Last Sunday I was taken out of mothballs, having been asked to preach at a nearby church. The theme of the day’s lectionary texts centered around the contrast between seeing and blindness, how spiritual seeing, in other words, differs from the way the “world” generally sees itself.
The gospel reading from John featured Jesus healing a man blind from birth. The upshot is that the religious leaders, the Pharisees, refuse to believe what is right before their eyes – a man born blind is now able to see.
Near the end of the reading, Jesus says, “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”
And then, turning his gaze on his accusers, the religious leaders, he offers up this bon mot: “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”
All too often we assume what we see with our eyes – our outward take on things – is fact. Yet beneath the surface exist far deeper, unexplored truths. Spiritual truths.
Compounding this natural human tendency toward blindness are forces that, for a variety of reasons, don’t wish for us to look too closely.
As I’ve “matured” over the last few years, I find myself reviewing my life in a new way, from 30,000 ft. This strikes me as entirely natural – that as we age we tend to look back with new perspective, with new eyes.
Martin Copenhaver in his Christian primer, To Begin at the Beginning, speculates about what happens when we go to heaven. It’s sort of like entering a theater, he says, where a movie of our life is being shown. The audience, watching every moment, comments: “You did this?” and “You did that?” The idea is that we see our lives as God sees us for the first time. And it’s revelatory.
It’s similar to the Roman Catholic idea of purgatory, that waystation where we prepare to enter the fullness of heaven. It’s also consistent with accounts of people declared clinically dead who then return to life. Many report the events of their lives flashing before them.
And isn’t that what the Christian life is all about? Learning to see ourselves as God sees us?
In keeping with this theme, I’ve found myself thinking more about my forebears. What is it about them that helps explain who I am?
For one, I’ve been thinking about my paternal grandfather, also a pastor, whom I never met. In 1913 he began serving one of New York’s Collegiate churches, in Harlem. Later, as senior editor of the Messenger (the flagship publication of the German Reformed Church, one of four denominations that merged in 1957 to form the United Church of Christ), he championed the then newly emerging religious, social, and political movement known as the Social Gospel.
No doubt it seemed like a great idea at the time. The Industrial Revolution had created massive immigration into America’s cities, from both the countryside and overseas. Our now overcrowded cities were teeming with the poor and disposed. Living and working conditions were appalling (think Dickens) and the churches, especially in a city like New York, felt a strong responsibility to help.
So far, so good.
But while the goal was inarguably noble, the strategy designed to alleviate such human suffering seems to have proved, in retrospect, a tad wanting. At the time, the progressive era was picking up steam, the mainline churches hardly immune to its intoxicating allure. As with much of American society, the church found itself swept up in the overheated optimism of turn-of-the-century evolutionary zeal.
The idea was that history was moving inexorably toward a new phase where old truisms had become obsolete. The old had to make way for the new. Updated values were replacing out-of-date ones. A higher, more evolved form of civilization was the future.
Part of the logic of progressivism. and thus the Social Gospel, was the belief that society had become too complex and unmanageable. Old solutions would never work in this emerging brave new world, assuming, of course, they ever had.
With the brilliant successes of science and technology, having produced such marvels as the electric light bulb, thought leaders came to believe that these same life-changing advancements could be applied to human society as well. With the proper application of science, technology, and education, humanity was on the cusp of eliminating life’s most vexing problems – poverty, crime, inequality, etc.
Needless to say, such a complex society would require “expert” management. Thus, the nation needed to turn its lonely eyes to our universities and the newly forming “social sciences,” each positioned, finally, to figure things out and implement the right solutions. The sky was the limit!
Progressivism also was premised on the quaint notion that these same newly minted experts and professional bureaucratic managers would be “objective.” The general public, be it known, was thought to be the opposite – self-interested, ignorant, and morally suspect. Simply not up to the job. Only the truly enlightened, pursuing fact-based science, could take us to the Promised Land.
Of course, around the 1940s or so, intellectuals (the same cohort of the best and brightest) discovered a rather discomfiting fact: in human affairs “objectivity” doesn’t actually exist. Which means, among other things, that our heroic “experts” and enlightened managers are, if you can believe it, just as self-serving, ignorant, and morally suspect, and thus as prone to sin as every single human being on the planet.
In fact, if anything, concentrating all decision-making into fewer and fewer hands only tends to make matters worse. To paraphrase Lord Acton – power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I was talking recently with one of my nieces’ fiancé, a trial lawyer. He said he observes in court virtually every day one “expert” after another who, with presumed authority, argue totally opposite sides of any given subject.
In the end, the Social Gospel, though well-intentioned, found itself relying less on the church’s historic emphasis on spiritual maturity to effect personal and social change, and more on this new rising caste of experts who would engineer a society so well-ordered, as one wag put it, as to render sin impossible.
But here’s a news flash: the human heart, the human soul, remains stubbornly the same in every age; it doesn’t improve simply by reordering external realities. The experts have not, nor will they ever, solve the problem of human sin or the societal implications thereof. Only the things of the Spirit can hope to address these matters at their root.
