When Timothy Keller published The Reason for God in 2008, the work was widely understood to be an apologetic for Christianity to secular liberal society. The work’s title alludes to an age of skepticism, a phrase that in itself conjures—at least for the historically minded—the French philosophes of the Enlightenment and their fellow travelers of the 18th Century Enlightenment. Keller’s polemic at first blush appears to be a plea that Christianity is safe for the liberal order ostensibly birthed out of the Enlightenment. In 2008, there was no indication that anything other than a broad acceptance of the liberal order would define American political and religious life. Barack Obama’s ascendency and the loss of faith in the George W. Bush’s neoconservative regime by both moderates and conservatives in the Republican coalition appeared to herald a new golden age of secularism and liberalism. Even then, however, Keller hinted at what was his own intransigence towards the liberal order as it was constituted. He cast doubt on the very notion of an individual conscience’s right to determine moral or political truth.
“Some people say, “I don’t believe in Christianity because I can’t accept the existence of moral absolutes. Everyone should determine moral truth for him-or herself.” Is that a statement they can prove to someone who doesn’t share it? No, it is a leap of faith, a deep belief that individual rights operate not only in the political sphere but also in the moral. There is no empirical proof for such a position. So the doubt (of moral absolutes) is a leap.”
Keller’s 2008 proposal tied doubts over the absolute right of conscience in moral matters to a similar right of conscience on politics. The suggestion, however subtle, was that neither were as complete or as sovereign as liberal society believed they were.
The Reason for God also posited a belief that a new type of politics was emerging, particularly in major American cities. He foreshadowed the rise of Trump when he noted that young educated Christians served as the “the vanguard of some major new religious, social, and political arrangements that could make the older form of culture wars obsolete.” Once this new generation of young Christians worked out questions over orthodoxy, “many come out on the other side with an orthodox faith that doesn’t fit the current categories of liberal Democrat or conservative Republican. Many see both sides in the ‘culture war’ making individual freedom and personal happiness the ultimate value rather than God and the common good.” Here was Keller’s most explicit allusion to his own dissatisfaction with the liberal order. Individual freedom and personal happiness, in Keller’s moral political economy had led to racism, income inequality, and a host of other sociomoral ills. The new generation of postliberal urbanites Keller looked forward to would be Christian, but concerned more for common good than individual rights. “The new, fast-spreading multiethnic orthodox Christianity in the cities is much more concerned about the poor and social justice than Republicans have been, and at the same time much more concerned about upholding classic Christian moral and sexual ethics than Democrats have been.”
What Keller did not see was the Republican political coalition being overtaken by a 1990s Democrat, and the ensuing shift in policy prerogatives among younger conservatives. In many ways, Keller asked for, and received, postliberal Trumpists, although he undoubtedly would have wanted—demanded—a more churchly and moral agent to deliver an enduring vision of Christian postliberalism. Whether Keller would have accepted the definer of postliberal for himself is debatable. Yet his belief that the Christian church was the first cause of human association and politics is evidence that he would have at least been safely termed a devotee of ecclesiocentric liberalism, which Ben Petersen describes as a “political theory recognizes the church as a polis—the true polis, pointing to the telos of human life. The church ultimately submits only to divine authority, and God calls the church to embody and proclaim the truth of the gospel, along with its redemptive social and political implications.” Ecclesiocentrics like Peterson, and Keller, provided “a robust basis for religious tolerance and liberty, an alternative to both liberalisms and illiberalisms of fear—an ecclesiocentric liberalism…”