David Albertson and Jason Blakely, authors of Utopia for Our Century: A Manifesto of Hope, describe utopian thought as an answer to the partisan politics of “apocalyptic nationalism and self-satisfied progressivism,” though their primary audience is proponents of the latter whom they define as a “secular Left” that “needs to rediscover the riches of virtue traditions.” Indeed, for a certain liberal atheist, “religion” can seem like promising material for post-secular ideological synthesis, an ascension from the mundane conflict between left and right to seemingly bygone practices of the self. Similarly, the satirical efflorescence of utopian writing challenges political realism by imagining a radically better and happier society. Who could argue with virtue, ethics, hope?
The intellectual movement of post-secularism posits itself as a corrective to the partiality of modern unbelief, yet it carries the very secularist notion that “religion” is, in contrast, a source of universal, ethical goods. It neglects how any return to religion – in these discussions, almost always Christianity – is laden with the historical and contemporary weight of Christian violence (often a violence imposed in the name of Christianity’s universalism). Religion and utopia are essential categories in contemporary politics, but they are necessarily ambivalent and subjective forms of meaning-making and social action. We must engage with them critically to find real utopian resources for our century.
Albertson and Blakely look to Christian history as a repository to mine for “unsurpassed reservoirs for utopian inspiration and action,” and the descriptive aspect of this project is a necessary corrective for popular understandings of both Christianity and utopian thought. Sometime after Feuerbach, there evolved the idea that a Christian utopia is a contradiction in terms, as if utopian humanism worries only about people while Christianity worries only about God. There are several ways to dispute this claim, including citing Christian Abolitionism, the Social Gospel, Liberation Theology, and the endless examples of Christian utopian communities from Joseph Smith’s United Order to John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community. It is also possible to read religion in the history of utopian thought. H. G. Wells wrote in A Modern Utopia (1905), “The leading principle of the Utopian religion is the repudiation of the doctrine of original sin.” This antinomian claim is theological at its core. Utopian thought has always aimed at spiritual and psychic projects as much as economic reforms.
Positioning their work as “a guide, a manifesto, a proposal,” Albertson and Blakely divide their book into short, intentionally fragmentary chapters set into three sections, “Worlds,” “Experiments,” and “Catastrophes.” In the first section, they cover the utopian contributions of Thomas More, whose 1516 book Utopia coined the term, and Augustine of Hippo, the Christian saint of the 300-400s who described the differences between our “Earthly City” and the utopian “City of God.” In the second section, Albertson and Blakely recount succinct histories of Dorothy Day, Catholic Worker organizers of Los Angeles, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all of whom drew upon Christianity as a font for spiritual strength while productively performing the practices that realized social justice. King’s words, they write, “were not future aspirations but present enactments of a post-racial way of being.” (With the brevity of these chapters, Albertson and Blakely do not address the contestable claim of King’s activism as “post-racial,” although they claim that King’s work is more radical than liberals often stipulate.) In these chapters, Albertson and Blakely show persuasively how Christianity has played a crucial role in civil rights history. It has given justice workers emotional and theoretical tools for understanding the performative ethical impact of their utopian labor.
Albertson and Blakely situate this utopian Christianity within the Aristotelean tradition of virtue ethics, filtered through the influential work of the Scottish-American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, which emphasizes the continual production of social subjectivities. Virtue ethics refutes the claim of Hobbesian political realism that asserts humanity’s unchanging and amoral nature. With what MacIntyre called “practices” – pursuits that bear their benefits internally, rather than externally (i.e., to produce capital) – subjects create the communities they desire (in what Albertson and Blakely call “cosmopoiesis” or world-building). “Practices” also shape utopian subjectivities. The utopian project of “radical ontological difference,” in the words of Duncan Bell and Douglas Mao, occurs through the willed actions of utopians themselves. Utopians are not indoctrinated into ethics; they actively and consciously learn by doing.
The archetypal structure for utopian Christian “practice” is the monastery, wherein every action is meant to shape the votary’s devotional subjectivity, as the sacrament performatively enacts Christ’s presence in the world. Christian monastic communities, Albertson and Blakely write, are “daring micro-experiments in holistic transformation from the ground up,” laboratories for radically rethinking change beyond neo-liberalism’s emphasis on the mechanistic, trickle-down effects of mere reason.
