Political Action and the Power of No for the Remnant Church

 Political Action and the Power of No for the Remnant Church

Rev. Douglas Olds

18 March 2013

As a critical voice of social and political structures in America today I am occasionally asked why I do not go into politics myself.  The short answer is that I have a sense of God’s calling to my present ministry.  The longer answer is that I pursued doctoral studies in Policy Analysis and Formation during the Clinton administration and had my politics and programs rejected in the course of proposing a critical dissertation of what was then being called “globalization.”   From the perspectives of my environmental and social justice commitments at the time, I believed that the concerted moves by governing, academic, and corporate elites to radically loosen regulation on capital flows and money creation, to equate free trade in goods with offshoring of jobs while ceding domestic sovereignty to international trade tribunals (NAFTA, GATT, WTO, MAI) were not in the public interest as I understood the public interest.  I recognized these political movements as private interests banding together for private gains, at the same time transferring costs and risk (“externalities”) to the public in the form of debt, reduced social safety nets and environmental conditions except in the backyard of the privileged.  I believe that the last 20 years have borne out these concerns while creating many more that I did not foresee.

At the time of my training in policy development and studies, I learned that my ideas of serving the public good in proposals and analysis were received by most of my instructors and my peers-in-training as just some personal preference of mine.  In other words, there was an ideology at my university that perhaps accepted that concern for the public good made expedient political rhetoric, but that all political programs and political action were motivated exclusively by self-interest. Social justice, taking care of the poor, and substantive environmental protection were not on the agenda of the controlling powers at that time, and my career of proposing positive policy as a student of the public good died a Hobbesian death: my political training was brutish, nasty, and short.

As I moved on from academics, I found myself more socially "successful" in pursuing independent work and small partnerships.  Large-scale collective organizing unfortunately is not an innate skill of mine.  I pursued my critical scholarship outside the academy, and later, on God’s initiative, I was called into the Reformed Church and then to ordained ministry.  I discern that God has some small call for a critic’s interdisciplinary training. I am increasingly appalled by concentrated power and the breakdown of checks and balances to that power. I am appalled at the creation of a society that exchanges citizenship for consumerism and that treats people who lack utility to moneyed interests as a material good to be propagandized, militarized, hyper-sexualized, anatomically commoditized, traded, bartered, policed, and finally thrown away into prisons or back alleys.

I exercise my voice of criticism while balancing elements of proportion and optimism.  It’s not all condemnation and pessimism all the time, nor is it all pie in the sky escapism. Either way, I’m sure in my enthusiasms and concerns I may at times lose sight of this life here and now.   I give voice to my concerns in church and also independently in my daily activities and friendships.  I wondered recently if I’m a political dissident, but two friends told me independently that I sounded like a patriot to them, that I was someone who was raised in privilege but also on the civic narratives of ideals in the American founding including the "checks and balances"on concentrated power, self-evident human rights, the Pledge of Allegiance, elite obligations to the less fortunate, and in the reestablishment of the Republic on the basis of equality as the Civil War evolved.

So, the question is posed to me: I hear your criticism, what are you doing about it?  Why don’t you go into politics?   Hanani the Seer railed with truth outside King Asa’s palace and was imprisoned (2 Chr 16), Jeremiah the prophet thrown down a well by Zedekiah's henchmen (Jer 38).  With more menacing technology, dissidents in South and Central America were thrown alive from planes and helicopters into the heights over the ocean.  What is accomplished?  The Voice Crying in the Wilderness I saw in Hyde Park was ignored in the 1980s.  In the 1990s, that voice was likely to be medicated. Now, there is a chilling trend to throw those voices into privatized prisons to be silenced by solitary confinement and, it is reported, torture.

