Smith's worry is that Radner is avoiding some of the more uncomfortable aspects of liberal democracies in his prescription that churches should be more like them and not less. For one thing, he queries, "does the Church's concern for the common good and civil society necessarily translate into being a servant of liberal democracy?" This is a common enough rejoinder to arguments like Radner's: doesn't Yoder's vision of a witnessing church imply social engagement and work for the common good? But this is a slight underdetermination of Radner's thesis, which aims not merely to advocate for the common good but to define it--not exhaustively but substantially--in terms of the goods liberal democracies realize.
Smith continues, "Radner praises the modern state for reducing violence and fostering civility. But he doesn't spend much time considering how the modern liberal state has also privatized (and thus marginalized) religious faith. Nor does he adequately address the "autonomism" that seems inherent to liberalism—defining freedom in only negative terms, encouraging an atomistic individualism, thereby fragmenting the common good in its own (liberal) way."
Smith acknowledges that Radner is not caught by surprise on these questions; at best the church involves itself in what Smith calls "complex ambivalence." Even so, Smith thinks that Radner fails to note the unpleasant side effects that attend his prescription of assimilation to liberal democracy on the part of the church. But this is not true, in fact. Radner advocates a church that conforms itself more to liberal democracies not as a telos but as a penance. We have such a profound sickness that these side effects are no grounds to refuse the medicine.
Smith's two worries, namely about "privatized (and thus marginalized) religious faith" and "autonomism" are each related, it should be noted, to a divided church's central ills. A divided church ahs privatized the Gospel and put human beings in the impossible position of either choosing a pope or becoming one for themselves. The contradictions bound up in this choice release the forces of boundless self-assertion and hatred that democracy has to hold in check, admittedly by a bloody peace. Democracy limits the evangelism of the ego, which it cannot do except by reifying it. Living as a part of a liberal state requires by force exactly the kind of sacrifice of conscience that Radner thinks would, if taken on voluntarily, characterize Christian charity with lovers of Christ who are divided from us. Assumed voluntarily, the yoke of accommodation of brothers would then be the public act of which democracy is a privatized parody. But a parody that limits violence is better than a purist insistence on a genuine article that leaves people stranded in the violent tendencies of rival churches when those churches will not pay the ransom of genuine Christian polity.
Smith notes in his review that we are at "a new moment" in regard to common Christian action and witness: "one can see all kinds of collaboration (rather than competition) between Roman Catholics and Protestants, for example, rooted in a deep sense of common catholic confession and a shared concern for the public good. Indeed, at Cardus we try to embody this as an organization, enfolding both Protestant and Roman Catholic voices in our work." For Smith, this phenomenon counters the notion of religious competition that Radner claims to observe. But I would argue exactly the opposite; who can deny that this new moment for Catholics and Protestants (mostly evangelicals) is a direct result of a deepening secularization in the culture, which has dislodged from the public sphere convictions that both Catholics and evangelicals hold deeply (abortion, sexual mores, and--in fewer cases on the Protestant side--prisoners' rights)?
These opportunities for common witness have been forced upon the churches, and not everyone has liked it. The quickness with which evangelical leaders were willing to believe the worst about the new Pope's comments in September 2013—remarks which a reporter in La Reppublica had taken considerable liberties with and whose context were almost entirely omitted from consideration—shows that such "common action" has not been a pleasant experience for everyone. Many evangelical leaders did not wait for clarity before criticizing the new pope's remarks, and their quickness betokens a certain discomfort with the conspicuous integrity of Catholic public witness. Holiness in the Catholic church is a theological problem for evangelicals and they know it; hence, it seemed to me anyway, they were eager to find a chink in the armor. But they are also stuck with Catholics by the growing determination of a secular liberal culture to disenfranchize their values.
I suspect, then, that Radner is right--democracy represents the judgment of God upon the church's failure to embody a life of peace in difference. And embrace of that judgment, a willingness to swallow the pill that will at last be administered one way or another, is exactly what has always been meant by the sacrament of penance. By its embrace of penance, the church anticipates the coming justice of God and touches the present ground with that future. And the embrace of a democratic suspension of conscience, willingly, will not yield a church in the image of secular government in the way Smith fears. Rather, it will yield a church that no longer finds any compelling reason to continue gathering, preaching, worshipping, and acting in public that presupposes the irrelevance of the other. We will run out of reasons not to be together. And in discovering our need for and dependence upon one another--upon all of those who name Christ, we will constitute a witness to the peace of the Gospel which democracies can never deliver but are ever seeking.
