It's a rare occassion when I feel proud to be a theologian/religious scholar, mostly because our topics have the tendency to get lofty and off the ground (so to speak). But recently, when flipping through magazines like Harpers and The New Yorker and reading newspaper articles in the NY Times, I am struck with the relevance of smart religious rhetoric in public discourse. As we see with growing frequency, headlines pairing political candidates and faith-based belief systems abound during the election season. When it comes down to it, the average citizen wants to know what the person representing them believes about ultimate reality, salvation, moral decision-making and public vs private ways of 'doing' faith. And thank God! Richard Niebuhr once said "religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people." A telling of difference between the former and the latter happens when we have the courage to interrogate belief systems, a move that is often taboo and uncomfortable in public. Though many candidates pay lip service to God, their conclusions about God and application of that belief in real-life, are not qualitatively equal in content. Curtis White in a recent article entitled "Hot Air Gods" says:
Religious freedom has come to this: where everyone is free to believe whatever she likes, there is no real shared conviction at all, and hence no church and certainly no community. Strangely, our freedom to believe has achieved the condition that Nietzsche called nihilism, but by a route he never imagined. (...) Our (American) nihilism is our capacity to believe in everything and anything all at once. It's all good! Ultimately, our beliefs become just another form of what the media call "content." (...) In short, belief becomes a culture-commodity. We shop among competing options for belief.
(Harpers Vol 315, No 1891 pp 13)
Again, I stress that not all belief systems are equal, and certainly the application of those beliefs in the shaping of our lives--individually and communally--differ drastically. Being able to see through paper-thin religious rhetoric masking corporate/capitalist ideology is important these days. This country, with its reliance on foreign aid, addiction to war-making, and isolation from the international community cannot afford to place its security in profit and aggression any longer. I agree with Judith Butler who writes "both our political and ethical responsibilities are rooted in the recognition that radical forms of self-sufficiency and unbridled sovereignty are, by definition, disrupted by the larger global processes of which they are a part, that no final control can be secured, and that final control is not, cannot be, an ultimate value." So if final control is not our ultimate value, what is?
Fact: we lack control. We are at the mercy of free-acting agents and naturally self-imposing entities every minute of the day. Whether or not we admit it, this fact of life scares the shit out of us--sometimes in an all-consuming way, and other times in a low-grade, just-below-the-surface anxiety. This is the oceanic existential condition that religion deals with for better and worse. My friend Wade has a hypothesis: "our religious task is not to provide certainty but to help people cope with uncertainty in an undetermined world." When we are faced with fear and uncertainty, a belief system that encourages us to grasp and seize betrays the potential and possiblities inherent in life for resourceful collaboration, graceful improvisation, and new-birth in relationships.
As our country decides on who will lead us into the next phase of this experimental democracy, I hope religious scholars and theologians will continue to collaboratively write, read and speak out to the heart of the people. The last 8 years have cast a deep shadow over the land: now is the time when the light can break through with greater strength and potency than ever before...and I'm not talking about a political party or particular candidate. Let us prepare it room...together.
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