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Assessing the Concerns of the Religious Right

There has always been a ‘religious right." Perhaps the first Christian instance of this phenomenon was the resistance of the Jerusalem Christians to Paul’s liberal tendencies, as recorded in Acts. Though Paul provided many proof texts for future conservatives, on the greatest issue of his time he was adventurously liberal, opening the church to the gentiles and traveling over half the known world to gather them.

Of course, some of the reasons for the emergence of a religious right are to be found in the secular political choices that religious people must make, but there are also several aspects of Christian teaching which, when emphasized to the neglect of other aspects, lend themselves to political and social rightwing interpretations.

For example, there is the common emphasis on otherworldly salvation for individual souls, with no corresponding emphasis on the social conditions that oppress and distort those souls and with no concern for justice in this world. Larger structural social problems, it is felt, can wait for the Second Coming. One recalls the recent occasion on which Secretary of the Interior James Watt dismissed the idea that it might be important to conserve resources for future generations -- because there may not be many generations before the Second Coming of Christ.

Another emphasis is the notion that divine providence supports the dominant powers in society and sanctions the alliance of the church with those powers. For centuries the idea of the "divine right of kings" was dominant; eventually there evolved the belief, common among 19th century Protestants, that divine providence was to be identified with the laws and practices of a free-enterprise economy. This latter teaching characterizes the religious right of today, and the policies of the Reagan administration are based on a secularized version of that belief.

There has also been a one-sided emphasis on sin -- an emphasis that has led many Christians to believe that, though existing conditions may be bad, a change would probably be worse. Understandably, this doctrine has been popular among those who benefit from the status quo. It is often thought that change would open the door to control by crude and godless people, perhaps by "secular humanists," perhaps by individuals influenced by some revolution abroad. That last fear began early in our history. The Congregational clergy in New England charged Jefferson and his followers with being Jacobins influenced by the French Revolution.

Finally, there is an authoritarian tendency in religion which meshes well with authoritarian secular structures and with rigid prescriptions for living. Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority, says in his recent book Listen America that "the Bible is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc." That "etc." is his, and it covers a lot of ground. I have seen a Falwell quotation that takes back a little of that, but in interviews he has a way of bending.

Both modern Protestantism and Catholicism have correctives for each of those tendencies, which keep coming to life and making connections with the secular political right.

Considerable debate is going on as to how much influence the religious right has, the extent to which it influenced the results of the 1980 election, and how many people listen regularly to right-wing preachers on television. This is a subject in itself, and I shall offer only a few suggestions to help counteract the tendency to exaggerate this influence. Last year’s national election was not won by a large popular majority, and almost half of those eligible failed to vote. People felt frustrated over the economy and over what they believed to be signs of American weakness in the world. These feelings could have determined the election results without much help from the religious right and without a strong new right-wing direction among the voters. The use of single issues -- different ones in different states -- by the Moral Majority had a great deal to do with the defeat of liberal senators.

The June issue of the Atlantic carried a study by sociologist William Martin of Rice University about the number of listeners who tune in regularly to politically right-wing preachers. Based on Nielson-type ratings, it shows that the nonpolitical though rather conservative preachers such as Oral Roberts and Robert Schuller have many more listeners than does Jerry Falwell. Between them they have nearly 4.5 million listeners, whereas Falwell has only 1,440,000 who hear him regularly. I must admit that Falwell is very successful each month in raking in millions of dollars. Not that I want to play down the influence of the right-wing preachers, but it is well for those of us who disagree with them not to be overawed by what we believe to be their power.

As I see today’s religious right, especially the very vocal Moral Majority, it involves the merging of four concerns. The coalescing of these interests may be somewhat accidental, and a few years from now we may see a weakening of the right-wing coalition that now seems so strong. At least three of these concerns reflect anxieties and frustrations now common in our country.

