Left Behind Liberals

For liberal Christians, things are really tough these days, up and down. They have to figure how to avoid being left behind not only when Jesus meets the elect in the air, but also when “W” re-does American society on the ground. The first prospect still can be brushed off with a closer reading of St. Paul. But not even a trashing of Alan Greenspan will make the second go away. 

The fact of the matter is that liberal Christians have been getting pretty much what they deserve of late in secular elections, and the outcome of the one Election that really counts may still be in doubt for them as well. As always, the qualifier “may” is important. For none of us should presume to think God’s thoughts for --- Him? him? Her? her? the Divine? the Transcendent? It? Now you begin to get the idea: one of our problems in the church today is that some liberal Christians can’t even complete a sentence as simple as this one.
   
A second problem is that other liberal Christians are altogether sure about language like this, but also terribly misguided about how being narrowly truthful in what we say is only rarely being broadly helpful. Alternating masculine and feminine pronouns when we refer to God? Praying to Sophia instead of to a Heavenly Father? “God Godself is with us…” Please say you are kidding when you talk like this --- please. Alas, we know you aren’t.

One of the reasons that liberal Christians can’t get to first base these days is that the way they swing their words makes striking out inevitable. Another is that they want to play the game at all only by their own rules. Home plate for liberal Christianity has always been what we can know on solid historical grounds about the life, faith, and ministry of Jesus and his early followers. But liberal theologians keep shifting the plate around, indiscriminately. Time-honored methods for discovering facts about the first century all too often get twisted in the support of ideologies that reputable historical research simply does not support.

A case in point is the recent strange turn of Mariology, in the direction of the Magdalene and away from the virgin. An affair between the former and Jesus, they say? Marriage, and even children? This Mary as the God-designated leader of the church? Her authority stolen by power-hungry male disciples? Women driven underground in the church all the way back to Paul’s time? Fiction writers like Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code) are not the only ones making this stuff up. So are liberal “scholars,” whose books are selling like Starbucks coffee to … can you guess?

From the standpoint of real rather than media-driven scholarship, what lies behind these otherwise bizarre aberrations is a sequence of not-all-that-far-out conjecturing, a process of inference that is always worth respecting and encouraging, even if its results must be rejected whenever the evidence requires it. The radically-liberal school of Christian thought just described is anchored in hypotheses about which witnesses to Jesus and first-century Christianity are the earliest, and therefore the most important. (“Earliest is best” is a cardinal premise of all recent liberal theology.)

According to scholars aligned with this self-designated “Re-Imaging” wing of thought in the church, the anti-Gospels accounts of Jesus and his ministry come from sources that pre-date the Gospels themselves. Therefore, the argument goes, they deserve the first consideration in shaping the Christian story for today’s world. The problem is that hardly anybody else --- conservative or liberal ---agrees with this construction of the sources for our knowledge about early Christianity.

Basically, the most reliable sources for understanding our faith are still the books of the New Testament themselves. Yes, they are maddeningly incomplete, as a whole. And yes, we can get along without The Book of Revelation, if we have to. Jude doesn’t help all that much, either, and James may leave us with more problems that it solves. But what we most certainly do not need thrown into the mix is The Gospel of Thomas, or of Mary Magdalene, or the host of other fourth-century documents discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and now promoted with great fanfare.

Maybe it is because of earlier and more invidious “Red scares” in this country that mainstream liberals have for all practical purposes taken themselves out of the red zones that count right now. Shouting until you are blue in the face, rather than red, is much more acceptable. How ironic. For recovering the vital center of liberal theology, and making it an equal partner with conservative interpretations of the Christian faith, is one of the things most needed today if the church is to present a truly full-bodied, red-blooded witness to the gospel in all its fullness.

"Moral Values" and the 2004 Election

Only non-religious liberals, especially within the media, could have been surprised that “Moral Values” would become this year’s biggest voter concern. Or that John Kerry, a man of obvious moral sentiments and convictions, would thoroughly flunk a moral values test that he should have passed with honors. How did he manage to do it, anyway?

The easy answer is that the Senator’s own moral values were too far out of synch with those of a large majority of the electorate. But this answer will not get us very far. Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush took pretty much the same positions on the most important issues of the campaign, such as finishing things in Iraq, protecting against terrorism, the need for health care reform, creating new jobs with better than living wages, and on at least one very “hot button” issue, gay marriage. They did drift apart on stem cell research, but nowhere near as much on abortion.

A better way to account for Senator Kerry’s being perceived as too far out on moral values is in terms of his personal disposition and temperament, in contrast with the President’s. It was not so much what values the two men held; it was the way each expressed his own. Bush was, is, and always will be loudly vocal about values; Kerry became so only after a good bit of reluctance, when it was for all practical purposes too late. Hesitance is not highly prized in our society; if you are afflicted by it, you will be better off not letting it ooze out from behind public podiums. By contrast, standing up for what you believe, with neither nuance nor doubt, will get you elected almost every time.

But we still need to go deeper. For behind the stylistic differences between Bush and Kerry were values of a quite different kind than either discussed very articulately in the campaign. These represent a kind of values that do not typically take the form of rules prohibiting and prescribing specific behaviors in highly circumscribed spheres of life, as in “no late term abortions,” “marry someone of the opposite sex only,” or “support our men and women in uniform.” Rather, they express broad principles, in the language more of aspiration than of accomplishment. As ethicists put it, the reason why these higher-order moral values are not easily translated into particular political programs, plans, and strategies is because they constitute the bases of any and all programs, plans, and strategies, political and otherwise.

What we are talking about here, as Bush One might put it, is “the vision thing” all over again, particularly the vision of a country that is always and at the same time safe and free. If America is ever to become that shining city on a hill on which the rest of the world will gaze admiringly and gratefully, it can become so only when these two overarching moral values can be maintained in comfortable balance. We are not there yet, but we have been working on it for almost 400 years now, and just about everything we have done to establish government of, by, and for the people can be viewed as one long, continuing experiment to ensure God’s promise of security and gift of liberty, together.

The operative word here is “together.” Achieving either security or freedom is never particularly difficult. But the price is always steep. Realizing only one of these values necessarily demands giving up the other. The better course is to honor both, even if it means that from time to time we choose one direction --- toward security is what the majority seem now to want --- before we shift back toward the middle ground, as circumstances permit. John Kerry lost his bid for the Presidency because he too strongly emphasized ensuring liberty before people were quite ready to go that route with him.

If liberals are to recover from their latest drubbing on the “moral values” playing field, the first thing they must do is seize the right to define themselves from the conservatives who gleefully stole it from them. Then, they must begin re-framing the terms of the next round of debate on “moral values”, by acknowledging openly that our most cherished moral values are also religious ones. And while they are working up a sweat on their side of the field, conservatives should be doing more push-ups in the end zone on the notion that ensuring both security --- their own supreme value --- and liberty --- the liberals’ strongest value --- is worth everyone’s best efforts. They would do well to consider that there are no “moral values” worth honoring on only partisan, ideological terms, whether in politics or religion.