“Although it is good to contemplate the lilies of the field, anxiety is understandable when one does not know how to find food and shelter.” These lines appear in the conclusion to David Newheiser’s Hope in a Secular Age (154–55). I appreciate Newheiser’s point because it resonates with my own conclusions following fieldwork I conducted between 2016 and 2020, which resulted in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding. For that book, I conducted research on religion and peace and development practices in various regions in the Philippines and Kenya. There I saw profound human insecurity, where food was not a precondition for hope, but its very destination. Newheiser’s reference to total insecurity, however, is not what his book is truly about. It is, rather, about hope as an individual practice of risk predicated on uncertainty. Such hope, Newheiser contends, offers a glimpse into the possibility of radical political transformation. Rather than speaking to those deprived of food and shelter, hope, for Newheiser, constitutes a site of ethical discipline. Newheiser’s argument focuses more on reconciling Dionysius’s negative Christian theology and Derrida’s deconstruction in pursuit of such discipline. Newheiser’s conceptual labor connotes privilege, security, and an abstraction from any empirical concerns with the prospects of food and shelter themselves. Such practical concerns are different from Newheiser’s conceptualization of hope as a virtuous practice involving self-departure. The empirical hope that I traced during my research is not one built upon uncertainty and unpredictability, but on an aspiration for certainty and a predictable future, which alone constitutes a defense against fatalism and despair.
In this post, I reflect on the challenges that on-the-ground empirical research among marginalized communities poses to Newheiser’s book, as well as the limits of philosophical reflection when articulating any universalizable account of hope. I contend that ethnographic research of the kind I conducted in my work on religious peacebuilding reminds us that hope is never abstract for those who are seeking basic needs, such as shelter, food, and safety.
Grounding the Practice of Hope
My first of two areas of engagement with Newheiser’s meticulously argued and layered book concern the idea that hope is practiced via ethical discipline, on the one hand, and the empirical reality, for many, that “hope” simply names the concern one has with feeding her children or protecting them from harm in their ordinary day-to-day life, on the other. My critique of Newheiser’s position is that the possibility of food and shelter does not enter the theoretical exposition of hope as an ethics of uncertainty. In Newheiser’s reading of Dionysius and Derrida, this uncertainty constitutes a constructive opening with potentially desirable political implications (“democracy to come” in Derrida). In my empirical research, I found that hope, as defined by the ability to imagine survival and to avoid fatalism and despair, depends often on hermeneutically closed (and thus conservative) accounts of religious traditions, which also correspond with and define hermetically closed communal boundaries and thus stable narratives of identity.
Rather than self-critique, in other words, hope depends on self-affirmation. Take, for example, efforts to “deradicalize” youth in Kenya by reducing the allure of fatalistic ideologies, such as al-Shabaab’s, which manipulate authentic grievances and experiences of suffering and marginality and propel youth into an apocalyptic imaginary with redemptive promises as well as economic incentives. In order to redirect people away from fatalism, concrete “development” incentives, such as meager but sustainable livelihood options, are programmatically cross-fertilized with religiously coded anti-violent counter-messaging. To counter “perverted” religion and its fatalistic consequence, “authentic” religion—a set of close prescriptions and textually bound “teachings”— are deployed. Here “hope” means certainty about religion, food, shelter, and security within the framework of the present. Hope is decidedly not in reference to an uncertain future operative according to indeterminate new horizons (i.e., the version of hope in Newheiser’s book). In contexts where people’s hopelessness is often also expressed in their hunger and marginalization, hope against despair means survival within, rather than transcendence of, the institutions and power structures shaping their predicaments of insecurity.
The tradition of critical pedagogy going back to Paolo Freire tells us about the emancipatory potential of critical consciousness to undo the oppressive systems structuring people’s realities. Newheiser’s secular hope certainly cannot be categorized within this radical transformative genre, even if it claims to have a radical political “cash value.” Of course, he is not claiming to engage in critical pedagogy, but, because he does aspire to intervene in justice discourses his argument should be subject to the empirical experiences of those facing realities of injustice and their accounts of hope. The secular hope that he rescues from the critics of religion remains an elitist practice, despite his sincere concern with justice and political meanings of hope.
