people. And so that's kind of that's more related often to the Brexit thing. But then you have obviously a populist movement in America with Trump. And at the same time, you have basically the first massive post-liberal, pop massively popular post post-liberal book under the post-liberal banner is why liberalism failed by Patrick Denineen. At the same time, you also have the book Rod Dreer's Benedict Option, which is a type of older kind of like I view the type of post-liberalism that I was drawn to originally more as like the 1990s communitarianism, which in many ways Rod Dreer's book was kind of a popular expression of that, obviously with a little bit more of an angle, an edge with the focus on the sexual revolution, uh, that those other figures didn't focus on so much, but like a thick sense of communal bonds, you know, that, you know, the mediating spaces between nation and individual, tradition, et cetera, et cetera. But so you got Dreyer's book comes out at the same time. But at the same time, both Dreer and Milbank or uh uh Danin's books really don't reflect also now what postliberalism has become within their tribes. It's uh even Danin's first book kind of just ends with uh kind of a Tocquevillian vision for kind of local activism and communal bonds, et cetera. But he got he gets challenged by, for instance, right away, uh his friend Adrian Vermule, who's a Harvard law professor, now is a key player because he's part of the Catholic integralists with strong coordination between church and state, et cetera. And he challenged a need to go further. He didn't think his arguments were radical enough. But okay, so now where we are, that that's the beginning stage of that, is post-liberalism basically is associated with either the kind of populist semi-authoritarianism of the mixture of the integralist with also J.D. Vance, because J.D. Vance pals around with those guys, and also maybe the Christian nationalists, even though I don't think Christian nationalists would call themselves post-liberals, but usually now when there's there's people who are critical of post-liberalism, they would kind of link the Christian nationalists with it. And so it's frustrating to me as someone who's identified as a post-liberal and who's per who's himself publicly advocating on another podcast a version of post-liberalism. Now it's associated with those kind of two movements. And what the one of the critiques has been is first of all, are these just, you know, kind of fascistic adjacent ideologies? And also in their radical critiques of liberalism, are they carving, creating space, kind of creating a vacuum to allow for more nefarious forces like the Fuentes type figures to emerge because you've basically eviscerated confidence in the kind of contemporary liberal order? And now you're basically allowing these kind of you know more nefarious figures to offer up an alternative. And so does does post-liberalism, do post-liberals bear responsibility for that? That's been a big challenge.

SPEAKER_03 7:23

Yeah. So I as somebody who is adjacent to these conversations, and then I'm not a, I'm not a participant, but my friends all seem to be. Part of what I've I've seen is you've got the baseline critique of liberalism and kind of modern neoliberalism, hyper-individualistic, chipping away at society, chipping away at all the common spaces, chipping away at the family, chipping away at the nation, chipping with the order of order of things in order to intensify uh freedom both economically, sexually, and so on and so forth. It's it's the freedom maxim freedom maximization society. And and what that is is the uh order destabilization society. The critique of that, like you're saying, the the reason the the way I see it pairing up with folks in the integralist and uh Christian Nationalist Society kind of wings is that both of those seem to that they share the critique of liberalism, but the question is whether or not they're actually very post-liberal or whether or not they're pre-liberal, right? They're they're they're or or pre-modern in in some of their orientation and some of their design- the structural orders that they are wanting to go back to. Obviously not all, obviously not every iteration, obviously not every figure. You can name somebody, all that sort of thing. But that question of the critique of liberalism opens up a space for, and this is why we need to keep pushing forward so truly post-post-liberalism, like drawing on the goods of liberalism, not going back, et cetera, but but kind of realizing that the contemporary, the contemporary scene is unhealthy and we need to do something about it, versus the person who's saying, okay, yeah, and this is why we must return with the little V, U, uh the UV thing. We must the big, the big V, the big V. We must return, return back, uh, go back to the land, go back to the people, go back to the Vogue, go back to the throne and altar, uh, go back to the Anchamp regime, whatever it is, say it in French properly. Uh that that's your that's your language, James, now. But but that's kind of how I see those overlapping, is that there's a lot of shared critiques, shared instincts about the need for a more substantial society. And then there's different iterations of how we go back to that. So there's more left communitarian uh visions and then more right communitarian authoritarian visions, although you can get left authoritarian visions as well. So that's kind of how I'm reading the way those two connect. Alistair, uh do you do you see something similar, different? Do you gotta weigh in on that?

