I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Craig Carter. He wrote a couple of good books–one on John Yoder directly (which was helpful, though well critiqued by Chris Huebner for its attempt to systematize Yoder’s thought), and then a revision of Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture categories, drawing heavily on Yoder’s old book, The Christian Witness to the State. Any appreciator of these works has likely been as perplexed as myself at the content to be found on Carter’s blog over the course of the past year or so. When he brought his blog back, he changed the title to “The Politics of the Cross Resurrected“, which refers to his bringing it back, but also seems to reference a shift in his thinking–according to the sidebar, away from Yoder and “modernity” and towards Augustine and Aquinas, the apparent cure for modernity.
A more worthy title for the blog, however, would have been “Craig Goes All First Things on Everybody’s Ass.” The blog is now basically a rant on the Liberal takeover of the Americas, from the homosexuals’ conspiracy to poison the minds of our children and force evangelical ministers to marry them, to Obama’s determination to kill as many unborn babies as he can, to socialism being the enemy of the church, and so forth, with some smattering of Augustine, Aquinas, David Bentley Hart, and the quasi-catholic extolations of the recent popes mixed in. His taking on the mantle of Neuhaus seems to be losing all reservations as in places he seems now to relegate pacifism to the church in a Lutheran sort of two kingdoms paradigm that would leave the state free to enforce justice as it sees fit. He seems to be relegating the view that Christians, rightly called, cannot kill people, to liberal pacifism. And now he is at work on a non-liberal reading of Yoder. Who on earth has actually found a kindred spirit in Yoder who could reasonably be called a liberal? Nate Kerr? Romand Coles? Chris Huebner?
At any rate, I recently spent an evening re-reading Rethinking Christ and Culture, looking for the sources of Carter’s recent demise, and was largely unsuccessful However, I do think an argument could be made that his attempt to reappropriate Niebuhr’s categories for “non-christendom” bears in it the seeds of his current outlook.
Speaking of categories, I propose to identify one which I call resentment. Resentment here is the political posture which believes that some entity out there controls the destiny of your self, community, or nation, and is controlling it in an undesirable fashion. Yet how can you be resentful when you have voluntarily chosen other than affiliation with that power (whether this is still the case with Carter seems hard to tell)? Here then is what Zizek describes as envy, which is the bane of most attempts at true fundamentalism. Envy names the attempt to withdraw from the world, yet all the while constantly measuring up to the world to ensure that we are really living a better life than them. Examples of this are found where someone renounces one path, yet constantly references the life he could have had as though he actually possessed it in some parallel present. For instance, the youth pastor who rejects an NBA contract to enter the ministry; the minister who used to get in bar fights but now just wears chokers, no undershirt, watches MMA, and could totally mess you up if it weren’t for Jesus; the teenage purity advocate who is addicted to porn; in general, the conservative who is obsessed with what the liberals are doing. This envy undercuts the claim to have become a part of the community that bears the true witness to the meaning of history; the constant references to what the liberal government is doing, what the gays are plotting, what the teachers’ union is going to implant in our kids’ heads are all just indicators that the psuedo-fundamentalist believes deep down that it is the powers of this world that control our destiny.
Ultimately, though, obsessing over every turn our fallen world takes is just exhausting. And boring: like Thoreau says, once you’ve read the news for a year, you’ve got the idea of how things go–each day is just a variation on the theme. My basic point here, then, is that we will know the true fundamentalist by her fretting. If she genuinely believes that Christ is the lord of history, then she will live simply, enjoy life with her friends, and trust providence.
Good post. I’ve been wondering about Carter for quite a while now. It is surprising that someone who apparently read a lot of Yoder could actually be screaming about “the gays” and “socialists.” Carter, of course, admits his conservative shift but what I find so fascinating is that he seems to think this is due to reading Augustine and Aquinas! I’m so sure A & A would be all on board with Craig decrying the “liberal agenda.” I’m sorry but as far as I’m concerned Craig Carter is totally out to lunch.
