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19 Religious Violence and Christian Blasphemy 1 Should Christianity once reach the point where it ceases to be worthy of love (which might well happen if it were armed with dictatorial authority instead of its gentle spirit), then a natural antipathy and insubordination toward it would be bound to become the predominant mode of men’s thinking, since no neutrality prevails in matters of morality (still less a coalition of conflicting principles). And the Antichrist, who is considered to be the harbinger of Doomsday, would take up his reign (presumably founded on fear and selfishness ). Then, however, Christianity, though indeed intended to be the universal world religion, would not be favored by the workings of fate to become so, and the (perverse) end of all things (in a moral point of view) would come to pass.1 It may seem odd to begin a discussion of ecclesiology, and of the nature of Church unity especially, with a discussion of the liberal state. But we must start this discussion by staking out a central ecclesiological claim that is bound to a political reality: that is, we must seek to identify the 1 Immanuel Kant, “The End of All Things,” in Immanuel Kant, On History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 84. This section is also quoted by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi (19 and 23), although in this case the Pope is using Kant’s vision of a “perverse” end of all things—bound to purely human reason—to argue for the necessity of the Church’s faith to inform secular reason. Kant, however, was here pointing to the Church’s moral failures historically as a reason for her marginalization in history, and it is telling that the Pope chose to leave out from his quote just those phrases that underline such failures, especially in the political realm. Kant’s prediction, its contrary hopes, as well as Christian “perversions,” in its face is, in any case, at the center of the present book’s reflection. 20 A Brutal UNity Church first of all as a killer, if we are to understand the nature of ecclesial existence properly. And it is in the political realm that this question arises. To tackle the question, however, I will need first to claim this political space of the Church anew and take it back, as it were, from those who would drive the Church from the sphere of formal social ordering—often referred to as “the State”—in order (as they suppose) to save the Church. But the Church cannot be so saved by moving her about the pieces of the world, and that is at the center of understanding who the Church is. So, we will begin by trying to carve out the Church’s place, inextricable in historical terms within the squalid, but also sometimes noble, field of social and political relations. And to do this we will have to grapple with the ideas of those who clamor for the Church’s repristinization in comparison to this tortured field. The liberal state is a place of torture, in any case. Alas, we know this to be quite concretely true if only recently, as we have watched the unveiling of the values of such a state’s construction through the now almost symbolic acts of her citizens and leaders with respect to the “war on terror” of the past decade. But in fact the liberal state has been under theological fire for some time. The socialist Christians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attacked it for its protection of inequalities; the fascist Christians of the twentieth century berated it for its encouragement of moral degeneracy. In the late twentieth century, liberationist and Anabaptist and Postliberal and Radical Orthodox theologians began to decry the liberal state’s intolerance, godlessness, and finally violence. The so-called Whig interpretation of history is probably gone for good, at least among Christians. Instead, versions of Marcel Gauchet’s pessimistic reading of humanity’s religious development have taken hold: we have moved relentlessly over time toward a brutal atheism.2 As actual legal tensions between certain religious claims and state laws have come to the fore, these concerns have become more self-defensive: the liberal state, some Christian writers have argued, is actually on a path that seeks to drive religion out of the civil sphere altogether, in a sense, to “outlaw” it. Legislation valuing the rights of various identity groups over those of...

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