Liberal Is Not Enough
A
Call to Spirit-based Socialism
Liberal
is not enough. Lorraine Hansberry, the young, Black, lesbian author
of the play Raisin in the Sun, knew that being liberal isn’t
enough. She called on white liberals to become white radicals. In his
“Letter From a Birmingham Jail” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
called white liberals out on their timidity, on their calls for
patience, in effect for their meek and ineffective support for the
civil rights movement. Lorraine Hansberry was right. Martin Luther
King, Jr., was right. Liberal is not enough. Yet for us Christians
there is an even more important truth that establishes that liberal
is not enough. Jesus Christ was not a liberal. He was a radical,
nonviolent revolutionary. His teaching turned his world upside down,
and it turns our world upside down too. That the church which claims
to be his body on earth has betrayed him by taming him doesn’t
change the truth. Jesus wasn’t a conservative, and he wasn’t a
liberal. He didn’t want to conserve the faith or the world of his
time, he wanted to change them, he wanted to change them radically.
He wanted to transform them. Many mainline Christians, myself
included, have long thought of ourselves as liberal Christians. Well,
maybe we were, but liberal is not enough. Liberal isn’t true to
Jesus Christ. Liberal won’t reform the world.
By
the 1960s American liberals, including Christian liberals, had been
calling out for justice for a very long time; and it should have been
obvious that it wasn’t working. By 1968 it was obvious to anyone
with eyes and a brain that the Vietnam war was immoral, pointless,
and unwinnable. We marched in the streets. We put up liberal
political candidates like Bobby Kennedy and Gene McCarthy. What
happened? In 1968 this country made the despicable Richard Nixon
president. The election of Nixon showed that the liberals had lost,
and had lost more than one presidential election. We thought we could
change the world. We thought that maybe we had changed the world. By
electing Nixon the American people said like hell you have. The
election of Tricky Dick showed that liberal wasn’t enough. Liberal
lost. Being liberal gave us the worst American president until Donald
Trump. Nixon betrayed the country and had to resign, but things
didn’t get better. In 1976 we elected liberal Jimmy Carter. Carter
is our greatest ex-president, but he was a weak and ineffective
president. Then in 1980 we elected Ronald Reagan. We made a
dimwitted, right-wing ideologue, whose primary claim to fame was
having made a movie with a monkey, president. Reaganite culture saw
immoral greed as moral. It made selfishness posh. Reaganites claim
credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, a very good thing that
resulted entirely from internal Soviet dynamics not American foreign
ones. In 2000 we made George W. Bush president, an affable but slow
bumbler who invaded Iraq when there was no reason to do so and lied
trying to justify it. Then we got Bill Clinton, a personally immoral
manipulator who gave us the Defense of Marriage Act and right-wing
welfare reform. Yes, in 2008 we elected Barack Obama. Obama is a
silver-tongued orator who was never as liberal as we wanted him to be
and convinced ourselves he was.
Then,
in 2016, absolute disaster. The United States of America, the country
that claims to be a beacon of freedom and justice in the world, made
Donald J. Trump our forty-fifth president. Trump is the swindling,
lying New York real estate wheeler dealer who has failed at most
everything he has ever tried to do by any measure other than making
money, in part at least by defaulting on his legal obligations and
not paying his debts. How many times did he declare bankruptcy? I’ve
lost count. There simply is no doubt that he is in bed with the
Russian mafia, laundering their money and lauding their strong-arm
president Putin. Trump, the apparently mentally unstable man who has
not one single qualification for being president. Trump, who signs
tax legislation that benefits only the very, very rich and screws the
rest of us. Trump, who denies the reality of climate change and whose
appointees are dismantling the EPA. Trump, who rolls back legal
protections for LGBT folks, protections it took us decades to put in
place. Trump, who gets elected after he has bragged about grabbing
women by the pussy and getting away with sexual assault because he’s
famous. Trump, the serial adulterer, sits in the Oval Office, the
place Aaron Sorkin has called the strongest home field advantage in
the world. The office of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. He
lives in the home of Abraham Lincoln. He disgraces the White House by
his very presence in it. To make matters worse, the ignorant,
backward voters of America keep putting the Republicans in charge of
Congress. The result? Tax law for the very rich, demands to throw the
Dreamers out of the country, confirmation of federal judges opposed
to individual liberty, complicity in Trump’s plans to undo all of
the gains in civil liberty and care for Americans in need put in
place over the last eighty plus years. Congressional Republicans even
want to undo Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the minimal
programs that provide most of the inadequate social safety net our
country provides.
