God and other famous liberals: reclaiming the politics of America Read online

  The same holds when generosity—the open heart and open hand—spills into profligacy. Contrary to recent punditry, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society did in fact sponsor several effective social programs, such as Head Start. But our inner cities did not benefit from undisciplined government giveaway programs. Paternalism proved a poor substitute for neighborliness. Compounding the damage, the liberal sponsorship of massive government intervention in such areas as school bussing and social engineering drove many middle-class and blue-collar constituencies into the unnatural embrace of the party of privilege.

  Not only was liberalism razed by bankrupt liberal policies but out of the ruins rose the illusion that, left to our own devices, individual citizens and corporations would prove far more effective agents of charity and social service than had the previous generation of government planners. Not surprisingly, the free market failed to deliver. During the Reagan years the gap between rich and poor grew more dramatically than ever before. The rising tide may have lifted all yachts and battleships but the rowboats were swamped in its wake. Even so, much of the responsibility for this rests squarely on liberal shoulders. One excess invites another; that's how pendulums swing.

  This is only half of the story, however. If liberalism fell from grace due to the excesses of some liberals, it also was pushed, a victim of adventitious right-wing rhetoric. During both the me-decade and the greed decade, liberalism proved an easy mark.

  Here is where the liberal tradition, if made vital once again, can be so regenerative. There is nothing attractive about selfishness, about climbing up other people's backs to get to the top, for the welfare of each is to a significant degree dependent on the welfare of all. When we lose sight of this, when the spirit of compassion and cooperation is supplanted by that of unsentimental and cutthroat competition, among the spoils that go to the victor are the spoils of classism, sexism, and racism, each of which rots the foundations of the commonweal.

  This continues into the 1990s. We have entered an era of tumultuous change. The world is shrinking; lines are shifting; comfortable boundaries are breaking down. Yet there will be no new world order without a new world ethic, an ethic of interdependence based on cooperation, not just competition, a win/win not win/lose, both /and not either /or ethic in which the good is not what one possesses but what one shares.

  Here the liberal spirit, both religious and political, meets entrenched and growing resistance. For instance, since bunkers are fashionable in uncertain times, throughout the world religious fundamentalism has new appeal, as does anything that promises a refuge from contemporary reality. So does jingoism, the idolatry of nationalism. In each case, the accompanying rhetoric, playing on people's fears—of the other, the outsider, the stranger—is enormously effective, but the consequences are devastating. Victims of our own fears, we are in danger of losing our soul. If my understanding of the liberal tradition is correct, the soul we are losing is the soul of America.

  To save that soul—though this may jerk the knee of many contemporary liberals—one must first remember that the liberal tradition of America is not merely a secular tradition. It flows along two streams that run parallel to one another and converge redemptively at critical moments in our nation's history. One is secular, but the other is decidedly religious.

  From the outset, the American experiment was a religious venture, inspired by a search for freedom of belief and founded according to covenant, a religious agreement based on mutual trust, and not (like a contract) on law. The Protestants who first settled this country invested individuals with direct spiritual authority, to be supplemented but not supplanted by church law. Even before the Pilgrims shared their newfound religious freedom with settlers of differing theological views, the covenant principle, central to Puritan theology, established a basis for participation that led naturally to democracy and mitigated against hierarchy. Children of the Reformation, the Puritans emphasized the principle of private judgment. Casting into question the exclusive authority of religious hierarchies, they replaced it with a new and far more democratic principle: the priesthood and prophethood of all believers. By stressing the autonomy of the individual conscience, this opened one door to liberalism.

  Enlightenment thinkers who fashioned our government opened the other door. It too had a religious key, shaped according to the law of nature and nature's God. In addition, underscoring the primacy of private judgment and conscience, our founders' insistence on separation of church and state complemented their Puritan forebears' spiritual aspirations.

  In Europe, political modernization and democratization were unabashedly secular. Both met resistance from religious ideologues, who shared in the privileges granted by the monarchy and therefore remained faithful to the threatened ruling establishment. In contrast, our revolution was inspired by people of faith, individuals who, in the Declaration of Independence, appealed "to the Supreme Judge of the world for the Rectitude of our intentions," expressed "a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence," and drew from the religious tradition of natural law—today unnaturally feared by some liberals—to declare that all are "created equal and given certain inalienable rights." That liberty which benefits each and should therefore be possessed by all is nothing if not a religious idea.

  Throughout our country's history these two liberal streams, secular and religious, flow in and out of one another's channels. Abraham Lincoln regarded the Declaration of Independence as spiritually regenerative. Martin Luther King, Jr., drew both real and rhetorical inspiration from the "American proposition" that all people are created equal. Declaration signer Benjamin Rush, a Universalist from Pennsylvania, claimed that democracy "is a part of the truth of Christianity. It derives power from its true source. It teaches us to view our rulers in their true light. It abolishes the false glare which surrounds kingly government, and tends to promote the true happiness of all its members as well as of the whole world, for peace with everybody is the true interest of all republics." As described by American church historian Sidney Mead, "the theology of the republic" reverberates profoundly throughout our history.

