Jack sets aside the pages and relaxes into his chair. He takes a sip of wine.

JACK: So, that’s it, at least so far. What do you think?

DANIEL: Well, I have to say, that was quite a ride! After hearing this and reading the sermon, some questions come to mind that go beyond the texts themselves and are mostly about the underlying commitments that I’m assuming have animated your writing.

JACK: Very good. Interrogate me! You can serve as my Socratic midwife.

DANIEL: Well, a clear point of connection between this and the sermon is your insistence on God being love. I’m broadly interested in hearing more about your conception of God, as well as the implications of affirming that God is love.

JACK: Alright. Perhaps providing a brief explanation about how I’m thinking about it will give you a basis upon which to ask some more pointed questions.

Daniel nods and lifts his glass as an invitation for Jack to continue.

By comparison to how I hear other theists talk, the way I think about God has become fairly—oh, what’s the right word?—austere, I suppose. Yes, metaphysically austere. 

DANIEL: Haha, okay. 

JACK: What I have in mind is the popular conception of God as some sort of mysterious, transcendent, individual being. I think I am being charitable when I interpret such a view as implying that God is one being among many, albeit one that is greater than all other conceivable beings since the God-being allegedly possesses all positive properties to the maximal degree. 

DANIEL: Okay, sure. The “omni” God, or “god of the philosophers.”¹

JACK: Well, maybe. That’s one of the things that trips me up! 

DANIEL: How so?

JACK: There’s both a trivial point and a more substantial point; each are relevant. The trivial point is that it is dishonest to say there is a single “god of the philosophers.” The fact of the matter is that plenty of philosophers have had wildly different conceptions of god; it’s one of the things that they have spilled a lot of ink over. 

DANIEL: True enough, but I think we all know what “God” refers to.² 

JACK: Well, I’m not so sure. I think some people use the phrase to refer to a so-called “supreme being,” where this being is, as I described a moment ago, one being among many. But I don’t think that is what many of the people who are associated with developing the so-called god of the philosophers actually had in mind. And that gets me to my substantive point. There’s an important difference between God-as-supreme-individual-being and God-as-being-itself. I want to subject the first of those to harsh criticism.

DANIEL: (Incredulously) Why?

JACK: In some sense, I’ve finally come to appreciate a classical theist conception of god. When I think back to when I was a younger man, studying philosophy and theology, I certainly thought of God as an individual being. I used to assume that “God” referred to “that being than which none greater could be conceived,” and hence, an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly benevolent, necessarily existent demiurge.³ 

DANIEL: Like any good philosopher!

JACK: Hah, well, certainly like some philosophers, but again, not all. I no longer think that is a good way of thinking about God. For whatever reason—and even I can’t really explain it—one day I just felt knocked off my feet by the passage from First John that proclaims God is love. The force of that statement, taken as an identity claim, exploded all of my highly intellectualized ways of thinking about the godhead. That’s why it crops up now in almost everything I write. I’ve come to think that it is the key to faithfully deconstructing traditional theology. Or, to shift the metaphor, it’s the solution that dissolves much of the shit that has become encrusted around the deposit of the faith.

DANIEL: Haha, that is certainly more striking. Am I hearing you correctly: you no longer think of God as omnipotent, omniscient, and so forth?

JACK: That’s correct. 

DANIEL: Is that shift in your thinking a function of the standard arguments against the coherency of the concept? I have in mind the problem of evil and so forth. 

JACK: Not exactly. I certainly think the problem of evil can help us recognize the inadequacy of traditional philosophical formulations of the divine. But I also think that intellectually grappling with it is counterproductive in a really important way. 

DANIEL: What else can one do? It is, after all, an intellectual puzzle!

JACK: Sort of. I am more inclined to apply Wittgenstein’s diagnosis: it’s a case in which we become bewitched by language.⁴ The problem of evil states the bewitching problem, but the responses to it—the various theodicies that have been developed—don’t really break the spell. Rather, they operate within the bewitchment without recognizing it as such.

DANIEL: That’s a captivating metaphor, but I don’t understand what you mean. 

JACK: The basic idea is this: when we try to respond to the problem of evil, we tend to do so in one of two ways: we either try to show that the god-person is, in fact, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent; or, we try to show why it is appropriate to concede that the god-person lacks one of these qualities. But once we state the matter in that way, we can see that either option begs an important question: both routes assume that what we must account for are the predicates of the god-person. That’s precisely what I no longer care to do. 

