A Divine Campaign? : Progressive Christians and Political Activism

Ellen Ott Marshall, Inaugural Lecture

Draft: September 20, 2004

 

            My friends, we have a problem.  There is a traffic jam at the intersection of faith and politics.  Now, there is nothing new about this.  This intersection is one of those spots in your commute where there is always a delay.  But the reasons for this traffic jam are not mysterious.  Think about this with me.

            We have hazards on the roadway.  We have Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was elected in 2000 after campaigning as “The Ten Commandments Judge.”  He then kept his campaign promise by refusing to comply with the federal order to remove the 2.6 ton granite Decalogue from the rotunda of the state judicial building last fall.  Now, it is not the nature of an item on the roadway that makes it hazardous, but simply its presence.  A piece of rubber can be as hazardous as the sofa that Lori Anne Ferrell says is always somewhere on the 10.  My “hazards” here are not just expressions of faith and politics that I disagree with; the “hazards” are simply current events that prompt a collision between faith and politics.   I’ll get to the nature of these collisions in a minute.  First, a few more hazards. 

Many of the people who supported Chief Justice Roy Moore last summer were appalled this summer by judges who performed civil ceremonies for same-sex couples.  These civil ceremonies ignited a religious firestorm manifest in demonstrations of protest and support, in seemingly endless commentary, and in multiple political maneuvers.  As an example of the latter, Senator Bill Frist may have cited sociological data to “defend marriage,” but his language of covenant and procreative purposes betrayed the influence of religious conviction on his political positions.[1] 

A more recent hazard has been Roman Catholic Bishop Michael Sheridan in Colorado Springs who preached that pro-choice Catholic candidates should be denied both communion and the votes of other Catholics.  Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis then announced that those who vote for pro-choice candidates must confess this sin before receiving communion.  All of this has prompted clarification from the Vatican’s arbiter for doctrinal orthodoxy, Cardinal Ratzinger, who stated earlier this month that Catholics may indeed vote for pro-choice candidates as long as their pro-choice position is not the reason for voting for them.[2]  As we will see, this is not solely a Catholic issue because nearly an equal percentage of black Protestants support it and even more white evangelical Protestants do too.

And now we have presidential politics, which not only poses a terrific hazard itself, but multiplies and magnifies all of the other hazards as well.  We have politicians speaking about their faith, or in some cases speaking about not speaking about their faith.  We have pundits asking preachers which candidate is a greater man of faith.  We have pollsters asking everyone whether political decision-making should be informed by faith.  We have a Commander-in-Chief who believes he is responding to the call of a liberating God.  And we have liberationist Christians saying, “Whoa, that’s not what we mean.”  We have campaign managers asking for church rosters.  And we have clergy and Christian organizations working to get out the vote.  There are always hazards in this intersection, but the political season multiplies and magnifies them.  It is like pouring water on gremlins, for those of you who remember that fine film from – could it be? – twenty years ago.

            Now, these hazards are not only causing delays because rubberneckers like me slow down to gawk at them.  They have also contributed to a number of head-on collisions as people who have been traveling in different directions rush to each particular scene.  People who hold different views about the proper relationship between church and state, for example, collide over The Ten Commandments Judge hazard.  According to research conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 72% of the U.S. population find it proper to display the commandments in public buildings.  32% support gay marriage and roughly the same percentage (34%) say that it is a “very important factor in their choice” of president.  However, the fact that twice as many people name the economy, terrorism, and Iraq as a very important factor in their decisions might explain why Vice President Cheney felt he could afford to defend his daughter’s freedom to love whomever she chooses. 

23% of Roman Catholics believe it is proper to “deny communion to politicians who defy church teachings on abortion and related issues.”  But even more white evangelical Protestants think so, 35%.  And 20% of Black Protestants agree, though the Pew study did not distinguish between mainline and evangelical Black Protestants as it did with white ones.  15% of white mainline Protestants believe this communion-denial is proper. 

