First a passage on what I like to call "Christianity and its Disguises":
BILL MOYERS: So who presumes to speak for Christianity? I mean, James Dobson is a Christian. Rick Warren is a Christian. Barack Obama is a Christian. Jeremiah Wright is a Christian. All of you are Christian. So who presumes to speak for Christianity?
CORNEL WEST: Well, Christianity's always had a number of different voices, a number of different streams and strands, and I think we had to keep track of prophetic strands and keep track of priestly strands. There's always been Christians who are well-adjusted to greed, well-adjusted to fear, well-adjusted to bigotry. There's always been Christians who are maladjusted to greed, maladjusted to bigotry, maladjusted to fear. So the question is what kind of Christian, which has to do in the end, with what kind of human being you choose to be.
SERENE JONES: There is always people who are speaking through, for the Christianity of the dominant voice, and they can weigh in and support everything that's going on in the present culture and this way and that. But who speaks for the Christianity that stands on the margins of society, in places where there is no voice, often? I mean, that's the really critical question of every age, because it's those voices by which you're going to be able to measure the true health of a society. And whether Christianity is speaking.
BILL MOYERS: Do you think mainstream America is really concerned about the margins of society as you say?
SERENE JONES: This is an interesting moment because I think suddenly, quite a number of Americans find themselves on a margin they didn't even know existed. I think in our life course, it's hard to find people who don't experience themselves in moments of brokenness and marginality. Right now, the whole system's collapsing and the margin looks like a very big space. And a Christianity that speaks to those margins can be a powerful presence in that.
BILL MOYERS: Gary Dorrien, what is the crisis, as you see it?
GARY DORRIEN: This is a society that has stoked and celebrated greed virtually to the point of self-destruction. And so, we can't just go on saying, "If we can just patch this thing up and get back to where we were that things will be all right." And none of us believe that, so we also have to talk about what was wrong with this system to begin with that had, you know, outcomes that you can't really justify morally. And that do, in fact, lead to the kind of outcome that we're dealing with right now.
Here's the larger context for the quote that's in the diary title. It's a discussion that goes from defining the current crisis, back to the roots of the answer in the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th Century.
SERENE JONES: You ask how you would define this crisis? I think it's a crisis of value. We have misplaced, in deep ways, the ruler that we use to measure what matters most in life. And it has become completely exhausted by monetary value.
But it's sort of the simple story of how do we think about this?
Because I've got in front of me a class full of people who are sitting in a Union classroom to become a minister. And so what do we tell people who are going to go out, many of them are going to work in soup kitchens, they're going to be working in clinics, they're going to be in churches that, you know, don't have 3 thousand people in them, but 30.
How do we help them understand the crisis in such a way that the remaking of the fabric, which can allow our democracy to thrive, happens? And, again, I just keep thinking it's the simple concepts. How do we get people to rediscover love?
And we truly cannot find in ourselves sustained resources for thinking about love. For thinking about affection.
BILL MOYERS: But isn't it a fantasy to think that love can tame capitalism. In fact, you talk about the religion of catastrophe.
The origins of your faith. And, yet, the prosperity gospel, the gospel that began in a lot of big American churches, saying that God wants you to be rich, is spreading like wildfire to the rest of the world. Now, there's a different take on your faith. That is not about catastrophe, but about success.
CORNEL WEST: But that's part of the escapism. If they define success by how the world conceives of prosperity, rather than greatness. In the biblical text the greatness says what? He or she is greatest among you be your servant. There's a clash here. A very important clash.
But love is not a real small thing. Love is not just the key that unlocks the door to ultimate reality. But there would be no weekend if there were not a trade union movement that loved justice enough, and loved working people enough, so that bosses wouldn't treat them like commodities to be marginalized.
There would not be racial, the racial justice that we have of Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Phil Berrigan. There wouldn't be, without the love that you all had for justice, and the love enough for black people, to say, "Quit niggerizing these people. Quit intimidating them. Quit trying to make them so scared that they won't stand up and fight." Love is a serious thing. When you love your mamma, you take a bullet for her if she's treated unjustly. That's why justice is what love looks like in public.
