Soothing
Modernity’s Combative Anxiety:
Virtue
in Culture and Politics
Intellectually-cultivated,
companionable reticence rather than ignorance and tribal symbols serves
Providence-constructed polity in diversity. The mode of “virtue ethics” have an
underappreciated value in building stakeholder consensus through interfaith
partnerships and politics--for building peaceful networks across religious
traditions. Social renewal and shalom emerge from ethical transformation one
disciple—one ego--at a time, which includes the intellectual virtues applied to
deliberation. Governing and moral authority in the United States is invested in
the people’s legislative assemblies and not located in an executive autocrat or
religious totem, even if that totem has the name of Jesus.
“Religious
people who relate to a God in an uncertain or anxious manner are more likely to
experience psychological distress disorders, including anxiety, paranoia, and
obsessive compulsions… those who are less avoidant and those who are more
avoidant in their relationship with God both have lower levels of psychological
distress…These data suggest it’s only those in the middle, those who experience
uncertainty in the relationship with God, and not the avoidant, that have worse
mental health” (Westmont College [2022], reporting the study of Henderson and
Kent [2022]).
Many
consider that the culture and practices of agon (aggressive strife)
offer a virile and effective path for the realization of the Kingdom of
God—aggressively “contending for the Gospel.” However, many Bible passages rule
out a third-way syncretism (heterodox hybridization) that blends agon
with shalom.[1]
Especially in its moral center, the Book of Proverbs, the Old Testament
speaks of but rules out blending the dichotomy of paths—the way of the good
(good and justice) and the way of wickedness (Prov. 2:20-22). In chapters
10-23, Proverbs contrasts the two ways of strife and righteous peace, death and
life in B-A and A-B structures. This dichotomous structure formalizes the
explicit contrast between (as opposed to hybridization of) shalom and agon.
No diversion is allowed from the right path (Prov. 3:6; 8:20; Proverbs 4). The
good is straight and straightaway to be followed. It is the one true way that
does not admit a third-way syncretism between the truth and error, between the
straight and what strays. We are to never waver from the one path of truth and
peace—not “to the right or to the left” (Deut. 5:32-33; 17:11; 28:14; Josh.
1:7; 23:6; Prov. 4:25-27; 2 Kings 22:2; Cf. Prov. 10:9, 17; 12:28) by applying
the techniques of agon in the attempt to deliver oneself from agon.
To do so is to live inside death-dealing clouds of deception.
The
findings of empirical psychologists suggest that blending strife with the
pursuit of peace brings psychological distress and political neurosis. The
healing of these fragmented states requires repentance and the pursuit of
unfettered and unadulterated shalom. However, psychologies may instead
be sublimated in the “affective polarization” (Mason 2018, 866) of tribalism that
holds out the prospect of psychic relief in religion’s affiliative assurance
that one belongs to the inner ring of true religion. There appears a psychic
reward to being one of the few—and being with the few--that really KNOW what’s
going down, on earth and in heaven. Such cultural collectives may be
define[d by] both a system of beliefs, but
also a sense of connection to like-minded Others…Identity does not require
values and policy attitudes; it simply requires…a sense of inclusion and a
sense of exclusion [that] designate who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them.’
[I]dentity-based elements of ideology [in the current American
politico-religious culture]…[g]enerate[s] social distance [from] the
‘otherness’ of ideological opponents, more than issue-based disagreement, [to]
drive [political and cultural] rancor… [A] study of [religious-political]
ideology argues that looking at issue positions alone is inadequate to
understanding ideology… making a clear distinction between issue-based
(operational) ideology and identity-based (symbolic) ideology (Mason 2018,
867-868).
CS
Lewis (https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/) provides a description of the
tribal “phenomenon of an Inner Ring…[T]he passion for the Inner Ring is most
skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.” The
inner ring involves an informal hierarchy that is not
even a formally organised secret society
with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted.
You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover
gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside
it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.
There are what
correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A
particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of
conversation, are the marks. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at
a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are
obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the
borderline… There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are
in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been
allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It
has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders
call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases,
by mere enumeration…
Freud would say,
no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder
whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages
of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus
than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is
the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that
other people know. They are uninitiated…
[The impulse to
seek membership in an inner ring is an adaptation and accommodation to this
world’s] whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft,
disappointment and advertisement… If you do nothing about it, if you drift with
the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a
successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside
Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further
in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man… the makings of [agon’s
scoundrels:] unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists.
[T]he choice which
could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic
colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost
certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality
and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you
have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know
better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude,
or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which
the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something
which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about:
but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try
not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”
And you will be
drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply
because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to
be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see
the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated
face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for
the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will
be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further
still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a
scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the
prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.
Aldous
Huxley (in Brave New World Revisited [1958]) writes of “Herd Poisoning,”
the intoxication of large groups with high emotion and suspension of standard
consensus behavior patterns—skepticism of charismatic leaders and outlandish,
illogical phenomenological claims. Inner rings as herds become “poisoned,”
beguiled by the polemics of social media and enabled by its seeming anonymity
and privacy:
Propaganda in favor of action that is
consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical
arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth.
Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below
self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical
argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of
catchwords... and by…associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals,
so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most
cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and
patriotic duty.
Symbolic
identity takes on heightened performative valences and intensities in the
cultural sphere. Religious groups with low commitment to formal liturgies often
sublimate symbolic performances of the peaceful community and the
operationalization of virtue by exercises of titular prerogatives, contentious
leadership, and spectacles of dominating or hold-taking power. Politically-charged
tribal identities are characterized by a particular set of moral foundations
(Graham et al. 2013): 1) expressions of loyalty (and denunciation of
betrayals—e.g., see Shepherd [2022]), recognition and submission to 2) authority
(and denunciation of subversion), and definitions of 3) purity/sanctity
of a tradition (and attribution to outsiders of degradation, disorder,
and depravity). These features combine in certain high-visibility conservative
Christian circles to define all other Christian ecclesiological and theological
circles as “heretics.” Only the inner ring has access to saving truth.
Seemingly
accelerated since 2016, the tribal melding of symbolic identities in American
religion into politics has prioritized political contention to the detriment of
virtue and shalom. The justification for these performances of agon
is “contention for the Gospel” that wins back the culture for Christ. Taking
back “our freedoms” becomes a common ideological totem to construct
religiopolitical, symbolic, and culturally-affiliated identity.[2]
Christian
libertarians repeatedly point to their freedom in Christ as if such meant more
than liberation from the contagion and chains of sin. The liberation for good
works. Instead, libertarians seek a life free of accountabilities to and for
others. For Christian libertarians, “socialist” government is the ultimate
enemy that seeks to re-enslave them, by policy, into the “secular noesis of
sin.” This flawed noesis (condition of cognitive understanding) is alleged to ground
the persecution of “believers,” to be materialist and collectivizing
(“Marxist”), and to deconstruct valorized traditions that introduces
insecurities and disrupt “family values.”
Ideologies that valorize libertarian “freedom” (negative freedom—the impulse to be left unhindered to pursue personal preferences) above other religious and political values may be symbolically reconstructed for political and religious action. Conferences, rallies, and thematized spectacles promote peak experiences aligned with material content. Such symbolic performances risk mistaking peak experiences of politics with the Spiritual, especially when the latter is conceptualized in agonic, rather than self-denying, power. Gun culture and conventions demonstrate the pretense of negative freedom as a claim of personal security. With the ceaseless onslaught of gun-fueled shooting sprees, the metaphysics of freedom as grace—the endeavor to give life—is tragically and perversely contradicted. So-called “2nd Amendment freedoms” function to risk taking life while falsely promising body security. They are an idol that makes a travesty of trust in the living God’s sovereignty and providence that establishes shalom. The ultimacy and metaphysics of life-giving and -sustaining grace affords no freedom to desecrate, desolate, flee, or destroy.
Symbolic
identities have begun to coalesce into the strange bedfellows of vicious inner
rings within American religious and political-cultural spheres. Anxious members of contemporary consumer society may be drawn to
participate in mediagenic religious cultures that offer safety in numbers. The
ideas, identities, and alliances of religious cultures are shaped and amplified
within commercialized activity, revealing that an enclosed cultural identity
became a component of modern capitalism. Capitalism historically has favored
enclosure of the resource commons, and boundary-making is inherently
capitalist. Enclosure historically has drawn on Biblical symbols and
justifications (Attie 2011). Contemporary American religious and cultural
affiliation has recently become increasingly grounded in capitalist pursuits
and its adulterated and circumscribed “prosperity gospels.” These link
righteousness with positive material results--personal wealth, suaging of
debility, displays of spiritual “power,” and/or community affiliation and
assurance. Alienated individuals who crave such are recruited by appealing to
these benefits and symbols linked with messages purporting these accrue to
those righteous in the Gospel. While both its purveyors and consumers may see
religious tribalism’s outreach to fulfill the Great Commission of Matthew 28,
it is readily being coopted to serve political inner rings. Church and
para-church ministry growth become both the signal and the raison-d’etre
of prosperity righteousness (i.e., that God’s favor is manifested in wealth and
cultural impact) carrying forth the immodest banners of political power.
Fostered
by attempts at a third-way synthesis of agon and shalom,
religious neurosis recruits political malcontents by packaging the Gospel as
the avenue for both eternal salvation and temporal and hierarchical power. This
package promises the possibility that both eternity’s peace and temporal power
are accessed by thymic striving. If the world is to be won for the Gospel by
strife, some heterodox, syncretic form of spirituality is claimed to resolve
the contradictions of peace won by antagonism. Some intermediate condition of shalom
and agon becomes proclaimed in contentious and adversarial pulpits,
the straight and soft edge of which state is not to be found because it is a
Biblically-attested impossibility. The result of this destabilizing
syncretism--like a blood-sucking parasite on a gentle lamb--is the discontent
and disquiet of culturally affiliated actors and the collective performance of
neuroses on civic and cultural stages.
