Politics and Religion in America – How Did We Get Where We Are?
Politics and Religion in America – How Did We Get Where We Are?
By R. Hal Ritter, Jr., Licensed Professional Counselor
What Ronald Reagan did for politics-individual values over social values, evangelical Christianity has done for religion-individual morals over social conscience.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, social concerns were a very present feature in the national consciousness and in public discourse. The writings of Reinhold Niehbur provided careful analyses of how apparently successful societal concerns can be grounded in very dark motives. His writings made public the notions of "institutional evil," evil that exists in the very systems and processes of public and corporate life.
The struggle for authentic faith was a struggle to "make a difference" in the face of overwhelming forces. For Niehbur, the Christian is called to love, and he argued that love, under the conditions of finitude and brokenness, means striving for justice for those who are victimized by the larger systems of power. Love is justice under the conditions of finitude.
The title of Niehbur`s book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, conveys a sense of this dilemma. Man-people-struggle to be Christian and do the right thing, even as they live in a society that is immoral and provocative. Thus, the moral person will seek to challenge the structures of the immoral society and bring changes that will empower and encourage those who are disenfranchised and marginalized by racism, materialism, capitalism, ignorance and poverty.
The 1960s and 1970s provided an ongoing public discourse about social change and the need for justice for all people. Examples of this discourse included civil rights, the war on poverty, voting rights, the women`s movement-including an equal rights amendment to the Constitution, although it never did receive enough votes to pass-and war and peace, ending the war in Vietnam. The national conversation remained oriented to society and social change. During this time, Christian ethics also addressed these issues, and Christians were challenged to get involved and think about the laws and issues that shaped the larger society and the world.
When Ronald Reagan became president, the nation seemed to want to go another direction. Inflation was at 14% per annum, and the American Embassy in Iran was under siege by radical students. Jimmy Carter was President, and for many people his servant leadership style was not robust enough for the political climate in which he served.
Almost single handedly, Ronald Reagan was able to transform the national dialogue from social issues to individual rights. The first politician to really tap into the reservoir of feelings in the religious right, Reagan was able to talk about personal values rather than social change. Many in the religious right believed that social change was carried out by a bunch of wild eyed liberals who completely disregarded the importance of individual change. So, when Reagan began to speak to personal values, he quickly resonated with many of the religious right`s concerns including personal morality, anti-abortion views and pro-business for all to get ahead.
An example of the shift is in tax policy. With social change during the previous decades, taxes were raised in order to provide the resources necessary for the changes to be initiated and sustained. As taxes increased, many believed their taxes were being wasted on unnecessary government programs providing hand outs for people whose hearts and minds needed to be changed first.
Thus, with his individual rights perspective, Reagan shifted the national dialogue away from big government and onto individual responsibility. The following years showed many social programs, initiated in the Lyndon Johnson administration, being reduced or eliminated. By the time of the 2000 election, George W. Bush pushed this individual agenda even further by promoting more tax cuts, individual savings for retirement, opposition to abortion and opposition to gay marriage. Each of these issues, in some way, represented a step toward providing the American people some personal benefit, on an individual level, while reducing or eliminating a sense of concern for the larger welfare of the society.
In these years, there was a clear shift from societal values such as education, civil rights, war and peace, poverty and health care to individuals being promised that they can keep more of their own paycheck. No longer is tax money viewed as a way of improving the social conditions for many Americans, but it is now viewed as wasted money that individuals should keep and use as they see fit. In its primary form, it is an appeal to basic greed.
During this same time, churches went through a similar shift in their understanding of values. No longer are prophets and preachers speaking out against an unjust war in Iraq that is killing thousands of non combatant civilians. But rather, the evangelical voices are promoting the view that the war in Iraq is righteous and just, and meets all of the criteria of St. Augustine`s just war theory. In education, the No Child Left Behind legislation has not been funded adequately, and yet, President Bush claims to be the "Education President" who is reinventing the educational process for children. And while fewer and fewer Americans are covered by minimal or adequate health insurance, the actual costs for even limited health care continue to increase faster than inflation.