All
of this is what being liberal in America has gotten us. Yes, there
has been some progress. The 1964 Civil Rights Act is still in place.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act is still in place though the Supreme Court
has take most of the teeth out of it by claiming that racial
discrimination in voting is no longer a problem among us. Despite
Republican attempts to repeal it, some of the Affordable Care Act is
still law. The US Supreme Court has decreed that marriage equality is
the law of land, perhaps became some of its conservative members are
really libertarians. Still, millions upon millions of Americans live
in poverty while the very rich amass more and more money that they
don’t need, don’t use productively, and no one should have. Time
in prison is still so much a part of the lives of Black American men
that, it seems, many of them just expect to experience it.
Institutional racism makes Black Americans second class citizens.
Many of them live with lousy schools, lousy health care, and a system
that convinces them that they will never be equal, will never make it
in American society. So do a lot of poor white people. Untold numbers
of our young people check out through the use of prescription
opioids, heroin, and other illegal drugs, and no one wants even to
ask the question why. We just want to throw people in jail, which
solves nothing. Millions of Americans still lack health insurance
because even our supposedly liberal politicians won’t work for a
universal, single payer system of health insurance, the only system
that makes any sense and that works well almost everywhere else in
the so-called developed world. Obama took it off the table before he
even began working on health insurance reform. That’s what being
liberal in America has gotten us. A wealthy elite that puts the
robber barons of the gilded age to shame. Tens of millions in
poverty. Tens of millions without health insurance. Individual
liberty under attack from racist and homophobic bigots. A warming
climate that threatens unimaginable damage to the planet and a great
many of the people who live on it while right-wing politicians deny
that it is even happening. A psychotic gun culture that results in
orders of magnitude more gun deaths per capita than in any other
“advanced” country. Right-wing politicians hellbent on making
sure none of that ever changes. Ignorant voters who buy the
right-wing lies and vote against their own self-interest. An enormous
military that cloaks itself in the myth of defending our freedom
while actually projecting American political and economic power
around the world. That’s “liberal” America folks. That’s what
being only liberal has gotten us.
Being
liberal is not enough. Liberal doesn’t work. Liberal isn’t strong
enough to overcome the forces of reaction and oppressive political
and economic systems. Liberal doesn’t overcome racism, especially
the institutional racism that most white Americans won’t even
acknowledge exists. Liberal doesn’t overcome homophobia. Liberal
doesn’t reverse climate change. Liberal doesn’t end the gun
culture. Being liberal is so ineffective that its actual effect is to
empower the political, economic, and cultural right to the detriment
of most Americans and even of the planet earth. Liberal isn’t
enough. It’s time for something more. It’s time for liberal
Americans to become radical Americans. Indeed, it is way past time
for liberal Americans to become radical Americans.
It
is way past time for liberal Christians to become radical Christians.
Imperial Christianity, the de jure or de facto established Christian
faith of the European west since the fourth century CE has so
convinced us that Jesus was mostly about how we get our souls to
heaven after we die that we have almost completely forgotten how
radical he was. Listen anew to some of the things he said: “Blessed
are you who are poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God.” Luke 6:201
“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your
consolation.” Luke 6:24 “Blessed are the meek, for they will
inherit the earth.” Matthew 5:5 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for
they will be called children of God.” Matthew 5:9 “You have heard
that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’
But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.2
But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also;
and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as
well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second.”
Matthew 5:38-41 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love
your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your
enemies and pray for those who persecute you….” Matthew 5:43-44
“The last will be first, and the first will be last.” Matthew
20:16 “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from
this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being
handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”3
John 18:36 The list of Jesus’ radical statements could go on and
on.
Many
of Jesus’ actions were as radical as his statements. Jesus rides
into Jerusalem on a donkey. That may not strike us as radical, but it
was. Jesus is enacting an Old Testament passage, Zechariah 9:9-10,
which reads:
Rejoice
greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout
aloud, O daughter
Jerusalem!
Lo,
your king comes to you,
triumphant
and victorious is he,
humble
and riding on a donkey,
on
a colt, the foal of a donkey.
