Why I Must Do This: Part One
From a book I am currently reading:
Western civilization is passing through a social revolution unparalleled in history for scope and power. Its coming was inevitable. The religious, political, and intellectual revolutions of the past five cneturies, which together created the modern world, necessarily had to culminate in an economic and social revolution such as is now upon us.
By universal consent, this social crisis is the overshadowning problem of our generation. The industrial and commercial life of the advanced nations are in the throes of it. The industrial and commerical life of the advanced nations are in the throes of it. In politics all issues and methods are undergoing upheaval and re-alignment as the social movement advances. In the world of thought all th eyoung and serious minds are absorbed in the solution of the social problems. Even literature and art point like compass-needles to this magnetic polie of all our thought.
The social revolution has been slow in reaching our country. We haev been exempt, not because we had solved the problems, but because we had not yet confronted them. We have now arrived and all the characteristic conditions of American life will henceforth combine to make the social struggle here more intense than anywhere else. The vastness and the free sweep of our concentrated wealth on the one side, the independence, intelligence, moral vigor, and political power of the common people on the other side, promise a long-drawn grapple of contesting forces which may well make the heart of every American patriot sink within him.
The title of the book is Christianity and the Social Crisis and it was published by Walter Rauschenbusch in 1907. His call is one for greater social justice. He saw that the full power of vested wealth and political power was arrayed against the common man who simply wanted to live out his days in peaceful labor.
Primary to his arguments is the revolutionary concept of Jesus as a religious agitator, not a social reformer. He tore down taboo and ritual - the trappings of what Rauschenbusch refers to as "priestly religion" - and substituted a concerted focus on the treatment of fellow human beings - the bones of a "prophetic religion". The difference is important, because Rauschenbush sees a priestly religion as being one of a conquered people who have no power in their world. When you can’t force greater justice, you seek inner piety - and the ritual, pomp and circumstance of priestly religions help guide us in that direction. When a people has control of their society, the focus shifts to that of a prophetic religion. Jesus is an important and revolutionary figure because, supernatural origins aside, he called for a prophetic religion even in the midst of a powerless and downtrodden people.
Even if it killed him.
It’s an approach that is gaining strength in many progressive circles. Brian McLaren, Jim Wallis, Robin Meyer, Michael Lerner, and others are addressing themselves to this very-long-historied strain of faith. I believe it is probably the overwhelmingly preferred approach for my fellow participants in the Progressive Faith Blog Con. It certainly fits very closely with the faith of my childhood - before evangelical Christians raced to embrace the far right-wing of the Republican Party.
With this approach in mind, I looked through a collection of news articles sent out by Sojourners:
The first one directly casts aspersion on this approach, asking if Judas Iscariot might be comfortable with it. This follows, of course, on the heels of a sickening statement of identity for the author who "saw some sort of messiah in Bush and voted for the man because he said he was saved". For those who believe in a divine Christ, the first part of the comparison is straightforward heresy. The second part simply shows the worst part of using faith to guide politics - that it blinds someone to everything else being discussed.
"I’m saved - but I’m going to bomb someone back to the stone age."
Trust me. Those are not words that Jesus would speak.
The next one is even more blatantly damning. It also shows a complete ignorance of the message carried by Rev. Wallis. "That is, to cast poverty not as something that individuals rise above and out of, but as something that bureaucrats spend other people’s money on to eliminate." Since Rev. Wallis, in particular, devotes at least half of his book, God’s Politics, to a searing indictment of this approach, you have to wonder if the author actually looked past "Democrat" before snapping shut any semblance of thought and putting the rhetoric on auto-pilot.
Still a third refuses to see any such approach as being of faith unless it becomes a shadow of the Christian Right. "Until I see a Democrat push for legislation that restricts abortion or protects traditional marriage, I’ll remain unconvinced." I’ll make a deal with you - show me in the Bible where it says that should be our primary focus and I’ll write a thousand posts on it.
The Gospels didn’t care much for marriage - Paul preached that it was a poor substitute for someone not strong enough to remain celebate and alone. Luke writes: "But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage." Matthew and Mark contain passages that are much the same. If marriage is something that will be entirely foresaken in the here-after, then how can it be in such dire need of protection?
This is one half of the problem faithful people like myself face. The de facto "public voice" of our faith would require us to entirely give up everything we believe in. I actually left more than one church because of that.
This is one of the major reasons why I called for a Progressive Faith Blog Con. The simple faith of my childhood, in many ways, was too small. It was a naive faith that accepted a literal interpretation of 5000 year old words. In the almost forty years that I’ve been on earth, my faith has been challenged, sometimes failed, but always come back stronger and more able to deal with the reality of the world in which I live.
My faith informs my politics, my politics does not determine my faith. The authors of the three articles cited above will never understand that, I fear. So, I will leave off this post the same way as I began - by quoting Walter Rouschenbusch, whose prose has the power to melt your heart:
All human goodness must be social goodness. Man is fundamentally gregarious and his morality consists in being a good member of his community. A man is moral when he is social; he is immoral when he is anti-social. The highest type of goodness is that which puts freely at the service of the community all that a man is and can. The highest type of badness is that which uses up the wealth and happiness and virtue of the community to please self. All this ought to go without saying, but in fact religious ethics in the past has largely spent its force in detaching men from their community, from marriage and property, from interest in political and social tasks.
The fundamental virtue in the ethics of Jesus was love, because love is the society-making quality. Human life originates in love. It is love that holds together the basal human organization, the family. The physcial expression of all love and friendship is the desire to get together and be together. Love creates fellowship. In the measure in which love increases in any social organism, it will hold together without coercion. If physical coercion is constantly necessary, it is proof that the social organization has not evoked the power of human affection and fraternity.
X-posted from Xpatriated Texan
