Anyone who spends time following the Christian discourse on social media will invariably come across statements like, “You cannot proclaim Jesus is Lord and be a nationalist,” or “You cannot be a true Christian and support Trump,” or “You cannot follow Jesus and support murdering babies.”¹ Such statements are by no means a recent phenomenon. Frederick Douglass in 1845 similarly wrote, in effect: “You cannot follow Christ and participate in slaveholding religion.”² By and large, those who make such claims and those who read them both intuitively understand that these are not meant to be taken as descriptive fact. Not only would it be impossible to evaluate the authenticity of each individual’s Christian identity, but in most cases, setting any of these up as a descriptive criterion would conflict with the average person’s views about what actually makes a person a “Christian” (e.g., baptism, personal confession of faith, etc.). We understand instead that such statements are meant to be taken as prescriptive ideals. It ought not to be the case, according to this person on social media, that someone proclaims Jesus is Lord on Sunday and joins a nationalist rally on Monday. Things should be otherwise.

There are, however, two problems with these claims, which concern descriptivism and prescriptivism respectively. I began this book by explaining the descriptivist problem, articulated most forcefully by Chrissy Stroop. By stating that such people cannot be Christian and thus, implicitly, are not, such statements are descriptively false and construct idealized versions of Christianity that conveniently omit those whom the speaker would like to exclude from the ranks. Both progressive and conservative Christians who engage in this rhetoric create an oversimplified account of Christianity in which – like the “no true Scotsman” fallacy – “no true Christian” has a position that differs from their own, and thus genuine Christianity is always innocent of whatever they view as immoral or anathema. The result is the constant gerrymandering of Christianity to fit the definition of the moment. This leads us to the prescriptivist problem with these statements I raised at the end of the book, namely, that they reinforce an account of Christian orthodoxy that refuses to make space for difference and wishes to exercise magisterial authority to exclude anyone who violates the prescribed norms. I say “wishes to” because these statements are typically written by people who have no institutional power to exclude anyone, but they suggest that, were such power in their hands, they would not hesitate to employ it. There are, of course, some differences we rightly refuse to make space for, but the use of prescriptive orthodoxy as the mechanism for such refusal opens the door for weaponized forms of exclusion that only compound the problem.

It is tempting, in the face of these problems, to give up on norms altogether and opt for the most neutral version of descriptivism: Christianity is simply whatever people who call themselves Christian do. There is an important grain of truth in this to which I will return. Defining Christianity in such a detached way, however, would only work for journalists and academics seeking to analyze Christianity as an object. For those who view Christianity subjectively, as being in some sense normative for their own lives, a purely descriptivist attitude is impossible. But is it possible to conceive of a prescriptivism that does not repeat the errors of orthodoxy and Christian supremacy? That is what I hope to accomplish in the rest of this conclusion.

I have argued in this book that to be Christian in modernity is to be on a quest – a quest for the essence of Christianity. Conservatives no less than liberals are questing Christians, seeking to find a credible faith for the modern world. Not only are conservative questers reacting to liberalism, but they have constructed an antimodern essence that is defined in opposition to the liberal quest. Each aspect of the liberal quest – doctrine, culture, and politics, or believing, belonging, and behaving – has a corollary in the conservative quest, where antimodern antiliberals have doubled down on the boundaries of Christian identity in an effort to relieve the anxieties of modern society by pursuing the illusion of historic Christianity, the imperialism of Christian culture, and the martial politics of white cisheteronormative supremacy. The compulsion to construct a world without these anxieties is a many-headed hydra that will only breed more extreme efforts, with each failure only confirming their own sense of persecution and each success only revealing ever new anxieties that need to be suppressed. A clear example is the way, in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s overturning, conservative activists pushed harder for a nationwide ban on abortion, restrictions on contraception, the end to same-gender marriage, and bans on transgender rights. It is inadequate to suggest that those who hold such views take the separatist route of forming intentional communities that abandon the rest of society to what they view as its heretical liberalism. The alternative to (Christo)fascism is not separatism but pluralism. Separatism maintains the logic of orthodoxy that divides the world into a pure, holy “us” in opposition to an impure, sinful “them.” Dismantling the logic of orthodoxy itself is the task that lies ahead for Christianity in the twenty-first century.

The cliché conservative rejoinder is that this is just a new us-vs.-them, with the “us” being the liberals against the conservative “them.” This is only superficially accurate. Conservatives like to play “gotcha” with liberals when it comes to tolerance, arguing that liberals are just as intolerant of conservatives as the conservatives are of liberals. Insofar as the divide is framed simply in terms of liberalism and conservatism, they have a valid point. Indeed, as I have argued in previous chapters, certain schools of liberal theology showed a tendency at times to be as prone to the logic of orthodoxy as the orthodox theologians. But the real division is not between conservatism and liberalism at all, but rather between fascism and pluralism – that is to say, between a vision of religion and society that seeks to exclude difference and dissent and a vision that encourages and even empowers multiple expressions of faith and multiple essences of Christianity. The problem with the conservative quest for the rule of faith is that it was self-consciously not a quest for an essence of Christianity, precisely because conservatives saw themselves as retrieving and inhabiting the only valid version of Christian identity to the exclusion of all heterodox alternatives. Dismantling orthodoxy does not necessarily mean uplifting liberal Christianity, but rather allowing for a plurality of Christianities to coexist, each recognizing the autonomy of the others and supporting their right to construct a faith that is meaningful to them.