DANIEL: Do you mean you are giving up entirely on the idea that God is a person?

JACK: Sort of, but not exactly. I would say that I’m giving up on the philosophical notion of god as a substance with properties, as well as the strict theological doctrine that God is a metaphysical individual. But I don’t thereby reject poetic expressions that utilize personal terms. (After a pause.) Here’s a case in point, which relates to the problem of evil:

Rather than trying to evade the problem by claiming either that God has morally just reasons for allowing evil or that gratuitous evil doesn’t exist, I want to say that love is not able, on it’s own, to prevent or overcome evil. Love has to be embodied and enacted to do so.⁵ There is no divine subject that happens to love but is either incapable or unwilling to intervene; rather, the whole assumption that God is a subject or substance needs to be abandoned.

DANIEL: (Quietly, and with genuine concern.) Jack, I worry that you are in a state of apostasy. 

JACK: I suspected you might, but I don’t think you should. 

DANIEL: But aren’t you denying God?

JACK: I’m denying a particular way of intellectualizing God as an object of thought. I’m not abandoning what I take to be revealed about God through Jesus’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection, which is that God is love. And, although this sounds antagonistic, I’m increasingly of the view that such intellectualizations evidence a failure to be risen in Christ—or a failure to let what was revealed about God through Jesus trump our rational expectations.

DANIEL: But you’re setting yourself at odds with what the Church has faithfully taught!

JACK: I certainly think that what is called “Church teachings” has included things that shouldn’t have been taught, so I oppose those matters. But I don’t take myself to be rejecting the fundamentals of the faith. 

Daniel runs his hand through his hair.

I can tell you’re frustrated. 

DANIEL: I’m concerned about you, not exactly frustrated. (After a pause.) I suppose I trust that the Holy Spirit was operative when the Church settled on certain ways of intellectually understanding the nature of God.

JACK: Okay, I can understand that form of trust. But let me ask you: how do you judge whether trust is warranted or whether it ought to be withheld. I assume there are limits on what you could, in good conscience, affirm to be forms of the Holy Spirit being operative.

DANIEL: Hmm, well I suppose so, yes. It’s in-principle possible for the institution or its leaders to make a decision that isn’t well-formed. I trust that, over time and through the continual operation of the Holy Spirit, errors have been and will continue to be corrected. But that implies that we have a standard against which to judge which things were errors and which were not. On that point, I think the criterion is one of coherency. Things which cohere with revelation and tradition are, at least on the face of it, worthy of trust. 

JACK: That’s helpful. I think I might agree, though with a few caveats. First, there isn’t a single tradition; rather, certain traditions were selected for preservation and fuller articulation, and others were rejected or silenced. Sometimes this was a function of a genuine concern for truth, but I suspect some were a function of other motives. Part of what is in question is the wisdom of those decisions, so appealing to what emerged as “the” tradition is problematic. The second caveat stems from the first. Lots of things accrued over time and those accretions may have more social, political, and psychological force than whatever was a primary or secondary revelation. So, when we set about to evaluate the coherence of what is taught, we need to be cognizant of the possibility that some elements could enjoy undue weight owing to factors other than mere coherence. 

DANIEL: I think we’re entering the terrain of our long-standing difference: your Protestantism and my Catholicism. 

JACK: Perhaps. While there is much I disagree with that was put forth by the Reformers, I do think continual re-formation is a good thing.

They sit in contemplative silence, sipping their wine. Eventually, Daniel consults his notebook and shifts the conversation. 

DANIEL: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think there’s more you could say about the issue of identity politics. 

JACK: Hah! I didn’t expect you to plead for more.

DANIEL: Me neither! But you left me hanging in a sense.

JACK: That’s understandable. At a certain point in the writing, I started to think the whole thing was a bit supercilious. I worried it wasn’t a good use of my time, so I let it be for quite a while. 

DANIEL: Well, in light of what you said earlier, I think you’ve come to see that it was not supercilious. Certainly I don’t think it was time wasted; you’ve used the opportunity to think through some complicated issues, and it’s provocative, to say the least. But obviously it’s up to you whether to add to it. 

JACK: What was it about identity politics that piqued your interest?

