The Institutional Roots of America’s Political Crisis

This article was published in the Winter 2025 edition of our print Journal. To read for free online, please Subscribe. If you would like to receive future editions of the print Journal, become a Basic or Solidarity Member today.

The course of American Christianity over the next thirty years—if not the rest of the twenty-first century—will be entirely downstream of James Davison Hunter. For the last three decades, this professor of religion, culture, and social theory has set the parameters, language, and goals of public Christian engagement, introducing important concepts such as “culture war” and “faithful presence,” and establishing institutions critical to understanding and navigating the world, such as the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (initially called “The Postmodernity Project”) and The Hedgehog Review. Hunter is not even seventy, but already in his lifetime he has had an outsized impact, serving on the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities and providing consultation to the White House, the Bicentennial Commission for the U.S. Constitution, and the National Commission on Civic Renewal. 

Hunter is even responsible, in part, for the mainstreaming of postliberal thought through Patrick Deneen. Hunter was the co-editor of Yale University Press’ Politics and Culture (formerly Democracy and Its Discontents) book series, which published Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and placed Deneen at the center of much debate over the shifting political tides in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Hunter’s Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis is the most recent book in that same series and it deserves every bit as much careful study and engagement. And perhaps Hunter’s book is something of an apologia for his bit role in the rise of postliberalism and populist forces. While Hunter is no apologist for the status quo (writing that “there are clear signs… we are now in a period of exhaustion”), he nevertheless says his “concern for the fate of liberal democracy” drove him to write this 504-page book, his longest yet.

In writing his own “big book,” John Steinbeck claimed that everything he had published before (including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Grapes of Wrath) was merely “an exercise, as practice for the one to come.” Steinbeck wrote that the book—what would eventually become East of Eden—“must contain all in the world I know and it must have everything in it of which I am capable—all styles, all techniques, all poetry.” This is what Hunter has delivered in Democracy and Solidarity, weaving his life’s research into a multigenerational tale of America’s coming of age.

Hunter’s story begins with the hybrid-Enlightenment: “the specific configuration of cultural sources that underwrote American democracy” and “could contain democracy’s many internal disagreements.” “Drawing as much from Calvinism as it did from classical Republicanism and Lockean individualism,” those disagreements are inevitable, but not necessarily fatal in the way that Deneen (never explicitly mentioned in the book) would argue.

Americans up until the present have found new ways of reforging the hybrid-Enlightenment, often with dramatic differences, but always in a way that has “remained recognizable to successive generations.” Hunter’s question, indeed his unresolved concern, is: “can an Enlightenment-era political institution—liberal democracy—survive and thrive in a post-Enlightenment culture?”

Others did so in their own cultural moments. The book walks through vignettes of “David Walker, Angela Grimke, Lyman Beecher, Phoebe Palmer, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann, Martin Luther King Jr, Richard Neuhaus, Richard Rorty, and Chantal Mouffe,” each articulating with “uncommon clarity the contradictions inherent within liberal democracy” and contributing to “the process of working through these stubborn contradictions.”

And yet, for reasons Hunter explores in the book, it is unclear that our own day’s many formidable Christian intellectuals could achieve what their predecessors did in the past. For one, “the secular turn in intellectual and academic life… was a successful challenge to the monopoly long held by the Protestant establishment over the legitimate interpretation of the world.” At the same time, fundamentalist Christianity followed a “strategy of civic privatism… through the 1960s.” In combination, those two trends ensured that “never again would traditional Protestant Christianity provide the background cultural consensus” for America, at least not in the twentieth century.

It is not merely that we live in the “negative world” whereas the subjects of Hunter’s book lived in the “positive world,” as a clumsy application of Aaron Renn’s paradigm might suggest. The challenge is about institutional and financial realities as much as it is about cultural attitudes. The stepping stones that once laid a path to public platforms have since eroded. Though not covered in detail in the book, Niebuhr’s own rise is illustrative of the challenge of reforging the hybrid-Enlightenment today. 

While Niebuhr first honed his craft in church pulpits and a denominational publication, it was his 1916 essays in The Atlantic that launched his career—both in terms of exposure and compensation (“he still recalled with delight, forty years later, that these two pieces had brought in the colossal sum of $120,” the equivalent of more than $3,000 today). In the 1920s, the Christian Century was able to provide Niebuhr “near-total freedom to write what he wanted, a sizable supplement to his income, a national, interdenominational readership of some thirty thousand who soon came to expect regular illumination or provocation from his pen.”

As Niebuhr’s biographer notes, the Century made his later career possible “by creating a loyal audience of friends and even foes, who followed his writing from one journal to another,” snowballing in size as he was able to tap into more and more institutional reservoirs for even broader reach, including Union Theological Seminary, the World Council of Churches, and the various projects of American magazine magnate Henry Luce (whose TIME Magazine featured Niebuhr on its front cover in 1948). By the end of his career, Niebuhr could draw the modern-day equivalent of $25,000 or more for a single article.

The capacity of institutions to sustain the intellectual life in this manner has thinned considerably. By his own account, Hunter’s intellectuals had “a significant public platform for addressing the affairs of the day” and “a disproportionate capacity to define and shape the symbolic universe of a community or society.” Lacking our own Henry Luce, and with publishing weaker than ever, it is unclear whether another Niebuhr could ever emerge. 

Hunter is right about the cultural challenge of sustaining an Enlightenment-era political institution in a post-Enlightenment era. But saving liberal democracy from its lethal exhaustion will first require repaving the paths that allowed Christian intellectuals like Niebuhr to define and shape the symbolic universe. 

Some younger Christians have called this sort of effort a “reconquista,” taking back the institutions that many 20th century Christians either ignored or abandoned. But I prefer a different term, one I first learned from James Davison Hunter: “faithful presence.”