The assumption by most is that this pluralist vision is only possible if we abandon norms and normativity entirely, as an older era of liberal theologians seemed to suggest was necessary. I want to propose instead that there is at least one way of retaining a normative, prescriptive Christianity that fosters pluralism, not only interreligious pluralism but also intrareligious pluralism – a pluralism internal to Christianity itself. To help articulate this, I turn to a resource from Reform Judaism, from which Christians have much to learn.

Polydoxy: Religion and Theology in a Pluralistic Age

The American Reform rabbi and philosopher of religion Alvin J. Reines (1926–2004) recognized that his community had a dilemma. While Reform Judaism clearly existed, it was not clear what kind of religion it actually was. Against those who claim that all Jews share a single religion – either Orthodox Judaism or a similar variation, which he calls the “Orthodox Jewish Cognate Complex” – Reines argues that there are multiple Jewish religions, one of which is Reform Judaism.³ But with such ambiguity over what distinguishes the Reform Jewish community, the risk remained that the community would be unable “to attain a coherent religious identity.”⁴ Reines wrote his 1987 work Polydoxy: Explorations in a Philosophy of Liberal Religion to address this need.

Reines argues that the implicit defining characteristic of Reform Judaism is not a covenant with any divine power but instead what he calls the Freedom Covenant.⁵ According to the Freedom Covenant, “every member possesses an ultimate right to religious self-authority, but, at the same time, has the duty to limit her or his exercise of freedom within the boundary set by the freedom of other members.” The covenant thus establishes individual religious autonomy as well as the conditions for a community in which members enter into a relationship defined by this mutual recognition of religious autonomy. Another name for the Freedom Covenant is “polydoxy,” which is a term that applies to any religious community that abides by the commitment to religious autonomy. Reines calls religions that accept this covenant as their norm “Freedom Covenant religions” or “polydox religions,” while the communities that profess the covenant are “Freedom Covenant religious communities” or “polydox communities.”⁶ The Freedom Covenant is the one “essence” of polydoxy, the sole norm of those religions that embrace religious autonomy. Polydox religions that share this essence are essentially the same religion even if they differ from one another nonessentially, due to the use of different names, symbols, liturgies, and other nonessential beliefs and practices.⁷ Religions that are “latent polydoxies” subscribe to beliefs that imply polydoxy, while “de facto polydox communities” are religious communities whose members behave as if they were polydoxies without explicitly claiming the label.⁸

Polydoxy stands against every form of orthodoxy and authoritarianism. Reines distinguishes between these terms with respect to religion, associating orthodoxy with beliefs about God and revelation and associating authoritarianism with beliefs about how religious communities are structured. Orthodox religions, according to Reines, are those that believe “there exists an entity … who not only possesses absolute authority but who has also laid down dogmas and practices that the adherents of the religion must follow.” Orthodoxy typically involves a belief in verbal revelation, with the assumption that such revelation is permanently binding on all adherents. Historically, orthodox religions have also been authoritarian, meaning they subscribe to what Reines calls the “absolute authority principle,” which says that “the right exists in a religious community for a member or group of members to exercise absolute religious authority over the other members of the community.”⁹ These members act as the authoritative interpreters of revelation and the representatives of the entity that gave the revelation.

Polydoxy also stands in contrast to liberal religion. Reines categorizes liberal religions under the broad umbrella of orthodoxy (though halfway between orthodoxy and polydoxy), because they “limit the creedal freedom of their adherents, and impose dogmas beyond that which is logically or organizationally necessary for a maximum freedom liberal religious community.”¹⁰ He subdivides liberal religions into two categories: supernatural liberal religions and natural liberal religions. The former includes Liberal Judaism, Liberal Catholicism, and Liberal Protestantism, while the latter includes groups like the Unitarian Universalists and Ethical Humanists. The supernatural liberal religions affirm greater intellectual liberty but still mandate certain dogmas, such as the existence of a theistic God, the special status of the Bible, and in the case of Christianity, the divinity of Jesus. While the supernatural liberal religions are liberal in contrast to their traditional, orthodox versions, there remain dogmas and practices that are mandatory for members to remain in good standing. Reines is more critical of the natural liberal religions, which, in his judgment, have orthodoxies as extensive as traditional supernatural orthodoxies, but are still called “liberal” because of the assumption that norms regarding rationalism, empiricism, and antitheism are not dogmas.¹¹ For Reines, anything that is compulsory for participation in a community is a dogma. In contrast to traditional orthodoxy and the orthodox liberal religions, polydox religions have only “the one dogma of the Freedom Covenant” – a religious norm that liberates members from any obligatory beliefs and encourages the creative exploration of beliefs and practices, both old and new, that a person finds meaningful and fulfilling.¹²

