Christianity has left the public square
by Kenneth Briggs
From http://www.beliefnet.com/story/152/story_15276_1.html
Christianity Has Left the Public Square
American public religion is now a servant of the social order that
sets the real priority: material comfort.
By Kenneth Briggs
Politicians and pundits have once again this election cycle
discovered that the United States is awash in religion. Results from
the usual polls are used to prove the case: More than 9 in 10
Americans say they believe in God, nearly as many report that they
pray every day, and about a quarter go to church on Sunday.
Meanwhile, campaign managers and journalists imply, often ominously,
that religion is a wild card that can decide winners and losers by
meting out rewards and punishments to candidates who either agree or
disagree with various religious positions. Among the issues most
often mentioned as carrying political weight in the current campaign,
for example, are homosexual marriage and abortion.
Yet this is a faulty conclusion built upon a facile analysis. America
may be brimming with religion, but it is a kind that generally has
little to do with the traditions and teachings that underlie it. It
has become, for the most part, yet another servant of the economic
and social order that sets the real priorities: success and material
comfort. The prophets Jeremiah and Amos, who regularly scolded
ancient Israel for crushing the poor, have been sent to the woodshed.
In the process, Christianity has become a private concern, a rescue
squad to revive those crippled in free enterprise combat. It has
taken on the functions of therapy and self-help, preaching its own
version of self-centeredness that leaves political matters such
as "justice" far behind. Religion hasn't been booted out of the
public arena by mean-spirited secularists; it has largely quit going
out in public to bring the full message of its heritage.
Rather than looking critically at social policy, in the manner of the
prophets, Christians ignore or passively accept it at a time when
prophets are so urgently needed. Examples abound. Prominent CEOs sing
in the choir on Sunday and rob their corporations on Monday;
physicians say their morning prayers and bilk Medicare for
unnecessary surgery; Fellowship of Christian Athletes huddle in
worship in locker rooms before breaking the bones of their foes. Many
American Christians simply find ways to feel good in Sunday pews and
then get on with the real business the next day.
This monumental collapse of public religion into individualism and
self-seeking was dramatized two decades ago by Robert Bellah in
Habits of the Heart. Bellah claimed that among Americans, commitment
to concepts of the common good--the welfare of others and the
community--was being undermined in the face of a growing consumer
mentality that increasingly used religion to attain personal ends.
God had been increasingly cast as Therapist, for example, giving
harried Americans "permission" to do most anything. The trend was so
vast and deep, he said, that it was virtually unstoppable. Many would
argue now that, if anything, Bellah's analysis might even have been
understated.
As the land of freedom and opportunity, America has always been a
nation of people bent on success and improvement. No period of the
nation's history was governed purely by religious precepts. But it
could be argued that before the industrial revolution dawned in the
19th century, religion provided a frame of reference for public
policy, a canopy over its proceedings. This mindset was undoubtedly
flouted more often than it was honored, perhaps, but it was at least
a set of standards deemed worthy of serious consideration.
Christianity has always been prone to captivity by the culture since
it fell to the lures of the Roman Empire and began to benefit from
its position as the official state religion. But the church has not
always ignored its message for the sake of gaining favor. Two
examples: One was the religious uprising against a segregated
America, led by Martin Luther King Jr., when large numbers of church
people marched into the teeth of armed defenders of racial bigotry.
Their actions came with a price--for some, their lives--and made an
enormous difference with the passage of civil rights laws.
Another example was the "People's Church" movement in Latin America,
which linked Bible study with political and economic goals to advance
fairness for the poor. Much of it followed liberation theology and
brought great hope and real progress, though a nervous Vatican saw
people exercising their own authority as Catholics and condemned the
movement as "Marxist." The Pope issued two strongly worded messages
warning against the movement, and disciplinary action was taken
against liberation theologians such as Leonardo Boff. Nonetheless, it
spread across the continent. At one point, Brazil alone had as many
as 50,000 of these "base communities."
So Christianity can be practiced in the public square and obviously
has, though rarely.
But in America, Christians will go to the polls with choices formed
far more by their secular attachments than their religious
consciousness. The division between the two goes deep, to the chagrin
of many leading Christian thinkers. Harvey Cox, the Harvard
theologian, wrote a book four decades ago called The Secular City in
which he saw the secular realm as the sphere of God's activity while
institutional religion withered. At the same time he
deplored "secularism," or worshipping the secular for its own sake.
For most Americans calling themselves religious, worldly concerns are
likely to soundly trump broader matters of faith once they enter the
voting booth.
Both liberal and conservative churches have borne out such forecasts.
With some exceptions (I think of Sojourners), churches have stood
aside while the gap between rich and poor has widened, as public
schools in poor neighborhoods rot, as more than 40 million Americans
go without medical insurance, as the United States invades Iraq on
fraudulent grounds, as gambling juggernauts wreak havoc on countless
households, as the nation refuses to go all out fighting AIDS, and as
workers suffer poverty wages--to cite just some ills. The "What-Would-
Jesus-Do?" slogan seems never to raise that very question.
Even when religious leaders try to steer the vote, they lose. Roman
Catholic bishops, for example, have generally failed in efforts to
steer their people toward anti-abortion candidates and the attempt to
deny John Kerry communion for his pro-choice stance has only depleted
their authority. If religious leaders themselves can't influence
their own people on these topics, then politicians don't need to
worry much the impact of religious groups. The laity increasingly
believes that religion is indeed a private affair that has no
business challenging their "other lives."
I hear a loud protest: What about the religious right? Don't they
have clout? They demand prayer in schools, a ban on abortions, laws
against homosexual marriage and "under God" in the Pledge. Aren't
politicians dancing to their jig?
The priorities of the religious right are in fact more cultural than
religious. Take this lobby's strong support of capital punishment. It
received supporting arguments from religion, but it is grounded in
patterns of social control that includes racist lynching and
vigilantism. It is deeply cultural, coming from a long tradition of
southern militarism and frontier justice.
The religious right, to the extent that it is political, is merely a
creature of the political right itself rather than a movement that
gave rise to the right. As an appendage and supplicant, it has been
used and abused by the political right wing in its quest for power.
For all the ballyhoo over its alleged power, most evident in Pat
Robertson's Christian Coalition or Jerry Falwell's earlier Moral
Majority, such campaigns have been confined to those issues on which
it already finds consensus with the larger secular conservative
movement, such as its opposition to homosexual rights.
In any case, religion loses its soul when it morphs into a set of
rules such as the religious right is now pressing, from prayer in
schools to a ban on abortions.
Since the time of Roman Emperor Constantine, the church was always
absorbed within the empire or was made into a "state church." Our
nation's founders made it possible for religion to enter the public
square freely for the first time in 1,500 years. The U.S.
Constitution insisted on separation. That gave religion a chance to
do things differently, the freedom to speak its conscience. How
tragic if that blessing were squandered in idolatrous pursuit of the
American Dream.