The first concern which makes the religious right’s backing somewhat different from the religious support accorded right-wing politics when Barry Goldwater was its chief symbol is anxiety over signs of moral breakdown in society, especially those that are believed to threaten the family -- abortion, homosexuality, pornography. Frequently there are attacks on what many of us would regard as signs of moral advance: the ERA and movements for the liberation of women, which rightists perceive as undermining the family.

The second area of concern is the rightists’ view that American morals are being eroded by what they call "secular humanism." They engage in caricatures of this type of humanism, and their attacks indicate no realization that Christian humanism has long been a significant expression of Christianity. Christian humanism, the humanism of some other faiths (especially Judaism), nontheistic religious humanism, and secular humanism have much in common in their commitment to moral values. Usually one finds among all four humanisms greater moral sensitivity about problems of justice and peace, about reconciliation between races and nations, than one finds in the Moral Majority.

The third area of concern has to do with the widespread feeling that America is weak and being pushed around and that Soviet power and communism threaten its freedom or its very existence. In a call for military superiority to the Soviet Union and for victory over communism -- rather than containment -- Falwell pulls out all stops in his superpatriotism. He sees the Soviet Union and communism as almost supernaturally evil entities in an apocalyptic drama. Among political issues this seems to be the one that arouses him most, partly because of the atheistic orientation of communism.

The fourth area of concern is a prevalent frustration over the economy. The religious right strongly supports the secular right and advocates pure free-market capitalism liberated from big government. Its adherents are extreme in their opposition to socialism, and I doubt that they see very clearly the difference between democratic socialism and communism. Their celebration of free-market capitalism seems to be part of their uncritical Americanism. It is my impression that economic issues do not for them involve the kind of emotional commitment that they express in the other three areas.

Before discussing these areas of concern, I would like to make two clarifying points.

First, we must not suppose that the religious right is representative of the very large community of evangelicals. A minority among the evangelicals -- represented by such journals as Sojourners and the Other Side -- is so radical in its criticism of the American economy and of our foreign policies that it gives up on liberal politics; nonetheless, its witness is an important corrective to what many of us regard as the Moral Majority’s distortions of Christian faith.

In September 1980 a Gallup poll published in Newsweek -- one which Jerry Falwell repudiated in an interview -- indicated that the evangelical community is divided in this way: left of center, 20 per cent; at center, 31 per cent; right of center, 37 per cent. At that time 52 per cent of evangelicals were for Carter and 31 per cent for Reagan. Many changed their preference before November, but such a change could hardly reflect strong commitment to the politics of the religious right. On the important symbolic issue of the ERA, 53 per cent were in favor.

Second, the critics of the religious right cannot, in my opinion, claim that its political activities involve a violation of the separation of church and state. That principle has never meant the separation of religion and politics. Liberal Christians have a long history of political action, most recently in connection with civil rights and the war in Vietnam. Also, the Moral Majority is not a church but an example of the unofficial religious movements that have long been an aspect of religion in this country -- and often a highly creative one. Those who disagree with the Moral Majority people should attack the substance of their commitments rather than their right to be political. There are, however, some issues that do raise the establishment-of-religion question, such as (1) legislative action, prescribing the teaching of "creationism" as science and (2) prayer in the public schools. Some critics would include abortion among these issues, but I would not, for reasons I shall cite later.

Most Americans share the Moral Majority’s anxiety about signs of moral breakdown, including the weakening of the family. But the Moral Majority confronts these problems with a sledgehammer, and its proposed solutions would threaten other values. This is seen most clearly in its attacks on women’s liberation. A patriarchal society can by sheer authority preserve the appearance of stability in the family, but often this stability disguises the fact that the family can constitute a trap for women. There is no going back to male supremacy.

The right-wing moralists make scapegoats of homosexuals, who are now aboveground and who claim the full rights of human beings and citizens. Though in interviews Falwell appears more moderate on this subject than his book would suggest, we can expect the religious right to harass homosexuals and to try to deny them their civil rights.