  To neglect the mutuality of the democratic and biblical spirit, especially as perceived by many of our nation's architects and social activists, is to strip American liberalism of its transformational power. In his book, Under God, Gary Wills says it well:

  Religion has been at the center of our major political crises, which are always moral crises—the supporting and opposing of wars, of slavery, of corporate power, of civil rights, of sexual codes, of "the West," of American separatism and claims to empire. If we neglect the religious element in all those struggles, we cannot even talk meaningfully to each other about things that affect us all.

  Yet the moment our profoundly religious national character is acknowledged, certain civil libertarians, dogged in opposition to any hint of religion in the public square, profess their fear that the line of separation between church and state, prudently drawn and beneficial to both, will be blurred. If the American religious tradition is abandoned by liberals and left to the religious right, these fears may be justified. But this would be to cede both flag and Bible to those who reject the liberal impulse that informed both.

  Besides, abdication is unnecessary. The surest protection against an un-American co-option of government by religious sectarians continues to lie in the proclamation of biblical truths as understood by so many of our country's founders and prophets. From the outset, politics and religion have mixed in America, sometimes caustically, but often to profound effect. Their marriage gave birth to the liberal tradition. Only the renewal of their vows will keep it strong.

  The key is community. The basic family values, civic and religious, that have helped to define our country at its best become central to any sustained renewal of the national spirit. For years these values have served within parochial communities to bring people together. Today, with the concept of neighborhood changing as rapidly as the globe is shrinking, a liberal family policy mus
t take into account not only discreet families but as many members of the extended human family as can be accommodated. To help us find our way, there are blueprints in the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, and such symbols as the Liberty Bell and the Statue of Liberty. Nonetheless, the natural human tendency, honed over generations by the utility of tribalism, remains resistant to pluralism. Here we struggle with a new reality, for pluralism is emerging as the one essential ingredient for functional community in a global village. As Benjamin Franklin said—and never has it been more true—either we all hang together, or we will all hang separately. We even put it on our money. The American motto is E pluribus unum, out of many, one.

  To help reclaim this spirit—America at its best—I shall begin with the Bible, turn to our nation's history, and close with the family. As both the noble and sorry chapters of our history remind us, God, country, and family will either thrive or languish together. That is the thesis of this book.

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  Reclaiming the Bible

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  The Most Famous Liberal of All

  And God saw that it was good. —Genesis 1:12

  Who IS THE MOST famous liberal of all time? It simply has to be God. No one is more generous, bounteous, or misunderstood. Not to mention profligate. Take a look at the creation. God is a lavish and indiscriminate host. There is too much of everything: creatures, cultures, languages, stars; more galaxies than we can count; more asteroids in the heavens than grains of sand on earth. Talk about self-indulgence, in the ark itself, if you take the story literally, there must have been a million pairs of insects. We may not like it, but that's the way it is.

  Every word I can conjure for God is a synonym for liberal. God is munificent and openhanded. The creation is exuberant, lavish, even prodigal. As the ground of our being, God is ample and plenteous. As healer and comforter, God is charitable and benevolent. As our redeemer, God is generous and forgiving. And, as I said, God has a bleeding heart that simply never stops. Liberal images such as these spring from every page of creation's text. They also characterize the spirit, if not always the letter, of the Bible, which teaches us that God is love.

  Admittedly, God's love is hard to approximate. To begin with, God created us in many colors; we come in many faiths, and two genders, with differing sexual preferences, a whole spectrum of political views, and widely varying tastes in food and dress. Such variety raises the level of difficulty as we try to live together in amity. It also requires that—created in the image of God—we cultivate the liberal spirit, especially as it enjoins open-mindedness and respect for those who differ from us, each a necessary virtue in our pluralistic world.

  Though experience and observation lead me to describe God as a liberal, liberal is not a big enough word for God. God is more than liberal, much more generous and neighborly, far more imprudent than the wildest liberal on your block or mine. Most revealing of all, God's gift to us is beyond anything we deserve or could possibly have expected: the gift of life.

  In the early middle ages, one school of mystical theologians, Dionysius principal among them, argued that, given the limitations of our knowledge and our vocabulary, the best way to describe God is by saying what God is not. Following Dionysius Ave can turn things around and say with great confidence that God is not illiberal. God is not miserly, parsimonious, penurious, or stingy. God is not narrow or rigid. Neither closefisted nor tightfisted, God is never spare when giving change.

  God is also not God's name; God is our name for the highest power we can imagine. For some the highest imaginable power will be a petty and angry tribal baron ensconced high above the clouds on a golden throne, visiting punishment on all who don't believe in him. But for others, the highest power is love, goodness, justice, or the spirit of life itself. Each of us projects our limited experience on a cosmic screen in letters as big as our minds can fashion. For those whose vision is constricted—illiberal, narrow-minded people—this can have horrific consequences. But others respond to the munificence of creation with broad imagination and sympathy. Answering to the highest and best within and beyond, they draw lessons and fathom meaning so redemptive that surely it touches the divine.

