Ten years ago, our sibling academic journal Political Theology published a special issue on “The Secularization of Hope.” We asked that issue’s editor, David Newheiser, to revisit the theme. He compiled brief reflections from each scholar who contributed to the special issue, written in light of how the world has (or has not) changed.
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Since despair is so tempting these days, hope has been on my mind. Some Americans have a rigid idea of what our community should look like based on a fantasy of American greatness. They see nonwhite people as a source of change, and they find that threatening. This nostalgia expresses a sort of hope—a vision of the world they want—but it is a hope that is closed to the future, congealed by anxiety.
In the United States, hostility toward immigrants is bound up with religion. Some people are hostile toward those who are different because they believe God is on their side; in their view, religious hope is a guarantee that things will work out exactly as they imagine. The difficulty, on the terms of classic Christian thought, is that this reduces God to the scope of their expectations, an idol to ward off anxiety.
Despite its assertion of certainty, a hope of this kind is close to despair. According to medieval negative theology, if God is more than a projection of our preferences, God can surprise us. Since God is more than we imagine, Christian hope includes a profound uncertainty, and that is its strength: it reminds us that anxiety is not the last word. In contrast, a complacent confidence attempts to foreclose uncertainty, but it is prone to shatter when things do not work out as we want.
In the throes of this authoritarian turn, pessimism is reasonable, but that does not mean hope is lost. Over the last year, US leaders have weaponized the power of the federal government to subdue their political opponents. Although American democracy is under serious threat, popular resistance movements—past and present—remind us that things are more fragile than they seem.
Hope can persist even when things seem impossible. This affinity with the miraculous, rupturing the force of prevailing law, gives hope its extra-rational power. Just as Christians believe that God is always beyond us, practices of solidarity open unimagined possibilities.
David Newheiser
Associate Professor of Religion, Florida State University
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I don’t see many grounds for hope these days at the abstract, global, or national scales. Recently, however—and perhaps unsurprisingly—I found a source of hope at the local level, in a way that touched my concrete, lived reality.
At our annual school district meeting, where town residents gather to debate, amend, and vote on various proposals (“warrants”) related largely to the school budget, a group of residents had introduced a petition for change. New Hampshire RSA 40:13, or “SB2” (Senate Bill 2, 1995), is an optional form of town governance that replaces the traditional, single-session town meeting with a two-stage process. Under our current structure, residents gather for several hours on a Saturday in March for a deliberative session that moves sequentially through the warrant articles, discussing and voting on each in turn. Petitioners argued that this model is exclusionary because it requires attendance in order to vote. They cited health concerns, work schedules, and caregiving responsibilities that can make attendance difficult and, in their view, effectively disenfranchise some residents.
The proposed alternative separates deliberation from voting. One meeting would be devoted to discussion and the final setting of the warrant articles. A second stage, held days or weeks later, would consist of ballot voting—similar to national elections—where residents would simply approve or reject the proposals without discussion.
On the surface, the change may seem benign, even salutary. Indeed, petitioners invoked the language of “voter suppression” to argue the moral necessity of the shift. But several concerns emerge.
First, the move disincentivizes deliberation and tends to produce less engaged and less informed voting. Experience in other towns shows that far fewer people attend the deliberative session. The result is that residents vote later in a more isolated, atomized fashion, with fewer opportunities for dialogue or exposure to competing viewpoints. It is not difficult to see in this shift a further erosion of what little communal fabric remains.
Second, the change exposes deliberative sessions to targeted manipulation. Because attendance is typically low, organized interest groups can mobilize a small but decisive presence to reshape proposals before they go to ballot. A neighboring town experienced precisely this scenario when a small group used the deliberative session to slash the school budget in half. Days later, voters arrived at the ballot box to find themselves forced to choose between approving or rejecting a budget that could not sustain the town’s schools. The matter ultimately had to be resolved in the New Hampshire courts.
Third, the new structure actually creates additional barriers for those who value the deliberative process, requiring attendance at two separate events rather than one.
What gave me hope, however, was the way residents spoke in defense of our current system. Many acknowledged the importance of reducing barriers to voting, but they also insisted that communal deliberation and informed decision-making were worth preserving. The proposed change required a three-fifths majority to pass. Instead, it was resoundingly defeated, receiving around one-fifth of the vote.
As a transplant, I confess that there are many things about New England that I still find challenging. And there is much about the Puritan legacy I find problematic. But this form of local governance where residents can act as their own legislators is a genuine civic treasure. And I was heartened, perhaps even a bit hopeful, to see how strongly my neighbors felt the same. The question that remains for me is not why our local practices do not imitate our national ones, but why our national politics has drifted so far from these local forms that honor the democratic virtues more clearly.
Devin Singh
Associate Professor of Religion, Dartmouth College
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It was hard to write about hope ten years ago. It seems almost impossible now. In the face of the active denial of responsibility witnessed in policies which hasten rather than slow down climate catastrophe and, relatedly, in the face of a rapid slide into authoritarianism around the globe and the inhumane detainment, deportation, and death of immigrants, in the face of unchecked war crimes and genocide, what business does any of us have in claiming hope?
Hope has always had a dangerous capacity: when directed idolatrously towards one specific end, it can fuel action that spurns the preciousness of all human beings and accepts any means, however violently nihilistic, to reach that end. In the past month we have seen this dangerous logic (and profound misunderstanding of the New Testament) play out as US military commanders invoke Armageddon and the Messiah’s return in order to justify dropping bombs on Iran. On the other hand, when hope is fixated on a transcendent act of salvation, on a savior to fix these earthly troubles, a certain passivity or quietism is risked: What need have I to do anything?
