Donald Heinz

Devout Catholic critic Gary Wills declares that it doesn’t matter who the Pope is because nobody follows him anyway. Maybe that’s a way to hedge one’s hopes. I would argue that the existential question of the times is whether Catholicism is capable of reformation. The possibility of reformation lies somewhere between two rhetorical questions: Is the Pope Catholic? Can the Holy Spirit run an institution?

            Why is reformation necessary? In the 16th Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther reasserted a Christian Gospel he thought had gone missing in the fog of late medieval Catholicism. Today, one could reasonably argue that the central message of contemporary Catholicism (its Gospel) is the repression of women and gays and obsession with the incarnation of gender. Some would insist on the difference between doctrine and action, but even Forrest Gump understood that stupid is as stupid does. Repression and boundary-tending have become Catholicism’s core message (one could say the same of much of American evangelicalism). No bishop need go to court to defend the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and society does not challenge the priest’s magical power to turn a wafer into the Body of Christ, but the deal-breaker for Catholic religious freedom in this country, for Catholic identity, for what constitutes Catholicism of late, for what determines who’s in and who’s out--is the determination to restrict women’s access to contraception and to defeat “the homosexual agenda.”

            At a time when the Church had lost its grip, Luther taught his followers to ask of every churchly practice, What promotes Christ here? How is the Jesus of the Gospels and the theology of Paul at stake here? Would any theologian today argue that the central message of the Christian New Testament is the constraint of women and gays? Is there a biblical scholar anywhere, Jewish or Christian, who would claim that the historic legacy of the Hebrew prophets stands or falls with the current obsessions of the Roman curia? We are astonished recently to learn from the Church’s teaching office that trying to ordain a woman is the same class of sin as molesting a child. Reformation, a regularly recurring event in the history of Christianity, has always involved going back to the biblical sources, recovering Christianity’s central message, and building Christian renewal and revitalization upon it. Can this happen inside today’s Catholicism?

            Of course Catholics worldwide enjoy a stupendously rich material culture, splendid liturgies, a shared history of holy lives, moral courage, and theological astuteness. But how did Catholicism become most famous today for making old prejudices normative? It is easy to guess that a thousand years of celibate male clergy might have something to do with a jaundiced view, not to say cluelessness, about women. It is easy to imagine enforced sexual repression drifting like a poisonous cloud over the gay community (including as many as 40% gay priests).

            Does resistance to reform—a fact of all human institutions—have a “social location” inside Roman Catholicism? All recent studies of the papacy note that in the last two centuries two game-changers occurred: the complete loss of temporal power by theVatican and the never before seen complete centralization of spiritual power. The Roman papacy is now an absolute monarchy whose authority and secrecy must be sworn to by all, and where blind obedience and complete surrender of freedom of conscience is required of every priest, bishop, and theologian. Everyone in the hierarchy understands that institutional self-preservation is required at all costs and is the preeminent value. Hence the truth that every single bishop has botched handling the pedophilia crisis.

            All of the present Cardinals were appointed by the last two popes, two of the most absolutist and intellectually repressive in history. Neither fell far from the tree of Pope Pius IX, who said when questioned too closely: “I am the Tradition.” In his Syllabus of Errors, Piux IX condemned the notion that “the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and recent civilization.” To drive home the point, that Pope enlisted the First Vatican Council to declare him infallible. To which the great Catholic Lord Acton responded, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But European modernism was seen as the great challenge to Christianity. In theUnited States its threat gave rise to fundamentalism and its cultural and intellectual retreats. To fearful Catholics in Europe, theVatican promised a restoration of enforced certainties if only the worldwide church surrendered all its freedom of thought toVatican centralized control. Henceforth the Pope would do all the thinking, as Paul VI did when he overruled all his expert advisors and declared contraception an absolute sin. Like much ofAmerica after 9-11, Catholics were asked to surrender to a national security state that alone could protect them from a new and dangerous world.

            Nevertheless, there came the miracle of the Second Vatican Council, and Pope John XXIII who came out of nowhere to open the windows and doors to invite all people and ideas in to the Church. And for centuries there had been the movement called conciliarism, which invests the Holy Spirit in all the bishops. Vatican II widened the Spirit’s investment from a rigidly hierarchical Church to “the whole people of God.”

            In the modern world we have Martin Luther King, who did not know his place and so changed the world, and Gandhi, who imagined his life as an experiment in truth. Who will come forward from within Catholicism in imaginative acts of civil disobedience?  It is not enough for the occasional parish priest to quietly welcome gays or support contraception; they must go public and say why their understanding of the Gospel demands the positions they are taking. What about Catholic universities? They rightly resent the secular establishment saying things like “A Catholic university is a contradiction in terms.” But it’s not enough occasionally to invite the president to give a commencement speech or to allow non-threatening academic departments to thrive. What about religion departments, whose every move is tracked by modern versions of the Inquisition? What about Catholic hospitals who send desperate patients to the secular world, lest they lose the right to the name Catholic? The national council of Catholic bishops in theUnited States is a disgrace when it annually consents to play the role of Sunday School children who are directed what topics they are allowed to discuss—hint, not the status of women.

rMany sign up to do God’s work, but why do so many believe that the renewal of religion must come through terrorism or redemptive violence? It is an interesting exercise in rhetorical oversight to note that the West calls Islamist jihad “terrorism,” but understands Christian militancy as “redemptive violence.”