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Let me add a few more complexifying things. First of all, it's important to bear in mind that post-liberal can also refer to a theological movement associated with Yale. And that movement has certain I mean it the complicating reality is that there are ways in which these things are adjacent to each other. So if you um take the work of Hans Frey, George Lind Beck, and then downstream of that, people like Stanley Howass, there's a challenge to liberalism's idea of universal rationality, the idea of the individual very much as the center of social organization and analysis, and a move you see very much in the work of Stanley Howwas, for instance, into an emphasis upon the category of narrative, community, and other things like that. So the church is seen as having a sort of grammar of theology and scripture in terms of which it operates. It's not necessarily trying to define that next to some universal standard of rationality in the same way as the older form of liberalism would, where it would try to get behind the biblical text and connect that to some broader account of reality. Rather, there's an account of the internal logic and language of scripture. Now that influences other movements such as the post-liberal forms of something like radical orthodoxy, which is post-liberal politically as well. It's thinking about the ways in which the church and various communities are not operating in terms of this universal rationality, which has been the mode of liberalism, and it's thinking very much into more communitarian categories, recognizing a thicker anthropology, for instance, the way in which narrative is important, and there's a less foundationalist account of reason and truth. Now, once you've moved in that sort of direction, there are deep questions that are raised about public discourse, about persuasion of the public square, and how societies work in a pluralistic context. It's always one of the questions that's been pushed against someone like Stanley How was. Now you can see alongside that there are a series of developments in society. We might think about the internet, we might think about move towards multiculturalism, whatever it is, which lead to the possibility of post-liberalism functioning not just as a sort of political theory or not just as a more general movement beyond liberalism and its categories of universal rationality and a focus of the in upon the individual, but something more of an account of political reality that has developed. And so post-liberalism can be more descriptive in many modes. It's accounting for a reality that has developed in the same way as we might speak about postmodernism, not just as a sort of philosophical project, but as an account of the weird ways that society is shaped by spectacle. There is a displacement of that which is uh the sort of old foundationalist realities, the understanding of universal rationality, the emphasis upon meta-narrative, all those things break down under certain social and material conditions. And postmodernism is in part an account of those sorts of conditions. And so when we're talking about post-liberalism, there are a number of ways we can speak about it. We can speak about it as a descriptive thing. And it seems to me we have to do that. Liberal account of reality no longer really works within our contemporary set in many of our contemporary settings. There is a need for some account that goes beyond liberalisms. Then there's also the challenge of political theories that are maybe challenging some of the ideas of universal rationality and individualism and the way that they structured thought. And so that's a more theoretical approach. And then there's these practical political projects. Now these can operate in various ways, some of them very authoritarian, and so it's a rejection not just of liberalism, but of liberal values more generally, not just as we find them enshrined within liberalism. And so I think many of us would want to move beyond liberalism in various of its iterations, while also holding very strongly to the importance of liberal values of mercy in politics, of persuasion as a possibility, of an emphasis upon procedure, of all these sorts of a society that's based pursuing trust, that's pursuing peace, that's not working in terms of friend-enemy structures all the time. These sorts of things are liberal values that don't demand liberalism as such. So sorry to complexify everything, but that's some of the thoughts upon the terminal the terminology. Trevor Burrus, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

An episode of talking about the links between post-liberal theology and post-liberal politics a while back, which I think is fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 14:59

And you just did it.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

So a fascinating discussion that was sparked. I've been thinking about it for a while because you know, where I did, for instance, where I did my theological training is kind of the last bastion of the Yale school at Wycliffe College, under Radner and Mangina, they're kind of uh like a third generation of the Yale uh school of post-liberal theology. And it's in a sense because the second generation was really a duke with Howard Wass and others. Um and it's really, you know, and to some degree dying out for various reasons. Um and uh but I've also uh been in many ways inspired by post-liberal political theology for a while. And I view the link, and so I've often been a people have asked me, well, do I think is there a link there or not? And a recent article was published by David Congdon, who makes a particular argument about their connection, which I I'm not necessarily convinced by. But I think a key linkage would be Howerwas, for instance. I think he bridges both worlds, but he is not in any way connected with the contemporary post-liberals that we're talking about. He offers something quite different, more, you know, in some ways connected to the Milbank radical orthodoxy world. One of the ways I summarize the difference between post-like the post-liberalism of Howrawass versus of John Milbank is one of the things that, and I forget where I picked this up, it could I forget which author coined it this way, but I think it's really helpful, is they're both challenging common dichotomies in liberal politics. One would what Hauerwas does in his tribe will challenge um us to see the theological or the political nature of theological categories, so the political nature of the church and its practices, et cetera, and even just the nature of the gospel, of liturgy, et cetera. And that's very much informed like Peter Lighthart, who we're some of us are near and dear to, and and some one other thing.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