DANIEL: I’m not entirely sure; it is hard to pin down. That brief discussion was sort of baffling. On the one hand, I tend to think that identity politics is unnecessarily divisive, so I am inclined to view it with suspicion. On the other hand, I recognize why marginalized people have adopted such a perspective. (After pause.) Sorry, I haven’t really answered your question. I suppose the thing to say is simply that I don’t have my bearings when it comes to that topic.

JACK: Well, how about this: let’s begin by making sure we mean the same thing when we talk about identity politics. I use the term to refer to the social-political theory that was developed in opposition to the revolutionary Marxist claim that class should be the ground of solidarity. The proponents of identity politics claimed that other social identities, such as race and gender, were more important than class. And, more importantly, they claimed that the forms of oppression experienced by people with otherized identities operated independently of class antagonism, at least to some extent. For example, Simone de Beauvoir argued in The Second Sex that the status of women as Other is unique and different than other forms of marginalization and objectification since it isn’t historically contingent.⁶ 

DANIEL: Okay. What I find objectionable about both those views and a Marxist view is that they assume an antagonistic understanding of how we relate to other people. By contrast, Catholic social teaching, which is the perspective I occupy, is premised on a non-antagonistic social theory, or the idea that antagonisms are not necessary.⁷

JACK: Ah, well, I think a distinction needs to be made there: namely, between a descriptive and a prescriptive theory.⁸

DANIEL: Hmm. I understand the distinction, but how is it relevant here?

JACK: When you said that Catholic social teaching is premised on a non-antagonistic social theory, I think you mean that it is a non-antagonistic prescriptive theory. 

DANIEL: Yes, that’s right. Rather than calling us to engage in and perpetuate conflict, it seeks a “healing way forward.”⁹

JACK: Okay, but notice that this implies there is healing that needs to be done; the way things are is broken, damaged, or unjust. The prescriptive theory is a framework for action that is aimed at overcoming antagonisms. In that sense, it is actually premised on a theory—or, if you prefer, a recognition or assumption—that society is, in fact, marked by antagonisms and conflict. So, in a descriptive sense, it is antagonistic.

DANIEL: Ah, right. It is one thing to say, “Society is structured by antagonisms.” It is a very different thing to say, “Society ought to be structured by antagonisms.”

JACK: Exactly. In that limited sense, the Catholic view is not different from revolutionary Marxism and various forms of identity politics: all of them are prescriptive theories or programs for action that are premised on a descriptive theory of actually existing social antagonisms.¹⁰

DANIEL: Okay, I suppose I have to accept that. 

JACK: The significant and relevant difference between those views isn’t  found at the level of the descriptive social theories upon which they are based. Rather, it’s that CST is a non-antagonistic theory of action whereas the others are antagonistic theories of action. Where Catholic social teaching counsels non-revolutionary, reformative healing, as you put it, revolutionary Marxism, the Black Power movements, and so on counseled revolutionary action. But Marxists and other advocates for revolutionary action typically argue that the point of a revolution should be to bring such antagonisms to an end, or at least establish the conditions for the possibility of a non-antagonistic society.¹¹

DANIEL: Okay, right. It is the means by which they want to secure that future that I disagree with. 

He pauses for a bit and strokes his chin before continuing.

That was a helpful clarification. Can we shift to another set of concerns I had? 

JACK: Sure. 

DANIEL: You indicated that religiosity can be put to anti-Christian ends. (After a pause.) I guess I think that you’re right. And that is deeply troubling.

JACK: Troubling indeed. In some sense, that was the bothersome thought I had that ended up motivating the whole project. I’ve always been irked by how our faith has been weaponized to support imperialism and all sorts of other forms of oppression. Over the past few years, I have been paying more attention to how nationalists and Western chauvinists had successfully usurped our religious faith and repackaged it for their own use.¹²

DANIEL: Unfortunately, I don’t think they are doing so in some intentional, conspiratorial manner. I assume they think they understand the truth of the religion.

JACK: That may be true in some cases, but in others, people explicitly adopt Christian nationalism and identitarianism as a political maneuver. I read an article in which a supporter said, “If it makes the left or liberals upset, I’m more than willing to claim it.”¹³ The fact of the matter is that religion, or the lack thereof, is downstream from politics for most people.¹⁴ That’s tragic and despicable, but  I’m convinced it is the case more often than not. 

