There are obviously many issues that President Obama will have to address, now that he's been re-elected. A writer on Yahoo news says: "Now, Obama heads back to office facing what will most likely be bitterly partisan negotiations over whether the Bush tax cuts should expire. The House will still be majority Republican, with Democrats maintaining their majority in the Senate. The loss may provoke some soul searching in the Republican Party. This election was seen as a prime opportunity to unseat Obama, as polls showed Americans were unhappy with a sluggish economy, sky-high unemployment, and a health care reform bill that remained widely unpopular." (http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/barack-obama-wins-election-second-term-president-041852102--election.html)
Among the many topics one could think about at this time, I've been returning to some challenges and national attitudes. To start with, this article---http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-big-choice-governments-role-224209622--politics.html---makes a good point: “For all their philosophical differences, neither man [Romney and Obama] has hit Americans between the eyes with the painful truth of what it will take to tame deficit spending, driven by the public's demand for low taxes and high services.” This is a challenge that we Americans must keep considering and examining. We want a strong military, strong disaster relief, various safety-net programs, good schools, and other things, but how to pay for these things, especially when we loathe both higher taxes and high state and federal deficits?
For instance, I personally---being an admirer of Jonathan Kozol, who recently visited my university----think we need to think deeply about education inequalities, and the fact that school districts in wealthy areas spend more per child than school districts in poor communities. To say “we can’t throw money at the problem” of public schools, as some of my friends have said over the years, is to ignore fundamental realities of school quality and funding.
That same article's author comments that, “With record numbers of people on food stamps and other assistance, President Barack Obama emphasizes ‘we're all in this together"’— code for sweeping government involvement.” Unfortunately, our country needs a much stronger narrative of “we’re all in this together”---a narrative that is not a code but a genuine national spirit. We tend to frame our political and social narratives in “us vs. them” ways, but I don't think those kinds of narratives are the best (see below). Can some clever leaders, for instance, discover ways to unite government and private sector involvement in social and economic issues, and possibly encourage a greater spirit of national unity in addressing social and economic issues?
I worry about this, especially with the prospect of the ongoing conflicts between the president and congressional GOPs. I like what Thomas Friedman says about the condemnable cynicism of some leaders like Senator McConnell, and I hope that the next four years will see some breakthroughs. Some of it will have to happen from the president's side, too. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/opinion/friedman-hope-and-change-part-two.html?smid=tw-NYTimesFriedman&seid=auto
Another challenge is the way we select our leaders. So much money is spent on relentless political advertising, so much of which does not advance intelligent discussion about political issues. As they say, those billions of dollars could be going to good causes----and we're tolerating a fundamentally untruthful, impressionistic system. (But what can "we" do about it?) We hate the system but our leaders use it and, to some extent, it works. Mudslinging and image-creating, though, have been part of our national politics for a long time: look at the 1840 election, for instance.
Another challenge is (as this article argued) the fact that we’re looking to our presidents are a kind of savior or messiah (http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/10/30/we-must-stop-treating-the-president-as-our-savior/) A related challenge is the hostility and, for some people, hatred toward our presidents when they fail our expectations or push policies with which we don’t agree. I’m not talking about robust disagreement, but actual hatred. (One author, for instance, has termed recent conservative rhetoric the "Obama hate machine.")
And.... a related challenge is that we religious people don’t always subject our expression of political opinions to much religious scrutiny. Do we praise Jesus but sound like some hate-filled media pundit? Do we stop and think of our speech is helpful and kind? Do we listen to our friends who have different opinions, and if we disagree with them, do we love each other anyway?
This is particularly difficult in light of the division in the country over issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, health care, and others. Any effort from us Christians to help our democracy can start by affirming both Proverbs 3:5-6 and Romans 15:7.
Great that the election has resulted in a record number of women in the U.S. Senate, and Tulsi Gabbard, elected in Hawaii, is the first Hindu member of Congress! Also Mazie Hirono, an LGBT support, will be the first Buddhist Senator, while Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin becomes the first openly gay Senator.
