​Our times are politically confusing. We are confused because we cannot seem to remember what politics is and what it is for. We use a variety of metaphors and images such as culture war, identity politics, and political horse racing. We aim for progress or to make America great again. Celebrate diversity and ideological purity. Treat politics as either resignation or revolution. Every election is the most important, and every election leaves things the same.

But what if the primary work of politics is not about any of this? What if we need to redirect our political attention to the kinds of things that we spend most of our time attending to already, the work of living and dying, bringing about new life, raising the young, caring for the old, and handing on what has been received? This is the vision of politics Ephraim Radner offers in his book Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty, in which he sets forth a politics of tending, of roots, of limits, of life and death. For Radner, Christian politics is the “tending of mortal goods.” To be political is to act within the limits of reality and to face transience, uncontrollability, and mortality. It is to know the good and the fragility of what you tend. Tending is closer to gardening than fighting or winning, limitlessness or resignation. It has to do with care, attention, and small improvements.

In drawing us back to the simple actions of tending to the goods surrounding life and death, Radner offers much wisdom. We need a politics that knows limits and fragility, goodness and transience, and puts our children and our families at the centre of the things that most need tending. At the same time—and despite Radner’s withering critiques—we need to restore a politics of bettering.

A Politics of Tending

Before disagreeing with Radner, it’s worth asking: What is involved in his politics of tending? Neither revolutionary nor laissez-faire, Radner has a “modest if essential goal: to permit the birth and death of human beings in a way that expresses the generative love of parents and children, who together are such birth and death given as a gift.” He calls us back to these modest and rooted realities from what he sees as the Christian’s more common but immodest and unrooted political aspirations.

These political goals include, most fundamentally, the support of “marriages, families of two parents and children . . . and the nurture and care of the ill and dying.” They also include opposition to actions and policies that reject these goods, such as the undermining of marriage, the prevalence of abortion, and the denial of sexual difference.

Beyond matters of family and home, Radner advocates for what he calls “political indifferentism.” “Politics is mostly a matter ‘indifferent’ to core human interests,” he says. Putting matters of faith and family first recognizes that politics as we tend to think of it is not one of the first-order principles of life. But indifference runs deeper than this.

Radner argues for indifference to “normal politics,” which he distinguishes from “abnormal politics.” Where abnormal politics deals with moments of crisis, normal politics consists of “playing one’s role in whatever system of governance one finds oneself living within, according to the rules of the system.” While Radner thinks we should partake in normal politics, we should not be particularly concerned about it and should generally accept whatever political arrangement we happen to be in. Political activities such as voting, donating, volunteering, or even reconsidering political systems and their rules “are, literally, pastimes, activities that provide stimulation to oneself or others on perhaps multiple levels, but without long-term or even immediately ameliorative benefit, except by chance.” For Radner, political engagement is of little more consequence than following a baseball team or gardening.

Radner grants that sometimes the larger world of politics will rightly seize our attention and draw us into action. This is where abnormal politics comes in. Where normal politics might include educational reform, increased voting access, or broader access to health care, abnormal politics arises when our ability to practice our faith or raise our children is under direct threat, whether because of a natural disaster or political oppression. Christians are thus to engage “abnormal politics when they are pressed by some threat to their mortal goods to take on a political role.” We engage politics with indifference, in other words, unless the sovereign or the environment threatens our ability to tend to our goods, whether these be goods of family or ecclesial life. We might here think of the Barmen Declaration, in which Christians denounced the Nazi regime for its corrupting influences on Christianity and for its encroachment on the practices of the church.

Radner’s indifference to normal politics centres on his rejection of bettering in our theological and political lives. “Neither normal nor abnormal politics holds some intrinsic capacity for betterment,” he writes. At best they might offer some “tweaks here and there, but only a few, and only sometimes.”

These tweaks are unlikely, he argues, for the same reason they are unlikely in our religious lives: we are always sojourners but never pilgrims. “The equation of sojourning with a pilgrimage in its ecclesial context, in the sense of aiming at a destination of holiness toward which one can mark a gradually closing distance, is perhaps misleading.” For Radner, the idea of progressing to our homeland stems from the rise of specific pilgrimage sites, which associate the idea of pilgrimage with identifiable, this-worldly destinations. Radner thus de-centres the idea of pilgrimage and centres instead the instability of foreignness. We are and will always remain foreigners because our task in this life is to travel toward our true city—the heavenly city.

