Outward Journey / Inward Journey

This is a repost.  Thx @ Mainstream Baptist.

One American political party has adopted “country first” as a campaign slogan. That same party is the party of political preference for the bulk of the evangelical community in our nation. I have been waiting for the significance of that statement to dawn on someone in the conservative evangelical community, but to date they seem to be blissfully unaware of the idolatrous overtones of their politics.

Christians are warned not to divide their loyalties. We put “God first” or else God is not God in our lives. Nothing in scripture authorizes God’s people to equate their loyalty to God with loyalty to their nation. There is much that forbids it. Jesus commands us to be singlemindedly devoted to God and his kingdom (Matt. 6:24-34). His kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).

Christians should not even put “country second.” Discipleship requires that we share the same priorities as our Lord. If God so loved “the world” that he sent his only Son to die for it, and the Son was obedient unto death, then the good of the world as a whole deserves more concern from his disciples than the good of any single nation. At best, then, country only comes in third.

That’s not a message that most American evangelicals have ears to hear. They don’t have ears because they have no desire to pay attention to the genuine demands of discipleship. The thought of self-conscious self-sacrifice for the benefit of strangers is completely foreign to them. They’re looking for cheap grace. They only have ears for those who will tell them what they want to hear and who ask them to make sacrifices only for what is near and dear.

It would be hard for me to conceive of a more damning indictment of American evangelicalism if it weren’t for the research that indicates how widely evangelicals defend the government’s use of torture as an investigative technique.

According to the Bible, as the reformers understood it, marriage is a duty prescribed by the law of creation and a right of persons protected by the law of Christ. No human law could impinge on this divine duty or infringe on this God-given right without the warrant of divine law. No human authority could obstruct or annull a marriage without divine authorization. “It is contrary to faith as well as to love,” wrote Andreas Osiander, “when man puts asunder, without God’s command, what God has brought together.”

-John Witte, Jr. (1997) From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition. Westminster John Knox, Louisville, 62.

Maturity in our relation to our parents consists in going beyond both a belief in their omniscience and a disdain for their weakness, to an understanding and a gratitude for their decisive part in that ongoing process in which now we, too, must take our place, as heirs and yet free.  So it must be with our relation to our spiritual and intellectual parentage, our tradition.  An abstract concept of parenthood is no substitute for our real parents, an abstract cosmopolitanism no substitute for our real traditions.  Jerusalem truly is “the mother of us all,” or perhaps more precisely the grandmother of us all, with Athens as our other grandmother (since everyone is entitled to two grandmothers).  The tension and complementarity between Athens and Jerusalem has been a recurring theme, a sort of melodic counterpart, of our tradition.  And it still must be, for us as descendants of those two grandmothers, with that melody that we learn to sing, and from that counterpoint that we go on to compose melodies of our own.  To be tone-deaf to the tradition is, therefore, to be unable to hear to voices of the past or the present–or of the future.

-Jaroslav Pelikan (1984) The Vindication of Tradition.  Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, 54.

I’ve been thinking a bit for awhile about the accelerating phenomenon in the West in which we are moving away from the demand that religion and religious values and discourses remain strictly in the private realm. It’s not just those in the margins — those vulnerable to denunciation of crackpottery, like fundamentalists and liberation theologians — who’re rejecting the demand that we religious folks “know our place” and leave religion at the door if we want to take part in civic society. From the recent spat over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s comments regarding the role of Islamic law in the British legal system, to the popularity of Brian McLaren and Jim Wallis, and not to mention the continuing role of “conservative” “evangelicals” (to use two nebulous terms), this is a major theme in our public discourses, but very little discussion of the fundamental issues seems to take place: should secularism change, and if so, how? How can we ensure that religious people are able to carry our values into the public square without trampling the rights of folks of other religious beliefs, and those with none? Is there a way between the implicit authoritarianism of both secularism and religious domination of public discourse?

With the issue accelerating but most dialogue centered on contrived controversy (let us all now pity Rowan Williams, the latest target of the deliberately ignorant tabloids) instead of their underlying issues, I was pleased to read an excellent post entitled “Cosmopolitanism and the ideal of postsecular public reason” by Craig Calhoun on the outstanding blog The Immanent Frame.

[T]he ‘privacy’ of religion has been bound up with the notion that religious convictions were to be treated as matters of implicitly personal faith rather than publicly authoritative reason [...] In [this] sense religious freedom could be recognized as a right, but it was implicitly always a right to be wrong or to have a peculiar taste, and thus not to have matters of faith arbitrated by the court of public opinion.

[...]

[O]f course secularisms are themselves intellectual and ideological constructs and traditions. They differ with different political histories – and also with different juxtapositions to religious claims on and in the public sphere. China is secular in a different sense from India and each from France. Attempts to suppress or at least manage religion, tot reat different religions equitably, and to ignore religion are different secularist projects – they are not merely secular. And of course there are more variations on this theme – states that fund multiple religions, states that grant all religions special privileges, states with established official religions that nonetheless demarcate substantial secular spheres within which religious claims or institutions are expected not to intrude.

[...]

Cosmopolitanism is not realistically imaginable as the transcendence of all forms of belonging. To propose a leap into traditionless secular reason is to propose the tyranny of the pure ought, and indeed, an ought without a can.