A very complicated issue, that continues to empower the religious right, is the discussion regarding what is called, "family values." For traditional marriages, rates are declining as more heterosexual couples are choosing to simply cohabitate, while the one group that wants to get married, the homosexuals, cannot. However, the real threat to America and American family values is not from homosexuals who want to live in committed, monogamous relationships, but, rather, it is the increased rate of heterosexual cohabitation, along with the high rate of divorce and the increased number of children being reared in single parent households. Like the issue of war and peace, the preaching from the pulpit no longer challenges the immorality of divorce, partially because many in congregational leadership have themselves been divorced.
The voices for social change in churches have been nearly silenced, as sermons have returned to individual issues and salvation and character. In the 1980s, Stanley Hauerwas, an ethicist at Notre Dame and now at Duke University, began writing about ethics as personal character. No longer was ethics about society and change, as it was for Niehbur. Now, ethics is about individual character formation, personal virtues. Social ethics is no longer about society, but about individual Christians and their dealings within the community of faith.
In this regard, political discourse and religious discourse have both migrated from the themes of social change to the themes of individual rights and responsibilities. Lower the taxes; reduce the government. Grow your life in the church; let the church be the sphere for ethics.
One of Hauerwas` books, A Community of Character, says that the ethical question for decision making is how the decision reflects the character of the church of which one is a part. As the church makes various decisions, the question is, "What kind of people will we be for the decisions that we make?" It is not about changing society, but it is about minding our own character and identity. The primary society, of which the Christian is concerned, is the church community.
This shift of the national and religious conversation from society and social issues to the individual and personal responsibility is an important corrective. But it is not the final resting place. Like Hegel`s historical dialectic, a new synthesis can emerge which says that both are needed for society to be for all people. The church cannot remake the state in Christ`s image-a "Christian nation," but the church cannot withdraw from the world as an alternative society where people only care for one another.
Orlando Costas wrote a book in the 1970s titled, Church Growth: A Shattering Critique from the Third World. In that text, Costas says that the church grows in numbers through evangelism, baptisms and even financially, and it grows in discipleship by education. But Costas then says the church also grows incarnationally, that is, in how it incarnates itself and becomes the body of Christ in the community where it lives. As an intentional community, the church establishes itself as a community of concern for others. How does the community view the church? What kind of reputation does the church have? How do those outside the church view the church? Is it viewed as a place for people? Is it viewed as elitist? Is the church for the down and out, or only for the up and out? For Costas, how the church incarnates itself is a critical measure of whether, or how, it is growing.
To only grow numerically, by gathering in individuals without also incarnating itself in the community, is a superficial view of growth based in social Darwinism. Seduced by the capitalist view of bigger and better, the lack of incarnation makes the church look more like a commercial enterprise than the body of Christ in the world. And viewed from the perspective of American pragmatism, if the church is growing in numbers and getting bigger, then God must be the force behind it. Numerous evangelicals, as well as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons, have used this logic of pragmatism-bigger is God at work.
Somehow, the voices of Niehbur and Hauerwas and Costas all have something to say to who the church is today. The church is a community of character and Christian nurture, in an immoral society that needs to be challenged and changed, and change comes through incarnational growth and putting down roots and presence in the communities where the character of the church is the body of Christ in the world. The world may not accept the church or its message, but the world cannot ignore the church which constantly challenges the decisions of a society that directly affect the lives of all of its citizens.
For the Christian, it is a dialectical relationship that Paul Tillich viewed as "individualization and participation." These two dialectical points are constantly at work in the life of the Christian, and in the incarnated life of the church in the world. Each church community, made up of individual Christians, confronts the realities of power and evil, as well as personal integrity and identity. It is the life of Christ that confronts the attitudes and structures that seek to prevent, seduce and thwart the Word being made flesh.
In Romans 8, the Apostle Paul says that the power of the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is now at work "in your mortal bodies." The life and power of God, in the world both in individual Christians as well as in churches, stand in the dialectal relationship of individualization and participation. It is a vision that the church can claim from Jesus as it seeks to bring the body of Christ into the twenty first century, and into a post modern world that often ignores the voices of the church as largely irrelevant.
Who are these people? Who are these Christians? Who are these followers of the Way? And what is their agenda? Why are they turning the world upside down?
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
