The Raven Foundation

I recently read an article by Ross Douthat that summarizes the thesis of his new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, and by the time I finished reading it I felt like the robot from the old TV show, Lost in Space, waving my arms wildly and shouting, “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” As much as I usually admire and agree with Mr. Douthat’s columns, in this case I think he has completely misunderstood the cause of our current political polarization and the cure he offers is not only guilty of romanticizing the past but of promoting a dangerous religious unity.

Mr. Douthat says that since the 1950s we have witnessed a weakening of mainline Protestant denominations and an explosion of “more start-up sects, more do-it-yourself forms of faith.” In his article he explains that our tolerance of religious diversity has led to a loss of a shared Christian center that we used to rely on to bridge political differences and “call people out of private loyalties to public purposes… inspire voters to put ideals above self-interest, [and] inspire politicians to defy partisan categories altogether.” Our failure to achieve political unity to address national issues, he claims, is a result of weakened religious institutions and a resulting combative religious environment.

He points to the civil rights era as a time when religion served as a unifying force. In the 1960s, our religious institutions were still strong enough to unite people across the political spectrum, so much so that leaders of black churches were able to “shame many Southerners into accepting desegregation.” Douthat longs for that time when “the institutional churches proved their worth as both sources of moral authority and hubs of activism, and where religious witness helped forge a genuine national consensus on an issue where even presidents feared to tread.”

I do agree that the civil rights movement offers a masterful example of using faith to inspire reform, but Martin Luther King, Jr. did not accomplish that by appealing to the existing shared religious center. That shared religious center was an obstacle he had to overcome. [Cue robot arms waving wildly.] Segregation was preached as God’s will from pulpits across religious denominations and political divides. King could not appeal to the shared belief at the core of those churches, because that belief was racist at its core. And more problematic still, the racist God was also a violent God in whose name one could fire bomb black churches, murder black civil rights workers, and lynch black men as the main event at a summer picnic. These atrocities were all committed by good Christian folk who believed God was on their side and that they were acting in God’s name. Douthat may try to argue that this does not represent the essential core of Christian faith, but back then he would have a fist fight on his hands.

Martin Luther King’s success came from challenging that racist and violent faith by calling on Americans to believe in a different kind of God, a God whose mercy and love could not abide violence of any kind. Not even violence in the name of good, which is actually the only kind of violence there is. To challenge our faith in good violence, King refused to use violence as a weapon. He refused to hate his enemies or exclude them from God’s kingdom, even as they were excluding him.

The reason we are so polarized today is not that we have lost a common religious understanding or access to a shared value system, but exactly the opposite. We are at loggerheads with each other because we all believe in the God Dr. King was trying to overcome: the violent deity who is on our side and against our enemies. Despite appearances, we do have a shared national religion, and it is one that cannot tolerate any disagreement. If I am on God’s side and you are against me, I have no choice but to defeat you in God’s name. In this religion, the world is black and white, good and evil, and all differences must be violently eliminated.

What Mr. Douthat fails to see is that in our current climate, we have only the appearance of religious diversity. What has proliferated is a profusion of religious groups who all believe in the same violent God and who are trying desperately to distinguish themselves from one another by dividing the world up into good and evil. Not surprisingly, they find themselves and only themselves among the good. They have created a world of false differences to avoid seeing that nothing real distinguishes them from their so-called enemies.

Dr. King recognized that dividing the world into good and evil would only generate more division and more violence. He offered us a new kind of unity that would allow differences to flourish. Racial, cultural and religious differences would not be erased in this unity, they would become more fully alive, making the world more diverse, complex, and interesting. This other faith is what Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement offered us – a faith in a God of love and mercy who is capable of loving even those we call our enemies. The end of political polarization will not come about by a reunification of our religious center if we are gathering around a God of violence. Such an occurrence would be disastrous for us and for the world. It is what totalitarianism looks like. For a different kind of unity, I offer Dr. King’s own description of the crowd that gathered for the historic 1963 march on Washington, D.C.:

The enormous multitude… was an army without guns, but not without strength... It was white, and Negro, and of all ages. It had adherents of every faith, members of every class, every profession, every political party, united by a single ideal. It was a fighting army, but no one could mistake that its most powerful weapon was love. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson, 222)

Christianity is the religion of a repentant lynch mob. To follow Jesus is to take our victim as our king and to never forget how dangerous the wrong kind of unity can be.

