Early on in Politics & the Order of Love , Eric Gregory comments, in response to anti-liberal Augustinians like Milbank and Hauerwas, that “theological orthodoxy and political liberalism are not alternative answers to the same question.”

Analyzing Gregory’s work in the Journal of Religious Ethics , James KA Smith offers this rejoinder, which dovetails with my brief criticisms of Gregory yesterday: “Gregory’s account of liberalism fails to appreciate the extent to which liberalism is not just forming penultimate habits, but ultimate loves; that is, I take some of its practices to be ‘trumping’ practices that constitute rival liturgies, not just penultimate (‘earthly’) procedures for organizing ‘secular’ life. In this respect, I think his account of liberalism has problems similar to those of Jeffrey Stout.” Liberalism has its own rites that inculcate its own virtues, which are not necessarily compatible with Christian ones.