wrethcard wrote:
Of the “true” model I can only conjecture, and I suspect that each of us has a similar conjectural model which we update all the time, depending on the new developments.
As usual, your remarks are thought-provoking without sliding into over-simplication, conspiracy theory, or the like.
I, like everyone else, have my conjectures about the motives behind the morives on our political elite. And while I’m sure there are people who simply live to besmirch something others hold dear, I’m also sure that those who patronize us so mercilessly can be perfectly sincere in believing they have the country’s best interest at heart. (As one wily old priest said to me, Sincerity or the lack of it was never the problem.)
I’m blessed or cursed, take it as you will, with a theological education, though I am neither religious nor pious. I hasten to say, neither am I a “spiritual” man, as most who make the first statement go on to claim. My bedtime reading is Karl Barth.
But enough of the vertical pronoun.
BC commenters have often remarked that our elite is running a religion under the color of secularism. I think they’re right. They’ve also noticed that for all we give exaggerated service to “Freedom of Religion,” some religions are freer than others. We have lately seen the President, no less, defend the freedom to practice Islam in a sensitive spot in Manhattan, while sneering at those who practice Christian religion in the heartland. Freest of all, though, is the religion that claims not to be a religion, secularism; as Flannery O’Connor puts it in Haze Motes’ preaching, the Church Without Christ, where redemption is unnecessary.
A further irony is this: For all that we congratulate ourselves on the separation of Church and State, it has never actually been the case in the United States. From 1620 on, we have lived in the Puritan belief that faith is no faith unless it finds expression in behavior; private behavior (see ahem, # 36 above) or public (political morality). The underlying belief in the latter case is this: if we elect and follow virtuous leaders, God favors our cause.
There are plenty of strong reasons why this notion takes hold among us. Remember that among those who stepped off the Mayflower in 1620 there was not a single ordained clergyman, and the leaders they did have had a different job. Their job was not to preach but to govern, and to do so under very harsh circumstances. We honor them still, and well we should. They did govern partly by invoking God’s help, as who with a shred of wisdom would not?
This is not merely the sophomoric criticism of a Mark Twain, who points out that both saides in war pray to the same God; not even the more sophisticated view of an Abraham Lincoln, who found it possible that both he and Jefferson Davis could be enacting a plan of God whose meaning might not be revealed until they were both a hundred years gone. This belief lies at deeper level than either.
Whether we know it consciously or not, whether we consider ourselves “religious” or not, even if we deny it explicitly, as atheists do (always with moralistic reasoning), we cannot exist without a subliminal understanding that God is with us. If any proof of this is needed simply consider how confidently and vehemently even God-deniers express opinions about what God ought to be, and about how God hates those who identify their silly personal notions with His.
If this holds any water so far, then by reason of our Puritan heritage, Americans are uniquely ill-equipped to separate politics from some notion of salvation, whether that be an explicitly desired political outcome, or something subtler. Secularism shares this problem with all the rest of American religion. Indeed it confines itself more narrowly than theistic religion, because the only possible salvation for it is salvation in the here and now, the immanent domain. No eschatological escape valve is open to it.
By the way, Puritanism shares this limitation with Islam, which is what makes them both so dangerous. (Arthur Schopenhauer was the first to point this out.) For if the only salvation is political and temporal, then no sacrifice of [others’!] lives is too much, to bring it about. This alone accounts for the political irrationality and the worse-than-existential dread we hear in the voices of Pelosi, Reid, and their scores of predecessors when they contemplate defeat of their social engineering schemes. They are not just confronting a political defeat; they are looking into an abyss which cannot be named in any vocabulary available to them.
Now while we’re talking about the limitations imposed by vocabulary, it bears saying that a theological vocabulary undoubtedly has its limits too. But in a certain (Barthian) sense of the word, there is no theology in any of the above; it’s all about human potential, human action, human competetitions, human good and human evil. Not a kilderkin of God’s Grace in a carload.
That takes us back to a remark you made weeks ago, while discussing the elation one feels, not at being shot at and missed, but at learning one need not kill a man one though one did have to kill. They key sentence had to do with prayers of thanks, tempered by the knowledge that one would have killed all the same if circumstances required. Spoken, if I may say so, like a Christian.
If this hold any water, then perhaps one of our needs (while still governing and being governed) is the need of Grace. Thinking into that a ways, one finds it entails a shift of perspective, from ever so eloquent political rhetoric and every so clever historical analogies to this (if you’ll forgive a hokey-sounding peroration): the key to the present never was in the past, nor in ourselves, but in a Judge whose promise of mercy we may hope to claim in His own time. This is an eschatological, not a political Hope. But as long as we lack the ability to distinguish Hope from hope, we and our fellows remain susceptible to the Obamas of the world. God help us.
