Abstract
Theology is not immune to trends. The 1960s brought the language of ‘alienation’, the 1980s ‘praxis’, the noughties went wild about ‘resilience’ and now this book exhorts theology to get on board with ‘vulnerability’. The pattern of co-opting fashionable philosophical terms as they gain currency in the wider culture is part of what keeps theology relevant, it being entirely contingent on culture for its meanings; but sometimes it also enables theology to say something new. Indeed, as many publications on alienation, praxis and resilience showed us, theologies can be transformed by concepts that are all too easily dismissed as fads. Stålsett asks us to see religious activity as vulnerability so as to unlock its potential in political thought and action.
A Political Theology of Vulnerability starts by describing the context to which it speaks as a global fireball, burning with the ‘furious flames’ of climate change, war, poverty, Covid-19 and anti-migrant politics. Encapsulating this condition as one of ‘precarity’, its argument proper begins in the second chapter with its consideration of recent philosophical responses to various forms of precariousness via Guy Standing, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. Concluding that these theorists do not take sufficient account of coloniality, it sets its subsequent rudder by appeal to Achille Mbembe’s diagnosis of our era as necro-politics. Its main question thus becomes: What would be the conditions for the possibility of political agency and community in this context of precarity given that ‘[t]he possibility of agency and community differs radically for colonizers and the colonized?’ (p. 21)
Before offering his answer, Stålsett goes in search of a more precise understanding of vulnerability and precarity, terms I remain unconvinced are wholly synonymous. His resultant ‘anatomy of vulnerability’ is heavily reliant on Judith Butler’s account of precariousness, as can be seen in the sub-headings that punctuate the long third chapter through which it is traced: Provocation, Grievability, Differentiation, Agency, Relationality, Responsibility, Community, Recognition, Dispossession, Resilience, Resistance, Performativity, Affirmation, and Framing. Paying particular attention to Butler’s distinction between ‘shared precariousness and unjustly distributed precarity’ (p. 92), Stålsett draws on a large number of additional scholars, many of them feminist theologians, to demonstrate the need for forms of political agency capable of dealing with the unjust nature of the vulnerability that characterises today’s world. He concludes that ‘by defending the lives of others so that they are recognized as lives that count—grievable, liveable lives—we participate in the affirmation of the priceless worth of everybody’s life, including our own’ (p. 104).
Along the way, almost hidden in the chapter’s dense tangle of references and hat-tips and occasional sideswipes (sorry, Brené Brown), we get the kernel of his (and Butler’s) (and Brown’s) insight: relationality necessitates vulnerability; therefore (given the essential and creative nature of relationality), vulnerability has inherent agency.
Advocating for a relational hermeneutics in the study of religion itself, Stålsett’s fourth chapter sets out to argue that certain kinds of religiosity can fruitfully be seen as modelling human responses to vulnerability. Indeed, this is advanced to such an extent that, he claims, ‘Religion’s key contribution to politics centers on how to deal with the lived experience of vulnerability’ (p. 109). Again, the hinge on which the argument relies is the identification of agency inside vulnerable situations and responses via attention to specific forms of relationality, in this case the ways that religion can alter experience by putting human beings into ongoing encounter with ‘the ultimate’ (i.e., God, the sacred, divinity, etc.). ‘The ultimate consists of elements that give meaning to human life and practices beyond individual life’ (p. 121) and as such harness a power within the vulnerable act, inherent to the vulnerable situation, which has political potential.
The final two chapters of the book turn from religion in general to Christianity in particular. Respectively, they consider Cardinal Oscar Romero’s Christmas sermon at the start of the El Salvador civil war in 1979 and the African American song tradition of Spirituals that emerged from slavery and segregation. These contexts are engaged by reference to Latin American liberation theology and Black and womanist theologies but also to trauma theologies and a large and sometimes scattershot selection of critical theorists, political philosophers and others to reinforce the argument that religious acts that offer resistance and hope in the face of oppression themselves constitute a political theology of vulnerability.