One of the best discussions of religiously-motivated terrorism is Mark Juergensmeyer’s Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. The “odd attraction of religion and violence” requires a large religious community whose ideology makes violent acts possible and plausible.  Typically, religious terror is meant to cleanse dishonor done to a particular religious group, empower the marginalized (young males), and help religion regain its grip in the middle of a secular world. Violence comes from the few who perceive that the mainstream has been too tolerant of slights against its tradition, but ultimately the terror is set on a cosmic stage, in a world gone awry, where God and true believers fight it out against their enemies. God’s enemies are demonized, and God’s forces become martyrs.          

On 9-11-01, Islamic terrorists attacked two symbolic targets, the global forces of transnational conglomerates headquartered in the World Trade Center and the military enforcers of the American “new world order” headquartered in the Pentagon.  It appears they believed that western capitalist consumerism had undermined their traditional values, they were frustrated by their powerlessness to resist repressive regimes backed byUnited States foreign and military policy, and they hoped that a resurgent jihad could renew and reinvigorate Islam in the face of the overwhelming power of the West.

In the aftermath of 9-11, Americans could not imagine why people hated us.  That their motivation was simply envy of our freedom is a continuing wet dream of conservative Americans, which enabled a Republican President to frame his war on terrorism and then against Iraq as a defense of our freedom. Freedom is much more inspiring than oil to rouse the populace. The president was heavily invested in not believing that the terrorists acted because they hated our foreign policy. The terrorists’ own reasons were dismissed, because the hegemony ofAmerica’s far-flung empire disavows its economic and military force and the responses they elicit. Listening to the terrorists themselves speak would unmask our secret self.

            Only Americans spoke of a “war on terror.” Terrorism acquired an ideological overlay that included any evil against innocents committed asymmetrically by non-states or rogue states. Such a pejorative definition, that excludes violence by sovereign states, loses analytical usefulness. By definition, nation-states cannot be guilty of terrorism, and the systemic violence they sometimes practice evades definition and perception. So nations stand for the good and insurgencies stand for evil. National military forces are depicted as heroic and self-sacrificing for the cause of freedom, while suicide bombers or guerilla forces are denounced as unspeakably evil and sick.

            It has to be acknowledged that religion has a remarkable capacity for getting sick (intellectually and emotionally delusional or corrupted by power), for overwhelming the necessity of self-examination with the perceived righteousness of the cause, and for lending its divine legitimations to questionable or even reprehensible acts. It has been said that every nation goes to war religiously.  The same can be said of insurgencies.  When religion is most absolute and least humble, it possesses the greatest capacity for carrying out violence or terror in the name of God.  It appears that innocent Western Christians and reprehensible Islamic terrorists are equally good at harnessing religion to their efforts.

            Progressive religion, never excusing terrorism and never denying religion’s capacity for the demonic, believes that all peoples, whether united in nations or forcefully atomized in insurgencies, and all religions, not just Islam, are capable of self-delusion, of joining God to fanaticism, of turning human certainties into divine absolutes, human causes into holy wars.  But religion can also lend itself to revitalization movements against foreign powers, in which genuine religious awakening and renewal occurs. This, for example, was characteristic of Jewish uprisings against the Roman Empire during the centuries immediately before and after the time of Christ. A good example in recent decades was the resurgence of Shiite Islam against the Western-backed Shah of Iran. Iran became a contest between mullahs and modernists, and in the overthrow of the Shah, the mullahs won.  The American support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan, against Russia, inadvertently galvanized a resistance that took religious form. The American invasion of Iraq, and before that the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, has undoubtedly brought to new life Sunni Islam movements against the West as a life or death threat to their way of life. The American military presence in Islam’s holy lands infuriates their religious sensibilities.

Many people have trouble understanding how religion gets connected to economics and politics, though the Christian Right is in front of their nose and Lutheran non-violent resistance to the East German regime helped bring down the wall.  During the Cold War, religious revolution was not in the CIA’s analytic vocabulary and so they did not dream it. Progressive religion does not run from all power relations, and in fact it feels called to take on the great power of international capitalism or the American Empire. But secularists devoutly hoped that the modern world would produce a post-religious situation in which religion and society lived in separate enclaves. Shrewder than Western scholars, the Iranians did not privatize religion but, instead, placed its symbols on the stage of history.  Accordingly, the United States came to be called the Great Satan, clearly an evocative religious labeling.