He
will cut off the chariot
from
Ephraim
and
the war-horse from
Jerusalem;
and
the battle bow shall be
cut
off,
and
he shall command peace to the nations….
Borg
and Crossan invite us to consider the contrast between Jesus entering
Jerusalem on a donkey enacting this passage about a king of peace and
Pilate entering Jerusalem on his chariot with his soldiers bringing a
show of massive military force. Jesus is a king, but he is a
nonviolent king of justice and peace.
Other
passages show Jesus’ radicality even though he doesn’t even
appear in them. Take, for example, Mary’s song from Luke known as
the Magnificat. There supposedly meek, mild Mary sings:
He
[God] has brought down the
powerful
from their
thrones,
and
lifted up the lowly;
he
has filled the hungry with
good
things,
and
sent the rich away empty. Luke 1:52-53
The
Magnificat is an example of already and not yet eschatology, for God
has hardly done those things in any full or visible way. Still, Mary
sings the vision, her son’s vision, God’s vision of a world
transformed from one where domination is the order of the day to one
where justice prevails, a vision of the world turned upside down.
Mary’s song isn’t just radical, it’s revolutionary.
Jesus’
earliest followers understood how radical he was. They practiced
nonviolence though it sometimes cost them their lives. They got it
how radical his social teaching was. In the book of Acts we read:
“Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and
soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but
everything they owned was held in common.” Acts 4:32 It is likely
that Marx’ vision of a classless society came from Bible passages
like these. Maybe the atheist Marx understood the radicality of Jesus
better than most Christians have. In any event, whether we look at
the matter through secular eyes examining recent history, or whether
we look at the matter through the vision of the one we call Lord and
Savior, it is clear that liberal isn’t enough. It’s way past time
for us liberals to become radicals.
Which
of course raises the question of just what it means for us liberals
to become radical. Radical how? Radical to what end? Radical by what
means? To get answers to those questions we start by looking at the
definition of the word radical. Radical means going to the root of
something, to the fundamental nature of a thing. It comes to us from
the Latin word radix, which means root. Radical then is the
opposite of superficial. To be radical is to look to the root of a
thing, to its origin; and it is to work to bring about transformation
by addressing the root causes of that which needs to be transformed.
In the political context it means advocating complete or thorough
change of existing institutions. Change them from the root up, for
without changing the causes of poverty, injustice, and violence we’ll
never transform the world.
By
contrast, liberal means something like relating favorably to progress
or reform. Historically, liberal once meant what we now mostly mean
by conservative. Liberalism advocated capitalism and the free market.
It advocated democratic forms of government. In its time those things
were perhaps desirable. Today they are what must be reformed.
Moreover, while relating favorably to progress or reform is better
than opposing them, liberalism does not go to the roots of our
problems. Liberalism leads people to demand patience when it comes to
civil rights. Liberalism means treat conservatism as a legitimate
option with which you just disagree on some issues and with which you
are willing to negotiate and compromise. Liberalism provoked King’s
“Letter From a Birmingham Jail” because it didn’t go far
enough. It didn’t grasp the depth of the problem of racism,
segregation, and racial discrimination. It didn’t understand the
misery those phenomena produced. I’m not sure it does even today.
Liberal
sees the world as it is, or at least sort of as it is, and is willing
to work with and within the structures it has created. For a good
example of how liberal works look at the Congressional Democrats
negotiating with Congressional Republicans. In doing so they tacitly
recognize the legitimacy of hard right people and hard right
politics. To recognize the legitimacy of the hard right is to say
that it has something to offer, that those who belong to it are
decent people with whom one can work, with whom one compromise. Today
that is no longer true.
Radical
sees the world as it is and says “No more!” Radical gets how bad
things are. Radical gets how much far too many people suffer. Liberal
may open food banks. Radical seeks to transform society to that food
banks are no longer necessary. Liberal decides whether or not to vote
to authorize Bush to invade Iraq. Radical says no to all war not just
to some war. Liberal doesn’t create a universal single payer health
insurance system. Liberal doesn’t reduce the military to what might
actually be necessary to defend the nation. Liberal doesn’t use the
tax system to redistribute wealth down where it can do some good
rather than up where it just makes the wealthy wealthier. It just
tweaks around the edges, making things a bit more fair but hardly
ushering in a time of true justice. Liberal compromises with the
powers that oppose what is right, and when it does it keeps real
transformation from happening. We don’t need more liberal.