As I said, excellent, and well worth reading if you’re interested in these issues. And you should be.

This is all, for me, rather timely because at the moment I’m reading Jaroslav Pelikan’s 1983 Jefferson Lecture The Vindication of Tradition (1984) (Yale Univ. Press, New Haven). Perhaps I’ll post about that when I’m done with it.

I was flipping through the English Hymnal a couple of weeks ago and was astounded by this hymn and its relevance today.  I don’t know the music, but I rather like it as a prayer.

O God of earth and altar,
  bow down and hear our cry,
our earthly rulers falter,
  our people drift and die;
the walls of gold entomb us,
  the swords of scorn divide,
take not thy thunder from us,
  but take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches,
from lies of tongue and pen,
from all the easy speeches
  that comfort cruel men,
from sale and profanation
  of honor, and the sword,
from sleep and from damnation,
  deliver us, good Lord!

Tie in a living tether
  the prince and priest and thrall,
bind all our lives together,
  smite us and save us all;
in ire and exultation
  aflame with faith, and free,
lift up a living nation,  
  a single sword to thee.
 
- G. K. Chesterton, 1906.

The election aftermath is just about over.  Obviously as a socialist and as a Democrat I was mostly pleased by the results.  Among the most promising developments: the United States Senate has its first socialist, courtesy of Vermont, several states raised the minimum wage, and oh yes, we now have the first female Speaker of the House in the person of Nancy Pelosi, and both House and Senate will now be under Democratic control.  Click here for an article from In These Times about the rise of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

I took a few days off from work before and on Election Day to work on Pat Kreitlow’s State Senate campaign.  Pat defeated Dave Zien, the incumbent State Senator for 18 years, and a real far-right-wing ugly that we are much, much better off without in Madison.  Because I expected Election Day to be somewhat hectic, I decided to cast my ballot ahead of time by absentee ballot.

 As you can see, on October 29th, I preached in church, and one of the points I wanted to get across was that just as Bartimaeus and Martin Luther did not silence themselves for what was right, neither should we.  Christians have a responsibility to be witnesses to culture and to reject false cultural doctrines in favour of the living Christ.  In pre-war Germany the falsehood facing the Church was a Nazified “Christianity”.  In America many of our false doctrines that society gives us are those of consumption capitalism, a totalizing system that pervades every aspect of our lives in this country, and one that all too often the Church is complicit in.

All this was on my mind as I thought about casting my vote.  I considered and I prayed and I meditated: in the past I have chosen not to support non-Democratic progressive candidates because voting for third parties, I thought, was ‘throwing your vote away’.  But voting, like many choices, is a moral one.  Voting for a candidate who champions an immoral system because he or she is slightly better than another candidate is still voting for a candidate who champions an immoral system.  Bartimaeus and Luther were not concerned with supporting the popular positions.  They were concerned with discerning and proclaiming truth, at whatever expense.  So I resolved to vote for the best candidates on the ballot.  I voted for the Green Party of Wisconsin candidates for United States Senate and for Governor.  Jim Doyle and Herb Kohl are distasteful Democrats: both are members of the right-wing “New Democrats” faction and support neo-liberal economic positions that put workers America and abroad on unequal and unfair ground.   While I was very glad that neither Mark Green nor Kohl’s no-name Republican opponent were elected, I could not in good conscience vote for either of these men.

Does this make me a bad Democrat?  I doubt it.  As we keep hearing over and over in the media, the Democratic Party is a big tent.  The struggle for the progressive movement is to turn it into the instrument which will reform American economic life so that the cultural drive to consume, consume, consume can be dampened.

I watched A Clockwork Orange for the first time last night.  I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it; it raises questions about civil liberties, the will, violence, etc.  I found myself sympathizing with the main character, for some reason, and the violence was almost comedic.  I don’t know if this is a comment on myself or on the film: probably the former.  I saw it as an interesting depiction of the relationship that most people have with the State.  Indeed I think the State itself was a main character in the film.

 A future project for me: re-read Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern and some other works surrounding technology, Enlightenment thinking, and authoritarianism, and then watch this film again.  There’s something familiar about the theme of a government with positivistic aims and methods that is more than willing to trample civil liberties in the meantime.  Perhaps also of the realpolitik of an opposition which prods Alex into attempting suicide in order to generate sympathetic headlines and concern for individual rights and freedoms.

There was a troubling feature on Democracy Now! last night about how the debate about Video News Releases has failed to halt their use.  If you’re unfamiliar with this issue, here’s the jist: corporate public relations firms produce VNRs, which deliberately resemble news segments to promote their clients, and then release them to local television stations which air them without explanation about their origin.  In short it amounts to corporate propaganda being passed off as legitimate journalism.  You can read more about VNRs here.  For me it really speaks to the domination that corporations have over American society; while the work being done by the Center for Media and Democracy is certainly very good, it seems to me that it’s a bit like swatting at mosquitoes when really the swamp should be drained.  Every single aspect of our lives in America is affected by consumption capitalism and the corporations.  What we need is structural, democratic reform of the American economy which would in turn bring about a profound shift in our culture away from greed.

 You can read the report from Democracy Now! here.