The  Bible’s eschatological hope never leaves earth behind. A planetary ethic is required for a biblical ethic. Some leaders of the Christian Right have called global warming a myth, a fiction created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and economic stability. Or an excuse to grow big, regulatory government. On the environmental left, activist-scholars like Bron Taylor have pioneered the concept of “dark green religion,” in the hope that it might precipitate a global, civil religion of the earth. This view perceives nature as sacred and alluring, with its own intrinsic value, believes humans and the environment are interconnected and mutually dependent, imagines all life sharing a common ancestor, and posits a kinship ethic with responsibilities to all living things. Such perceptions lead people to see more continuities than differences between their own and other species, and this perception generally leads to humility about one’s place in the grand scheme of things.

            Environmental recovery requires celebration and consciousness-raising.  The newly focused attention to planet earth led to the first Earth Day, held in 1970.  It gave birth to the insight that we are not living daily on present income, the continuous energy from the sun, but on accumulated capital, for example ice age water, oil, and minerals.  A look to the future requires a reappraisal of the past.  We began to see that we have mortgaged our grandchildren’s future.  The concerns of environmentalism are energy, global warming, ozone depletion, pollution, available and safe water, sustainable agriculture, and population control.  These bracing new insights were answered with counter-delusions: that over-consumption is an interesting moral issue but not a biological one (Dick Cheney); that nature can best be addressed in aesthetic terms; that if there were real environmental problems, signals from the prices of commodities would alert us; that the past sheds sufficient light on the future; and that rapid economic growth is actually good for the environment.

            To the free market mentality, natural resources seem infinite and therefore economically valueless: ecological considerations are “externalities” beyond the scope of economic calculations and that do not show up on balance sheets. Meanwhile, interest and profits escalate the pace of exploitation. A society that extols unlimited acquisition cannot be expected to honor the integrity of life on earth.  Capitalism’s great myth is the self-regulating, self-healing mechanism of market growth, and it has degraded and debased cultures everywhere—and the earth as well.  An ecological economy must be a moral economy, in which economic relations are expressions of care and interdependence, not aggression and exploitation.

            While contemporary biology and earth science are now leading the way in the environmentalist movement, it has also been recognized that modern science had contributed to the earth’s denigration by imagining nature as a place of human conquest and by a secular philosophy that “dis-enchanted” the earth, stripped it of the presence of God, and stole its mythological story.  Women especially noticed that the earth long ago had often been identified as a cosmic mother and that deities connected to nature were typically feminine.  It did not escape their observation that both women and earth had become subject to ruthless male domination., that alienation from the body and its wisdom is the inner aspect of the ecological crisis.  They noticed that what happens to bodies, to women’s bodies, and to nature are all connected. Until women led the way, no one, including no one representing biblical religion, was mourning the lost mother.

            James Lovelock is one of the early tellers of earth-story.  He writes:  “The idea of Gaia was born in my mind in 1965 while I was at NASA in the Jet Propulsion Labs.  It was a personal revelation, an idea that suddenly appeared like a flash of enlightenment.  I was reflecting on earth’s reactive, unstable atmosphere, compared to Mars.  Such an unstable atmosphere could not stay constant unless something was regulating it.  Somehow life keeps our atmosphere constant and favorable for organisms.  Life on earth not only created our atmosphere; it also regulates it.  I perceived Gaia as a single living entity consisting of earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, land.  Its entirety constitutes a feedback system that creates optimal physical conditions for life on the planet.”  Gaia is a whole far beyond its constituent parts, and its condition parallels our own.  If life contributes to creating the conditions for its survival, then enhancing living organisms improves our shared environment.  Lovelock came under enormous pressure from scientists to color within the lines of scientific orthodoxy and to avoid mentioning anything nonscientific regarding Gaia.  They encouraged this resolve by refusing to publish his work in peer-reviewed scientific journals. So he wrote a famous book.

            A fascinating example of spiritual sensibilities brought in defense of the earth is the tree-hugging movement initiated by indigenous women in northern India in the 1970s.  It combined Hindu devotion to the integrity of the forests with Gandhian non-violence.  The women fasted, embraced ancient trees, lay down in front of logging trucks, and uprooted eucalyptus plantation seedlings.  They simply defied Western dualisms of public-private, morality-self-interest, biocentrism-anthropocentrism, militancy-pragmatism. The third world, they saw, was being turned into an international debtors’ prison, and a vast plantation run for the benefit of masters far away.  They believed that the earth cannot and should not be owned, but respected and cared for. Their intuitions are remarkably similar to those of the Hebrew prophets speaking on behalf of a liberal God.

From early Christianity to the present, heaven has symbolized the bright effervescent Christian hope, leaving untold metaphorical deposits in human language, without which our imaginations would be greatly impoverished. At times, heaven became the pie in the sky by and by, the sole hope for people, like American blacks, in devastating circumstances from which no earthly delivery could be imagined. But even oftener, that view of heaven became an excuse to postpone God’s dreams and human responsibility for creating a new earth with good news for all the people. This may have been human pessimism, or the rejection of human agency in favor of God’s grace, or lazy thinking, or human inertia and sloth, but in the interests of the powerful and the wealthy it became an excuse for not challenging the status quo. In effect the rich said, We have ours and you will get yours someday in heaven. To this day, a very significant percentage of American Christians fully subscribe to this view. It may be they cannot imagine a new earth now, or that their conservative politics tell them what we have is the best we can do, or that a new earth might imply governmental efforts on behalf of the common good, which they on principal oppose, or that social justice and a planetary ethic are written off as liberal projects (as indeed they are, rooted in a liberal God). More insidiously, the Christian complicity in the postponement of heaven on earth is bought by the powerful and the wealthy in exchange for the pittances of family values support. Dreams of all humans living in new kinds of community are exchanged for promises to hold the line on women and homosexuality.