Reines examines religious autonomy primarily in terms of doctrines and practices that relate to God, such as theism, (super)naturalism, providence, and revelation. He largely sidesteps whether this autonomy extends to sociocultural norms – often codified as doctrine – regarding how society should be structured and the way human beings are supposed to live. Because of the importance of such norms to the rule of faith today, especially within the context of American Christianity, it is necessary to reflect more directly on how the Freedom Covenant pertains to these norms. I have in mind patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, and religious nationalism as examples of such norms. In the context of describing Orthodox Judaism, Reines mentions its patriarchal rules regarding marriage and divorce that “clearly have calamitous consequences for the women they affect.”¹³ Reines does not say so, but he implies that polydox religion would not have such rules. I argue we can make this boundary explicit in a way that does not contradict the commitment to autonomy. While polydoxy does not place doctrinal restrictions around beliefs and practices pertaining to God, the Freedom Covenant does place restrictions around beliefs and practices pertaining to human beings precisely in order to ensure each person’s religious autonomy. Beliefs and practices regarding, for example, women’s subordination, the rejection of LGBTQ persons, and the supremacy of a single nation over others infringe on the autonomy of those who do not conform to these norms and thus have no place in a polydox community. To be sure, polydoxy respects the right of individuals to hold such views in isolation from others, but it equally protects the community from positions that would undermine the community’s very existence and raison d’être. It is irrelevant for the purposes of prohibition whether these social doctrines are justified on theological grounds rooted in God, but since the very enforcement of these norms requires appealing to some exclusive, hierarchical revelation – such as an infallible scripture – such theological grounding would already be in violation of polydoxy’s foundational commitments. Once again, this is not the creation of a new orthodoxy but rather the conditions for a pluralistic community and society.

Reines does not articulate the basis for an alternative religion but rather provides a vocabulary and framework for thinking about religion as such. While he describes a concrete instance of polydoxy in the form of what he calls polydox Judaism, this is meant to show one possible example of what polydoxy looks like in practice. A virtually infinite variety of forms are theoretically possible. His work is a formal description of the normative parameters necessary for any religion that wishes to break free of orthodoxy – and thus the rule of faith – altogether. Following Reines’s lead, my proposal in this conclusion is to develop a polydox Christianity, or rather polydox Christianities, that embrace the “many beliefs” or “many rules” of polydoxy.¹⁴ What those beliefs or rules might be can only be decided by each individual exercising their religious autonomy, constructing a Christianity normative for no one beyond those who have freely embraced it for themselves. Whatever this Christianity looks like, it will not have a set of “right beliefs” but only the freedom to construct, explore, and hold many possible beliefs. Polydox Christianity will provide no basis for continuity or identity in the traditional senses of those terms. If there is continuity, it is only at the descriptive level of people self-identifying as Christian. Unlike the descriptivism of the journalist, polydox Christianity does not abandon prescriptivism entirely, but its prescribed norm is the polydox norm of religious autonomy – what Marcella Althaus-Reid calls “polyfidelity” – which provides a normative grounding for the messy pluralism of religious descriptivism.¹⁵

The proposal here is to democratize the quest for the essence of Christianity by relocating the quest from the work of academic and ecclesiastical professionals to the everyday lived religion of those who are now responsible for their own religious beliefs and practices. We need more quests for the Christian essence – though, in contrast to liberalism, it will not be the essence in the old sense of being the single, timeless point of continuity throughout the ages of history. Instead, each person will be on a quest for the essence as they understand it for themselves. Religious autonomy thus means that each person has the right to quest for their own essence, so long as they also respect everyone else’s right to engage in their quests. Polydoxy is a quest not for continuity or communal identity but for a meaningful existence in the modern world.

While polydox religions have only one norm (the Freedom Covenant), polydox theologies may have any number of norms – so long as those norms do not reproduce the authoritarian dynamic of orthodoxy.¹⁶ Any concrete polydox religion that makes space for multiple doxa will need polydox theologies that reflect on and generate multiple doxa. The distinction between polydox religion and polydox theology is particularly important with respect to the question of orthodoxy. Polydoxy in the sense of polydox religion is set in mutually exclusive contrast to orthodoxy, since these two terms refer to competing formal structures of authority: orthodoxy refers to the establishment of boundaries that are arbitrarily set by a magisterial authority that requires obedience, whereas polydoxy refers to the establishment of religious autonomy and thus the elimination of doctrinal boundaries. The formal distinction between orthodoxy and polydoxy is equivalent to the distinction between fascism and pluralism. Polydoxy in the sense of polydox theology, however, is not necessarily set in contrast to orthodox theology, because in this context the terms refer to material norms (e.g., incarnation, redemption, sacramentality, etc.) that are complex and already always open to multiple meanings and a plurality of embodied forms. Polydox theology – meaning a theology that supports the formation of polydox religious communities – can draw on the whole history of orthodox Christianity, so long as these theological concepts are differentiated from the boundary-making aspect of orthodoxy.¹⁷ The purpose of this conclusion is not to develop a polydox theology but simply to begin thinking through the conditions for such theologies within the discursive field of Christianity.