Rather
than cultivate the self-reflexivity of theological reflection to enable
virtuous living for others, cultic warriors futilely seek to discern their
power (and thus their assurance of divine acceptance) by their impact and ephemeral
monuments and banners. Their need for planting standard-flags manifests their
need for divine approval in an update to Weber’s (2002 [1905]) thesis—their
symbols and standards manifest prosperity and power that signals to them that
they are in accord with the furtherance of God’s plans. In ephemeral
demonstrations of cultural sway, bombast, and thunder, these symbolic
collectives seek the assurance that settles their anxieties. For them, even
when absent virtue, temporal noise manifests divine favor.
The
neurotic attempts third-way adaptations of Christianity with pagan agon to
promote order and assurance: “what happens when you just stop relying on
God—you don’t trust that God will be there for you, so you learn to rely on
yourself” (Henderson and Kent 2022). Tragically, this lack of divine trust and
allegiance pulls instead toward practices of agon—strife, contention, violence,
domination, and manipulation.
Inside
anxiety’s unresolved questions and discontents are the foundations of
authoritarianism that promises to restore order without the necessity of prior
establishment of interior peace and the virtue of accountability to justice.
However, by instilling the virtues of patience and courtesy that is tolerance,
order may result providentially and organically in shalom that dispels
neurosis. Through mirrored virtue, we can assuage our neurotic neighbors,
helping them live in an increasingly crowded and challenging society.
Democracies, by assembling the gamut of citizen stakeholders, more optimally
foster the civic virtues of accountability to justice than autocracies (see
below).
On
the religious right, syncretism and commercialization promote heterodox totems.
At the same time, the cultural left subordinates cultivation of virtue to
techniques and practices of exotic inwardness and relational detachment—the
various detachments of “spiritual but not religious.” If the self is discovered
and absolutized inside its spontaneous and unevaluated urges, spiritual
formation inside an agonist tradition becomes nihilistic, nominal, and
idiosyncratic. Inwardness tends to “find oneself” in one’s sexual and
antagonistic inclinations (“nature”) rather than submitting to the great
tradition of virtue that continually announces Christ’s supra-historical
existence and enduring power to shape our actions and guide our thinking
towards shalom. The Church may lose focus on moral cultivation when pursuing
self-determination and -awareness inside crafty narratives of identity,
autonomy, sexualization, and deconstruction--the kind of academized nonsense
and empty self-display, willfulness, and prejudice for inventions of glitz,
spectacle, and celebrity. The neurosis of the right is in repressive tribal
inner rings that pull and orient toward narcissistic, immodest, thymic, and
ruthless (“spiritual badass” [Du Mez 2020]) temporal leaders. Neurosis of the
left manifests in tendencies of ostentatious identity derived from
self-gratifying sensuality that too is narcissism. Both sides tempt egotism in
authorities by celebrification based on the performative attractions of
narcissism.
Neurosis
conflates the attributes of God with itself while formally and informally
repressing its own faults (Matt. 7:5). The conflation that attempts to
synthesize agon and shalom is culturally--not theologically--performed and
proposed, marked by the bald assertion that agon represents a side of God that
is hastening by agon to drive forth the eschaton of peace. This putative,
divine agon is often portrayed through a violent and earth-bound reading of the
Book of Revelation. In their tribal inner rings and neurotic forms,
dispensationalist readers of the Bible (Vlach n.d.) seek assurance by trying to
shape and participate in this supposed ultimate cause of eschatological
violence. They misattribute their culturally broadcast agitations for
Kingdom-building. They seek to predict the next temporal world order (2 Tim.
4:3) rather than living here and now in the eternal world of truth and
shalom. Conflating God’s fearsomeness with
its own ruthless nationalism (Isa. 8:12-13; 25:3) is a hallmark of agon’s
neurosis, particularly when accompanied by the fetishes of the anxiously
fragile--the gun and symbols (bromides and “camo”) of the military. In no way
are violence, compulsion, and contention—and their symbols--representations of
and trust in the Holy Spirit.
From
Here to Modernity: Virtue and the Public Square
Philosophically
grounded in the Enlightenment, American Constitutional structures have come
under populist assault by various identitarian, libertarian, and religious
symbolic actors (Rose 2021). Church-state separation, one-person-one-vote
elections, and the establishment of the voice and venue of moral policy-making
inside a representative body (rather than by a divinely-ordained hierarch) are
being questioned and attacked by domestic groups as at no time since the Civil
War.
The
opponents of Enlightenment liberalism have various ideological commitments and
beliefs. Still, as the symbolic images
at the assault on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 manifest, these opponents include both religious actors
and those who more cynically have tied their cause to the symbolic power of
religion’s forms and claims. The violence acted out on that date demonstrates
the vicious tribalism of agon applied toward an anti-progressive set of objectives.
Because
of the human propensity to mirror and emulate what we admire of others in close
proximity, political communities are training grounds of both vice and virtues.