But heaven has also fueled the dreams of radical utopians and millennial dreamers. They imagined the Godside coming down to join the earthside—as had already occurred, in the Christian view, in Christ’s Incarnation, and that defined the eschatological hope immanent in Jesus’ proclamation of theKingdomofGod. Just as the Exodus narrative can be seen as the inspired model and impulse for all subsequent revolutions, at least in the West, so heaven inspired human hope for second Adams and second Eves (in the apostle Paul’s theological imagination), the hope for a new creation—precisely on earth. The risen Christ, too, became the down payment on a resurrected earth—not God’s dream indefinitely rerouted to the end of time. A new earth would become the eschatological verification of Christ’s resurrection.

The best of heaven above and distant and heaven coming down soon can be conceptually and theologically united today. True heaven is an absolute by which all dreams are measured, but also resonant with working towards a new earth. Surely they are united in God’s mind. Any view of heaven should inspire Christians to open their arms rather than wag their fingers at all the things that cannot be done. Heaven as God’s space unites blue sky heaven with green earth heaven. Eternal life happens, even now in prototype, whenever God brings heaven and earth together. Hence Christians have always prayed, though often inattentively, “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven.” Christians are meant to attain their faith as they portray it. In this view, heaven is not a hopelessly delayed future destiny but the hidden dimension of ordinary life, waiting to be discovered, dramatized, and enacted. Heaven means the God dimension of new life on earth. If God made each, the blue sky and the green earth, God can join them together, and the liberal God of the Bible authorizes human hope to join with God in achieving just that. 

How unfortunate, then, when progressives, religious as well as secular, throw heaven overboard so that they can steer their boat straight towards earth, where they hope that much good can still to be done. Cynics and myopic know-it-alls also doubt that much can be said for transcendent hope. Isn’t it a childish projection, wishful thinking, mystification, an unhealthy illusion? Marx and Freud were suspicious, too.

But earthly hope is one of God’s tropes. Nor does this depend on childish, wishful thinking alone. The (non-religious) philosopher Ernst Bloch set out to rehabilitate hope and anchor it in the “infinity of the unfinished.” There is so much of the universe still unfolding, and it is now the task of human culture far transcending biological evolution to imagine joint ventures with God towards a new earth. The human propensity to project is a fine flower in the world, not a psychological habit to be outgrown. Bloch postulated the preconscious or the not yet conscious as stages in our cultural and religious evolution. We do not yet see all we shall attain—a truism in science, but can it also come true in the humanities and social sciences and religion? That we aspire relentlessly to more than we can reach is a promising clue about the human project. Instead of pessimistic “realism” or defensive posturing against revolutions, we could learn to celebrate a human world chock full of dispositions and tendencies toward something beyond. A liberal God authorizes humans to leverage possibility, process, daydreams, utopias, and hope as the proper dispositions in a universe still unfolding. In the workshop of hope new earths are fashioned. Jews recognize this (or not) when they set a place for Elijah at their meal, when they say “Next year in Jerusalem,” when they imagine that final redemption comes when all of Israel keeps a single perfect Sabbath.

The enemies of hope and immanent heaven are sloth, on one hand, and irony, on the other. Sloth, one of the old “seven deadly sins,” gives up the effort to change the world (or find God in a world of suffering) because it’s just too hard. Irony is that cool detachment learned by college sophomores and perfected in life after graduation, in which individuals congratulate themselves on not being taken in by efforts that will probably fail, or that betray too much unsophisticated enthusiasm. In a 2008 commencement address to Duke graduates, novelist Barbara Kingsolver warned all those raised in an Age of Irony to get over it and join movements to change the world.  Of course, she said, we all know that “we’re a world at war, ravaged by disagreements, a bizarrely globalized people in which the extravagant excesses of one culture wash up as famine or flood on the shores of another.” Nevertheless, Kinsolver called for emancipatory hope in action:  “The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, ‘We already did. We have made the world new.’”

If heaven, fully understood, drives hope, it is also true that hope treasures the imaginal power of heaven and refuses to let go of it. But the power of heaven must be rescued from fundamentalists. Lately, as in the “Left Behind” books, heaven implies the destruction of the earth and designated enemies and all the stuff we hate. No doubt theological ideas have consequences and these negative scripts lead to self-fulling prophecies (even President Reagan found them captivating) about the fate of the earth. The “apocalyptic habit” can produce despair or revenge fantasies instead of hope for a new earth. Hope is turned into glee over divine airstrikes called in on the human positions we despise, accompanied by the heady expectation that history is coming to an end in our own lifetime and everybody but us left behind. Cosmic war becomes a blessing, for those who can see, and environmental disasters part of a larger plan. Why is destruction so much more head-turning than dreams of a new earth in which Godspace descends to effect our re-enchantment?

