We live in a time of conspicuous public disagreement, in which the possibility of finding common ground – or even of agreeing on the bare facts of an event – is becoming increasingly precarious. This is evident in a range of political communities, from national polities to universities to faith communities. Responses to the pervasiveness and intractability of our disagreements often communicate a sense of loss: that something is going badly wrong (perhaps in new and unprecedented ways) and that this is eroding invaluable prior norms.
Part of the loss being mourned seems to be a sense of shared political identity. In this context, there’s a marked tendency for theology to be drawn on in articulating substantive visions of the common good. These are offered as a response to a felt void left by the erosion of shared sources of authority and certainties about what constituted the good life, and about what that looked like at the level of a united national political community. Catholic integralism is perhaps the most visible example of this tendency. Proponents such as Adrian Vermeule (and, downstream, JD Vance) are certain that the future of their nation – and of ‘Western civilisation’ as a whole – rests on an alignment of the telos of the family, church, and state. By this political theology, as Jonathan Chaplin has noted, ‘governments must secure not only the earthly but also the heavenly common good’ (in a review of Kevin Vallier’s All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism in Studies in Christian Ethics 38: 2 (2025): 258–62).
Much has been written about the dangers of this political theology for those who aren’t cis-het white men (and, indeed, for those who are), but a negative theological emphasis on the need for epistemic doubt brings into view the account of knowledge underpinning these dangers.
Central to the negative tradition is an awareness of the epistemic limits of finitude. We can only ever see a situation from the particular position in which we stand, and we come to that position through a complex web of relations that have made us this particular person with this particular history. We are, we might say, our limits: not simply in the sense of having a particular location, but in the sense of being material and historical – shaped by all manner of forces in a specific history, in a tangle far too dense for us to tease out our identity with any completeness. We inevitably see only some of the factors that shape our vision and our desire and make us who we are. Furthermore, the things we desire are often self-serving rather than oriented to serving the good of all – and we are prone to deceiving ourselves about the reasons why we desire some particular course of action over others.
If I only have a limited grasp of my own interests, motives, and desires – let alone everyone else’s – then I must acknowledge that I don’t fully know what it would take for anyone’s interests to be met. This generates a radical uncertainty about political goods. The fact that I have only a limited grasp of my own interests, motives and desires, and of your interests, motives and desires, means that I do not know what it would take for my real interests to be met or for your interests to be met. I therefore do not know what we are aiming at: the possibility of achieving a complete grasp of what is in the interests of every member of the community is ruled out.
Integralism, on the other hand, offers a blueprint from above for the life of a given political community. There is no concern that those drawing up the blueprint might have missed anything, and therefore no need for the picture to be supplemented or challenged by anyone else. Such an approach assumes a God’s-eye view of a polity – or as Kevin Vallier puts it, operates as an ‘indirect supernatural sovereignty’ (All the Kingdoms of the World, 37)– with an unimpaired confidence to judge what is going wrong and what should be done to correct this.
As King-Ho and I have explored in relation to eschatology, this ends up reinstating the dominance of one particular group and reifying their epistemic authority to determine the nature of the good and what the good looks like not only for themselves but also for others – and ultimately for the nation as a whole. As such, it demonstrates the force of the argument advanced by Agamben and Gorgouris, amongst others, that political theology can end up assuming divine authority unto itself, and as such is a danger to democracy (if we take democracy to be, at its most basic, practices of deciding together).
However, negative theology does not just have something to offer in critically exposing the dangers of such theopolitical blueprints for the common good. It also points to the capacity for democratic action to offer its own distinctive ethical formation. For the flipside of acknowledging our opaqueness to ourselves and to one another is the need for any one voice to be challenged and supplemented by others. Doubting the completeness of any single voice and perspective reveals the need for it to be brought into conversation with others, and so also brings into view the possibility that I might discover my own good as well as the good of others more deeply in the process (and thus hitherto invisible possibilities of mutuality).
If it is the case that we need the voices of others to discover our own good, then our common life is found most fully not in finding out definitively what the common good is, but in participation in the discussion of what comprises the common good. In this light, a common good is so in part because it is discerned in common. The kinds of practical settlements reached through this kind of deliberation are ones in which there is no single definitive account of what the settlement means, but rather one where those with different theoretical understandings find overlap. Affirming in this way the need for one’s relationship to a political community to always be configured and re-configured locates the theological character of political belonging in day-to-day practice. By this negative rendition, the role of theology in democratic life is not to attach a sacred aura to any one particular institution or regime (or even to any identifiable body, ecclesial or otherwise). Rather, the vital contribution of negative theology to political life is in its nature as a formative practice or discipline – one that is characterised neither by pure orientation or pure contestation but instead with the capacity both for critique and affirmation, in always provisional and non-finalisable democratic actions.
