If we’re all we’ve got, then any hope for justice is on us, and politics is as close as we’ll get to an engine for bringing about the naturalized kingdom of god. Pelagian activism—resigned to, yet confident in, human power and ingenuity—is prone to being blinded by innocence. Indeed, as a later Augustinian, Reinhold Niebuhr, would put it, our atheistic confidence makes us “incapable of recognizing all the corruptions of ambition and power