But if we purged heaven from our vocabulary to rid ourselves of fundamentalists, we would die for lack of metaphor. Heaven has been called the mother of all metaphors. How impoverished our language and our mythology would be without heaven as the infinite horizon of our consciousness and of life on earth. We do not make ourselves better by starving our imaginal resources. With no transcendent pole star would we forget that we’re heading somewhere, that our purposes can be drawn out in a very long arc? Images of heaven are visionary anticipations, engraved on the human psyche and embedded in our culture, rehearsals of the future. As metaphors they enable us to think about what is unsayable. A new earth will not come to those who do not passionately desire it—above reason and even against reason. Once it recovers the baby accidentally thrown out with the bath water, progressive religion, with heaven as its driving metaphor and hope its mood, moves resolutely earthward.

            How could we think these ideas out loud into public discourse? We have seen that the liberal God of the Exodus, the prophets, and the life of Jesus cannot become good news for all the people unless publicly engaged, unless projected into the air we breathe and written into the social contract. God is waiting for human collaboration. The liberal God must be invited to dinner, entertained, and become part of the table talk. The point of discussing reason and rationality now is to see to it that human reason, under secular auspices, is not employed to thwart God’s dreams aligning with human hope. But it is common among public intellectuals and developers of public policy to argue that a secular-rational discourse should be the only lingua franca allowed in the commons. At first glance, this is not a silly or intolerant argument, since presumably everyone speaks this language, and the multiplicities of religious views are more likely to produce division than unity. The European Union manages to conduct itself in English as a purely utilitarian measure, without implying any denigration of the multiple vernaculars that flourish within its boundaries.

            But a second look notices the questionable implications of the decree that in the public square of an exceedingly complex multi-culture, only one network-standard, familiarly accented voice is permitted to speak. Imagine someone coming to speak before a city council hearing, or in a national debate, or in a letter to the editor, or at a hospital ethics committee and be explicitly disallowed to draw arguments or insights from the religious worldview that encompasses everything that is most important and deeply felt—the fullest meaning of that person’s life. If varying worldviews produce vernaculars unique to themselves because they are specially honed carriers of meaning, they are on notice that, when in public, only the voice of one worldview is permitted—and that an Enlightenment worldview that has come under radical postmodern questioning. Let there be no denial that different cultures and genders and orientations and religions speak specially nuanced languages, which have grown out of them organically. There are no dis-interested voices, including that of the Enlightenment. Every voice comes encumbered with culture, economics, politics, and power. Every voice arrives trailing its own claims, its own stake-holders, its own occupation in a worldview.

The idea that the voice of secular rationality is sufficient to speak for all kinds and conditions and times of human life and that it therefore can readily be enforced without harm to anyone will not bear close examination. Such an argument must go the way of the argument that the masculine pronoun actually includes all or that whiteness is a useful short-circuit to all of humanity. We have long come to see that civic meals may not be so hearty or so tasty without multiple ingredients. The heart, too, may have reasons that lucid rationality cannot express. Champions of reason must consider a long line of detractors, beginning in the modern age with the Romantics, who challenge their triumphalism.

Two further clarifications are necessary. Rationality is a wider term than often admitted and it cannot be reduced to rationalism. Religious assertions or ethical reflection cannot automatically be construed as irrational. Most theology, though perhaps not most mysticism, speaks in rational sentences and uses rational arguments when constructing a convincing worldview. The issue here is a particular kind of rationality that comes locked in the assumptions of an entire secular worldview, which may imply the exclusion of religion or feeling or even, in the case of “rational choice theory,” non-capitalist assumptions. The other issue is that religious people, or others who speak in their most meaningful vernaculars, may still, from time to time, deliberately choose to confine themselves to the lingua franca of secular rationality. They may do this for strategic reasons, for example, to win over the largest possible sympathetic audiences. But they should not be required to switch to this language, not required to dispense with being true to their own inner voices. Telling the religious to keep silent belongs in the same category as telling women, or blacks, or the southern hemisphere, or non property-owners, to keep silent.

            A mono-culture of purely rational discourse has other problems, too. It isn’t just that although secular discourse is the most unchallengeable way of speaking, we must also honor diversity. It is also the case that this very dominating language comes with its own dubious history. Post-modernism celebrates diversity and is suspicious of the totalizing unity of single, universally imposed grand narratives. The much vaunted lucid rationality of the Enlightenment is not without its downside. This was the language that prevailed in and was used to justify the world of colonialism. This kind of language does not readily acknowledge the larger nuances of human life and provides the grating voice for rational choice theorists with their grossly simplified picture of social reality and human psychology.  When it prevails as the law of the market and the hegemony of global capitalism, it eliminates, on principle, indigenous voices and compels all to speak in the network standard of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and Wall Street bankers.

