MysteriousFaith

God’s Politics or Man’s Dilemmas?

Religion in America today seems precariously poised between two extremes. On the one hand, voters whose defining motivation is religion are struggling to graciously accommodate those who disagree with their beliefs. The contemporary Religious Right makes not-so veiled allusions to its desire to make a pluralistic America into a monolithic Christian entity (hence the attempt to squire away each of the Founding Fathers and remake them into the progenitors not only of a Christian America, but of a Christian evangelical movement, the combination resulting in a new covenant people replacing Israel). Such people provide much of the ammunition fueling the media demagogue of what it means to be American and Christian (right wing, pro-war, pro-tax cuts). On the other hand stand religious people whose defining characteristics are beliefs built on social justice, combating poverty and who have an underlying suspicion of people who believe Christian ideals can be accomplished through political power. Called by many names, most pejoratively “liberal Christians”, these are people who want to define their lives around ideals they find nobly upheld in the Christian tradition. These simple snapshots serve a limited descriptive purpose, but at a deeper level are caricatures of much more important questions lurking beneath the surface of today’s discernable debates, namely, the question of what form religion will take in the coming decades. The balance beam religion seems poised on is between two extremes with, at one side, a religion of politics and, at the other side, no religion at all. Both are potential tragedies as the implication to one is another inevitable Crusade, and the implication to the other is an inability to acknowledge spiritual insights that are to be found within religious community.

If contemporary entrepreneurial, personality-driven evangelical Christianity continues to be the successful form the church in America takes, it will be a form unique to what has sustained the church in Europe, where a more rigid hierarchy and the resulting institutionalized belief system have better sustained the church across two millennia. Wisdom suggests the more elemental question hiding beneath the vitriol and hyperbole being thrown about by almost everyone in the debate over America’s civil religion is whether the church can prevent itself from taking on a political form. History’s lesson is that when the church does this, it over-reaches badly. Can the church temper its political motives and focus on spiritual reformation in an attempt to change hearts through action, focused on those parts of the world that governmental power so willingly overlooks and trivializes? It is into this dialogue that Jim Wallis enters with his timely book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.

Wallis’ book was incredibly well-timed, coming at the heels of one of the more divisive elections the American people have recently experienced. This election pulled few religious punches, with the evangelical church painting a picture of the country under Kerry’s leadership that suggested to vote for Kerry was to lose your salvation (an association more than a few pastors were happy to make from the pulpit). You were without a place to cast your vote if you were a person who considers yourself religious but were against the war in Iraq, or disagreed with the President’s handling of events post-9/11, or thought his economic and environmental policies were heavily skewed towards further enriching the powerful at precisely the wrong time and in the wrong way. If you were someone who is tired of the litmus-test a candidate’s position on abortion has become, and if you believe both sides are hiding behind pigeon-hole debates instead of dialogue over legitimate solutions that would curb un-necessary pregnancies (and the resulting abortions) in high socio-economic risk areas, you had no where to cast your vote. It was for these voters that Wallis’ book was written, and perhaps also as a reminder to those within the religious right who have forgotten parts of the Judaic prophetic tradition and the Christian call towards taking care of the poor. Wallis is never more prophetic or inspired than when he says:

“God’s politics reminds us of the people our politics always neglects – the poor, the vulnerable, the left behind. God’s politics challenges narrow national, ethnic, economic, or cultural self-interest, reminding us of a much wider world and the creative human diversity of all those made in the image of the creator.” (Preface, Page xv).

What powerful words and what poignant concepts! It is on these points that Wallis’ book is moving and challenging. His repetition of the words from a now passed away social activist who said that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” is Wallis at his best, calling people to stand up and be a part of making things better, not hugging onto safe abstract debates when real people have real needs that can only be met by personal involvement. These moments are those precious times when Wallis lets us into his heart, and shows us his core motives are sincerely to make poverty uncommon, to emphasize real, actionable justice, and to believe that all of us – even those who strongly disagree with another – are honestly and honorably searching for the truth.

