July 11, 2022 | zechariah mickel | ethics, interviews, theology

.Among political theologian and Christian ethicist William T. Cavanaugh’s myriad publications are Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (2003), Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (2008), and Field Hospital: The Church’s Engagement with a Wounded World (2016). He is also the series editor of Cascade’s Studies in World Catholicism Series and editor of two of the series’ volumes, Fragile World: Ecology and the Church (2018) and Gathered in my Name: Ecumenism in the World Church (2021). Cavanaugh was gracious enough to sit down with Wipf and Stock social media manager, Zech Mickel, and talk about a whole host of subjects, including Cavanaugh’s mentor, Stanley Hauerwas, his response to the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the dangers of Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

ZM: Well, first of all, thanks Bill for taking the time out of your day today. It’s a pleasure to be able to sit down and chat with you. I thought we could start by giving you an opportunity to introduce yourself, so maybe tell us a little bit about yourself and your work.

WTC: I am Professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University and Director of the Center for World Catholicism, which is a research center on the church and the Global South, also based at DePaul. I guess what I do is theology, and more specifically political theology—talk about the intersection of theology and politics, economics, and so on.

ZM: Wonderful. And I would be remiss if I didn’t plug that you’re also the co-editor with Michael Budde of the Studies in World Catholicism Series through Cascade. And you’ve got a couple of individual volumes also that you’ve edited in that series, which are Fragile World: Ecology and the Church and then Gathered in my Name: Ecumenism in the World Church.

WTC: Yes, that’s right.

ZM: Great, let’s start by talking about Stanley Haurwas. Obviously, you studied under him at Notre Dame and at Duke. I have read your “Stan the Man” chapter in the Hauerwas Reader, which is one of my favorite pieces of writing about Stanley, because I think it’s such a personalized presentation of him. Even though his personality really shines through in his own writing, that chapter especially is really fun. But I’d love to hear from you. How would you describe the influence of Stanley Hauerwas on you as a person and on your work?

WTC: I owe Stanley so much. He rocked my world when I first encountered him as an undergraduate in a Christian Ethics in America course. And basically the question was: what difference does it make to be a Christian? And that set me off on a path that I’ve been following ever since in some ways. I just in May went to Paris with Stanley. We were invited, the two of us, to do a series of presentations—seminars and public presentations and interviews and so on—for a week at the Catholic University of Paris. And that was really fun to be with Stanley. I never imagined when I was an undergraduate that I would be privileged to share the same stage with Stanley, but that was the culmination of our relationship in a lot of ways.

On a personal level, Stanley has always been just unfailingly generous to me and formed me in ways of doing theology. When I was a TA for him in graduate school, he used to start out undergraduate classes by saying, “Some professors tell you they want you to think for yourselves, but I don’t want that, I want you to think like me.” He would say, “You’re eighteen-year-old Americans, you don’t have minds worth making up.” And the students of course would gasp and be scandalized by this. But then, on a more advanced level, the first essay that I ever handed in in one of his seminars at the graduate level, he came back and he had scrawled on the front of it, “This sounds too much like me.” You know, he doesn’t want people to imitate him. He really wants people to develop their own way of following Jesus. It’s an interesting juxtaposition of those two kinds of things. I mean, the first example, he talks about, you know, “I don’t want you to think for yourselves.” He’s trying to make a point there to break down this autonomous idea that what we all need to do is craft our own theologies and ways of thinking. And it’s more a matter of following the Master who is ultimately God, in Jesus.

On an intellectual and spiritual level, I take from Stanley his emphasis on ecclesiology, on the sacraments, virtue ethics—hence habituation—and appreciation of the Catholic tradition, which I’m a part of, and he’s not. And in some ways, all of those things are related to the Incarnation, that Christianity has to be enfleshed in real life. And that, I think, is maybe one of the central themes of Stanley’s theology that I’ve tried to take on as well. And then there are other individual themes like non-violence and so on that have been really influential for me.

