The Faith Pendulum

I have only just started reading Jesus and the Disinherited, the slim volume that Jim suggested in response to my call for reading recommendations. Though it was written and published in the 1940s, it's almost impossible not to read it in context of what's happening today as the blending of religion and government comes closer and closer to reality.

I almost hesitate to comment on it, because I fear that in approaching the subject of Christianity I will very quickly find myself out of my depth. However, as I was reading some of Howard Thurman's words from decades ago, I kept hearing echos of another more recent work. I can't quite resist commenting before I've finished Thurman's work. In his preface, he writes:

Why is it that Christianity seems impotent to deal radically, and therefore effectively, with the issues of discrimination and injustice on the basis of race, religion and national origin? Is this impotency due to a betrayal of the genius of the religion, or is it due to a basic weakness in the religion itself?

It's obvious that today one might broaden Thurman's categories to include gender, sexual orientation, and economic status, just to name a few. He goes, on in his first chapter to write the following.

To those who need profound succor and strength to live in the present with dignity and creativity, Christianity has often been sterile and of little avail. The confentional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague. Too often the price exacted by soceity for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in it's formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak. …it reveals the extent to which a religion born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and a of nations whose very position in modern life has too often been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless peoples.

If that didn't take your breath away, read it again and ask yourself if Thurman would write that passage any differently if he were able to observe he brand of Christianity exhibited by the likes of George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, James Dobson, and the rest of the usual suspects. If ever there was a brand of Christianity "on the side of the strong against the weak," I think we have a winner today. I suspect Thurman might add one word. Simply, "amen."

Reading Thurman's words reminded me of some words by George Lakoff, that I read some months ago, buried deep in his book Moral Politics : How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Would that I had the time to go back an search for Lakoff's words, but it comes down to his explanation of conservative metaphors for morality, particularly the metaphor of morality as strength.

In the conservative mind, the metaphor of moral strength has the highest priority. Though it clusters with other metaphors that we consider shortly, it is the one that matters most. It determines much of conservative thought and language -- as well as social policy. …The morally weak are evil and deserve what they get. …An important consequence of giving highest priority to the metaphor of Moral Strength is that it rules out any explanations in terms of social forces or social class. If it is always possible to muster the discipline to just say no to drugs or sex and to support yourself in this land of opportunity, then failure to do so is laziness and social class and social forces cannot explain your poverty or your drug habit or your illegitimate children. And if you lack such disciple, then by the metaphor of Moral Strength, you are immoral and deserve any punishment you get.

In my unstudied view, for there are countless others more well-read in this area, and who have thought more about it, it makes for a world view in which the "strength" of wealth and well being are seen as signs of moral rightness, the very state being being among the "disinherited," as Thurman calls them—"those who need profound succor and strength to live in the present with dignity and creativity"—is a sign of moral failure. It makes it easy to consider that the poor and disenfranchised deserve to be such because of their moral failings, as evidenced by the fact that they are poor, disenfranchised, etc., for if they had the "right moral values" they would not be such.

I have a lot more to read, and certainly a lot more to understand.  But considering that Thurman's work is said to have influenced and shaped the civil rights movement, with it's own flavor of "liberation theolory" and the idea that "God" is on the side of the disinherited and oppressed, looking at where we are now makes it seem as though the momentum that moved the pendulum of faith through its arc from right to left has swung it back right again. Thinking on that, I find myself wondering: how long is that arc? And how long before it swings back this way?

Comments

[Joe Perez]

Terrance,

I prefer the metaphor of evolving waves to that of the pendulum. Let me expand on this for a moment.
The pendulum suggests that there is a reigning religious sensibility (liberal or conservative) and history oscillates between them. But at any given time in history, there are both liberal and conservative elements duking it out. I see the conservative and liberal elements as successive waves. The conservative wave is first and largest, and the progressive wave follows.

Of course, conservatives don't see themselves riding an evolutionary wave with the liberals out before them, at a more evolved state. They see the liberals as spiritually and morally degenerate. Conservatives thus attack liberals using metaphors such as Moral Weakness that never fully appreciate the new insights that the liberals have brought to the table. They are blind and unable to move forward.

Liberals sometimes see themselves riding a more evolved wave with the conservatives out behind. Liberation theology often fits into this camp. But more often they see themselves as a rival to the conservatives (flat, binary metaphors of Left and Right, for example). And when religious liberals make breakthroughs by forging effective coalitions with others--secularists, for example--it can sure look to them like the binary pendulum has swung their way. But liberals have a perspective that's more complex, sophisticated, and evolved than the conservatives ... and one that necessary builds on the truths, values, and strengths of the conservatives (as all evolutionary waves do). When liberals begin to see themselves as on the same evolutionary continuum as the conservatives, it becomes harder for them to think in binary metaphors. Parents don't eat children. Molecules don't destroy their own cells.

So to your rhetorical questions: "How long is that arc? And how long before it swings back this way?" I would say there is no arc. Fundamentalist and traditionalist Christianity is a pathological wave of evolutionary development. Presuming that it doesn't destroy the health of the whole social ecosystem (which with radical Islamic terrorism is a small risk), then the lifespan of this "arc" is the span of the extinction of the pathology in the course of social evolution. And like anything facing its own extinction, the pathology is unlikely to go quietly. Just the opposite. However, the pendulum is swinging back ... it is always swinging back ... the civil rights and gay rights movements are signs that the pendulum is swinging back ... but we are frequently caught in painful, ugly, sometimes violent backlash.

Enough for now.