Therapist and pastoral theologian Gary Pence made an initial attempt at polydox Christianity in a 2001 article, where he argued for embracing the changes in religious consciousness and commitment that were unfolding at the time. Rather than responding to a post-Christian North American society with a posture of anxiety, Pence argued instead for adopting Reines’s model of polydox religion. The result would be an “open Christianity” that “repositions itself as a vital, curious, non-anxious community.” The new forms of spirituality emerging among young adults are “not phenomena to be feared, but windows into transformations of Christian faith and practice.”¹⁸ While this is an important insight, Pence was on less sure footing when it came to the theological framework for Christian identity that would support his polydox vision, relying on the postliberal resources of Robert Jenson. For a better theoretical framework, we need to turn to the work on polydoxy developed at Drew University .

In 2009, the ninth annual Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium at Drew University focused on the topic of polydoxy, resulting in the 2011 volume, Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, edited by Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider, as well as a 2014 special issue of Modern Theology with articles responding to the book. Despite sharing the title of Reines’s book, the work of this colloquium represents an exercise in polydox theology, not polydox religion. Reines is not mentioned by any of the contributors, nor is he referenced in any of the ten essays in the special issue. This does not mean there are no points of overlap, but the meaning of polydoxy is decidedly different in each case. Whereas Reines articulates a practical philosophy of religion that describes in formal terms how a polydox religion should structure itself, the contributors and respondents to the Keller and Schneider volume explore a distinctively Christian process theology of multiplicity, uncertainty, and apophatic unknowing. Polydoxy for Reines refers to a structure that encourages multiple religions and beliefs, while polydoxy for Keller and Schneider refers to a theology that originates in multiplicity (e.g., divine multiplicity, multiple sacred texts, and multiple religions) and explores the ambiguity internal to theology.¹⁹ Reines would likely classify the latter as “orthodox liberal” because of the way ideas like materialism and process philosophy – as well as even the triune nature of God – are held up as implicitly normative values, and it is notable that Keller pits polydoxy not against trinitarian orthodoxy but against monotheistic “monodoxy.”²⁰ Nevertheless, I want to suggest that aspects of Keller and Schneider’s account of polydoxy can help guide the quest to develop concretely Christian polydoxies (in Reines’s sense).

When it comes to polydox theology, the closest Reines himself comes is to articulate the kinds of theology suitable for polydoxy. Any theology based on authoritative revelation is inappropriate, including those that combine revelation with natural knowledge, such as the medieval synthesis of Thomas Aquinas. This leaves theology based on “subjective evidence” (e.g., prophetic vision, mystical union, personal experience, etc.) and theology based on public, naturally accessible, and empirically verifiable “objective evidence” (e.g., scientific data, historical records, universal human experience, etc.), so long as any such theology renounces claims to authority.²¹ This is as far as Reines takes us. He intentionally leaves his readers with the space to figure out what beliefs and practices fit with the evidence as they encounter and understand it.

In that light, I read Keller and Schneider’s Polydoxy as a series of reflections on a Christian polydox theology that derives primarily from the evidence of the ambiguity and indeterminacy that characterize human existence. Keller, in her chapter, draws on the work of the seventeenth-century English philosopher, Anne Conway (1631–1679), whose single work of Platonist metaphysics develops what Keller calls a “cosmotheology of the multiple” rooted in the observation that each creature is a multiplicity because “we do not exist, let alone grow and thrive, without the help of the others and therefore of God.”²² Keller connects this empirical multiplicity with the apophatic insight into God’s uncontrollability, grounded not in the private mystical experience of the divine but the public experience of life’s complex multiplicity and relationality. The uncontrollable character of creaturely existence and divine becoming makes it impossible for any theology to become a discourse of mastery. Indeed, “negative theology doctrinally protects that uncontrollability,” thereby preventing the establishment of new theological and religious authorities.²³

The details of Keller’s apophatic panentheism are not important here, as interesting as they may be. What is instead relevant are the two implicit norms that structure her chapter – and, by extension, most of the other work associated with the colloquium. The first norm focuses on publicly accessible, and typically empirical, evidence as the basis for understanding human existence and thus divine existence. The work associated with the “new materialist” turn in theology illustrates this norm in the way it embraces the empirical data of modern science to both exemplify and reconstruct theological claims.²⁴ Whitney Bauman, in an article reflecting on polydoxy and ecotheology, suggests a “phenomenological approach to epistemology” in which “we can only see, hear, taste, smell, touch and think so far into the past and future before our knowing shades off into mystery.” ²⁵ This norm prevents theologians from making appeals to unverifiable revelation as a source for exclusive knowledge and exclusionary authority. The second norm, which is the obverse of the first, is the uncontrollability of the divine. Whatever else a polydox theologian might want to say about the word “God,” the idea of the divine refers to something that cannot be possessed or controlled in such a way that might give the theologian divine status or authority. Negative theology is merely one way to protect this uncontrollability. Many of the liberal theologies surveyed in Chapter 1 offer other resources to accomplish this, such as dialectical theology’s emphasis on the eschatological event. Without the second norm, the first norm could lead to a natural theology in which the divine is objectified as part of the world, being available to empirical observation and analysis. The process theologians seek to obviate this concern by emphasizing the open-ended multiplicity of the world, but they also stress apophatic unknowing of the divine as a way to preclude any objectification. Both of these norms together make polydox theology functionally agnostic, not as a way of shutting off inquiry but instead keeping inquiry aware of its inherent limits and open toward new possibilities.

