Democracy Matters (19 page)

For Richard Rorty religious appeals are a conversation stopper.
They trump critical dialogue. They foreclose political debate. He wants to do away with any appeal to God in public life, especially since most appeals to God fuel the religious Right. He is a full-fledged secularist who sees little or no common good or public interest in the role of religion in civic discourse. Like Rawls, he supports the rights and liberties of religious citizens, but he wants to limit their public language to secular terms like democracy, equality, and liberty. His secular vision is motivated by a deep fear of the dogmatism and authoritarianism of the religious Right. There is much to learn from his view and many of his fears are warranted. But his secular policing of public life is too rigid and his secular faith is too pure. Ought we not to be concerned with the forms of dogmatism and authoritarianism in secular garb that trump dialogue and foreclose debate? Democratic practices—dialogue and debate in public discourse—are always messy and impure. And secular policing can be as arrogant and coercive as religious policing.

Prominent religious thinkers have also made impassioned arguments for the distancing of religion from American public discourse. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas’s prophetic ecclesiasticism and John Milbank’s radical orthodoxy—the major influences in seminaries and divinity schools—are so fearful of the tainting of the American empire that they call for a religious flight from the public square. For Hauerwas, Christians should be “resident aliens” in a corrupt American empire whose secular public discourse is but a thin cover for its robust nihilism. His aim is to preserve the integrity of the prophetic church by exposing the idolatry of Constantinian Christianity and bearing witness to the gospel of
love and peace. His deep commitment to a prophetic church of compassion and pacifism in a world of cruelty and violence leads him to reject the secular policing of Rawls and Rorty and to highlight the captivity of Constantinian Christians to imperial America. But he finds solace only in a prophetic ecclesiastical refuge that prefigures the coming kingdom of God. His prophetic sensibilities resonate with me and I agree with his critique of Constantinian Christianity and imperial America. Yet he unduly downplays the prophetic Christian commitment to justice and our role as citizens to make America more free and democratic. For him, the pursuit of social justice is a bad idea for Christians because it lures them toward the idols of secular discourse and robs them of their distinctive Christian identity. My defense of King’s legacy requires that we accent justice as a Christian ideal and become even more active as citizens to change America without succumbing to secular idols or imperial fetishes. To be a prophetic Christian is not to be against the world in the name of church purity; it is to be in the world but not of the world’s nihilism, in the name of a loving Christ who proclaims the this-worldly justice of a kingdom to come.

Hauerwas’s radical imperative of world-denial motivates Milbank’s popular Christian orthodoxy that pits the culprits of commodification and secularism against Christian socialism. His sophisticated wholesale attack on secular liberalism and modern capitalism is a fresh reminder of just how marginal prophetic Christianity has become in the age of the American empire. But, like Hauerwas, he fails to appreciate the moral progress, political breakthroughs, and spiritual freedoms forged by the heroic efforts of modern citizens of religious and secular traditions. It is just
as dangerous to overlook the gains of modernity procured by prophetic religious and progressive secular citizens as it is to overlook the blindness of Constantinian Christians and imperial secularists. And these gains cannot be preserved and deepened by reverting to ecclesiastical refuges or sectarian orthodoxies. Instead they require candor about our religious integrity and democratic identity that leads us to critique and resist Constantinian Christianity and imperial America.

All four towering figures—Rawls, Rorty, Hauerwas, and Milbank—have much to teach us and are forces for good in many ways. Yet they preclude a robust democratic Christian identity that builds on the legacy of prophetic Christian-led social movements. Jeffrey Stout—himself the most religiously musical, theologically learned, and philosophically subtle of all secular writers in America today—has, by contrast, argued that American democrats must join forces with the legacy of Christian protest exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr. He knows that the future of the American democratic experiment may depend on revitalizing this legacy. The legacies of prophetic Christianity put a premium on the kind of human being one chooses to be rather than the amount of commodities one possesses. They thereby constitute a wholesale onslaught against nihilism—in all of its forms—and strike a blow for decency and integrity. They marshal religious energies for democratic aims, yet are suspicious of all forms of idolatry, including democracy itself as an idol. They preserve their Christian identity and its democratic commitments, without coercing others and conflating church and state spheres.

There can be a new democratic Christian identity in America
only if imperial realities are acknowledged and prophetic legacies are revitalized. And despite the enormous resources of imperial elites to fan and fuel Constantinian Christianity, the underfunded and unpopular efforts of democrats and prophetic Christians must become more visible and vocal. The organizations of prophetic Christianity, such as the World Council of Churches, the civic action group Sojourners, and the black prophetic churches, must fight their way back into prominence in our public discourse. They must recognize that they have been under a kind of siege by the Constantinians and have not lost their dominance by accident.

Ironically, the powerful political presence of imperial Christians today is inspired by the success of the democratic Christian-led movement of Martin Luther King Jr. The worldly engagement of King’s civil rights movement encouraged Constantinian Christians to become more organized and to partner with the power elites of the American empire. The politicization of Christian fundamentalism was a direct response to King’s prophetic Christian legacy. It began as a white backlash against King’s heritage in American public life, and it has always had a racist undercurrent—as with Bob Jones University, which until recently barred interracial dating.

The rise of Constantinian Christianity in America went hand in hand with the Republican Party’s realignment of American politics—with their use of racially coded issues (busing, crime, affirmative action, welfare) to appeal to southern conservatives and urban white centrists. This political shift coincided with appeals to influential Jewish neoconservatives primarily concerned with the fragile security and international isolation of the state of Israel. In
particular, the sense of Jewish desperation during the Yom Kippur War of 1973—fully understandable given the threat of Jewish annihilation only thirty years after the vicious holocaust in Europe—drove the unholy alliance of American Republicans, Christian evangelicals, and Jewish neoconservatives.

