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READING:
(from Bill Moyers, one of the most influential and respected journalists
of our time, writing in Sojourners magazine):
I trace my spiritual lineage back to a radical Baptist in England
named Thomas Helwys. In 1612, Roman Catholics were the embattled targets
of the Crown and Thomas Helwys, the Baptist, came to their defense with
the first tract in English demanding religious liberty for all. (As
an aside: this came more than 40 years after Francis David, speaking as
a Unitarian, won full religious freedom in Transylvania under King John
Sigismund…though he later suffered the same fate as Mr. Helwys: being
thrown into prison, where he died.)
(Back to Moyers) Thomas Helwys was not the first or last dissenter to
pay the supreme price for conscience. While we are not called upon in
America today to make a similar sacrifice, we are in need of a generous
vision of religious freedom. We are heading into a new religious
landscape. For most of our history, religious discourse was dominated by
white male Protestants of a culturally conservative European heritage,
people like me,” wrote Moyers. “Dissenting voices of alternative visions
of faith, race, and gender, rarely reached the mainstream. It’s
different now. Immigration has added more than 30 million people to our
population since the late-1960s. The American gene pool is mutating into
one in which people like me will be a minority here by mid-century.
 merica is being
recreated right before our eyes. The world keeps moving to America,
bringing new stories from the four corners of the globe, a “contest of
narratives” competing to shape a new American drama. Even back when most
of us claimed a Protestant heritage and practically everyone looked
alike, we often failed the test of tolerance: ask the Catholics, Jews,
and Mormons of their early struggles. So our troubled past with
tolerance requires us to ask how, in this new era when we are looking
less and less alike, how are we to avoid the intolerance, the
chauvinism, the fanaticism, the bitter fruits that mark the long history
of world religions when they jostle each other in busy, crowded streets?
It is no rhetorical question. You only have to glance at the daily news
to see how passions are stirred by claims of exclusive loyalty to one’s
own kin, one’s own clan, one’s own country, and one’s own church. These
ties that bind are vital to our communities and our lives, but they can
also be twisted into a noose. “Onward Christian Soldiers” is back in
vogue and the 21st century version of the Crusades has taken on aspects
of the religious ferocity that marked its predecessors. But recall what
Quaker William Penn said: “To be furious in religion is to be furiously
irreligious.”
MEDITATION: (from Dorothy Day, Catholic activist, followed by
silence)
“People say, ‘What is the sense of our small effort?’ They cannot see
that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble
cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one
of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit
down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”
MESSAGE:
 ho are we as
Americans these days? Where are we headed? Are we advancing into a
hopeful, pluralistic future or are we retreating back to a reactionary,
intolerant past? The long-held liberal view that diversity was good for
the melting pot of one nation (under God or not), a model for the rest
of the world, has been challenged by our inability to pull it off. The
more pluralistic we’ve become as a society the more confused and
frightened we’ve become as individuals. And, rather than becoming more
courageous, fearful people tend to become more hateful.
Joined together for most of our history by a belief that democracy would
bridge any cultural differences, we now seem to be disintegrating into
separate ethnic groups and private social sets, and—as de Tocqueville
predicted back in the 1830s—that leaves too few to care about the nation
as a whole. Rather than uniting behind the optimistic spirit and
idealistic understandings of our founders from the 18th century, 21st
century Americans choose to give lip service to clichés about America’s
freedom and democracy’s promise, all the while emphasizing their
differences.
With the end of the cold war against the former Soviet Union, America
needed a new way to define itself. Following 9/11, our focus shifted
from a vanquished economic and political foe to an enemy ultimately
defined by religion. In his book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s
National Identity, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington writes:
“Americans are…anything but religiously diverse by world standards. With
as many as 88% declaring themselves to be Christian, the United States
is more Christian than Israel is Jewish, Egypt is Muslim or India is
Hindu.” Huntington continues: “Americans strongly equate religion with
personal ethics and behavior, considering it an antidote to the moral
decline they perceive in our nation today, …(believing) that these
problems would be mitigated if people were more religious.”
No longer able to define itself ideologically over and against
communism, Huntington now encourages America to define itself
religiously—as Christian. But which brand of the thousands of varieties
of American Christianity would be acceptable as a national identity?
Further, the more “Christian America” wages war against militant Islam,
for example, the more militant would become its Christianity. Retreating
to reactionary beliefs and traditions, denying any doubts and
ambiguities, we would become even more intolerant of anyone who
disagrees, fearfully demanding a purity in mind and practice that is the
absolute antithesis of who we say we are as Americans. But a society
formed in fear makes itself vulnerable to far more destructive forces
than terror attacks.
Thus, we are faced with something even more powerful, even more
insidious, than attempting to define ourselves by our religious
polarization; we are faced with something that, unfortunately, provides
an even better way to describe America today. How did we get to this
point?
Let’s start with this understanding: by its failed promises of
enlightened democracy and in the way freedom often lends itself to
hysteria, any attempt to define ourselves ends up as momentary and
piecemeal. Trying to explain the meaning of the American dream reduces
us to trite platitudes for, in truth, America has always been a place
where we’ve invented ourselves as we go along. Each of our personal
stories is a single thread in a more encompassing narrative, a tapestry
of a movement so much larger and grander than any one individual…or any
one group.
