Postliberal Theology and the “Sectarian Temptation”

The Congdon-Fitch debate turns on a specific question about transmission. Did late twentieth-century theological postliberalism supply intellectual habits and rhetorical resources that later political postliberals could reuse, including in nationalist and authoritarian forms? David W. Congdon answers “yes,” in a qualified and genealogical sense. David Fitch answers “no,” and he frames Congdon’s thesis as a guilt-by-association narrative that misreads Hauerwas and mislabels postliberalism as “sectarian.” My claim in this post is evaluative: from a post-Barthian standpoint that (1) privileges Christological concentration and (2) resists ecclesial triumphalism, Congdon’s diagnosis is more persuasive. The strongest version of his argument does not claim determinism. It does, however, claim conceptual availability. Certain ecclesiological and epistemic patterns can lower the friction for anti-pluralist political appropriation, even when the original theological authors reject coercion.

It helps to treat the debate as a dispute about how theology forms political imagination, and about which forms of ecclesial self-description become politically portable. Congdon’s Journal of Religion article and his Substack response propose that key postliberal moves (e.g., an anti-apologetic posture, skepticism toward “translation,” and the picture of the church as a bounded cultural community) can be redeployed as a politics of bounded national community. Fitch reads Congdon’s genealogy as careless and unfair. He argues for a postliberalism oriented toward engagement and non-coercion. The disagreement is therefore methodological, since each side relies on a different definition of “sectarian” and a different account of what “engagement” means.

My aim here is to map the debate clearly, then press the points that most directly test each position. The testing question concerns what kinds of reasoning their frameworks authorize, and what they tend to treat as unintelligible. That question is quite significant because postliberalism often presents itself as a kind of therapy for liberal modernity. If the therapy depends on boundary-protective habits that restrict critique (and translation), it can create conditions in which politics of homogeneity appear theologically coherent.

What “postliberal” means in theology and in politics

In theological discourse, “postliberalism” refers to a late twentieth-century movement often associated with Yale, especially Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, and commonly extended to include a wider orbit that features Stanley Hauerwas. In Congdon’s account, the movement is diverse. He still identifies shared instincts. Postliberals assimilated neo-orthodox critiques of liberal Protestantism and also criticized conservative evangelical rationalism. They reframed Christianity away from universally available propositions and toward a community-forming “grammar” or way of life.

Congdon argues that postliberals rejected apologetics that claim a neutral, rational basis for Christianity, and that they resisted projects of “translation” that recast the gospel in allegedly universal categories accessible to outsiders. On this view, Christianity is learned as one learns a language, through practices internal to the community and through catechesis. Congdon later condenses the structure in a sentence that becomes central to Fitch’s response: postliberal theology rejects finding common ground with cultural “outsiders” and recommends protecting the walls that distinguish one’s community from others.1

Indeed, that picture can sound attractive to readers fatigued by liberal Protestant accommodation and by fundamentalist propositionalism. It can also foster a strong church/world binary, especially when “the world” is treated as a cultural Other and when external critique is framed as a category mistake. Congdon’s argument focuses on precisely that vulnerability: he claims that vulnerability does not require bad intentions, but it can arise from the logic of the account of rationality and community.

Political postliberalism is newer and more visible in public debates. Congdon uses it to describe anti-liberal currents that criticize pluralistic liberal democracy and universalist political philosophy, and that promote politics ordered toward thick communal traditions and (in some versions) explicit confessional arrangements. In his article, he situates these developments within longer trajectories of political economy and cultural conflict in the United States.2 He treats political postliberalism as one response to perceived failures of liberal social order.

The key question Congdon presses concerns intelligibility. Do Christians formed by decades of anti-liberal ecclesial discourse find these proposals more “natural,” because they already inhabit a framework that treats pluralism as a problem and boundary protection as an ethical good? His thesis is that postliberalism supplied a usable template, one that later actors could employ with fewer conceptual adjustments than critics of political postliberalism sometimes expect.

What is being argued about “sectarianism”?

One pivot in the debate is James Gustafson’s mid-1980s critique of Hauerwas, framed as a warning against a “sectarian temptation.” The label is volatile because it is often heard as an accusation of withdrawal. Congdon uses “sectarian” in a sense closer to Gustafson’s own concern. The concern is epistemic insulation and boundary-policing in moral reasoning. Congdon describes the temptation as treating Christian discourse as a self-contained enterprise. Ethics is defined chiefly as fidelity to community ethos and with limited accountability to patterns of interdependence.3

Fitch treats “sectarian” primarily as “withdrawn,” and he rejects the label because he reads Hauerwas’s church/world distinction as a tool for engagement. He writes that Hauerwas “is not clarifying the church-world distinction for the purposes of withdrawing the church from the world,” and he presents the distinction as aimed “for the express purpose of engaging the world.”4

Here is the methodological fulcrum. If “sectarian” means literal withdrawal, Fitch’s defense does significant work. If “sectarian” means an epistemic posture that resists external critique and treats translation as theological compromise, then the question shifts. Engagement becomes compatible with sectarianism in Gustafson’s sense. A community can engage others and still define outsiders as incapable of understanding Christian truth except through conversion into the community’s language. Congdon leans on that point. He argues that postliberals can engage the world and still construe the world as culturally alien.