Do our politicians reveal virtues that promote shalom? Or is it the violent virtus of
classical traditions of agon? In the latter case, we would expect tribes to
form in space around traditions and “heroic” (thymic) powers of anatomy,
virility, and patriarchy (see Du Mez 2020). In the former case, we would expect
collectives to be more socially diverse because both space and power are
shared. We would expect each tribe or collective to have varying degrees of
syncretism with pagan, agonistic traditions. The dichotomous phenomenology of
agon and shalom set in relief with the witness of empiricism and history
proposed earlier provides a taxonomical frame to relate commitments to
past traditions compared with relative openness to what is prophetic and
peace-making in modernity.
Modernism’s
project of increasing subjectivity of agency exposes the virtues that manifest
inside a polity. These virtues structure the design of liberal government
enacted in the U.S. Constitution and thus would be most relevant and practical
in its political spheres. Among other innovations, the U.S. Constitution:
• Establishes (democratic)
accountability to non-tyrannical justice in a robust separation of
administrative, legislative, and judicial powers.
• Establishes moral voice and policy
inside a representative, deliberative body rather than in the will of a
divinely ordained autocrat.
• Recognizes that political conscience
in the embodied electorate is served by free speech, allowing a domain for
moral claims—not just self-interest--to change hearts and minds toward
diversity, sharing, and tolerance.
• Separates Church from State as
spheres for the former’s modeling of egalitarian grace to be recognized by,
mirrored, and extended to the material and political economy of the latter.
• Processes in history by
rights-granting amendments sensitive to social developments, including those
that extend the voting franchise to originally disenfranchised groups (now
under the threat of rollback).
Wholeness
includes eternity and infinity, so diversity and pluralism must be primary and desired
features in God’s Kingdom--where grace is spread and shared. Wholeness consists of the spaciousness in time and
space given to wonder and tolerance. Wholeness is relational in its fullest
human sense and representations. Hospitality of diversity celebrates the
distinctives and particularities of God’s human creation, including of
plebiscites. Racial identification and exclusion can never be wholly relational
in this eternal sense of shalom.
It
follows that democracy is a worthy Holy Spirit-enabled arena for governance. It
reflects the Bible’s critique of monarchy, particularly in the tradition of the
critique of kingship in Deuteronomic History (see Chapter 2). The precepts in the Law of the King (Deut.
17: 14-20) radically—in its ANE context--limit the monarch’s autonomy and
prerogative. These limitations fit the more general theme in the Hebrew Bible
of Israel’s adaptation to vassalage (subordination of sovereignty to another
monarchic power [Ska 2015, 429]) than with hierarchy and domination (Wright
2015). Laying out its demerits, the prophet and judge Samuel robustly decries
the people’s demand for a king (1 Sam. 8:4-20). Earlier, contextualized by
Abimelech’s leading question to the people in Judg. 9:2, Jotham’s tragic
parable of the bramble king in Judges 9 clarifies that autocracy has less
warrant for the Israelites than polyarchy.
The qāhāl (קָהָל) was Israel’s cultic—God-ordained and therefore morally
(and theologically [Neh. 13:1]) concerned—collected assembly “of the people”
(Jer. 26:17; Ps. 107:32; 89:6; Judg. 20:2 etc.).
While
disorder results from the situation in the Book of Judges where everyone acted
as they saw fit (Judg. 17:6; 21:25), the failure of autocracy to adhere to the
virtues of humility and loyalty leads to the alienation and estrangement of
God’s people from their historical milieu labeled “the land.” The Bible thus
illustrates antipathies to both libertarianism and autocracy. Representative
democracy, as the American founders recognized, coheres with Biblical wisdom
that promotes polyarchy. It becomes the governing resource for the
revolutionary as opposed to the autocratic spirit condemned by the Deuteronomic
Historian.
As
a political ideal, democracy valorizes the gentle acceptance of defeat, allows
for calculations of acceptable compromise, and ensures human rights to
participation, free speech, and bodily integrity. Democracy institutes the
progressive aspect of modernity—the location of intrinsic value in the
individual and the individual conscience represented in an assembly—the Torah’s
קָהָל qāhāl—carried forth into history by the Holy Spirit. Once established in
history, support for the people’s assemblies—as opposed to that for executive
autocrats--is warranted by Rom. 13:1, Titus 3:1; 1 Pet. 2:13; and Prov. 8:15.
Using these texts blindly to support an American administrative autocrat is a
misapplication because the Constitution structures the ruling authority in this
country on the people’s moral authority invested in legislative and polyarchic
assemblies.
In
light of these historical and Biblical warrants for assemblies, the formation
of a wise political actor is the possession and prudent exercise of both
deliberative and moral virtues. The mission of political deliberation in
representative bodies agreeing to policies representing the people’s collective
will has become the standard of modern governance. Like all collaborative
endeavors, these bodies solicit and reward virtues that accord with the shalom
and grace which is God’s will. To the extent that political actors can
deliberate virtuously, they transform disordered spaces into ordered and
relational places. The more deliberative microcosms seek to accommodate and
serve the Providentially-constructed plebiscite, the broader the scope and
scale its representative, political, and civic virtues transmit to the social
macrocosm. Representatives are civic models especially accountable to God’s
justice and shalom.
