Belief and Change

As one who has been interested in the nature of “belief” from theological and social-scientific perspectives, I was quite taken with one of the slogans of the Obama presidential campaign: Change We Can Believe In. There can be no serious doubt that many people who were caught up in the campaign in support of Obama were also energized by the prospect of change. He declared, “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours.” Apparently, enough voters chose to “believe” in change as expressed by his vision for America and our recent politics that he is now our President-elect—and many have considerable energy built up and pent up.

But apparently, a vast array of these supporters also believe in their own ability to bring change, just as President-elect Obama declared. Now, what to do? It is not likely that the change envisioned by Candidate Obama can be achieved without the help—and continued activity—of those who “believe” in his ability and their own.

One sure way to release pent-up energy and enthusiasm is to stay in the struggle; it’s not simply a matter of taking up new activities but continuing to work on behalf of the policy issues that remain most important to us. One thing we can do, then, is focus our continuing activity in an area where we have vested interest.

It might be working for health care because we know someone who can’t afford treatment or drugs, or immersing ourselves in advocacy for realistic and sustainable energy policy because we think current policy is not good stewardship of creation, or networking with others who are working to reform state funding for education because our school district has (or does not have) advantages and programs others don’t, or organizing a group of people in our community to do something about promoting multicultural understanding and relations because racist expressions have appeared in town.

There are issues so large and complex and national in scope—like health care and energy, housing and immigration—that it can be paralyzing to think about working for change. Fortunately, there are others who feel and think the same. Connection with them is desirable and possible with networks and coalitions that transcend state boundaries. But many of these issues have local policy implications; they are issues that have a very “local face” and can be engaged at the local level. One thing we can do is find out who is putting the make-up on the local face of an issue, and what is being expressed or hidden as a result.

Not sure where to start? Try pointing your browser to Google and doing a search on the policy area you are concerned about and the name of your community (e.g., “health care” and “Clarendon Hills”) and see what comes up!

The soon-to-be President Obama believes in us, in our ability to bring about change. This belief is important enough to him to confess it and campaign on it. If we want change, change we can believe in, we have to believe in our own ability to bring it about. And here is where the theology and social science sneak in. Beliefs are invisible in themselves. The evidence of belief is conduct, behavior, activity, and so belief in change and our ability to bring it about is absent unless we express it in our work.

Belief and change, when brought together with focus and work, can be measured. So what can one do? Believe, really.

Peace,
Douglas Sharp

Belief and Change

A Call to Civic and Religious Duty

Some years ago, back when the war and the soldiers were young, mortgages and cell phones cheap, executive bonuses and political corruption out of sight, and most Americans cruising along on the waves of a strong economy, an ethics and legal scholar at Saint Mary’s College of California wrote a book entitled Rediscovering America’s Sacred Ground: Public Religion and Pursuit of the Good in a Pluralistic America (SUNY Press, 2003). In this book, Barbara A. McGraw argues that this country’s “sacred ground” is freedom of conscience, and she makes her case not only by an analysis of our founding documents, but an examination of the social and political mind of the intellectual architect of our system of government, the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke.

As she sees it, this freedom, first elaborated at length by Locke in the context of social contract and natural law theory, is the ground on which all the enumerated freedoms in our Constitution and Bill of Rights are planted: Unless there is freedom to seek after the good and the true according to the dictates of one’s conscience and do as one is led by the moral promptings of a sense of right and wrong, it is inconceivable that a civil society could cohere and endure, let alone secure the freedoms necessary for all to flourish. A duty is owed to the Creator who has encoded the moral sense in creation and creatures, and a civil society as an aggregation of individuals seeking the good and the true for one and all must acknowledge this divinely-given freedom; God alone can establish it. This is the heart of Locke’s philosophy and theology.

On November 4, 2008, something quite remarkable happened in this civil democracy. We elected a person to the presidency who articulated a vision for our national life unlike any we have heard—or seen—in decades. The election of Barack Obama is not only the election of an extraordinarily gifted and visionary leader, but an indication—a symbol—of a social and political landscape alteration the likes of which are difficult to find in the last forty years, if ever. Political analysts have assured us that the economy at present was a significant factor in this election, and they are probably right. But Candidate Obama also gave voice to our deeper longings, our hopes for a different kind of national and local life, a shared world in which each matters and all have opportunity, a civitas where the social and economic well-being of all is the motive of our political involvement and activity. And now, President-elect Obama will have the opportunity to lead us to a truer, more authentic realization of e pluribus unum.