            Romantic, post-colonialist, post-Marxian, post-Freudian, feminist, and queer modes of discourse have all mounted their critiques of excessive Enlightenment self-congratulation and questioned the hegemony of Western, secular reason. Religion, too, has of course joined in this critique. Some Christian philosophical traditions have risen to argue that a full account of humanity must always include head and heart. Religion is more likely to see reason as the servant of the heart, not its displacement. Religion has joined the social sciences in the insight that there are no impartial or value-free claims that exist without presuppositions. Every social unit, including modern science, operates according to and in the interests of some ideology. No doubt the Enlightenment and the French Revolution joined hands in the proclamation of the sovereignty of reason as a triumph over ancient orders and practices. No doubt this diminished the life of other spheres, at least for a time, and perhaps shattered social bonds in the name of a new ethic of individualism and self-interest. No doubt the back and forth among great ideas will continue.

Agnosticism is a polite and mellow response and atheism a more determined rejection of God-conversations. While agnosticism came into being as a refusal to entertain knowledge that is not empirical, it has lately come to register a certain cultural mood of metaphysical abstention, and skepticism as the fitting and sophisticated posture of a secular and scientific age. Many are disinclined to assert, or deny, truth claims unaccompanied by the kind of compelling evidence now widely demanded. The default position is that God is unknowable and therefore a non-starter at table talk. Sometimes agnosticism is a polite form of atheism, or an easily defended defense against the call of religion. Yet some American polls show that people who identify as agnostics often say they believe in God. Pollsters assume the self-designation of agnostic is a way of separating oneself from the disagreeable or disreputable dimensions of what goes for “religion,” warding off the insistent salesmen .

Like the instincts of a runaway bride, agnosticism has a point.  At least tentatively. But is this a good lifetime strategy? Agnosticism looks like an inability to commit. It’s a safe posture that declines to take a chance on disappointment or looking unsophisticated or foolish. It resembles a student’s decision to take all classes credit/no credit and foregoing letter grades. But love, commitment, ultimate meaning—all require a wager.  Religion has an admittedly confessional character, going public with one’s wager.

            Agnosticism saves you from Dostoevsky’s heavy-handed trinity of miracle, mystery, and authority and joins Thomas Jefferson’s project to free us from mystification, burdensome tradition, fanaticism, and the frankly ridiculous, which is good. All things considered, agnosticism seems to many the best default position.  But one of agnosticism’s unpleasant guises is cynicism.  This is where the smart, critical, dissenting, and formerly idealistic go on retreat.  They bask in ironic detachment. They never have to risk seeming foolish, getting snookered, staking their lives on anything. If the engaged life is just too much of a work-out, this is the excuse to sit in the stands together with all those who refuse to suit up for gym. 

            Of course, a very respectable dimension of agnosticism is methodological doubt: don’t believe or assume anything because someone says so; be suspicious of received truths and popular assumptions; grant religion no “epistemological privilege” (arguing because “the Bible says so”). But there’s supposed to be a point to doubt: it’s a means to an end, not the end itself.  You keep moving and find better truth.  Agnosticism suggests a certain failure to close

            What about atheism? Atheists are impolite and lately militant, they don’t fit the American mode of tolerance, and their over-confident nihilism is tiresome at parties.  The Soviets launched militant atheism as the necessary legitimation of the new state their revolution was achieving. Enforced secularism would eliminate religion as the supply side of alternative worldviews. They worked to create atheism as a specific alternative to religion because they saw the necessity of creating alternative rituals that would glue the new society together. In Maoist China, the revolutionary government was determined to eradicate through explicit cultural genocide an entire Tibetan Buddhist civilization. Both countries hoped that an enforced atheistic enlightenment could, over just a few decades, wash away a millennium of religious belief. That attempt failed, and religion inRussia began to make a comeback under glasnost, and especially after 1989, and now Putin is crossing himself. Atheism did not have the lasting effect hoped for on the belief systems of most Soviet citizens and failed to establish committed followers, although forty years of East German Communism had a devastating effect on the land of the Protestant Reformation.

            Of course, atheism is not unique to totalitarian societies. The European Enlightenment and its modern heirs found work diagnosing the problems of theism in the last two centuries. Some thought they could trace the origins of religion to a prehistoric fraud. Image after image of God was deconstructed and found to be humanly constructed--and oppressive. God was dethroned as king once it was seen that a long line of European and other monarchs had claimed divine right in the image of the heavenly ruler. A universe evolving and human nature becoming made God as the Unmoved Mover, dear to ancient Greek philosophers, irrelevant. Feminists unmasked a male God who authorized patriarchy everywhere. Liberation movements arose to insist that God was not white, male, or straight, and ultimately some in the 1960s simply announced the death of God.