Deliberation’s
principal virtues are openness to compromise and discernment activated by the
love of and pursuit of truth and its animating and morally-directive power of
persuasion. Its “chief ancillary virtue is studiousness – assiduous,
open-minded, objective, consistent and well-tempered application to the pursuit
of new knowledge. Studiousness is earnest, ardent deployment of intellectual
faculties, powers, and talents, resisting premature satisfaction of
intellectual appetite, and continuing to study until the desired [attributes
and dispositions] are acquired” (Webster 2016, 176). Studiousness recognizes
that even the most worldly of knowledge offers some aspect of communion with neighbors and
enemies, and thus with God.
Next
are deliberative virtues which open us to discerning the moral claims of
others:
These virtues include attentiveness (steady, observant direction of the mind to that which lies beyond ourselves [Prov. 8:5]); humility (awareness and acceptance of intellectual [and material] limitations); modesty (temperate estimation of one’s own excellence and resistance to the desire to be conspicuous); and docility or teachableness.
There are those virtues which fit us to contribute to and [benefit] from common [deliberated] life: intellectual benevolence (the disposition to promote the…good of others);…generosity (sharing [moral and material] goods); affability (friendliness and approachability in [political] exchange); impartiality ([accountability to] justice in .... conduct towards others); gratitude (glad recognition of intellectual [and political] indebtedness)[and loyalty towards our benefactors].
There are those virtues which ready us to deal with difficulty in the pursuit of [moral] goods [and justice]. These include magnanimity (the largeness of purpose which causes us to attempt demanding tasks); [political] courage (firmness of mind in enduring what is outstandingly difficult); and, finally, patience (Ibid.).
Magnanimity and openness to compromise combats agonism’s psychological tendency to extremism and intransigence, the hardening of one’s position that claims material and public goods and constructs exclusionary politics.
Schismogenesis
is a “conscious cultural inversion” where groups in geographical (or religious)
proximity define themselves in contradiction to their opponents. Schismogenesis results in an us-them
framework of historical and demographic identities and national mission
operating under cultural duress and the threat of political marginalization and
displacement (See Pally in Telos Group 2022). Schismogenesis amplifies
Schmittian politics (Schmitt 2005 [1934])—the coalitions of friends and the
animosities against enemies to locate the source of all duress in the political
neighbor. The resort to radical separation and cultural divergence is
self-defense in extremis. It breaks traditional or aspirational relationships
under conditions of existential vulnerability preoccupied if not obsessed with
socio-cultural threats, including threats to group (white patriarchal)
autonomy, normative definitions (of freedom as negative without general
obligations to include), and nostalgia (for hierarchical traditions and
idealized social order).
Holiness
may become a religious resource that relates to outsiders by contradicting
prevailing secular and cultural norms (tragically losing sight of the Apostle
Paul’s warning in Eph. 6:12). The rage of agon in cultural proximates is quick
to demonize, reducing the humanity of their political peers. In such dehumanizing
rage, the virtues of deliberation are swallowed up by unholy culture war and
the false claim that the level of anger and loudness of denunciation
proportionately reflects the level of righteousness held by “truth’s” inner
circle.
Patience
and hospitality, by contrast, lays the groundwork for agreeing to worthy ends.
Patience puts a rein to anxiety—that jailer of reason--and allows parties in a
deliberative process to breathe inside the Spirit. Patience resists stifling
the legitimate moral claims of others that our undisciplined aggrandizement and
ruthless willfulness would otherwise bring on.
The
list of deliberative virtues includes tolerance, which allows and mutually
reinforces equity applied to heterogeneous interests arising in modern, postcolonial
polities. Tolerance of stakeholder diversity and its varied moral claims
promotes deliberative wisdom and morally-sensitive policies: toleration works
toward both the diverse membership and morally inclusive society and its
protection and enablement of free speech. It follows that the political virtues
of democratic norms counter environments of intimidation characteristic of
authoritarianism.
Constituted
in major part by colonialism and immigration, the United States is structurally
pluralist in culture and polity, and its governing institutions have heretofore
fitfully but directionally established juridical pluralism as both a norm for
extending rights to previously excluded groups and interests as well as
distributing legislative (moral policy-making) powers according to the
principle of subsidiarity in Constitutionally-negotiated federalism.
Constitutionally-ordered
assemblies of democratically elected representatives—and their modern genius
for efficiency and equity—host and allow for a broad polity’s deliberative
knowledge structured by virtue to secure more accountable and just ends than
can be achieved by a constricted, unaccountable, homogeneous, or vicious
autocracy. This explicit intention to
locate ruling and moral authority in the people’s assemblies is found in the
Preamble to the United States Constitution
valorized by the conclusion to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The deliberative and legislative power of the
people to make moral policy is located in the assemblies of Congress. The People
are in covenantal relationship because they have been established in and by
God’s providence within the Constitutional polity.
