Public Theology in Retreat

From The LA Review of Books-

WHERE IS THE Reinhold Niebuhr for today? What is theology good for? Such questions have become hallmarks in public commentary on the role, past and present, of Christian thought in politics and in the academy. The first has generated a whole subgenre unto itself — call it “O Niebuhr, Where Art Thou?” — marked by an understandable, but usually nostalgic yearning for the halcyon days when serious Christians commanded an audience by dint of their learning, eloquence, and pertinence to the national situation. The second question is less prominent, but no less well meaning: recognizing theology’s profound loss in social and intellectual stature, earnest essays recommend giving it another chance, at least as a sort of instrumental good; it may not be of much value in itself (at least to the unbelieving), but familiarity with theology may help one better understand the history of art, philosophy, and politics in the West, not to mention one’s church-attending neighbors next door.

That such questions must continually be asked, and such essays continually written, tells us all we need to know about the time in which we live. Obituaries, diagnoses, and genealogies have been offered in plenty, the most recent and profound of which is Alan Jacobs’s “The Watchmen” in Harper’s last year. There he chronicles the death of the Christian public intellectual in the United States. Although Jacobs recognizes the manifold external conditions that both gave and took away the possibility for thoughtful religious discourse to have a broad public in the United States, his argument comes at the issue from the inside: what actions on the part of Christians led to their marginalization? It turns out that Christians silenced themselves, at least in part. That is, just as society began to turn its attention away from the Church, the Church turned inward, began to talk primarily to itself; and when it turned outward, moreover, it increasingly and stubbornly used language unfamiliar to an unchurched polis.

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