LONGING AND DESIRE IN PYRAMID LAND: THE QUESTION OF DEMOCRACY AND THE FAITH COMMUNITIES

 Slave labor is supposed to have built the giant pyramids of Egypt, like those at Giza, more than 4,500 years ago.  But was it really slavery under the oppressor’s lash or was it the connection the men and women hauling the giant stones made to their own place in the scheme of salvation?  Everything pointed them to an ironic hope in this giant sarcophagus they were building:  a place where a dead Pharaoh would go, somewhere up the river Styx, and maybe somehow bring them along?  The people’s only proof was in the giant building, the tallest thing ever built in the world.

 Modern slavish devotion to symbols of power suggests similarity. The recession recovery news is not just gloomy but dangerous. The first quarter economic uptick has turned abruptly south. March unemployment increased across most of the country. European austerity programs are suddenly collapsing and the regimes that designed them are losing elections across the continent.  In the U,. S. the data projections show that even under the best of circumstances unemployment will not fall below 9 percent until after 2016.  In California it will be after 2018. [see graphs below]

There are four persons standing in line for every available job. That’s why surviving veterans of many tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan are returning home to find themselves without jobs.  Pyramid theologies will not do for this predicament now turning for the worse after three years of recession.

As bond interest rates rise large segments of global society from Greece to Bank of America may quickly become unable to afford any more borrowing.  Comparisons are being drawn between the economic disarray in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and the rise of the Nazis.  The idea of market sovereignty, historian Eric Hobsbaum observes, “is not a compliment to liberal democracy but an alternative.” It represents “a sharp decline in ‘that divinity that doth hedge not only Shakespear’s kings,’ but the public symbols of national cohesion, a fading chance for citizen loyalty to legitimate government.”

As both President Obama and the Republicans head into elections against the winds of this prolonged unemployment and sharp  public disillusionment, there are several critical questions for faith communities to take seriously. The first is their own reluctance to embrace the role of judgment; the role of critical citizenship. Prayers in faith communities these days often end with the reassurance that somehow the grace of God extends as generously to the unjust as to the just. So what we do doesn’t matter that much, right?  This kind of sentiment seems to have crept up on faith communities along with institutional anxiety about their own future.  Of course, we might ask why faith communities should have a future in current discourse if they have abandoned the moral imperative of critical judgment?

There are therefore several things to watch for.  There is confusion about whether democracy is a process of civic engagement or a competition for domination and control.   Civic and faith communities can be and should be places of discernment where  alternative ideas are weighed about just and fair social and economic policy proposals. The danger of the Weimar years was growing public despair (they too had no jobs along with worthless money ruined by the domination of the powerful nations). This growing despair deepens if democratic practice is perceived as ceremonial; if it is thought that someone else beyond democratic reach is pulling the actual levers of power.

Major protest efforts and large scale mobilizations are planned for this spring and summer. We will see them on the Left and the Right.  Non-participation in a critical examination of the issues behind these mobilizations should not be an option.  There is a deep longing for a civic faith that does not worship pyramids.  Democratic practice must be thought of as a process of discernment among neighbors.

Passover, Death, Resurrection

      Speaking of Passover Death and Resurrection—last week’s Supreme Court hearings on the Health Care Law passed by a democratically elected Congress bring to memory the teaching of theologian Paul Tillich, famous for speaking about the rise of Adolph Hitler.

      The problem in that tragic era was the failure to recognize the demonic potential in every human proposal. For example, the glorious national future that lay just ahead, promised by both Nazism and Stalinism; a marvelously simple vision intended to destroy many old enemies (Jews, Socialists, etc.) and fulfill dreams. It’s truly monstrous new direction remained invisible to many followers as well as observers until it was too late. Tillich, not one of those, saw the human condition “in terms of disruption, conflict, self-destruction, meaninglessness, and despair in all realms of life.”

    

       He taught that real grace, true revelation and newness of life could only be found through building a new and just creation for all humankind. He had many students, including Martin Luther King, Jr.

     This all seemed especially applicable at last week’s Supreme Court hearing where twenty-six Republican states brought suit to declare the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.  Paul Clement, their attorney, argued to everyone’s exhaustion that the law was dangerously coercive; its individual mandate a violation of the voluntarism and individual liberty at the heart of the Constitution.