Deliberative
diversity of interests is the impetus behind modern democracy. The investiture
of ruling authority (ἐξουσίας exousias) in the people’s representative
deliberative assemblies optimizes policy beyond entrusting decisions to a
single leader’s solipsistic perspective.
While all authority may come from above and not from below, the
establishment of people’s assemblies may be seen (as did the American Founding
Fathers) as the reflection of the ultimate cause (God) inside secondary
agencies (people). In this, God is becoming all in all. Contrary to some
post-liberal claims, representative democracy is not destructive but a way
station in the unfolding Kingdom of God operating from the ground of Christ’s
immanent power inside people seeking justice and peace absent monarchy. By
this, “the people” invested with common grace may repudiate their fascinations
and desire for King Saul.
The
U.S. Constitution invests the Executive agency with carrying out the ἐξουσίας
of the people’s moral and deliberated will. However, with the recent, regional
disestablishment of civics classes in secondary education, many American
religious leaders lack the knowledge to make the connection between these
developments of modernity and American Constitutional ἐξουσίας. They instead
misapply scriptural texts to rally behind and unquestioningly support the
government’s executive leader. Tragically, pastoral leaders ignorant of history
and suspicious of Enlightenment modernity feed religious inner ring tribalism’s
neurotic impulses for order, control, and security to make accommodations
with—and blind and unquestioning support for—the Executive prerogative as the
seat of administrative compulsion. This accommodation conflates temporal
leaders with Jesus. It also enlists OT verses and symbols (like the display and
blowing of shofarim—ram’s horns—at the nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021) to
valorize violent political struggle. Protestors re-enacted ancient biblical
rituals, ratcheting up their political significance. Such actions associate
political objectives with biblical symbols, transposing them into a totemic
amalgam with seeming divine endorsement.
These symbols integrate personal experience with ideological concepts to
produce an overly-determined significance for these displays. Their integration
consequently normalizes (because of their religiosity) increasingly extreme
political action—especially of compellence and assaultive ruthlessness as
representing God’s warrior will. Political factions—even the non-religious--try
to harness the power of eternity for their shameless spectacles by allying
themselves with commercialized religion. The Christian Right in the U.S. has an
especially accommodating, fearful posture for political alliance with mammon.
Both desire social order as ultimate ends though they differ in what that order
looks like. Those ends would surely reflect the harmonization of means--of fear
aligned with greed. But they will not come about. Another kind of
eschatological order will surely come forth within the metaphysics of grace.
Pluralistic
societies that move toward fascist, absolutist conformity are corrupted by
dichotomous thinking of God’s inner circle vs. totally depraved outsiders. This
dichotomous thinking is decadent and rigid, not the relativism that grounds
deliberative tolerance or extends the value of recognizing common grace.
Because
most traditions in a pluralistic interfaith society have a program for virtue,
such can become the common grounding for deliberative policymaking. Building
institutions that instruct and reward virtue and assess a political cost to
oppositional ruthlessness can be the ecumenizing (bridge-building) principle
for politics rather than turning inner circle conservative Christianity into
the institutional banner of the coalition overseeing material allocations of
public goods. Popular Christianity’s cooptation with thymos has
all-too-frequently manifested the promotion of mammon (Matt. 6:24): libertarian
economics, consumer symbols, and immodest, affluence-signaling and -seeking
lifestyles.
Rather than virtue, consumerist
elements and contentious and selective applications of the written word of God
become adapted to signal who is inside the polity and who is outside.
Tragically, Biblical elements are syncretized with traditions and practices of
agon in the attempt to gain the victory for their battle standards—their
Christian flags, their denominational or mega-church brand, their heroes of
contemporary faith, their urgent seeking of personal safety and national
security. Their militarized and
authoritarian syncretism in service to cultural influence and
“freedom”-securing power is predictably but tragically seen by outsiders as
hypocrisy to the Gospel grounded in the orthodox ethics of the Sermon on the
Mount. Christian syncretists have replaced the Sermon on the Mount as the
center of their social message with a violent reading of Gen. 1:28 “dominion”
and the Book of Revelation that manifests their own neurotic anxieties
regarding their relationship with living inside God’s promises and steadfast
love. Church order and mission realized in syncretic blends of features and
practices of agon do not correspond to the Sermon on the Mount. Instead, they
operate in conjunction with secularized will-to-power, grotesquely distorting ethics
through religious violence and blasphemous politics. Agon is not a feature of
human ontology. Those who, by reasons of
fear, syncretize Christianity with violence lack concord with the assurance of
Hebrews 2:15.
Any
hypocrisy of violence and abuse abrogates the social influence that these
culture warriors crave. Their syncretic accommodation with agon and thymic
culture has created a new cadre of political actors and consonant alignments,
but the data seem contradictory in terms of advancing the Gospel. The rise of
religious “nones” in American society, Christian disaffiliation, and turning
away from Christian institutions among younger generations (PRRI 2021a)
suggests that syncretist narratives to program the blending of hierarchies and
violence with the Gospel are, except for reaching fellow neurotic worriers and
graspers, a misdirection of effective evangelism. Packard and Rusert (2022)
report that members of Generation Z have turned away from their parents’
Christian institutions in favor of a “spiritual” identification alongside a
more “dynamic” set of non-traditional religious practices.