ZM: Absolutely. You and Stanley obviously both write quite a bit in political theology. I’m curious, with the current state of vitriol in our country, what’s your assessment of where we’re at as far as political partisanship? Especially as that relates to popular-level discourse in America?

WTC: I think something is going on that’s more than just people are not nice to each other, they’re partisan, and so on. It seems to me like we have to look for the roots of the current moment in the concentration of wealth and power that’s been going on over the last few decades. It seems to me like, starting in the 1970s, corporations abandoned the idea that they had responsibilities to anyone but shareholders. This is Milton Friedman’s idea that the only responsibility is to make money for the shareholders. The social compact that had been in place since Fordism was the idea that you treat your workers well enough that they can buy your products and you create a kind of middle class, a very broad middle class. And that staved off revolution from the 1930s onward. That gets abandoned in the 1970s/1980s for this idea that people should make as much money as they can for themselves and their shareholders. And wealth and power become really concentrated from that point on. Neoliberalism is basically the idea that the state should defend capitalism from democracy. This produces this extreme polarization in terms of wealth and power and then that polarization, I think, just gets instituted in politics. Someone like Trump who comes along is kind of an empty signifier. Populism has been described as the gathering of grievances around an empty signifier. And in a lot of ways that’s Trump, so people with grievances, people who feel abandoned, project their grievances onto this figure who sees them, who notices them, and promises to rescue them. The Republican Party then becomes the party of the underclasses, amazingly enough, by rallying them around bullsh*t like election conspiracy theories and guns and fear of Mexicans and this kind of cult of the strong man who will rescue you. You get blue collar workers in rural Alabama becoming convinced that some narcissistic billionaire from New York is their personal lord and savior. In a lot of ways, I think the current political moment is just the fruit, the rotten fruit, of this realignment of wealth and power that’s been coming for the last half-century.

ZM: Thank you for that. I think we would be remiss again if we didn’t bring up the recent Supreme Court decision. I’m very interested to hear how you’ve understood that decision, and its relationship to the church’s witness in America, but also if you think anything is lacking in the current debates over abortion. And maybe if there are things you would add or subtract from the conversation, what those might be?

WTC: I published an article before the election in 2020 arguing that it’s been almost fifty years, at the time, of Republican control of the Supreme Court, and they’ve been promising to overturn Roe v. Wade, and they never have. It’s like Lucy with the football pulling away from Charlie Brown at the last minute. And I was wrong about that. They did overturn Roe v. Wade. And I think for the church, it’s a dangerous moment. Winning through the courts is always going to be a Pyrrhic victory, because you haven’t created the kind of consensus around these issues that you’re looking for. And all you have to do is convince five of the nine Supreme Court justices, and that, I think, is going to backfire against the church. And of course what’s even worse is winning on this issue through supporting the Republican Party, and that, I think, is a disaster for the church, especially among young people. They see nothing but lies and hypocrisy and corruption coming from Donald Trump’s Republican Party, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade is not worth that. It’s just going to send the issue back to the states, and you’re going to end up with the same kind of polarization and lack of action, especially on behalf of women who would prefer not to resort to abortion and prefer to have children but don’t feel like they’re capable of doing that.

As far as what’s missing from the current debates over abortion, I think it was Holly Taylor Coolman who said, “One side says, ‘My body, my choice,’” which ironically is just like what the anti-vaxxers are saying, “and the other says, ‘Your baby, your problem.’” You know, “You need to have your baby, but good luck with that, we’re not going to do anything to support you.” What’s missing from the current debates on the pro-life side is a real appreciation for what women go through, how difficult and life-altering pregnancy and childbirth and raising a child can be, and in a very permanent way. And on the pro-choice side, there’s just this refusal to even consider the moral status of an unborn child/baby/fetus, whatever the language might be. But it’s all couched in terms of individual autonomy, and the moral status of the intentional killing of human life is not even considered. I think the current debate is really kind of bankrupt, and the church needs to do a better job of talking about both of those goods—the good of women’s autonomy and supporting them in the difficulty of these decisions and the good, on the other hand, of being open to life in all its forms. I’m not sure what the answer is, but there’s a lot of polarization on this where people are just talking past each other.

