Stanley Hauerwas, along with the Yale post-liberals, pioneered a radical critique of liberalism, tied as it is to capitalism, individualism, and the nation state. Hauerwas defines liberalism as a set of beliefs built on the primacy of individual autonomy, privacy, rights, and self-interest rather than a shared substantive vision of the good. At one time Christians knew themselves to be “participants in a grand drama of God’s salvation of all creation” but “beliefs” cannot participate in drama. Liberalism robbed Christians of the primacy of a narrative reality.[1] The central point of Hauerwas’s critique is not liberalism or anti-liberalism, but it was a call to the church to be the church. The church, in Hauerwas’s estimate, is the singular community where one encounters truthfulness, or an embodied way of life (a narrative reality), in which the truth about reality emerges. It specifically involves the church community, because living the truth requires formation in principles, such as nonviolence and peace, which are not and cannot be fostered outside of the story of Christ and the church nurtured on this narrative.
The Anti-Liberalism of the MAGA New Right
Among those, such as political science professor Patrick Deneen, who have taken up Hauerwas’s anti-liberalism, there has been a profound misunderstanding. Deneen has focused on the failure of liberalism (in his breakout work, Why Liberalism Failed) and the need to replace it as captured in Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. The second book shifts to a prescriptive and state-oriented blueprint arguing that anti-liberal forces must actively seek a “regime change” to wrestle control of existing political, legal, and economic institutions from the ruling class. In this shift toward state apparatuses, he has abandoned the central point of Hauerwas’s critique. Those like Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and J. D. Vance, who see Trump as the hammer with which to install an anti-liberal authoritarian government, have missed not only Hauerwas’s point but the point of the cross. They too are seeking to defeat evil, but rather than equate evil with what Christ defeated at the cross, these thinkers equate evil with modern ideas, the rejection of an absolute moral order and traditional values, as in a neo-Marxist wokeism. In the words of Trump, the evil they are aimed at is the left: “They are sick, radical left people.” In their estimate, there must be a return to America’s founding principles so as to once again become a Christian nation, even if this requires regime change and a redefining of rule of law. As Deneen advocates, this means employing evil means for good ends, or in his phrase “using Machiavellian means for Aristotelian ends,” by which he primarily means reorganizing America’s social order and “replacing the elites.”[2]
According to Laura Field, “When the thinkers of MAGA New Right suggest that only conservatives — or as some put it, heritage Americans — have access to America’s founding principles or that America is a Christian nation, they are providing a justification for authoritarian actions on the part of the government.”[3] Christian salvation, Christian ethics, or the teaching of Christ, become secondary in this project in which the religion is weaponized as an anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, and anti-woke, instrument. For example, Yoram Hazony an Israeli political theorist and a leading advocate for national conservatism, “argues that the nation-state, as a homogeneous cultural entity, sets the true foundation of good politics. Despite being an Orthodox Jew, he has promoted Christian dominance in the United States, arguing that ‘the only thing that is strong enough to stop woke neo-Marxism, the religion of woke neo-Marxism, is the religion of biblical Christianity.’”[4] The point is to use whatever cudgel is necessary to defeat the left, and Christianity is another tool in the primary goal of defeating liberalism.
As James Chappel writes, “The ubiquity of funeral rites for liberalism can distract attention from those few who are genuinely committed to its murder. There are intellectuals and politicians out there who are seeking to uproot liberalism, root and branch.” [5] He cites Deneen, and Rod Dreher, but is focused particularly on Vermeule, the Harvard legal scholar, who is advocating Catholic integralism, or the subordination of the state to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. “It would certainly ban abortion and pornography, and it would likely mandate Catholic education in schools. It is hard to see what place would be made for homosexuals or religious minorities in such a state. What he has said does not bode well for religious tolerance: he has argued that atheists should not be allowed to hold office, and that Catholic immigrants be given priority over Muslims, Protestants, and Jews.” [6] In his envisioned technocratic rule of elites, centralized rule will have to undermine the rule of courts and the judiciary. Vermeule’s first book, Judging Under Uncertainty (2006), calls for judges to step back and let expert authorities make complex decisions, and Law’s Abnegation (2016), is about the empirical success achieved so far. “Judges have no business, Vermeule thinks, meddling with technical or regulatory matters, and thus they seldom do. So whatever fantasy we might spin about living in a republic of laws, in reality we are living in a republic of administrators.” [7] This defeat of the rule of law opens the door for the executive branch, the president, to take control.