Seeing the Danger

If you are like me, when you encounter works that memorialize past saints or activists like Wallis, your emotions are conflicted. Some of the internal conflict I find is conviction when I reflect on the life of Wallis who lives in the inner-city in Washington D.C. because of the implications to his beliefs about poverty. This is a move of courage that happens only when we give ourselves over to the manifestation of our ideals. When I contrast this dedication to my own paltry commitments I see very clearly the limitations to holding dry ideas about social activism without the willingness to get dirty myself, and here I should rightly learn from Wallis and be willing to put my proverbial money where my quite literal mouth is. But some of the conflict within me when encountering the work and life of someone like Wallis is because while I love his commitment to his ideals, I fear the parts of his worldview that seem unrealistic. I find Wallis at times almost naïve about others and about the implications to the singular truth claims of Christianity he comes back to. I would very much like to know more about Wallis’ theology as it would help me to understand how he can so selectively pull from a book like Leviticus which does, to its credit, have powerful ideas held within about debt relief (the much recent publicizing of Jubilee 2000 or the Live Africa round the world concert are both based on these Judaic ideas). Were I to have time with Wallis I would very much like to understand how he focuses on this part of Leviticus and overlooks the other parts of Leviticus that are hateful, theocratic and morbidly nationalistic. In seeing only the good of Leviticus, Wallis overlooks other parts of what I can only assume he holds as canonical Scripture; in doing so it seems he shows how his theology invariably will suffer at the hands of literalists or dogmatists. This fear is a reasonable fear, and is one that is a shadow of my deeper fear in Wallis’ analysis, namely, whether he can see the root cause of poverty and whether or not his view of those he is surrounded with – those he calls Christian brothers – rightfully reflects an understanding of their motives and the implications to their worldview. His activism is unimpeachable, but I wonder if his insight is?

Selective Emphasis

The defining question for a sectarian reading Wallis’ book will be the singular interpretive prism through which he bends all the light of his analysis, namely, his solitary emphasis on Christianity; its God and Bible being the primary source and utmost truth that shapes his actions. In his analysis, one finds repeated emphasis on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Christian beliefs, and appropriately so. But nowhere does Wallis accommodate the enormous work done by secularists – specifically secular Jews – who played an enormous part in the civil rights movement in its earliest stages and during the heady days when the legislation that would reshape America’s social consciousness was taking place. Wallis is not wrong to hold up Martin Luther King Jr. as the epitome of Christian ideals in action, but it is an incomplete analysis that seems to intentionally de-emphasize something Wallis is fearful of.

Wallis shares a fear of two things – one was the emphasis of this book – an America defined by the religious right; however, Wallis equally fears a secular America, believing that a secularist future would be equally sparse and desolate of humanity.

“We contend today with both religious and secular fundamentalists, neither of whom must have their way. One group would impose the doctrines of a political theocracy on their fellow citizens, while the other would deprive the public square of needed moral and spiritual values often shaped by faith.” (Page 7)

Wallis is profoundly right to point out, as many religious scholars have, that after the Enlightenment scholastic and governmental tendencies were to reduce man down to the physical body with any remaining idea of soul, mind or consciousness being distilled to neurology, biochemistry, developmental psychology and religious sociology. Each of these areas can withstand a withering empirical analysis but each equally leave mankind adrift left to believe he is nothing but an organism, without what he knows about himself (his consciousness) and what he knows about the world around him (his mind). Drawing on the realization that this view of modernity is unhelpful and needs to be cast aside, Wallis argues for an essential Christianity that is built on ideals we have earlier discussed. In wrestling with the obvious potential contradictions (that my more secular/liberal religious tendencies are right to influence my public positions but his more traditionalist/conservative religious tendencies are not), I have come to the point where I believe the challenge is more to people like myself. It is time for a healthy view of spirituality which will, as people like Ken Wilber argue, require religious certain myth statements be set as distantly secondary to social commitments but will also engender profound improvements in social consciousness. I am not certain Wallis’ view is as healthy as Wilber’s, primarily because again I can not see fully the delineation in the ideology held by Wallis when contrasted to the ideology of the Religious Right. Wallis is not wrong to fear an America disembodied from spiritual experience and values; however, in his emphasis on Christianity being the supreme truth, he can not avoid the selective truths he espouses and the implications to others who can not live with such selective emphasis.