Liberalism has failed, and it’s not ever going to succeed. It’s
never going to remake the world, and nothing less than remaking the
world will do.
So
what do we need? We need radical. We need reform from the root up. We
need to reorder how human beings live together. Now, I get it that
that sounds like a Herculean task or even an impossible one. I hear
the cries of “It can’t be done!” “People have tried that
before, and it’s always been a disaster!” “You should know
better, Sorenson. You lived in the Soviet Union for a year. You saw
the utter failure of the Communist ideal.” And yes, at least that
last one is true. I did live in the Soviet Union during the 1975-76
academic year. And yes, Soviet Communism was a total failure. Instead
of creating the promised land it created one of the worst, most
brutal, dehumanizing, life diminishing systems of human political,
economic, and social organization ever.
Yet
if we are to learn from the failure of Soviet Communism we must
understand why it failed and failed so miserably. Some say it failed
because its ideology contradicted human nature. In this view people
are essentially motivated by greed. People work only to make money.
Wealth is the surest sign not only of earthly success but of divine
favor. Yet I don’t think that is primarily why Soviet Communism
failed so miserably. I believe that it failed from the beginning
because of its materialistic ontology. The Russian and other
Communists who created the Soviet system (Stalin was a Georgian not a
Russian) began with Marx’s philosophy of “dialectical
materialism.” Dialectical materialism begins with the belief that
only the material is real. Only the physical is real. Marxism is thus
radically atheistic. If only the material is real then there is no
spiritual reality that can be called God. In Marxism there is no God.
Marxism claims to be a theory that benefits humanity, but it isn’t.
It isn’t because it has no transcendent reality in which to ground
a belief in the value of human life. If humans are just material like
every other reality then they have no greater value than any other
reality.
Moreover,
Marxism speaks in terms of the benefit of the mass of the people, not
of the benefit of people individually. Consequently, in Marxism
people become tools. They are nothing more than a means to a
proclaimed end, namely, the building of a classless Communist
society. When people become tools rather than ends in themselves they
lose their value. Killing a person has no less moral value than
throwing away a saw that doesn’t cut. Is this person impeding the
construction of the Communist ideal? Kill him, he has no moral value
in himself. Does that person object to what the Party is doing to
build the Communist ideal? Kill her. She is less than worthless.
Stalin is famously quoted as having said that one death is a tragedy,
one million deaths is a statistic. Well, I suppose one million deaths
is a statistic, but for Stalin and the Soviet Communists generally
that’s all it was. People were just material. Soviet Communism saw
no greater reality. It saw no higher power, no God. So if you believe
that it will further your goals to kill someone, kill them. If you
think it will further your goals to kill one million people, kill one
million people, or twenty million people like Stalin did.
Marxism-Leninism claims to work for the benefit of the people, but
ultimately the people have no moral value in that belief system. They
are mere tools. They are mere objects.
The
Leninist part of Marxism-Leninism played its part in the failure of
Soviet Communism too. Lenin’s contribution to the theory of
Marxism-Leninism was multifaceted, but perhaps his most consequential
contribution to it was his theory of the Communist Party. Lenin
taught that the Communist Party (or the Russian Social Democratic
Labor Party as it was originally caused, also the Bolshevik faction
of that party) consists of the leading elements of the proletariat.
That is, it supposedly consists of the most class conscious members
of the working class. Lenin intended it as a small group of highly
dedicated revolutionaries who accepted Marxist philosophy and
Leninist ideology. The task of the Party was to lead the country into
the Communist ideal of the classless society. To oppose the Party was
to be counterrevolutionary. To oppose the Party was to stand in the
way of progress toward the Communist ideal. So Lenin created the
Cheka, the first manifestation of what became the KGB, the Communist
Party’s main instrument of terror.
In
Leninism the interests of the people and of the Party merge into one.
What the Party decides is by definition correct because the Party
consists of the people who get it, who get Marxism in its Leninist
form. Thus, if the Party decrees that progress toward Communism
requires that it starve several million Ukrainians to death in order
to force collectivization of agriculture, then that is precisely what
progress toward Communism requires. People who get it do it. Those
who oppose it are counterrevolutionary and must be eliminated. When
you combine that kind of Party totalitarianism with a materialistic
view of humanity that’s what you get. The starvation of millions of
Ukrainians. The creation of the Gulag in which millions more died.