In contexts where people’s hopelessness is often also expressed in their hunger and marginalization, hope against despair means survival within, rather than transcendence of, the institutions and power structures shaping their predicaments of insecurity.
Newheiser is explicitly concerned with hope’s relation to secular understandings of justice. This concern leads him to negative theology whose form, but not content, he shows resembles (Jewish) atheist deconstruction. This move then allows Newheiser to reconcile (Christian) faith and secular plurality and norms. This concern with the reconcilability of “religious and secular hopes” (73) is motivated by an abstract philosophical agenda that is most invested in building a cogent interpretation of Derrida and Dionysius. If the starting point would have been that of justice and radical political transformation, his focus would have shifted to the domain of critical pedagogy, as well as empirical and anthropological work about hope.
Newheiser’s approach, because it primarily deals in abstracted philosophical discourses, also conveys privilege. I find it productive to juxtapose this privilege with memories from my fieldwork among marginalized communities in Kenya and the Philippines. Their practices of hope more often dwell in the difference between endless cycles of violence and insecurity and some measure of sustenance to counteract fatalism and despair. Uncertainty is not a virtue to be cultivated for these groups, but an obstacle to be overcome. This reality underscores the difference between the privileged practice of abstract philosophizing and on-the-ground realties of survival.
Newheiser connects virtuosity to hope and this virtuosity seems to suggest food and basic material life-affirming necessities are not an issue at the very heart of the practice of hope. Hope, instead, is the outcome of a disciplined ethics, which Newheiser rescues from Albert Camus’s demolition of hope as “a form of false comfort” (73). I resonate with this effort to re-approach Camus’s analysis of the myth of Sisyphus because my aforementioned fieldwork involved interviewing people who persisted in practices of intercommunal peace that they deemed “religious” or “interreligious” in the midst of communal despair. I referred to their persistence in what might be analyzed as a futile exercise of hope as “Sisyphean.” Unlike Camus’s reading of the myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphean peacebuilding does not persist in resignation to the struggle. This modality, rather, seeks to transform the conditions for the persistence of suffering, but does so with a recognition that this transformation entails an everyday struggle against despair. Whether this struggle entails resolving conflicts between pastoralists and farmers that erupt along ethnic and tribal lines in Kenya or concentrated efforts to reduce child sexual abuse and child marriage by working with schools, teachers’ networks, and municipalities in the Kenyan Coast, Sisyphean peacebuilders creatively navigate the neoliberal landscape of development and peacebuilding policies with both its epistemic and donor parameters. To this extent, rather than an “ethics of uncertainty… unconstrained by the subject’s present understanding,” which is what Newheiser recovers from Derrida’s deconstruction (37), Sisyphean peacebuilding constitutes a disciplined practice of hope, even if it is beholden to realist and presentist accounts of political norms and hermeneutically closed religious self-identification. The empirics of hope, therefore, manifest in statements such as “peace is the real message of Christianity or Islam” and participation in interreligious dialogue as an expression of one’s religious vocation in the world. All of the Sisyphean peacebuilders I encountered during my fieldwork are virtuous in their own ways of resisting resignation to despair, even if not also denoting an ethics of uncertainty and unforeseeability of the kind that would demand a high level of critical theory and decolonial methodologies for epistemological and ontological undoing.
The hope I observed during my empirical work in Kenya and the Philippines was neither virtuous—if, by that, what is meant is deconstruction or negation—nor a false comfort. It is not virtuous because it operates with a closed account of religious traditions and communal identities and because the conceptions of justice within which hope is practiced are predetermined by the distorted realities of the present. For example, in Mindanao, interreligious peacebuilding work relies on a demand to rewrite the script of conflict between Christian settlers and Muslim Moro and Indigenous Lumad minoritized communities. It does so through the prism of “One Mindanao,” a celebration of plurality. In this case, what is bracketed are the ongoing effects of centuries of colonialism. The “justice” script here was already massive before programmatic efforts and international NGOs’ investments focused on religion as one mechanism to inject this script with sacred commitments and hope against fatalism. The hope I heard as people described their positive experiences of building friendships across communal lines was authentic. This authenticity is not mere “false comfort,” but an enactment of political ethics (see also Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s work on this issue). Indeed, the empirical hope I observed, just like the account of secular hope Newheiser develops, “can endure darkness” (74), but this endurance does not also depend on subjecting “realistic proposals… to utopian critique” (132). Neither does political ethics depend on a privileged location of comfort and security.