While these descriptions of utopian theories of change are accurate, I have concerns that the solely Christian focus of Utopia for Our Century suggests that performative, utopian, or value-oriented politics are only a characteristic of Christianity, rather than an aspect of religious or ideological formation in general. Saba Mahmood’s work on the Egyptian women’s piety movement is important theoretical precedent in this vein in anthropology and the study of religion. So too, Benedict Anderson’s conception of “imagined communities” posits that nationalities are real, “utopian” fictions, productive of the dreams of which they are constituted.
I also doubt that the performative principals of value ethics cannot be mobilized across the political spectrum by the right as much as any prospective left. Take the immediate example of monastic asceticism, which involves a call to self-discipline that has been attracting young men to neo-orthodoxy in droves. There is something both monastic and utopian in the manosphere’s fitness-culture injunction to “disappear for a month” and “become unrecognizable.”
These are only local emanations of the larger question of Christian nationalism, to which Albertson and Blakely do not provide rigorous answers. Instead, their manifesto of hope elides prominent and even dominant Christian histories. For instance, they write in an early chapter on Henry VIII, the king who had More beheaded for insubordination, that the monarch pushed “a peculiar state-sponsored church that contradicted the actual teachings of traditional Christianity” [emphasis mine]. A similar sort of anti-historical wishful thinking animates their responses to contemporary religious conservatives. In their final section on “Catastrophes,” Albertson and Blakely claim that Christian nationalism is really a “pagan” idolatry of history. “There is no such thing as an earthly utopia only for the Christians,” they write. “No polity can be built on Christian identity alone, because there are no Christians who could truthfully draw that boundary line in the first place.” If only such pronouncements could convince conservative Christians of their religion’s truthful endorsement of social justice, rather than what is often taken as its validation of nationalistic xenophobia.
To be clear, I have no problem with theological claims that Christianity should not be mobilized for nationalism. If I were of the faith, I would believe in a similar manner as James Talarico, whose contemporary brand of the Social Gospel is a bugbear for the conservative decedents of the Moral Majority and can be, I think, a forceful Christianity in America’s next century. But Christian discourse and exegesis, to serve effectively as a reservoir for utopian inspiration, must contend with emanations of partisan Christianity, which include its own descriptions of Christianity’s utopian appeal.
In doing so, Christian utopianism might also avoid replicating the Moral Majority’s assertion that the “secular Left” spurns morality, which is a version of the claim that “the putative science” of Marxist material history lacks an appreciation of ethical development. While Albertson and Blakely begin the book by voicing support for the Green New Deal, universal basic income, and other progressive policies, they critique utopian proposals for such measures as mere technological solutions that “picture the good life as purely a matter of economics.” They say that proponents of such political projects forget how “moral transformations might be required to improve the human future.”
But one can also define material conceptions of the good life as both animated by and in service of radical and utopian moral transformations of individuals and society. I do not mean that we should believe technologists’ promises that labor-saving inventions will resolve proletarian exploitation. (Amazon will mistreat its workers regardless of any scientific advancements it makes.) Instead, I mean that economic goals to redistribute wealth and ensure societal safety-nets would allow many more people to even consider pursuing the “practices” of virtue ethics that Albertson and Blakely see as essential.
Moreover, many economic changes – zero unemployment, for instance – would require such drastic transformations to the capitalist political economy and its reserve army of unemployed laborers that the demand for economic changes cannot be separated from some “deeper form of political creativity.” For utopian thought, spiritual and emotional goals are part and parcel of the pragmatic call for sufficient material abundance. This is the reason for Theodor Adorno’s seemingly unexceptional, utopian and Marxist demand: “that no-one shall go hungry anymore.” Utopian thought is a real synthesis in its rejection of the distinction between principled ideas and mundane existence. Its ambivalent potential lies not in its division between ethics and science, religion and politics, virtue and material abundance, but in its imaginative calculus across each domain.
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I can imagine two paths to develop utopian thought productively in our century.
The first is to avoid the panegyrical and necessarily fragmentary form of the “manifesto.” Contemporary discourse already teems with the confident proclamations of AI-executives telling us that we need utopian manifestos, the “move fast and break things” of argumentative genres. (We should remember that these executives have massive capital incentives to convince us that this day and age of technological growth is a “revolutionary” moment in human history.) There are important forms of theology, critical theory, and utopian writing that are plenty imaginative and still conceptually rigorous. Indeed, the opportunity to engage in deep and thorough reflection is an ever increasingly utopian, anachronistic, and essential practice today. Has anyone been converted to Christianity by Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans? Has a neo-Nazi ever spurned their movement after reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism? Does that lessen their impact on the history of thought?