SERENE JONES: But this thing about the story of love that we have the capacity for includes, within it, a recognition of the harshness and the brokenness and the darkness of our lives. And love exists in that. It doesn't exist despite it.
CORNEL WEST: That's right.
BILL MOYERS: I'm not sure you haven't confused love with justice.
SERENE JONES: Justice is nothing but love with legs. Justice is what love looks like when it takes social form.
BILL MOYERS: And that's the trade union movement you talked about.
SERENE JONES: That's what love is.
CORNEL WEST: That's the woman's movement. That's the gay and lesbian movement.
SERENE JONES: You put it in policy forms.
GARY DORRIEN: It's the love that, that's what holds you in the struggle, you know. Even if you're not succeeding, you know.
CORNEL WEST: Allowing you to sustain and do.
GARY DORRIEN: It's the energy. It propels you into a struggle in which you might not be succeeding.
BILL MOYERS: You remind me that all three of you come out of what, once upon a time, was called the Social Gospel movement. The movement to apply Christian ethical principles to society. And wasn't that a response to the first round of economic collapse in the early part of the last century?
GARY DORRIEN: There is something new that started in the 1880s with the Social Gospel. You have a sociological consciousness itself that there's such a thing as social structure. And so, well, if there's such a thing as social structure then now there's something that's just different.
That makes the equation different. That it's not just a question of bringing people to Jesus who will then transform society. But rather salvation itself has to be conceived, not just in personal, but social-structural terms. So, with the Social Gospel movement in the 1880s, you do, for the first time, see preaching and theology in which Christian salvation is being talked about as including making movements toward the change of social structures themselves in the direction of something that's now being called social justice.
There's also this bit from West, where we see him sort of struggling, sort of tap-dancing around the fact that Obama's not really walking the righteous walk that West knows all too well:
CORNEL WEST: The cross signifies unarmed truth and unconditional love crushed by the Roman empire, embodied in the flesh of a first century Palestinian Jew named Jesus. So that you can be a non-Christian, concerned with poor people. Sometimes some of the greatest defenders of our poor brothers and sisters have been secular and pagan and Hindus like a Gandhi, and so forth and so on.
But for me as a Christian, it means I'm looking at those in the prison industrial complex. I'm looking for the children in our dilapidated school system, in the decrepit housing, those who don't have health care and child care. So that Tom Friedmans and others, they're looking at the world from the vantage point of the top.
Very much like brother Obama's economic team. They're not looking at the world through the lens of poor people and working people. They got Wall Street elites as their buddies, their cronies, intimate ties, so the vantage point through which they look at the world is very, very different. Christians begin with the catastrophic.
And West's struggle with himself, and what he should be demanding from Obama then gets played out against the greater clarity of Jones and Dorrien:
BILL MOYERS: You said the age of Obama is about everyday people. And you asked the question: how do we unleash their power? What's the evidence that that's happening?
CORNEL WEST: Well, I think it's a very complicated situation. Because, of course, the age of Obama actually emerges with a discredited Republican party in disarray. With a mediocre Democratic party that only had the Clinton machine at the center. And if this charismatic, brilliant, young, black brother can somehow get over the Clinton machine, he can become president.
That's why I supported him. Critically! A Socratic, prophetic, orientation toward the brother, right? Because he becomes the initiator of a new age. We had to bring the age of Reagan to a close. The era of conservatism had to be brought to a close. Thank God it was. But then the question will be, well, is he going to focus on the poor and working people? Will he recycle neo-liberal elites from the old establishment of Wall Street - which the economic team is?
BILL MOYERS: We know the answer to that.
CORNEL WEST: We know the answer to that.
BILL MOYERS: Right after the election, you were-
CORNEL WEST: Will he recycle the same neo-imperial elites when it comes to foreign policy. I know he's dealing with tremendous power. Wall Street. Congress. And so forth, and so on. I understand the political considerations. People have the right to organize. Lobbies have a right to bring power and pressure to bear. That's what American democracy's about.
