No Separation: Christians, Secular Democracy, and Sex. By Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey
Date
2024-12-10
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Journal of Church and State
Abstract
What happens when a Western secular democracy produces a Christianity of its own? Does it become another formation of the secular, a civil religion, or a cultural religious movement in service of a select body politic? Following in the lineage of Robert Bellah, Talal Asad, and Saba Mahmood, Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey’s No Separation: Christians, Secular Democracy, and Sex challenges the deployment of political secularisms in three Western nations and argues that such deployments in the twenty-first century have woven populist, anti-textual Christianities into the boundaries delineating borders and citizens. Disconnected from doctrine and institutional authority, these Christianities form cultural religions that Viefhues-Bailey labels civil religion’s “unruly cousin” (p. 24). In his taxonomy, cultural religions lack founding myths and central texts; their usage of history is neither scripturally nor politically coherent; and they are often “coercive” in identifying “who is part of the body politic” and “who is not” (p. 24). The intervention that Viefhues-Bailey makes goes beyond which bodies matter to the state and why. Rather, he concludes that these “exclusionary Christianities” reveal that “the project of democratic governance is profoundly problematic” and strives to envision new theological strategies for liberative democracies (pp. 224–225).
Description
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Journal of Church and State following peer review. The version of record Lauren Barbato, No Separation: Christians, Secular Democracy, and Sex. By Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey, Journal of Church and State, Volume 67, Issue 1, Winter 2025, csae070, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/csae070 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/csae070.
© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
This article will be embargoed until 12/10/2026.
Keywords
Citation
Lauren Barbato, No Separation: Christians, Secular Democracy, and Sex. By Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey, Journal of Church and State, Volume 67, Issue 1, Winter 2025, csae070, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/csae070