It's interesting how much Lightheart in framing ecclesiocentrism has dialogued with Howwas. And of course, he's downstream of Milbank in many ways as his Milbank.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Yeah, and I think he blends them well. So if Hauerwass highlights the the the political nature of theological categories, what Milbank does is highlights the religious or theological nature of politics. And that's they do intersect a lot, but I th I think that's a helpful distinction. But you know, it's funny, Milbank and others, like Milbank and Pabst wrote a major work of uh political theory that has almost gone unrecognized in the the American landscape. But so when I hear people say, like, well, post-liberal politics is just J.D. Vance, the integralists and the Catholic the Christian nationalists, I'm like, there's a whole bunch of other categories that are not accounted for. But I I think the linkage is complicated. It's not obvious. But to say that it would be like this is what one of the things that Congden says, is that post-liberal theology inherently, inevitably translates into an authoritarian politics, I think is just completely uncharitable. I mean, one of the things that's going on at post-liberal theology, especially the other category that I know you're aware of, but we didn't bring up, is the cultural linguistic approach to the theological task. And part of that, and I I know Rishmao he's got his attendee up, he's gonna bring his Van Hooser in, but part of the agenda of framing it was also for ecumenical purposes, for charitable purposes, for intra-Christian dialogue, to actually see how there's an internal logic to another tradition that they might arrive at similar orthodox places from different categories than our tradition would. And so it was an attempt at ecumenism. And so to then, you know, take from that that it would translate into an authoritarian politics, to me, that's a that's a pretty big step.

SPEAKER_03 18:37

But my my problem, so my my problem with that, that the connection point that I do see is the communal focus and the skepticism about potentially, you know, the kind of post-Wit Wittgenstein skepticism about having a shared universal space of language that uh and you know, and reason that can be shared between people that leads to the skepticism about persuasion, that leads to a sort of retreat to commitment. All we can do is articulate the claims of our community that have an internal logic that makes sense to us, informs us, and so on and so forth, in an escape to you know, an attempt to escape um, you know, uh going back to a more doctrinal propositionalist approach to doctrine, or or going into the into the ether of kind of a liberal, kind of experiential expressivist approach to doctrine, I think it doesn't go far enough and it does leave you with the danger of being abandoned in kind of a in a hyper-particularist space, which eventually shuts down the possibility of shared community, the possibility of shared reason, the possibility of shared dialogue. Even though it had ecumenical intentions, I think the the the post-liberal move leads to in theology does lead to the post-liberal tendencies in politics that could, could, doesn't always, could on one stream bottom out in in we've got our community, you've got yours, and we've got to assert power, we've got to assert authority, we've got it. And that that can happen. It's one trajectory that is possible, even if it's potentially not necessary. So I don't know, Alistair James, push back.

SPEAKER_00 20:25

I definitely think that's um a factor. I I do think it's important to take account of the descriptive reality that that post-liberalism is often wrestling with. There is it seems to me increasingly um a situation where there does not seem to be a common ground that can be held. There does not seem to be confidence in persuasion, even among those who are claiming the name liberal, but there seems to be an abandonment of the public square and increasingly the policing of the public square that's replacing actual persuasive dialogue. And so liberalism, even though people are appealing to it, it seems to be withering and failing in actual practice. And in that sort of context, what's going on, in many ways, what's going on is post-liberal dynamics. Um even under the name of liberalism, the actual reality I think is confirming many of the post-liberal claims about the failures of liberalism. Liberalism by itself is not able to sustain these things. And liberalism was always and this is one of the points that many of the more theoretical accounts of post liberalism have put forward. Liberalism was never able to sustain the values that it really held. Many of those values, for instance, if you want free speech and exchange and the confidence in a um a realm of persuasion. You need a lot of cultural and institutional things in place for that to work. It's very easy when you have a balkanized society for those things to fail. And so what you need are institutions that are committed to values, that are confident enough to open up space for people who are different, and there's enough goodwill and enough building of trust and relational capital for people to have these spaces open and not just collapse those spaces and retreat into those r realms of commitment. The more realms of liberalism that are not really committed to liberal values, but are committed to a very specific vision of progressivism that rule other people out. That is in many ways a form of post-liberal retreat. And so I think what needs to take place is on the one hand, an analysis of the situation which accounts for the the failure of liberalism in many of in many quarters, even in its former bastions. We might need to also think about some of the ways in which the theory of liberalism was just inaccurate. It was not fitted to human nature, to human community. But then I think also we need to find some way in which to reground many liberal values, which are values that, again, here I think of the work of Oliver O'Donovan, who in many respects is someone who's a Christian liberal. He's arguing for many of the fundamental values of liberal political society, but he's arguing for them in a context where their rationality is no longer perceived, where there's a loss of faith and confidence in them, when there's a situation where their rationale has been forgotten. And what he's doing is arguing that there needs to be an apologetic for these and part of the strength of the Christian faith, this is a post-liberal move to re-ground liberal values, where he goes to these the Christian faith and shows that the ground for these liberal commitments, things like candid speech, the public square representation, um sort of democracy to some extent, and all these sorts of things, they require a set of Christian commitments to really understand them and for them to be properly operative. And that, it seems to me, is the sort of complicated move that's required. On the one hand, it's post-liberal in the sense that it's not grounded upon an ideological liberalism. It's a move, in some sense, of a post-liberal kind to a specific narrative that's committed, that's not the sort of foundationalist narratives of universal reason that liberalism would put forward. It's also communitarian in certain respects. It there's an emphasis upon the place of the church. But also there's an appreciation of the values of liberalism of liberal values. We're not going to jettison those, but we do need to reground them.