On this definitional question, the debate often slides into parallel monologues. Fitch argues that postliberalism produced deeper dialogue and respect among cultures and religions.5 Congdon argues that the kind of “dialogue” at issue becomes constrained when conversion is treated as the precondition of intelligibility. The debate therefore needs a more specific test: does the postliberal posture permit external critique to function as critique, and does it permit translation that does not require conversion as its prior condition? If the answer is uncertain, then “engagement” alone does not settle the charge.

Congdon’s central thesis in the Journal of Religion article

Congdon’s argument has multiple parts. Many readers miss where he is strongest because they treat the piece as a linear “blame” narrative. The core of his thesis is a structural analogy. Postliberal theology did for “religious identity” what political postliberalism seeks to do for political identity. In Congdon’s formulation, each rejects apologetic common ground with “outsiders” and each prioritizes boundary protection.6

Several elements matter in his presentation.

Congdon offers a “family tree” account of postliberalism. He describes multiple trajectories emerging from a shared set of instincts. He denies a simplistic causal story and denies that postliberal theologians were covert nationalists.7 The claim is genealogical—it concerns how forms of reasoning travel.

He connects the theological posture to ecclesial and subcultural practices that shape political instincts. He cites Hauerwas and Willimon’s Resident Aliens as influential for urging Christians to stop investing in reform of liberal institutions and to focus on the local church as the site of virtue.8 He links this to intentional communities and later proposals such as Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option.” The point is not that these movements are identical with Christian nationalism. The point concerns how patterns of anti-liberal ecclesial discourse can normalize the idea that human flourishing requires thick homogeneity.

He treats Lindbeck’s “intratextual theology” as an epistemological bridge. Congdon argues that intratextual theology, understood as resistance to translation into extrascriptural categories and as commitment to redescribing reality within a scriptural framework, parallels political postliberal resistance to liberal universalism and its preference for thick cultural particularity.9 This is where the debate becomes delicate. Fitch claims intratextuality trains humility, especially in cross-cultural settings. Congdon claims intratextuality can function as a method of absorbing the world into the church’s grammar.

Congdon links the “sectarian temptation” and an “authoritarian temptation” as conceptually allied. In his strongest formulations, the alliance concerns how both presume an anti-liberal church/world binary and treat cultural homogeneity as a condition for flourishing. He states the point sharply by claiming that the “sectarian temptation” has “matured into” an “authoritarian temptation” among political postliberals.10 Readers can fairly question the rhetoric, since it can imply an inevitability that Congdon elsewhere rejects. The analytic core remains: a framework that treats pluralism as a threat and that makes conversion the gateway to intelligibility can be repurposed by political movements that treat pluralism as a threat and that make assimilation the gateway to citizenship.

Congdon closes with a theological diagnosis. Drawing on Harvey Cox’s critique of the 1975 “Hartford Appeal,” he argues that church/world dualism can be weaponized. In Cox’s summary, the posture shifts from “avoid the world” to “purify the world.”11 Congdon identifies a missing Christological center as a recurring weakness of postliberalism and then commends a theological and political commitment to pluralism. He argues that political liberalism has real advantages over anti-liberal alternatives because it assumes disagreement and pluralism as durable features of social life.12

A post-Barthian reader has to decide how to receive this conclusion. Congdon’s political recommendation gestures toward “renewed theological liberalism.” A post-Barthian framework does not need to adopt “liberalism” as an ideology to agree with his theological warning. The central issue concerns the priority of Jesus Christ over all human communities, including the church, and the consequent refusal to treat the church as the subject that must conquer or purify the world. Congdon’s appropriation of Cox presses that issue directly.

Fitch’s reply

Fitch’s Substack series pursues several aims that can be separated from its rhetorical register.

He contests the framing of the debate as consensus. He calls the storyline connecting Hauerwas, Lindbeck, and contemporary postliberal politics “lazy,” and he rejects the idea of a straight line.13 This is a legitimate caution because any genealogy can become an overconfident compression.

He distinguishes Hauerwas from political postliberals who admire Hungary or embrace integralism or national conservatism. He suggests Hauerwas “left the club,” meaning that Hauerwas distanced himself from the rightward trajectory.14 This point targets guilt-by-association logic. It is relevant to moral responsibility and to reception history. It is less direct as a response to Congdon’s claim about conceptual availability.

