Traveling in Place

In Defense of Civility

As hosts of important dinner parties know very well, seating arrangements make a difference.  In the case of Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, the difference was impressive.  In response to the attempted assassination of Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords which left six people dead, members of the House and Senate decided to pair up across party lines as a show of unity. As a result, the President’s audience was one Congress, not two parties sitting on opposite sides of the aisle. Applause was less boisterous but more often unanimous.  Nobody could keep score over the how many ovations each party gave.  The focus moved away from the theatrics of competing interests and toward the words of the president’s speech.

Sitting together as a symbol of unity and civility was the suggestion of Mark Udall, Senator from Colorado. Congress never formally acted on his recommendation. The idea simply caught on.  Those members of Congress who didn’t care for it had to grin and bear it or else look like curmudgeons. Up until the time of the speech, there were people inside and outside of Washington who were denouncing the move as mere symbolism (as if symbols don’t mean anything). Cynicism about Congress being able to work together is understandable, given the experience of the last eight Congresses.  But another basis of criticism was opposition to the idea of civility itself.   Hard as it is to believe, several arguments have been advanced to oppose efforts to bring civility to Washington.

More Thoughts about Church in American Society

I continue to mull over the implications of James Hunter’s book, To Change the World, which I referenced in an earlier post.  I’ve been thinking a lot about his three categories of how contemporary American Christians relate to the culture at large.

Hunter divides the American church into three camps: conservative evangelicals (those groups with roots in the revivals of early American history, including fundamentalists, mainstream Evangelicals, and new-style evangelicals), mainline Protestants (those denominations rooted in the Reformation and now distinguished for their advocacy of the poor and the values of community and equality), and neo-Anabaptists (a hodge-podge of alternative Christian communities theologically rooted in the radical reformation).

Jesus in Central New York

Here in the Snow Belt of Central New York, we’ve settled in for the winter.  December, with its record snowfall, was an adventurous month.  We plowed our way out of six feet of snow, nearly all of which fell in six days.  Had it come in March, we would have groaned with exhaustion and complained that spring was never coming.  But in December, the snow quickened our hearts.  We were glad to see its return in time for Christmas.  And we were happy to show off our resilience.

Now, in mid-January, the snow is usually light to moderate.  It falls most days of the week, laying a new blanket over the landscape.  This rhythm is broken by the occasional burst of bright sunshine and deep blue skies, but on such days, the temperature is too cold to stay outside for very long.  So we’re well into the winter routine, which (when we’re not at work or school) includes lots of hot drinks, reading, watching sports on TV, and venturing outside periodically to move the new snow that has accumulated on the walk and the driveway.

Meanwhile, the lectionary has us reading about Jesus calling his disciples and beginning his Galilean ministry.  He’s outdoors most of the time, conversing, teaching, and healing on hillsides, along the shore of a lake, and even in a boat.  These stories don’t all unfold in the summertime.  It could be January or February when Jesus visits Peter and Andrew on the beach of the Sea of Galilee.  In northern Israel, the climate is always warm.  I visited the Holy Land in October.  In Galilee, it was so hot I had trouble staying hydrated.  Around the Sea of Galilee, which is 600 feet below sea level, daytime temperatures were in the 90’s.  Around the Dead Sea, 1200 feet below sea level, they topped 100.  Jesus could have feasibly carried on his itinerant ministry, traveling dusty roads from town to town, all year long.  In fact, the gospel of John says he went to Jerusalem for Hanukah in December.  That means he walked, presumably in sandals, all the way from Capernaum to Jerusalem around the time of the winter solstice.

A Moment of Healing

The spirit and words at yesterday’s memorial service held to honor those killed and rally for those injured in the Tucson, Arizona shooting are still reverberating. President Obama’s speech in particular seems to have turned the national conversation in a healthy direction.  I think he had it exactly right when he dismissed efforts to lay blame for the shooting and called on Americans to honor the victims with their speech and action.  In other words, the question of whether rhetorical vitriol somehow made this tragedy more likely is beside the point.  What is beyond debate, though, is that civil discourse going forward is a fitting way to pay tribute to those who died.