SPEAKER_03 25:08

Yeah. So this I was going to say Matt Matt Anderson's been toying around with that for a while, and Jake Jake Meeter's actually been trying to figure out I think he was who's who's the guy who's been quoting the democracy and tradition, Jeff Stout. I mean, part of part of what I've I've cribed from him is two points. One, liberalism admits of several definitions. There's kinds of liberalisms as just as much as there's different kinds of post-liberalisms. Actually, that's one thing that your podcast, James, has done really well is try to bring out um varieties and steel man that. Yeah, if you're interested in all this stuff, the Civitas podcast has been doing this for like three years now.

SPEAKER_01 25:45

All of our listeners already see that.

SPEAKER_03 25:46

Yeah, you should we're speedrunning it right now in like 35 minutes. But um but that whole move, that the the grounding things in the Christian narrative um is kind of the um it's it's kind of the where where Oliver O'Donovan and like Tom Holland meet, I hate to admit it, uh like Van Till. Uh essentially it's there there's like a terr there's like a a fancier precept. Sorry, sorry, Gray uh Satanto. Uh but there's like a fancier version of showing that eventually these universals that we depend on as a culture and a society, the the particular kinds of liberalism that advanced and was central to the American way of things was particularly, unabashedly, Christian liberalism that saw these virtues flowing forth from the particularities of the Christian narrative, which is taken to be universal, which is a very what you the argument you just made there is a very post-liberal argument. Yeah. But again, it's one that tries to push out all the way into a universalizing thing that applies to everyone in the sense that like, and that's the reason you and I can have that conversation. Even though you do not believe in this story, you live in it. And for that reason, we we have a shared context in which I can try and persuade you. And I think one of the things that people are wrestling with is they're saying, no, this is the true story, this is our community, you are outside of it. Therefore, I mean the hyper-antithesis moment comes in, as it were, to use the little bits of Vantil I picked up from others, where we really just we have we have incommensurable worldviews, incommensurable languages.

SPEAKER_01 27:26

I mean, it you know, that's a very like Vantillian. McIntyre.

SPEAKER_03 27:30

I mean, this is McIntyre too. Yeah. Right. So this is the out-narration move. This is the conversation we have with Jason Blakely.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

But you can out-narrate without being sectarian, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:43

And so you've got universal there's a very clearly the Christian message is one that has a certain universalism at its heart, a certain commitment to the possibility of the message and the work of Christ touching and changing every single human being. This is not something that's restricted to a particular people group. I think very much of the there's an i an extreme way of seeing an anti-Christian approach that's represented by the um the Inquisitor in the book Silence, where he argues that there's no way that Christian faith can grow in Japanese soil. That it's just incommensurable that the Japanese have a particular way of seeing the world, and the more that you try and force Christianity in that, it's just not going to take root. Japan is an alien environment, the Christian faith does not fit there. And that's something that the Christian faith can't accept, because on the very basis of the work of Christ, Christ is someone who every single human being is implicated by. When we think about the sorts of statements that we find in Colossians 1, 15 to 20, the universality of Christ is the image of God, the one in whom the whole race meets its destiny, and the one in whom the whole of humanity is addressed by God as the one word. It seems to me that there is this radical move against the sort of extreme particularities that you might have with that almost ethnocentric understanding of truth, that each society has its own truth, its own form of epistemology or whatever. What we have in the Christian faith stands against that. But at the same time, it's not a sort of neutral understanding that this is an understanding that you can get away from any religious commitment. Every single human being, by virtue of universal rationality, has a sort of secular, neutral there's a secular and neutral ground of truth. That's very strongly against the Christian message, too. So we have a very particular account of universality. And the fact it's a particular account and it's also account of universality, both of those aspects are very important in the post-liberal conversation.

