Here’s some interesting stuff making the rounds of the Web this week that I thought I’d share.
The first is an excellent article from Inside Higher Ed that speaks about the notion of American citizenship and what does it mean to live in a country which originated on the premise of participatory democracy and what it means to be “American” in this sense.
These principles, which form what can be called the “American theory of justice,” argue for human equality; for the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; for government established by popular consent; and for the right of the people to rebel should government cease to fulfill the purposes for which it was instituted. On this basis, the United States is more than a mere address, more than its history, and more than its demographics. It is, in its essence, an idea…
… concerns over the Americanization of newly arrived immigrants need also to take account of the fact that native-born citizens are nearly equally challenged at “becoming American,” that is, at the task of understanding the principles that established and largely continue to define this country. Even those born in America are failing to become American in this, the deepest sense.
The other is a 2-part analysis by Zack Exley in the blog Revolution in Jesusland. In “The Next Step for Christian Big Thinkers: Part 1 and 2,” he discusses the desire of many Christians to address enormous, society-level problems such as poverty or the despoiling of the environment.
These days, Christians are asking really enormous questions. They’re asking, “How can we eliminate poverty completely?” and “How can we stop harming the environment altogether.” What’s so great about them is that their faith in Christ leads them to believe that total redemption is possible. That is the miracle that makes their world irresistible to me…
…But when it came to, “HOW?” they could only offer the political economy of the personal: Be a good-hearted business person. And consume less.
From part 2:
Even the Christians who are doing the most see that what they’re currently doing is not enough to really fix this broken world. And so they feel God’s call to do more. But most think that means only more of the same: dig more wells, fund more micro loans, build more schools and orphanages, etc… And for sure, God is calling us to do as much of that as we possibly can.
But a certain dogma regarding social change has taken hold of the Christian imagination, and limited it to only projects that are small, local, “relational” and that they can personally witness themselves. Those who have been bitten by this dogma go on the faith that, if we all just live as followers of Christ in our neighborhoods, churches and workplaces, then God will work out the rest. They believe it’s wrong to work for social change at the level of the whole society because that requires political power, and therefore leads to all kinds of messy compromises, unintended consequences and, ultimately, corruption.
Hi LAD, good to see you blogging again.
These days, Christians are asking really enormous questions. They’re asking, “How can we eliminate poverty completely?” and “How can we stop harming the environment altogether.” What’s so great about them is that their faith in Christ leads them to believe that total redemption is possible. That is the miracle that makes their world irresistible to me…
Hmm. I’m an atheist, but there’s a sense in which I share some assumptions with a certain brand of fundamentalist Christian. They believe that man is fallen, that the world is broken, and that this can only be completely fixed through the intercession of God. I believe something similar minus the fixing and the God parts.
This is one of the parts of the conservative world-view that I think is very hard to argue with, even if you are not very conservative in other respects (and in many respects, starting with the fact that I am an atheist, albeit not a particularly evangelical atheist, I am not very conservative). Not only is the perfect the enemy of the good, the evidence suggests that the good is often the enemy of the tolerable. I’d suggest that you really need to believe in miracles to believe that it is possible to eliminate poverty entirely, or for humans to do no environmental damage at all. The first miracle you need to swallow is that of everyone agreeing on what “poverty” and “environmental harm” mean. The Tower of Babel is, IMHO, a more interesting story if you posit that after its fall all men continued to speak the same language, but were no longer able to agree on the definition of terms.
The truth is that people have to eat to live, and that we must interact with, and alter, the environment to do so. I think a lot of the more faddish Green concerns are nonsense, and environmentally harmful nonsense at that. But I do think that we should be very concerned about some things. At the top of the list I would put land and water use, and release of heavy metals. The thing is that we certainly can’t entirely stop using land and water, and we would have to give up a lot to entirely stop releasing heavy metals.
When I was a kid I lived on an organic produce farm for a while. My mother is one of the better known American writers on the subject of organic growing. I can testify that organic farming is as harmful to the environment, using my semantics at least, as other sorts of farming. In some ways it is worse. On the other hand, the produce is generally a lot better- this is not a direct consequence of Organic Farming(TM). It is a reflection of the fact that a lot more resources go into growing organic produce, and of the fact that good organic produce cannot travel far from the farm before being eaten. Organic produce that is grown on an industrial scale and shipped across the country is not, generally, any better than non-organic produce (that I can’t write inorganic there says something about what a misnomer “organic” is in the first place- I have yet to see an inorganic vegetable).
Now, I may seem to have strayed a long way from the subject of your post, but… this is an example of a place where absolutism is impractical. The truth is that we have to practice agriculture in order to feed the 7 billion people on the planet. We will have to practice it more intensively to feed the projected 10 billion people we’ll have at the peak of global population. It is simply not possible to practice agriculture on this scale without doing a great deal of “environmental harm”, and that is true almost without regard to how you define that term.
So we have to make some decisions about the patterns of agriculture, and beyond that we have to make some decisions on the meta-agricultural level: how will these decisions be made, and how enforced? My worry is that those who start from the position of wanting (or professing to want) to do “no environmental harm” will move to a position of regulating agriculture based on aesthetics and ideology. We are already starting to see this in the outrageously bad practices that the policy of promoting bio-fuels encourages. I’m not quite a greenhouse skeptic- I believe that the anthropogenic forcing to date is about a degree Fahrenheit, and that it will be twice that in 100 years. But I am sure that huge environmental damage, using my semantics, is being done in the name of Greenhouse Reduction(TM). And I know that it will not reduce the anthropogenic effect even if I am wrong about its magnitude. Massive quantities of greenhouse gases are released when nations like Indonesia destroy peat swamps to grow biomass for bio-fuels, or to grow food to replace food stocks used for bio-fuels (grains are pretty fungible).
Thank God the Christians are limiting themselves to local projects, and concentrating on being good people. They are right about the dangers of enforcing radical change at the whole society level. It almost never turns out well, as a few of my friends who spent their youths trying to smelt pig iron in their backyards could explain to you in excruciating detail. I don’t think God will work out the rest of course- I just don’t believe the rest can be worked out. The world is a fucked up place, man. Always has been. But it has gotten a lot better in the last 100 years, and I think it will get a lot better in the next 100.
By: Duncan on June 7, 2008
at 10:12 pm
Hi Duncan
Thanks! I’ve been busy and you will notice my output is not as prolific as before. But I’m trying to keep up a regular blogging schedule.
You raise some provocative points, especially about organic farming and its effects. I don’t really know much about that area (or about agriculture for that matter) so I will keep my thoughts on the original post on Christians and political activity.
I think that Zack Exley’s blog “Revolution in Jesusland” is great. I don’t really know many Evangelicals and much of what I know are stereotypes based on the American culture wars. It is refreshing for me to see that Evangelicals in a more complex and human light and not limiting their notion of public policy to questions of abortion and gay marriage.
Where I come from originally (the Philippines) church people are active in social justice movements and as professed Christians I can’t see them not being active given the extreme conditions that exist over there in terms of poverty, inequality, human rights, etc.
In the US I am glad to see Evangelicals branching out (although one can argue there has always been a wing of Progressive Christians who have always concerned themselves with social justice issues).
I have my own preferences of who and what I think Christians should support — but I will leave it to them to decide those things. A large number of people considering critically and seriously society’s institutions and their role in it is a good thing for democracy overall.
By: Liberal Arts Dude on June 8, 2008
at 3:27 pm