I take it both as a sign of his own humility and wisdom and an indication of how seriously our civil and political life is out of whack that President-elect Obama solicited our help in his first speech following the election. I have no doubt that he and his Democratic colleagues have the “determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress.” And I certainly agree that he will have to “earn” the support of those who did not vote for him. I also choose to believe that Republicans too would prefer national unity over continued partisanship. But at an even deeper level, I believe that the sea-change in our politics and our reconciliation as a people cannot occur without each taking up the challenge laid before us by the vision and strategy of the new president: There is work that he cannot do alone, and there is work that we all must do together.

Professor McGraw hardly anticipated the social, economic and political developments of the last five years, so it is significant that in her articulation of “America’s Sacred Ground” and its roots in Locke’s thought, she delineates two moral axioms without which the vision of the founders for a civil democracy characterized by justice and equality—and freedom—is unrealizable. The good society is not attainable unless and until those who participate also acknowledge a responsibility toward others and consent to live together in mutuality.

The first axiom is that “each individual has a duty to move beyond one’s own wants and desires,” to expand one’s horizon of view to include the whole of society, and “to reflect on and discern through conscience (however conceived) what it is that promotes the good for society....” (97-98). This represents both an affirmation and a critique of a fundamental social and political value, namely the priority and self-interest of the individual. The difficulty some of us have in suspending our self-interest and dislodging our egoistic “number one” from its pride-of-place is a measure both of our enculturation into individualism and the polarization characteristic of our politics. I don’t believe that assent to this obligation means one no longer cares about or attends to one’s own wants and desires. Rather I think it enlarges the circle of community and relationships because it acknowledges the fact that the good of one is correlative to the good of all. We are, in a word, in this together!

The second axiom is equally straightforward: “Each individual has a conscientious moral obligation to do one’s best to contribute . . . to the development of a good society” (98). Here we bump up against another social and political value, one not frequently met in our individualistic and polarized society. This axiom urges not just regard for others in a shared context, but an active engagement that imparts some added value to the context, a set of activities and practices that “give back” to the larger whole something that would not have been given otherwise. This contribution is a tangible expression that one has benefitted from one’s participation in a society with others, enjoyed a measure of justice, equality, and freedom, and therefore presupposes that others have acceded to the moral demands of the first axiom. By contributing to the development of a good society, each of us discharges our responsibility to provide for and secure the well-being of others.

These are not values and duties alien to early Christianity, at least not in its New Testament form. Paul exhorted the Christians in the churches to attend to the needs and concerns, interests and circumstances of others in the community of faith. To the church in Philippi, he wrote: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” (Phil. 2:3-4). A similar sentiment is pressed upon the church in Rome: “For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned” (Rom. 12:3-4), and “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. . . . Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. . . . If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Rom. 12:9-10, 13, 18; cf. 1 Pet. 3:8-17).

To be sure, these exhortations were written by a Christian for other Christians who came together as a community of Christians to worship God, follow Jesus Christ, live in the Spirit, and relate to one another in a sociopolitical and religious context that was diverse and occasionally intolerant and oppressive. But it is also worthy of note that such very human values and behaviors as ambition, conceit, arrogance, disdain, manipulation, deception, and yes—by some accounts—even first-century forms of what we have come to know and name as racism, classism, sexism, to say nothing of ethnocentrism, could all be found in the earliest churches. A good many New Testament scholars have argued that the early Christian community sought to proximate an egalitarian community in the midst of a highly stratified and exploitative socioeconomic empire. There are indications of this in the gospels and epistles. All the more reason to observe that the communities of faith attesting to the crucified and risen Lord were not always sweetness and light!

Remarkably, our current situation as a nation parallels the early churches. The summons to us by President-elect Obama to come together, to work together, to forge a different future for ourselves by seeking the common good not just for ourselves as individuals but for all as a national people of extraordinary diversity, is, in its own way, a recall to the fundamental civic virtues and moral precepts embedded in the founding of our country and to the social and theological values and convictions embedded in the founding of the church: consider others and give something back for them

This parallel is misunderstood if it is thought to warrant a solution that “Christianizes” our society and politics or legitimates an ideology that seeks to impose a particular “Christian” perspective on the expression of our civil liberty. To the contrary, what is remarkable about this parallel is that it authorizes persons of Christian faith to be persons of faith in the larger civic community. It liberates Christians from being bound to our own wants and desires and empowers us—in the light of God-given freedom of conscience—to consider carefully and value highly that which promotes the good and well-being of all and not just ourselves. It unleashes us from preoccupation with our own agenda and fits us to work for—contribute to—the common good.

Whether from education in our civic responsibility as citizens of this country, or from formation in the community of faith grounded in the sacred literature of our tradition, we as Christians surely ought to have both regard for others and something to give back out of our trove of love, mercy, compassion and grace. Surely we have the capacity to respond decisively to the call of President-elect Obama to help him help us help others, and exorcize the unprofitable spirit that has worked among us.

Peace,
Douglas Sharp

A Call to Civic and Religious Duty