Against both of these views, in my essay ten years ago I argued that hope was best understood as a discipline or practice that is open-ended and attentive to respond to what comes rather than awaiting a particular outcome: “Hope is neither passive expectation of a rescue from above,” I wrote, “nor the idolatrous, illusory expectation of the fulfillment of our own desires.” In the face of the onslaught of suffering experienced by so many living beings of the planet, hope is something chosen and practiced daily, again and again, perhaps differently each time—as anger, lament, compassion, repentance, or as service and care. The sense of hope as a preparatory discipline necessary to bear witness to the truth of our world and to be capable of a dynamic politics of openness to the suffering of the other, the suffering of all others, remains necessary, even as it becomes infinitely harder to choose and cultivate. For without it, we have no hope.
Tamsin Jones
Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Trinity College
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“When I was young, Nazism seemed to belong to another era, but the older I get the closer this era seems to be.” That this sentence by French writer Édouard Levé resonates with me now seems both hysterical and radically appropriate: hysterical because of the tiredness of the trope of Nazism as the emblem of all things evil but appropriate because of the collapse of time it describes. The older I get, the more what seemed like a movement from one point to another on a flat plane is revealed to be a circuit around a melting globe, leaving me in the exact same place, but somehow looking the other way. When I was young and heard of Martin Luther King, Jr., invoking the phrase “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” I thought the difficulty implied was a matter of patience, of sheer waiting for the inevitable to arrive and all the shenanigans to finally be over. But now the arc itself seems to be in hysterics; the bend, wherever it’s going, is not a smooth slide. I feel surrounded by ruins gasping into or away from life. Hope must be hiding someplace, embarrassed for itself and for us.
Joshua Daniel
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Ten years ago, I wrote about the variety of ways that the term hope is used and the muddled thinking that often follows. Whenever we try to be precise about hope, what results would be classed by theologians as idolatry, deifying some aspect of the world in a process that secures the interests of the wealthy and powerful (for which “whiteness” stands in). We can be precise about what theological hope is not, but we cannot be precise about what theological hope is—and that is as it should be, if hope is directed at God. Therefore, Christians should:
(1) work to purge idolatrous hopes;
(2) attend to communities struggling against domination (where slavery and its afterlives are the paradigm of domination), believe that God is present in those struggles, and believe that hope is happening in such struggles, even as it is impossible to be precise about it and even as it is impossible for those with wealth and power to fully join those struggles and hopes.
Still true.
Vincent Lloyd
Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, Villanova University
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One of the impediments to enduring hope is the false hope to which many political theologies are especially vulnerable: identifying some movement, some possibility, some feature of the social world with untroubled normativity, especially divine normativity. Once revealed to live within the churn of the world’s powers, such judgments can disappoint us in a way that paves a royal road for knowing cynicism.
In my contribution to our special issue ten years ago, I sought to show that a dialectical Christian political theology, emphasizing the non-ideal character of political critique and motivated action, need not leave us without conviction. Ten years later, I still think that. But I also think, ten years later, it may better nourish the hope we need to invert it: to remind ourselves that the non-exteriority of our practices and judgments also entails the proximity, the intimacy, for better and worse, of our lives. To assert that no border or space colonization program is likely to succeed in realizing the nightmarish fantasy of truly living apart from one another. To say that we can and should use “we,” despite all the difference it has to include and is in danger of eliding, as a commitment to building a collective in practice that honors the solidarity written into our social being.
I know of no grounds for easy optimism that this project will succeed. The surest grounds for hope in it that I know of are on display when non-ideal people, using the best judgments at their disposal, decide to take to the streets in defense of their neighbors near and far—streets in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and streets around the world as people watch with lament and hope for Gaza. Sometimes, critics of such action air the trope that those involved, like others who oppose or fall victim to the powers of the world, are “no angels.” Fine: let us not be angels together, striving to live a better freedom.
Rick Elgendy
Martha Ashby Carr Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology, Wesley Theological Seminary
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The characters in Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House are joined together through their connections to the long-running case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce in London’s Court of Chancery, now abolished but notorious in Dickens’s time for the slowness, complexity, and inhumaneness of its manner of proceeding. Cases drag on for years and exhaust the financial and mental resources of many of the plaintiffs, often leaving them ruined—in all senses of the word. One such character is Miss Flite, who attends the court each day, desperate for some sign of her case’s progress but always in vain. In her apartment she keeps a collection of caged birds which, she says, she will release on the “Day of Judgment” (as she refers to the day when her case will be definitively concluded). The birds’ names reveal the sorrow and pity of her predicament: Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach—beginning with hope only to pass through ruin and despair and ending in absurdity and meaninglessness.
The author is suggesting, perhaps, that hope built solely on what may be is not a hope that can nourish, nurture, or comfort (in the old sense of the word: to make strong by one’s presence). The alternative, then, could only be a hope that is grounded not in what may be but in what, in some sense or degree, already is. Our hope for the newborn child is not essentially a matter of speculating about what may or may not happen to it in life, love, or the world, but a response to the love we experience in its look, its cry, its touch. It is the real that strengthens, not the imagined—or, to be more precise, the imagined can only strengthen when it is rooted and grounded in the real.
Of course, to discover what is or what might count as the real is the beginning of a whole other set of reflections and might, indeed, be considered to have constituted the matter of philosophy for the last two millennia. One could also gloss this as saying that hope is itself engaged in a questioning journey of discovery as to what, really, is to be hoped for. What matters enough that we would rightly hope for its continuance and future flourishing? This is a simple question to which there are no ready answers, only the constant renewal—Kierkegaard’s repetition—of the questioning quest itself.
George Pattison
Honorary Professorial Research Fellow, University of Glasgow