The President rose to the full stature of his office as both representative and leader of the American people.  Nothing in his remarks favored one political viewpoint over another.  His sole purpose was to bring healing.  At least for the moment, at least for the families of the victims, I believe he has largely fulfilled that purpose.  The day after the speech, his words are being met with appreciation and praise by elected officials across the political spectrum.  The lack of negativity speaks more than bi-partisanship – it is a sign of unity, which is welcome even if it proves fleeting.  Obama’s words were his own, distinguished less by eloquence than by the sincerity with which he delivered them.

Here are the sections of the speech that I most appreciated.

Politics, Dr. King, and the Christian Witness

As our nation approaches Martin Luther King Day, we are grieving the loss of six people, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl who were gunned down by a madman in Tucson, Arizona.  His target was a U.S. Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, who is in critical condition with a head wound.  Eleven others are also seriously injured.

Talking heads are engaged in a debate over whether this tragedy resulted from overheated political rhetoric that has often employed careless metaphors about “taking out” political opponents and “second amendment remedies” to get our political way.  It has also given new life to the gun-control debate, since the shooter was mentally ill, and apparently had little trouble purchasing an assault handgun and two magazines containing 30 rounds each.

Perhaps in the long run this sickening event will sober us enough to bring some civility back to our frayed society.  In the short term, it appears to have done nothing to change the course or tone of our political conversation.  Despite the bi-partisan resolution passed by Congress, political activists seem unwilling to engage in any meaningful reflection.  Instead, they are looking for ways to spin this tragedy to support their positions.  That is almost as nauseating to me as the shooting.

In To Change the World: the Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, James Davison Hunter argues that the politicization of everything in our country has resulted in more harm than good.  He laments particularly the politicization of Christianity in all its expressions, which has only served to cheapen the gospel and weaken the church’s position in our society.  Indeed, it appears now that the greatest impact of all the political ambition of the religious right in the last three decades and the religious left in during the ‘60’s (and still manifest among mainline Protestants) is not the creation of a more “Christian” society, but cultural polarization and a mass exodus, especially by young adults, from organized religion.  A growing number in America are simply fed up with Christianity because it has become so politicized, assuming hard, uncharitable positions on a range of cultural issues.  (See my earlier post, “The Fascination and Frustration of American Religion” – 1/2/11.)

An Epiphany

It’s Epiphany Day.  Appropriately, I had a small epiphany.

I lead a weekly Bible study in a senior citizens apartment complex for a group of a dozen or so elders aged 70-95.  Today, I went into the Bible study with a raging headache that was probably a physical manifestation of a lot of recent stress.  In fact, I would have to place yesterday near the top of my “worst days” list, for reasons that I need not detail here.

Anyway, the Bible study commenced.  We were in the 16^th chapter of Matthew, which opens with the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to Jesus to “test” him by asking for a sign.  Jesus refuses, saying that plenty of signs had already been given that they failed to interpret.  The chapter closes with Jesus assuring his disciples that his work would not be done until he had come in glory to judge the earth, and that “there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.”

The Fascination and Frustration of American Religion

I’ve just finished reading American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us by Robert Putnam and David Campbell.  I predict this book will be widely quoted in religious circles for years to come.  It is probably the most important work on American religion since Harold Bloom’s The American Religion, published twenty years ago.  The authors collect and carefully analyze a raft of polling data about the habits, attitudes, and opinions of religious people in America, the intensity of their religiosity, and the relationship between religion and politics, civic life, and community. 

The scope of their work defies an easy summary.  Here, I’d like to address just one component of their research that I find both fascinating and frustrating.  Putnam and Campbell piece together a compelling narrative about the convergence of religion and politics in America since World War II.  They note that, during the American church heyday of the 1950’s, little correlation existed between religious affiliation and political ideology.  Liberals and conservatives worshiped together in the same churches, and both were also found in comparable numbers among the unchurched.  By the end of the twentieth century, however, religion had become one of the most polarizing factors in American politics.  Today, people who regularly attend church are most likely to vote Republican, while those who rarely or never attend church overwhelmingly vote Democratic.  What happened?