The country is choking on a scam: the manipulation of
politics by religious absolutists, and the manipulation
of spiritual malaise by reactionary politicians. What
is needed is a Heimlich Maneuver, an intervention in behalf
of life. In the Heimlich Maneuver, someone with concern
and skill extends prompt aid. Thought was required to
learn how to do it. Will is required to do it. The aim
is rescue. It is not just a mechanical procedure. It is
a liberating act.
The Heimlich Maneuver is a metaphor of what religious
liberals, in coalition with other caring religious bodies,
must undertake. It is a metaphor of self-transcending
energy, and of the respect all progressive and compassionate
spiritual communities hold for the disciplines required
to practice life-serving skills, and to exercise redemptive
powers.
The immediate task is a realistic assessment of the threats
religious chauvinists pose to the democratic process and
to the struggle for social justice and peace. We must
expose and oppose, but without making scapegoats of them
for the miasmas on which they fasten and flourish. They
prosper because they attack vulnerabilities in our political
and religious perceptions. The need of the 1980s is for
new creations of American political thought and theologies
of politics. A cooperative, broadly ecumenical agenda
is required. Many lively contributors are welcome.
The New Religious Right has brought multitudes of formerly
apolitical, born-again Christians into the political arena.
While we have reason for restrained joy, it is still true
that democracy stands to gain when more citizens are involved.
Whether religious convictions and politics should "mix"
has never been the question. The nature of the mix has
never been the question. The nature of the mix is the
issue: what use of religious convictions resulting in
what kind of politics?
For
the 2,500 Christian Right leaders who assembled in Washington
in January 1981 to celebrate Ronald Reagan's victory,
the Bible and Christ are still "the place to be."
But what an extraordinarily different place.
God, they exulted, is alive and rejoicing in an awakened
Christian America about to smite—hip and thigh—
abortion, liberalism, welfare, food stamps, affirmative
action, sex education, the United Nations, aid to the
third world. They even managed to round up a black clergyman
who applauded the slave trade. "The greatest thing
God ever did for blacks in this country," he cried,
"was to send some white men in ships to Africa and
bring us back to this country so that we could know Jesus
Christ." The overwhelmingly white audience gave him
a standing ovation.
How can we take this seriously, while still retaining
our sense of humor and purpose? We'd better. In one hundred
and ninety days—from Inauguration to passage of the
Reagan budget and tax cut—a new national administration
and its Christian Right allies created a whopping reversal
of direction for this country, threatening visions of
America as an embodiment of a just and humane society.
The religious platoons of the Regressive Revolution, via
the electronic church, have made, in the 1980s, a quantum
leap beyond the past, both in reaching mass markets and
in hugely successful fund-raising. A significant difference.
Someone has measured the total audience to which Jesus
preached as no more than twenty or thirty thousand persons.
Today's electronic preachers speak regularly to millions.
Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, et al. are paragons of up-to-the-minute
communications technique.
Why is so much of this effort politically right-wing?
It is only fair to credit whatever heartfelt political
convictions the electronic evangelists may have. It is
also crucial to reckon with this country's "free
enterprise" syndrome. The airwaves are open to those
who can pay. Who can pay? Those who know how to appeal
to a paying audience. The electronic evangelists have
learned who is able and willing to supply cash!
Progressive and compassionate religious forces, like a
silhouette painting, will begin to take new shape by what
the rampant right in religion and politics is seemingly
driven to do. It is critical, as we construct an activist
interfaith agenda, that we will sanctify no self-serving
pieties, no coarse manifestations of greed and privilege,
no social amnesia in the name of personal salvation; that
we will be defined by a sense of the holy that is genuinely
liberating as well as commanding. There will be no play-acting,
no mumbling by rote, no posturing. We will commit ourselves
to what transcends ourselves, to what makes the whole
world, not just our private corners of it, more fit for
living. We will cleave to history's higher rather than
its meaner meanings. We will act for the freedom and dignity
of those to whom freedom and dignity are now a farce.
Our disciplines will be humility and hope. Our faith will
exalt love, justice and moral power, a marvelous mixture
of openness and conviction.
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