He argues that the church/world distinction aims at engagement. For Fitch, this defeats the “sectarian” label because it shows a posture of mission rather than isolation.15 This is where the definitional disagreement becomes decisive. If “sectarian” means social withdrawal, Fitch’s response is forceful. If “sectarian” means epistemic insulation, the defense requires more.

He intensifies a classic Hauerwasian claim by calling the church “a political strategy.” He writes, “The church is a political strategy,” and he describes the strategy as embodied witness that invites others to “join in.”16 This language matters for Congdon’s thesis because it can be read as supplying a template for thinking of the nation as a site for a similarly “true” strategy.

He emphasizes non-coercion. He presents Hauerwas’s politics as cruciform, marked by refusal of coercive power. He claims that God does not impose himself.17 These claims are theologically constructive. The relevance to Congdon’s thesis depends on whether non-coercion at the level of intention prevents coercive appropriation at the level of reception. Fitch seems to assume it does. That assumption requires argument.

He offers an alternative interpretation of intratextual theology. Fitch describes intratextuality as a sensitivity to the cultural particularity of rationalities. He describes it as a discipline of entering another culture, listening, learning its grammar, then translating. He calls this posture anti-colonial.18 This account requires further textual substantiation from Lindbeck, since Congdon’s critique explicitly targets Lindbeck’s resistance to “translation” models.

For all that, Fitch’s claims do cohere: if Hauerwas’s politics is non-coercive, if church/world distinction aims at engagement, and if Lindbeckian intratextuality trains humility, then Congdon’s genealogy looks like a category mistake. The central question is whether these claims engage Congdon’s definitional and epistemic concerns, or whether they shift the debate to a different register.

Congdon’s reply

Congdon’s Substack response focuses on three lines of rebuttal.

He argues that Fitch treats “sectarian” as “withdrawn,” and he repeats that the Gustafsonian concern centers on epistemic insulation and boundary-setting. Congdon claims that engagement can take a form that polices boundaries and absorbs the world into the church’s grammar.19 This response clarifies that the dispute is about what counts as engagement and what counts as accountability to critique.

He argues that Fitch’s “church as political strategy” language exemplifies a conceptual path from ecclesial postliberalism to political postliberalism. If the church is framed as the bearer of the right social vision, then it becomes easier for some Christians to conclude that national politics should embody that ecclesial strategy.20 Congdon does not claim Fitch endorses that conclusion. He claims the conceptual bridge is present.

He argues that Fitch misrepresents Lindbeck. Congdon emphasizes Lindbeck’s rejection of “translation” as the way one learns religion. He cites Lindbeck’s preference for catechesis and his account of conversion as deciding first and understanding later. Congdon reads this as incompatible with Fitch’s portrayal of intratextuality as a dialogical posture of learning another culture’s rationality in order to translate.21 Congdon’s point here is methodological: Fitch’s portrait requires text.

This is an important pressure point. Fitch’s defense of intratextuality functions as a moral defense, since it depicts postliberalism as anti-colonial. Congdon does not deny that postliberals can act with humility. He argues that the internal logic of the epistemology can still function as absorptive. If Congdon is right about Lindbeck’s rejection of translation, Fitch’s “anti-colonial Lindbeck” requires more than a generalized cultural-linguistic claim. It requires Lindbeck’s own language.

A post-Barthian evaluation

“Post-Barthian” is not a single position. It indicates a family of instincts shaped by Barth’s claims about revelation and the church. Two such instincts are relevant here.

First, revelation is not at humanity’s disposal and cannot be secured by religious experience or ecclesial practice. Second, the church does not possess Christ as an asset. The church is continually judged and renewed by the living Word. These instincts produce suspicion toward ecclesiologies that treat the church as a “coherent culture” whose internal grammar secures truth and renders external critique unintelligible.

Congdon’s critique resonates with that suspicion. He argues that postliberal theology can become ecclesiocentric, and he ties that risk to church/world dualism. His appeal to Cox’s critique of the “Hartford Appeal” is particularly pointed, since Cox argues that the Hartford posture casts “the Church, not Christ,” as the subject of judgment, liberation, and healing.22 A post-Barthian reader recognizes the danger: the church becomes a self-authorizing agent and a self-justifying subject. The theological problem precedes the political one.

The political stakes follow. If a community’s epistemology defines outsiders as incapable of grasping the community’s truth except through conversion, then translation becomes morally suspect and critique becomes a category mistake. In a social context marked by pluralism, that epistemology can normalize a posture of assimilation. The logic can remain non-coercive in intention and still become coercive in political reception. That point does not require attributing authoritarian motives to postliberal theologians. It concerns how their frameworks mark off intelligibility and accountability.