SPEAKER_03 30:18

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SPEAKER_01 31:20

And why I think O'Donovan is such a fascinating figure is because I think he's the best bridge between a a steel man case for liberalism from a Christian perspective and the best of the post-liberal arguments. Because example, here would be an example. So he calls himself a a Christian liberal, Christian liberalism, an advocate for that, explicitly so. But I think all the arguments he makes throughout the book, most people who would identify as liberals would not be comfortable making. So, for instance, like here's a way you could let me explain how you you out-narrate and you bring the universal particular together when it comes to Western values that we associate with quote unquote liberalism, which I just I tend to think most of the things that people want to associate with liberalism, I just don't think you have to do it exactly that way. But here's how he does it, though. He tells a story. He says basically the way you defend liberalism is by telling the story of the emergence of liberalism as the triumph of Christ over the powers, such that the state recognizes that it's under judgment and it can only render judgment, that it's it's held accountable to Christ. To me, I just don't think most liberals would want to say that though. And so, and then he would say, like, most of the things that you value as quote-unquote liberal values are themselves the product of Christendom. But like, you know, for instance, like a lot of things in like liberal institutions, we'd say like constitutionalism or the rule of law, but constitutional emerges out of the conciliarist movement or, you know, and things like this, or and the rule of law, it's like Lex Rex, you know? I mean, uh, and and also like the classical exposition of natural law and how it applies to divine to positive law, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that's a very and then what you can do, I think, for like the West and let's say America, is a way you could still bridge a lot of the post-liberal arguments, but try to build a country together, is to try to also tell our story as a country, but that story has Christian roots. And I, as we continue to untether ourselves from them, are the things, the values that we associate with liberalism, are they sustainable? Like Alistair said, my favorite little term for that is the is the Bochenford dilemma. He exactly that he's the German philosopher who talked about this of just like these liberal values are predicated on pre-liberal institutions and resources that they themselves constantly uh erode. And so it's like liberal, the liberal public order is continuing to saw off the branch that it sits on. And so I agree with you, Derek, of like, okay, I this is where post-liberal political theory is complicated because there are versions of it. Some of them are very anti-liberal, and not all of them. So, like the version that Peter Leithart and I are arguing and advocating for is not purely anti-liberal. We would want to provide the best resources to sustain what people value about the liberal order, but on very different grounds, and not also limit our political imagination to those particular values that liberalism defends.

SPEAKER_00 34:14

I think it's very helpful just to reflect upon some of the different ways that this conversation has been illumined. So you have just the history of political theory, for instance, in books like Eric Nelson's The Hebrew Republic, the importance of just Christian concepts in shaping that, the way in which Hebraists and others were taking the Old Testament text, and that was forming early modern political theory. The work of Tom Holland, and that's already been mentioned in Dominion and elsewhere, the way that specifically Christian commitments have shaped our current values. You might think also of certain issues with his work, but the work of someone like René Girard, again making points about the way that a specifically Christian revelation changed the values of society. And much of what we're dealing with in modern society, and this is what both Holland and Girard get at in various ways, are perversions or distortions of fundamentally Christian convictions. And so what we're dealing with in progressivism and liberalism in their more extreme forms, require a Christian predecessor. They require a Christianity of which they can from which they can develop as heresies. Might also think about the work of someone like Bijan Amrani, his latest book, God is an Englishman, and the importance of the Christian faith in shaping England as a place and a people and a polity. That sort of book could be written of many countries. That's the universal particular in that voice.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

Yes, it's very strong.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

And it seems to me that from all these different vantage points, from telling the history of a particular people, from telling the story of political philosophy and how it developed, from talking about the revolution that Christianity represented in the ancient world, and from talking about the more the questions of political theory and political ethics that Oliver O'Donovan is doing, from all these angles, there are ways I think that the post-liberal challenge is opened up when we realize the resources that the Christian faith has offered. What liberalism liberalism did not just arise from a neutral situation. It arose from the Christian faith. And to understand and retrieve those values that are important within it, we're going to have to address it as a heresy from the perspective of its mother, the faith from which it has derived.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

Yeah, it's the prodigal child. It's that liberalism is the child of Christendom, which is the child that's gone the way of the prodigal. And so that means, right, you use the word heresy, right? If like uh it's a perversion of a truth. Well, then the answer is to bring that truth back home. You know, uh like that's the the most dangerous heresies are the one the heresies only have plausibility because they're partially true. You know, they're a reflection of a partial truth. Uh and and so the answer is to pair the to link them up in in the proper context where it's rounded out with other truths. And that's kind of the way I think my version uh of post-liberalism is trying to advocate for is like these are values, these are goods, they are not sustainable on their own. We we can't isolate them from other realities. Let's situate them properly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:32