DANIEL: Ah, I’m beginning to better understand what I suspected was a bourgeoning Marxism on your part. 

JACK: Hah, yes. Part of what I meant earlier, when I was talking about idealism and material conditions, was that I am beginning to understand the Marxist critique of religion. 

DANIEL: That comes through in what you wrote. 

JACK: To loop back to our earlier discussion, I’m trying to figure out, on my own terms, what I will do in response to that unfolding understanding. At present, I’m not sure how to respond to the bad theology and false articulations of Christianity, other than by trying to explicitly draw out the assumptions and implications.

DANIEL: Okay, I see. That’s why you chose this ironic form of presentation?

JACK: Exactly. I don’t know what to do in the face of this bastardization of the faith except to try to show how ridiculous it is.

They both sit with their own thoughts for a moment.

DANIEL: This isn’t a criticism, but it is a concern I have: I’m generally dismayed by how ironic our culture has become. All sorts of people use and hide behind irony—so much so that is seems we rarely speak directly to one another.¹⁵ Although that is my general view, I don’t exactly feel that your satirical approach succumbs to the same problem, but I don’t know how to explain why I think that.

JACK: I share that sentiment, and that is partly why I don’t know what to do with the document. I’m reticent to contribute to the culture of irony, and yet I don’t know how not to. Part of me thinks that since we live in an age of irony, we must lean into it in order to get out on the other side. The only way to get past it is to push through it. 

DANIEL: Huh. You might be right, at least to a limited degree. But it sort of seems like the problem of using the master’s tools against the master.¹⁶

JACK: Well, I’m not planning on sharing this with others—at least not by simply putting it out there without context. (Pauses.) Two things come to mind. First, I fully acknowledge that my use of irony may very well be a function of my lingering idealism. Second, although I generally agree that we can’t dismantle the master culture’s despicable institutions and prejudices by using their own tools, I don’t really think that satire and irony belong to the master culture. We can’t let them claim ownership of them, and we can’t deprive ourselves of them. They’ve certainly found a place within the dominant culture, but they are more properly the tools of the outsiders. There is something subversive about satire and irony.

DANIEL: Ten or twenty years ago, I probably would’ve agree. But just think of all the online trolling, and the allegedly ironic misogyny, racism, and so forth that the trolls deploy in an effort to trigger their opponents. My concern is that, like it or not, irony has become the preferred tool of the highly online reactionaries who defend the master culture. 

JACK: Oof. I think I have to agree with you. 

DANIEL: Also, I think we should be careful about thinking of ourselves as outsiders. You and I are, by almost all measures, part of the dominant social group, since we’re cis-gender white males. 

JACK: That’s a good point. (After a pause.) However, I think we should, with humility, make ourselves outsiders. I’m all in favor of being a class traitor—that seems very much in keeping with our Master’s model—but I acknowledge that choosing to be in solidarity with outsiders is different than being made to be an outsider. 

DANIEL: Hmm. Those are good points.  (He thinks for a moment.) We live in odd times. The people who end up supporting the master culture and existing systems of oppression claim to be outsiders. They think of themselves as persecuted and marginalized, even as they seek to continue the marginalization of others. Unfortunately, that probably contributes to their success.¹⁷ There is something to learn from that, which bears on your point. 

JACK: Yes! Nietzsche was right: ressentiment has become the dominant form of political consciousness.

DANIEL: I’m not familiar with that. 

JACK: It’s the tendency to engage in blame-shifting to protect the egos of those in an oppressed group. It’s what he thinks characterized Jewish and Christian group psychology the first century. Basically, rather than accepting responsibility for their own failure, or  instead of considering how they might improve themselves in order to efficaciously fight those who have beat them, they shift the blame to their enemy—that is, to the superior, or winning, party—and claim that their debasement is a mark of virtue.

DANIEL: Hmm. I know he had a dim view of Judaism and Christianity, so I’m not surprised, but I don’t understand the assessment. In what sense were they resentful?

JACK: Well, I think he had in mind the relationship of the lower classes to the higher classes—the Romans and their collaborators. I take the idea to be that, objectively speaking, they were in a debased position. Their land was occupied, their religious leaders were collaborators, and eventually the very heart of their community, the Temple, was destroyed. But rather than seeking to change themselves—making themselves materially more powerful and physically capable of fighting—they operated with the realm of ideas. They basically said that everything that the ruling classes held to be virtuous was evil and everything they held to be vicious was good. 

