Around 15 years ago, as a part of my first or second job out of faculty, I used to be sent to serve because the token young person at a lunch hosted by some boutique Washington think tank. The topic of conversation was the “good life” and the way best to secure it in a rapidly changing world. Most attendees were of their twilight years, temperamentally and politically conservative, and, to my recollection, mildly appalled once I volunteered that a lot of my peers won’t be convinced of the very premise: that there exists a single good life—oriented around God and virtue—to be sketched and secured.
Ephraim Radner’s Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty has no such doubts in regards to the existence of the nice life. But he too breaks from the classical notion my lunch companions had in mind, rejecting the trendy Christian West’s association of the nice and the life that pursues it with the immaterial, especially the “development of virtue and knowledge of God.”
Radner’s vision is more mundane. The good lifetime of the Christian, he says, consists of receiving from God the mortal goods which are “our bodies, families, work, friendships, sorrows, and delights” and the church, after which surrendering them back to God in life and death. “Tending these goods is our vocation, our ‘service’ or ‘offering’ to God,” Radner contends, and it is usually the right aim of Christian politics, “no more and no less.” The ability to send these basic components of existence back to God in worship and forward to our youngsters in peace needs to be the “benchmark for Christian political engagement,” Radner advises.
This argument is framed with a letter—discussed within the introduction, written out within the conclusion—to Radner’s adult children. Along the best way, it attends to questions of whether we will higher our world, whether catastrophe is normal, after we are justified in resorting to “abnormal politics,” and what we must always expect and hope for ourselves and our family members on this life.
In exploring these questions, Radner offers some powerful corrections to unexamined assumptions of latest politics. Yet Mortal Goods is hamstrung by needlessly abstruse language (made all of the more obvious by the effective and pleasing simplicity of the closing letter) and an oddly abstract approach in a piece serious about savoring the small, concrete realities of our lives.
Survival and subsistence
A serious problem of our politics, Radner writes, is that we expect an excessive amount of of it. “More and more, politics has turned its attention to a social cosmos of unrealistic abstraction and has transformed limited creaturely lives into the combination measures of pursued principles,” and that is as true in Christian circles as anywhere else. A “stress on a Christian politics of specifically mortal goods is rare. Instead, Christian politics of ‘the nice’ has all the time had the soul mostly in view, someway disengaged from the human person’s mortality.”
Radner’s goal is to direct our attention downward, away from great heights and ideological glories and into our own homes. Expect less of politics, he says, for Christian politics has but “a modest if essential goal: to allow the birth and death of human beings in a way that expresses the generative love of oldsters and kids, who together are such birth and death given as a present. Christian politics is deeply misunderstood on another basis than this socially ordered permission.” Or, to make use of Paul’s simpler words to Timothy, the distinctly Christian political project is to be allowed to “live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness” (1 Tim. 2:2).
Indeed, Radner writes, we don’t go too far if we speak by way of subsistence: The “fundamental good of mortal survival [is] an offering to God,” and survival must have a “central place in how Christians should conceive of their political calling.” We should consider ourselves as “peasants,” he argues, people concerned with the “the limited realm of mortal goods,” meaning things like “children, animals, gardens, feast days, marriages, bedsides, burials.” Jesus spent most of his 30-odd years on earth closely acquainted with just such things.
In Radner’s telling, a peasant politics doesn’t expect progress. It doesn’t fixate on grand schemes. It has no expectation of what Radner calls betterment: “solutions to the evil of the times we’re in.” Trying to forestall “the upheavals and catastrophes of existence must seem not only intrinsically frustrating but additionally morally perverse,” Radner says, and ours needs to be a “politics not of betterment but of limited and gratefully informed survival.”
Life is temporary and sometimes difficult. Catastrophes are a part of the conventional order of things, not exceptions we will escape. To ward off discontent and ultimately despair, Radner argues, we must content ourselves with the products of earth. As he puts it (in a line I find hard to square with the Lord’s Prayer), “Making earth and heaven ethically or experientially continuous is something that the Evil One seeks to enact.”
So “ratchet down [your] historical expectations.” Remember that political wins could also be illusory and, in any case, are “only a small plank in a bigger structure of witness.” Love your loved ones. Worship God. We “cannot ask for anything ‘more.’”
‘Constant attention’
There were numerous points at which Radner’s writing left me unsure of whether he could possibly mean what he gave the impression to be saying, the bit in regards to the Devil amongst them.
In one other spot, Radner writes that to “be ‘done to’ is … not a condition to be tamed by politics through contracts or laws and punishments” but “itself amongst the best goods of mortal life, which politics can at best preserve, though in a fashion that could be rendered beautiful.” I too see the wonder if our working example of being “done to” is, say, the unearned and even perhaps unasked receipt of God’s grace. It is reasonably less beautiful if what’s “done to” you is rape or murder, because the mention of “laws and punishments” may suggest.
