A CHRISTIAN ALTERNATIVE TO AMERICA’S BROKEN POLITICAL DUOPOLY

Michael StaffordABC RELIGION AND ETHICS

25 JAN 2012

In his book Render Unto Caesar, Archbishop Charles Chaput notes that neither the Republican nor the Democratic parties are comfortable political homes for American Catholics. His insight is correct and applies to all Christians who take their faith’s public policy implications seriously.

Indeed, today the Republican and Democratic parties are not merely uncomfortable, imperfect, homes for people of faith; they are prisons that artificially divide us and prevent us from coming together as a community to advance the common good.

The Republican Party portrays itself as the political home for people of faith – in its imagery, the Bible and the flag often go hand-in-hand. The GOP is also, ostensibly, America’s “pro-life” party. And given the primacy of the abortion issue for many Christians, it’s not surprising that it has attracted the support of large numbers of evangelicals and conservative Catholic voters.

However, the policies advocated by the Republican Party today, and the ideology animating them, do not comport with Christian teaching on a range of issues. Its support for torture as an interrogation technique, capital punishment as a criminal penal sanction, and the dehumanizing rhetoric it directs towards immigrants, for example, do not reflect a Christian vision of the world.

Even more importantly, the Republican Party refuses to address social, economic and environmental justice issues within our society. Instead, as John Gehring puts it, the GOP has embraced an extreme form of “economic libertarianism and [the] tireless defense of struggling millionaires.”

The economic libertarianism that has become increasingly dominant in Republican thinking over the past several years poses particular problems for Christians given our faith’s preferential option for the poor and emphasis on community and justice. George Monboit (no friend of religion’s role in politics) has correctly described the GOP’s brand of libertarianism as

“a pitiless, one-sided, mechanical view of the world, which elevates the rights of property over everything else, meaning that those who possess the most property end up with great power over others. Dressed up as freedom, it is a formula for oppression and bondage. It does nothing to address inequality, hardship or social exclusion. A transparently self-serving vision, it seeks to justify the greedy and selfish behaviour of those with wealth and power.”

This is a soulless, materialist, view of the world that transforms unbounded greed and selfishness into positive goods. It is a recipe for creating a reckless and irresponsible rent-seeking elite, and then keeping it in power. It bears no resemblance to the world-view articulated in the Sermon on the Mount.

Sadly, the Republican Party has abandoned the economic and social implications of the gospels and chosen, instead, to become an idolatrous market-worshipping cult. The Merrill Lynch bull is essentially serving as a stand-in for the biblical golden calf.

The politically powerful Christian Right within the GOP has not served as a break on these tendencies. Instead, it has become a prime spokesman for a “gospel of prosperity” that sees economic success as a mark of personal righteousness, and failure as evidence of an individual’s inadequacy.

The Christian Right is also antediluvian in a way that is increasingly unattractive to those who do not share – for lack of a better phrase – its beef with modernity. This antipathy to the modern world manifests itself in a number of ways. One example is the refusal to accept the scientific basis underpinning the theory of evolution that is widespread among Republicans – a view that has been echoed by several Republican presidential candidates.

Finally, the Christian Right is fixated on questions of personal righteousness to the almost total exclusion of everything else. Indeed, it has framed abortion in this way and made it, along with gay rights and, oddly, even global warming, key battlegrounds in the ongoing culture wars. The Christian Right is silent, however, on the questions of justice that are, in my opinion, at the heart of the message communicated in the gospels.

As a result, according to Marcia Pally, a significant segment of younger “new evangelicals” are drifting away from the Republican Party and searching for a new political home – a movement that I believe is also occurring among Catholics. Pally attributes this migration to a dawning realization that “Christians should care about a wide range of social issues” in addition to abortion, including economic justice, environmental stewardship and conservation, and immigration reform.

But if Christians are leaving the GOP, where are they to go? Towards what political destination are they headed?

If the errors of the political right lie in the embrace of a heartless and cruel economic libertarianism, then the errors of the left are rooted in the triumph of its mirror image: social libertinism.

The Democratic Party is the bastion of this left-liberal cultural consensus. Pro-abortion, heavily invested in divisive identity politics, committed to a libertine approach to many moral and social issues under the guise of individual freedom, prey to centralizing tendencies that run counter to the principle of subsidiarity, and in some ways even overtly hostile to religion itself – this is not an attractive destination for Christians fleeing the GOP.

The Obama administration, for example, moved speedily once in office to roll back the very limited legal gains made by the pro-life movement, and has worked to undermine conscience protections for pro-life healthcare workers.

In the end, the Democratic Party cannot serve as a new political home for us – it is as deeply flawed, from a Christian perspective, as the GOP, albeit for different reasons.

Are American Christians destined to wander alone in the political desert as independents? Will people of faith continue to be faced with a Hobson’s choice between two wholly inadequate and unsatisfactory ideological alternatives that do not represent our values and our vision of the world?

I don’t think so. American Christians have a unique opportunity, potentially, to create a new political home of their own.