Their deaths weren’t significant in any ultimate sense. They were
merely people who consisted only of matter. People were either tools
in the Party’s hands or they were fully expendable at best and
criminal at worst. Soviet Communism failed because it valued ideology
over people. It failed because it valued Party over people. It failed
because it was spiritually dead, as dead as any understanding of life
that denies the spiritual and says that only the material is real.
When
we understand that the failure of Soviet Communism was due not to its
ideal of a just society of equality but to its underlying
materialist, atheistic philosophy, then we can see not only that the
failure of Soviet Communism is no proof of the unattainability of the
socialist ideal but also how we need to change the Soviet model to
achieve a just society of equality for all people. We start by
jettisoning Marxism’s underlying ontology. Marx and the other
positivists of nineteenth century Europe were just wrong. There is
more to reality than the material. In fact, ultimate reality isn’t
material at all. It is spiritual. Indeed, it is spirit or, if you
prefer, Spirit. It is because ultimate reality isn’t material that
we know that people, both individually and collectively, have immense
moral value. We know that that is true because our values are
grounded in something transcendent, something ultimate. We people of
faith say that people have value because they are children of God.
Even if you don’t like that God language, please recognize that
reality is so much more than the material objects we see around us.
Recognize that human life comes from and is grounded in a
transcendent reality and that it is its coming from and being
grounded in a transcendent reality that gives it moral value. When
you kill a person you are not killing a mere material object. You are
killing an expression of ultimate reality. You are killing an entire
world of that person’s experience, and you are ending that person’s
connection with the ultimate, or at least ending it as far as this
life is concerned. Because we all come from and are grounded in the
same transcendent reality, every person’s life is as sacred as
mine. Or if you don’t like the word sacred, every person’s life
has the same moral value as mine. Many of us find the expression of
this truth in one or another of the world’s great religions to be
compelling, but even if you don’t find religion compelling you must
find the moral value of every human life to be compelling. For it is
only in the compelling conviction of the moral value of every human
life that atrocities like those the Soviet Communists (or German
Nazis, or Tojo’s Japan, or Mao’s Chinese Communists, or so many
others) can be avoided.
So
what do we need? We don’t need more liberalism. Liberalism isn’t
radical enough. We need a system of social, economic, and political
organization that works for the benefit of all people not for the
benefit only of the wealthy. And we need a system of that sort that
recognizes and respects the infinite moral value of every person. In
other words, we need faith-based socialism. For us Christians it
would be Christian socialism. For non-Christians it wouldn’t be
Christian socialism, but it could still be a faith-based or
spirit-based socialism. This socialism would not seek to force any
religious faith on anyone. All faiths, including atheism, would be
respected and have full freedom to function within the law as the
tenets of the faith direct. Taxation would be based on ability to
pay. Services would be provided on the basis of need. The political
system would be democratic, for undemocratic socialism has proven
itself to be a disaster.
The
model would be countries like Norway. Yes, taxes are high in Norway;
but the people are mostly quite content, and all reports are that
life is good there. Would a system like Norway’s work in the United
States, which is so much larger and more demographically diverse? I
think it could, and I definitely think it is worth a try. Sadly, the
American public is a long way away from accepting such a system.
Americans did, after all, recently make the American fascist Donald
Trump president. That doesn’t mean we give up on the task of
creating a truly just and equitable system. It means we have a lot of
work to do to overcome the outmoded political and economic beliefs of
so many Americans, who associate socialism not with fairness and
equality but with Communist oppression. I don’t expect to see those
efforts succeed in my lifetime, but as they say our call is to do the
work not worrying about completing it. May we get on with that work.
1 The
Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised
Standard Version Bible, copyright (c) 1989 by the Division of
Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in
the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
2 The
Greek word translated here as “resist” means to resist
militarily or violently. The specific actions which follow are
examples not of passivity but of creative, assertive, nonviolent
resistance to oppression.
3 John
Dominic Crossan considers this verse to be one of the clearest
statements of Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence in the New
Testament.
No comments:
Post a Comment