ZM: It’s interesting what you said about the degeneration of the church’s witness, especially among the younger population. Your book, Field Hospital, follows Pope Francis’s language of the church as a field hospital. How would you say the church is doing as a field hospital? What does the church need to rediscover or repent of in order to fulfill that calling? And what other visions of the church have held sway today that you see leading to a failure of this vision of the church as field hospital?

WTC: I like that image that Pope Francis uses. “Field hospital” indicates that it’s mobile and not just a stationary institution. And the “hospital” part is a recognition that people are wounded. You’re not just making demands on people, but you’re trying to meet people where they are in all of their various kinds of woundedness. And who’s not wounded? The church needs to do better to get out of itself, go out into the streets, as Pope Francis says. Don’t just cater to the intact middle-class churchgoing families because the days are gone, I think, when you can just sit back and wait for people to come to church. You have to go out to people. The United States and the Global North in general are mission territory. We have to realize that. We need to cross racial boundaries in a very deliberate way, in particular.

And the other visions that are on offer out there include resentment and nostalgia. We want to return to power for the church, at least using the courts and the state to protect the church. Donald Trump, the first time he was running, said to an audience of Christians in Iowa, “If I’m president, you’ll have plenty of power. You won’t need anybody else.” And that kind of temptation is disastrous and, if anything, is just accelerating secularization as people see the church complicit with this kind of mendacity that Donald Trump represents, and they don’t want any part of it. This emphasis on defending religious freedom is in some ways important. It’s important for the church to be free to be the church and not have too much state interference. But the impulse oftentimes behind religious freedom is just the defense of the institution with power. If you keep going down that road, there won’t be anybody left in the church whose freedom needs defending. 

ZM: Speaking to the church’s witness to younger folks, what can or do you say to students of your own who look at the state of the church and feel like there’s nothing there for them, nothing desirable, and especially that the church is not the kind of community that you call it to be in your work? What hope can you give to those who are not necessarily interested in the church?

WTC: I mean, I get it. For every reason you can give me for leaving the church, I can give you two more. I’ve been around the church all my life, and I’ve been around the world and see what the problems are. I stay in the church because I like it and because I think it is in some non-trivial sense true. It’s not very often that we talk about being in church because we like it, that it’s an attractive place. But it still is for me. That, in a sense, is a kind of sociological argument, and there are all sorts of sociological arguments that tell you all the great things there are to enjoy in the church in terms of community and action for social justice and ritual and a sense of higher purpose and meaning, and so on. And I think it’s probably true that the loss of church affiliation on the whole is not going to be good for us, either individually or as a society. But you can’t just stay on the sociological level. I think you need to go to the theological level and go to the root of it—how is the church not just like a Moose Lodge or some other sort of communal gathering? I go to church because I think the gospel of Jesus Christ is true and important and necessary, and I’m not just talking about giving me a higher sense of meaning. I’m talking about the root idea of Christianity: that God humiliated Godself to take the form of a poor man who was tortured to death and then did not take revenge on the torturers. And that makes all the difference. The church is where we remember that and participate in Christ’s body. But, of course, you can’t just say this, right? This has to be lived. Groups of Christians need to live it and invite people to live it with us. And if we live it, I think people will be attracted to it, because it’s inherently attractive.

ZM: You’ve related the Eucharist and social and political realities in really interesting ways in your work. Tell me a little bit more about what role the Eucharist has played in your own theology.

WTC: My first book was Torture and Eucharist, where I talk about the church’s response to human rights abuses under the military regime in Chile. I lived in Chile for a couple of years in a poor neighborhood in Santiago in the last years of military dictatorship there. Torture and Eucharist are the two movements of the book, torture the kind of splintering atomization of the body politic, and Eucharist the gathering of the body back together. Torture has a way of making people fearful and staying away from any kind of organized action and Eucharist bringing them back together. I talk there about different eucharistic practices that made that possible.