On the domestic front, the fierce battle over admissions and employment slots produced a formidable backlash led by Jewish neoconservatives and white conservatives against affirmative action. The right-wing coalition of Constantinian Christians and Jewish neoconservatives helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. The fact that 35 percent of the most liberal nonwhite group—American Jews—voted for Reagan was a prescient sign of what was to come. When the Reverend Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority received the Jabotinsky Award in 1981 in Israel, Constantinian Christianity had arrived on the international stage, with Jewish conservatism as its supporter. Imperial elites—including corporate ones with huge financial resources—here and abroad recognized just how useful organized Constantinian Christians could be for their nihilistic aims.

The rise of Constantinian Christian power in our democracy has progressed in stages. First, ecumenical groups like the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches, and liberal mainline denominations (Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Congregationalists)—who spoke out in defense of the rights of people of color, workers, women, gays, and lesbians—were targeted. The Christian fundamentalists (with big money behind them) lashed out with vicious attacks against the prophetic Christian voices, who were branded “liberal,” and worked to discredit the
voices of moderation. In McCarthyist fashion, they equated the liberation theology movement, which put a limelight on the plight of the poor, with Soviet Communism. They cast liberal seminaries (especially my beloved Union Theological Seminary in New York City) as sinful havens of freaks, gays, lesbians, black radicals, and guilty white wimps. Such slanderous tactics have largely cowed the Christian Left, nearly erasing it off the public map.

The Christian fundamentalists have also tried to recruit Constantinian Christians of color in order to present a more diverse menagerie of faces to the imperial elites in the White House, Congress, state houses, and city halls, and on TV. The manipulative elites of the movement knew that this integrated alliance would attract even more financial support from big business to sustain a grassroots organizing campaign in imperial churches across the country. The veneer of diversity is required for the legitimacy of imperial rule today.

The last stage in the rise of the Constantinians was their consolidation of power by throwing their weight around with well-organized political action groups, most notably the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority. With this political coordination they gained clout, power, legitimacy, and respectability within the golden gates of the American empire—they were acknowledged as mighty movers, shakers, and brokers who had to be reckoned with in the private meetings of the plutocrats and their politicians. Imperial elites recognized just how useful the Constantinian Christians could be for their nihilistic aims. The journey for Constantinian Christians from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to
George W. Bush’s selection in 2000 has been a roaring success—based on the world’s nihilistic standards.

Never before in the history of the American Republic has a group of organized Christians risen to such prominence in the American empire. And this worldly success—a bit odd for a fundamentalist group with such otherworldly aspirations—has sent huge ripples across American Christendom. Power, might, size, status, and material possessions—all paraphernalia of the nihilism of the American empire—became major themes of American Christianity. It now sometimes seems that all Christians speak in one voice when in fact it is only that the loudness of the Constantinian element of American Christianity has so totally drowned out the prophetic voices. Imperial Christianity, market spirituality, money-obsessed churches, gospels of prosperity, prayers of let’s-make-a-deal with God or help me turn my wheel of fortune have become the prevailing voice of American Christianity. In this version of Christianity the precious blood at the foot of the cross becomes mere Kool-Aid to refresh eager upwardly mobile aspirants in the nihilistic American game of power and might. And there is hardly a mumbling word heard about social justice, resistance to institutional evil, or courage to confront the powers that be—with the glaring exception of abortion.

Needless to say, the commodification of Christianity is an old phenomenon—and a central one in American life past and present. Yet the frightening scope and depth of this commercialization of Christianity is new. There is no doubt that the churches reflect and refract the larger market-driven nihilism of our society and world.
Yet it is the nearly wholesale eclipse of nonmarket values and visions—of love, justice, compassion, and kindness to strangers—that is terrifying. Where are the Christian voices outraged at the greed of corporate elites while millions of children live in poverty? Do American Christians even know that the three richest men in the world have more wealth than the combined gross domestic product of the bottom forty-eight countries or that the personal wealth of the 225 richest individuals is equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the entire world’s population? Philanthropy is fine, but what of justice, institutional fairness, and structural accountability?

There are, however, groups of prophetic Christians who are taking up the challenge of confronting the rise of the Christian Right and have realized the necessity of countering those powerful organizations with their own. There is Jim Wallis, who leads the activist group Sojourners; the Reverend James Forbes of Riverside Church in New York City; Sujay Johnson Cook of the Hampton Preachers’ Conference; the Reverend Charles Adams of Hartford Memorial Church in Detroit; the Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity Church in Chicago; Bishop Charles E. Blake of West Angeles Church of God in Christ; the Reverend J. Alfred Smith of Allen Temple in Oakland; and Father Michael Pfleger of Faith Community of Saint Sabina in Chicago. And there are quite a few more.

Yet it is undeniable that the challenge of keeping the prophetic Christian movement vital and vibrant in the age of the American empire is largely unmet as of yet. The pervasive sleepwalking in American churches in regard to social justice is frightening. The
movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.—the legacy of which has been hijacked by imperial Christians—forged the most subtle and significant democratic Christian identity of modern times. And it now lies in ruins. Can prophetic Christians make its dry bones live again?

The Constantinian Christianity of the Bush administration—especially of President Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Congressman Tom DeLay—whatever authentic pietistic dimensions it may have, must not be the model of American Christian identity. Its nihilistic policies and quests for power and might supersede any personal confessions of humility and compassion. Even the most seemingly pious can inflict great harm. Constantine himself flouted his piety even as he continued to dominate and conquer peoples. Yet a purely secular effort against the religious zealotry will never be powerful enough to prevail; it is only with a coalition of the prophetic Christians of all colors, the prophetic Jews and Muslims and Buddhists, and the democratic secularists that we can preserve the American democratic experiment.