Highjacking
Jesus in support of nationalistic and compulsory agendas and personalities
alienates many who claim no adherence to Christianity but instinctively recognize—and
turn away from--these overly-determined propagations of malice and false
ethical narratives inside Christian symbols. Those outside the Christian faith
expect its Sermon on the Mount witness of peace and justice. Likewise, those
progressives living in union with Christ expect that the sum of political
virtues and deliberative faculties are directed by the Church toward creating a
polity that is the harbinger and pull of the just society—the Kingdom of God.
Political
virtues enable powers to be exercised in a morally and providentially optimal
way. God reveals and contrasts the pattern of wise and unwise rule and virtuous
and vicious governance in the Psalms (especially Psalms 2; 7; 9-11; 21; 45; 58;
82, etc.). Their themes of the basis, purpose, and virtues of human rule keep
the focus on “returning to God as model for the perfect realization” (Adam M.
Carrington @carringtonam 5/9/22) of politics and governance. In the psalms
concerning political leadership, deliberative virtues like humility and
discernment are portrayed as an optimizing means to just and shalom-building
ends. These ends include their social recognition and mimetic emulation for the
sake of moral justice.
Recognition
of virtue operating inside public deliberative and political spaces may be more
effective to evangelization of those spaces than proclaimed and broadcast
dogmas, particularly in those modern contexts that have formalized the
separation of Church and State. The recognition of virtue in the neighborhood
sphere and assembly promotes shalom, while in the deliberative spheres of moral
suasion and policymaking, their recognition can sway debate to mitigate
deprivation of the kind outlined by Matthew 25.
Christian
deliberative virtue and conduct is that by which all may recognize the
processive Spirit—insiders and outsiders alike. As stated earlier, recognition
is no less a theological resource than the traditional quadrilateral of Bible,
experience (of which it may be a subset), tradition, and reason. One kind of
politics deals with others from considerations of their merit, and another
which does so with respect to the others’ need. One of these is Gospel. One of
these is radical grace. The Church distinguishes itself from the culture of its
age by the politics of grace. It does not distinguish itself by ethical
subordination to or accommodation with the reward systems and appetitive and
thymic strife and hierarchies of capitalist agon.
Virtue
Ecumenism: the shared lived values in mixed-faith society
Reconsidering
the polity along the lines of lived values—of which virtues its varied faith
traditions hold dear—may break the yoke of material identity and oppositional
symbolic propaganda to bring forth a more fruitful political discourse and
policy regarding the common good. Toward this end, Christians ought to refrain
from the lens of disparate demographic identifications that have been instead
transformed into spiritual community articulated by Paul in Galatians 3:
Early
Christian thinkers drew inspiration from the New Testament’s vision of a world
in which differences of race, class, and sex would be healed. “There is neither
Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, male and female: for you are all one in
Christ Jesus,” Saint Paul instructed the church in Galatia. This early Christian
universalism also insisted on the primordial unity of the human family, arguing
that “God has made of one blood all the nations of the world.” (Rose 2021,
149).
God
restores territories and histories of mutual hostility into a new and united
people in Christ. Rather than making up an ethnicity or race, the blood that
circulates to make one world—one people—is that of Jesus’ love. Shalom is
accomplished in and by the one blood:
[T]his
[blood] pedigree included not only Jesus and the patriarchs of Jewish
scripture, but the wisest philosophers of antiquity, who sought the truth about
God with a sincere heart. All were part of the “race of the saved,” as one
scholar has put it, because they had rendered sincere worship to God.
Religious
universalism may be derived in and from the blood—in that love of God for the
material creation of blood that God extends toward all people--and from which
all are intended to mirror and reflect back to God and to neighbor:
Christian
thinkers were aware of the extraordinary nature of their genealogical claims,
and they invoked scripture to defend them. They drew on Paul’s idea,
understandably shocking to Jews, that Christians acquire Abraham as an
ancestor, becoming descendants of Israel through faith. They imagined that Christians
were reborn by being grafted onto a new family tree, exchanging the traditions
of their earthly fathers for those of their forefathers in faith. But was it
only a spiritual lineage that early Christians imagined they shared with
faithful Jews and noble pagans? Astonishingly, no. For some theologians, since
the humanity of all believers…was included in the flesh of Jesus, Christians
had a kind of sacramental kinship with all those united in his mystical body.
The Christian …genealogy boasted of saints, sages, and heroes with whom they
were related through God.
Christians
need not call this community [in love’s blood] a “race” to make stronger claims
about the way it binds them together across time…[Christians] might be more
willing to bear witness to an ideal of ethnic solidarity that is open to
transcendence, rather than closed to it (Rose 2021, 151-152).