Many of the issues with Utopia for Our Century, as I see them, could be resolved if Albertson and Blakely did not need to maintain the political purity of Christianity or utopia. They do write early on that no utopias are pure “fantasies cut off from concrete demands,” that all ideologies “sustain an ideal vision that imagines a good self and just community.” A critical reading of utopian frameworks – oriented toward interpretation rather than advocacy – might challenge their later claims that realist (“false”) utopias are ideologically tainted whereas counterfactual (“true”) utopias like More’s escape ideological constraints.
In fact, utopian literature is always a simultaneously normative and critical genre (an “ideological critique of ideology,” in the words of one utopian theorist). The reformist aim of the utopian genre requires that the alternative utopian world still be recognizable – that is, desirable – for utopian readers. (A text is dystopian if the imaginative imposition of utopian reforms causes despair, even for a few.) Utopian literature says: You (and everyone else) want X now. You will still want X in the altered utopian future, when you will all get to enjoy it. This means that every utopia posits a kind of universalism, continuity, or “realism” of the reader’s contemporary desires, which the utopia seeks to fulfill in the future.
Such elements of the first path for utopian thought might even support the second, which is to strive to missionize utopia: to convince people of both the possibility of and the personal imperative to reform. To missionize, the utopian message must attempt to derive a degree of universality, which will form a general belonging that, paradoxically, will always entail exclusions. I suspect that the largest coalitions could be realized when utopian thought starts with those invented memories, impossible desires, and unspoken yearnings that make up our psychic lives and gesture (often only awkwardly) to the fulfillment of human needs. The key theoretical figure hereis the German philosopher Ernst Bloch, who detailed in his magnum opus The Principle of Hope (1954-9) how various “images of desire” or “objective fantasies” act as repositories of social desires, waystations of the yearning for political improvement while material improvements are still economically unfeasible. Bloch’s conception is amenable to various utopian dreams, of which he includes religious longing and romantic nostalgia. (Albertson and Blakely deplore nostalgia as “a perverse mode of dreaming.”) And through Bloch’s work, one could rearticulate what Albertson and Blakely call “failed” utopias of the left and the right as paradoxical successes that share the project of faintly envisioning an ideality that might be better realized upon critical reflection.
Like the emotional awareness borne by nightmares, our everyday desires carry utopian insights, though these desires are always partial, or incomplete, their details hazy, their pragmatics undefined. This viewpoint is also latent in Utopia for Our Century, the “Prologue” of which describes a nightmarish scene of surreal perception reminiscent of the Blochian phrase, borrowed from Bertolt Brecht, “Something’s missing.”
The catholicity of dreams makes them powerful but politically ambivalent. In my mind, the dreams of utopian Christianity are no different. One prominent Christian dream is its own universalism, which is a claim to boundary-defining sovereignty that denies itself as such. (While sovereignty promises to resolve insecurity, its use is the tell-tale sign of fragility.) This universalism leads Albertson and Blakely to write, “Despite their frequent disappointments and many flaws, Christian communities at least bear witness to the possibility of mutual belonging built not on market interests, the exercise of power, ethno-nationalism, or ideological uniformity.” Christianity is no political monolith, but who could say that a community bounded by Christian faith does not entail a measure of uniformity or an implicit exercise of Christianity’s power?
This Christian desire for the universal means it has been a historical resource for utopian thought and practice, both for good and for ill. Like all utopias, utopian Christianity is particularistic and partial. The original island of Utopia was formed by a sovereign named Utopus, whom More’s narrator describes as conquering the “rude and uncivilized inhabitants” and imposing the laws of good government. Utopus even created the island when he ordered his subjects to dig a channel to separate his nation from the continent. Likewise, utopias are the emanations of individual authors who are sovereigns on account of their authorship. We should not pretend that Christian utopias escape this fact. We all share a propensity to desire utopias: those individual, distinct, contradictory, and partial (because they claim sovereign universality) images of the good life. It is upon the recognition and critique of these always imperfect utopias that a broader and more diverse utopian missionizing can be based.
