In our most recent podcast, Mark and I spoke with Professors Julia Mahoney and Steven Smith about the prospects for a revival of classical law in America. That retrieval would depend, at least in part, upon the systematic reintroduction of Christian concepts and categories. Our guests had mixed views on the matter, reflecting different feelings about what the future might hold.

Here is a new volume of essays that seems to support Professor Mahoney’s sense of things (and to which Professor Smith contributed a chapter!): The Oxford Handbook of Christianity and Law, co-edited by our friend and law-and-religion titan, Professor John Witte, Jr., and Professor Rafael Domingo. The book is massive, and I don’t see a single chapter I am not interested to read. A must-have to usher in the season of Advent.

This volume tells the story of the interaction between Christianity and law—historically and today, in the traditional heartlands of Christianity and around the globe. Sixty new chapters by leading scholars provide authoritative but accessible accounts of foundational Christian teachings on law and legal thought over the past two millennia as well as the current interaction and contestation of law and Christianity on all continents. Several chapters explore the ways in which Christianity shaped and was shaped by core public, private, penal, and procedural laws. Other chapters analyze various old and new forms of Christian canon law, natural law theory, and religious freedom norms as well as Christian teachings on fundamental principles of law, politics, and legal order. A final cluster of chapters probe Christian contributions to controversial and cutting legal issues of migration, biotechnology, environmentalism, and racial justice. Together, the chapters make clear that Christianity and law have had a perennial and permanent influence on each other over time and across cultures, albeit with varying levels of intensity and effectiveness.

Thanksgiving is the holiday that most perfectly reflects the political theology of America. Its distinctive blend of religious politics, and political religion. And there are few better representatives of this fusion than George Washington. Listen to the music of his political theology in this, the beginning of his famous Thanksgiving Day proclamation of 1789:

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor– and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be– That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks–for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation–for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war–for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed–for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted–for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

As it happens, an excellent edited collection has just been published by Carson Holloway and our dear friend and outgoing executive director of the James Madison program at Princeton, Bradford P. Wilson: The Political Writings of George Washington (Cambridge University Press). I’m told a paperback edition is in the offing as well, but this one looks well worth a holiday splurge.

The Political Writings of George Washington includes Washington’s enduring writings on politics, prudence, and statesmanship in two volumes. It is the only complete collection of his political thought, which historically, has received less attention than the writings of other leading founders such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton. Covering his life of public service—from his young manhood, when he fought in the French and Indian Wars, through his time as commander-in-chief of the revolutionary army; his two terms as America’s first president, and his brief periods of retirement, during which he followed and commented on American politics astutely—the volumes also include first-hand accounts of Washington’s death and reflections on his legacy by those who knew or reflected deeply on his significance. The result is a more thorough understanding of Washington’s political thought and the American founding.

The sociologist and cultural critic, James Davison Hunter, is well known for his discussion in the 1990s of the concept of “culture war.” Hunter is an astute and insightful diagnostician of the present political and social discontents. On a personal note, his work has influenced my own thinking and writing on many of the matters we often take up at the Forum.

I’m a little early to notice this new book (no cover quite yet), which comes out in February of next year, but here Hunter is with a new volume in the same vein, but which seems to make the point that liberal democracies depend for their survival on other, non-liberal premises and commitments, and these (so he argues) have now been dissolved so completely as to make the political project deeply unstable. The book is Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis (Yale University Press). One to pre-order and to anticipate.

Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there has always been an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment.”
 
James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” thirty years ago, tells us in this new book that the historic sources of national solidarity have largely dissolved. While a deepening political polarization is the most obvious sign of this, the true problem is not polarization per se but the absence of cultural resources to work through what divides us. All political regimes require some level of consensus. If it cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed coercively.
 
Can America’s political crisis be fixed? Can an Enlightenment-era institution—liberal democracy—survive and thrive in a post-Enlightenment world? If, for some, salvaging the older sources of national solidarity is neither possible sociologically, nor desirable politically or ethically, what cultural resources will fund liberal democracy going forward?