*****
I’ve been struggling with and thinking about some of these topics in previous posts. Last July I wrote about Obama’s saying, “You didn’t build that,” where I wrote about some of these topics:
http://paulstroble.blogspot.com/2012/07/you-didnt-built-that.html In one of my November 2010 posts, I wrote this:
This past year I was hired to write a series of lessons called Faithful Citizen: Living Responsibly in a Global Society, which is part of a forthcoming DVD-based curriculum from the Center for the Congregation in Public Life, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School. The Center created the lesson formats, outline, and basic approach, and I built upon that foundation, with terrific input from the Center. The following website explains the overall curriculum: http://www.congregationinpubliclife.org/DVDCurriculum.htm.
As stated at the website above, the Faithful Citizen designers and writers hope to offer a corrective to the individualism that often characterizes both our religious faith and political opinions. Robert Bellah and his fellow authors of the book Habits of the Heart 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)
Individualism also flavors American's politics. Bellah et al. argue that both welfare liberalism and neocapitalism tend to focus upon individual good as the way toward the common good. “The purpose of government is to give individuals the means to pursue their private ends,” the first by allowing periodic government intervention into the economy "to balance the operations of the market in the interests of economic growth and social harmony," and the other by a free-market approach with less government involvement.(2)
Bellah and his fellow authors hope that "the biblical impetus to see religion as involved in the whole of life" can give a broader political vision, as well as a less personalistic religious faith, which in turn renews our sense of civic virtue. (3)
Eric Mount of Centre College, in his book Covenant, Community, and the Common Good: An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, echoes Bellah in stressing that Americans have always had a twofold drive: personal success and a desire for the common good (4). Although we Americans are indebted to the 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.(5)
The Faithful Citizen lessons will highlight some of the ways by which we can broaden our religious and political visions to have a greater concern for the common good and for responsible civic participation. For instance, among other ideas based upon Mount's research, we can think of religious faith as "audacious openness." Mount writes, "openness is not simply tolerant of the other, or receptive to encounter by difference; it is audacious. Its hospitality is daring. it is not docile obedience; it is courageous engagement" with other people and their needs.(6)
Another approach to civic virtue and the common good is through "better stories." Mount cites Robert Reich who in turn identifies four "stories" woven into American political discourse: the "mob at the gates" which is often about foreigners or any "dark force" portrayed as a real or perceived threat to American well being, "the triumphant individual" about workers and entrepreneurs which often pits economic discourage in terms of winners and losers, the "benevolent community" which lauds efforts to help the poor but which still portrays the poor as "them" who are helped by "us," and "the rot at the top" about big government and big business. (7)
Approaching public issues from a faith perspective can be very challenging. On one hand, many religious people tend to keep their religious faith and their politics in two mental "zones," so they feel warm in the love of God while other times spouting angry, uncaring political convictions that they picked up from the media. There is also the challenge of ongoing public discussion about what is the common good, and what is the proper role of government in enhancing the common good.
Mounts offers this challenge: "Social conflict is not going away, and sometimes we may fear 'the other' for good reasons. Our fears, however, become self-fulfilling prophecies if we are always acting on our worst suspicions of 'the other' instead of seeking areas of overlap between our problems, our interests, and even our hopes. Trying to tell stories that move us beyond the counter-productive antagonisms of 'us' against 'them' will not make all of our differences go away, but better stories could restore a sense of community membership in our land and even beyond our borders that has characterized us in our best moments as a people. In a world of increasingly inescapable interdependence and mutual vulnerability, the need has never been greater."(8)
1. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkley: University of California Press, 1985), 227.
2. Ibid., 262-266.
3. Ibid., 248.
4. Eric Mount, Covenant, Community, and the Common Good: An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 1999), 11.
5. Eric Mount, “Covenant, Community, and The Common Good: A Tale of Two Americas,” Church & Society, May/June 2005, 43-45.
6. Mount, Covenant, Community, and the Common Good, 136-137. For this insight Mount cites Peter Hodgson’s Winds of the Spirit: A Constructive Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 204-8, and also the thought of Darrell J. Fasching, Narrative Theology after Auschwitz: From Alienation to Ethics (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 6, 15-16, 73, 123, 126, 187-88.
7. Mount, "A Tale of Two Americas," 47-48.
8. Eric Mount, “Storytelling and Political Leadership,” The Progressive Christian, 182:5 (Sept.-Oct. 2008), 19.
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