For me, the underlying complication to Wallis’ analysis is that I can not clearly understand the outlines of his faith. One early section in the book is worth quoting at length to make this point more fully:

“But there was a deep lesson learned in my banishment and return to faith. And it would become the foundation for everything I would do thereafter. The lesson is this: God is personal, but never private. If God is not personal, there is little meaning to faith. It merely becomes a philosophy or a set of teachings from religious figures who died long ago. Without a personal God, there is not personal dimension to belief. There is no relationship to God, no redemption, salvation, grace, or forgiveness. There is no spiritual transformation without a personal God, and no power can really change our lives beyond mere self-improvement. In today’s world there is one over-riding and key distinction in all of the religion that is growing – a God who desires relationship with each person. Much of liberal religion has lost the experience of a personal God, and that is the primary reason why liberal Christianity is not growing. And without a personal God, liberal faith will never grow.” (Page 34)

This is, to me, a very problematic section that reveals a basic disparity between Wallis and committed secularists who believe moral values can be found outside of faith, and why the faith he advocates may be only shades different from fundamentalism. Several points need to be drawn out: first, Wallis makes his worldview absolutely center on a personal God. My response is, in line with what I have written elsewhere, that God is not personal by any standard we call anything else in our lives personal; however, to his credit, I believe what Wallis is trying to get to is a deeper truth that beliefs without action are meaningless. If all of my writing and prognosticating does not ultimately shape the reality I live within; if it does not drive me to sacrifice to help others in need, then the ideas are void of meaning. Here he is right. But do we have to have the Christian God and the related ideas to say that “without a personal God, there is not a personal dimension to belief”? Certainly not! To say this is to trivialize the beliefs, motives and sacrifices non-theists, agnostics and secularists (even strident atheists) have made that embody selflessness, forgiveness and mercy. It is also a particularly bad representation of past philosophers whose worldview has been as equally moral as the worldview Wallis advocates, but without theism. Second, Wallis says that “In today’s world there is one over-riding and key distinction in all of the religion that is growing – a God who desires relationship with each person.” This is a bald overstatement: growing religions right now include the ridiculous Word of Faith movement in Christianity, Islam and Mormonism. More problematic still is that Wallis wholly overlooks scholarship showing the most vibrant and growing religious sects globally to be various fundamentalisms. This is Wallis at his worst, selectively emphasizing a part of his own religious experience and extrapolating it to overlook the deeper fissures within his and other religious traditions. Third, Wallis by implication says in this paragraph that Christianity is the only valid spiritual experience, and because of this he again can not explain where the lines should be drawn between private faith and public policy. Last, Wallis argues that liberal Christianity is not growing because it does not have a personal God. In some sense he is right: because liberal Christianity has distanced itself from a personal God and from much of the orthodoxy of the church, but has attempted to stay within the hierarchy of the church itself, it has been unable to walk the fractured landscape left behind in this hodge-podge of belief. Better the liberal church look elsewhere (wholly outside the church) to find community and generate activity that can change society than to attempt and continue to work within an institution they do not believe in. Better that society build a new church, a new place for social consciousness and spiritual experience, than attempt and reform an institution that is quite happy where it stands.

