As if beating a dead horse, I must yet again propose this simple truism – that the mainline church today is far more influenced by the secular culture than the other way around. And to make matters worse, they don’t seem to recognize it.
Perhaps the greatest fallout from this is the loss of “fellowship,” the sense of belonging, of being inextricably bound to one another, of being “in Christ.”
The surrounding culture has largely jettisoned this rather quaint notion, to disastrous result. Yet despite its pronounced effect, it remains largely unnoticed.
One of the root causes is the hyper-politicization of every aspect of modern life. One must choose sides. You’re either with us or against us. It’s Manichean, black or white.
There’s no middle ground, much less any alternate reality such as – dare I say it – the holy or the transcendent, i.e. that which provides perspective and order to all earthly endeavors. Religion and the things of the Spirit simply have no place. Or when they do, they perform a purely utilitarian role, recruited as ammunition in the ongoing culture wars.
And because the political is preeminent, the church, along with everyone else, is forced to make a binary choice. We must pick a side.
So how did we get here? First, it’s important we understand the two major combatants in today’s political food fight. There are the modern-day “classic” liberals and the progressive liberals. Ironically, both are deemed “neoliberal.” They function, in other words, as the Coke and Pepsi of contemporary political ideologies.
From its political inception, America was “liberal,” meaning that the sentiments and hierarchies of the Old World were rejected. The idea was that the job of government was less to rule than to be an impartial referee, establishing equal treatment under the law, thus insuring the rights and liberties of its citizens. Here the populace was free to engage in commerce and pursue its wishes and desires without undue government interference.
This tended to work fairly well when America was still mostly agrarian and bound by the institutions and sentiments of civil society, made up of what Edmund Burke famously dubbed the “little platoons”: the family, the church, and the various local, voluntary associations that not only bound people together but provided the mechanism for character development.
It was this same civil society, Tocqueville observed, that made it possible for a free people to govern itself, combining both the requisite sacrifices and responsibilities of belonging to a distinct community and the moral agency decreed by God.
With the advent of the industrial revolution, as countless Americans migrated from the countryside into the cities, the federal government assumed greater influence in the day-to-day affairs of the average American. The traditional American notion of “self-reliance” began to defer to the balancing act wrought by the New Deal and, later, the Great Society.
American society had evolved into a highly centralized bureaucratic order, with power-sharing among three major sectors of society, Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government.
But as the costs of this behemoth government-industrial complex spiraled out of control in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, combined with its increasingly questionable results, a new ideology emerged. Thus the ‘80s ushered in the libertarian conservative movement, which erroneously claimed the mantle of classic liberalism. It was not.
Otherwise known as “fusion conservatism,” it sought to graft together two incongruous ideas: traditional morality and a newly privatized, globalized free market. It was but a caricature of traditional American liberalism. After all, the civil society upon which the original version depended had already been eclipsed. The communal ties born of family, church, and polity had been fractured, replaced by radical individualism and the blandishments of narcissistic me-ism.
Having opened the proverbial floodgates to the turbulent deregulation of society, this form of “conservatism” pretended it could manufacture a new prosperity and a return to traditional “values.” (Spoiler alert: it didn’t work.)
Yet the stark changes in market forces that began in the ‘80s only accelerated in the ‘90s, this time under new political and ideological management, reaching new heights in the present (think the exponential growth of global trade, the outsourcing of labor and markets overseas, and other forms of arbitrage).
Following the neoconservative failure to restore traditional morality, and sensing, at least outwardly, the need to address the inequities exacerbated by the then decade-long deregulation of society, progressive liberalism made a nostalgic turn to the past, much as the neoconservatives had done earlier, yet with a twist.
As incomes and quality of life issues grew ever-more disparate, the new progressive elite, unwilling to fall back on traditional morality – something they viewed as antiquated, if not hopelessly déclassé – chose to return to the failed progressivism of the early 20th century.
The idea was to employ “experts,” the professional bureaucratic elite, to devise top-down strategies to “manage” the disruptions and inequities caused by the unfettered market. Notably, those engaged in this effort were frequently extra-governmental entities, corporations, academia, NGOs, and other private, elite institutions, often funded by a wealthy donor class.
Whereas government under neoconservatism defers to free markets and political individualism, government under progressivism defers to free markets and private, well-funded interest groups.
The latter has made blatantly hypocritical, condescending, out-of-touch stabs at social engineering (directed mostly at the “losers” in the global competitiveness game). One result has been the emergence of a curious neo-puritanism, complete with proscribed speech codes and strictly policed, politically correct diktats. Meanwhile, the disparities continue unabated.
The logical incongruities within progressive neoliberalism might be symbolized by the kinds of advertisements we occasionally see on TV. Here the consumer is asked to buy a certain bath soap, with part of the proceeds going to save the Andean condors of Patagonia. It’s bare-knuckled capitalism with a smiley face. We feel good because we think we’re saving the planet while the underlying system remains unchanged and unchallenged.
Both conservative liberalism and progressive liberalism, then, toe the same neoliberal line of unfettered global trade, yet with divergent, albeit equally ineffective, strategies for addressing the cultural and economic fallout both inevitably generate.
The one thing neither attempts, much less considers, is the loss of that place we call home. With increasing stresses on the American family, the spiritual impoverishment of the mainline church, and the atrophying of participatory democracy and the body politic, Americans increasingly have nowhere they can find rest or be at peace.
These modern politicized ideologies devised to take us to the promised land are but pale substitutes for the intimacy and security known only in community, in belonging. Such radical secular theories serve as mere abstractions masking a debasing moral, cultural, and economic deregulation, an atomized kind of me-ism that mimics but does not deliver the only thing we human beings truly care about and desire above all else – love.
So, yes, in the end, we are in truth our brother’s keeper. And until this fundamental fact of life is restored, in our families, in our churches, and in our politics, we will continue to suffer, whether we recognize the cause or not.