But that's not truth. That's not the same as prophetic witness to truth. Especially as Christians, you see. So that the critique launched against Barack Obama, be it Gaza, be it Darfur, be it in Ethiopia, be it wherever. It has to be put forward. That is the calling of prophetic Christians.
GARY DORRIEN: Well, I wouldn't even give him the out that Cornel just gave him. Because I think, in fact, he could stay in his lane and do way better than he has on the economy, and also on scaling back the military empire.
So, on those two things, to be so solicitous of Wall Street, to have treatment of the banks that's just absurdly favorable to their interests, and refusing to clear out shareholders, and refusing to get to the bottom of it.
And also in his just utter refusal to really face up to the cost and extent of the military empire that, even though he notes in this book, "The Audacity of Hope," is outspending the next 25 nations combined in the military. He says in the next paragraph, and he has continued on this line, that we need to expand it further. So we've got nothing coming on sort of pulling back on that issue as well. On the other hand, you can't say that this has been a cautious president overall.
I mean, it's quite amazing that he is taking on virtually everything one way or another at the same time. So he has - there's been a fair amount of audacity in deciding that this is his moment. There's not going to be a better moment to come along anyway.
If he's going to do something about health care, or a number of issues. Dealing with Iran, maybe make a breakthrough with Cuba. That he's got to put his cards on the table now and get what he can.
BILL MOYERS: You said, after the election, "We want to give him time. We want to give him room." And my question to you is: how much room and how much time?
CORNEL WEST: Well, the first thing we want to do, we want to protect him, and he and his precious family. Second thing we want to do, we want to make sure all the criticism is fair, so it's not ad hominids, it's not personal. It's not racist. It's not whatever, you see.
At the same time, he is subject to all the same requirements of truth and justice as any other president, any color. So my criticism out of love for, not just the people, but Barack Obama himself. How my criticism help him? Give him strength? He plans to be progressive Lincoln. Fine. That's difficult. He will be helped by more progressive Frederick Douglasses. That's what I aspire to.
BILL MOYERS: Do you see the-
CORNEL WEST: To help him push him in a progressive direction.
BILL MOYERS: Do you hear those voices coming from his left? We know about them from the right. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh. We all know them.
CORNEL WEST: Well, the voices are there! Paul Krugman, and Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ben Barber and William Greider and Ron Walters. The voices are there. He's not yet listening. That's the difference. Lincoln listened to Douglass, Garrison. Brother Barack Obama, he is listening too much to Summers, Thurman, Geithner. We can go right down the neo liberal list. That's dangerous if he wants to be a progressive president.
BILL MOYERS: Why do you think that is?
SERENE JONES: I think one of the reasons that it happens is that we are living in a very overwhelming time. And it's always going to be the case that a conservative familiar neo liberal agenda sounds safer.
Because it's what we know. But the truth of the matter is what we know is what got us in trouble in the first place. So it's one of those moments that everybody faces in their own life. We happen to be facing it structurally right now. Is everything collapses, what do we do? In the midst of that fear, do we grasp for what's most familiar? That's what's happening. But the very thing you're grasping for is the thing that got you there in the first place.
CORNEL WEST: Absolutely.
SERENE JONES: It takes a little opening of spirit and an opening of intellect and courage. It's courage.
CORNEL WEST: Absolutely. There is a reluctance of Barack Obama to step into the age of Barack Obama. We must help him do that out of love, not just for him, but for poor people and working people. That's when the age of Obama becomes the age of what Sly Stone calls "every day people."
GARY DORRIEN: There's also just the political angle. I mean, it's almost too obvious to say, and yet there it is, that he does tend to take for granted his base. And he's always looking to move out from it. So he's not terribly worried whether progressive Christians are going to support him. Because they've been there from the very beginning
CORNEL WEST: Why does he take the base for granted, do you think?
GARY DORRIEN: Oh, well much of the base is just too nice and quiet and willing to roll over for him.
My take? Enough with Obama's political theater of religion and politics.
It's time to get real. |