 

The statistics about politicians speaking about their faith, mixing church rosters and campaign mailing lists, and churches engaging the political sphere are quite a jumble.  This could indicate, to keep my metaphor alive and kicking, either that a lot of drivers just don’t know where they are going or that the traffic report is too fast and general to catch the nuances of each situation.  For example:  72% of “registered voters say it is important to them that the president have strong religious beliefs,” but only 50% believe that churches should express views on political matters.  And among this 50%, there is considerable difference according to religious affiliation.  71% of white evangelicals, 64% of black Protestants, and 60% of white Catholics believe that churches should express political views.  But the most intriguing statistic to me really is this one: secular persons support this more than mainline white Protestants do.  That is, 59% of secular individuals believe that churches should express views on political matters, while 51% of mainline Protestants agree.  But even among white evangelicals, less than half believe that churches should endorse a particular political candidate.  And across the board, only 25% of those polled believe it proper for campaigners to ask for church rosters.

 

Nothing spices up a traffic jam more than a litany of statistics, huh? Maybe this is why the traffic reports are so brief, to save us too much knowledge about the tie-ups we are in.

 

Let’s see where we are.  We have hazards in the roadway, we have consequent head-on collisions, and we have some general confusion.  One final contributing factor deserves mention.  We also have drivers who throw on the brakes, causing disorientation and pile-ups behind them.  These are, I’m sorry to say, the academics.  As people speed along these freeways of faith and politics, we are the ones who say, “Stop, Wait, Slow down.”  Stop: Is your theological reflection adequate?  Wait: Is your biblical exegesis rigorous?  Slow down: Is your ethical assessment honest and complete?  So, let me signal as clearly as I can right now.  This lecture is putting on the brakes.  Indeed, what I would like to do is have you exit at the next rest area for a bit of reflection, a moral pause if you will.  And we will, you’ll be glad to know, leave the traffic metaphor behind, at least until the conclusion. 

 

I want to be very clear about my purpose here because my comments are likely to rankle my fellow progressive Christians.  They (you?) will say with good reason, “I can’t believe you are telling us to slow down right when we are mobilizing so effectively to life the voice of progressive Christianity in the political sphere.”  In the 1980s and 1990s, progressive Christians (or liberal Christians as we called ourselves then) ceded this ground to conservative evangelicals, preferring to work diligently but quietly on a host of individual issues.[3]  Now, progressive Christians are mobilized and vocal in the political sphere in a more comprehensive way.  Call to Renewal, Lift Every Voice, Progressive Christians Uniting, and Mobilization 2004 are four examples of highly organized and energetic progressive Christian activism right now.

In order to be effective, they need progressive Christians to not only be politically active, but also to voice religious reasons for their political positions.  {{In his preface to Progressive Christians Speak, John Cobb makes this point when he says the Progressive Christians Uniting believes “that nothing is more important for the revitalization of progressive Protestantism than regaining confidence in the way we bring faith to bear on the whole range of social issues” (ix).}} This is why Reverend Dr. James Forbes encourages us not to be embarrassed to talk about our faith to our secular liberal counterparts.  In this lecture, I am speaking as one whom Dr. Forbes interprets as embarrassed to speak about her faith.  It is not embarrassment, but there is hesitancy that we have not explained.  Here I need to give name to a distinction.  I am going to refer to these hesitant progressives as liberal Christians and our encouraging counterparts as progressive evangelicals, a term used by Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Call to Renewal.

Liberal Christians have theological and ethical commitments that complicate faith-explicit political activism.  Notice that I said faith-explicit and not faith-based.  Our political activism may indeed by rooted in a faith commitment, but we hesitate to make that faith explicit.  So, we find ourselves in this frustrating spot: We enter the public sphere as secularists and get offended when evangelicals from both sides call us that!

So, I want to explain these features that complicate political activism for liberal Christians.  Now, this is the part that might rankle.  Public expressions of liberal Christianity differ from conservative Christianity in content and in form, and they differ from progressive evangelicals in form if not in content.  Liberal Christian ethics is simply not politically expedient.  And I worry that our energetic mobilization in the public sphere might compromise our theological and ethical integrity.  That is, as we try to be both faith-explicit and politically effective, we sacrifice those theological and ethical commitments that make us liberal.