Another way to frame these norms is by returning to the distinction between intellectualism and voluntarism I introduced in Chapter 2 to help explain the rise of orthodoxy. Some of the earliest Christian theology was intellectualist, in the sense that theologians like Justin Martyr did not claim fundamentally new knowledge but rather related the person of Christ to Greek philosophical ideas that were understood to be available to any rational creature. It was precisely the connection of Jesus to this prior, publicly available knowledge that made the Christian story compelling. As time progressed, however, it was increasingly in the church’s interest to confine saving knowledge to the beliefs and practices taught by the church authorities, which led to the abandonment of intellectualism in favor of theological voluntarism: whatever the church says was deemed the orthodox truth. Liberal theology, I argued, was a quest for a modern intellectualism, rooted no longer in Greek philosophy but in the moral law, human experience, political action, and the like. Theological intellectualism thus implies at least the first norm for polydox theology noted above – namely, the public accessibility of theological sources. But to prevent efforts at confining and controlling the divine within the limits of one’s social, cultural, or political context, it is necessary to combine this first norm with the second regarding the public inaccessibility of the divine. In the interest of developing future theologies that achieve both, Keller and Schneider’s polydoxy provides a useful model and resource.²⁶

Ultimately, though, the development of a polydox Christianity (in Reines’s sense of polydoxy) requires the subordination of all theological norms to the right of individuals to refuse beliefs and practices that do not align with their own sense of what is true, just, or spiritually meaningful. For this reason, in addition to the norms regarding accessibility of evidence and inaccessibility of the divine, we must add the norm of the violability – not just reformability – of all religion and theology. To better understand what this means, we must turn to the example of the United States Constitution and the question of constitutional disobedience.

Theological Disobedience: Toward a Transgressive Christianity

The civil religion associated with the United States Constitution is as prescriptive as any traditional orthodox religion, complete with normative founders, a normative text, a normative interpretive method (Robert Bork’s “orthodoxy” of originalism), a hierarchy endowed with magisterial authority over how to interpret and apply the text, and a civil theology of constitutional nationalism that purports to define the relation between this text and the identity of the people who are obedient to it. The disputes over constitutionalism thus provide a useful analog for similar disputes over Christian norms. Just as the dominant tension within Christian theology is between conservatives who seek to recover a traditional rule of faith and liberals who opt for an essence of Christianity that seeks to retain some level of continuity with the past, so too the dominant tension in constitutionalism is between originalists who advocate restricting the Constitution’s meaning to the time when it was ratified and living constitutionalists who argue that the essence of the Constitution endures even if the application changes over time.²⁷ And just as polydoxy represents a contrast to both conservative and liberal Christianity, so too there is a contrast to both originalism and living constitutionalism – what Louis Michael Seidman calls constitutional disobedience.

Seidman’s On Constitutional Disobedience is a concise but powerful argument that asks: Why should we obey a text written down over two hundred years ago? If “one thinks that, all-things-considered, the right thing to do is X, but the Constitution tells us to do not-X,” on what grounds should we abandon our practical judgment simply because a group of men in the late eighteenth century said so?²⁸ While Seidman’s argument is specific to the political system of the United States and there is no need to rehearse all of his points here, certain features of the constitutional debate are relevant to the relationship between present-day Christians and the tradition of the rule of faith. Seidman points out, for instance, how “vague and sweeping” the claims in the Constitution are, such that in most cases it is possible for each side of the political spectrum “to read [the Constitution] in a fashion that embodies its own contestable political programs while delegitimating the programs of its adversaries.”²⁹ A much more pressing version of the same problem applies to the Bible and the creeds, for whom the distance of time and the complications of genre and audience compound already ambiguous texts. The problem of time raises the issue of who consented to these rules in the first place. Constitutionalism bases its obedience on the claim that “we the people” chose to be bound by this document, but as Seidman points out, “no one alive today had anything to do with the ratification process.”³⁰ One generation cannot consent on behalf of a future generation. For this reason, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to James Madison that “no society can make a perpetual constitution,” for “every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”³¹ There is no equivalent proposal with respect to the rule of faith for the simple reason that, traditionally at least, such doctrines were thought to derive from divine revelation and were thus timelessly valid.