Far too few Christians have this eschatological sense that this world, while good, is not our home. To be a Christian is to be a sojourner, “someone who is far from their home.” All political loyalties and attachments are thus secondary to our fundamental allegiance to Christ’s kingdom, which is “not of this world” (John 18:36).

A Politics of Bettering

The world needs a book that recalls us to our mortality, to the goodness of our limited lives, and to the theological centrality of sojourning. And yet there are notable areas where Radner’s views are as likely to lead us astray as lead us rightly.

A core area where many Christians, and certainly this one, will disagree is Radner’s relegation of what we typically think of as politics to the periphery. As his partial endorsement of Hobbes indicates, Radner is something of a political liberal, denying that political life is an essential aspect of what it means to be human. This Hobbesian bent is apparent in Radner’s general sense that politics can be ignored (when possible) and engaged with indifferently (when needed). As a stimulating pastime, people can take it or leave it. A political system and its rules are not a matter of primary—or secondary or even tertiary—concern. As with Hobbes, we can mostly leave this to the sovereign to deal with except when the sovereign interferes with family or church, because “family and generational nurture in the faith . . . constitute the absolute good of mortal life itself,” and politics should not threaten these absolute goods.

Radner rejects a more classical account of politics, in which politics is a primary expression of our essentially communal nature. In such a vision, activities like deliberating together about our communal life, developing a just system with just rules, fostering the common good, and working toward mutual betterment are essential to our lives. If we hold to this vision, then dismissing the work of politics as a pastime means adapting an apolitical politics and failing to see the ways we can love our neighbours through collective action. A book review is probably not the right place to settle such a debate, but it is a good place to highlight that difference.

Politics is (or should be) about living together well, sharing in the common good, improving people’s lives, and helping the community move toward justice. Radner might be right to make politics less important than family life (though I doubt it), and he is right that politics is less important than our religious lives, but it is not mere pastime. To be communal entails being political. Centring itself on private mortal goods while de-emphasizing the common good, Radner’s apolitical politics risks the individualism endemic to our liberal (and often Hobbesian) world.

Beyond being apolitical, it is not clear what makes his politics uniquely Christian. Tending mortal goods is a human action, something “even the Gentiles do” (Matthew 5:47). Further, his description of our engagement with abnormal politics seems dangerously self-referential. Abnormal politics does not seem to arouse political duty when the threat is to other people’s mortal goods. The Barmen Declaration was a heroic stand to defend Christian mortal goods and the integrity of the church, but it failed to defend Jewish mortal goods, a failure that Karl Barth later regretted.

What would make politics Christian is tending to the smallest and most forgotten, the oppressed and the marginalized, the dehumanized and the alienated. In so tending, we aim to better or at least create the conditions for bettering. Radner does expand the realm of political concern beyond our family and to our neighbours. He writes, “The dynamic by which the stranger comes close to us and becomes our neighbors is the same one by which we are driven to recognize our lives as divine gifts: we are receivers at the core of our beings.” We need a non-political understanding of neighbour-love so that it does not become abstract or distant. Nevertheless, a Christian politics necessitates that our tending expands that circle of concern and aims, at times, at institutional reforms to better the lives of others. Sometimes we express neighbour-love through institutional practices aimed at bettering.

But for Radner, as we have seen, we make little progress, if any. “Do our lives, or can our lives, close the gap between us and the fulfillment of our longing for God?” Radner asks. His answer is “probably not.” But this sense of getting closer and making progress is older than pilgrimage sites like Santiago de Compostela. My contention is that we can narrow this gap through God’s grace working in us. We can see it closing in the life of St. Paul. Bettered by being converted, he worked to develop a more Christocentric life. “One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13–14). For Paul, we “must live up to what we have already attained” (Philippians 3:16), and thus we press on toward the goal for which God called us.

So too with Augustine, who preaches that the Christian life requires we “keep on walking.” What does this mean? “Make some progress, make progress in goodness. . . . If you are making progress, you are walking. . . . Make progress in goodness, progress in the right faith, progress in good habits and behavior.” Augustine knew that we stumble, backtrack, and wander off. These are the ways we progress toward badness and so worsen our state rather than better it. No amount of progress is certain, permanent, or self-constituting. While it is grace that makes it possible, Augustine, like Paul before him and like John Bunyan after him, believed in the possibility and reality of the pilgrim’s progress.