 

I see three interrelated features at play here.  The first is a posture of theological humility.  The second is a narrative approach to the moral life.  And the third is attentiveness to moral ambiguity. One place to begin explaining the posture of theological humility is to say that liberal Christians remain in the grip of Immanuel Kant’s call for reasonableness in religion.  We might also explain this in a more positive and less Kantian way by saying that liberal Christians subject religious claims to a variety of criteria.  H. Richard Niebuhr, for example, turned to history in order to place his religious claims in conversation with “companion knowers” of previous generations.  He valued this practice because it reminded him of the partiality of our perspectives and of our tendency to conflate our own agenda with the “divine campaign” unfolding.  (I owe this lecture’s title to H. Richard Niebuhr.)  He wrote,

History has become for me the great critical inquiry which enlarges my community of discourse with my companion knowers of my present object, which enables me to compare my patterns of interpretation with those of men with other perspectives …. [These companion knowers] do not represent for us an ideal after which we can or would aspire, but in thinking their thoughts after them we are led to criticism of our partialities.[4] (82-3).

 

            H. Richard Niebuhr’s student and Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics from Emory and earlier Yale, James Gustafson turns to science for similar reasons.  In 1981 and 1983, Gustafson published a two-volume work entitled, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, that makes my “rankling” here seem like unbridled enthusiasm.  Describing his work as an attempt “to force theologians to modify or correct exaggerated claims,” [5] Gustafson criticized political theologians of all stripes for their instrumental use of religion.[6]  Their claims are shaped by particular human interests, he asserted, rather than faithfulness to the way things really and ultimately are.  Where H. Richard Niebuhr turned to history to guard against this tendency, Gustafson turns to science.  Our theological claims must be adequate given what we know of our world through the sciences. One of the things that we do know is that we exist as interdependent creatures in a vast cosmos.  In such a world, that pre-dates us and will likely outlive us, Gustafson argues, it is implausible to suggest that the Creator’s concerns correspond with human interests.  Thus, any proposal which construes God’s activity in terms of human well-being is inadequate.  Such proposals do not adequately reflect the ineffable mystery of God and our rather minor role in this vast creation.[7]

            Feminist Christians puzzle over Gustafson’s gymnastics.  Can’t we recognize our partial perspective and our tendency toward self- and group-interest and still speak adequately from experience?  That is, we appreciate Gustafson’s critique because we also scrutinize the instrumental use of religion, particularly as a tool of subjugation.  But we are equally suspicious of the bird’s eye view that Gustafson claims to gain via science.  Isn’t it more accurate and honest to say that all theological claims are contextual (i.e., rooted in human experience) and so are mine?  My point here is not to quibble with Gustafson.  I do appreciate his caution, and I agree with his description of our, human, place in the scheme of things.  My point is to name another measure of theological adequacy, namely experience.

            Liberal Christians are trying to remain accountable to the feminist assertion that experience has cognitive and normative value.  Therefore, a theological claim that is reasonable, historically responsible, and scientifically adequate but does violence to a person’s embodied experience in the world must be rejected.  I want to stress this point because theological humility does not mean a denial of one’s self and one’s experience as a source of knowledge about God.  But it does mean that I see myself as a self among other selves, be they companion knowers, mitochondria, or Republicans.  If my experience has cognitive and normative value, so does theirs.  Can you see how theological humility is important to us and why it is politically inexpedient?

 

            The second feature of liberal Christian ethics is deeply related to the first.  Liberal Christians tend toward a narrative approach to ethics more than a deontological one.  For those of you less familiar with the jargon of my discipline, deontological ethics takes the form of should and should not statements, emphasizing obedience to principles or other imperatives.  Divine Command ethics in its purest form represents deontology well and provides a helpful foil to the narrative approach.  (I stress “purest form” here because Richard Mouw of Fuller has crafted a “’softer’ divine command ethic” that blends deontological and narrative methodologies.[8])  In its purest form, Divine Command ethics is based on Scriptural imperatives believed to constitute God’s law.  The right thing to do, then, is that which God commands in Scripture.  In other words, the justification for a position or the rationale for action is the Scriptural imperative.  For the group that I have designated liberal Christians, however, a Scriptural imperative is more likely to fuel deliberation than resolve it.  In the public sphere, therefore, liberal Christians do not see God’s law, command, or call as sufficient rationale.  To put this more plainly: one’s conviction about God’s call is not a reason that needs no additional explanation.  A conviction or a calling, especially in the pluralistic, public sphere, is a reason only if it is explained.

