Believe in America?

“Believe in America” could be as simple as a call for the nation to buck up and find a new resolve to face its problems unafraid. However, for a culture that despairs of transcendence (its many outward appearances of religiosity often masking that despair, rather than seriously meeting it), “Believe in America” can be read as an invitation to pledge allegiance to the god of nation. This is an idolatry that a certain strand of triumphalist American Christianity– in thrall to the idea that America has God’s special favor– has aided.

The larger observation is that theological language is increasingly part of political discourse. One reason this is happening is that a large group of people see god [the small "g" is intentional] as being on their side– their party, their candidate– and so theological language seems natural and appropriate; another reason is that a different large group of people have no religious grounding, and so their deepest longings for purpose and meaning get projected into the political realm. For them, politics serves as a substitute religion.

The problem is obvious: no human being– no party of human beings, no nation of human beings– can fill the need we have for hope, for belief, for restoration. Meanwhile, parties and politicians will continue to appeal to our willingness to believe that, yes, they can deliver the new life we long for– even as we become increasingly angry when they inevitably cannot.

 

Ideas for a Better World in 2011

I wrote about James Davison Hunter a few times this September, and I was happy to find his critique of American Christianity included in the Christian Science Monitor’s recent article: “Ideas for a Better World in 2011.” Davison thinks that American Christianity is squandering its unique potential to transform American public life by being too political– that (perhaps counterintuitively), American Christianity’s potential to effect change in our culture is compromised by its over-involvement in politics. Davison suggests a different way of being for churches– a way that is public but not political:

Mr. Hunter argues that the Christian community should move away from the “politicization of everything.” Churches are now too often destructive battlegrounds of an ideological right and left. He advocates something called “faithful presence” – a humble reappraisal of what is distinctive and different about church and its public expression. “This is active, not passive; it requires engagement, not an opt-out. It is not ideological, but it is public,” he says.

The title of Hunter’s controversial new book, “To Change the World,” is ironic. While American Christianity often imagines itself a major player in US public life, it is, in fact, marginalized, he says. Despite large numbers, they don’t influence the actual structures of power and culture. Worry that a Christian America is fading has not brought a deeper commitment to church but anger. Political efforts to conform law or policy to narrow or sectarian teaching are often acted out coercively, not compassionately.

The “faithful presence” Hunter calls for transcends politics. The point, he says, is to serve faithfully and well in relationships, tasks, and networks of social influence. “Christians need to abandon talk about ‘redeeming the culture,’ ‘advancing the kingdom,’ and ‘changing the world,’” he said in the magazine Christianity Today. “Such talk carries too much weight….” In the case of abortion, he suggests that 10,000 families could get together in Illinois and announce they will adopt a child of any background and declare no unwanted children in the state; it’s a public but not a political act.

via Ideas for a better world in 2011 – James Davison Hunter – CSMonitor.com.

 

Missing the Mark

We’ve been reflecting on the work of James Hunter in recent posts (here, here, and here), on the limits of political power and the flattening of public life that results from reducing “the public realm” to the merely political. As Hunter himself acknowledges, this is cultural– and culture doesn’t change quickly. To use a meteorological metaphor (as he himself does), cultural change is more like a change in climate than it is like a change in weather. And while we can very well imagine what tomorrow’s weather will be, we can not so very well imagine what a different climate might be like, or how– or whether it’s even possible– to help bring it about. Cultural change, while a human artifact, resists human manipulation.

Hunter’s criticism of American Christianity is that both the Christian left and the Christian right have bought into the politicization of public life, thereby squandering the unique authority of the Christian worldview to provide an alternative way of being a society together. For example, politicization by its very nature leads to a public conversation marked by zero-sum outcomes: I’m right; you’re wrong. I win; you lose. An alternative– which is, as Hunter points out, one mark of a healthy culture– is a public sphere characterized by affirmation rather than negation. His words:

What’s even more striking than the negational character of political culture is the absence of robust and constructive affirmations. Vibrant cultures, healthy cultures, makes space for leisure, philosophical reflection, scientific and intellectual mastery, [and] artistic and literary expression, among other things.

Within the larger Christian community in America, one can find such vitality in pockets here and there, and yet where they do exist, they tend to be eclipsed by the greater prominence and vast resources of the political activists and their organizations. Once more, there are few if any places in the pronouncements and actions of the Christian right or left, where I could find these kinds of affirmations, [where] those kinds of gifts are acknowledged, affirmed or celebrated. What this means is that rather than being defined by its cultural achievements, its intellectual and artistic vitality, [or] its service to the needs of others, Christianity is defined to the outside world by its rhetoric of resentment and the ambitions of a will in opposition to others.

I think Hunter is largely correct. I think those of us who have hope for what a different kind of Christian contribution to public life might be, have a lot of work to do– both in bringing down the hyper-politicized barriers between so-called liberal and so-called conservative Christianity, and in building up a richer public life that is not collapsed into the merely political.

 

Politics Limited

The problem is that there are no political solutions to the problems that most people care about.

I take this observation to be simply true. Tracing some of the implications of this simple truth– that there are no political solutions to the problems that most people care about– will be the subject of upcoming posts.

The speaker of the above quotation is James Davison Hunter, Professor of Religion, Culture and Social Theory, at the University of Virginia. His analysis of American public life is illuminating, as is his critique of the way that American Christianity (both “conservative” and “liberal”) has engaged the public sphere. I will be responding to his insights.

The transcript of Professor Hunter’s three-hour presentation to the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Faith Angles conference (from which I lifted the opening quotation) is here.