I do not know what the rightists intend to do about pornography. I have heard Falwell say that he does not believe in censorship. On the, other hand, he cheers parents who try to censor schoolbooks. This problem has proved to be too much for the courts; it is a serious one, and I would not want to see the religious right in a position to determine what is pornography.

The issue that will have the highest priority for the religious right in the near future is a constitutional amendment that would outlaw almost all abortion. We can expect the struggle for such an amendment to produce bitter conflicts in American politics nationally and in every state. I used to think that abortion was chiefly an issue dividing Catholics and Protestants, but this is not the case -- though the top Catholic authorities are today more adamant on the subject than are the leaders of other denominations. In poll after poll the Catholic community has shown that it is very much divided; there is even disagreement among Catholic moral theologians, partly on the morality of abortion and even more so on the use of law to regulate it.

The Moral Majority is mostly Protestant. Even the Republican platform in 1980 supported such an antiabortion amendment, as does President Reagan. The issue of the establishment of religion would be involved if the only basis for the absolutistic opposition to abortion were theological, but actually it is more metaphysical than theological. That is true of the debate in Congress concerning legislative determination of when human life begins. The debate is not really about that but rather about when a human being begins who has claims equal to the claims of those who are born.

The adoption of such a constitutional amendment would be an act of repression for a large part of the community, and would actually go against the moral and religious convictions of most Protestants and Jews and many Catholics. It is significant that the following denominations have, in official statements, endorsed the view that abortion should be legally permitted in several situations: the United Presbyterian Church, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Church in America, the Reformed Church in America.

Very restrictive abortion laws go against the consciences of many, but the lack of such laws does not require behavior that goes against the consciences of others. Also, enforcement of those laws would be limited, and hundreds of thousands of women would have abortions under unsafe conditions. Life for them would be distorted by secretiveness. I know of no moral issue involving personal behavior that is more agonizingly puzzling. In the conflict concerning the use of public funds to pay for abortions for poor women, both sides are governed by moral outrage. One side is outraged by almost all abortions; the other is outraged by the injustice to poor women. The two sides pass in the night; no helpful communication is possible.

The tirades of the Moral Majority against "humanists" are misdirected. The various kinds of humanists I have mentioned usually are morally sensitive about a number of issues, including those related to justice and peace, personal integrity, poverty, hunger and oppression in many parts of the world. Very few American secular humanists are polemical atheists. The respect for religion and for the Christian and Jewish traditions in this country is widespread indeed, as shown in polls about beliefs and about church attendance. The culture is highly secular, but the problem is not one of an intellectually aggressive secularism orchestrated by humanists. It is true that there are probably more people today without either religious or moral moorings than was the case of a generation ago, but this situation is partly a consequence of disillusioning events and loss of roots and hopes that give direction and meaning to life. Humanists at least do have moral moorings.

The vocal insistence of the religious right on biblical "creationism" and such doctrines as the inerrancy of the Bible is likely to create a one-sided impression of the Christian faith and to turn away people who are not aware of other Christian views. The effort to secure action by state legislatures to require the teaching of creationism as science along with evolutionary theories has already succeeded in two states. The textbooks will have to include this teaching, but teachers will often feel bound to correct those textbooks. How many more Scopes trials can Americans take? It is an intolerable intrusion for legislatures to determine the content of science to be taught in schools.

The support, of the. Moral Majority and other groups for what they call "voluntary prayer" in the public schools threatens the religious liberty of the minority that will oppose prayer in general or particular prayers. Private voluntary prayer is constitutional now. A serious issue is raised only when prayer involves the use of words in a public event. Who is it that is expected to make the voluntary choice? Is it a teacher, a faculty, a superintendent, a class, a school board? In any of those cases there would be social pressure to conform, and those who may have sincere reasons for absenting themselves would often be subject to prejudice or even scorn. Who is to determine the content of prayers? If the content is Christian or more broadly biblical to be meaningful for Jews, the problem of the objector would be intensified. If the content is vague and without important meaning, prayer itself would be discredited. This country does not need an increase in empty religious observances.

