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that is political, but the theological is inherently political too. The fact that the theological significance of The Tree of Life seems to have overwhelmed theolo- gians’ awareness of its political resonance serves to bolster Taylor’s criticism of professional theology’s inattentiveness to extradiscursive interpretive factors. Interpreting The Tree of Life in relation to two cornerstone traditions in the history of the American debate over religion, ethics, and political community – Augustinianism and Emersonianism – can give a start to acknowledging the film’s political vision. Jeffrey Stout, in his book Democracy and Tradition, pro- vides a helpful conceptual framework for understanding these traditions and the sticking points of their disagreement. The first strand, Augustinianism, “is that of orthodox Christianity from the Puritanism of Plymouth Rock to the de- nominational soup of our own day”, Stout says.4 This strand emphasizes the efficacy of institutional authority to chasten human nature, which, Augustinians believe, has been vitiated by the effects of original sin. The second strand, Em- ersonianism, takes most seriously the question of character as a pre-requisite for considering the conditions and arrangements of society. In the history of American politics, says Stout, these two strands have butted heads more often than not: [Emerson] and his followers have been engaged in a tug of war with orthodox Chris- tians over the future of American piety. Christians, ever mindful of Augustine’s great work, The City of God, have never been reluctant to condemn the Emersonians for underestimating the human spirit’s need for unsettled institutional and communal forms, including a structure of church authority to rein in spiritual excess. The Emer- sonians, for their part, would rather quit the church than grant that some holder of church office or even a democratically organized congregation has the authority to administer the distinctions between saved and damned, saint and sinner, true and false prophet, scripture and apocrypha. Above all, they have been persuaded from the beginning that the idea of original sin is blight on the human spirit. Orthodox Christians sense in all this the errors of ancient heresies – Montanist and Pelagian, to be precise – and have never tired of prophesying against them.5 The conflict between Augustinians and Emersonians maps well onto the tra- ditional divide that persists between secular environmentalists and Christians, namely evangelicals. Ideological tensions have long frustrated Christian and secular groups’ collaboration on ecological concerns. Evangelical Christians, for one, worry that environmentalist politics supplant theocentric values. Their concern is with idolatry to the extent that environmentalists can be interpreted as reframing devotion to God as devotion to the earth. The inclination to, as 4 Stout 2004, 19. 5 Stout 2004, 20. Narrative and Experiment, Religion and Politics in The Tree of Life | 169www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 167–185