September
2006
Getting Out of the Bubble: The Urgent Need for a New Christian Realism
The Right’s appropriation of Reinhold Niebuhr’s legacy is, to me, a significant if minor footnote to the overall chronicle of a triumphant conservative resurgence in the course of four decades. What the right-wingers like about Niebuhr, it goes without saying, is his willingness, especially later in his long career, to sanction the use of U.S. military power for worthy ends. My purpose is not to apotheosize Niebuhr or to excuse his susceptibility to the blandishments of the powerful. I want simply to focus in on Niehbuhr’s core insight that Christians should see the world as it is and act ethically in the light of a clear-sighted realism. For the neoconservatives and for most other Right ideologues, “realism” means understanding how bad they are–all the “enemies of freedom,” “Islamo-fascists,” etc.; yet surely a major part of Niebuhr’s realism entailed understanding our own propensity to sinning, our own capacity for self-deception and hubris. It’s this kind of Christian Realism that is in critically short supply right now.
Clear-sighted realism, whether Christian or otherwise, is a scarce commodity in all of contemporary U.S. culture, suggesting that American Christians, for the most part, are every bit as encapsulated in the corporate-media mystification bubble as everyone else. The fact that fully 40 percent of adult Americans–and a solid majority of self-described Christians–still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11 attacks only begins to scratch the surface of Americans’ boundless ignorance and credulity.
Other evidence of the advanced decay of critical faculties in this land:
- a public that seems barely aware, let alone alarmed, over the implications of Bush’s push to get his official eavesdropping, his military tribunals (which allow the use of coerced evidence), and official U.S. government torture retroactively legalized by Congress; this latest push–and this administration’s concomitant fearmongering about terrorists at the gate–amounts to nothing else than an attempted coup d’etat, but almost no one seems attuned to that reality. All the White House needs to do to advance its agenda is to bray, “Do you want to give Miranda rights to terrorists?” Very few seem to be fazed or outraged by the depth of such villainy.
- a public that continues to be ruled by fear in our “home of the brave.” In this fear-ridden land, it is hard for us even to imagine how the Londoners of 1940, who saw 30,000 (not 3,000) of their neighbors die, and 100,000 houses destroyed during the first six days of the German blitz, kept going about their business with utter calm and courage, refusing to surrender to their fear.
- a public that may have finally turned against the Iraq war but only because that war looks unwinnable and not because the whole premise of the war was profoundly immoral and illegal
- a huge majority of self-described Christians who can still judge George W. Bush to be a deeply moral and decent man despite his obvious lack of a moral compass
- almost no public agitation for the impeachment of this president for Bush’s easily-documented high crimes and misdemeanors: misleading Congress in the run-up to the Iraq war, recklessly endangering members of our armed forces, openly violating key provisions of the Constitution, etc.
- a public that still doesn’t seem to understand how thoroughly its pockets are being picked by the set of policies that constitute what Bush and his cohorts are pleased to call an “ownership society.”
It is this last blindness, I think, that holds the key to the rest. The heart of our collective stupor is connected to the way Americans think of themselves as consumers rather than as citizens. So we don’t care, for example, if the oil is running out or if carbon emissions are suffocating the earth itself; what we care about is whether the price of gas is going to go up to $4. We tell pollsters that we’re still doing okay because we’re still spending at a rate that makes us happy, even if our household savings are nonexistent and we are funding our purchases on maxed-out credit cards and shaky home equity loans. We take comfort in the fact that the U.S. still has the world’s most productive economy, but we fail to see that the price of that productivity is chronic overwork, not technological innovation or wise use of productive capital.
Consumption is a lonely pursuit, but it’s a pursuit that accords perfectly with the high level of small-bore anxiety that rules our culture. Shouldn’t I trade up and out of this tired-looking house? Have I bought enough gear to make my kids feel okay with their school peers? Why can’t I take the kind of vacation my co-workers take instead of going to the same old place every year? I don’t have an I-pod or a Mac computer or a plasma TV–is there something wrong with me?