  Proposing that God is not God's name is anything but blasphemous. When Moses asks who he is talking to up there on Mount Sinai, the answer is not "God," but "I am who I am," or "I do what I do." That's what the word Yahweh means. When the Hebrews later insisted that it not be written out in full, they were guarding against idolatry: the worshiping of a part (in this case the word-symbol for God) in place of the whole (that toward which the word-symbol points). Politicians and theologians who claim that "God is on our side" often forget that "I am who I am" may have little to do with who we say God is. When we kill in the name of God, hate in the name of God, or justify an illiberal spirit in God's name, this is blasphemy.

  Simply turn on the evening news. Somewhere in the world terrorists for truth and God are blowing up embassies, airplanes, and Planned Parenthood clinics. From Northern Ireland to the Middle East, God's self-proclaimed champions fight to the death, raising a gun in one hand and a Bible, the Koran, or some other holy book (perhaps written by Karl Marx or Chairman Mao) in the other. Many of our ancestors did the same, equipped with proof texts to drive home the point of their spears. Far too often war is synonymous with religious war: Catholic against Protestant; Shiite against Sunni; Muslim against Jew. Even the Greek gods chose sides.

  Throughout history millions of people have killed or died in God's name. Religious passion is human passion writ large. When we care deeply, it is because we believe fiercely. This is especially true of religious belief. Our very salvation is at stake. In contests with underlying religious motivation, it is understood that we and our enemy cannot each be right. Too often what escapes us is that we both may be wrong. Religious wars of words can be equally ferocious. Spiritual leaders have long since perfected the rhetoric of bellicosity to damn their chosen adversaries. Even those right-wing Christians, Islamic warriors, and Jewish fundamentalists who don't go in for plastic explosives often enlist as soldiers for a fierce and vengeful God who damns more often than he saves, a hanging judge serving their own narrow interests.

  When individuals without sympathy give the name God to the highest power they can imagine, their experience may construe this power to be as brutal as a wicked stepparent, imperious as an absolute monarch, strict as a boot-camp sergeant, wanton as an invading marauder. It is impossible for me to believe in such a God. Projecting my limited experience of the greatest concepts I know—love, goodness, generosity, kindness, and neighborliness—I see not a monarch (powerful, distant, judgmental, capricious, and controlling) but the spirit of love, working with us not against us, in a cooperative relationship, and for our common good. Reading both the tea leaves of creation and the high points of scripture, I can think of few adjectives that encompass the sweep, vitality, and heart implicit in both creation and the Bible as eloquently as does the word liberal.

  People sometimes tell me they don't believe in God. I ask them to tell me a little about the God they don't believe in, because I probably don't believe in "him" either. I don't believe in the great father in the sky armed with a bolt of lightning aimed at the heart of his adversaries. I don't believe in a God that saves some people from airplane crashes, earthquakes, or hurricanes, while grinding others to dust under his merciless heel. I don't believe in a God who glibly chooses sides, and then brings in the heavy artillery. If the God they disbelieve in is anything like the God I disbelieve in, their God is too small.

  Since our understanding of God is grounded in experiences of love and death, good and evil, peace and war, we cannot help but draw analogies from nature, history, and science in our attempt to approximate who or what God might be. We humans are not the animal with tools or the animal with language; we are the religious animal. Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and
having to die. When we discover we must die, we question what life means. "Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going and why?"

  These are religious questions. Children ask them. So do adults, when we can't avoid them. When a loved one dies, or we are given three months to live, the roof caves in on our carefully circumscribed existence. But there are other times when life, in all its awe-inspiring majesty, dazzles us and blows our roof away. In this two-chambered crucible of bewilderment and wonder our religion is forged.

  So it was for the biblical Jacob, who wrestles for life and meaning with a mysterious heavenly messenger. Having struggled all night long, when dawn finally breaks Jacob demands to know his adversary's name. "Don't worry about my name," the angel replies. "It is completely unimportant. All that matters is that you held your own during a night of intense struggle. You will walk with a limp for the remainder of your days, but that is simply proof that in wrestling for meaning you did not retreat, but gave your all. Therefore, though my name is unimportant, I shall give you a new name, Israel, 'one who wrestled with both divinity and humanity, and prevailed. ' "

  Taking its clue from this encounter, liberal theology is grounded on the dual principles of humility and openness. Beginning with humility—and it may be a truism—the more we know of life and death and God, the greater our ignorance appears. Beyond every ridge lies another slope and beyond every promontory looms yet another vast and awesome range. However far we trek, while cursed (or blessed) with the knowledge of our own mortality, we shall never finally know the answer to the question why.