Renew Christianity in America?
Should we? Can we? According to Pastor Keller, in a recent Atlantic magazine essay, we can and should. I understand that religion has been a major factor in holding a culture or civilization together. And I also understand that America’s culture and polity is fragmented. I too studied Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart and other works on the rapid growth of individualism in our secularizing and very pluralistic American and now global society.
Yet I also know that the leading intellectual in the history of the American democratic republic was Thomas Jefferson. He was a strong adherent to the principles of Enlightenment and reason over superstition. He rewrote the gospels of Jesus by excising most of its “superstitions”: the dogmas of both Catholic and Reformed Christianity. Many of the other founders and representatives of the “Soul of America” were Deists or Unitarians who dismissed the Christian belief system, but not the faith.
I agree with the first sociologist Max Weber on the primary role of capitalism in fragmenting, while replacing, the democratic republican faith that served the unity and community of America and revolutionary France. The democratic republican culture with its faith in the People, their dignity, equality, and freedom, led the country through its perversions of white supremacy, oppression of women and workers, colonization, civil and world wars, and temptations to fascism. And hopefully it will lead us through the new rise of that heretical perversion today.
The mistake of the sociologists, historians, theologians, and other scholars, who, willy nilly, foster this perversion, is that they make political power subservient to economic wealth using their religion or ideology as rationale. Even Marx who probably presented the best critique of capitalism was trying to solve its self-contradictions in the cultural rather than political sphere (according to Sheldon Wolin). I see Pastor Keller doing the same.
He is right that we do need to change our thinking, education, language to fully support a democratic republican faith over ideological beliefs. But as Marx said in his manifesto that it’s the doing, not the expression, that changes our world. The doing of democracy will change our habits and institutions as DeTocqueville observed in Democracy in America and Dewey in The Public and its Problems. Unless we have a democratic politics that rules our economy by achieving justice and equality towards the freedom of all, the ideals of Democracy in America will not be achieved.
Stories, myths, rituals, religion as expressions of common beliefs are important to our civilization. Removing the superstitions, mysteries, religiosity, icons, and art is a disenchantment of human nature and life. But it is important to recognize to what they point — the unity that makes us a community beyond our expression in the political realm.
Moi, I am born and bred in the Christian Catholic tradition. I struggled with the renewal of the Catholic Church through Vatican II. As a Divinity student, I read and studied the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian gospels and meditated the life and teachings of Jesus who was named the Christ by his early followers who chose him Lord apart from Caesar — a political crime for which some paid dearly.
In 1976 the American Bishops urged by the laity asked every religious congregation to celebrate the American bicentennial by taking “freedom and Justice for all” as the expression of our common faith and create the institutions for expanding that faith throughout the land. The Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Charities, and parishes in concert with other religious communities Jewish and Christian developed the Call to Action and the “small Christian community movement” to carry out that agenda primarily for civil rights, the end to poverty, peace in the world including Vietnam and Latin America. In my lifetime, it was the high point for the Catholic Church in America before we moved to darker times of patronage, polarization, and partisanship.
I adhere to my Christian faith, even understanding its outmoded premodern beliefs. I see its relevance to my democratic republican faith. With Wil Herberg, I see how Catholic, Protestant, Jew, and now Muslim, Hindu, Native American, secular humanist, and even Atheist) can share a democratic republican faith as citizens with very diverse religions and beliefs. Faith in people, community, love, and the future of humankind, however we express it in our stories, myths, and rituals.
That faith does need to be renewed as Pastor Keller says. Democracy will only be renewed, as will the life and values of Jesus, other prophets, and the better angels of our human nature, by confronting cruelty and oppression of others. And most of all, in the tradition of all the great rebels and leaders on behalf of ordinary people, by doing democracy. We do democracy by resisting authoritarian autocracy and by organizing democracy every time and place in our neighborhoods, congregations, villages, workplace, nation. In faith in action, we create the habits of the heart individually and collectively.