Faith...Maybe

This tumultuous year draws to a close. I am reminded of the old-fashioned cartoon images of Father Time, who at this point in any given year is depicted as ancient and ragged while the fresh-faced babe of the following year waits for his turn. American democracy has come through the year intact but not unscathed, and dangers still lie ahead.

On this Christmas Day, the culmination for many of the Christian faith of the year and certainly of the period of watchful waiting called Advent, I imagine an America with an undergirding philosophy of true Christ-like love—a human love that is found in the deep soul of humanity, regardless of religious expression, be it Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, or one of many others—or, indeed, none at all.

Our society has been challenged to understand a number of gun violence incidents in recent weeks. To be sure, our society has too many guns. Period. But their presence is not the real issue. Rather, we must acknowledge that the problem is American reliance on a shoot-first-ask-questions-later, Wild West mythology-driven philosophy that espouses peace through threat instead of love and reason. If this violent philosophy were discarded and the fear-mongers suddenly fell silent, Americans would realize that all the guns are unnecessary, that in fact we are less safe in a gun culture than if there were no guns at all.

Sadly, true Christian love is still overshadowed by the loud Christianist radical right, which wields the Bible like an assault weapon. Though various groups adopt various labels, they hold in common a philosophy that is homophobic, xenophobic, and misogynistic. They mouth platitudes and deceive those who do not look beyond their rhetoric to see that they are deeply anti-Christian and anti-democratic. Far more than the radical Islamists, who pervert their own religion in the same way, this strident faction, collectively, presents a greater danger to American society and American democracy—and by extension to a peace-loving world—than any other threat now visible on our national horizon.

I would like to envision a United States in which conservatives actually seek to conserve the best values of American democracy, balancing those values against the march of time and tide. But many who today are labeled “conservative” actually conserve nothing, instead espousing an agenda of quasi-religious radicalism and a winner-take-all greed that has already succeeded in increasing the wealth gap between rich and poor in our country. These “conservatives”—the same Christianists who often beat their breasts over the supposed moral woes of our society—are trammeling the least among us, those whom Christ actually embraced and held up.

I would like to envision a future in which these things will change, in which we will narrow the gap between rich and poor, in which we will ensure an intact social safety net with strong public schools and universal health care—because they are the right thing to do from every perspective, whether Christian, democratic, national, or international. But I confess, my faith in the will of the American people to assert an inclusive, truly democratic governance in the face of these strident anti-Christian, anti-democratic elements is challenged.

Faith in the Common Good

Recently “socialism” has become a principal pejorative in political rhetoric. The label is applied to anything and everything that smacks of affecting, usually to their benefit, the majority of the population. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), so-called Obamacare, has been labeled as “socialist” in the same sense that Social Security was so labeled by its critics when it was created in 1935, during the Great Depression. One might be excused for confusing the “social” in Social Security with “socialism” were it not for the fact that such confusion, particularly now, is political rather than definitional. In the eyes of Obamacare’s critics, socialism equals bad, therefore any program that can be painted with the brush of socialism can be characterized as bad for the nation. This is patent nonsense, of course. But it sells well in some sectors.

Social Security was created at a time when more than half of all senior citizens lived in poverty. PPACA has been enacted—and upheld by the Supreme Court—at a time when more than 50 million Americans are without health insurance, which in this country amounts to being shut out from adequate health care. More than 60 percent of the uninsured live in households earning less than $50,000 a year. Children living in poverty are more likely to be uninsured than others. Indeed, the lower one’s income, the less likely one is to have health insurance or adequate health care. This situation might be excused in a developing nation but is unacceptable in one that claims to be the world’s leading democracy and is the world’s wealthiest nation.

Socialism is an economic system wherein means of production are owned by the society, the government in the case of state socialism, which is what most politicos who use “socialism” as a pejorative mean. To conflate “socialism” and the “common good,” which is a tenet of American democracy, is disingenuous at the very least. One is reminded of something Hubert Humphrey said, “Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.” The idea of our nation being founded on the belief that democracy provides the best possible hope for the common good is imbedded in the first sentence of the Constitution, in the phrase “promote the general Welfare.” The common good is fundamental to our “more perfect Union.”

Faith in the common good also is a tenet of Christian belief, though the Christianists on the far right seem to disavow it. For those crying “socialism” of a religious bent, it might be piquant to quote Woodrow Wilson, himself highly religious, a Presbyterian and the son of a Presbyterian minister: “There is no higher religion than human service. To work for the common good is the greatest creed.” I also like Rev. Matthew Dutton-Gillett’s take on the notion. In a commentary dated February 19, 2010, on the blog, Below the Surface (subtitled A Conversation Between a Priest and a People about Life in Christian Community), Dutton-Gillett of Trinity Episcopal Church in Menlo Park, California, writes:

All that stuff about loving your neighbor as yourself, taking care of the poor, giving people who asked you for your coat more of your clothing than they had asked for, the suggestion that we should sell what we have and give it to the poor, the parable about the rich man and Lazarus the beggar—these are all teachings about redistributing one’s own wealth so that the more vulnerable in society would be protected and provided for. It seems clear to me that if we were to classify Jesus’ views according to today’s political definitions, he would probably fit into the category of “socialist” more easily than any other.

Faith in the common good seemed evident when Mitt Romney, as governor, signed the Massachusetts healthcare insurance reform law (referred to as Romneycare) in 2006. The law mandates that state residents obtain government-regulated minimum health insurance coverage and provides free health insurance for residents earning less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level. Now, ironically, as the Republican presidential candidate, Romney must—in order to align with the “socialism”-shouters in his party’s rightwing base—argue against the common good, against the very law he championed that is mirrored in Obamacare.

Faith in the common good—for the good of us all and for the good of American democracy writ large—ought to be unwavering. When it is smeared by epithet and battered by the hot winds of political expedience, we should be wary of those doing the smearing and blowing the hot air.