            One way to explain a call or command or to wrestle with its meaning individually is to consider it as part of a larger narrative.  For a deontologist, the law determines what is right; therefore, her rationale/justification is the law.  The narrativist sees the law, command, or call within the context of an unfolding story.  She responds to the call not by referencing the law, but by wrestling with the story.

            Now, what does this mean: wrestling with the story?  Or, more pointedly, how can this be an ethical response to anything when we have such urgent needs?  Let me, once again, use the deontologist as a foil.  The deontologist sorts through an ethical dilemma by categorizing the problem in more general terms so that application of a principle is possible.  A woman’s struggle with an unwanted pregnancy becomes a question of preservation of life or of preservation of individual autonomy/bodily integrity.  The terms of debate quickly become competing principles or competing applications of the same principle.  The narrativist, presented with the same situation, moves in the opposite direction.  Rather than seeking clarity by framing the situation in more general terms, she seeks understanding by hearing about the situation in more detail.

            The deontologist generalizes the situation in order to apply a principle and determine the right thing to do.  (The principle provides the justification.)  The narratives says: This is not about determining the right thing to do. It is not about obedience to a principle, law, command, or call.  This is about a woman whose life is taking a dramatic turn, regardless of the decision she makes.  In other words, for the narrativist, this situation is not about legality or even morality in a narrow sense.  It is about being.

            The narrativist does not see himself primarily as a citizen standing before the law (as H. Richard Niebuhr depicted the deontologist[9]), but as a person constituted by relationships.  Therefore, moral problems are experienced as fragmentation rather than disobedience.  On our tenth wedding anniversary, my husband and I were walking along the beach, and I found myself telling him that our marriage is constitutive of my identity. It seemed more romantic to me that it sounded to him!  What I meant was that part of my concept of self is being Tommy’s partner.  Now I do not want to get into the debates over postmodern concepts of the self, whether there is a self apart from relationships or the self is pure relationality.  My point here is simply this: if I see my self as constituted (whether in part or completely) by relationships, then I tend to experience moral problems as fragmentation.  I feel pulled between commitments and the relationships wrapped up with them.  Consider, for example, the fragmentation experienced by pacifist feminists who are equally committed to preserving life and to securing a woman’s control over her own body.  If moral problems are experienced as fragmentation, then the moral life becomes a striving toward integrity, or what Alasdair MacIntyre calls “narrative unity.” 

            Before turning to the third feature, let me push an earlier question a bit more.  How can this narrative approach be an ethical response to the urgent needs that face us?  Our world is filled with blatant injustice and myriad forms of human cruelty that warrant sure and speedy responses, not this wishy-washy narrative business.  One of the reasons why the narrativist seems so wishy-washy and is politically inexpedient compared to the deontologist is that her approach makes her conscious of her own complicity in the story.  And, given the inter-relatedness of life, we are complicit in moral dilemmas more often than not.  That is, the narrativist complicates moral deliberation by asking not only “what must be done” but also “what did I do or not do in the past to contribute to this situation in the present?”  Every time that we look to the structural conditions that contribute to a young person’s turn to criminality; every time we examine our country’s foreign policy as a reason for the military build-up of a former-ally-now-enemy; every time we consider our neglect of the natural world as part of the energy crisis… what we are doing is to honestly examine the ways in which our stories have interwoven in order to create the current predicament.  This does complicate a response.  The narrativist approach is not sound-bite-friendly or bumper-sticker-friendly.  (Although we may be getting better at the latter.  I saw one the other day that said: “I love my country, but I think we should begin seeing other people.”)  The narrative approach may not be politically expedient, but it is honest.  It insists on a truthful description and admits of our own complicity.  This approach recognizes that the persistence of sin in our personal lives also takes social and structural form.  However one analyzes criminality, United States foreign policy, or environmental degradation, Christians commonly recognize that we are sinful creatures living in a broken world where contrition is warranted.  

