“Hauerwasian”, as in the famous theologian, has become synonymous in some circles with totally separatist, unrealistic Christianity. Which is odd to me, because Hauerwas writes in much more concrete and personable terms than a lot of the realists I read. Sure, he tends to deploy some pretty awesome hyperbole when critiquing liberalism, but to me that just looks like part of his overall belief system. (I am thinking here especially of his titles and taglines, infamous ones being Sex in Public: How Adventurous Christians are Doing It and so forth.) You can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, so they say, and Hauerwas seems to take that pretty seriously: you can’t hack away at entrenched liberalism with the qualified and moderate complaints of liberalism.

Niebuhr, realist extraordinaire, seems to envision this complaint as well. He loathes the stridently religious, claiming that strident (heavily committed) religion damages the religious person’s ability to participate in politics. He writes,

“…the full force of religious faith will never be available for the building of a just society, because its highest visions are those which proceed from the insights of a sensitive individual conscience…To the sensitive spirit, society must always remain something of the jungle, which indeed it is, something of the world of nature, which might be brought a little nearer to the kingdom of God, if only the sensitive spirit could learn, how to use the forces of nature to defeat nature, how to use force in order to establish justice. Knowing the peril of corruption in this strategy, the religious spirit recoils. If that fear can be overcome religious ideals may yet achieve social and political significance.”

Emphasis mine. For the intensely religious, politics is a game of using the master’s tools to alter the master’s house, or of somehow co-opting the projects and processes of sinful earthly politics to make alterations to sinful worldly edifices. This isn’t my view, but it’s the one Niebuhr imputes to people like Augustine, who he views as unable to cope with the fear of corruption via use of the master’s tools in order to alter political arrangements. For Niebuhr this means we’re more or less stuck in some kind of catch-22 unless we can accept the simulacrum of Christan virtues as suitable enough for our political projects.

What does that look like, though? Oddly it looks a lot like regular old liberalism without any real Christian intervention at all. This is because when you’re dealing with simulacra, you can turn the volume up or down as loud or quiet as you like. There can be a thin vein of love in your politics or a robust stream, but there’s no agreed upon required saturation. A lot of love is better than a little, but that the thing should be present is the only agreed-upon principle. Hauerwas really hit this home for me, writing about sex:

“Yet, in spite of the kind of ‘worldly wisdom’ that makes the realist position attractive, it is doomed to failure. What realists fail to recognize is that, in spite of claims to being amoral or at least nomoralistic, their position in fact presupposes an ethical recommendation. Realists cannot help but assume that the way things are is the way things ought to be. In so doing, realists accept as morally normative the liberal assumption that sexual activity should be determined by what each individual feels is good for him or her…By accepting such an assumption, moreover, realism fails to provide an adequate response to our other primary cultural alternative, romanticism. For many teenagers get pregnant exactly because of their romantic notion that sex should be a romantic gesture denoting the level of commitment between two people.”

In other words, because realists are committed to operation from the real, their ethical recommendations follow from what they understand to be available to them, but the available ethical recommendations are produced by an ethical environment which has certain values pre-built in. This is what Hauerwas means when he says the Christian realist who makes ‘realistic’ recommendations about sexual activity has already agreed — not for any Christian reason, but merely because it is the only ethic available — that sexual activity ought to be determined by what feels good to a person. The realist can’t go back beyond the real fact that this is what determines sexual behavior in the current world to question whether or not it ought to be. To do so would be to move outside the real.

But Hauerwas’ argument also points us toward the problem of simulacratic Christian reasoning. The Christian realist, knowing that people are going to have sex out of wedlock and whatnot, attempts to thread a little Christian reasoning into that decision by imploring people to wait until they are genuinely in love to have sex as an expression of that love. There are Christian elements in that view of sex, but as Hauerwas aptly demonstrates, the outcome is no different than any other liberal sexual ethic. This is because the Christian realist can’t actually make any recommendation as to how someone should experience or recognize love; they can only submit to the way in which people do experience and recognize love, and ask them to use that as a compass.

Yet if love, especially romantic love, has been rendered alien to Christian ethics by contemporary culture — transformed, that is, into just another way of ‘feeling good’ — then the Christian realist isn’t actually recommending anything other than that a person have sex when it feels good to them. They might be recommending a particular type of good feeling as the best feeling to take directions from, but that feeling itself belongs to the culture, and not to Christian ethics. In that sense you can see how troublesome the submission to simulacra really is: when you settle for representations or imitations of Christian values in your ethics, the intensity can be revved up or toned down to cooperate with whatever the surrounding cultural ethic happens to be. While this might be a “good enough” type situation for Christian realists, it is not effectively different from non-Christian systems, which calls into question how useful it really is beyond the rhetorical. (Not that the rhetorical doesn’t matter, it does, but mainly internally.)

This is just a little note I thought might interest you. It came up in a footnote in my dissertation on Niebuhr and Augustine, and I always like little nuggets like these, so I thought you might as well.