In the spring of 2002, I entered local politics. I successfully ran for a seat on the school board, riding a wave of discontent over the school system’s administrative leadership. Because I had been actively and publicly involved in an effort to prevent the closure of our neighborhood school, community members drafted me as a candidate. Ten of us ran to fill four seats. Turnout was higher than it had been in memory. The incumbents lost and the rebels won. Those were heady days.
The interest in the race that year was generated by widespread anger in the community. One group was angry about the school closure. Another group was upset by the decision to demolish the original high school building. Still another group had been complaining for years about the rise in property taxes. The teachers’ union disapproved of the administration’s heavy-handed leadership style. All this anger created a perfect storm of voter discontent. Change was in the air. The people would prevail!
Some of the discontent was warranted, but not all of it. During the campaign, I had to publicly distance myself from the divisive rhetoric of some of my own supporters. The demand for change had given legitimacy to a number of people who seemed to have a pathological need to be angry. I learned early on in my school board tenure that nothing we said or did would mollify this segment of the population, which had no agenda except to punish all those in elected positions, including those they had helped to put in office. They regarded themselves as victims of political oppression and characterized representative democracy as a form of tyranny that enabled politicians to usurp the will of the people. With nothing but anger to propel them, these members of the community were true anarchists.
I was re-elected to the school board twice, even after I had assumed leadership of the board, so I knew that the angry anarchists did not represent the majority. But they kept things stirred up, and like barnacles on a ship, they attached themselves to any public expression of concern or disapproval as evidence of the incompetent but devious nature of the school board and administration.
The current national movement for change is pretty much an anger movement. It’s hard to gage how much of it consists of constructive discontent in search of solutions to our problems, and how much is just raw emotion, but there is an anarchic quality about it. Other than an amorphous call for less government, there is no vision, philosophy, or set of core principles driving it. It represents an amalgamation of social conservatives, hard-core libertarians, closet white supremacists, and various and sundry other disaffected people. Many of them, especially the ones commanding the most attention, seem to embrace anger for its own sake. They just want to blow up the political system, and don’t care what happens after that. (Looking back, I’m not sure the coalition that swept Obama into office in 2008 was much more cohesive than the present one. In fact, there’s probably some overlap between that coalition of voters and the one currently generating enthusiasm against the President.)
The King James Version of the Bible renders Proverbs 29:18 this way: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” American politicians have invoked this verse as a trite way of justifying their plans for the future. The verse really means something very different. The NRSV translates it this way: “Where there is no prophecy, the people cast off restraint.” That is, where the word of the Lord is not heard, the people toss aside any sense of common purpose or mutual responsibility.
The Bible describes the period of the judges in Israel as a time of moral anarchy: “All the people did what was right in their own eyes” (Judges 21:25). As a result, “the word of the Lord was rare, and visions were not widespread” (1 Samuel 3:1). This suggests that lack of vision is the result of moral anarchy instead of the other way around. When we stop listening and looking for signs of God’s presence, God quits speaking and appearing. Then, when the people mourn the loss of vision and lack of a clear word, God returns. In the case of Israel, God spoke again through Samuel: “The Lord revealed himself to Samuel at Shiloh by the word of the Lord. And the word of Samuel came to all Israel” (1 Samuel 3:21-4:1).
How close are we to moral anarchy in America today? When anger is a better motivator than anything positive, you have to wonder. Maybe we’ll see the ugly results of our cynicism soon enough to pull ourselves back from the cliff. (On a hopeful note, that seems to have happened with the furor over burning the Koran. Pastor Terri Jones gave a face to American bigotry, and the American public as a whole rejected it.) Maybe we need to see the ill effects of anger-motivated politics before we reject it in favor of reclaiming some sort of vision.
We can always hope. In fact, we must. There are Samuels in America to whom God will speak. That tells me that the role of churches in a time such as this is to teach people how to listen for God, so when the word comes, we are ready to hear.
Copyright 2010 by J. Mark Lawson
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