DANIEL: Okay, that’s the part of Nietzsche’s writings that I’m more familiar with: the transvaluation of values. (After a pause.) Haha, you’ll have to remind me why you brought that up!

JACK: Oh, right.  As I understand it, Nietzsche thought ressentiment had become something of a norm. As a result of the influence of Christian and Jewish thought, ressentiment infected all politics. On the right, it came to be exemplified by fascism and Nazism. On the left, that’s how he seems to have interpreted socialism and communism. 

DANIEL: Okay, gotcha. The fascists blamed Jewish people and others; the socialists blamed the capitalists for their misery.  

JACK: Yeah, more or less. 

DANIEL: And you meant that helps us diagnose oppressors claiming to be oppressed, is that right?

JACK: Yes. What I wanted to say is that our time might not be quite so “odd” as you characterized it. Rather, it’s simply a further elaboration on, or development of, ressentiment. Nowadays, even the dominant groups seek to justify themselves by claiming they are being debased. 

DANIEL: Oh, I see now! It’s kind of like saying almost everyone has a persecution complex, right?

JACK: Yes! It seems rampant. 

DANIEL: I often think people mistake having their views challenged with being persecuted. 

JACK: Agreed. (After a pause.) That’s another way in which the difference between idealism or ideology and material conditions is relevant. We could restate your point as: people mistake or conflate opposition to ideas with oppression of persons. There are persecuted people throughout the world, but living in a society where the hegemony of one’s views doesn’t go unchecked doesn’t amount to persecution.¹⁸

DANIEL: Right. I don’t think people like us should claim to be persecuted for the simple reason that we are not; however, I do think we should be in solidarity with those who genuinely are. One of the things I deeply appreciate about Catholic social teaching is the preferential option for the poor, though I think it should be put in terms of the genuinely marginalized, whether it is economic, social, or what have you.¹⁹ Though it still doesn’t solve the problem of what to do with non-marginalized people who claim to be marginalized.

JACK: Right. The social situation we face is daunting. Everything is topsy-turvy—but not in the way Christ called us to make it topsy-turvy. 

DANIEL: Alas and alack! 

JACK: This just took shape in my mind—it is something I’ve been trying to put into words for quite awhile: all things held equal, I should be willing to submit to the insights of marginalized persons about how and to what extent I should act in concert with them as a class traitor. I shouldn’t assume that I have the best insights about such matters. 

DANIEL: Hmm. Yes, though there has to be some measure of retaining your own agency.

JACK: Sure, though I don’t think we really need to make too much of that. My own sense of self-possession and autonomy is a constant. It is more likely to need checking than it is to need shoring up. 

DANIEL: Okay, but what I had in mind harkens back to what we said about antagonistic theories of social action. I don’t think I can give up being committed to finding a peaceable and healing way of trying to respond to social problems. 

JACK: I understand. I am also inclined in that direction. Certainly, when such a route is available, my presumption is that it ought to be pursued. But what do we do if the dispossessed ask us to fight? To fight with them? Or what if we find ourselves in something like the position of Bonhoeffer who was committed to non-violence but ultimately decided that he would need to “sin boldly,” as Luther put it?²⁰

Once again, there is a lengthy pause. 

DANIEL: I don’t know, Jack. I really don’t know. 

JACK: Minimally, I think we should acknowledge that our practiced forms of peacefulness have often served those in power, even though they have been intended to serve the dispossessed. That has to be a countervailing consideration.  

He polishes off his glass of wine. 

The “preferential option for the poor,” even understood in the more expansive sense, is something worth interrogating. As I understand it, it’s a fairly benign principle which asserts that we ought to consider how a policy or decision would affect the dispossessed. But that preserves their status as the recipients of decision-making, or patients, whereas I am increasingly convinced they should invest themselves with decision-making power and agency. And we who presently possess such power over them ought to divest ourselves.  To take a back seat, as it were. 

As they once again sit with their thoughts, both are aware that the lulls in  their conversation have been growing longer. 

DANIEL: I confess I am feeling a bit wrecked—or is it wracked? 

JACK: Both are serviceable. 