The progressive bargain seemed to be: give us all authority and power, let us make all the important decisions, and your life will improve dramatically.
So how’s that working out? Was giving away our human agency really such a great deal for us and our world? Can anyone really argue that our world is appreciably better after 100 years of progressive governance? Oh, we may have a lot more cheap Chinese goods to buy, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that our culture has grown far coarser and vulgar.
Today, it seems, we’re prone to major in the minors and minor in the majors. We’ve been conditioned to chase after all the shiny objects the elite educated class tells us is of utmost importance – distractions such as BLM, LGBTQ+, DEI, ESG, “white supremacy,” climate change hysteria, and political tribalism.
Each is a variation on progressive thought which serves to divide us as a people while masquerading as the fix for all that ails us. Together they promise a veritable utopia to be realized at some unspecified future. Technocratic engineering, not spiritual enlightenment, is now the means of our salvation.
Meanwhile, as we squabble over the minors, our world is convulsed by the majors – events and circumstances mostly unacknowledged and unseen.
Take, for instance, the Ukrainian debacle, which has led us to the brink of WWIII. While forcing Russia into the arms of our greatest geopolitical threat, China, it also risks reversing Nixon’s strategy to play the one against the other. Nixon believed that the Vietnam War had so depleted America’s military strength that we could not defend against a combined Soviet-Chinese threat. Arguably, today, we face a similar situation as our military capabilities are diminished daily by the endless war in Ukraine.
Add to this the shifting realignment of countries around the world hedging their bets on who is today’s geopolitical strong horse. Alarmingly, for some, the answer is China, and no longer the U.S.
Not to mention China’s ongoing efforts to weaken us from within. I read a quote years ago by Elie Wiesel, the famed writer and Nazi concentration camp survivor: “When someone tells you they want to kill you,” he wrote, “believe them.”
China hasn’t kept it a secret that they plan to replace us and become the world’s sole “hegemon.” They even have an apt phrase: there is no room in the sky for two suns. In fact, they have a hundred-year plan (you can read it) to become the world’s hegemon by 2049, the centennial of Mao’s victory in 1949.
And part of that plan, as I say, is to hollow us out from within. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, corrupt Soviet officials sold off Russia’s assets to the highest bidders, thus earning for themselves the title of “Russian oligarch.” In effect, they sold the Russian people down the river.
For decades now, our leaders and experts, both in business and government, have been doing pretty much the same thing, only with China. They’ve been selling off our assets to the highest bidder, leaving America considerably weaker, socially and economically.
They shipped American jobs overseas and financialized our economy so that we are no longer a producer or exporter nation, while the oligarchs of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and our multinational corporations have reaped unprecedented wealth – beyond anything in world history, by far.
Meanwhile, China pursues its clearly articulated strategy of “elite capture” (their term, not mine), which is the ongoing attempt to insinuate Chinese influence into all of America’s leading institutions, both in business and government. Chinese money is everywhere. In a statement generally attributed to Vladmir Lenin, the thought was to sell capitalists the rope they’ll use to hang themselves. Whether true or not, it should invite reflection.
And in case you hadn’t noticed, our economy is a mess, with failing banks and bailouts which, needless to say, the average taxpayer will pay for (with inflation and higher taxes), while the high rollers are safely protected. The U.S. government continues to print trillions in funny money while acting surprised when inflation “unexpectedly” soars and the inevitable rise in interest rates crashes banks.
I could go on.
Oh, and just to be clear, I personally don’t recall ever voting for any of this. Do you? Did anybody ask for your opinion or seek your input? I didn’t think so.
All of the above might sound to you, dear reader, as the rantings of an aging Baby Boomer looking back with rose-tinted glasses at the days of his youth. Romanticized nostalgia, in other words.
Yet I don’t believe everything was better in the past, nor do I choose to live in the past. I try to stay current with what’s happening. And I agree with my mother who once told me she’d never want to go back to her younger self.
But as I look at the contemporary landscape, I do see a country that has lost its spiritual bearings, where civility and morality has degenerated in kind. I wish it were not so and take no pleasure in saying this.
Though, obviously, all of society’s problems cannot be laid at its doorstep, it seems the Social Gospel of my grandfather’s day has born but bitter fruit, given that the culture upon which the church placed its bets has turned against it, having since moved in an aggressively secular, godless direction. Rather than the Social Gospel’s original idea of capitalizing on Christianity’s historic success by expanding out into the culture in order to Christianize its institutions, that same culture has fought back and, alas, summarily rejected us.
So, as I see it, the contemporary church flails about, blindly assuming the culture is still its friend, while continuing to adopt its political and social values, those, that is, of our elite, secular overlords. It’s pathetic.
It’s time for the church to reclaim its historic mandate, to open its eyes and, thus, reorient itself in light of the ever-changing realities of its surrounding culture. Otherwise, we risk behaving like the ancient Pharisees, who fail to see what is right in front of their eyes.
We should do this if for no other reason than that the world needs us. And that by being the church.
Tom- Thank you for the wonderful perspective and sweeping view of the past century. If James Michener ever wrote a blog, my guess is that he would envy yours!