The End of Civility: Christ and Prophetic Division
By Ryan Andrew Newson.
Baylor University Press, 2023.
Hardcover, 248 pages, $54.99.
Reviewed by Lee Trepanier.
In the past few years, there has been a growing number of commentators decrying the lack of civility in public discourse. What has been missing in this conversation is a theological perspective. Ryan Andrew Newson’s The End of Civility: Christ and Prophetic Division fills this void with a reading of Jesus’ life and witness that orients his theological critique of civility. In his book, Newson analyzes the development of the concept of civility and distinguishes between healthy and toxic forms.
Before delving into his argument, it would be first helpful to understand Newson’s definition of civility, which he borrows from political scientist Keith Bybee: “As the standard for all citizens, civility is the baseline of decent behavior and its requirements outline the most basic kind of consideration that we owe one another in public life.” Civility is to respect one’s fellow citizen, even if one disagrees with the person, thereby allowing a pluralistic society to exist. It is a public relationship between citizens, as opposed to more intimate relations between friends or spouses. A husband loves his wife; friends are loyal to each other; citizens are civil.
However, according to Newson, this “baseline of decent behavior” is fluid and not neutral. The concept of civility “has regularly been deployed to reinforce a vision of the ideal citizen that carries assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and class.” When appeals to civility are made to tolerate evils, like bigotry or discrimination, civility loses its moral authority. Those who are suspicious of civility are often described as uncivil and complain that such accusations detract society from the greater injustices that are being tolerated or committed.
Contemporary Christian defenders of civility connect virtue and civility, rejecting that civility is silent complaisance. Rather, civility is the manifestation of a virtuous mind. When disagreeing with someone, a person exercises certain virtues like humility, mutual respect, and integrity. Stephen L. Carter goes as far as to argue that civility is the ultimate expression of neighbor love. Because liberal democracies are pluralistic, civility is “the etiquette of democracy” for it to function.
Newson dismisses these Christian defenses of civility as expressions of “white, privileged theologians” who see their profession “to systematically understand and interpret the world, not to change it.” For Newson, Jesus is not the “perpetually nice and ‘civil’ figure,” but rather “one who enters into the suffering of others and who preached about the reign of God, a concrete social reality in which the year of the Lord’s favor is declared, the poor are lifted up, and justice is done on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus is a model of disruptive action, challenging the civility of his time, and radically “reconfigures institutions and relationships that are central to the life” of the state.
Although he calls it “prophetic theology,” Newson really has resurrected liberation theology and the Social Gospel for our times. In Newson’s account, Christ shows Christians the path of liberation from earthly poverty and temporal indignity. Civility, according to this “liberative Christology,” is associated with control, paternalism, whiteness, and colonialism, while incivility is correlated with vulnerability, disability, blackness, and freedom. As Newson puts it, “Uses of civility are toxic if and as they are used to reinforce the aesthetic ideal of the white, able-bodied, heterosexual man. Uses are also bad when issued from the powerful as a means of diffusing prophetic critique from those who are challenging this aesthetic ideal.”
Civility, consequently, is of limited value for Newson, especially in situations when other virtues, like justice, demand one to be uncivil to assert what is right. Newson cites Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as an example of when laws and civility prevent justice from transpiring, such as Alabama’s laws of racial discrimination. Both the law and civility should be violated for “the overall and eventual health of society.” Civility should be suspended when pursuing justice.
But what happens to those to whom we have been uncivil? Newson argues against the dehumanization of the other; for Christians, “no person should be treated as anything other than a beloved creature of God.” More practically, such people “should be treated as potential partners in future movements of liberation, even if they must be resisted in the short term.” Christians must be committed to forgiveness, of granting absolution, to those who have been obstacles to the realization of earthly justice.
Although one can admire Newson’s dedication to justice, even at the price of civility, he seems to have rejected the distinction between Christian social justice and liberation theology. The former is primarily a spiritual movement; the latter a political one. By collapsing the spiritual and the secular, Newson is in many ways reviving the Social Gospel movement of the early twentieth century. Sinfulness is not merely an individual matter but also an institutional one. Thus, society is the guilty inheritor of the oppression and injustice of the previous generations that inhabited it. The Baptist pastor, Walter Rauschenbusch, called for a church that was prophetic, revolutionary, and oriented towards solving the imminent social and political problems that confronted it. Such a view of the church presupposes an optimistic account of human nature that mirrors Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau and appears contrary to Augustinian teachings of human depravity, corruption, and sin.
Newson’s privileging of our temporal horizontal relationships with one another over our spiritual vertical relationship with God also has the tendency to reduce all human relationships to material ones rooted in power. This is not to say that earthly injustice should not be pointed out and addressed by Christians. But a “liberative Christology” suggests that earthly concerns are the most important ones for Christians instead of contemplation, prayer, and the hope of eternal life. Relations among people can be seen only in terms of power and privilege rather than friendship and solidarity. The result is a society that is permanently fractured—divided by oppressors and oppressed—rather than one that is united by something that transcends the material and temporal.
And while I agree with Newson that civility too often is invoked to paper over inequitable power structures and relations, I’m less persuaded that incivility is the answer to address these issues. Civility implies a commonality among citizens—that all people share a basic understanding and need for decency, respect, and dignity. Once that is violated, why would anyone listen? Instead of disobedience, or the shock and awe of “prophetic theology,” civil disobedience is the more prudent path for societal reform. Justice is possible only when the oppressors recognize they share the same humanity as those whom they oppress. For today’s Christians who are concerned about social justice, more civility is needed, not less.
Lee Trepanier is Dean of the D’Amour College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Assumption University and Editor of the Lexington Books series Politics, Literature, and Film.
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