Saturday, April 7, 2012

Christian Nation

The more I think about it, the more I really do wish that the Blue Team would concede the terms of the game and actually wage an election on the question "which party is more Christian?" I know we couldn't actually change anyone's votes, but I think it would be valuable to have that discussion out in the open. It would rehabilitate Christianity in the minds of those who, like me, have come to see religion as just another bludgeon used to beat the Other into submission.

There are many arguments I would mobilize were I the chair of the DNC. I'm sure you can imagine most of them. But, like Felix, I like the sight of my own words, so I'm going to explicitly state one upon which I recently stumbled. Feel free to be bored.

At the end of my third year at Whitman College, I took a seminar course in the religion department entitled "Religion and Science." It remains one of the most exciting intellectual experiences of my life. I have recently (well, not recently, but I'm slow, so I'm still not done) re-reading the central texts we read over the course of that semester. I am currently 85% through Ian Barbour's "Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues." In one of the many paragraphs on the Christian view of human nature, Barbour writes:

"Paul Tillich identifies sin with three dimensions of estrangement. Sin is estrangement from other persons in self-centeredness and lovelessness. It is estrangement from our true selves in pursuing fragmented and inauthentic goals. It is estrangement from God, the ground of our being, in attempted self-sufficiency. For Tillich, estrangement, brokenness, and division can be overcome only in reconciliation, healing, and wholeness. To Tillich's three forms of sin I would add a fourth: estrangement from nonhuman nature by denying its intrinsic value and violating our interdependence. I suggest that sin, in all its forms, is a violation of relatedness."

This idea of sin (focusing on the four types of estrangement) calls into question the assertion that the United States is a "Christian nation." Usually, that assertion is countered with the argument: "no; the First Amendment and 222 years of legal interpretation establish ours as a secular government." In my Fantasy Election, I would counter it with "no; we are not a Christian nation; we in no way act like one."

I do not think I misspeak when I say that most interpretations of Christianity hold that humans are wholly dependent on Jesus for their spiritual salvation. You cannot earn your way into heaven. Nothing you do can ever be good enough. You are wholly dependent on God's forgiveness. Hence Tillich's idea of sin as "estrangement from God....in attempted self-sufficiency." Contrast that with the American mythology of the self-made person, succeeding exclusively by the sweat of his or her own brow without relying on anyone else. These self-made people are the ideal to which we must all aspire, and if you find yourself dependent on social institutions like Welfare or Medicare/aid, it is because you have failed and are in some way inferior. There are, of course, secular reasons that this myth is a falsehood. Elizabeth Warren does a particularly good job of laying one out (in my mind, she does a particularly good job of most things...). Religiously, I would ask: why the cognitive dissonance? Why is it a sign of inferiority (or even sin?) to be dependent in our Earthly lives but a definitional aspect of humanity that we are dependent spiritually? Are we fallen, or not? Are we broken, or not? Maybe you can have it both ways, but not without first having the discussion. Politicians like Rick Santorum make their bread and butter talking about "equality of outcome" versus "equality of opportunity," but there's a lot of distance between true "equality of outcome" and making sure poverty and unemployment are not death sentences*. We can achieve the latter. All we have to do is act like Christians (or Jews, or Muslims, or Buddhists...really, anyone who believes there is something more important than self).

*Don't get me started on how a nation that claims to follow the teachings of an innocent victim of capital punishment routinely fights tooth-and-claw to defend its right to execute people.

I suspect things like this are going to become the new gist of this blog. Be forewarned.