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.