There is indeed a role for Christians in political action.  Some denominations shy from it.  There is the regular anchorite, puritan and monastic tendencies in Christianity to withdraw from society and from politics.  My Reformed tradition embraces social engagement.  My denomination for years has engaged in lobbying for positive policy change in Washington, DC, through its own central office and through partnerships with other Reformed, Protestant, ecumenical, and interfaith structures.  Tragically, these policy efforts are being curtailed as our denomination shrinks demographically, as our congregations age and go on fixed income, and as what relatively few young people we draw face reduced employment and earnings prospects.  The voice of my Reformed, Presbyterian Christianity--marginalized as it has been since the 1960s in offering positive policy proposals--ebbs.  According to the reports I read and trust, most Christian denominations in America seem to be moving toward minority political status. Some denominations and churches are looking to the signs of the times in the militarized Middle East for the prophesied Armageddon to humanity’s end time of yearning.  Many in my own denomination hope for a more peaceful extension of humanity’s time on earth while decrying the militarization at home.  We are learning to hear the voice coming from the global south—from Africa and central and South America as we discern the Holy Spirit’s increasingly moving in and through these regions, seemingly changing the center of gravity of faith from outside the Mediterranean cradle of the church and its privileged experiment in colonization in North America.  The Holy Spirit seems clearly to be reconfirming Jesus’s preferential option for the poor in leaving a remnant for American and European Christianity.

Yet in North America, where democracy is bartered away in overt power grabs justified by GNP,  the United States may have already entered a third type of republic—oligarchy.  What earnest political program may be offered in a republic that has exchanged democratic deliberation for secrecy and ceding of sovereignty to an international class of mobile financiers? To such a political moment that has lost sight of earnest moral language, there seems only the presumption that power understands NO.   Moral exhortation in my experience is not just denied by this class, not just dismissed, it seems no longer to be heard by many of our elites.  It seems that they do not see care of others or self-sacrifice outside of immediate families or what military medals they award.  Or so it seems to me, informed by my religious tradition:

    Psalm 49.20 (NIV) People who have wealth but lack understanding
         are like the beasts that perish.

Are we to engage the deaf and unseeing like they have living hearts (Lu 24.5; Lu 9.60)? Animals showing us talon, claw, and fang are we to counter by demonstrating our entreaties, tears, and positive suasion?  We don't give up trying and evangelizing--with the message of hope, forgiveness, and God's love--but in addition to that ongoing work, there is another tactic, a Biblical way. The Biblical way of saying firmly and with the conviction of the spirit: NO.

       Understandably, the idea of a new “revolution” is proposed in the margins of the Occupy Movement, though I am committed to non-violence as the meaning of “turn the other cheek” available to us in Jesus’ message.   I am reminded of William Lloyd Garrison’s crusade for abolition, which he began in the 1820s and pursued non-violently for close to 40 years.  As the political compromises of the 1850s rolled back his achievements and became even more committed to eternal slavery, Garrison recognized that non-violence was not going to achieve his social ends of justice and non-domination.  He came to understand that injustice may escalate into expiatory bloodletting.  In my view, it’s not some retributive action or character of God that demands violence for injustice, but that God has built into humanity the cosmic foundation and expectation of justice, so that when a class of oligarchs denies justice to a minority for long enough, even the majority revolts.  The social bond and trust is destroyed and atavistic, irrational, and cruel forces may too often be unleashed.  Notoriously, both sides of the Civil War in America believed God sanctioned their systems of political economy.  Many on both sides were willing to take up arms and even commit atrocities in the furtherance of their own moral certitude in God’s will.  I believe I understand God’s will in both slavery and in taking care of the poor and infirm in our own society. I recognize, like Garrison, that violence may be inevitable.  However, I cannot embrace it as a positive policy option for the church as I understand Jesus’s instructions to it.

Which brings me to my conclusion.  I renounce violence to redress injustice. For myself and for any who are convinced by this communal reading of the Bible.  I say “no, thou shalt not!" to killing, to Drone strikes against citizens or against non-combatants. Even against foreign, suspected or known terrorists.   I say "no, thou shalt not!" to torture or corporal punishment of any kind, to military escalations, to “preventive” war, to war to further capitalist market access or resources.
       I say no to glorifications of violence, rape, economic domination, machismo, and environmental racism.  I say no to disestablishing social safety nets, to reducing labor protections, to environmental degradation and global race-to-the bottom “harmonization” of environmental regulation.  I say no to secrecy, to National Security Letters, to imprisoning and intimidating whistle blowers.  I say no to privatizing humanity’s global endowment of plant genomes by agribusiness, no the grant of extra-constitutional intellectual property protections to genetic modifiers of seed stocks, no to privatization of peasant lands in Chiapas, Darfur, and Vietnam so that elites in the capitals of Mexico and Sudan can generate rents and taxes (and in Hanoi to generate commissions from corporations) to pay off their foreign bondholders. I say no to death squads enabled by foreign governments to carry out that privatization in Pinochet’s Chile, in El Salvador, in Guatemala and elsewhere.  I say NO to the "neo-slavery" in prisons, and to all  private capitalization in both the law writing and the incarceration sector. I could go on.  This is the arena for the power of NO to be exercised, and I believe it is the primary political program that the current age allows to people of faith and social conscience.  If American citizens are only validated and empowered as consumers, we have shrinking power for positive redress and have only the right of voice or exit, to take our business elsewhere, to say NO to the corporations, courts and universities offering us these consumerist visions of disposable society and disposable humanity.

