Catherine Tumber: How to Talk About God and Politics

I don't agree with everything in this new piece by feminist author Catherine Tumber, but the section below is really to the point. It's much the same thing that Bill Scher said in his fine book Wait Don't Move to Canada--the key to talking about God in politics is integrity.

Catherine Tumber writing in the Boston Review, The Reckoning: The proper place for religion in politics

Liberal politics never fully recovered from white liberal evangelicalism’s fatal collision with modernity, notwithstanding that great wave of spiritual contagion, the civil-rights movement. Wallis seems to recognize as much when he wonders, “Why do so many liberals seem supportive of religious language when it is invoked by black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., but recoil when such language is employed by white political leaders?” The answer, he suggests, lies in “a subtle kind of racism” that holds white people to a self-styled higher intellectual standard.

There may well be something to that, but limiting the problem to racism misses what was crucial in King’s genius: his own social-justice ministry was not crafted for politics but rooted in a sense of cosmic struggle that grounded hope itself. King was never much troubled by the “literalism” that discredited so many white evangelicals’ eschatology in the eyes of liberals, because the black church had always relied on figurative biblical interpretation; literalism had, after all, given warrant to slavery. Though he took in the theological currents of his day while in seminary—the personalism taught at Boston University and Niebuhr’s “Christian realism,” with its insistence on spiritual discipline against resentment—and though he had once been “embarrassed” by the “emotionalism” of the black church, with its talk of “mansions in the sky,” he ultimately drew on its cosmic, catastrophic story line. In black-church eschatology, “what is hoped for is in some sense already present,” as King put it in a 1966 sermon, as evidenced by those who refuse to give up on Christian hope itself—the slave forebears, the sick, the abused and tormented—hope that is never confined to personal desires but is always extended to others. The mystery of the “already”–“not yet” motif holds the eternal–temporal divide in tension and could never warrant a simple linear optimism or a belief in moral progress. As King said, “human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.” This is the conviction that underwrote the black church’s ministry of deliverance and forgiveness—crucial resources for King. It also made it possible to accept unmerited suffering as aligned with the purposes of God, with full knowledge that one can retain moral control of a situation, even in the teeth of agony.

King never patronized his auditors, black or white, because his faith was too capacious, hard-won, and demanding to allow him to give in to the temptation to see pain as the lot only of the poor and black. Surely there is still much to learn from this monumental achievement. But white political leaders, racist or not, too often come across as faking it—as if they are simply using religious language to “connect” with supporters—and therefore patronizing. Even Wallis himself at times addresses his readers as though they were kindergarteners, as when he asserts that “it’s bad theology to say that power, per se, is always bad.” Surely we’re more politically sophisticated than that. Can you imagine Martin Luther King, for whom power was nothing less than an enormous given, uttering such words?

Learning from King, contemporary religious progressives would do well to look for signs of religious integrity—a mood, a set of convictions, an orientation specific to religion—without using a political prism. Among them might be included a double consciousness of knowing yet not knowing God; a humility before the majesty of the heavens; a sense of worldly alienation that dares hope for reconciliation; a sense of mystery breaking in on the prosaic; an understanding, with Kierkegaard, that faith often requires a “leap”; a reckoning with the limitations of life that surpasses stoic resignation; a sense of a cosmic future that will outlive us, upon which to base present hope. Without at least some of these elements, which capture facets of God’s immensity, religion loses its shape and becomes all too malleable to human purposes.