Parsing Pluralism: In Defense of Hopeful Realism

Jesse Covington defends the book Hopeful Realism: Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics against critics who question its stance on pluralism. Writing for Public Discourse, Covington addresses recent reviews from postliberal perspectives that describe the work as uncritical of the American liberal regime.

Covington uses the concept of illegitimate totality transfer to explain the need for precision in interpretation. He notes that seminary students are cautioned against this error, which occurs when a person attributes every possible meaning of a word to a specific context without using grammatical or contextual clues to narrow the definition. Covington argues that just as biblical interpreters must attend to technical details to avoid making meaning too flexible, scholars in theology and political theory must address interpretive details to maintain clarity.