Theology and the political imagination

[My aim is] to put theology into conversation with political theory in an attempt to expand our current political and pluralist imagination. Political theory is nothing if not an exercise of imagination, offering new or different pictures of collective life in the hopes of remolding, refashioning, or altogether altering contemporary political arrangements. Indeed, the success or popularity of a political theory could be said to depend upon the extent to which it offers a picture of political society and life that is more attractive and persuasive than that of the status quo. To take but one example, imagination was crucial in fostering the move to organize collective life into nations, for nations are, as Benedict Anderson shows, imagined political communities. Yet today, the concept of nationhood is so entrenched that, according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “the nation becomes the only way to imagine community! Every imagination of a community becomes overcoded as a nation, and hence our conception of community is severely impoverished. This is where theology can play a subversive role, challenging the givens of our current political situation by presenting an alternative picture of political community and social reality. This is to think of imagination as Walter Brueggemann defines it, as “the human capacity to picture, portray, receive, and practice the world in ways other than it appears to be at first glance when seen through a dominant, habitual, unexamined lens.” By applying a Christian imagination to the question of difference, we have an opportunity to be critical of social reality and to undertake the ethical task of creating alternative pictures of communal and political life. By ensuring that this undertaking is primarily theological, we offer, as William Cavanaugh puts it, “a different kind of political imagination, one that is rooted in the Christian story,” but one that can nevertheless help augment the political imagination of contemporary political theory and pluralist society.

Kristen Deede Johnson, Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22-3.