So I guess the question there is if it's a, you know, there's there's there's heresies, there's prodigals. Was there a time when liberalism was at home? Is is one of the questions that somebody might ask. Like, what's the non-prodigal version? And and in that sense, the return with the maybe a little you is perhaps you know, uh there's a form of post-liberal post-liberalism that is returning to an earlier form of Christian liberalism that is potentially on the table, uh, if that's the way you want to tell the story. I mean, obviously some of this is semantics. But um, some of this is is trying to think through, all right, well, we've seen that once you ditch the Christian foundation for this, when you have a a secular liberalism, a uh a liberalism that doesn't acknowledge its own parentage and and its own necessary preconditions, the thing goes sour and bad and can't sustain itself and starts to eat itself. Okay, but but that doesn't mean that all liberalisms everywhere and forever are forbidden, or that that that whole thing was a mistake, we'll scrap it and start over again. Part of the thing is just question, okay, but but can you get to the time where actually, with uh a proper acknowledgement of the Christian metaphysic that sustains the thing, a Christian society that uh shelters the reality, that there is space for kind of pluralism, of of fair play, of certain kinds of conversations that can happen that that are the hallmark of what we think of as liberal societies, the the high points, the the virtues. In that case, you know, are there forms of post-liberalism that are really just rejections of secular neoliberalism and really are longing, longing, begging for a a return of Christian liberalism of some sort, as it were.

SPEAKER_00 39:16

Not enough. There are definitely those forms of I think in many forms, in the more authoritarian forms, there is sometimes explicitly a desire to re-paganize, to return to that society that pre-existed the advent of the gospel. And that is the sort of Nietzschean move that you find in some quarters.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

Yeah, I I have a few kind of preliminary comments to that, Derek. First of all, I don't think secular liberalism exists. That's I mean, at the just descriptive level, I'm extremely post-liberal. And so I don't think, but even you don't have to be a post-liberal, you could be like a Jose Casanova, or you could, or or not that Casanova, um, who's the guy my uh friend is working. Anyway, I'll think of it later. But you I I just don't think any any political order is going to be an instantiation of a vision of the good, and so therefore it'll be religious and it and uh and inescapably so. And this is one of the reasons why I think wokeness was such a gift to the church, because it reminded everybody that that's the case. You're it's gonna that vacuum will be filled.

SPEAKER_03 40:14

Just waiting for that clip to come out.

SPEAKER_01 40:15

Yeah, that vacuum will be filled.

SPEAKER_03 40:18

Wokeness is a gift to the the church's reminded.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

It pulled the veil back of just like you're gonna have some vision that's religiously inspired and animated uh in the public order. I think that's inescapable. And so uh and there are bad versions of trying to retrieve the Christian public religion, but I I I I think it's you know there's a sort of battle of the gods there just because uh that the the seat uh will be filled uh in the public space where God should be. Um so there's that, but then um returning, okay, so there's a couple things. One, even if I identified a period that we could return to where Christianity and liberalism were harmonized, the critics would still hate that for various reasons. One, you know, you can't really go back. So going back's impossible anyway. And so we have to go forward. That's why I still think post-liberalism is a better term. We still have to move on and come up with answers for today. But secondly, you know, I could identify, for instance, hey, well, because for instance, I think many of the Christian nationalists, you asked, are these actually post-liberal, or are they are they post, are they actually after modernity or something? Well, I think the versus like the Catholic integralists, I think the integralists are a little bit more pre-modern. And I think the Christian nationalists are a little bit more modern because an early stage of modernity, they they would probably want to return to that. But again, even if you said that, most of the critics would still not want that. They wouldn't want to return to that. And so and maybe I could say, okay, the public religion of kind of the the soft civil religion of the mid-20th century in America, that that's a that's a very kind of a pan-Protestant soft establishment. Where but again, I still think most people would not be okay with that. Uh and so we still have to go we have to press on. Uh, but uh yeah, I think there's there's a lot of different past moments we could look at. Uh but again, those those moments are all gonna have errors too. I mean, even if you returned back to the mid-20th century civil religion, you're gonna have to deal with the race issue in America. And so there's that. Anyway, so those are just some preliminary thoughts.

SPEAKER_03 42:22

Uh yeah, you can't, you can't, you you know, we you can ever walk into the same stream twice, all that sort of thing. History has moved on, modernity has happened, post-modernity has happened, AI is here. Like, is liberalism even possible in the age of AI? That's like a question we're all gonna have for like five minutes before AI shuts us down and puts us into camps. But like the the question though, uh with folks who do retrieval is always hey, is there something back there that we want to pull from and use creatively in the present moment? So my question is kind of just in the mode of retrieval is the the post-liberalism that's looking forward, looking not for a pre-liberal model, but a differently liberal model that can be redeployed, like good the good post-liberalism. Obviously, I'm I'm not talking about full revanchists like, hey, you know, Nietzsche and Vitalist, et cetera, et cetera, versions, but I'm talking about the sort of ecclesiocentric post-liberalism that the Civitas podcast is looking at. You know, the the fancy, the fancy church kind that still thinks the Lord Jesus' commands are good. There's there's a sense in which I I I guess I'm just asking that like people in their mind still have the dichotomy right now, I think. Post-liberalism is anti-liberalism. And I guess what I'm saying is I think it i some of it is. Some of it is d differently liberal, as it will, as it were be. As it were, as it could be. So that's that's that's my that's my thought.