But unfortunately today in Chile, the story is very different and the church is kind of in shambles. There have been all sorts of sexual abuse scandals, and the bishops there have been more interested in defending the institution than living this vision of the Eucharist out. I talk about the Eucharist as being important, but there’s nothing automatic about it. And I think I’ve been criticized for talking about the Eucharist as if it’s some kind of magical panacea. And of course it’s not. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11, the body of Christ can kill us. If we eat and drink the body without discerning the body in the community, then Paul thinks this is the reason why some people are dying. The Eucharist is a judgment against us as much as anything else.

ZM: Speaking of the Eucharist, I know Ephraim Radner at one point in his work critiques your book, The Myth of Religious Violence, essentially saying that you might be externalizing the blame for violence from the church onto social and political movements. And I think he also critiques John Paul II there, basically saying that JP2 was putting the blame for violence in the context of Rwanda on individual Christians but not the church as such. How might your insights on the Eucharist and resistance apply in a context where the violence of the culture seems to enter into the church itself? Especially in our context where we might see a militant or far right turn within the church?

WTC: I’ve responded to Ephraim Radner. We had a session together at the AAR after his book came out, and I’ve published that in my book, Field Hospital, too. So, if you’re interested in that argument, you can see it in more detail there. I think he’s fundamentally misread what I was trying to say. He thinks I’m trying to say, “It’s not religion, it’s really politics.” But of course, the whole point that I’m trying to make in the midst of religious violence is that you can’t make these kinds of separations between religion and politics. The point is not that the church is innocent and everybody else is to blame. The point is rather that the church has become complicit in violence precisely by aligning itself with the powers that be, especially the nation-state.

Radner thinks that the antidote to religious violence is the liberal nation-state. And I warn that that’s more problem than solution, that the church has precisely abandoned its own commitments to the cessation of violence and instead has learned that killing for Jesus is bad, but killing for the nation-state is okey dokey, that it’s in very bad taste to even proselytize on behalf of Jesus, but we think nothing of slaughtering other people on behalf of the flag and so on.

What are the insights of Eucharist and resistance where the violence has been taken into the church? I mean, that’s where we need to do penance, right? We need to do penance for the ways that people actually do kill. It may have been true that Christians at one time did in fact kill for doctrinal matters, although I think it’s considerably more complicated than that. What we kill for here and now is the state, and we need to do penance for that and try to extricate ourselves from that kind of war-making.

ZM: From the beginning in your work, in Torture and Eucharist, you’re looking to global social and political realities in your theology. I’m curious why that global turn in your work, why you’ve decided to feature these social and ecclesial realities, along with some non-Western theologies, as a central feature in a lot of your work, and maybe what you’ve learned throughout your career in terms of the global aspects of your work?

WTC: I mean, as you said, my first book is on the church in Chile. I don’t think there’s really been a global turn more recently in my work. I think that concern has been there since the beginning. I went to Chile looking for the church that Hauerwas was talking about and in some ways found it. What I found in the church in Latin America, especially in those years, was the incarnating of the gospel from the starting point of the marginalized. And that’s been an important theme in my work, I think, all along.

In 2013, I became the director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul. And that’s when I became an administrator of the center. I came to DePaul as a fellow of the center. My work was considered to be within this ambit of the church of the Global South. But then when I became director of the center, it has made me think more broadly and create more ties with Christians, especially Catholics, around the globe, so in Africa and Asia, as well as Latin America. And I think that helps me be more Catholic. One of the lessons that I’ve learned is there’s a sense of the presence of God in marginalized places. The figure of Jesus Christ is so important in a lot of places, precisely because of Jesus’s status as a marginalized person in many ways. And that’s the kind of attractiveness of Christ in many places in the Global South, precisely because God is with those who are on the margins of the world system.