Once we strip away these assumptions and examine the situation historically, we see that Christianity and constitutionalism face the same problem – namely, how to justify obedience over time. In both cases, it is a matter of identity, as I have been arguing throughout this book. Seidman observes that the argument for such obedience ultimately rests on the assumption that “the myth of connection over time is essential to national identity,” and the same is true for religious identity. Defenders of tradition in both communities “rely on [their] connection to a shared, if invented, past if [they] are to be an authentic community,” both assuming that the goal of their respective prescriptivisms is to establish a stable, authentic, transhistorical identity.³² Seidman has an answer for what this connection over time might be, to which I will return, but it is important to face the reality that the idea of authentic group identity over time is nothing more than a myth – what Seidman, borrowing from the lawyer Felix Cohen, calls “transcendental nonsense.”³³ This supposedly transhistorical constant is a convenient abstraction from the messy, constantly fluctuating reality of lived experience, in which virtually the only reason such an identity exists is that people say it does. The fact that communities continue to claim obedience to the same text over time cannot obscure the reality that this purported obedience is often anything but, as individuals and factions mold the tradition in the direction of what they believe is right. Appealing to the same texts guarantees nothing in terms of what the community believes and practices, much to the chagrin of those in authority. So why claim obedience at all?

This brings us back to the central question posed by every traditionalism, whether constitutional, biblical, creedal, or otherwise: Why should we disregard our current knowledge or experience in favor of what people said centuries ago? Within the context of Christianity, there are typically two main arguments in response. The hierarchical argument, the one that goes back to early Christianity’s shift to theological voluntarism, simply says: “Because we, the church authorities who speak for God, say so.” This position believes even asking such questions is an affront to the leaders of the church and thus, in practice, a denial of God. Since this approach is increasingly unpopular and nonsensical to those raised with a healthy skepticism of authority, the more common defense of the tradition – the one most similar to the constitutional defense – opts for the populist argument, most famously expressed by G. K. Chesterton: “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”³⁴ As compelling as this sounds, “the dead” are in fact not obscure at all but rather a class that infinitely exceeds those who are living, growing at a rate that the living will never match. Giving votes to the dead means, in effect, permanently nullifying the views of those alive today and never making our ancestors answer for their crimes. If we held to this view in other domains, we would never abolish the injustices – colonialism, enslavement, patriarchy, racial oppression, and the like – that characterized large swaths of human history. Tradition in this sense is not the “democracy of the dead” but rather, as Seidman puts it, “intergenerational imperialism.”³⁵

Appealing to the democracy of the dead relinquishes our responsibility for making our community better and only makes sense for those privileged few who believe that reform is never warranted. We need to take a lesson from the environmental movement, in which a key refrain is that future generations have rights we are obligated to respect.³⁶ If we reframe tradition from this perspective, our concern should not be the democracy of the dead but the democracy of those-to-come – the democracy of the future, rather than the past. And since future generations have not yet had a chance to decide for themselves what kind of world or community they want, it is incumbent on those alive now, those who belong to the future’s past, to create the best possible conditions for their existence. We need to replace “intergenerational imperialism” with “intergenerational justice.” The democracy of the dead is simply the tyranny of the past, whereas the democracy of the future is the liberation of the present. The maxim that “the earth belongs to the living” – and to those not yet living – is as true for the church as it is for the nation.³⁷

Jefferson’s notion that constitutions expire after nineteen years should apply to religious rules of faith as much as it should to political rules of society. Ernst Troeltsch sought to do theology in light of the fact that humankind’s time “upon earth amounts to several hundred thousand years or more” and humanity’s “future may come to still more.” It is therefore extremely difficult to identify a single doctrine, rule, or tradition as the exclusive norm for all. To say that all theology should be “Christocentric,” meaning centered around a specific conception of Christ, “looks far too much like the absolutizing of our own contingent area of life. That is in religion what geocentrism and anthropocentrism are in cosmology and metaphysics.”³⁸ No theological perspective is permanently valid. Because “each age interprets [Jesus] really quite differently” and claims him for their own account of the essence, Christianity throughout history has had “many Christs,” to use Sarah Coakley’s term, and there will be many more Christs to come.³⁹ For Troeltsch this is not something to lament but simply a fact of history. When Troeltsch stated that “the essence of Christianity differs in different epochs,” this was meant as a statement of descriptive fact.⁴⁰ But polydox Christianity turns this description into a programmatic norm: the essence of Christianity must change in different epochs, even in different generations and different cultural situations. There ought to be many rules of faith, many essences, many Christs. Rudolf Bultmann similarly argued that every articulation of the Christian community’s prescriptive norms is an act of historical translation from a previous generation to the present-day community. Contrary to those who claim that a previous creed or confession should stand for all time, he instead claims, like Jefferson, that “even the most accurate translation needs to be translated again in the next generation.” Every articulation of the Christian essence is “formulated for today, and only for today.”⁴¹ The quest never arrives at its destination but is a constant questing.