Fitch’s main defense focuses on engagement and non-coercion. These are important themes, but they do not settle Congdon’s central question. A post-Barthian evaluation asks: what kind of engagement is being proposed, and what is the epistemic structure of that engagement? Does it allow external critique to function as critique, or does it translate critique into misunderstanding that can only be resolved by conversion? Does it permit translation across discourses as a genuine practice of mutual intelligibility, or does it treat translation as capitulation to liberal universalism?

On this point, Fitch often treats engagement as a sufficient rebuttal to “sectarianism.” That move assumes a definition of sectarianism that reduces it to withdrawal. Congdon is operating with a different definition. He is focused on boundary-protective reasoning that resists translation. Fitch would need to show that Hauerwas and Lindbeck consistently permit external critique to stand as critique, and that they permit translation without making conversion the precondition of intelligibility. In the passages under dispute, Fitch asserts the conclusion more than he establishes it.

On Lindbeck, two debates remain distinct. One concerns what Lindbeck says about learning religion. Congdon claims Lindbeck rejects translation models and prefers catechesis. Fitch claims intratextuality trains cultural humility and cross-cultural learning prior to translation. This is partly an exegetical question. It is also a methodological question about evidence. Fitch needs Lindbeck’s text to support his portrait, since Congdon’s challenge concerns Lindbeck’s explicit rejection of translation.

The second debate concerns political portability. Even if intratextuality can be practiced humbly, it can still function (socially) as an absorptive method when paired with ecclesial identity maintenance. Congdon’s “conceptual availability” claim is strongest here. An epistemology that treats public discourse as material to be redescribed within a confessional grammar can be repurposed by political movements that treat public life as material to be assimilated into a confessional national identity. The question is not whether intratextuality entails coercion; the question is whether it supplies a structure that a coercive politics can adopt with minimal revision.

Congdon ends his article with a call to expand Christian imagination “beyond the church/world divide and away from homogeneity,” and he gestures toward renewed theological liberalism.23 A post-Barthian evaluation does not need to embrace “liberalism” as a total political ideology to affirm the theological burden of his warning. The decisive commitment is to the priority of Jesus Christ over church identity. It is also a commitment to God’s noncompetitive presence in the world, a presence that undermines any ecclesial fantasy of conquest.

Congdon’s quotation of Cox on God’s presence “in the mode of incarnation, sub specie crucis” captures a Christological grammar that limits ecclesial self-assertion.24 It also clarifies why this debate cannot be reduced to political alignment. The theological question concerns who, or what, functions as the primary subject in the church’s account of redemption (and judgment). When the church becomes the primary subject, church/world dualism hardens. The appetite for homogeneity grows. A politics of assimilation, then, becomes easier to imagine.

Fitch’s emphasis on non-coercion and cruciform politics is constructive within its own terms. The weakness is its limited engagement with Congdon’s epistemic critique. A community can sincerely intend non-coercion and still supply rhetoric that, when received within conditions of social power, supports coercive appropriation. If the church is described as the bearer of “true politics,” and if liberal pluralism is described as “the world,” then the space for pluralism can shrink in practice. That shrinkage is a Christological failure because it trades the living Word for ecclesial identity maintenance.

Conclusion

The debate becomes clearer when it is tested by a small set of questions. Which definition of “sectarian” is doing the work? Is the concern withdrawal, or is it epistemic insulation? What kind of engagement is envisioned? Engagement can take dialogical forms that assume translation and mutual intelligibility. Engagement can also function as absorption into the community’s grammar. Which form is being defended? What governs the church’s self-understanding? Does Christological concentration control the church’s posture toward the world, or does ecclesial identity maintenance take control? Finally, what status does pluralism have in the theological account? Is pluralism treated as a stable feature of social life, or as a disorder requiring homogeneity for flourishing?

Congdon’s argument is persuasive precisely because it identifies a theological hazard that can become politically portable. Postliberalism can construe the church as a bounded culture whose grammar secures truth in a way that renders external critique unintelligible. That posture can make anti-pluralist politics appear coherent. Fitch is right to resist simplistic causal stories and to defend Hauerwas’s opposition to Christian nationalism. Those points, however, do not address the central epistemic charge. They also leave unresolved the textual question about Lindbeck, since the “anti-colonial intratextuality” portrait requires stronger evidence.

Ecclesial self-description is never innocent because the church stands under judgment and cannot identify its own coherence with Christ’s lordship. When church identity becomes the controlling category, the church/world divide hardens and pluralism becomes threatening. Under those conditions, the move from ecclesial strategy to national strategy becomes easier to imagine. Congdon’s genealogy, understood as a claim about conceptual availability, deserves serious attention.