The greatest moral error of the Moral Majority is its tendency toward a narrow, chauvinistic nationalism. It has opposed the Panama Canal treaties -- a sign of nationalism in relation to the sensitivities of all of Latin America. It has been against SALT II, and its enthusiasm for the present military buildup is not tempered by a desire to control the arms race. It shows no concern about nuclear war and would only encourage the provocative elements in foreign policy that make nuclear war more likely. Jerry Falwell regards foreign aid as another case of "welfare" for which he has no respect.

The distinctiveness of this Moral Majority position on international affairs becomes evident when it is compared with what Billy Graham is now saying. We are dealing not with a contrast between theological conservatives and liberals but with a much deeper level of difference. Writing in Sojourners ("A Change of Heart," August 12, 1978), Graham renounces what he admits was a tendency to confuse the Kingdom of God with the American way of life. He asks: "Is it the will of God that resources be used for massive armaments which could otherwise be used to alleviate human suffering and hunger?" He supports the SALT disarmament efforts and says that he does not think "that present differences are worth a nuclear war." Graham’s visits to Hungary and Poland changed his emphasis in regard to the communist nations, and he states in a public letter in the Other Side (January 1981): "It is out of a deepening sense of Christian responsibility, therefore, that I have sought after my visit to Hungary in 1977 to make whatever contribution I can to building bridges of understanding and peace. . . . The issue of peace is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual issue." That stance is in marked contrast to the militaristic nationalism of the Moral Majority. I hope that many who have responded favorably to the Moral Majority will hear this other view. They are more likely to pay attention to Billy Graham than to me!

As I have said, economic policies are not in the Moral Majority’s area of greatest interest. But what it does say in applying moral doctrine to economics gives complete Christian sanction to the economic doctrine and policies of the secular right, for which economic policies are a major interest. It gives unqualified support to the economic doctrine and policies of the present administration. In his Listen America Falwell contends that "the free enterprise system is clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs" and that "Jesus Christ made it clear that the work ethic was a part of His plan for man," that ownership of property is Biblical."

The work ethic is generally a great good, but it needs to be under the criticism of the words of Jesus: "You cannot serve God and Mammon." How anyone who claims to be thoroughly biblical can be so little impressed by the passion of the prophets for social justice or by the identification of Jesus with the poor and in general with the victims of society is beyond my understanding. I think that in Falwell’s case it may be partly a naïve view of what society would be like if there were no limits on free enterprise. He says that there are jobs enough for people if they are willing to work, and he would like the federal government to get rid of "welfare," leaving that to the states and private charity. How callous he is about these matters I do not know, but he gives much religious aid and comfort to those who are callous, and he provides political support for those who seek to solve our national problems at the expense of our most vulnerable people.

On all sides we hear that people in power believe in equal opportunity for all, and that they distinguish between equal opportunity and equality of results. What they neglect is the fact that inequalities in the conditions with which people start can be so extreme that equal opportunity is nonexistent. The victims whom our systems are most certain to neglect are the deserving children of those, believed by authorities to be the "undeserving poor." There are other people who also need attention, but if policies have in view these neglected people, including the young people in our cities who have never had hope for a job with a future, they are likely to be more just in relation to others in need.

The economic doctrine of the Moral Majority is in absolute contradiction to the economic teachings of ecumenical Protestantism in most of this century and to the economic teaching of Roman Catholicism in many centuries. This is especially true of Catholic teachings concerning limits on the use of private property. Proof texts from Proverbs are not sufficient to make a view of private property biblical.

