“Do you really believe that God exists?”
July 7, 2009, posted by Tyler, under The Practicing Church | | 3 Comments
Due to my obsession with the question of religion and public life, I’m the kind of 22 year old kid that will sit down and watch Bill Moyers on friday evenings on PBS. Take a look at this interview from last week, I absolutely loved it. Moyer’s explores the economic collapse of the last year and our poverty of values through the lens of these three top notch theologians. Moyers interviewed Serene Jones, Gary Dorrien (The President and Social Ethics professor at Union Theological Seminary respectively) and Cornel West (Princeton University). I’ve taken excerpts from the transcript that I thought were the most insightful polemics and reflections.
This is the quote of the week for me from Serene Jones. As someone who is about to enter seminary and has my undergraduate degree in Theology and Religious Studies, I would sit there in class and often ask this same question of my professors that Dr. Jones highlights in the the end of this quote.
SERENE JONES: What I see in my students is powerful. It is a sense that, in the crumbling of all of this, what is being unleashed is an intense sense of the embodied character of faith. Call it Pentecostal. You can see it in my students now. What does it mean to call them Pentecostal? It’s not the traditional things we think of. But these are students who are coming off the set of “American Idol.” Or they’ve been on a war ship outside of Iraq.
Or they’ve been stocking shelves in Texas. And they’re coming to Union committed to social justice. And open to the power of the spirit in physical ways that give them this kind of zealousness that, for a large swath of time, the liberal left lost. They’re doing this as a whole new generation for whom tactility, thinking about the way the body lives in the world. It’s actually exciting to me. Because I think, in their own lives, we’re seeing the contestation of the power of the market to configure desire. Because they don’t want those market desires in the same way my generation did. They’re critical of them. They’re coming up with new forms of music. And they’re very committed to a sense of passion in it. To use a very scholarly term, I think we need to use it more often, I think it’s a crisis of metaphysics. These students are asking, and their liberal professors, questions about, you know, “Do you really believe that God exists?”
Now, the liberal church is sort of, you know, wanting to say, “Well, it might be a myth. It might be a symbol. We can say this about it. We can back away.” These students are saying, “I’m not going to get out there on the front line, and I’m not going to reconfigure my interior world to desire different things…” If this isn’t real, they want something real that is an alternative.
First Great Point
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.
CORNEL WEST: I think it has to do a lot with the profound spiritual crisis, a kind of spiritual malnutrition, an emptiness of soul, a whole culture of indifference that says, in fact, that you can possess your soul, by means of possessing commodities of thinking somehow you can conquer the world, your world, and end up losing your soul. These are old truths. These are old biblical truths.
Second Great Point
GARY DORRIEN: That’s why I’m for economic democracy, because I think that economic democracy is essentially an attempt to sort of hold down, serve as a kind of a break on human greed and will to power, which are virtually universal, so I’m not talking about anything that requires some kind of idealistic idea about human nature, or what we’re capable of, or the like. My main argument for it is the same that Niebuhr, that Reinhold Niebuhr had about democracy. You know, the human capacity for goodness makes democracy possible, but it’s precisely the human capacity for evil that makes democracy utterly necessary. There are two sort of fundamental stories or ideas about a just society, what it could be, that have been operative in US American history virtually from the beginning, and that are always there. And that one is the idea of providing unrestricted liberty to acquire wealth.
And there’s a politics that goes with that. You want to hold down government. You want to hold – even democracy is not really necessarily a good word, in that conception. And then in the other idea, it’s that you want to attain as much through a democracy as you can, over society’s major institutions.
You can interpret virtually every decade of U.S. American history by the way these two different sort of conceptions of what a just society would be, end up conflicting with each other, sometimes modifying each other, sometimes changing each other.
Third Great Point
GARY DORRIEN: You get an, yes, you get an economic oligarchy, a financial elite that rigs the game and its system. And they pile up a mountain of debt and they overreach in good times. And then the whole house comes collapsing down on everybody else. And then you end up having to deal with, you know, the mess. And if you’ve got an oligarchy, which you always have in these cases, they are always very good at taking care of their own.