The most important elements of those stories bind us together rather
than set us apart. And, thus, at its core, the American dream is a
spiritual movement. So, how are we to define ourselves amidst all our
social and political dissonances, all our competing cultural narratives;
how are we to find meaning when meaning is entirely relative or is, at
the very least, beyond our comprehension?
Such questions, of course, can make you crazy, can drive you to
despair…can lead you to fundamentalism. Still, the questions must be
asked—or, more accurately, what’s important is how we come to deal with
the uncertainty of our answers, trying to come up with some strategy for
understanding, even as we recognize that understanding, alone, will not
save us in the end.
In The Nation magazine recently, a reviewer of E. L. Doctorow’s latest
book, Sweet Land Stories, wrote: “America is now a land of diminished
expectations, in which both the myth and the meaning of its past have
deserted us and our great dreams and important works—our cities, our
societies—are now just shared illusions thrown up in the face of the
abyss. Where do we turn? Longing for redemption and hope, we see our
journey as both a promise and a curse. We’re at the vanishing point of
history, in the place where desperation leads. In Doctorow’s
America, fundamentalism is the other face of despair, and religious
fervor is as oppressive as a dream gone sour.”
That seems to be where we are and where we are headed. At the very
best—assuming it’s not already too late—we are at a time of testing for
those who believe in America. How do we protect the soul of democracy:
government of and by and for all the people? How do we nurture the
healing side of religion over the polarizing side, over intolerant
orthodoxy, that “other face of despair, …as oppressive as a dream gone
sour?” At stake is America’s role in the world; at stake is the very
character of the American Experiment, whether “we, the people” is a
political incarnation of a spiritual truth—one nation, with liberty and
justice for all—or a monstrous fraud.
It is no campaign cliché to say that there are two Americas today. For
years it was thought that the poor were mainly unmarried, jobless
mothers. For years it was thought that marriage, education and work was
how they could move up the economic ladder. But, today, poverty is
showing up where we weren’t supposed to find it: amongst two-parent
families, at least one working, and the head of household with even more
than a high school education; and these newly poor are being told that
they must climb out of poverty by riding an escalator pointed downward.
In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% of Americans and
the bottom 20% was 30-fold. Four decades later, that gap is more than
75-fold—and growing. Such concentration of wealth would be less
problematic if the rest of society was somehow benefiting and equality
was somehow expanding. But that is far from the case.
Yet this growing gap in standards of living is not the greatest concern
we face: we are also losing America’s historic balance between wealth
and commonwealth through a purposeful drive to dismantle our political
institutions and our laws while tearing down the intellectual and
cultural frameworks that helped shape past public policies dealing with
those social ills that befall every society. America is now undergoing a
powerful shift, and if you want to know what’s driving it, just follow
the money.
In Washington today, it is widely accepted that there is nothing wrong
with a democracy dominated by the people with the money. But of course
there is. Money has democracy in a stranglehold and is suffocating it.
Four years ago, presidential candidate John McCain said that elections
today are nothing less than an “influence peddling scheme in which both
parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest
bidder.” Or, as an article in “Time” magazine had it, America now has
“government for the few at the expense of the many.”
The rich may have the right to buy better cars and bigger houses than
the rest of us, but they don’t have the right to buy more democracy than
the rest of us. This may sound like a call for class warfare, but the
class war was declared a generation ago by corporate America. What has
been happening to the middle and working classes is the direct
consequence of corporate activism and collusion, joining forces with the
rise of a religious orthodoxy that has made idols of wealth and power,
along with countless political decisions favoring the moneyed special
interests. America’s social compact has been trashed; wages and the
workforce have been slashed; the safety net that was supposed to protect
people from hardships beyond their control has been shredded. And
Business Week magazine editorialized: “Some people will obviously have
to do with less. It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow,
the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.”
Over the past few decades—as the poor got poorer and the health care
crisis worsened, as wealth and the media became more concentrated and
our political system was bought out from under us—the voice of prophetic
religion was silenced. Big business flooded the political arena with a
deluge of dollars and formed alliances with the Religious Right, whose
leaders happily contrived a cultural war as a smokescreen to hide the
economic plunder of the very people they enlisted as foot soldiers in
their war. And they won: Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in
America and probably the savviest investor of them all, put it this way:
“If there was a class war, my class won.”
The corporate conservatives and their allies in the political and
religious right are achieving a vast transformation of American life
that only they understand because they are its architects, its
advocates, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic
inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our
states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will
last until our grandchildren’s children are ready for retirement,
systematically stripping government of all its necessary
functions—except for waging war, which also benefits the rich. Our
democracy has become a shell of itself, the privileged and powerful
sustaining their way of life at the expense of all others, and the
United States is beginning to look like just another Latin American
banana republic.