More than Hauerwas’s anti-liberalism (they would claim both him and Wendell Berry), these theorists are fostered by the Claremont Institute, building upon the theory of Leo Strauss, and the legal theorist, Carl Schmitt (as I have described here). The legal theory enabling Adolf Hitler, according to Damon Linker, has “risen to greater prominence now than at any time since the 1930s.” [8] Schmitt viewed liberalism as containing a fatal weakness in refusing to recognize the nature of human evil (original sin) or its political expression in sorting out the world according to friends and enemies. Liberalism is too weak to draw the necessary line identifying enemies. There must be a decider in chief, as legislatures are fraught with indecision and internal factions, and the rule of law (determinations of friends and enemies) is through the singular leader who can enact the law. “That leaves the executive as the best option for decisive action. It was this line of reasoning that led Schmitt to throw his support behind Adolf Hitler’s efforts in 1933 to transform himself into Germany’s sovereign decider.”[9] The leader as the embodiment of the law, is the law, and as such serves as something of a Christ-like figure.
The Abandonment of the Cross
Taking charge, gaining control, saving the nation, the Christian definition of evil, is specific to what killed Christ and what Christ defeated in his death and resurrection. Evil is defeated through the work of Christ, and not a human politic or social organization attempting to extend that work. The politics of Jesus institutes its own social structure in the church where he is proclaimed as Lord, and this does not pertain to either liberalism or opposition to liberalism. But Deneen and company miss that Christian salvation is precisely concerned to defeat the state monopoly on the power of life, one which they would institute, through its control of death and destruction. In Hauerwas’s reading, Christ has abolished war and violence and political strife, and along with it the liturgy of the state, which imagines through government, through the president, through the legal order, through the death of the victims of state, freedom is gained.[10] This is the lie Christ confronted in his life and in his trial and death. With the resurrection, the state power of death and coercion is defeated.
This new MAGA Right, not only miss Hauerwas’ point, but the point of Christianity, which is not to coerce through imposition of Christian doctrine (the point of this group, who would install ruling elites), but to participate in Christian freedom inaugurated in the cross. This freedom is not that of the Enlightenment but neither is it the imposed liberation, focused on a human agenda of gaining control over liberal democrats. In fact, these anti-liberals need to return to Hauerwas critique of liberalism, as it could serve as well as a critique of their aim to gain control, exercise their will, and implement their justice. It is still self-creation, and will to power, but under the auspices of religion. As Chappel notes, their plan “is to be achieved not through a coup but by the installation of a cadre of anti-liberal conservatives into positions of power in the administration. From those perches, they would leverage state power to create a new social order.” [11] Through social engineering they would impose what they perceive to be the Christian ethic, but in their method, they betray the faith they would promote. Peace, non-violence, taking up the cross, cannot be violently imposed. If liberalism seems to promote an ethically neutral state, the MAGA Right religionists have a definitive ethic, but it has little to do with the ethics of Jesus. As Fields concludes, “Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance, the kingpins of the MAGA New Right, embody a different form of politics. With particular ideas and a MAGA intellectual elite behind them, they are seeking to dominate a nation and impose their politics on those who don’t share his vision.”[12]
There is a definitive brand of religion and intellectualism behind the chaos of Trump, but those focused on Trump, should not miss that the project is to displace liberal democracy, as if this is the evil Christ defeated. Other than the critique of liberalism, and even this is misguided in presuming the problem is inherent to a form of government, this has nothing to do with Stanley Hauerwas. As Hauerwas has said, “the primary concern in my work has not been to critique liberal society; it has been to offer a vision for the church (in particular the integrity of the church) so that Christians might help negotiate the challenges of a liberal society. . . my position certainly does not entail a wholesale rejection of `secular civilization’, or even of liberalism.”[13] Hauerwas is a man of the church, and a church of a very different kind than those promoting regime change and the installment of an authoritarian government as part of their church work.
The Confusion Concerning Church
Hauerwas is not advocating an overthrow of liberalism or a taking control through regime change, but an acceptance of the already accomplished defeat of the world through Christ lived out in the church. Certainly, the Christian is not obliged to understand evil, peace, freedom and justice, under the dictates of an enlightenment rationality (which presumes such notions are available through a universal reason). The Christian need not presume autonomy, individualism, and universal reason, as defined by liberalism are the case, but neither is this the epitome of evil, as if to oppose liberalism is to side with Christ. The issue, for Hauerwas, is not liberalism or its opposite, but the centrality of Christ and living in a community of believers who learn to live this story. The embodiment and meaning of peace, justice, and freedom are specific to the person of Christ. “Though we continue to live in a time when the world does not dwell in peace, when the wolf cannot dwell with the lamb and a child cannot play over the hole of the asp, we believe nonetheless that peace has been made possible by the resurrection. Through this crucified but resurrected savior we see that God offers to all the possibility of living in peace by the power of forgiveness.”[14] We do not take charge and institute this peace, we receive it and inhabit it.
