The Dangerous Ground of American Popular Theology
Candidate Rick Santorum’s fulsome language of faith as he left Iowa to begin his week in New Hampshire was mocked by Jon Stewart the next evening, who caricatured a fickle and arbitrary god who plays favorites: blessing one way here, another way there. This lifts the curtain on the dangerous ground of American popular theology.
Outside the candidates’ walled chambers is a nation where the top 20 percent of the American populace holds roughly 93 percent of the country's financial wealth and the bottom 4o percent controls just 1 percent. A Pew study last summer reported that the median wealth of Hispanics had declined 66 percent. Asian immigrants’ wealth declined 54 percent, and African-Americans’ wealth is down 53 percent White decline during the same recession period is down only 16 percent.
Santorum’s resonance cannot be missed. It connects not only with the apparently monolithic audience he attracts, but also with the popular religion Jon Stewart mocks. On the campaign trail common parlance begins on the theme of restoring America to its “greatest” standing in the world and ends with the encomium “May God bless America.”
Just how serious and dangerous this is grows from a “candidate religion” that very closely mirrors every day religious practice in many U. S. congregations. As long as candidates and others remain in closed chambers that separate them from real world diversity and economic complications, this brand of religion amounts to easy grace. In many Christian congregations where social and economic particulars are considered off-limits, the liturgical answer invokes a loving God who in the end will forgive you everything.
This blinds people’s moral capacity to look at facts and respond with outrage and action. Facts like the enormous fraud conducted by the financial industry; facts like the current unemployment levels, ruinous home foreclosures (ruinous to both people and whole communities) and the continued shipment overseas of jobs created in the U S. We’re not talking economic necessity here, we’re talking economic betrayal. And the political danger in this election year is that both the people and the candidates may prefer blindness to a fierce struggle for justice.
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Growing Political Power From Money
On any given day in Washington, D.C., the city’s hotels teem with civic activity. Trade associations, lobbies, corporations seeking government contracts, lawyers looking to influence agency rules—all form a beehive of action. At last count, there were 12,200 registered lobbyists in Washington, according to opensecrets.org, and that doesn’t include the many thousands of corporate attorneys who are technically not lobbyists. Of the top-spending trade associations or issue organizations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce leads the list with a budget of more than $46 million. Only one quasi-liberal group, the AARP, is even in the top 20. This is the vision of Alexis de Tocqueville made flesh, with one notable difference: Nearly everyone in this associational paradise speaks for the top 1 percent or 2 percent of the income distribution.
Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, famously identified “the art of association” as an essential complement to American constitutional democracy. The franchise was only the beginning of an effective republic. Political associations, to Tocqueville, were “great free schools” of democracy. They breathed civic life into formally democratic institutions of government. To engage with public issues, people did so more effectively in groups, not as isolated individuals. “Americans of all ages, all stations of life … are forever forming associations,” he wrote admiringly.
But something has changed dramatically since Tocqueville wrote those words in 1840. [to read the entire article click on “All stations of life” no longer applies. Civic and political association and the organized exercise of influence have increased for the elite and have all but collapsed for the bottom half, even for the bottom three-quarters.
Thus, while inequalities of campaign finance have gotten most of the attention and indignation of reformers, participatory inequality is just as important. Perhaps it is even more important, since the most promising antidote to the narrow, concentrated power of wealth is the broad power of organized people. When non-rich people are disorganized, disconnected from practical politics, or overwhelmed by the networking power of elites, money rules. {To continue reading this very important analysis click on http://prospect.org/article/tocqueville-toffs ]
Chuck's succinct observations are on target! Political campaigners are evoking a popular religion which talks much about personal American values, and yet shies away from addressing the blatant corruption and exploitation of people and the huge societal issues of our day.
ReplyDeleteFrom a "Jew in the Pew's" perspective, none of these candidates are talking about what Jesus would have talked about were he walking around in our time. He'd be a 99% protester, sleeping in a tent in front of a Wall Street bank. Most sadly, even though a huge number of young Americans resonate with John Stewart's humor about the silly antics of candidates claiming God's mandate, laughter does not result in action. John Stewart is no Micah and we really do need a Micah nowadays.
ReplyDeleteThanks for these comments. Let's keep the conversation going! The critical passion of Micah and Jesus was a vision of God's justice built in the here and now of their own times. Embracing that vision means, I believe, both telling new stories about ourselves--who we are today--by pointing our own critical words at the architecture of inequality. Few people in powerful places will thank us for this. We'll need to cure our own vulnerability to being admired and liked.
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