Making Barth Useful? American Reception and the Critique of Religion

The contemporary mainline Protestant deployment of Barth against Christian nationalism constitutes the latest in a series of American domestications of his theology, following Niebuhr’s Cold War conscription and Hauerwas’s ecclesial recruitment. Each repeats the same formal error: converting Barth into a resource for a prior political commitment rather than receiving his theology as a disruption of the legitimating enterprise as such. Reading this reception history through Barth’s critique of religion in Church Dogmatics I/2, §17, the paper contends that the progressive mainline’s invocation of Barth functions as the very cultural-theological self-assurance Barth identified as religion’s Unglaube. Yet the argument does not terminate in negation. Following Barth’s own logic, religion is judged and justified in the same divine act. The church’s opposition to Christian nationalism is true only insofar as it knows itself under the same judgment it pronounces.