That’s what elites do. And so, the question becomes, are you going to let them organize the recovery on their terms? Or are you going to break the power of the oligarchy. And then maybe get or build something better than what you had before. Now what I just described is not that much different than what Russia and Argentina and Malaysia and South Korea and plenty of other places have gone through. But it’s different in this case, of course, because it’s so much bigger. It went global almost immediately. And in our case, because we are so big, we can play by different rules than all these other cases. And that’s happens, and that’s what we’re objecting to right now, is that we’ll just sort of string along and hope for a recovery. And we’ll just have the same thing that we had before.
Fourth Great Point
GARY DORRIEN: Yes. But, there’s a tendency, in so much of the literature. Tom Friedman’s book, “The World is Flat,” is just sort of a catechism on this theme, of saying, well, the politics don’t really matter anymore. And that states themselves, don’t really matter.
The electronic herd has control of the world, but it doesn’t really have control, it just does what it does. And so there is no third way in political economy anymore. There isn’t even a second way, you know. There’s only one thing that sort of runs the world, and so you either get on with that program, or you’re going to be run over.
But I think you’ve got to recognize the change, in the context of understanding that politics always mattered. I mean, that some states did way better than others, in regulating this system and even believing that you needed to regulate it. In dealing with equality and even believing that equality was an important goal to serve. And beyond all that, simply look at what happened in the world in mid-September, and then October.
CORNEL WEST: This is where the-
GARY DORRIEN: Government suddenly came up with trillions of dollars-
CORNEL WEST: Absolutely.
GARY DORRIEN: To hold up this system-
CORNEL WEST: Absolutely.
GARY DORRIEN: That they had built and defended to begin with-
CORNEL WEST: Why is that so? Because they don’t look at the world through the lens of poor people-
GARY DORRIEN: Right.
CORNEL WEST: And working people.
GARY DORRIEN: Right.
CORNEL WEST: The question will be for churches, you can’t have a prosperity gospel anymore. The prosperity’s gone. You can’t have a chamber of commerce – religion chamber of commerce is in crisis. You can’t have a market spirituality and an imperial religiosity because the empire’s in trouble. It’s wavering and wobbling.
And the market is no longer a model, at all. So where do we go? Transitional moment. This is a moment of the interregnum. We are looking for new ways. Think of all of our Evangelical brothers and sisters who tie their Christian faith, in part, to Bush. They’re looking for other places because they know it was a form of idolatry. And we–this is something that’s a challenge to all of us, not just our evangelical brothers and sisters.
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.
Fifth Great Point
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.
A Little But Of History Repeating
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.
CORNEL WEST: There’s a sense of-
GARY DORRIEN: Because even the term social justice is only coined during that very same period.
BILL MOYERS: But the Social Gospel tradition was, in itself, overwhelmed by the materialism of the last part of the 20th century and by the turbo capitalism that you were talking about enshrined in Thomas Freidman’s icon. I mean, the Social Gospel was not sufficient to sustain itself against the power of economics and, in fact, structural wealth. Right?
SERENE JONES: But I think we can never underestimate the crisis of desire. That it wasn’t just that there was – it didn’t have enough social strength, or a good enough analysis. That what turbo capitalism does, is it – the biggest, sort of, war zone is interior to us – where it takes over your desire. It makes you into a creature who wants to buy the commodities. So you could have a great political analysis. But what you’re doing, on the ground every day, is you’re fueling this turbo capitalism. And it’s in the churches that another kind of desire should have been being crafted. That’s where you can get people in their bones and really begin to force the question of, what is it that you want? What makes you happy? What makes your life mean? What, you know, it’s those deep questions of want.
The Social Gospel Recap
GARY DORRIEN: Well, in fact, Rauschenbusch did speak to exactly this issue that Serene’s bringing up. That’s why he wanted to expand the cooperative sector. He said, “We’ve got to create structures in which,” the way he would often put it, is, “Which bad people are forced to do good things.”
That is if you set up, have structures in which cooperation is actually rewarded. Where you’re met – where you have to deal with other people. Be solicitous of what they need. What they care about. And the like. That you can actually set up reward systems that make a better society. And sometimes he’d say you can even live out – you could be a Christian without having to retire from the world. And so that, I think these two things actually were tied together quite closely.
What Is Obama Gonna Do
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?
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.
More Obama
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.
CORNEL WEST: It’s a moment of euphoria! Which is blinding. But when we become more cantankerous, vociferous, noisy, in love, based on, focus on the least of these, he’s going to have to take us seriously. And we just tell the President we are coming.