            Alas, by the end of the 20th century the “new atheism,” with celebrity atheists all swooning at the salons of the sophisticated, had become the new postmodern superstition:  a pious rejection on the cheap that required neither critical thinking nor moral introspection. The new atheist air was filled with caricatures, ignorance, prejudice based on cherry-picked egregious examples, intemperate crusaders’ zeal, tedious tracking of errors, theological howlers, and category mistakes arising from complete and perhaps deliberate misunderstanding of what species religion actually belongs to. Street corner atheists, some famous, began to mirror the fundamentalist habits of mind they were railing against, and so the term “Enlightenment fundamentalism” was born. Many demonstrated an amazing ignorance of the history of religions and displayed only a sophomore’s grasp of theology. Those who came out of intellectual disciplines well known in universities (natural sciences, social sciences, humanities) rushed to escape all the critical reasoning and expertise required there in order to kill the dragon of religion with their bare hands. Islamophobic rants escaped from the same zoo.

Already in the Hebrew Bible the Exodus story became a contested narrative when the original meaning did not well serve subsequent interests of wealth and power. Today too sees competing narratives, rival stories about what is institutionally enabled, what is allowed to be in the air, what God or religion could mean for a society or nation. Of course there are the not always visible constraints of Enlightenment rationalism, and the skeptical detachment that makes social democracy viable, and gated communities that separate the privileged from the rest, but the most remarkable challenge to the story of God the liberal comes from within Christianity itself. While grace is foundational to the Exodus, renewed by the prophets, paradigmatic in the ministry of Jesus, and the key to Paul’s universalizing of the Christian gospel, it has always been problematic. It was always a slog to convince ancientIsrael that the land really belonged to God and that their liberation fromEgypt came from God with serious implications for the kind of covenanted community they should build. Already in early Christianity Paul, the apostle of grace, was fighting off “another gospel” that found grace unsuitable for the masses and substituted for it purity and worthiness and religiosity. Today, a liberal God runs contrary to an American exceptionalism that makes of our wealth and power the reward for our virtue and the evidence of our election to be the greatest. A God who gives it away provides too few marketing opportunities for the religious franchise, too little to do for those whose vocation is exclusion, too little warrant for national self-congratulation. In fact, God as a liberal poses a moral hazard for the American way of life. That’s why much of American Christianity has ended up with quite a different social contract than the one issued atMt.Sinai or tantalizingly enacted in Jesus’s proclamation of the reign of God.

If we are going to think out loud about a liberal God, if there is to be a national conversation about negotiating God’s return from exile and projection into the social imaginary (the air we breathe), I propose that we begin by attempting to write such a God into our present social contract.  If we live in a time of ever greater polarization, if God is required to neglect the 99% in favor the 1%, then we must reject the conservative or timidly centrist nostrums of the day, voting “none of the above.” A liberal God who gives grace away  is going to have to be a write-in.  God-talk itself is not off-base inAmerica, but what kind of God is actually “blessingAmerica”? When Thomas Jefferson made some God the authorization of a new social contract for the colonies, the God of the Exodus was not one of the contenders. “Good news for the oppressed” did not disturbMonticello. The “equality” of the French Revolution, which seems to take a page from God’s covenant righteousness in the Old Testament, did not rub off onAmerica. Television preachers who claim the founders had theocracy on the mind offer no briefs on behalf of the strange, liberal God of the Bible.

It could be that thinking God out loud, launching God into the air we breathe, writing God into the social contract is the essential religious task of every age. Thereby does a becoming God acquire ever new vernaculars. Such efforts easily reduce to the tired social science insight that all religion is a human construction, that God is a projection of our yearnings.  When that claim is held too close, it bleeds the dynamism out of the religious impulse. As novelists know, coming up with new scripts is as significant a task as humans ever undertake. Although the prophets could make God the subject of all transitive verbs, they also assumed that God did not appear, could not appear, except in the religious imagination, in the testimony of the people, in the righteous actions of the community.

New scripts require new plays. To think God out loud in the life of a people is to cast God and ourselves in a new play. In biblical stories both sides get good lines. My own belief is that life on earth has an upper side that is transparent to the ultimate direction of the universe, a cosmic drama. The point is to keep that upper side up (think solar panel), so that incoming light can energize it.  When only turned downward, human life becomes opaque. When Martin Luther King preached at the Washington Mall, he was dreaming God into the end of the second millennium.  Sweating hard, he delivered God into a new social contract.   

            On the stage of a declining Roman Empire, Augustine set out to write his autobiography, and his Confessions established this genre in the West.  But though he was intending to write his own story, he wrote in God to get the full account right.  He wrote, “What can anyone say about you, God?  And yet, woe to him who says nothing.”  Our lives, like Augustine’s, hide a drama—“Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” One Jewish solution is to set a place for Elijah, whose absence would otherwise come to define the meal.

For many centuries Christmas Day worshippers have been hearing these words as their New Testament reading: “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all” (Titus 2:11). Grace, everyone used to know, is foundational  to the Christian Gospel. It may be that contemporaryAmerica is not well-disposed to grasp the grace proclaimed in the New Testament.

So in the aftermath of this Christmas I’m paying attention to the surprising view of grace in Les Miserables, already seen by 60 million people as musical theater and now as a film that opened on Christmas Day. Victor Hugo’s novel and its theater and film adaptations may be seen as a story of grace transforming in the life of the common man Jean Valjean and grace rejected in the life of the rigid functionary Javert.

