Connolly at 80

That there is room in this conversation for a theologian testifies to the generocity of William Connolly's "deep pluralism." It is, as with certain trees much older than 80, a depth of immense width. At this depth the binary of root and rhizome, of depth and surface, disintegrates. The depth, however vertiginous, does not come down to verticality. It does suggest mystery, both as epistemic incertitude and ontological indeterminacy. It echoes James's pluralism, yet is preoccupied not with religious plurality but with the plurality, indeed the pli of multiplicities—the foldings, the interstitial relations of difference, that at once complicate identity and implicate democracy in urgent self-examination.

The difference between his own nontheism and various theisms does however test and exemplify his "ethos of engagement."¹ It expresses what he has called an "Augustinian artistry of the self."² His critique of Augustine's amor dei, as it funded a unifying ortho-hierarchy of world-transcendent obedience, does not cancel his appreciation for how that love of God inspired an art of self-cultivation. When his Augustinian art manifests in Why I am Not a Secularist it melds with a Nietzschean "spiritualization of enmity" without which an "ethos of engagement" lacks vibrancy.³ In other words Connolly takes from his explicitly Augustinian practice "not obedience,…[but] the cultivation of political virtues such as critical responsiveness [and] agonistic respect…"⁴ Connolly's spiritually charged figure of the seer brings alternative modes of perception to bear upon a political situation that also requires the fortitude that modes of "self-cultivation," like ancient contemplative practices, foster.⁵ So this artistry lends historical depth to Connolly's wide cultivation of "lines of connection across difference."⁶ All of his writings perform that art without cleansing it of religious residues. His depth of breadth sources his agonistic respect toward theology itself. Wendy Brown is right that Connolly's nontheism is theological.⁷ Unlike me, she doesn't mean it as a compliment.

I am however repressing my temptation to shriek—why would self-cultivation/ethos matter, now? As we warm unbecomingly toward ecosocial doom? But theologians must avoid apocalyptic rants. So I probe instead the fold between Connolly's political philosophy and a certain theology, hoping to strengthen the chance of what he means by a multifacted and more social democracy. I suspect no one in the present conversation thinks that the chance is good, let alone that some theos will save us. The theology I lucked into early was Whiteheadian. My teacher/seer John Cobb was half a century ago curating multiple spiritual originators—Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha—as teachers not of "religion" but of secularization. Long before "postsecularism," he was contrasting secularity to secularism, which is its own religion.⁸ The retro-resonance with Connolly runs deep.

Connolly's spiritual depth delivers a pragmatic width: the point is after all to cultivate a wide coalition, with a public broad enough to overwhelm the resonance machine he called a decade ago "evangelical-capitalist."⁹ But what do we call it now? Now, when neoliberalism reads differently in relation to the "insufficiency of capitalism to itself" and in relation to its Republichristian party machine?

It was twenty years ago that Connolly warned that if progressives do not make headway on the "social question," by which he signals above all "the drive to escape poverty," our failure would set "a white male Christian constituency up…for mobilization by the right to restore a nation of ethnic purity, masculine superiority, and religious unity."¹⁰ Nailed it. Priorities of social identity, particularly of sexuality and race, have helped to knock the economics of class into the background of our secular pluralism. So then progressive politics at once downplays economic struggle and shuns religious identity. If the white guys of the right have channeled class and Christian ressentiment at (our) elitist pluralism into a high-energy enmity, do they owe their renationalizing success to what Connolly calls the "conceits of secularism"?¹¹ If according to Deleuze devout believers "cannot look at each other without laughing"—maybe now devout secularists cannot look at each other without wincing...