Post Christian Society
BILL MOYERS: So I want to ask the three of you from your perspectives. Is it conceivable to you that, as we may be moving into a post racial society, we may be moving into a post-Christian society?
SERENE JONES: I love that term, actually because Christianity could well be its best when it gets completely undone. And Christians who are committed to prophetic presence in the world should be, in one sense, thrilled by the possibility of it being post-Christian.
Because it may mean we’re coming to the end of some structures of religiosity that were deadly. You know, in the Protestant Reformation they were calling it the end of Christendom. And what emerged on the other side of it was a completely new form.
BILL MOYERS: Are you saying that there’s a…you sense a hope, now for a new reformation?
SERENE JONES: Oh. It’s a fantastic moment to be standing at a seminary. That’s one of the reasons why I decided, after 17 years at Yale, to come to New York and be at the helm of this little school. It has a great legacy, but it’s not a huge mega university.
It’s because, and you can feel it in New York so palpably, but what is happening globally. Change in forms of technology. The breakdown and reconfiguration of the nation state. Forms of economic interaction that have never before been imagined.
And a crisis of knowledge. And a crisis of value. Parallel, in really profound ways, what was happening 500 years ago when this little guy named John Calvin got run out of Paris because he was asking the secular question. They ran him out of Paris. And he ends up in Geneva. And, in the midst of all of that, begins to listen to what’s happening in Europe. That’s the challenge right now, is for us to listen to what’s happening globally and to be able to track the emergent forms of spirit. The emergent forms of organizations. The forms of love and the forms of hope that people are finding on the ground in the midst of these changes and that is going to be sort of the spirituality that’s coming. And it’s coming fast.
The Next Students
SERENE JONES: What I see in my students is powerful. It is a sense that, in the crumbling of all of this, what is being unleashed is an intense sense of the embodied character of faith. Call it Pentecostal. You can see it in my students now. What does it mean to call them Pentecostal? It’s not the traditional things we think of. But these are students who are coming off the set of “American Idol.” Or they’ve been on a war ship outside of Iraq.
Or they’ve been stocking shelves in Texas. And they’re coming to Union committed to social justice. And open to the power of the spirit in physical ways that give them this kind of zealousness that, for a large swath of time, the liberal left lost. They’re doing this as a whole new generation for whom tactility, thinking about the way the body lives in the world. It’s actually exciting to me. Because I think, in their own lives, we’re seeing the contestation of the power of the market to configure desire. Because they don’t want those market desires in the same way my generation did. They’re critical of them. They’re coming up with new forms of music. And they’re very committed to a sense of passion in it. To use a very scholarly term, I think we need to use it more often, I think it’s a crisis of metaphysics. These students are asking, and their liberal professors, questions about, you know, “Do you really believe that God exists?”
Now, the liberal church is sort of, you know, wanting to say, “Well, it might be a myth. It might be a symbol. We can say this about it. We can back away.” These students are saying, “I’m not going to get out there on the front line, and I’m not going to reconfigure my interior world to desire different things…” If this isn’t real, they want something real that is an alternative.
GARY DORRIEN: Certainly, from our experience of the course, this is an extraordinary generation. I mean, it’s, they are connected. They care. They’re looking for, they’re always sort of obsessing about what’s real. I mean, they’ve got radar for what’s unreal.
For what is just merely abstract, or it doesn’t really speak to their condition. What isn’t going to make a difference. What kind of learning doesn’t make any difference at all. They’ve got radar for that. But they’re very hungry for what is going to make a difference. And how it is that they can live out their faith in this world that we’re creating.
SERENE JONES: They’re not afraid of hard thinking. But they also want, they want beauty. The beauty of the thought to inspire.
If you want to see more on this go to Itunes and search Union Theological Seminary, you can find the entire 13 week class these three professors just finished at Union.
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Post-christianity is not dawning. It was here when I attended Union in 1960. Then and now the issue remains structural and the responsibility of the liberal church, what’s left of it, is to understand the way that structure and theology intermingle and why, with all the current professions, liberalism (theologically) remains at a dead end, as Richard Niebuhr said in 1960. Otherwise seminaries are training folk to get their legs shot out from under them when they are expected to profess things in which they can no longer believe. BTW he also said neo-orthodoxy was at a dead end, Right on both counts.
It was an INCREDIBLE interview! Thanks for your summary.
Warm Regards,
EP