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 People

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Sadly, we have not followed Jefferson’s advice. The consequence is that corporations have increasingly come to dominate our national sense of direction, so much so that the United States now leans strongly toward corporate oligarchy as a form of governance. Is “we the people” becoming “we the corporation”?

In this election year we are seeing the effects of corporate “personhood,” as it is called, particularly in the arena of campaign finance. Much of the current presidential contest revolves around money, and not just Mitt Romney’s personal fortune and where he keeps it. It has become, to the disgust of many across the political spectrum, a tenet of the current conservative contenders that votes can be bought and lies passed off as truth if enough money is thrown into the mix. In the party of the wealthy, who has the money? Corporations, of course.

Two Supreme Court cases dominate. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976) the Court held that political spending is protected by the right to free speech in the First Amendment. Then, crushing Jefferson’s hope, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) the Court held that corporations have a right to free speech under the First Amendment, just as though they were individuals. The latter decision opened the floodgates for corporate spending to promote the interests of monied elites—wealthy corporate entities—over those of individuals.

Democracy invests faith in the people to govern. The United States was founded on the democratic principle that all citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. This principle has yet to be fully achieved. But progress has been made incrementally over the past two-plus centuries, granting equal civic personhood through freedom and enfranchisement of various segments of the demos, such as African Americans and women.

In this progressive realization of our democratic principle, however, the granting of corporate personhood has been a misstep. When the powers of governance come to be held by a small number of people, an elite of any sort (the military, royalty, etc.), which is the danger of corporate personhood, then we trade democracy for oligarchy. For Aristotle, oligarchy was synonymous with the rich.

Most of us—the 99% much referred to this year—are not rich and are being disenfranchised, our individual personhood diminished, as wealthy corporations become an ascendant aristocracy. Whether the American “experiment” can survive will depend on whether we the people can revive the power of the demos in our democracy. 

Faith in Positive, Progressive Humanity

The news is always bad. This is a simple, reassuring truism, although it often is uttered as a lament.

“News,” by definition, is the label journalists give to the exceptional. The ordinary is rarely considered to be newsworthy. That the news is generally negative should be taken as a signal that positive events—with the exception of the truly extraordinary—are viewed as the norm. We don’t get exciting about routine goodness; we expect it. Despite all of the world’s ills, this is reassuring. Positive is normal, negative is not.

So, one feels compelled to ask, why does negativity appeal to a large—and largely conservative—segment of the American population? I am not talking about negative campaigning here. Both conservative and liberal campaigns stoop to mudslinging. Rather, I am talking about the fundamental positions held on the left and the right: the “pro” and “anti” positions that undergird our opposing political parties’ philosophies.

By far, conservatives rack up more negatives than do liberals. The farther right, the more negative conservative positions are likely to be. The Right can be counted on, for example, to be anti-tax, anti-gun control, anti-immigrant, antigay, and anti any number of other things.

But, hang on, what about pro-life?

The veneer of “pro-life” overlies a thoroughly negative underbelly. Pro-life actually means pro-fetus; the “pro” does not extend to life after birth. Anti-universal health care (more recently, anti-Obamacare) accounts in large measure for the position of the United States in the statistics on infant mortality: 34th in a field of 194 nations, behind the European countries, Australia, New Zealand, and some unlikely nations, such as the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Brunei, Croatia, and Cuba. This is according to the United Nations. The 2012 CIA World Factbook puts the United States at 49th among 222 countries. These are dismal showings for the richest nation on earth.

“Pro-life,” incidentally, does not include pro-life imprisonment; and pro-death penalty can hardly be counted as a positive. Perhaps (tongue firmly in cheek here) it’s the “pro” in “progressive” that conservatives are responding to so negatively. It’s truly a bleak vision of the world, this country, and our population. It’s a black-and-white view where black predominates.

Theodore Roosevelt said, “A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy.” Sloganized patriotism—“America First,” “We’re Number One”—belies the facts in many aspects of our commonality that we are not at the top of our game as a great democracy. We have made strides in expanding civil equality and the “right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” spoken about in the Declaration of Independence, mostly uphill against the persistent tide of regressive conservatism. But there is much left to do.

American positivism, rooted in the core belief in democratic progressiveness, as expressed by Roosevelt and many others, is an essential attribute in the struggle for the common good, whether it be in terms of civil rights expansion, the welcome we give new immigrants to our immigrant-created nation, or the extension of adequate health care to all our citizens. It is our civil faith and our national ideal, though it falls short of universal acceptance.