Here we find, with Seidman’s aid, a way to think about what constitutes the Christian community’s connection – perhaps even identity, in a loose sense – over time. Seidman argues that the key to constitutional disobedience is not the rejection of past or present political structures, but rather the recognition that “these categories are constructed” and thus “we have an ongoing choice between structures.” Within the context of political community, the choice means we could stick with a traditional constitution or opt instead for something entirely different.

We can apply this directly to Christianity. A polydox Christianity, as I am defining it, would be a religion in which the defining characteristic is that its religious and theological order is never finally defined. Christian prescriptivism would be a site for struggle and dialogue over the essence or rule of faith, a constant contest over the structures and norms of Christian community. The possibility would be always open for people to choose what norms are more appropriate to the given moment. Theological disobedience would be built into the very fabric of the religion. Indeed, it already is. Christian faith harbors “an impulse toward total and defiant faithlessness” within itself, as David Bentley Hart observes. “Christianity is filled with an indomitable and subversive ferment, an inner force of dissolution that refuses to crystallize into something inert or stable,” always oriented instead toward the future. It is this “ungovernable and seditious” element that polydoxy recognizes as normative.⁴³ A questing, polydox Christianity is a transgressive Christianity. Rather than frame Christianity as a binary tension between normativity and transgression, polydoxy constructs a Christianity whose normativity is transgression – an ongoing violation of past rules in search of new theological norms and structural forms.

Theological disobedience is a mode of religious practice that willingly disregards scripture, creeds, and confessions when they fail to suit the needs of the moment. Inculcating a blind obedience to the texts of the past on the assumption that what is ancient or original is thereby normative leads, as I have argued, to authoritarianism and warfare, since the only way to enforce arbitrary standards that do not actually serve the needs of the moment is to impose them by force. Instead of justifying religious norms based on their continuity with the past, we ought to base them instead on their continuity with the future, and since the future is inherently open-ended, the norms we articulate in the present must remain open as well to alternative possibilities.

Put another way, the pursuit of polydox Christianity means that everyone must embrace heresy.⁴⁴ The word “heresy” derives from the Greek word hairesis, meaning “choice” or “choosing,” and can refer, depending on context, either to a chosen opinion (i.e., heresy) or to a group that follows their chosen opinions (i.e., sect or faction).⁴⁵ The assumption embedded in this term is that if an opinion is chosen, it must not be true and therefore cannot be orthodox. The idea of orthodoxy originated in the belief that truth is given, not chosen – discovered, not constructed. According to the Acts of the Apostles, the followers of Jesus are called a hairesis, a sect, because of their choice to follow a different authority from the available orthodoxies of the time (Acts 24:5), whereas in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he criticizes the church there for having “heresies among you” (1 Cor 11:19). The effort to police the boundaries of orthodoxy appears already in Paul but becomes especially pronounced in the later catholic epistles, where there are warnings about “false teachers” bringing in “destructive heresies” (2 Pet 2:1). The road to the orthodox rule of faith had an early start, which makes it all the more difficult to uproot from our theological imaginations. Peter Berger famously observed in 1979 that, by forcing everyone to choose their faith, modernity created heretics of us all.⁴⁶ Since then postliberals and antimoderns of all stripes have sought to suppress or reverse the “heretical imperative” of modernity, a pursuit that can only lead to new religious wars. The proposal here is to embrace the imperative, not as a foreign imposition from modernity but as the essence of Christianity itself.

Theological disobedience does not mean religious anarchy, any more than constitutional disobedience entails political anarchy. Even though “we should give up on the pernicious myth that we are bound in conscience to obey the commands of people who died several hundred years ago,” this does not relieve people of the responsibility of showing why their positions – political or religious – warrant people’s attention and deserve their respect. “Rather than insisting on tendentious interpretations of the Constitution designed to force the defeat of our adversaries,” Seidman writes, “we ought to talk about the merits of their proposals and ours.”⁴⁷ Embracing this idea will require abandoning the binary logic that assumes a doctrine is either right or wrong, either inside the bounds of authentic faith or outside. Rather than judge an idea or doctrine based on whether it agrees with some magisterial authority, such as an ancient text or present-day leader, the proposal here, again following Seidman, is to examine in detail each theology or religious system and evaluate it based on more practical and relevant criteria, such as the emancipatory potential it contains, the quality of life it promotes, and the intellectual rigor it evinces.

Crucially, these criteria are not means of evaluating whether a particular theology is “truly Christian,” much less “biblical” or “faithful to the gospel.” Any theology that aims to say something about Christianity is Christian, but that does not mean it is something worth saying, much less worth hearing. Theologies, like public policies, are not right or wrong, biblical or unbiblical, constitutional or unconstitutional – or at the very least, this is the wrong question.⁴⁸ The logic of orthodoxy has taught Christians to ask boundary questions that examine foundations when they should be asking practical questions that examine consequences. Theologies may not be right or wrong, but they may be better or worse. Orthodox prescriptivism has to give way to comparative prescriptivism.