[...] Adam has written a lengthy skewering of Craig Carter. Here’s a few paragraphs: [...]
[...] John Howard Yoder and St. Augustine are crying in their graves at the sight of this man’s distortion of their [...]
Hi! Interesting post. I’ve been following Craig’s blog a bit. It’s not as good as his books are, but I guess they’re different formats. I’ve noticed the shift myself. Your post had me convinced until the last sentence, “If she genuinely believes that Christ is the lord of history, then she will live simply, enjoy life with her friends, and trust providence.” And yet, somehow, you spent hundreds of words critiquing Craig instead of just living simply… But perhaps you were more than just ranting.
I’m not sure I follow, Mat. Do you mean to suggest that living simply precludes trying to discipline one’s thinking?
“he seems now to relegate pacifism to the church in a Lutheran sort of two kingdoms paradigm that would leave the state free to enforce justice as it sees fit.”
Actually, at a recent Stone-Campbell attempt at a John Howard Yoder conference in Indianapolis in March, Carter actually argued from the podium that Yoder could/should be read (approvingly by Carter) as representing the position that pacifism is a vocational ethic for certain segments of the church, but is not for every Christian. (Talk about going Catholic!) After his address, John Yoder’s daughter stood up and said, “So are you actually saying that not every Christian is called to be a pacifist?”
Carter tried to relativize his reading of Yoder by saying that he wasn’t putting it in print yet.
Unbelievable. Who knew “John Yoder” was just Reinhold Niebuhr’s psuedonym all this time!
It’s like, go ahead and claim that the message of Jesus is irrelevant for politics, but for God’s sake, don’t do it in the name of John Yoder.
Regarding Carter’s shift, I certainly took a double take in “Re-Thinking Christ and Culture” when he stated that the just-war theory is actually more politically subversive than pacifism. “The just-was theorist who reserves the right to refuse participation in unjust wars is implicitly rejecting the absolute lordship of the state and exalting Jesus to a status above the state” (p. 115). A statement such as this from a “Yoderian” (at the time) was indicative of a possible shift.
Well I think the way Carter puts this is mistaken. Refusing to participate in unjust wars is not rejecting the lordship of the state, but rejecting the unjust application of the state’s otherwise legitimate power. In a just war, on this view, the state has legitimate dominion. Carter sees this as an accurate reading of Yoder, because he believes Yoder’s reading of Romans 13 give legitimacy to the state’s violence when it acts in self-defense. This is of course a superficial reading of that section in Politics of Jesus.
That said, Yoder (like many others) did point out that the state (specifically the U.S.) can tolerate pacifism but not just war theory. If you believe all war is evil, you’re exempt; but if you believe just this war is evil, they won’t grant you conscientious objector status. Individual citizens apparently do not have the right to disagree with congress on what is or is not a just war. In that sense, just war theory can actually be seen as more subversive than pacifism. But Carter didn’t formulate it this way, and the way he formulated it is certainly problematic. Regardless of how Yoder read Romans 13, Romans 13 does not really ascribe legitimacy to the state’s use of the sword. Paul is mocking Rome in the passage, contrasting what Rome claims about itself with what his readership really knows about Roman power.
It seems to me that Romans 13 falls into the same sort of prophetic view of the role of the state in God’s providence that we see so clearly in Isaiah. The state is a tool that the Lord will not scruple to make use of, but that is not to be construed as an endorsement of the state in its present form. The Lord is free to use Babylon to judge Israel, but Babylon will nevertheless be judged insofar as she is a rebellious order founded on violence. Just so, the Lord may put Rome or the U.S. to certain uses, but we cannot read from God’s providence to God’s directive – what some Germans have called Weltgeschichte als Weltgericht. Here I think the Herbert Butterfield’s historiography is very informative, with his notion of history-making going on “over our heads.”
Yeah, I have a sympathetic but slightly different take on Romans 13, as you can see in the last forty pages or so here.