Several biblical interactions read strangely too. For instance, Radner contends that John 1:9 (“The true light that offers light to everyone was coming into the world”) isn’t only in regards to the Incarnation but about each human. Or, when Jesus said that the story of the lady who anointed him in Bethany would “even be told” “wherever this gospel is preached” (Matt. 26:13), Radner conflates the acts of anointing and preaching, attributing to Jesus the claim that the lady’s gesture “is expressing in its own way ‘the gospel.’”
But my core critique goes beyond these points to the larger query of what Christian political duty actually looks like for those persuaded to adopt a politics of tending Radner’s mortal goods. I understand—have often felt—the appeal of writing a book concerning things so vital and universal that they feel unbound to anyone time or place. But Mortal Goods executes that approach to a fault.
Radner’s “narrow range of normal political concern” is, in truth, all of life. He principally concedes this while describing Levitical law as an expression of how we provide our lives in service to God, noting that this law “covers every element of day by day life.” So do Radner’s many lists of the political scope of mortal goods:
- They are the “sustained realities and possibilities of birth, growth, nurture, generation, weakening, caring, and dying.”
- Disputes “over sexual identity, couples, responsibilities, children, education [are] properly reduced to the important thing mortal goods of our existence.”
- Domains “wherein the Christian’s normal politics will demand a continuing attention and at times energetic engagement” include “laws and policies that make possible and support marriages, families of two parents and kids and of multiple generations; that protect the conception and birth of youngsters and the nurture and care of the sick and the dying; and that prevent the imposition of actions that overturn the created bases of this generational extension and arc of life (e.g., interventions in sexual refashionings, assisting in self-murder, the promotion of abortion).” Add to this a responsibility for “promoting or repairing larger contexts of security—from violence and medicines especially.”
What else is there? That’s the entire of politics. I can fit immigration in there. Farm policy, foreign policy, monetary policy, taxes, social security, health care, your entire culture war. It’s not narrow. It can’t ratchet down expectations and arguably doesn’t even eschew interest within the soul. And evidently all of it requires “constant attention.”
Radner argues that in most circumstances, Christians can participate—without an excessive amount of investment or anxiety—in what he calls “normal politics”: One “‘goes along,’ in whatever system one finds oneself, until one feels one can achieve this now not.” But in extreme circumstances, when “mortal goods and their flourishing [are] being threatened,” the time for “abnormal politics” has come, and “Christian politics may develop into indistinguishable from the abnormal politics of the world.” Does that mean we do “wage war because the world does” (2 Cor. 10:3)?
What few constraints Radner places on abnormal politics are about goals (to get back to “peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness”) greater than means. He does exclude “terrorism and civil war” from the category, but most of his skepticism is reserved for organization and strategic pondering (“the Christian’s abnormal politics … is ad hoc and limited”), not tactics as much as and explicitly including revolution.
And since the category of mortal goods is so broad and Christians’ political beliefs are so varied, it’s difficult to see how the choice to plunge into abnormal politics, possibly even violence, could be anything but personal. One feels one can go along now not. In theory, Radner wants this selection to be discerned via “Christian teaching in its various forms,” but faithful Christians can and can differ on whether our mortal goods face political threat and, in that case, the way to face that threat.
Radner says he isn’t writing a “‘the way to’ guide on voting, policy advocacy, or activism, let alone political theory within the tradition of much ‘political theology,’” and he acknowledges that his political vision doesn’t offer “much latest, with respect to activity.” Thus, he doesn’t address the way to pursue an inherently religious peasant politics in a secular age. Or the way to scale down political expectations if mortal goods comprise the entire of life. Or the way to determine when a shift into abnormal politics is unjustified.
Guidance for today
It’s definitely legitimate to jot down a book of pure philosophy and theology and leave it to the reader to work out the sensible implications. But for all Radner’s protest that he isn’t doing a voting guide, Mortal Goods doesn’t land as that form of book. It is doggedly concerned with mundanity, with beings comprised of dirt, with each imperfect day. The subtitle broadcasts a reimagining of our political duty—is that not a promise of guidance for what we must always (indeed, must) do? And the vanity of a letter to Radner’s own children only enhances that feel, however the guidance never really comes.
The final letter is tender, direct, and reflective without lack of rigor. A complete book in that mode could have been more more likely to answer the concrete questions that those of us still within the high throes of life are wont to ask. It’s evident that Radner writes from a spot of deep love and sorrow, and he’s right that that is the 12 months—the minute, the day, the life—of our Lord. But it’s, specifically, the 12 months of our Lord 2024, and we (Radner’s children and readers alike) are specifically in the trendy, liberal-democratic West. In on a regular basis detail, what’s our Christian political duty? For all its attention to the here and now, Mortal Goods is just too transcendent to say.
Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.
