The Potential for Democratic Collapse: Can Faith Communities Make a Difference?

   

With the Polar ice pack melting, unusually severe storms increasing and a dysfunctional American democracy, it’s a good time to ask a lot of questions about faith and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice of Capitalism.  A prime example is the increasingly powerful interests at play in the fossil fuels empire that are releasing both floods of shale drilling and a growing corruption and political recklessness that could sink American democracy.      

As inequality grows such forces are compelling economically vulnerable people to sell partial land rights for fracking and shale drilling.   They are becoming increasingly helpless today and this is a condition that should invite the liberating and prophetic power of the faith traditions. But is that real any longer?  

Compare the last hundred years of faith community activism with today’s faith-based localism.  The “social gospel” in the early 1900s gripped faith-based consciences over terrible factory and mining working conditions, including exploitation of women and child labor.  A Federal Council of Churches was convened with thousands of faith leaders at its founding assembly in 1908. They adopted  an historic fourteen point ethically-based Social Creed that helped propel a progressive movement whose reforms under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson changed the whole landscape of public health protections and worker rights.

 After WW II faith communities gathered in Amsterdam to form a World Council of Churches to rethink and begin to reconstruct a post-Hitler world. Their mission was two-fold: theological in the wake of Nazism’s failed “religious” rationales and the Allies failure to advocate against the Holocaust; and humanitarian as they supported creation of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and relocate millions of displaced persons to new secure beginnings.

Again, in the 1950s U. S. faith groups (tardily but finally) created ecumenical agencies and interfaith coalitions for civil rights inspired by many prophetic figures of the times, including Martin Luther King, Jr.  Creating ecumenical agencies for racial justice a National Council of Churches and a national office of religion and race furthered the Civil Rights Movement in local communities where local congregations felt too threatened to raise their voices.  These faith communities played a key role in passage of the Civil Rights act of 1954.

This is no longer real, nearly all lapsed today in favor of a “localism” intended to encourage individual participation rates while avoiding the public square controversies of the civil rights days that broke up many local congregations. 

It’s not an organizational or tactical question any longer. What’s at stake is the power of religious language itself, the power of a mythic moral vision about an exodus to freedom from slavery, about dry bones coming alive, about god born in poverty, about a city with waters of life flowing through it, about everlasting life. Theologian Paul Tillich taught that the symbol (for example, of faith) participated in the reality which it represents.  

What’s at stake as democracy hurtles toward the cliff’s edge is whether the symbolic language of faith is real anymore.  Today, it’s in the hands and voices of the people of faith to answer that question.  More  soon about faith-based roles in the public square.