A couple of months ago, my wife and I bought pumpkins and flowers to place at the entrance of our subdivision. Our neighborhood doesn’t have an official HOA, but a few residents occasionally try to foster a sense of community. It’s no easy task—most people have left little margin in their life for neighbors. In October, my family hosted a chili cook-off for the second year, drawing a modest number of people who came to hang out and catch up. Everyone seems to like each other, and I’m sure we’ll do it again next year. Like many neighborhoods today, though, our sense of community comes and goes. Many families have lived here for over twenty years and still know their neighbors only at a surface level. It’s not that people don’t like each other—everyone just has busy lives.
A Longtime Champion of Faithfulness
While community contributes more to one’s health than even regular doctor’s visits, I sometimes feel as though most Americans have given up on living in one. I was once one of those people, but the work of an aging theologian gave me a window into a vision of the good life and convinced me he was on to something. That person is Stanley Hauerwas, a longtime professor at Duke Divinity School who has done an extraordinary amount of thinking and writing about community formation. Hauerwas is difficult to pin down: he isn’t an evangelical, but many evangelicals admire him. He’s not a liberal, but he’s certainly not a conservative. Instead, Hauerwas has a formed an eclectic political theology that borrows from several streams of thought, including Anabaptist nonviolence theology and Catholic social thought.
One of the familiar targets of Hauerwas’s criticism has been liberalism, the enlightenment era political thinking that prioritized individual freedom. In liberalism, the individual is the center of the community. In fact, the most important task of any government is to protect the rights of that individual against unnecessary interference from the state or other individuals. Hauerwas is not alone in this criticism: Many thinkers, Christian and secular, have noted the breakdown that an individual rights-based society is prone to. Patrick Deneen, in his book Why Liberalism Failed, argues that this individualist societal thinking has, in effect, killed itself. Extreme individualism slowly erodes the very institutions that are necessary for society to function.
The prescriptions to deal with liberalism are varied. Hauerwas has long been a champion of localism which emphasizes small, community-based faithfulness over time. One of the main tenants of his thinking is that the virtue needed for a community cannot be learned in abstract principles–it must be learned face-to-face. In other words, people learn about forgiveness, compassion, and truthfulness from existing with others and practicing cohabitation. This type of formation takes time and effort which requires patience. For Hauerwas, the enemy to this type of formation comes when efficiency is prioritized over faithfulness. By its very nature, the type of healthy community needed to form virtue is inefficient: It produces fewer measurable outputs, functions slower, and changes slowly over time.
A Better Time for the Message
Today, Stanley Hauerwas is eighty-five years old. He is still working but at a slower pace than in the past. Unfortunately, in the years of Hauerwas’s prime when he was named America’s best theologian in 2001 by Time Magazine, his thinking was pushing against the tide of tremendous mobility among Americans. From the 1960s until the early 2000s, the rate of Americans moving each year hovered around twenty percent. In the year I was born, for example, 20.2% of Americans, or thirty-eight million people, moved out of their homes and neighborhoods. While Hauerwas was at his best, American communities were quickly fracturing.
America’s mobility began in earnest after the Second World War. The GI Bill allowed unprecedented numbers of Americans to leave their homes to attend college. In 1956, Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act into law, creating thousands of miles of highways across the country. Also by mid-century corporations were growing larger at the same time as farming was decreasing as a profession. Finally, by the end of the twentieth century, manufacturing as a large-scale employer had begun to die. In other words, it’s not that people simply left their homes, stacking incentives made for an environment that encouraged leaving.
Hauerwas’s most important work was happening at a time when the forces against localism conspired to make enacting it nearly impossible. Fortunately, things have changed. During the 2020s moving has decreased to somewhere around eleven percent, fewer young people are attending college, and the nature of work has made moving for advancement less important. At the same time, there has been a renewed interest in postliberalism as an option to historical liberalism. Today’s most popular forms of postliberalism form a different stream, though, than the one that Hauerwas swam in. Now, more authoritarian versions have gained ascendance.
Postliberal thinkers today mostly consider how the state could create a more moral political environment. One of these thinkers is Adrian Vermeule. For Vermeule, the answer to the breakdown of individualism is a type of judicial order that legislates morality in the right direction. While Hauerwas advocates for “faithful presence” as the force of change, Vermeule wants to see laws structured to create stronger families and increased morality. Vermeule, correctly in my view, argues that laws themselves cannot be neutral. Therefore, the aim of laws should be based on what society wants to accomplish rather than individual freedom. Unfortunately, Vermeule and his fellow travelers have entrusted too much faith in legal and legislative systems.
Vermeule is perhaps the best-known postliberal thinker advocating for this more authoritarian type of governance. He is certainly not alone, though. Those arguing for a more powerful state fall across the political spectrum. Christian Nationalists, liberal democratic-socialists, and Silicon Valley techno-optimists all advocate for increased state power to counter negative individualistic impulses or provide a better economic environment. Yet in their rejection of liberal individualism, they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and neglected the reality that individuals still make up societies. A government can force action, but it cannot provide for the good life human beings crave. Individuals are as likely to rebel against coerced morality as they are to embrace its formative potential. In the context of these political debates, Hauerwas’s approach deserves a fresh hearing.
