Thursday, July 21, 2016

¡Quemar las naves!

 
I grew up in a political household, and a Christian one.  My father was the treasurer of the county Democratic party, the very county that is currently hosting the Republican National Convention; my mother was an elected member of the school board.  At the age of seven, I would help stuff envelopes for mass mailings, hand out bumper stickers on the street, and sit at party meetings next to my Dad.  I remember helping my parents campaign for Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and Jimmy Carter, by which time I was old enough to vote.

I appreciated the liberal view, as it promoted independent and original thinking.  I believed that if a government were to have any value it would serve those who, through circumstance or tragedy, found themselves otherwise powerless.  I really appreciated the broad range of perspectives it permitted.  I deliberately sought out military service because the motto "ex liberatore oppressorum" meant something to me and was a world view promoted by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, both Democrats.  [I note their political party not for those who are roughly my age, but for those younger who are not aware that they were Democrats and were never taught that it was those two presidents and the party behind them that advanced our involvement in Vietnam.]

For similar reasons, I appreciated the Episcopal Church.  I liked that art and music were a part of its spirituality and that intellectual accomplishment was celebrated.  I appreciated that it eschewed sentimentalism and avoided the institutional tendency to exclude people.  I loved that a precisely rendered liturgy was not only a venerable work of art, but a shard of what will be felt in the Kingdom.  Through some confusing, and occasionally dark, times, it was the Episcopal flavor of Christianity that kept me grounded, balanced, and faithful.

As the Episcopal Church was an institution that reverenced the liberal perspective, it was, I suppose, only natural that I would find a role in it.  It's because the bulk of my life has been spent in its witness or service that I experience the death of true liberalism, and The Episcopal Church, with such mortification.

What changes have occurred since my early days, though.  In seminary, we were encouraged to identify Ronald Reagan, then in his second term, as one deserving of our hatred.  It bothered no one that hatred seemed to fly in the face of Gospel teaching but, you see, he wasn't a liberal.  A couple of decades later, we were told that parishes that were not as evolved on the issues of gay clergy and same-sex marriage would be officially educated by morally-advanced clergy, so that all Episcopalians would be together in regard and practice.  Any parish that was not advancing at the same rate to the greater church's morally elevated view would be treated not with love or patience, as had once been our tradition, but handled through the civil legal system.

Hence the unofficial motto became "We think the same thoughts, we use the same words".  Anyone else was regarded as disharmonious and mocked behind their backs.  [A secondary motto for The Church could be "We will never say anything unkind...to your face."]  The disharmonious would find it difficult to find positions in this brave, new world, too.  Again, a practice at odds with the Gospel.

Universities and schools, where I spent the rest of my time, were the same way, as to be a liberal now meant to conform one's thinking to a greater Überblick, one that is determined by nameless others.  The whole notion of questioning assumptions and discussing various viewpoints devolved into our current grotesquerie of "safe spaces" and "microaggressions".  What was once a political philosophy and a denominational theology that permitted freedom to think, experiment, and explore became something dark and disturbing; it was now a prison of conformity where any divergence was considered a danger to the greater body.

Worse, we now participate in what has traditionally been the human race's greatest sin: We label and categorize people by politics, gender, race, and education in order to judge the validity of individual opinions.

Consider what has happened to the civil rights movement in the United States, where once The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. elevated our hopes when he placed character above skin color:
Why was King, and the coalition of people walking with him, so successful? The answer isn’t complicated. With a few exceptions the 1960s civil rights movement was made up of law-abiding middle class people (in values, if not uniformly in economic status) who espoused ideas thoroughly identifiable by middle class Americans not attached to the movement. King embraced the Declaration of Independence and the Enlightenment principles of America’s founding; like the great Frederick Douglass before him, he asked only that the benefits of those principles be extended to black Americans in the places they were not. He made an argument that no American in good faith could reject.
Or consider the whole nature of liberalism, now called "progressivism", in the 21st century, where confidence in one's experience and judgement has become simple, foul smugness:
There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what's good for them.
Again, there is always the Überblick, whether defined as an episcopacy or a government, that is to order even the smallest details of our lives.
Perhaps now to be a free-thinker in this evolving century is to eschew institutional religion and political affiliation, or else be whelmed by the strangling tentacles of conformity.  Perhaps this is the reason, at least in part, for the distaste that younger people have for denominational identity or party politics.  For those of us who are older, and regrettably have had something to do with the creation of the system that has made us its victim, maybe it's time to take Cortes' practice and make it a metaphor for a new beginnings.  After all, retreat is easy when you have the option.  Removing the option gives us only one way to go.
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