Can the constant confrontation with our failures and deficiencies produce a culture that is generous and forgiving? Can it be concerned with those who feel not just left behind, as many in America do, but left out, as so many Ukrainians were for so long?
The answer to that, if there is an answer to that, may lie in the Christianity the anti-liberals feared, which too few in politics actually practice. As an outsider to Christianity, what I’ve always found most beautiful about it is how strange it is. Here is a worldview built on a foundation of universal sin and insufficiency, an equality that bleeds out of the recognition that we are all broken, rather than that we must all be great. I’ve always envied the practice of confession, not least for its recognition that there will always be more to confess, and so there must always be more opportunities to be forgiven.
It would be a delicious irony if the postliberal contempt for universal obligations — plain old humanism — started making the intrinsic universality of Christianity more appealing to “outsiders to Christianity.” That might arouse some very complicated feelings in the bosoms of postliberal Christians who have redescribed Christianity as merely a superior tribalism.