To take control and direct the Christian social strategy, the MAGA Right’s project, is already an abandonment of Christ’s kingdom. His truth cannot be relegated to human political organization, certainly it cannot be privatized or made to serve another story – i.e., the story of the nation state, the story of the rise of liberal democracy, the story of Rome or America, but neither does it promote Constantinianism or the story of a modern Catholic integralism.
The Church is a Politic and Method
As Hauerwas puts it, “The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.”[15] Hauerwas is picturing the role of the church as a practical defeat of evil in living out peace. Peace is its own fruit, and its own end as an overcoming of deception, a defeat of violence and death, and a coming to reality. The church is to be the instantiation of the peace of Christ, and every other means, including liberalism or illiberalism, falls into division and violence. As Hauerwas puts it, Jesus is the embodiment of the peaceable kingdom, he is the embodiment of Sabbath peace. “God’s kingdom, God’s peace, is a movement of those who have found the confidence through the life of Jesus to make their lives a constant worship of God. We can rest in God because we are no longer driven by the assumption that we must be in control of history, that it is up to us to make things come out right.” [16]
The justice or righteousness (or the making right) of Christ cannot be extracted from the church, as if American freedom or liberal justice or illiberal justice, mean the same thing as they mean in the story and rule of Christ. As Hauerwas writes, “We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.”[17] The idea of a Christian nation, according to Hauerwas is extraordinarily destructive. Instead, “The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action.”[18] The people of God are the empirical reality of the rule of God, the embodiment of the crucified reality.[19] The point is not to determine the outcome of history, “For Christians hope, is not ‘in the processes of history,’ but in God whom we believe has already determined the end of history in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” [20]
Peace Not Coercion is the Method
For Hauerwas, peace is at the center of the gospel, as violence, whether in the name of justice or equality, is inevitably about power and control over others. Violence derives from the self-deceptive story that we are in control – that we are our own creators – and that only we can bestow meaning on our lives, since there is no one else to do so.” [21] Violence is the practice of a lie, a form of deceived meaning. It is not that violence may not gain short term goals, but Christians cannot rely on a justice that comes from the barrel of a gun, or that indicates less worthy motivations (being in charge), “for God does not rule creation through coercion, but through a cross. As Christians, therefore, we seek not so much to be effective as to be faithful – we, thus, cannot do that which promises ‘results’ when the means are unjust.”[22] The New Right, in abandoning the centrality of peace and nonviolence have missed that violence is the primary problem with liberalism and anti-liberalism, or any means other than the cross. In the name of their Anti as definitive, they stand against the means and method of Christ and the cross.
[1] A Community of Character: Towards a Constructive Christian Social Ethic, 4th edition, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1981), 11. Robert Jenson, “Hauerwas Examined” in First Things (August 1, 1992). See also Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer on Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 114 Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer on Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 114.
[2] Laura Field, “The 77-Year-Old Book That Helps Explain the MAGA New Right”, New York Times (Dec. 13, 2025). In Laura Field’s book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, Patrick Deneen serves as a leading figure and key architect of the postliberal intellectual faction.
[3] Laura Field.
[4] Laura Field.
[5] James Chappel, “Nudging Toward Theocracy: Adrian Vermeule’s War on Liberalism” in Dissent (Spring 2020). https://dissentmagazine.org/article/nudging-towards-theocracy/
[6] Nudging Toward Theocracy.
[7] Nudging Toward Theocracy.
[8] Damon Linker, “These Thinkers Set the Stage for Trump the All-Powerful”, New York Times (May 4, 2025). Robert J. Shapiro, “The German Political Theorist Who Explains What’s Happening in Washington” The Washington Monthly (February 10, 2025).
[9] Damon Linker.
[10] Stanley Hauerwas, “Ten years and counting: Christianity and the end of war,” ABC Religion and Ethics – https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ten-years-and-counting-christianity-and-the-end-of-war/10101158
[11] Nudging Toward Theocracy.
[12] Laura Field.
[13]‘Will the Real Sectarian Stand Up! ‘, Theology Today, 44/1 (April 1987), 87-94. p. 93. Cited in J. B. Thomson, `The Ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas as a Distinctively Christian Theology of Liberation (1970-2000)’ (PhD University of Nottingham, 2001), 88.
[14] The Peaceable Kingdom, 135.
[15] Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader, John Berman ad Michael Cartwright eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 124.
[16] The Peaceable Kingdom, 134.
[17]Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 47-48.
[18] Resident Aliens, 83.
[19] The Peaceable Kingdom, 107.
[20] The Peaceable Kingdom, 145.
[21] The Peaceable Kingdom, 94.
[22] The Peaceable Kingdom, 104.
