After my musings about postliberalism went to the press last month (“What Does “Postliberalism” Mean?”, January 2026), a friend drew my attention to a recent essay by David W. Congdon: “What Has New Haven to Do with Hungary? On Theological and Political Postliberalism” (The Journal of Religion, Fall 2025). The author takes up the same topic that I addressed: the connection between religious and spiritual misgivings about liberalism in theology and the judgment that liberalism has failed in public life.
Liberalism is a contested term. But as I observed last month, it was originally used in theology to denote freedom from the constraints of inherited dogma and ecclesiastical authority. In its optimistic phase, liberalism in theology held that this new freedom would unleash the intellectual powers of modern man, allowing him to attain a higher and more universal perspective, which would serve progress and vindicate Christianity.
This promise animates The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, published by Ernst Troeltsch in 1902. I read this book as an undergraduate and marveled at Troeltsch’s intellectual élan. But I could see that his reframing of Christianity in more universal terms altered its meaning. This alteration was what concerned my teachers at Yale. The first duty of a scholar is to do justice to his subject matter on its own terms. A culturally dense phenomenon such as Christianity requires immersion in its distinctive language and practice.
Congdon offers an accurate summation of the postliberal approach in theology: It “rejects the attempt to account for humanity in general or to speak in global terms.” But he goes on to draw a false corollary: “It is a consistently localist project that views each particular community as essentially incommensurable with every other.” Postliberalism leads to “sectarian ecclesiocentrism.”
George Lindbeck was one of the major postliberal figures at Yale. He was also one of the most influential ecumenical theologians of the late twentieth century, a role hardly consistent with “sectarian ecclesiocentrism.” Lindbeck recognized that concepts take on meaning within a language system. As a consequence, we should beware of presuming that seemingly divergent or contradictory statements are in fact divergent or contradictory. The 1999 Lutheran–Roman Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification demonstrated a Catholic–Protestant commensurability that few had imagined possible, and the ecumenical document discerned convergence using Lindbeck’s postliberal methods rather than relying on a supposedly more comprehensive and universal frame of reference.
Congdon makes the same false claims about political postliberalism. He is correct when he observes that political postliberalism, like theological postliberalism, rejects “transcultural universalism.” But it is not true that political postliberalism rejects “the apologetic effort to find common ground with cultural ‘outsiders’ and instead [recommends] protecting the walls that distinguish one’s own community from others.”
Liberals recoil at the mention of Adrian Vermeule, whom Congden ranges among the postliberals. Yet the Harvard Law professor and proponent of Catholic integralism has coauthored Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State (2020) with his decidedly non-Catholic and liberal colleague Cass Sunstein. One need not rely on “transcultural universalism” to discern common ground. History was full of cooperation, alliances, and common causes long before the advent of Enlightenment universalism and liberal political theories.
In my experience, rather than promoting unity, contemporary liberalism tends toward an insularity that refuses common ground. As Ryszard Legutko observes, the liberal conception of freedom has become paradoxically obligatory, and liberal pluralism functions as a strange kind of monism. Legutko points out that Isaiah Berlin argued for the moral superiority of pluralism. He’s entitled to his opinion. But note: Berlin’s view requires the rejection of very nearly the entire corpus western philosophy, which sees truth as unitary. Only pluralism promotes human flourishing—that’s a monistic claim. In this regard, Berlin was typical, and Congdon follows his lead. He insists that pluralism is “a positive human good.” To say otherwise is to be an “authoritarian.”
Congden surveys postliberal interventions into recent political debates. His summation: “By rejecting individual autonomy, the new New Right was announcing [its] support for using the mechanisms of authoritarian state power to establish the right kind of society.” But postliberals do not reject individual autonomy. They (and I include myself) reject the liberal conceit that individual autonomy is the highest good. And they reject liberalism’s claim to have discovered the final form of a just society.
In this regard, postliberals are the true pluralists. Freedom and equality are not the sole measures of justice. Non-liberal principles of various kinds can order a just society. Authority and obedience play fitting roles. Hierarchy and rootedness are features of a humane society. In view of the tyrannical tendency of liberalism, restoring these principles often requires an intransigence that says “no” to liberalism’s relentless demand that freedom and equality serve as the supreme measures of justice. In that sense, postliberals may need to be “illiberal.”
Opposing the supremacy of liberalism does not make postliberals into advocates of “authoritarian state power.” Rather, they argue that liberalism does not have the final say about the legitimate exercise of state power. As an example, consider the recent legislation in some states to require the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools. Late-model liberals oppose this measure. They are well within their rights to do so. But describing the required posting of the Ten Commandments as an authoritarian use of state power turns on the fallacy of the excluded middle: either liberalism or tyranny.
I return to my observations about the promise of liberal theology. Liberal theology dreamed of reflection unhindered by inherited authorities. As I noted last month, my teachers at Yale came to doubt that promise. Instead of a richer and more relevant Christianity, they saw navel-gazing subjectivism and capitulation to passing fashions. Because they cast doubt on the promise of theological liberalism, they were postliberal.
Political liberalism harbors a similar dream, one in which the weakening of old social forms—hierarchy, marriage, borders, boundaries, traditional morality—will allow for cramped and limited lives to open up. The upshot of this new freedom will be the emergence of fuller and deeper, more tolerant and more accepting ways of being human. My friends, many of whom Congdon discusses in his essay, have come to doubt this promise. They see a demoralized and dispirited society, an irresponsible and self-serving elite, and an intellectual culture that is functionally nihilistic. They see, too, self-proclaimed liberals who police public discourse, quick to hurl charges of authoritarianism. Because we refuse to prop up liberalism’s promise, for all our substantive disagreements, we are rightly deemed postliberal.
One need not proclaim that liberalism has failed in order to be ranged among the postliberals. It is enough to say that liberalism is not enough; that freedom is not enough; that pluralism, which will always be with us, is a challenge not a blessing; that universal truths about the human condition, though real, do not provide sufficient bases for a fully human life. Liberalism prunes but does not plant. It does not speak the language of love and devotion. Men can live in bondage and be human. But they cannot live without love.