As the story begins, Jean Valjean is being released from nineteen winters of imprisonment for having stolen some bread to save his sister’s son from starving. But in the eyes of Javert, Valjean will always be a thief, which is his nature, because he has not learned the meaning of the law. Crushed under this ideological overlay, Valjean sees himself as a slave of the law—in a way remarkably similar to that of St. Paul, who makes grace and law antithetical. The chorus confirms it: “Look down, you will always be a slave.”   

In his first job after prison, Valjean is deliberately underpaid. When he objects, the boss says: “Why should you get the same as honest men like me?” (Jesus once told a parable about laborers in a vineyard to open people’s eyes to grace.)  Valjean concludes that society has closed every door to him. When he is refused lodging, the innkeeper says: “We’re law-abiding people here. Thanks be to God.” The conservative identification with the law is commonly made in alliance with God, while Victor Hugo seems to understand that the Christian vision identifies grace, not law, with God.

When Valjean finds himself at the door of a rectory, his last chance at lodging, the Catholic bishop welcomes him and we unexpectedly encounter a cleric who epitomizes grace:

Come in, Sir, for you are weary And the night is cold out there. Though our lives are very humble What we have, we have to share. There is wine here to revive you, There is bread to make you strong, There's a bed to rest till morning, Rest from pain, and rest from wrong.

Accepting the bishop’s hospitality, Valjean soon enough mocks him as an old fool and steals the silver. When he is caught and charged with a theft that will send him back to prison for life, the bishop protests that in fact he has made a gift of the church’s silver to this man. Turning to Valjean, the bishop astonishes him by saying that in his haste he left behind the most valuable of the gifts given him—the church’s precious silver candlesticks. The bishop wonders if unexpected grace might turn Valjean’s life around:

But remember this, my brother See in this some higher plan You must use this precious silver To become an honest man By the witness of the martyrs By the Passion and the Blood God has raised you out of darkness I have bought your soul for God!

Valjean gets it. He accepts a grace beyond understanding. The bishop touched his soul and taught him love, called him a brother, claimed his life for God. Can such things be? Valjean had come to hate the world which hated him, turning his heart to stone. As a moral void was closing in, Valjean accepts grace as the new story of his life. He goes on to become a factory manager, then the mayor. Witnessing the suffering of the poor, he sees that in God’s name his life task has just begun. When Javert wants to arrest the hapless Fantine, Valjean intervenes: “She needs a doctor not a jail.” When Javert intends to put away for life a man he thinks is Valjean, Valjean has a crisis in his new identity and wonders “Who am I?” His new life requires the truth. When Fantine lies dying, Valjean offers to become the guardian and then father of her daughter Cosette. Whence all this goodness?

My soul belongs to God, I know I made that bargain long ago He gave me hope, when hope was gone He gave me strength to journey on.

When student revolution is in the offing, Valjean goes to their side because embracing justice as one born of grace is his new vocation. Because he has discovered that “to love another person is to see the face of God,” he joins his story to the story of the downtrodden:

Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men? It is the music of a people Who will not be slaves again! When the beating of your heart Echoes the beating of the drums There is a life about to start When tomorrow comes!

By contrast, Javert speaks for all self-made men who believe in the infallibility of the economic order and of the law that sanctifies it. Who know they deserve their fortune, who are quick to judge, who are suspicious of mercy, who enforce the arrangements that keep people in their proper place. Javert experiences no need of grace and cannot accept it. When he hears oppressed workers singing, “At the end of the day you're another day older. And that's all you can say for the life of the poor”; when he cannot see how “the righteous hurry past and don’t hear the little ones crying”; when Fantine sings her show-stopper, “I dreamed that God would be forgiving,” Javert has heard it all before and it cannot penetrate his righteous certainty:

I have heard such protestations Every day for twenty years Let's have no more explanations Save your breath and save your tears Honest work, just reward, That's the way to please the Lord.

As the student revolution begins, Javert attempts to infiltrate it and is discovered. The students intend to kill him as a traitor to their cause, but accept Valjean’s offer to see to his fate. When Valjean pretends to be executing Javert but in fact sets him free, when it is clear that this is not a quid pro quo on behalf of Valjean’s own freedom, Javert faces a crisis in his own self-understanding. He has devoted his life to an unjust order that denigrates the poor and congratulates the fortunate. He realizes that people with his commitments cannot change their views. He cannot understand or accept the grace Valjean offers, musing to himself, What sort of devil catches someone in a trap and then sets them free? Vengeance was Valjeans’, but he gave me back my life. Ultimately, Javert must reject grace, perhaps honorably if also pathetically, because he sees that it is incompatible with the worldview to which he has devoted his life. Damned if he will yield at the end of the chase. “I am the law and the Law is not mocked. I’ll spit his pity right back in his face. There is nothing on earth that we share. It is either Valjean or Javert.” To accept mercy, to acknowledge need would be to admit that we all must live by grace and accept its dominion, and that Javert will not do. Grace would be hell, a betrayal of all he has stood for. It is too late to doubt his firm assumptions. He commits suicide to escape a world where grace is necessary.