If you are reading this, then you were left behind on Saturday just like me. Not good enough to be swept whole from the travails of this world, we are the ones left to muddle along the best we can. So now what? Last week I suggested that if we found ourselves in this predicament we might take the bold step of committing ourselves to making peace a possibility. This week I’d like to make a few suggestions of what that might look like, offering a few activities that might nudge us along the path away from violence towards peace.

My first suggestion is to read the sermon Martin Luther King Jr. wrote while in jail for nonviolent civil disobedience. It’s called “Loving Your Enemies” and in it King asks, why bother? Especially if you are a citizen of the world’s last remaining superpower, “Love Your Enemies” hardly seems a fitting motto. “Nuke them till they glow” is more like it or as Pres. Bush explained only weeks after 9/11 at a press conference with the visiting Japanese prime minister:

"The mission is to rout terrorists, to find them and bring them to justice," Bush said. "Or, as I explained to the prime minister in Western terms, to smoke them out of their caves, to get them running so we can get them."

Hunt them, smoke them out, and bring them to justice, a justice which we now know after 10 years of the war on terror, does not mean bring them to trial, but kill them where we find them and unfortunately whoever happens to be in our line of fire. Hunt, smoke, kill, hunt, smoke, kill, hunt, smoke, kill – I suppose it satisfies our desire to get even, to make them pay, but I feel like a mouse on a treadmill, doomed to an eternal breathless run pursuing an enemy that keeps reproducing itself, mocking my every hunt, smoke, kill victory. What Dr. King points out is that, among other awfully good reasons to love your enemy, is that it provides a way to get off the treadmill. He writes:

“… hate scars the soul and distorts the personality. Mindful that hate is an evil and dangerous force, we too often think of what it does to the person hated. This is understandable, for hate brings irreparable damage to its victims. We have seen its ugly consequences in the ignominious deaths brought to six million Jews by hate-obsessed madman named Hitler, in the unspeakable violence inflicted upon Negroes by bloodthirsty mobs, in the dark horrors of war, and in the terrible indignities and injustices perpetrated against millions of God's children by unconscionable oppressors.

“But there is another side which we must never overlook. Hate is just as injurious to the person who hates. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”

King makes a bold assertion that hate so distorts your vision that you see things for the opposite of what they are – beauty as ugliness, truth as a lie. I would add the most dangerous distortion of all – evil appears as good. This happens because having an enemy is not about the truth; it’s about knowing we are good. In his latest book, Broken Hearts & New Creations, James Alison summarizes the cynical equation we all know: “Give people a common enemy, and you will give them a common identity. Deprive them of an enemy and you will deprive them of the crutch by which they know who they are.” (p. 165) When we need an enemy to reassure ourselves of our own goodness, we give ourselves a morality pass which allows us to rampage through foreign towns and villages hunting, smoking, and killing without ever doubting our own goodness. Killing becomes good, and strangely we become eerily like our enemies, whom we are pursuing because they believe that killing is good. By counseling us to love our enemies, King is offering us an escape from this hall of mirrors, and Alison adds this warning:

“The instruction is not one about being a doormat, it is one about how to be free. ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’ means: ‘Do not be towards them as they are towards you, for then you will be run by them, and you and they will become ever more functions of each other, grinding each other down towards destruction.’” (p. 166)

To my fellow left-behind compatriots, I suggest that after you read King’s sermon you conduct a serious identity inventory: who needs to be bad for the sake of your goodness? Maybe it’s the terrorists, or maybe you have a few personal acquaintances there too. I have a family member or two who come instantly to mind! Then think of something you would do with or for a person on your list if you did love them and do it, this week, today even. Just a reminder: those on our lists are not so different than we are because we were left behind, too. We are all in the same boat now. All the good people have flown the coop and all that’s left are the weak, miserable, and wicked – in other words, all of humanity. Isn’t it nice to know you’re not alone?