British theologian and political philosopher Phillip Blond correctly notes that, “the current political consensus” in the United States is “left-liberal in culture and right-liberal in economics. And this is precisely the wrong place to be.” It’s also the fundamental reason why Christians cannot be at home in either political party – the Christian vision of the social and economic order is almost exactly the opposite of the current consensus.

We live at a time, however, when support for “the current political consensus” has been deeply shaken. It has, after all, seemingly driven our nation to the very precipice of disaster in a number of ways.

Such moments of crisis are dangerous, to be sure, but they are also pregnant with great creative potential. They present new opportunities for those with the vision and courage to see and seize them. Such an opportunity beckons for America’s Christians. The moment has arrived to unite and forge a new political identity that better represents our faith in the public square.

The contours of this hypothetical new political movement are already discernible. It would champion economic, environmental and social justice. It would emphasize human dignity, community and the family. Its core values would be stewardship, solidarity and subsidiarity, and its aim would be to advance the common good.

Such a political movement would represent a clear and decisive break with both the radical economic libertarianism of the right, and the radical social libertinism of the left. It amounts to a repudiation of the cultural process through which liberty has become synonymous with license, and individual rights have been shorn of their corresponding duties and obligations to society.

And this – the negation of virtue and the embrace of a disordered version of individualism on both the right and the left – is ultimately at the root of the entire constellation of problems we face as a nation.

In the end, America desperately needs a domestic form of Christian democracy – a political orientation well-known in other nations that leans to the left on economic issues, and to the right on social ones.

What would the views of a hypothetical presidential candidate from an American Christian Democratic Party look like? I think they would closely track Marcia Pally’s description of the ideal candidate new evangelicals are longing for, a candidate neither of the current major political parties are capable of producing – “someone who will help the poor, protect the planet and dramatically reduce the need for abortion, someone who will help both secular and faith-based organizations to do this work.”

Some on the secular left will surely object to such a prominent role for faith in the American political process – indeed, many have been labouring to drive religion entirely out of the public square for some time now.

However, politics is our attempt to answer one fundamental question: how should we live together? Faith speaks to this question in a critical way. Indeed, it proposes a radical answer - with love. That answer has political consequences that must inform economic, social and regulatory policy within our nation.

Moreover, as noted above, Christian democracy is a common political phenomenon in many European and Latin American nations. And far from serving as stalking horses for theocracy, these parties have generally served as moderating influences. Moreover, they are not, typically, tribal or exclusionary, but rather open to all people of good will of whatever faith (or even, of no faith at all).

Others on the right might argue that the objects of faith and politics differ – that, to paraphrase Jason Peters at Front Porch Republic, politics deals with mediate, not ultimate, ends and is, therefore, not a subject fully worthy of religious attention and involvement. This is certainly true, to a point.

However, politics is a game with profound real-world consequences. The public policies that result from the political process, and government action or inaction on specific issues, impact the daily lives of individuals and the structuring of our social and economic systems in innumerable ways.

Abandoning the field of play and adopting some form of political monasticism is simply not an option; we need a team in the game.

In addition, some may argue that abortion deserves its present primacy of place in the constellation of American Christian political concerns, and that this is best served by remaining within the Republican Party.

However, while today’s GOP claims to be “pro-life,” its policies and ideology show that it is merely anti-abortion. Examples abound, from Rick Santorum’s objections to mercury limits proposed by the EPA, to Congressman Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” which sought to eliminate or drastically cut critical social welfare programs, such as WIC, and balance the federal budget on the backs of the poor and the middle class.

Opposition to abortion is, I believe, a required element of an authentically Christian political orientation. But standing alone, it isn’t enough. Moreover, one could argue that the GOP has made cynical use of abortion to purchase the political loyalty of Christian voters, while delivering virtually nothing in return.

If we want to make real progress on the abortion issue, then we need to re-frame it as a question of social justice, not personal righteousness. This can only happen if America’s “pro-life” party stands for justice, stewardship and human dignity across a range of issues.

In saying this, I am not attempting to draw a moral equivalency between abortion and other issues, such as capital punishment or environmental policy. I am simply observing that the abortion issue is easier to address when it is nested within an authentically whole life approach to public policy.

Thus, the emergence of a Christian democratic political movement in America could actually advance a pro-life cause currently stagnating in the Republican political swamp.

Finally, some may say that the creation of a new political party or movement in America is simply impractical. Enormous barriers certainly stand in the way.

However, if you believe that Christianity should inform public policy choices, and that neither of the current major political parties are adequate vehicles for articulating this vision, then the alternatives are either reforming one of the existing parties, attempting to create a new home, or giving up altogether in despair. Here, the barriers to reform within either party are at least as great as those that would be encountered attempting to create something new.

Any exodus needs a Moses – a leader (or leaders) who will name the destination, chart the course, and help navigate an often difficult passage. America’s Christian political migration is waiting for these leaders to emerge.

Christian democracy is the political home that many of America’s new evangelicals and Catholics are seeking, even as they wander in the wilderness today.

Michael Stafford is a graduate of Duke University School of Law. He works as an attorney in Wilmington, Delaware and writes an op-ed column nationally syndicated in the United States by The Cagle Post. 

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/01/25/3415799.htm