The appeasement of 'the public square'

Eric Austin Lee

"So you just want everybody to hold hands and sing 'Koom-bai-yah'?!"

Don't put words in my mouth. And no. Heck no. No, instead, I might begin by offering the analysis of William Cavanaugh up on this. His essay called "The City: Beyond Secular Parodies" offers a great analysis of what happens when people start putting 'liberty' before love, or has John Milbank has put it elsewhere, the contract before the gift. The gift does not anull the contract, nor does love anull liberty (as critics seem to repeatedly [mis]argue), but when these things are rightly ordered, the contract and liberty are radically transformed in light of Christ. So, as Cavanaugh puts it, instead of being a Church-facing people, we Christians have instead become a stateward-facing people.

Thus, we don't resolve things in light of our baptism in Christ or in reconciliation as we partake of the Eucharist, but instead we look to the 'public sphere' to hash these things out: sue your neighbor, or get sued and don't reconcile and end up in prison "until you have paid the last penny" (Matthew 5:23-26)**; hash it out on 24-hour cable networks over a movie about Christ, or about celebrities and their anti-Semitism, or about any number of controversies about the state, or the federal government, or whatever is the hot-button issue.