SPEAKER_00 43:54

I think one thing that needs to be taken into account when we're reflecting upon liberalism is that so much Which is shaped by the horrors of the past and the ways in which liberalism is a a sort of nerfing to use a more modern term of many forms of political ideology. The utopianism, the extreme forms of populism. If you're in a society where you have mass media, where you have vast technological state status structures, when you have powerful ideologies that are running through populations, what liberalism offers is a way of keeping in check some of the utopianism, some of the extremes of, for instance, nationalist visions or fascist visions that you might have imposing some particular vision upon the whole of society. There's a sense of the importance of human equality. There's a sense of the importance of maintaining very much these are controls to kind of weaken the power of these things, to emphasize human dignity and equality, to ensure that there is not a movement in the direction of strong authoritarianism, and to recognize the danger when we believe that one person has the vision and that one vision is the vision for the whole of society and every aspect of society must operate in terms of that. Those forms of totalitarianism, we have a recent history with those, and they are devastating. We might also think about the the effect of human fallibility and human sin and liberalism being shaped by a sense of, first of all, the imperfectibility of society, but also the reality of the fall and the danger of absolute power, totalitarian systems, and the importance of having all these sorts of checks and limitations and values that limit the strong gods, as they would be called, the sort of description that Rusty Reno gives in his book on the subject. And so liberalism in many ways is a leash or a sort of muzzle upon politics. And the post-liberal move move allows for the arising of new grand visions of communism, of more fascist vision in some quarters, strong forms of nationalism. And these are forms of politics that offer grand utopian visions, but they also bring up the shadow of the horrors of the past, which liberalism was very much designed not just as a positive vision, but maybe more as a negative set of controls upon political visions within the age of mass media, mass mobilization, and technocratic states. John Eric has a superb piece on this.

SPEAKER_01 47:00

Yeah. And it's also kind of like the Judas Sklar version of liberalism. It's a liberalism's strengths is what it's trying to its appeal is because of the evils it's holding at bay. And so it's it's it's often uh animated more by what it checks rather than what it seeks. And there's a draw to that because there's Yeah, there's uh you know there's dangers. And I think but to maybe offer a curveball back to the question that Derek was asking, is there a good version of liberalism or several at least on one point I would think no, there's not. Well, at least on one point, which is related to, but also I think it will calm some fears, is it's related to Peter and I's project of the ecclesiocentric post-liberalism, which is at the root of the kind of liberal political imagination is Hobbes and Locke on the church and what the church is, kind of reducing it to defang it as a to reduce it to this voluntary society that's only concerned with the internal life and salvation of souls and entirely otherworldly and domesticated to the sovereign state over which, you know, and that it's it's really subordinated to even at a national level. And I I think what so at that on that point, what our project is trying to say, you have to you just have to reject that as a Christian. I I think that's just not what the church is. I'm sorry, it never has been and isn't. The church is the body of Christ that is a gift and it's a reality in the world that you have to deal with. It's the pillar and ground of truth, you know, it's the the the locus of salvation. I mean, it's uh all these things, it it isn't just a group of like-minded individuals that you get together, you know, like a country club, but really, you know, and it's just concerned with your internal life. I know it's also externed with it's concerned with your outer life, how you live as a Christian. And it's your ultimate community as a Christian. And so that's what Peter and I are trying to press. But also I think that is a way to get around some of the fears that we're talking about, is Peter and I would rather direct your more of your social ambitions to the life of the church. And if Christians gave themselves more to their local communities, but also the local community that itself is understanding itself as part of the broader body of Christ, if you located your social longings more and more there, not exclusively so, there's other things you have to do, of course. Then I I think it could take down some of the temperature of actually what you expect in the political order. That's that's part of what we're trying to do.

SPEAKER_03 49:21

Hmm. Alistair. Follow-up. Rejoin.

SPEAKER_00 49:24

I very much agree with with James that.

SPEAKER_03 49:27

That's weird. That's so weird that you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 49:32

Yeah, that's how we're I'm sorry, you don't usually have the experience of someone agreeing with you. I know. It never happens.

SPEAKER_03 49:38

I do agree with some of the other members of this podcast. It never happens now. I need to get Joe back on the show. The Derek and Friends agree. Derek, Derek disagrees with his friends podcast. No, and I'm I'm not even really disagreeing. I'm just trying to steel man a little bit for the for the liberal case.