Consumerism pits me against other consuming monads. It invites me to think about how well I will fare when I’m ready for retirement, how I am going to cope with outrageous health care costs, how I will finesse getting the education I need in order to compete for material success; it definitely does not invite us to think collectively about how we will fare in retirement, maintain our health, or gain education for the enhancement of life itself rather than for purposes of workplace competition. This latter way of thinking–thinking about the “we” and doing so with the benefit of critical consciousness–is the business of citizenship, not consumerism.
But aren’t Christians supposed to be about the “we”? Did not Jesus teach us to pray, ”Our Father, who art in Heaven” and “give us this day our daily bread”? Did he not warn us not to “store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt and where thieves break through and steal”? Did he not say, “whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant” and “woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation”?
For more than three centuries of the North American experience, a very significant number of Christians did in fact concern themselves with matters of citizenship–with the defense of the commonweal–and did not attend only to their private thriving. As Randall Balmer has demonstrated convincingly in his new book, evangelical Christians were among the staunchest agitators for a godly commonwealth in which all would have access to the good things of life: food and drink, rest and recreation, good public schools, decent housing and health care, and a secure and dignified old age.
When and how this shifted decisively–when and how North American Christians ceased to believe in the importance of the commonweal–is a matter for dispute and debate, but it does certainly seem that the seeds for the final ascendancy a false consumerist paradise– and for the manufacturing of consent–were sown in the period of unparalleled prosperity that followed the Second World War. Even then, however, there were powerful voices–voices like Niebuhr’s–asking not just whether the consumerist paradise is the best of all possible worlds but quite specifically whether it is a paradise that Christians should find themselves celebrating.
Now, of course, we begin to see the full extent of the damage done by our complete and unconditional surrender to consumerism. Now we begin to see the full apostasy of our habit of evaluating politicians and their proposals in good consumerist fashion on the basis of packaging, not substance. We begin to see, but just barely, the decadence of ignoring, say, the legalization of torture in our name because, after all, the new TV season is upon us and the kids are starting school and, well, there’s just a lot going on right now.
The paramount challenge facing progressive Christians, I believe, is developing the courage and the tools needed to puncture the mysification bubble–is finding the capacity open the eyes and awaken the consciences of our fellow Christians and of the body politic as a whole to the suffering and danger all around us.
I do not pretend to have a blueprint for how we meet this challenge. I do know that we won’t meet it unless we immerse ourselves much more deeply in scriptures of hope and liberation. Perhaps a place to begin is with the insight that this is not the first time God’s people have found themselves inside a bubble of mass deception:
“Stupefy yourselves and be in a stupor…For the Lord has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep; he has closed your eyes, you prophets, and covered your heads, you seers…
“Because these people draw near to me with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing…
“[but] on that day the deaf shall hear the words of a scroll, and out of their gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind shall see. The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord and the neediest people shall exult in the Holy One of Israel. For the tyrant shall be no more, and the scoffer shall cease to be; all those alert to do evil shall be cut off.” (Isaiah 29)
- Peter Laarman
Excellent! I have just begun exploring the question as to why a Christian (especially in the South) is expected to be an ultra right wing anarcho capitalist in America, when in fact the atrocities that result from corporate unaccountability are completely contrary to Jesus’ teachings.
The fact is, as “consumers” they have all jumped on the same bandwagon that the “right wing” (particularly radio) media has sold them as the only option consistent with Christianity.
It is insanity, because if one confronts the issues with a fellow Christian, they are accused of being “communist” or hating America, or “liberal”… or even worse, a democrat!
Peter,
You are agsolutely right about this electorate being brain-dead. We are like that frog in the pot that as the heat is slowly turned up does not realized that it is getting cooked. But that is exactly what has happened.
While those in denial plead for harmony and coming together as Americans, a terrible tragedy is manifesting itself in our nation. Those Christians who have minds have been captured by popular culture shop at Walmart oblivious to the ruin this behavior perpetrates around them. We do not connect the cheap prices with the enormous U.S. debt that China is now holding. We do not make the connection to the loss of jobs here in this country and the wage stagnation that is daily driving the middle class into poverty.