In spite of these criticisms, I resonate with Newheiser’s account of hope as an ethical discipline, entailing a process of self-dispossession (e.g., 34) and subjecting realist proposals to critique. I am compelled by this intervention, even if I am not invested in recovering Dionysius for secular modernity nor the atheist/Jewish Derrida for Christian efforts to grapple with the so-called “religion and public life” debates. I think the effort to cohere these two thinkers is an issue separate from Newheiser’s turn at the end of the book to the question of political transformation, which is where I have focused my attention. Newheiser, as well as other philosophical interventions made along these lines, need to justify what the social scientific jargon would call their “case selection.”
Self-Departure, Self-Critique, and Politics of Hope
With this qualified appreciation, I come now to my second and interrelated point of contention with Hope in a Secular Age. Like Judith Butler in their Parting Ways (2012), I am invested in the relation between self-departure, or the unsettling of ontological certainties, and the capacity to reimagine questions of political and historical justice according to a logic different than the supposedly “realist” probabilistic logic of the present. Hope is not an operative discipline for Butler’s Jewish political ethics. For them, relationality constitutes the foundation for a justice discourse in Palestine/Israel. Accordingly, the sources for a just framework cannot be merely introspective and self-absorbed Jewish interrogation. Instead, these sources need to be relationally confronted with concrete Palestinian experiences and grievances in a process of unsettling the dominant segregationist peace formula.
Butler’s relational ethics, therefore, amplifies and expands—by being historically located and responsive—Newheiser’s most compelling reading of Derrida’s deconstructive mode as demanding self-critique and a radical future different in kind than the present. Newheiser writes: “Whereas confident calculation assumes that one’s present understanding will hold fast in the future, Derrida describes a hope against hope that is directed toward the unforeseeable” (39). This is a critical insight, but it cannot be theorized in abstraction and across time and space from Dionysus to Derrida. It has to be relational and historical. Still, Butler’s relational ethics remains, like Newheiser’s disciplined account of hope, only accessible to virtuous philosophers, not easily translatable to a sociological process of rescripting normativity from the ground up. In addition to Butler’s relational ethics that requires the intellectual to move outside her own bounded genealogy and to posit historical experiences as relevant to theory (about hope and justice), I would further suggest that empirical and sociological accounts of justice require more than the intellectualization of hope as an ethical discipline. For the ethics of hope to intervene in the discourse of justice, it needs to take seriously both the empirical realities in which hope operates as self-affirmation (rather than self-departure or negation) and the sociological obstacles that the demand for self-departure or alterity requires. The larger point here is that abstract philosophizing about radical political transformation needs to take into account the sociological realities of ontological certainties. Rather than a matter of a philosophical decree, deconstruction, or apophasis, radical political transformation entails the production of theory through critical pedagogy and intersectional social movements’ work to rescript social meanings and normativity.
For the ethics of hope to intervene in the discourse of justice, it needs to take seriously both the empirical realities in which hope operates as self-affirmation.
Therefore, my above reading of Hope in a Secular Age shows that Newheiser’s account of hope obscures the empirical realities of hope as they function in the world, neither through apophasis nor deconstructive self-critique, but rather through self-affirmation. I further suggest that the virtuosity of hope as an ethical discipline reveals, as does Butler’s relational ethics, an opening to radical political transformation by resisting the subordination of the discourse of justice to presentist assumptions and analytic frames. However, an emphasis on virtuosity as self-departure, a constant that shapes the comparison of Derrida to Dionysius, demobilizes Newheiser’s aspiration that his account of hope will exert concrete political upshots beyond the aesthetics of ideas. Self-critique as a transformative mechanism is, indeed, pivotal for reimagining future political horizons, but such a process cannot be a top-down dictation from the philosopher’s mind. Instead, my analysis invites a multidirectional account of political hope and ethics that finally disengages from the model of the virtuous mystic, the charismatic leader, the prophet, or the messiah, in favor of social movement theorizing and critical pedagogy.