In
seeking to worship and embody transcendence, society as created by God
progresses toward the unity in diversity marked with shalom. Many if not most
traditions that recognize transcendence have a program for virtues—Buddhist,
pagan, Muslim, Stoic, Jewish, and Christian. The key to forming community
inside this religious pluralism is training our children and ourselves to
recognize the organic, common grace virtues in and of our neighbors. Universal
grace is found in conduct rather than simply in beliefs. But Christians, in
their sacraments, are constituted as the vanguard for the waves of communion
with neighbors that bring forward God’s Kingdom shalom. The blood we share with
neighbor is circulated in the love that neighbor has as God’s creature. Because
we share in the one blood, we seek its health and proliferation wherever it is
found.
Shalom
is promoted by the wisdom of others with whom we live in proximity. While the
unforeseen will arise, it is never entirely unprecedented. The wisdom of our
elders and our traditions prepare us to weather the shocks of novelty.
Deliberative
wisdom is proffered without expectation of the self’s advantage (Phil. 2:4).
Working for the good of others without considerations of self-advantage or
reciprocity is the practice of saints. The free grace of wisdom is the mirror
and gesture of recurrent experience given for the benefit of others in
community. It follows that diversity of both elders and of the community as
training grounds for wisdom recurs in God’s eschatological plan. Diversity in
the social structures and pedagogy of wisdom includes sound principles for
interfaith networks and networking. These networks tend, in part, toward the
centrifugality of boundary-making parochialism. But this book argues that
interfaith deliberation is “perichoretic” --it centripetally processes to solve
problems by gracious, mutual deferral serving commonly agreed virtues, especially
honesty and accountability to justice. A functioning community of diverse
interests is most optimally centered on shared lived values common to humanity.
Classicist
Martha Nussbaum and Development Economist Amartya Sen propose that Aristotelian
virtues have the broadest potential for identifying and making concrete
socially unifying capabilities and functionings toward health and safety
(Nussbaum 2008; Olds 1997) toward the common good of shalom inside a pluralist
society. From thence, the particular Christian vanguard of social virtues may
take hold.
Deliberative
pluralism founded in an educated public represented by wise and virtuous elders
is the means for a people’s good ends and moral policymaking, not an
authoritarian system. By this, the social location and diversity of learning
and experience serve the common good less bound by material totems and
solipsistic biases. Toleration and diversity of wisdom advance in interfaith
recognition and implementation of virtue.
Virtues
discourse is the singular praxis of deliberative wisdom applied for the common
good. It counters neoliberalism’s elevation of market transactions and
utilitarian productivity to the summum bonum of human existence. Decoupling
from the utilitarian and financial nexus of reciprocity instead to work for the
benefit of others by the free grace of virtues is both redemptive and radically
reconfiguring. Virtues resist established, antagonistic political economics but
instead seek solidarity with those most deprived. Shalom has the whole
community participate in material sufficiency and spiritual freedom. Freedom,
it needs always to be emphasized, must be tempered by virtue and structured by the Golden Rule.
[1] Agon
is physically competitive and compelling strife, valorized in pagan epics like
the Homeric as the arete (excellence) of combative cultures. Shalom is
the Hebrew Bible’s alternative to pagan agon—it is the state of a
cultural collective living with secure attachment to its God and God’s gracious
provision. The state of shalom is thus peaceful, with its civilian
constituents living with a wholeness of body, soul, and God’s spirit.
[2]
Totemism is marked by “affiliat[es that] share certain general attributes of
physical conformation, substance, temperament, and behavior by virtue of a common
origin localized in space. Now, these attributes are … derived from … the name
of an abstract property” (Descola 2014, 275). The American term “evangelical”
has become abstracted and relativized to serve the ends of a cultural amalgam
of unfettered freedom-seeking, nationalism, libertarian economics, and
traditional and commercialized household images and symbols in addition to an
identity marker of those of the “inner ring.” These social inner circles
broadcast and proclaim the Gospel’s call for individual repentance as the
prelude to salvation but increasingly have moved into the political economic
sphere.
The collectivizing totemization of the figure of Jesus
without following his ethics is discerned in the concern with membership
(loyalty, authority, and purity) and the physical (“racial,” not spiritual)
“essence.” Because of the radical disparateness of interiorities, assurance is
sought in the continuity of materialities (Ibid., 277). When totems combine
religious identity with a non-religious ideology, they amplify in-group loyalty
and prejudice against outsiders. By this combination, totemic communities
sacralize biases, attributing them to the ultimate, cosmic, and transcendent.
Rather than advancing the Spirit, it serves instead to protect the material
order.
Tribal
religion offers seekers ritual spaces of belonging, comfort, concern, and
matters of meaning more than of fact. The increasingly totemized coalitions in
American society manifest the seeking of assurance inside majoritarian identity
and “racial” essence. For some “believers,” the growth of religious tribes may
reveal assurance as it is marked by material (demographic or economic)
attributes as well as spiritual affinities. For others, political and material objectives
may be sought and become psychically assured by participation in the totemic
collective.
A consequence of dichotomizing the essence of people as
either fully saved or totally depraved is that it risks slipping into
naturalism that privileges the “beliefs,” subjectivity, moral conscience,
hermeneutics, and identity pertaining to one form of human culture and deeming
others unable to image God.