This power of NO as mentioned above historically has been accompanied by religious EXIT. The Puritans left Holland for England in the 1600s because of their persecution by power at home, then left for the New World.  Exit has traditionally been a political option in the church. My Protestant forerunners exited Rome.  John the Baptist exited the temple, ancient Copts exited to the desert to fight their demons unimpeded by the social structures of their day.   Yet I do not promote the option of EXIT as the only policy program.  If violence is to break out (and has broken out domestically in mass homicide, suicide and PTSD), I believe the church is there to bind up the psychic and spiritual wounds with God’s help.

       I believe that the Bible speaks to me about a political program for the declining mainstream church in America.  The Bible has multiple voices and I wish others of good will well who generate other visions and have the skills and calling for collective action.  But for me, God does not in those scriptures lay out a comprehensive blueprint for the ordering of society.  There is in the Hebrew Scriptures a positive vision of the temple and of worship, but God initially dissuades the people’s demand for a king.  When the people previously looked to faithful men and women for examples of righteous living, as the Book of Judges reports, there was some basis for localized peace.  The monarch and his servant, however, will TAKE, as the Prophet Samuel warns (1 Sa 8).

A millennium later, Jesus offers programs of non-violence and religious justice but offers love's guidance alone for structuring human economic governance. These necessarily includes the liberty from anxiety (Lu 12.22), greed (Mt. 6.19-24), and hoarding (Lu 12. 16-21) that faithfulness demands.  Subject to this rule of love, the Bible seems to endow humanity with extensive liberties in creating economic and social relationships yet has strong egalitarian morality in the parables of compensation of workers by ownership (e.g. Mt 20).  God’s specific social guidance for all, which is universal for believers and non-believers alike, is expressed in the 9 NOs of the Decalogue (The 10 Commandments' "Thou shalt NOT").  Later Israelite kings violate the expectation of justice by enslaving and impoverishing the poor and expropriating lands, and the prophets said NO without delicacy (e.g. Elijah to Ahab for the murder of Naboth for his vineyard, 1 Ki 21).   Jesus reconfirms the Decalogue provisions at various times during his ministry, strengthening and re-focusing his followers on their spiritual intent (e.g. Mt 5).  Christians may be in some sense free from Law as some claim Paul states (though not in my theological tradition of the 3-fold uses of the Law), but non-faithful powers certainly are not (Ro 7.7-8.4)! They like all of us will be judged for what they themselves know are violations of moral law, even the most contemptuous of them without fear of God in their eyes.
       While I’d like to think that Christians have the regular opportunity to be asked into policy councils to promote a vision of the public good in American society today, that invitation is not only mostly withdrawn, it seems unrealistic to expect its re-extension soon to the cloakrooms and hallways of power. Optimism, idealism, and dreamers flourish at the community level, in relationship, in the face to face where humanity and decency is engaged and supported.   At a time when critical policy voices are faint (though growing!) in Congress and in the socially prestigious universities, I believe it is the role of all religions and of my Reformed Christianity to be the critical voice to secret and concentrated power, speaking consistently God’s truth to power.   That truth is that God is saying NO! and Thou Shalt NOT! to what power establishments are doing to God’s righteous domestically and abroad.  That message of critique and analysis of systemic evil is the political role I see for my ministry in the present age. Of course, we say yes to positive steps as they occur, but  I believe the role of the faithful is to act and speak locally. The days of Mr. Smith going to Congress or (even if the current President reads him) Reinhold Niebuhr being invited to the White House seem cut short in the current regime.  I can so hope and pray for political renewal and revival, and will not stop. There had to be many who prayed for Abraham Lincoln as he struggled and wept, as I believe he most certainly did. Without prophesying, the current national political situation suggests to me a dawn of a remnant church (Ro 11. 2-6) in the West as the politics of exclusion works out its manifest destiny.