In the midst of those who plead that it is our patriotic duty to “stay the course,” we Christions must wake up. Our first call is to a ministry of ATTENTION.
We must look fearlessly to what is happening in the basic institutions of our nation. To our schools. To our economy and shopping habits. To our politics. And we must speak up as progressive Christians. Thanks be to God that we are finally finding our voice. Now where’s the megaphone?
I am pleased to discover this site, from the link in the subtitle of this piece above but used as the title for excerpts edited for a posting of the Christian Alliance for Progress by Jesus Politics [www.christianalliance.org]. I have posted a somewhat long response, beginning with the setting it right on what Reinhold Niebuhr really was interested in & my personal attachment to him intellectually.
Dubya & his kind fail in more ways than I’d want to chronicle —an exceedingly long task!—but I object most to his appropriation of his personal alcohol & drug inspired fundamentalism as ‘christianity’ when it’s just another dimension of his 12-Step existence. That kind of xnity has been duped into consumerism by its marginal existence being manipulated by charletans masquerading as “pastors” when they ain’t nuttin’ but loud mouthed preachers. While it is true that the alliance between capitalism & xnity may be traced back to the aftermath of the Reformation, this developmental consumerism that it ultimately became is hardly kosher, surely not religious & even less spiritual. It’s a feature of American values that we’d not export if anyone ever meditated on its losses & especially those left in its wake, auslanders looking in but separated from. How can we have now over fifty million WITHOUT access to healthcare? How can more gravitate to the top than sink to the bottom? How can we pay Halliburton/KBR milions for work or products/services never done while the Darfur-like needs of our own continues unabated? Only in America! We celebrate our wins, forget our losses & ignore the people-factor with facelessness. Winner-take-all capitalism is NOT what can be appropriated to Third & Developing World peoples as gain. Our infrastructure crumbles, higher education prices more out year by year no matter what a family might save or earn. Bush’s deficits paying the richest with a bribe in tax funds will come home to roost in at least the next two generations with a dollar that is devalued. Ronnie Reagan spent like a drunked sailor for obsolete Naval hardware, but Clinton’s paybacks via a burgeoning economy will not happen again for Dubya’s excesses & stupidities. Now with 65% of all kinds of Americans disapproving of the adventurism in Iraq, will he last until the elected endtime, or will a new Congress intervene? I think I could be very close to doing that blueprint & not have hubris closeby either! Encouraging others to find their voices is a project for orchestration of progressives.
Peter: This is an excellent analysis of where we are. But to get to what that really means for hard-nosed political analysis and ACTION programs, I found this article by political scientist Alan Wolfe exceptionally valuable. I hesitate to do this, but I have to include here his whole article, “Wise Up, Voters,” from the LAT September 10, 2006. There are some remarkable facts in it, and I hope readers of this will take the time to read Wolfe. I’m not sure where it actually leaves us as to action choices, or what we do about voter ignorance, but it sure is the central problem that all progressives have to grapple with, somehow.
Print E-mail story Wise Up, Voters
Citizens have a choice about the direction of their country. If only they’d read up before deciding.
By Alan Wolfe
LAT, September 10, 2006
Americans may be divided by party, but they are united in ignorance. Seventy percent of them are unaware that Congress passed a prescription drug benefit for the elderly, the most publicized domestic accomplishment of the Bush years.
Nearly 60% are unfamiliar with the Patriot Act and, as a result, are oblivious to the debate taking place in Washington about whether civil liberties should be curtailed in wartime. If Republicans lose control of one or both houses of Congress in November, the message voters deliver will be tempered by the fact that a majority does not know that Republicans currently control both.
Does ignorance matter? For years, scholars argued that it did not. Some pointed out that voters rely on what political scientist Samuel Popkin calls “low-information rationality” when making their decisions; in other words, they respond to cues — Al Gore’s sighs, George W. Bush’s sneers — that stand in, not always incorrectly, for a candidate’s broader policy positions.