Virtue is the Goal
The reason Hauerwas is necessary today boils down to one simple principle: Change cannot be forced from the outside. This is true in every area of life. In his excellent essay on homeschooling, Front Porch contributor Adam Smith wrote about his experience being homeschooled and now homeschooling his own children. Smith’s ultimate thesis is that you cannot learn anything you don’t want to learn. The same is true in morality. Government can restrain evil, but it cannot force virtue—that must come from formation over time. Virtue, then, becomes a question of community health rather than law. This doesn’t mean we do not have laws, but something deeper needs to be at work for a community to thrive.
The work of Hauerwas is largely directed toward the church. He takes the traditional Anabaptist view that the church is to exist as a “called-out” community. Much of Hauerwas’s work, in my opinion, must be understood as pushing against the excesses of the Religious Right beginning in the late 1970s and hitting its stride in the 1980s. It would be a mistake, however, to confine Hauerwas’s thought to only the church or religious realm. Hauerwas understands something that must be considered in today’s political and social debates: It is not enough to make laws restraining the worst of human impulses as this does little to create an environment where people actually help and care for one another.
In one of my favorite Stanley Hauerwas essays, he writes about the failures of liberalism. At the end of the day, however, Hauerwas points to the two stories that liberalism offers us. On the liberal side, classical liberalism offers to free people from past forms of oppression, while those on the right side of liberalism offer freedom in the form of economic and political opportunity. While they are in a constant war with one another, the project of the liberal left and the liberal right are the same—increase personal freedom. This individualism leads to a collective ethos that Hauerwas sees as destructive, the “presumption that I am to be held accountable only for what I have done, when what I have done as the result of my choice and my choice alone.” This view of freedom is toxic for a thriving community.
What Hauerwas is touching on here is that liberalism creates inherently selfish people. What he writes about Alasdair MacIntyre applies to his own thought as well: the “fundamental problem with liberalism is the kind of people it produces.” The disabled woman down the street is not my problem because I am not the reason for her unfortunate circumstance. The economic challenges of another neighbor really has nothing to do with me because my choices did not lead to that poverty. The examples abound, but the point Hauerwas is making is that any system where the individual is the center can only lead to a zero-sum game—I am either happy and fulfilled or not. In this system, others often only get in my way.
For most of the folks dissatisfied with liberalism, a number of goals exist. Some would like to create a more moral culture. Others would like to see society rebuilt around the family and church. Hauerwas, however, wants to see church communities built around virtue. Hauerwas, as a Christian theologian, sees the church as modeling virtue to the world, but virtue itself—and not the performance of it to a watching world—must be the goal. Only then, he writes, will our lives “have a purpose and meaning that is not just our arbitrary will.” Virtue is the bedrock of a society that asks what should be done, rather than simply what is best for me? Virtue, Hauerwas argues, allows for larger questions to be asked, such as “what sort of shape might my entire life appropriately take? What sort of character do I want to be and how should I order this desire in an acceptable way to my relationship with others.”
Not a Prophet, But Helpful
I don’t agree with all that Hauerwas has taught. He is a committed pacifist, which I see as a bit naïve. In a critique of Hauerwas, Mark Tooley from Providence Magazine makes the point that military might and capitalist trade create an environment that is safe and wealthy enough for folks like Hauerwas to live as a pacifist. Certainly, on the theological side, Hauerwas and I have disagreements. The truth, however, is that Hauerwas’s thinking is needed today. Hauerwas is not perfect, but his teaching challenges us to think smaller and more holistically than most other postliberal thinkers today.
While more authoritarian views of society building have become popular, I still believe that localism is the best way to build a healthy community. While I share Hauerwas’s view that the church must play a large role in this renewal, I believe that the work we must be committed to is clear: we must convince others that virtue can only be cultivated close to home rather than in Washington. The path to a more moral society begins with bringing a neighbor a meal. The road to healthier families starts with sacrificing time and energy to mentor a young student. Virtue must be built from the ground-up rather than forced down from the top. As Hauerwas knows, it is no easy road. This is mostly because it takes a complete reorientation of life’s goals to succeed. According to Hauerwas, people who live for the common good “do not think their first task in life is to become more wealthy or powerful as individuals.” Instead, these people see wealth in terms of what we share in common. This is the opposite orientation than the one that liberalism encourages.
One of the things I have tried to avoid becoming as I get older is an idealist. It is far too easy to get lost in ideas and forget about practical implications. We live in a global economy that is nearly impossible to scale back. Our financial wealth as Americans is inextricably tied to larger forces like financial and housing markets, and most people would rather cast a vote for change than be a local agent of change. But the long game of society is one of ideas, so localists cannot shrink back from the conversation. Instead, we must continue to champion small beginnings and success defined as faithfulness. In this endeavor, Stanley Hauerwas remains a necessary voice.
Image Credit: John William Waterhouse, “Good Neighbours” (1885)