The picture I have sketched here of a polydox Christianity defined primarily by religious autonomy and the right to exercise theological disobedience may seem destructive of religious community, but this is because we are conditioned to assume that community is only sustainable by means of one’s ideally free but often coerced obedience to magisterial authority. Polydoxy is in fact the condition for community – at least a healthy one. A polydox Christianity, as I envision it, would encourage the formation of pluralistic religious communities in which each person freely consents to the values and norms of their chosen community. Such norms would likely need to be kept to a minimum, and none could contradict the Freedom Covenant, but the point is that a group identity would still be possible. The community would be held together by mutual consent and respect for each person’s autonomy, not by threats of exclusion or claims of being vested with special divine authority. Polydox Christianity would be, in the words of Steven Nemes, a Christianity “without anathemas.”⁴⁹ When members propose new theologies and religious policies, they would not justify them on the grounds that these beliefs or policies alone follow from the biblical text or any other purported source of authority. Their justification instead would come solely from the group’s collective agreement that adopting these positions reflects the kind of community they all want. Most importantly, the right of each person to demur would remain sacrosanct, and obedience would never be expected as a condition for ongoing participation.

Polydox Christian communities would be characterized by what John J. Thatamanil calls “relational pluralism,” referring to an entangled, polydox pluralism in which each person’s understanding of God and religion is bound up in complex ways with their neighbors, both within and outside of their communities. The logic of orthodoxy encourages thinking of traditions as hermetically sealed spaces and discourses whose norms ideally remain unaffected by supposedly “external” conditions. Postliberalism was merely the most extreme version of this way of thinking, but it is basic to the concept of orthodoxy as such and finds expression in the language of the regula fidei with its mathematically precise rules. A polydox relational pluralism recognizes, by contrast, that all traditions – all religious essences and the individuals and communities who embody them – “grow as they learn from each other.” Every tradition is a syncretistic, hybrid construction. A polydox Christianity informed by this understanding of pluralism “refuses to arrest processes of mutual transformation by which our traditions came to be in the first place.”⁵⁰ Multiplicity and difference are essential to the human condition, and our religious communities ought to reflect this – both theologically and structurally.

The goal of polydox Christianity, in short, is a detoxified form of Christian community. Given just how toxic most forms of institutional religion have been and continue to be, the possibility of genuine polydoxy remains a question of religious imagination.

Who Is a Christian?

In his 1949 essay on the protest novels Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son, James Baldwin chastises the authors for their implicit theologies. The protest novelists, like “those alabaster missionaries to Africa,” seek to save society from some obvious evil, while assuring those on the right side of their own salvation. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he says, “is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation.” The novel breathes a self-righteous panic that “is not different from that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcize evil by burning witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob.”⁵¹ Similarly, the tragedy of Bigger Thomas’s character is that “he has accepted a theology that denies him life,” believing that his humanity is something he must prove.

Whether or not one agrees with Baldwin’s judgment on the novels themselves, his essay is important for the way he diagnoses the failure of the protest novel as a theological failure. It promotes a theology, he says, marked by the “rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty.”⁵² What makes the protest novel theological is not God-talk but rather the way it generates anxiety about salvation. By filling readers with panic about the evils that threaten them, the novel also gives them the “thrill of virtue” by assuring them they are within the circle of the redeemed.⁵³ The theological error here is the logic of orthodoxy itself. Orthodoxy is not the belief that one’s views are correct; that is merely conviction, and we would be lost without it. Orthodoxy is instead the belief that everyone else’s views are wrong unless they come to share one’s own exact perspective. Until they conform to the supposedly true perspective, they are excluded from the identity of the true Christian – that is, from salvation. The result is theological terror, because once the stakes are raised to the level of eternity, any action, no matter how violent, becomes justified in the mission to rescue the lost from damnation.

In castigating the protest novel’s life-denying theology of orthodoxy, however, Baldwin suggests an alternative logic. Rather than setting orthodoxy up as the goal, and thus justifying whatever actions are needed to attain it, Baldwin alludes to the possibility of making the beauty of human existence itself, in all its complexity and multiplicity, the goal of our endeavors. The prescriptive goal for Christian theology would not be whether it is orthodox – the criteria for which are arbitrary and authoritarian – but rather whether it is life-promoting, whether it embraces the human condition in its pluriformity. The rule of such a faith would be difference rather than sameness, polydoxy rather than orthodoxy. Life rather than death.

The anxiety over group identities and religious boundaries leads us time and again to ask life-denying questions to determine whether someone or something is Christian or not. In response to the bewildering array of claims in our Internet Age, it may seem natural to ask, “Who is a Christian, and how can I tell?” I am suggesting that this is the wrong question, and we should cease trying to answer it. The more important questions are always the more difficult: How does this person understand Christianity? What sources and norms does their understanding presuppose? How does their understanding of Christianity compare to previous accounts and to my own? What implications does their understanding have for the common good and the flourishing of society? What implications does their understanding have for the future of religion and humanity? How does their understanding promote life rather than death?

Asking these questions will not tell us who is truly a Christian, but they might help construct a Christianity worth believing.