           

            This sensibility that makes the narrativist cognizant of complicity in the story also increases awareness of unresolved tensions, incompatible outcomes, and ambivalent emotions in the wake of a moral decision.  Philosophers refer to these things as “moral remainders.”  And, as feminist philosopher Margaret Urban Walker explains, a self-understanding that is both relational and narrativist heightens the prospect of such moral remainders.  In her words, “if moral life is seen as a tissue of moral understandings which configure, respond to, and reconfigure relations as they go, we should anticipate residues and carry-overs as the rule rather than the exceptions: one’s choice,” she continues, “will often be a selection of one among various imperfect responses. … So there will just as often be unfinished and ongoing business, compensations and reparations, postponements and returns.” Walker concludes, “Moral problems on this view are nodal points in progressive histories of mutual adjustment and understanding, not ‘cases’ to be closed by a final verdict of a highest court.”[10] 

            Moral moments are not neatly circumscribed phenomena.  They arise and are then played out in the context of a larger story.  And that story is not limited to the experience of the moral agent, but interrelated with the stories of others.  When we see moral experiences in this richly textured way, then the possibility of feeling “finished” or “fully satisfied” with a decision becomes illusive.  I remember handing in my grades after my first semester of teaching at a small college in Pennsylvania.  I had expected to feel lighter somehow, relieved to have finished my first semester and happily unencumbered to bounce jubilantly into the holiday season.  But I didn’t feel that way at all.  I felt conflicted.  I spent hours deliberating the differences between a B+ and a B, weighing a student’s faithful preparation all semester against her surprisingly poor performance on the final exam.  I wondered if my grading was consistent across the pool of students and throughout the semester itself.  And then there were plagiarism cases that continued to trouble me though they were technically “over.”  You have had moments like this, surely, perhaps weekly?  Our experiences are simply not encapsulated in a temporal or spatial way, and that means that we rarely feel finished with them.  Moreover, the weightier the moment, the more residue, the more ambiguity we carry away from it.          

            Let me offer another example of this provided by Mary June Nestler, my faculty colleague and Dean of the Episcopal Theological School.  In August 2003, Mary June attended the annual General Convention of the Episcopal Church.  She was there for the contentious debate over Gene Robinson’s episcopacy and the vote which confirmed him as the first openly gay bishop.  When we gathered for our annual faculty retreat a few weeks later, Mary June shared this experience, and her account has stayed with me.  She told us that she and others who fully supported Bishop Robinson’s confirmation received this victory soberly.  What struck me about Mary June’s account, however, was that they received this victory soberly not because this confirmation would fuel the division rather than quell it.  (After all, a vote against Bishop Robinson’s confirmation would have had the same effect.)  Rather, they received this victory soberly out of love and concern for those whose position was defeated. 

            This is one example of moral ambiguity.  I know that my victory means another’s defeat. Moral ambiguity is often confused with uncertainty.  But these are not the same thing.  I can feel completely certain about my position and still recognize the pain that my position inflicts on another.  For example, I can be completely certain that the war in Iraq is unjust and immoral and recognize the pain that my conviction causes the mother of a soldier who dies there.  Moral ambiguity means that, regardless of one’s level of certitude, one acknowledges “the tragic element in each decision,” to quote Gustafson’s again.  One knows that each decision “contains a mournful act.”[11] 

 

            So, we have before us three features that I am suggesting characterize – at least in part – liberal Christian ethics.  These are theological humility, a narrative approach, and moral ambiguity.  Now liberal Christians do not have a monopoly on these three; that is they are not uniquely liberal Christian traits.  But I do think that these features help to explain a posture of faith in the public sphere that has been misconstrued.  We are not embarrassed to articulate our faith, but we are modest in our theological claims and vigilant about the adequacy and reasonableness of our beliefs, especially when those beliefs are offered to justify an action that affects the lives of others (as all actions do).  We are not wishy-washy about injustice, but we are aware of our complicity in it and determined to respond to highly complex moral questions with correspondingly complex moral deliberation.  We are not uncertain advocates, but we are attentive to the effect of our decisions on others and always striving toward compassion.  In sum, to return to our initial metaphor: liberal Christians are on the road, and we are good drivers.  Theological humility makes us cognizant of our blind spots.  Our narrativist approach makes us attentive to and properly responsive to changing conditions on the roadway.  And our sense of moral ambiguity has taught us that gridlock is always with us, and we must behave accordingly.