RELIGION & POLITICS, AGAIN.

Christian Critics
Religion and the Impasse
in Modern American
Social Thought
Eugene McCarraher
Cornell University Press, $26.95, 288 pp.

Readers of this journal will no doubt be familiar with the writing of Eugene McCarraher. His 1997 Commonweal article, "Smile, When You Say 'Laity': The Hidden Triumph of the Consumer Ethos," launched a storm of protest from readers across the political spectrum, and introduced a new phrase--"Starbucks Catholicism"--into the vocabulary of educated observers of American religion. In that article, and in his unrepentant response to his critics in a subsequent issue, McCarraher attacked American Catholicism for its capitulation to a corporate capitalist social order characterized by bureaucratic managerialism and a pick-and-choose spiritual consumerism. McCarraher's more fully developed historical arguments have to date been confined to academic journals. With the publication of Christian Critics, readers may now judge McCarraher's critique of "Starbucks Catholicism" in its full historical complexity.

This is an important book that should go a long way toward shifting intellectual debate beyond the liberal/conservative stalemate that has plagued religious as well as secular thought. Conceiving of this impasse as in many ways a conflict between progress and its critics, McCarraher looks beyond modernism and antimodernism to a notion of tradition "as an unfinished, creative, and animated historical conversation." More specifically, he examines how religious and secular intellectuals sought to adapt two particular traditions, Protestant republicanism and Catholic medievalism, to the twentieth-century reality of corporate capitalism. McCarraher shows the central role of these traditions in shaping oppositional movements from the social gospel of the 1910s to the antiwar movement of the 1960s, yet also examines how intellectuals who drew on these traditions provided much of the ideological legitimation for the welfare state and the private corporation.

Acknowledging the complicity of religious leaders in undesirable social developments, McCarraher nonetheless insists on the importance of theology to contemporary public discourse. From the social-gospel movement on, the defining feature of liberal religion has been not its readiness to bring religion into the world, but its willingness to reduce religion to a generalized feeling or sentiment devoid of doctrinal and liturgical particularity. For McCarraher, the reduction of religion to a "resource" for inspiring social activism deprived it of its genuine critical edge. As the neo-orthodox Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had no use for such basic doctrines as the resurrection of the body, McCarraher argues, so his "Christian" realism led him to conclude more often than not that Christianity had very little to contribute to the secular social order. Realism demanded that one look to the vanguard of technical-managerial professionals who alone seemed to possess the skills necessary to guide the complex bureaucracies of modern society.

Because the professional-managerial class has proved itself inadequate to the task of envisioning a social order "beyond the rule of Mammon," McCarraher looks for "redemptive hope" in the recovery of a distinctly Christian tradition of social criticism. In many ways a search for a usable past, this book refreshingly avoids the declension narrative that so often characterizes this genre of history writing. McCarraher offers no simple brief shining moment of promise betrayed, but rather a ceaseless dialectical struggle between the bureaucratic centralization of state and corporation and the democratic localism of small-scale Christian communities. The variations of historical specificity keep the story fresh while refining aspects of McCarraher's own critical ideal. Critical of labor Catholicism's endorsement of the "Fordist order" of the New Deal, McCarraher nonetheless sees CIO chief Philip Murray's labor Catholicism as almost utopian in comparison to postwar abdication of worker self-management in favor of high wages and job security. Sympathetic to the "cell" model of community espoused by the Catholic Worker movement, he nonetheless criticizes Dorothy Day for often retreating from the hard problems of industrial society into a "facile antimodernism."

Day was not alone in this retreat, and one of the great strengths of McCarraher's book is its placement of Catholic and Protestant thinkers in dialogue with secular thinkers. Christians looked to the rational structures of the emerging corporate order, but even so secular a thinker as Randolph Bourne could see in the Catholic Middle Ages a model for his ideal of beloved community.

Ultimately, the fatal flaw of these social critics lay in alienation, not nostalgia. McCarraher's Christian dissenters "believed--often self-deceptively--that their fellowship in religious communities offered them a uniquely auspicious opportunity to cross the chasm between intellectuals and other people." Ironically, the Catholic Worker movement failed to attract actual Catholic workers, and the "underground church" of the 1960s appealed primarily to middle-class professionals whose concern for autonomy in spiritual life precluded attachment to those church structures necessary for any broad-based political project, particularly in matters of social justice. Daniel Berrigan's too-late recognition of the limitations of "permanent estrangement" serves as a kind of cautionary tale for contemporary critics, Christian and secular alike.

The key to this seemingly intractable dilemma may have less to do with critical insight than with what Christopher Lasch long ago referred to as "the intellectual as a social type." McCarraher argues convincingly for "radical personalist democracy" as a distinctively Christian contribution to contemporary social thought, yet his ideal of the church as a "critical commonwealth" suggests the very vanguardism he shows failed previous Christian intellectuals.

Christian Critics reflects a deep appreciation for the idea of intellectual life as a vocation and the dilemma it presents. To be an intellectual, to be a critic, is to be alienated--or to worry that in suspending critical detachment one is forsaking intellectual integrity. Can critical detachment and social commitment ever marry? In looking for an answer to this question, I think McCarraher neglects the historically realized, if more prosaic, models of the priest and the nun. Within the Catholic tradition, the shift from clerics to critics stands as rupture, not creative adaptation. The writings of intellectuals contain insights into modern capitalist society that have been unavailable to clerics as a class. Parish priests and women religious have lived lives of vowed commitment unavailable to intellectuals as a class. We have the books; we need the priests and nuns.

Christopher Shannon is associate director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.