DANIEL: Indeed. I need to sit with these thoughts. (He makes an exaggerate grimace.) Can we play chess?

JACK: Absolutely. 

Jack stands and retrieves the board.

Notes

1. “‘Omni’ God” is intended to refer to the conception of God according to which God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipresent. For a defense of the claim that the God of Israel is one and the same as “the god of the philosophers” (i.e., the ancient Greek notion of god as impassible and one), see Wolfhart Pannenberg, “God of the Philosophers,” First Things (June 2007), firstthings.com/article/2007/06/002-god-of-the-philosophers. 

2. Dawkins has said, “if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is ‘appropriate for us to worship’.” Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Transworld, 2009), Chapter 1. 

3. Cf. Anselm, Proslogium: Or Discourse on the Existence of God, available in Ford University’s Medieval Sourcebook: sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/ anselm-proslogium.asp. Anselm writes, “God is that, than which nothing greater can be conceived.” Notice that this does not use the word ‘being’. 

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed., Hacker and Schulte; trans., Anscombe (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

5.  Thomas Jay Oord, The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (SacraSage Press, 2023),  74-75.

6. Simone de Beauvoir, “Woman as Other,” Introduction to The Second Sex, trans., Borde and Malonavy-Chevallier (Vintage Books, 2010).

7. For a version of this argument, see Robert Barron, “Understanding the Present Moment: Karl Marx,” from the Word on Fire YouTube channel, youtu.be/1207OcXUsw8.

8. A descriptive theory (or thesis) asserts that things are a certain way. It does not tell us how they should be, but rather how they (allegedly) are. A prescriptive theory (or thesis), by contrast, asserts precisely what a descriptive theory does not; it tells us that things ought to be a certain way.

9. Barron, op. cit.

10. One of central claims advanced by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto was that class conflict has shaped all of the significant developments in human history, and it continues to work unabated in present society. This, in itself, is a descriptive theory, and it is the Marxist parallel to the Christian notion that sin and brokenness have shaped human history.

11. See Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (Yale University Press, 2018), Ch. 8. 

12. For in-depth examinations, see José Pedro Zúquete, The Identitarians: The Movement against Globalism and Islam in Europe (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018); José Pedro Zúquete and Riccardo Marchi (ed.), Global Identitarianism (Taylor & Francis, 2023); and Eirikur Bergmann, Neo-Nationalism: The Rise of Nativist Populism (Springer Nature, 2020).

13.  Molly Olmstead,“‘Christian Nationalism’ Used to Be Taboo. Now It’s All the Rage.” Slate, August 5, 2022, slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/08/christian-nationalist-identity-marjorie-taylor-greene.html.

14. See David E. Campbell, Geoffrey C. Layman, John C. Green, and Nathanael G. Sumaktoyo, “Putting Politics First: The Impact of Politics on American Religious and Secular Orientations.” American Journal of Political Science 62, no. 3 (2018): 551–65. See also Patrick J. Egan, “Identity as Dependent Variable: How Americans Shift Their Identities to Align with Their Politics.” American Journal of Political Science 64, no. 3 (2020): 699–716.

15. For an interesting perspective on irony in American culture, see Christy Wampole,“How to Live Without Irony.” New York Times, Opinionator: The Stone (November 17, 2012), archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.
    nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/. Republished in The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments, ed., Catapano and Critchley (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), 764-769.

16. An allusion to Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (Penguin Books Limited, 2018).

17. García and Blankholm note, “evangelicals have relied on a simultaneous distinction from and engagement with other faiths and the wider secular culture. An emphasis on their embattled difference has provided a strong basis for collective identity.” Alfredo García and Joseph Blankholm (2016), “The Social Context of Organized Nonbelief: County-Level Predictors of Nonbeliever Organizations in the United States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 55(1): 74.

18. For an analysis of persecution, see Jaakko Kuosmanen, “What’s So Special About Persecution?” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17, no. 1 (2014): 129–40.

19. Daniel G. Groody, Introduction to The Option for the Poor in Christian Theology, ed., Groody (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

20. The complete quotation is, “If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true, not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness but... we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” Luther’s Works 48, 281-82, quoted in Eric W. Gritsch and Robert W. Jenson. Lutheranism: The Theological Movement and Its Confessional Writings (Fortress Press, 1976), 139.