In Wallis’ analysis, he struggles to paint a picture of America that is not as mono-chromatic as those within the religious right he wishes to distance himself from. Because the mediating metaphor of Wallis’ book is religious values as defined Biblically – a point of no return for secularists because it asserts the primacy of religion without explaining where Christianity’s sacred texts go too far or are of man’s constructs and not the Divine – Wallis never clearly explains where he sees the limits to religious activity in the public forum. His first attempt at explaining this is his fifth chapter, titled “How Should Your Faith Influence Your Politics.” For me, this section comes up short of fully explaining his position, the illumination it provides only serving to make more obvious the problem with using religion to define political involvement. In this chapter Wallis states:

“The best response to fundamentalism is to take faith more seriously than fundamentalism usually does. The best critique of fundamentalism comes from faith itself which challenges the accommodations of fundamentalism to theocracy, power, and violence.” (Page 67)

Wallis’ statement is at best shameful, and at worst a spurious attempt to overlook the passages in the Old Testament that are theocratic, predicated on rabid nationalism, and horribly violent. Evangelical Christianity does not exist without the preserved teaching and practices of the Catholic Church any more than Christianity does not exist without the Jewish Pentateuch.

The Question of Pluralism

Wallis’ view of the interaction between private faith and public activism is much healthier than that of the Religious Right; however, we are right to be cautious in embracing his prescriptions if for no other reason than the fact that while his positions are different from those held by the Religious Right, the foundational elements of his argument (the primacy of Christianity, the use of Scripture as the ultimate arbiter of moral and social truths) are very similar to those of the Religious Right. This is the complexity of the contemporary religious movement embodied by Wallis’ Sojourners and Brian McLaren’s Emergent Movement. No one who has seen, read or wrestled with Wallis or McLaren’s writing would say they represent the same form of reasoning and worldview as do Dobson, Kennedy or Falwell. But the question presented by people such as myself is whether or not the theology of mystery, tension and paradox that Wallis and McLaren advocate is strong enough and provides sufficient solace and solidity as to withstand the much larger, louder, angrier and easier to grasp fundamentalism? Our society seems to be predicated on simple answers to complex problems, in part because simple answers provide solidity; such a social tendency does stand in stark contrast to the work of those within the Emergent Movement whose theology is harder to grasp and leaves many unexplained questions.

Early in the book, when Wallis’ pleas for a prophetic religion sensitive to poverty are at its best, he says “The loss of religion’s prophetic vocation is terribly dangerous for any society. Who will uphold the dignity of economic and political outcasts? Who will question the self-righteousness of nations and their leaders? Who will question the recourse to violence and rush to wars, long before any last resort has been unequivocally proven?” (Page 6) These are great questions that illuminate some of the essential truths that have maintained the church through the millennia, for the simple reason that the answer to Wallis’ question is the truthful murmur even I find myself asking: “if not the church, who? If not within religion, where?” And it is here that religious and secular moderates could find much common ground if religious people would, in the words of Ken Wilber, put definable public “brackets around their myth statements”, and if secularists would respect the desires of religious people to worship a stirring sense within themselves of being part of a greater benevolent being, a being our monotheistic faith traditions all call God. These are not minor points to either camp, but as long as no compromise is possible, the debate that serves as the undercurrent to Wallis’ book will grow increasingly angry and defensive with disembodied frustration become very physically manifested.

What are we to make of Wallis’ book? On balance, this was a needed book whose contribution is to remind religious people that their selective emphasis on Republican ideals is badly misplaced. For people such as myself who are increasingly confident that religious conflict will be one of the under-currents to the next thirty years, I am troubled by the insistence of people such as Wallis that we find answers to our problems within religious ideas and religious language. However, in the same breath I would say this, I must equally acknowledge that not all of the religious impulses embodied by those – even within the Religious Right – are bad. Many of their impulses are based on a desire to have a worshipful community that acknowledges a Creator God they feel obliged to. Many of their impulses are based on a latent acknowledgement that the Christian ideals of grace, mercy, forgiveness and love, while perhaps not found always within the church, are found more frequently within the church than outside of it. These are all healthy impulses, and they are impulses that Wallis nourishes with his book. It is these impulses that are good and right. In the spirit of the Apostle Paul, I choose to say, on balance, that “what is good and righteous, think on these things.” Wallis has given us much to be thankful for, even if in doing so, he occasionally crosses some chalked lines demarking questions of pluralism and the ultimate human ideal. I choose to welcome this book as a positive contribution towards a more integral form of government, but in doing so, also acknowledge its limitations and the questions I believe it allows to go unanswered.

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• July 10, 2005

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