Others, such as professors Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro, argue that although each voter may not possess considered views, the mistakes cancel each other out when all views are added up, producing a coherent overall picture. Still others — notably, Stanford University professor Morris Fiorina — claim that voters hold politicians accountable retrospectively; that even if they don’t know the details of a candidate’s policy positions, they are quite capable of comparing the quality of their lives now with the quality four years ago and judging their elected officials accordingly.
The views of these political scientists once had some merit. Throughout much of the 1970s and into the ’80s, voter ignorance, however disturbing to people who teach about politics, did not interfere with how democracy worked because Americans were centrist in their views. Office-seekers understood that and tended to move to the center in search of support, and voters and politicians wound up on the same page. Americans were not harmed by their lack of knowledge because whatever the president or Congress did was more or less in accord with what most Americans wanted.
In recent years, the conditions that made democracy work in the face of ignorance remain in place — except one. Most Americans continue to remain moderate in their views: They think abortion should be legal but rare; that Social Security should be reformed but not privatized, and that the war against Iraq was justified, although they would have preferred to have had the support of the United Nations.
Yet the nation’s current leaders no longer share voters’ centrist inclinations; the Bush administration prefers judges who would restrict the legality of abortion, seeks to change the basic principles that have undergirded Social Security since the 1930s and went to war without the support of the United Nations. Not only are voters and politicians no longer on the same page, they are not even reading from the same book.
In these more ideological times, voter ignorance, far from being a relatively harmless quirk, becomes a serious problem for democratic performance. Politicians, for one thing, come to rely on ignorance to get what they want; lack of political knowledge, in that sense, is not a byproduct of the public’s failure to read newspapers or talk with their neighbors but is the result of systematic efforts to mislead the public by those claiming to represent them.
All politicians try to “spin” the truth to their advantage, as we saw during the Clinton years. But no one has ever gone to the extremes of the Bush administration in suppressing data hostile to its policies, punishing those who leak information needed by the public to make informed decisions, paying off journalists sympathetic to its causes or repeating claims widely known by everyone else to be false.
The Bush administration does not do these things because it is mindlessly mendacious; it does them because it is keenly aware that the more informed the public becomes, the less likely it will be to support what the administration hopes to accomplish. And to the degree that the public fails to pay attention to the administration’s objectives, it harms itself. Only later — when voters discover that the war in Iraq cost more than projected or that Medicare pays less than promised — do they realize how much their lack of attention has cost them.
Voters could respond to this attempt to impose on them policies they do not support by overcoming their political ignorance. But this they rarely do. Instead, Americans tend to grow increasingly cynical about politics; the distrust they express toward their leaders is as consistent a finding among political scientists as their lack of political knowledge.
When politicians try to manipulate them, Americans frequently respond not by informing themselves about events but by concluding that they were correct to distrust politicians in the first place. This creates a vicious cycle in which ignorance breeds manipulation that then justifies further ignorance. Why pay attention to politics, Americans ask themselves, if politicians are just going to ignore what we want?
Given the disheartening times through which so many Americans have lived — the 1960s, Vietnam, Watergate, the Clinton impeachment, the 2000 election, Sept. 11, the Iraq war and a looming constitutional crisis over presidential authority during the Bush years — it is perhaps understandable that they learn so little about politics and distrust it so much. Such a conclusion, however, can take us only so far.
Ultimately, the American public’s lack of information about politics stems from one fact only: Americans have a choice concerning the future of their democracy, and they are not exercising that choice responsibly.
This is a harsh conclusion to reach, and I do not reach it lightly. One always wants to give ordinary Americans the benefit of the doubt; Americans tend to be reasonable in their views and moderate in their inclinations.
But reasonableness is not enough, not in this contentious age. Leaders determined to achieve ideologically driven agendas have raised the stakes for Americans, brilliantly taking advantage of their ignorance of and hostility toward politics to pursue policies that can only prey on their fears and destroy their hopes.
American democracy will only be as good as Americans are willing to make it. If it is to perform better, they will have to work harder.
Alan Wolfe teaches political science at Boston College and is the author of “Does American Democracy Still Work?” Yale University Press, 2006.