SPEAKER_01 49:54

Yeah, I do think that the I think the liberal because if you want me to defend their arguments against me, okay, I can do that. Yeah, I mean I think but I I think the best argument about pushback against post-liberalism to me right now is uh a twofold. One, is it rejection of the American tradition? So like our Western heritage. And that's where I think that's where I think O'Donovan is really helpful. He he has this little phrase, like, even how he defends democracy in ways of judgment, I think it's that that's maybe Alistair and Susanna's favorite book by him. And he's like, it's a it's a very moderate defense of democracy. And then connected to that is liberal democracy. And he's like, look, it has the right of heritage, like it is our heritage. And so it has the first word even if it doesn't have the last word. And I think that's a really good way to begin it. Like we can't, we have to, I think, work from where we are. That's why that's how I'm trying to still do it. Like you got to work from where we are. So I think that's a if it's just this reactionary, nihilistic, you know, you know, anger about our moment, then that's not that's not enough. And so um I think we have to carry forward what's the best that we've inherited. I think that's a good. And then the second one, the second critique, I think uh it does it lack specificity, you know, kind of like postmodernism. You know, is it just we're just you're just after something, but you actually haven't laid out the vision uh of where to go. That's a fine pushback. I just say, you know, at least at the discourse level, it's not it doesn't lack value just by asking these questions and trying to press some critiques. But I I think that's fair insofar as you haven't produced a positive vision. I do think you leave a vacuum for more of the nefarious forces that we've talked about. That's that I think that's that's the point that still is something I I think post-liberals need to deal with.

SPEAKER_00 51:39

Yeah, there's I do think the one of the values of the term post-liberalism is just highlighting what is increasingly a reality that liberalism does not have the answers, either as a philosophy or just practically. And so something more is needed, and that there is a vacuum in many respects. It's not a fully laid-out p project or political theory or anything of the kind. It's more liberalism has died and or failed, and it's increasingly obvious to people, and there are various contenders trying to fill that space, but we are in a post-liberal moment, and the question is what comes next? And ideally, we want something that will not be a repudiation of the many Christian gains that liberalism represented.

SPEAKER_03 52:33

Yeah, I think that that kind of healthier reception of of our inheritance, of our parentage, of of kind of w where we're at. Put it this way, I am I am an American. I love the American tradition, I love the constitutional tradition, all those sorts of things. I actually think they flow from fairly Christian premises. And so Well, now you're against Oliver O'Donovan there, but Well, he is a Brit. And I love him, but you know, not everybody can be blessed to live to have been born and live on these shores, or at least, or at least emigrate to these shores. So um uh I I really do think that they're the kind of the kind of post-liberalism that I've seen that is almost a repudiation of some of the core values of the American founding. Well, I that I think a lot of them are actually Christian origin, and and at least among the various iterations of human construction, you know, humanly constructed political orders out there has been a pretty good one. You know, I'm I'm not somebody who's gonna I'm not a Mormon. I don't think the Constitution is divinely inspired, I don't think that, you know, d a democratic republic is the only place that you can live as a faithful Christian. Nevertheless, the criticisms that would be more forcefully forcefully open to kind of demolishing that, taking that down, that sort of thing, make me nervous and I instinctually don't like them. Um and so part of me is just trying to think through okay, what's the good version of these critiques? It takes on board the legitimate critiques of liberalism and neoliberalism that that are there, obviously.

SPEAKER_01 54:08

Yeah, I think one of the arg one of the ways to tie maybe your earlier question of like where what can we draw from the past in America? A scholar I I would promote on that point, even though I don't think he's necessarily trying to do exactly this, so I'm not gonna hold him accountable to how I've used him, is uh is our friend Miles Smith, his book Religion and Republic. And just like look that's a great book. It's just like look, these go back to our so he defines himself as a Christian institutionalist, and he that's how he looks at America. So he's not gonna he wouldn't appropriate that term post-liberal. That's okay. So I'm not gonna hold him accountable to all that. But that's a way you could retrieve some of the best of our past and be like, hey, even though we can't go back, these things are not alien. Some of the things that a lot of the post liberals are promoting, the best of the best ones, are not necessarily alien to the American legacy.

SPEAKER_03 54:52

Yeah. Yeah. That's helpful.

SPEAKER_00 54:54

And in some ways, these are more post-liberal in some sense, moves than many of the forms of post-liberalism that are more ideological. It's just recognizing this is America's story, this is England's story or whatever, and we work with that material. And we don't need to promote some grand theory of everything and the way that everything must be done in every place at every time. We work with our specific reality and we bring the best out of that as Christians.

SPEAKER_03 55:23

On that note, there's much more to say, and we will say it in the future somehow, some way, in some rambling form. Maybe we'll have miles on finally to talk again. We should do. Uh but for now, if you've listened thus far, thank you for listening to another episode of Mir Fidelity. If you stopped listening, you're not hearing this, well then you missed out on that. Thank you. Uh but beyond that, if this is helpful to you or our show generally is helpful to you, please rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, spread the word, uh, sign up for Mirror Orthodoxy, uh, that sort of thing. But for now, this has been another episode. Thank you.