The book’s final five-and-a-half pages host the appealingly ‘meta’ observation that its findings are, like vulnerability itself, essentially open-ended; more ‘a promise’ than a conclusion. Nonetheless, a more developed conclusion would have better served the project, not least because this ending raises many more questions than it answers. For example, Stålsett notes that the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for the war in Ukraine is an example of how religiosity does not necessarily lead to emancipative, decolonising or kind political action; but why does one sort of Christian action do one thing and others do differently, what makes the difference? He also cites various social activism projects as examples in support of his thesis: war-resisters around the world, Greta Thunberg and her followers, the Black Lives Matter movement and disability rights campaigners; but how are these projects religious? And if they are, then how are their religious dimensions critical to the work they are accomplishing? Instead of identifying and attending to these questions, the book ends with yet more quoting of other people: Ewa Ziarek, Paul Ricouer, Clayton Crockett and Catherine Keller, giving the last word to Leonard Cohen (light, cracks, etc.). This proliferation of voices (and footnotes) is an irritation here, as it is throughout the book, but the more significant problem is the challenge to the book’s overall argument posed by ending in this way: If completely un-faith-based movements are having a political effect vis-à-vis precarity, then how can his claim stand that vulnerable religiosity offers a particularly effective form of agency in the face of precarity?
More serious still is Stålsett’s failure to tell us whose work he has in mind when he consistently posits theology as seeing vulnerability as a weakness to be overcome rather than a potential locus of power. Initially, I was frustrated that this, the major premise of the book, was repeatedly asserted but never substantiated, but it morphed into something more consequential when Stålsett took down Linn Tonstad for ‘direct[ing] her critique at unidentified theories and theologies of vulnerability in general’ (p. 103), while doing the same himself. Especially unfounded was his assessment that reading Kameron Carter or Vincent Lloyd’s work on race, Catherine Keller's on the Anthropocene and Ulrich Schmeidel's on populism and migration leaves one ‘with the impression of the tacit acceptance of a conventional approach, which counts vulnerability among the problems to be solved or as something regrettably affecting only certain groups or individuals’ (p. 16). The argument would have been a lot stronger if it had taken Keller et al. and said instead: these are courageous and insightful examples of theologies tackling precarity that help me frame vulnerability in a new way and do something additional with it, instead of saying: I am trying to chart a wholly new path, against a mistaken conventional common consensus held by even my most precarity-responsive colleagues.
Stålsett's insistence on a phantom premise becomes even more problematic because it is reinforced by holes in his bibliography. Those holes include major recent works in systematic theology (perhaps most notably those of Willie James Jennings) and political theology—e.g. Ryan LaMothe, A Radical Political Theology for the Anthropocene Era (Cascade, 2021); Janna L. Hunter-Bowman, Witnessing Peace: Becoming Agents under Duress in Columbia (Routledge, 2022); Péter Losonczi et al. (eds.), The Future of Political Theology (Ashgate, 2011)—but especially when it comes to his theological method. Stålsett claims his method will be analysis of Christmas and Easter celebrations, yet he doesn't utilise (or even refer to) liturgical theology's treasure trove of precedents for proceeding in such a way. Furthermore, with a purported method and focus on liturgical celebration, and with a bibliography of this length, why not give at least a listing to Charles Heron's Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Political Theology (Fordham, 2017) or Willy Gaut's ‘A Turn to Liturgy in Contemporary Political Theology’, Melintas 35.3 (2019)?
Just as the bibliography has remarkable gaps, A Political Theology of Vulnerability as a whole is strangely unrooted. The old adage goes ‘think globally, act locally’ but, in this case, one is left wondering where local is for the author and what vulnerable religious agency looks like there. By setting his context as global and corralling data for analysis from, mostly, the Americas, the lack of the author's root in a locality ends up giving the text a paradoxically universalised feel. Contributing to this is the worry that arises from reading a white Norwegian man giving us as the project's promised basis in praxis only (and scantly) through case studies from African American Spirituals and Cardinal Romero's sermon. Granted, he has spent time in Latin America, but the power of his argument would be much stronger if he also modelled how his insights into vulnerability related to his major life-context in Norway. Is it okay for a white Scandinavian man to make his argument by using Mbembe to interpret the Spirituals but not to analyse what is happening at home, or is it appropriation? It depends. I’m not saying that theologians should draw, to coin a phrase, only from their own wells; but I am saying that greater attention needs to be given to situating the author in relation to his resources and his reasons for choosing them. Without it, the project seems unaware of its own vulnerability.
Nonetheless, vulnerability is the conversation in town and this book challenges theology to adopt its terms. It also parses those terms in such a way that theologians can consider their nuances and avoid their pitfalls, especially their colonial-tending blind spots. And it suggests that for Christians, it is in the regular practices of prayer and praise, in the round of the year ‘from crib to cross’, that their vulnerability and thus their agency can be found. I’m not convinced this amounts to saying something new, given how many theological colleagues have long been holding up grassroots practices in the midst of precarity, just without necessarily using ‘vulnerability's’ terms; but if using, and refining, those terms helps those theologies to be better heard in the world, it is all to the good.