Another thing I think that’s important about the witness of the churches in the Global South now is that you get a keen sense that Christianity is not something for Sundays, but it’s for Mondays through Fridays as well. It has to do with every aspect of people’s lives in a lot of places in the Global South. The church is not therefore an NGO whose only business is to provide healthcare and job training and training in farming techniques, and so on. As important as those are, there’s also this active presence of God, the active presence of the Holy Spirit in those churches. And I think that’s something that we can take inspiration from. And in a lot of ways political theology is a dangerous field because it always faces the temptation to reduce theology to politics, right? And that can be part of the internal secularization of Christianity in the West, where we think that the only way we can survive is to be relevant and to talk about social justice issues and so on. And obviously I think those issues are hugely important, but the way that we do them, the way that we talk about them, needs to be theological and have a sense of that active presence of God in the world, because if God doesn’t solve the problems, they’re not going to get solved.

ZM: That reminds me of Stanley Hauerwas’s distinction between phrasing it as political theology versus theological politics.

As far as ecumenism, what would you say are some of the key differences between ecumenism in its Western form and ecumenism on the Global South stage?

WTC: I edited that volume on ecumenism for the series that we have with Cascade. And I think it’s a good volume. It came out of a conference that we did where we brought people from all over the world to deal with these issues. That was a conference in 2017 on the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. So much of what was going on to commemorate the Reformation had to do with Europe and the US. I think it was an interesting project to see what the state of ecumenism beyond the West is.

One of the differences between the West and elsewhere is that in the West, you find that the competition amongst denominations has waned somewhat as the church shrinks. We now realize that, as Christians, we have a lot more in common in a secularized society, that we kind of need each other more in the face of increasingly secularized societies. The doctrinal differences tend to fade and people make different kinds of alliances in the US. Oftentimes you’ll find evangelicals and Catholics working together on certain issues, whereas a few decades before you’d find some evangelicals who considered Catholics to be unsaved and vice versa. The church is not shrinking in places like Africa and Asia. The dynamics there are different. Oftentimes you still do have this competition for converts amongst different denominations and so on, but there’s also cooperation. You get what Pope Francis calls an ecumenism of blood. In Pinochet’s Chile, you get the Catholics and the Lutherans cooperating in resistance to the military regime. We have an interesting essay by Justin Tse in that volume on Hong Kong and the collaboration between Catholics and Protestants there. In the case of Latin America, it’s different, where you had this hegemony of Catholicism that’s been eroded by Protestant evangelization over the last century. But in a lot of ways, it’s more subtle and nuanced there as well because the competition from Protestants has in many ways made the Catholic Church stronger in a lot of areas. Todd Hartch talks about this in his book about the rebirth of Latin American Christianity, that there’s a lot of places in which people were nominally Catholic, but it’s only because of the efforts of Protestants to convert people that Catholic laity have also gotten energized in response.

ZM: Speaking of ecumenical cooperation, I know Eastern Orthodox and Catholics and many evangelicals have started to cooperate on ecological issues. I’m very curious to hear how you would frame the church’s role in caring for the created world?

WTC: I think that’s a really hopeful thing. The Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, Patriarch Bartholomew, has been a leader on these issues of caring for creation and Pope Francis has as well with Laudato si’. I think it’s important when the church looks at these issues that the church has something interesting to say that’s not just the same thing that everybody else is saying. And I think a lot of what the church can contribute is seeing the ecological crisis at root as a theological crisis. It’s a crisis about the way we think about God and God’s relation to us and to the world. The abuse of creation starts when we recognize nothing higher than ourselves. And the technocratic paradigm, as Pope Francis calls it, won’t solve the issues. We can’t just rely on technology to get us out of the problem. We need a new kind of humility, really of humility before God and before our fellow creatures, and a recognition that we’re all interdependent and that we’re all dependent ultimately on God and on the creation that God has made. And this runs contrary to this attitude that we have been really good at gaining power over creation, and now in order to save creation, we just have to find new and better ways of exercising our power over creation. I think that’s just going to exacerbate the problem. What we need is a turning back and a humility that allows us to relinquish certain kinds of power or certain kinds of attempts at power and recognize our own interdependence.

