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Civics Beyond Critics: Character Education in a Liberal Democracy. By Ian MacMullen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 275p. $49.95.

that our churches will not have the safe space required to teach authoritatively their countercultural critique of the destructive excesses of our creeping libertarianism. What follows, for example, the Supreme Court’s declaration of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage is the demand that the internal life of our churches and our believers must conform to the dominant view of rights-based justice. It might be good for Christians to be somewhat alienated from fashionable currents, both libertarian and progressive, in American political life, but surely not so alienated that they are viewed as operating outside the law and rational, respectable conversation. And it really has been the case, as Tocqueville observed, that most of our personal morality has always come from religion. Lockean or Rawlsian liberalism has little to nothing to say about the line between good and evil that, as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn reminded us, runs through every person’s heart, or about how to subordinate the intricate trial to free will that is the seemingly unlimited progress of technology to humanworthy purposes that surely cannot be reduced to liberal justice and personal autonomy. Avoiding that complacency is one reason why Lynerd’s presentation of the crisis of our time for republican theology is, in part, with the intention of criticizing the superficiality of both evangelical theology and evangelical political thought with Christian political reflection that is more truthful and enduring. The concluding chapter on the era of the dominance and then the possible failure of evangelical free-market theology is followed by an epilogue. There, Lynerd observes that “None of the major Christian philosophers of the last half century has emerged as an apologist for [evangelical] republican theology,” condemning, for the most part, its “selective libertarianism” (p. 200). Thinkers such as Alastair MacIntrye, Stanley Hauerwas, and Oliver O’Donovan deny the truth of the Lockean doctrines concerning natural rights and limited government; they are integrative thinkers believing that political life should be infused with “love as the central imperative of justice” (p. 201), And even Nicholas Wolsterdorf, who finds a foundation for natural, inherent rights in the Christian understanding of justice, rejects republican theology’s limitation of government to the protection of individual rights, with an uncharitable indifference to human needs. But surely it is more of a problem than Lynerd suggests that each of his “Christian philosophers” holds to theologian premises incompatible with the extreme Augustinianism characteristic of most evangelical theology. Evangelical thinkers who become too open to, say, Catholic thought typically abandon the evangelical theological tradition because it is not traditional enough. Not only that, surely it is not a small matter that, say, MacIntrye’s political thought is also less than coherent or even judicious in its angry anti-Americanism and its curiously selective Marxism. Still, Lynerd does not really think that the “apparent wedge between the academy and the pulpit” will be resolved on the side of the Christian philosophers (p. 16). He doubts that mainstream evangelical republican theology will move to the left in a way that, in his view, makes it less American—meaning Lockean—and more authentically, or traditionally, Christian. Americans persist in wanting to believe that each of us is a free and relational being who is a creature, a citizen, and capable of managing his and her own affairs. There are good reasons why evangelical theology is at home in America, and why the supporters of Ted Cruz, for example, are evangelical, classically liberal patriots. So Lynerd leave us with the thought that incoherence and superficiality do not have all that much weight as practical criticisms. It might well be the case, once again, that exactly when we think the moment of republican theology “ has passed, along come the political and cultural conditions for a revival” (p. 206). His deepest view seems to be that liberal reason and biblical revelation are incompatible in theory, and that is a perennial problem for American practice. But so much of the evidence he presents suggests that American liberal reason is more dependent on Augustinian premises than liberals often think, and that is why we Americans both need and can expect revivals.