And, to top it all, adds that good Baptist Bill Moyers, “They hijacked
Jesus. The very Jesus who challenged religious orthodoxy, who offered
kindness to the prostitute and hospitality to the outcast and treated
even the tax collector as a child of God, the very Jesus who drove the
moneychangers from the temple. This Jesus has been hijacked,” says
Moyers, “and turned into a guardian of privilege instead of a champion
of the dispossessed. Hijacked
and made over into a lobbyist sent into the halls of Congress seeking
tax breaks and loopholes for the powerful while pushing public policies
that are punitive rather than helpful.” Moyers ends by saying: “Let’s
get Jesus back.”
In my own religious language, I would put it, “Our times cry out for a
politics of justice: rising poverty, compassionless health care, waging
unilateral warfare, are all religious issues.” Yet, these need not be
politically partisan or religiously polarizing: both main political
parties share in the same money-grubbing guilt. Likewise, they need not
be either liberal or conservative, politically or religiously (Jesus was
neither, and both). To help redefine our spiritual identity, we need a
prophetic faith that takes on the corruption of both parties and
challenges the sense of entitlement held by both the religiously and the
politically powerful.
But, in the spirit of the transformation that Jesus sought of his
society, can we who have so easily failed the test of tolerance in the
past, can we do it in love? We should be angry at having our ideals
bought out from under us—angry with them, angry with ourselves for
allowing it to happen—but will an underlying compassion support our
outrage? The word “love” gets thrown around too easily these days, human
history the tale of how casually we mock the whole idea of loving our
neighbors: Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Kosovo and Rwanda, Chechnya and
Darfur, Jerusalem and Baghdad—where has love gone, where is there any
real milk and human kindness left?
These cannot be rhetorical questions. So let’s begin our search for a
way to make this happen by considering the word “love” in a context
offered by two outstanding thinkers of our time. First, from the noted
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in his book Justice and Mercy: “When we talk
about love we have to become mature,” he writes, “or we will become
sentimental. Basically, love means being responsible: responsible to our
family, toward our civilization, and now, by the pressures of history,
toward the universe of (all) humankind.”
Of course, life is not fair and it is never equal. Yet America’s
founders were speaking a great spiritual truth when they made the
not-so-self-evident assertion that “all are created equal” which became
the heart and the hope for this new nation; they saw America as a great
promise—and it is. But, now, it’s a broken promise, and we are called to
do what we can to fix it—to get America back on track—to move beyond
sentimentality so that our mature, responsible love leads to justice. We
are called to the fight of our lives.
Somehow our apathy and cynicism must be turned around so we may heed
President Kennedy’s call to “Ask not what your country can do for you
but what you can do for your country.” The good news is that millions of
people—especially the young—have recently registered to vote: perhaps
they’ve seen that each vote really does count (when allowed to be cast
and tallied, anyway); or perhaps these new voters were inspired—as we
should be—by these words of Isaiah: “O my people, your guides lead you
astray; they turn you from the path, for it is they who have destroyed
my vineyards, the spoils of the poor are in their houses. ‘What do you
mean by crushing my people and grinding the faces of the poor?’ declares
the Lord Almighty.”
Dorothy Day put it correctly: “No one has a right to sit down and feel
hopeless. There is too much work to do.” We do not each have to become
the next Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr or Mother Teresa—nor even a new
Francis David or Thomas Helwys. Yet, the work we are called to do is the
fight of our lives, as “we must lay one brick at a time, take one step
at a time.”
Kahlil Gibran wrote: “All work is empty save when there is love, for
work is love made visible.” For those whose love will be made
visible by working to make a difference, I offer these guidelines
adapted from the Boulder-based Satyana Institute:
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Be clear on your intentions, on what you want to make happen, and
don’t worry about the outcome; “The victory is in the doing,” said
Gandhi, not in the results;
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Integrity is your protection: if your work has integrity, negative
criticism and unforeseen circumstances will be less damaging to you; a
noble goal cannot be attained by ignoble means;
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Experience your fulfillment through gratitude for the privilege of
being called to do your work;
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Remember that your work is for the world, not for you: the results of
your efforts may not be known in your lifetime, yet your work can make
possible a better life for future generations.
Recall earlier I said that we should learn from two outstanding thinkers
of our time when it comes to supporting our outrage and our work in a
context of love: I have already quoted Reinhold Neibuhr. Now, to
conclude, I offer this wisdom for how to handle the inevitable impasse
that comes when working with another: it comes from the second
outstanding thinker, my wife’s four-year-old granddaughter who, after
arguing with her mother, back and forth, before finally understanding
that she isn’t going to get what she wants, will pause and then say:
“Well, I guess we’ll just have to work this out together.”
Not just think about it or talk about it; not pray about it or hope that
someone else will somehow do it; but “we’ll just have to work this out
together.” This is the great challenge in the fight of our lives.
CLOSING:
There is a Middle-Eastern legend about a little sparrow lying on her
back in the road. A man came by and asked: “What are you doing in the
road with your feet in the air?”
“I heard that the heavens were going to fall today,” replied the
sparrow.
“And you think your puny legs can hold up the heavens?” laughed the man.
“One does what one can,” said the sparrow. “One does what one can.”
May we be moved to do what we can—one brick at a time—in this fight of
our lives.
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