And that of course has not just ecological but also social ramifications as well. Pope Francis talks about, and several other popes have talked about, a kind of social mortgage on property, the idea that property is not just ours to do whatever we want with it, but that the earth belongs ultimately to God and we need to recognize that it belongs to all of us together communally and make decisions on what we do with our property on the basis of what’s going to be good for everybody, the common good.

ZM: Your answer makes me think of John Zizioulas. He talks a lot about the Christian approach to creation being done eucharistically, that our role as humans in caring for creation is to offer the created world, right, in the liturgy, offer the created world upward to the Lord.

But speaking of Pope Francis, what would you say have been the biggest effects of his pontificate, and how would you compare it also to that of his predecessors, especially Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II?

WTC: I think it’s possible to exaggerate the difference in theology between Benedict XVI and John Paul II, on the one hand, and Francis, on the other hand. But there certainly is a different style that I think can be characterized as clarity versus charity. For Benedict XVI and John Paul II, I think there was this idea that we’re living in a dictatorship of relativism where truth is just whatever you happen to think it is, and the church’s most urgent task is to be clear on what it stands for and what’s doctrinally true and what’s not, whereas the approach of Pope Francis, I think, emphasizes charity over clarity, that in order to get people to even consider what the church has to say on any particular issue, you’ve got to meet them where they are and accompany them pastorally. It’s not a doctrinal approach. It’s a kind of pastoral approach. You have to give people a reason to care what the church might be saying on one particular issue.

There are some Catholics that are concerned that Pope Francis has muddied the waters and confused people, and I just don’t think that’s really the case. I think people know exactly where the church stands on some of these sexual issues and so on. But what he’s done is open up a space for dialogue where gay people can be heard and seen, for example, and not just vilified. And I think that’s been a really positive thing. He’s also reforming the institution by attacking clericalism, which I think is the root of many evils in the Catholic Church, this clerical caste that is suspicious of laypeople, especially women. He has, for example, now allowed women to be head of dicasteries in the Vatican and has invited more women into positions of leadership. That, I think, is a promising start.

There’s a lot more that needs to be done, but the whole tone that he has set is to be a church of service, to come not to be served but to serve. For too long, a lot of bishops came to be served and not to serve. There’s a different type of person that gets promoted in the Catholic Church these days because of Francis. The people that he has named as Cardinals who will vote for his successor tend to be not the traditional princes of the Church, but people that serve in marginalized areas. I think that’s a really hopeful thing.

ZM: I’ve heard you make that distinction before between charity and clarity. I think that’s really helpful, the necessity for both and how different different popes have emphasized each, with Pope Francis putting charity first while also maintaining clarity.

Okay, last question and then we can wrap up. Has your mind changed in significant ways throughout your career? And if so, how?

WTC: I had to write a piece for that Christian Century series called “How My Mind Has Changed” that came out maybe a year ago or so. I talk about how one of the things that attracted me to Hauerwas’s theology in the first place was finding a distinct identity as a Catholic in an atmosphere growing up in the suburbs where all identities had just sort of melted into standard, white, American-melting-pot blandness. A kind of undigestible identity as a Catholic, I think, was really important to me at one stage in my life. But I think I finally realized that I’ve had too much church and not enough God.

The church is shrinking largely by its own fault in the US. It’s growing elsewhere, but elsewhere there are going to be scandals and so on there. Although I still think ecclesiology is a really important part of theology, I think one of the ways my mind has changed is just to see that we need to give up any kind of temporal hopes for the church and just leave it in God’s hands, that God is still God, even if the church is falling apart.

ZM: Love that. Okay, let’s wrap up there. I just want to say thanks again for taking the time out of your day for this. Really appreciate it. It’s a pleasure to sit down and chat with you.

WTC: Yeah, my pleasure, too. Thanks, Zech. This was a nice opportunity to talk.

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William T. Cavanaugh is Professor of Catholic Studies and Director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University in Chicago.  His degrees are from Notre Dame, Cambridge, and Duke.  He is the co-editor of the journal Modern Theology.  He has authored eight books and edited six more.  He has given invited lectures on six continents, and his writings have been published in seventeen languages.  He is married and has three sons.