Having downplayed theological progress, Radner likewise denies political progress. The attempt to better our moral and political lives, he says, “is misplaced as a central motive for our common life.” Radner takes this stance very seriously. Since catastrophe is “the very shape of existence,” he has little time for attempts at “making the world a better place.” These are grounded in a false sense of existence and so lead to further catastrophes. His examples of attempts at betterment are “internment camps, torture, eugenics and euthanasia, and the technology and techniques of extermination.” For Radner, our attempts to make progress cause ruination. Better to merely tend and never improve. But we can use different examples of bettering and see real progress, such as abolition, women’s suffrage, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Dodds Supreme Court decision, to say nothing of something as mundane as my neighbourhood meeting about slowing traffic to save lives and make it easier for kids to cross the street.

We ought not forgo the communal and personal work of bettering because of the wrong or failed versions of progress. In fact, this is the value of distinguishing progress from bettering. Where progress can be morally indeterminate and lack a fundamental goal, bettering is grounded in the good as both moral framework and goal. Bettering also recognizes limitations. Perfection we will not achieve until God achieves it for us in the kingdom. But we can do better in this life. The impossibility of perfection should not stop us from pressing on; it should remind us of the realities of the mortal goods we seek to develop. That we can never make perfect and often fail is no reason not to press on in our pilgrimage, nor is it a reason not to make our pilgrim’s way a more just way.

Radner misses that bettering in this sense is one of our mortal goods. It is good precisely as desired and aimed for. It is mortal in that our bettering always ends—whether because of failure, transition, or death. Recentring politics on the work of tending, for Radner, precludes the avoidance of catastrophe or the work of bettering. But tending entails as two of its constitutive activities such avoidance and such bettering.

Bettering is always penultimate because it is on this side of the gates of heaven. Death ends all our projects. We are not made for everlasting projects. Heaven is not a project but a Sabbath, a bringing to rest by God of our work of bettering. But to stop bettering because we can never complete ourselves or our political communities is to deny the mortality of bettering and thus to fail to tend to it as a mortal good.

Better Tenders

Despite all my disagreement and critique, you should still read Radner’s book. Too many books aren’t even worth reading, let alone disagreeing with. Radner’s is not one of those. To read it is to wrestle with a great theologian and a man of clear Christian conviction who returns us to ourselves and to the fundamental realities about ourselves and our life together.

He reminds us of the centrality of tending, and that it is rarely a grand project. It is the small way of tending to my wife and my children, to my students and my readers, to my neighbours and my fellow parishioners. Even more so, to tend these goods is to be grateful for all the ways that I am tended by others.

Radner reminds us of the connection of fragility and goodness in two senses. The good in this life is fragile, prone to breakage and loss; and this fragility itself is good, as the form of life God has gifted us. The fragility of the good that is my daughter—who is digging right now in the garden near me—is also a fearsome good. Fearsome because the loss of her is perhaps more terrifying than I can imagine; still good because God did not grant perpetual earthly life to the things we love or to ourselves. Concerned with betterment and catastrophe prevention, I try to forget this fragility. But it is good to be here among the mortal goods. To pass and to pass on. I forget this; Radner reminds me.

He reminds us that “life, however hard, however beautiful, is a gift,” one that summons us to offer all things to the Giver. He reminds us that life is not about achievement, that the shape of our existence is “something that transcends all the ‘successes’ and ‘failures.’” The danger of bettering is the danger of narrowing our lives down to our successes, leaving little room for life’s many failings. We should offer up to God all our mortal goods, even the goods we have never achieved. Our life, including our political life, is the service of offering all these things to God.

We also offer the undone and the undoable, “that which can be neither bettered nor saved,” for it “is part and parcel of what it means to live with others and to receive with them the goods that constitute our lives.” Why is the undoable so central? Because God made us mortal, dependent, finite beings. That is the form of the good for us. “I cannot live forever; I cannot always have my way; I cannot eat my fill; I cannot stand upright for long; I cannot create forgiveness in another’s heart; I cannot summon up my own.” To remember this is to be returned to the gift of living together with loved and not-so-loved ones. “We cannot live without others; we cannot live with them as we choose.” To know this truly is to see it as good. We cannot live politically if we refuse this gift.

Radner returns his reader to these things. Even his errors are enlightening because he compels us to think of first things. The ironic gift of this book is that, in tending to tending, to fragility, and to gift, Radner betters our sense of life and of politics. But, in restraining our political hopes and in critiquing a politics of betterment, Radner narrows politics too far, divesting Christian politics of its Christianness. There is no tending that does not aim to better, no account of grace that does not motivate our spiritual progress. And there should be no politics that does not aim to tend to the good of all, especially the neediest. As pilgrims and citizens, we do well to be reminded of these things so that we can be better tenders of our spiritual and political lives.’’