Faith, Community, and the Common Good

The Center for the Congregation in Public Life has designed the curriculum "Faithful Citizen" for church groups interested in current global issues and biblical teachings about covenant and ministry. Check out the information on these lessons, which include an interview with Robert Bellah and also relevant film clips.  http://www.congregationinpubliclife.org/DVDCurriculum.htm

The Faithful Citizen designers and writers hope to offer a corrective to the individualism that often characterizes both our religious faith and political opinions. At the heart of the curriculum are two works, Robert Bellah and his fellow authors’ Habits of the Heart and especially Eric Mount’s Covenant, Community, and the Common Good: An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. Bellah and his fellow authors note that Americans tend to think of religion, not only in terms of institutional religion but also as a private, individual concern. A personal approach to God and faith reveals the “freedom, openness, and pluralism of American religious life” but neglects the fact that our relationship with God “is mediated by a whole pattern of community life.”(1)

Eric Mount, who is influenced by Bellah, stresses aspects of American religious life reflected in his book’s title. Americans have always had a twofold drive: individual well-being and success, and a desire for the common good (2). While Americans are indebted to the individualistic tradition of John Locke that affirms the rights of people to life, liberty, and economic and personal well-being, we are also indebted to a more covenantal and community-oriented concern for the common good.(3) Mount quotes H. Richard Niebuhr, “Covenant [in early American thinking] was the binding together in one body politic of persons who assumed through unlimited promise responsibility to and for each other and for the common laws, under God.” Becoming a member of that society was not granted at birth, but (Niebuhr continues) was “always the moral act of taking upon oneself, through promise, the responsibilities of citizenship that bound itself in the very exercise of its freedom.”(4) Such a framework of mutual obligation in turns provides the underpinnings of public discourse and mutual responsibilities within the communities in which we live, as well as a focus upon the common good.

Throughout his book, Mount provides much discussion and material for thinking about how the church can help society regain a sense of community, and to help shape “the common life” of our society and the social “common good.” The nature of the common good will always be debated—for instance, how much should the government ensure people’s well-being and when should the government stay out of people’s lives.(5) But the church can season these debates with its example of service and its own debates about crucial issues. Mount emphasizes the theme of “better stories” (Robert Reich’s term) that narrative our commonality–and our sense of being “in this together”–rather than our individualism and our “us v. them” attitudes. (6)

Mount believes the church can be faithful to its own Gospel message while also being respectful of pluralism and diversity. “My own contention,” argues Mount, “is that those of us in religious communities should endeavor to interpret and shape the common life on the basis of our theological convictions, but that we should do so confessionally, not apologetically, as [Max] Stackhouse does [in his writings].” Mount writes, “[T]here is too much damage done when a particular theology is implemented as the reigning ideology of societies,” since after all, “[t]here is enough religious pluralism in our own land and in the global community to make one hope that we can discover some commonly affirmed civic virtues from a variety of stories sources, including our American political tradition, and even some reiterative universal norms through dialogue, without promulgating one’s theology’s norms as universal directives.”(7)

Notes:

1. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 227.

2. Eric Mount, Jr. Covenant, Community, and the Common Good: An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 1999), 3.

3. Eric Mount, “Covenant, Community, and The Common Good: A Tale of Two Americas,” Church & Society, May/June 2005, 47-48.

4. H. Richard Niebuhr’s 1953 address, “The Idea of Covenant and American Democracy,” quoted in Mount, Covenant, Community, and the Common Good, 10-11.

5. Eric Mount, “The Common Good: It Takes a Community,” Public lecture at Davidson College, fall 2003; Mount, “A Tale of Two Americas,” 47-48.

6. Robert Reich’s four “morality tales” are the Mob at the Gates, the Triumphant Individual, the Benevolent Community, and the Rot at the Top. All are essentially us vs. them “tales.” In the first tale, the mob are welfare recipients, illegal immigrants or any other group that threaten the common good and therefore must be dealt with. In the second tail, people are ultimately responsible for their own success and so the common good is best achieved when people are left alone to make their own lives. In the third tale, society and specifically the government has a responsibility to step in and help groups that are struggling, such as the poor who could benefit from relief programs. In the fourth tale, the common good is threatened by the powerful, whether they are the rich or the government, and therefore we need smaller government or a redistribution or wealth, or other solutions. See Mount, Covenant, Community, and the Common Good, 98-102, and Mount, “A Tale of Two Americas,” 43-45.

7. Mount, Covenant, Community, and the Common Good, 155, 156.