Mourning Postliberalism’s Left Wing

In this paper, I reflect on the significance of white Christian nationalism’s postliberal inheritance for the field of political theology. While scholars of white Christian nationalism have increasingly recognized the impact of postliberal thought on far-right Christian political movements, this same genealogy of political and philosophical critique continues to animate the more normative fields of political theology and Christian ethics, which themselves tend towards anti-capitalism and anti-nationalism. Rather than contest which political expression represents the ‘true’ or more faithful inheritance of postliberal thought, this paper asks how the political success of white Christian nationalism calls into question optimism about the efficacy of postliberal politic thought for a leftist politics.