     The self-interest of the huge private sector health care industry was actually what was at stake.   The pious advocacy for the constitution gave a patina of social concern for a common good that was seldom mentioned by Mr. Clement. The idea of a demonic that rises up in human affairs is here perfectly illustrated: 

   

JUSTICE KAGAN:   “Mr. Clement… why is a big gift from the Federal government a matter of coercion? …the Federal government is…giving you a boatload of money. There are no matching funds requirements, there are no extraneous conditions attached to it, it's just a boatload of Federal money for you to take and spend on poor people's healthcare. It doesn't sound coercive to me, I have to tell you.

MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice Kagan, let me —I mean, I eventually want to make a point where even if you had a stand alone program that just gave 100 percent, again 100 percent boatload, nothing but boat load — well, there would still be a problem.

JUSTICE KAGAN: ….just a stand alone program, a boatload of money, no extraneous conditions, no matching funds, is coercive?

MR. CLEMENT: It is…. And the very big condition is that the States in order to get that new money, they would have to agree not only to the new conditions but the government here is — the Congress is leveraging their entire prior participation in the program….

JUSTICE KAGAN: But, Mr. Clement — Mr. Clement, how can that possibly be. When a taxpayer pays taxes to the Federal government, the person is acting as a citizen of the United States. When a taxpayer pays taxes to New York, a person is acting as a citizen of New York. And New York could no more tell the Federal government what to do with the Federal government's money than the Federal government can tell New York what to do with the moneys that New York is collecting.

MR. CLEMENT: Right…. But we all know that in the real world…the Federal government continues to increase taxes that decreases the ability of the States to tax their own citizenry and it's a real tradeoff….

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Are you suggesting that at a certain point the States would have a claim against the Federal government raising their taxes because somehow the States will feel coerced to lower their tax rate?

MR. CLEMENT: No, Justice Sotomayor, I'm not. What I'm suggesting is that it's not simply the case that you can say, well, it's free money, so we don't even have to ask whether the program's coercive.

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Now, counsel, [at] what percentage does it become coercive? Meaning, as I look at the figures…there are some states for whom the percentage of Medicaid funding to their budget is close to 40 percent, but there are others that are less than 10 percent.

....And you say, across the board this is coercive because no state, even at 10 percent, can give it up. What's the percentage of big gift that the federal government can give? Because what you're saying to me is, for a bankrupt state, there's no gift the federal government could give them ever, because it can only give them money without conditions….No matter how poorly the state is run, no matter how much the federal government doesn't want to subsidize abortions or doesn't want to subsidize some other state obligation, the federal government can't give them 100 percent of their needs.

MR. CLEMENT: [in his closing summary] It's really hard to understand tying the preexisting participation in the program as anything other than coercive. The Solicitor General makes a lot of the fact that there are optional benefits under this program. Well, guess what? After the Medicaid expansion there will be a lot less opportunity for the States to exercise those options, because one of the things that the expansion does — precisely because the expansion is designed to convert Medicaid into a program that satisfies the requirement of the minimum essential cover of the individual mandate, things that used to be voluntary will no longer be voluntary….

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Mr. Clement, may I ask one question about the bottom line in this case? It sounds to me like everything you said would be to the effect of, if Congress continued to do things on a voluntary basis, so we are getting these new eligibles, and say States, you can have it or not, you can preserve the program as it existed before, you can opt into this.

But you are not asking the Court as relief to say, well, that's how we cure the constitutional infirmity; we say this has to be on a voluntary basis. Instead, you are arguing that this whole Medicaid addition, that the whole expansion has to be nullified; and moreover, the entire health care act. Instead of having the easy repair, you say that if we accept your position, everything falls.

MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice Ginsburg, if we can start with the common ground that there is a need for repair because there is a coercion doctrine and this statute is coercion, then we are into the question of remedy. And we do think, we do take the position that you describe in the remedy, but we would be certainly happy if we got something here, and we got a recognition that the coercion doctrine exists; this is coercive; and we get the remedy that you suggest in the alternative.

     Theologian Paul Tillich’s students began to realize decades ago that “to caste out demons you had to call them by name.”