“Against this it will be asked, however: is there not something implicitly coercive in the very attempt to define a secular government as Christian? [O’Donovan is using ’secular’ in its proper sense of temporary or provisional.] Does it not makes some members of society ‘outsiders’, even if they are treated well as such? And is no the fundamental right of religious dissidents the right not to have to be religious dissidents? This suggestions, which certainly strikes to the heart of the Christendom idea, underlies a great deal of the discompfort that we now feel with the idea and its legacy.
We should understand its intellectual provenance, which is in the liberal tradition though it is not characteristic of what we might call ‘classic’ liberalism, i.e. the liberal doctrines of the early-modern period. Classic liberalism was hospitable to the project of resolving disputes on questions of truth by persuasion. The dialectical struggle of rational debate, in which each side marshals arguments to bring the other to agreement, seemed to early liberal theorists a healthy thing, the proper alternative to violent struggle. In an argument which had currency from Milton to Mill, they pleaded for the toleration of erroneous beliefs precisely on the ground that they stimulated rational discussion and so assisted the common quest for truth. But clearly one cannot approve the common quest for truth without approving the hope that common persusaions may emerge from it. They thought there was nothing to fear from shared convictions if they were rationally reached and rationally held.
Recent reworkings of the tradition, however, have lost confidence in the innocuousness of a search for shared convictions. It has come to seem perilous to allow persuasions of any kind, however reached, to shape the ordering of society. Doctrines that shape society are political doctrines, and all political doctrines are by their nature coercive. Even liberal doctrines of society are coercive, but since they define the minimum formal conditions for social existence (so the account runs) they have the indefeasible claim to make society as little coercive as it possibly can be; while any other shared doctrine is in excess of the necessary minimum and so imposes unwarranted coercion. Even societies that are actually in agreement on far more than minimal conditions ought not to express those agreements in politcical conventions, ceremonies or laws, lest they imperil the freedom of possible dissidents, present or future.
This impressionistic sketch will suffice for our limited purpose, which is not to engage self-conscious liberal theorists but to articulate the grounds for a common and largely implicit distrust of the Christendom idea. Those grounds seem to take us back behind alarm about governments to an alarm about society. For it is society that makes outsiders. Government may wrong dissidents by repression or persecution; but it does not make them dissidents by recognising and affirming things upon which its society agrees and they disagree. Deep social agreements unreflected in government would merely delegitimize the government. We are left with the suspicion that this liberal view springs from a radical suspicion of society as such and of the agreements that constitute it - to be traced back, perhaps, to the contractarian myth which bound individuals directly together into political societies without any acknowledgment of the mediating social reality.
However that may be, a theological discussion can take a short cut at this point: it is not Christendom but Christianity that is attacked, since by implication it makes the church inadmissible. If any social agreement is potentially coercive and to be justified only by the needs of civil order, then the agreements which constitute the church, with which many disagree, are coercive and unjustifiedly so. If there is no religious test on the right to vote, or to have access to education or medical care, why should there be one on attending Mass and receiving communion, which is, after all, a source of satisfaction to religious temperaments and an important means of social participation? This conclusion, that the church should not be defined by belief, seems to me to follow rather obviously from the general refusal of ideology, though I do not know of anyone who has yet drawn it, except for the incomparable Simone Weil, who proposed, in her wartime tract The Need for Roots, that it should be prohibited to publish any opinion on any subject in the name of a collective body. Any society defined by its belief was to be banned.
In particular the ne0-liberal thesis is incompatible with a narrative theology which professes that agreement on a common ’story’ is an essential elelment in social identity. Generally speaking this point is well taken by narrative theologians, who have understood themselves as fellow-travellers in the communitarian cause in the fight between communitarians and liberals. But they have not seen the implications for their customary repudiation of of Christendom. Christendom ought to be precisely the kind of storied community they aim to celebrate. Of course, they criticise it not for having a story but for having the wrong story, a story made up of the praise of coercion; but that is precisely where they succumb to the liberal thesis. The story-tellers of Christendom do not celebrate coercion; they celebrate the power of God to humble the haughty ones of the earth and to harness them to the purposes of peace. In resolving to deconstruct the self-storying of Christendom the narrativists have simply followed the principle proposed by their adversaries: social doctrine of whatever kind is coercive; those who claim a social identity in terms of unnecessary belief do violence to those who do not share it.”
Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, 221-223.
