4 - Faithful citizenship

Summary

How can faith operate in public life? If faith properly signifies our attachment to some community or end, some “ultimate loyalty” that cannot be prised away from a concrete historical narrative and material community, how can people possessed by one such loyalty affirm another one as well? And how in turn can faith be enriched by public engagement? Many think faith in public is properly impossible, both because faith assumes a capacity for deep and persistent conviction incompatible with the fluidity and radical voluntariness of contemporary society, and because the presence in public life of those committed to retaining such deep and persistent convictions is bad, both for public life and for believers. This chapter argues not only that there is a fruitful role for faith to play in public life, but that properly faithful engagement in public life is conducive to the deepening of participants' faith as well.

Today however, faith is a politically fraught term. For the state demands a certain kind of faith as well, and it is a jealous god. One of the oldest and deepest criticisms of Christianity is that it stymies true civic commitment. From Rome to Rousseau, and beyond to Nancy Rosenblum, those who find themselves most profoundly committed to the political order continually worry that those with other attachments and loyalties may find themselves torn between them in ways that damage their attachment to the civic good. But the opposite worry is real as well.