Desiring a Better Country: Forays in Political Theology by Douglas Farrow (review)

The latest book by McGill University theologian Douglas Farrow is a compendium of previously unpublished essays that cohere in their lament for a bygone era. Farrow has an axe to grind, and his disdain for the current state of affairs in liberal democracies of the West is patently obvious.

The five chapters address significant moral topics: the nature of human rights, marriage equality, pluralism, religious freedom, and the supposed neutrality of the state. Farrow believes that any defence of human rights without God is senseless, and that the proper point of departure for any rights discourse is a ‘‘thankful reckoning with the rightful claim of God on each and all of us’’ (21). That divine claim, for Farrow, assumes a certain understanding of what constitutes the human. ‘‘Man [sic]’’ is not ‘‘this person or that person,’’ but rather male and female (27). Gendered differences are foundational to marriage, for the three basic ‘‘goods’’ of marriage, as Farrow would have it, are procreation, faithfulness, and sacramental bonding. He thus concludes, in a rather incendiary tone, ‘‘that the promotion of homosexuality is incompatible with a healthy society’’ (36).

Farrow next targets what he calls ‘‘normative pluralism’’—the valuing of all moral and religious diversity—which he thinks is a threat to Christian political identity. This threat was manifested in the case of Montreal’s Loyola High School, which in 2015 won a Supreme Court of Canada appeal that recommended the school be granted an exemption from the Quebec government’s mandatory Ethics and Religious Culture curriculum (Farrow’s ‘‘expert witness report,’’ submitted to the Quebec Superior Court, is included as an appendix). Religious freedom is under attack, Farrow warns, and a renewed ‘‘doctrine of the Two’’—a rigorous separation of church and state—is how it must be safeguarded. The state, in Farrow’s view, is not neutral but should be invited ‘‘to organize itself in a way reflective of, or at least open to, the truth about human sociality revealed in the city of God’’ (99).

Since the chapters stand on their own as individual essays, I cannot attempt to evaluate the volume as though it develops a single cover-to-cover thesis. What I do find, however, is that the respective arguments of each chapter, though not original, are offset by at least three recurrent issues that weave their way throughout the book.

First, in naming his desire for a better country, Farrow does not sufficiently interrogate the category ‘‘country’’ or, more importantly, the extent to which the modern liberal state is a given. As the ongoing work of William Cavanaugh has convincingly shown, any intervention into the ever-expanding field of political theology cannot ignore the problem of the theological validity of the state itself. Farrow, however, merely laments the state’s operations without entertaining the harder questions about its very existence in the first place and whether it is owed the allegiance of Christians.

Second, what precisely does Farrow desire? He calls for a Canada committed to common human dignity, ‘‘a pluralism open to the other as other’’ (43). But that is finally unsatisfactory, for Farrow is intensely vexed by competing truth claims: ‘‘The very suggestion that incompatible beliefs can be equally valuable and equally true is an absurdity’’ (45). He is convinced ‘‘that God has clarified the path to happiness and so clarified politics itself ’’ (59–60). So when he declares that it ‘‘is not only over Christians that Christ rules’’ (60), Farrow’s preference for a thoroughgoing Christian state is exposed.

Third, who is the book’s intended audience? Farrow writes as a Roman Catholic, drawing on the contested tradition of natural law and citing papal encyclicals and conciliar decrees to buttress his arguments. On that score, the book may appeal to certain Roman Catholics, but its ecumenical purchase is lacking. It is nonetheless a valuable contribution insofar as it reveals the mindset of a conservative...