On May 15 the National Council of Churches’ Governing Board, which consists of 266 delegates from 32 denominations, made one of the most courageous statements that I can remember coming from such a representative church body. It is clearly ahead of present public opinion, but I regard it as an early presentation of what will soon be widely recognized as true. The statement declared that the Reagan administration is trying to remake America, that it threatens "the vision of America as the model and embodiment of a just and, humane society" After many specific criticisms of policies, it says of the administration’s vision of America that "the fittest survive and prosper, and there is little room for public purpose since it interferes with private gain, . . . and government is at best a necessary evil which must be strong enough to protect privilege from assault but kept too weak to impose public responsibility on private prerogative." This is also a description of the vision of America held by the Moral Majority and the religious right.

These rightists appeal to the real anxieties of a great many Americans about some serious moral issues, but their prescriptions are not likely to help in dealing with those issues; moreover, they threaten other moral values. What is more serious, they either neglect or respond inappropriately to the most fateful moral problems facing all humanity: the problem of economic justice in this country and in others, and the struggle for peace -- especially the struggle to prevent nuclear war.

America’s Shift from Revolution to Counterrevolution

One little-noted fact in this bicentennial year is that our country, which was born in revolution, has been opposed to all recent revolutions and in most cases has tried to undermine them. We need to reflect on this point and to ask if there was anything about the nature of the American revolution that helps to explain it.

It was not until 15 years after the Russian revolution that our government recognized the new Russian regime. In the Soviet Union a part of people’s memory is that the United States sent an expeditionary force to Siberia in 1918 and that many Americans, together with governments of our allies, gave moral and material support to the White Russian rebels against the Soviets. George F. Kennan claims that the U.S. never intended military confrontation with the revolutionary government -- and, indeed, the size of the expeditionary force supports that contention. He says that our government was concerned about the presence of German prisoners of war in Siberia and other matters connected with the ending of World War I. Even if that is the case, the Russian memory of that American counterrevolutionary presence has always been a negative factor in U.S.-Soviet relations. There was no doubt about the hostility of our government and of most American people to the Russian revolution.

Our opposition to the Chinese revolution has been a vital factor in U.S. foreign policy until the recent rapprochement with the Peking government. As allies of the Nationalists on Taiwan we were participants in the Chinese civil war. American hostility to the communist regime was clearly visible in the bitter opposition for more than two decades to its recognition by our government and to its inclusion in the UN. What troubles me most as I look back on that period is our willingness then to do anything short of war to destroy the Chinese revolution, even though the result would have been to throw China back into the massive poverty, corruption and partial anarchy that preceded the revolution.

We have been trying to strangle the Cuban revolution for 15 years, forcing Cuba to become completely dependent on the Soviet Union and putting the entire blame on Castro for the consequences of that dependence -- which may include the Cuban intervention in Africa. The depth of our government’s hostility to the Cuban revolution is revealed by the scandalous attempts by the CIA to assassinate Castro.

The war in Indochina has many meanings, but it was, among other things, a counterrevolutionary war. We tried for so many years and at appalling cost to us and to the people of Indochina to prop up a rightist regime in Saigon against the forces of a nationalist revolution that was in part inspired and given structure by communism.

We can add to these overt cases the many examples of the CIA’s covert counterrevolutionary activity, especially in Latin America.

I

These were for the most part communist revolutions -- a fact which may, on the surface, seem to justify our opposition to them. However, it seems to me that we should have had more humility as we faced the vast social upheavals within which communism was the agent of revolution. It was not our country’s place to judge that, when other nations were caught in such upheavals and were moving away from both political and economic oppression, communism was worse than any available alternative. Perhaps we were prevented from raising the question of alternatives because of an implicit assumption that there existed an American model which all these nations were wrongheaded enough to reject. But there really was no American alternative for most of these situations, and there is no such alternative today.

Nonetheless, we found ourselves supporting tyrannical rightist regimes that care nothing about the freedom we prize, and that do little or nothing economically for the lower 80 per cent of their populations. Our only tests for giving our support have been whether or not the governments were anticommunist and were open to the penetration of their countries by American business -- tests that have had nothing to do with either freedom or justice.

American policy-makers have justified their counterrevolutionary stance on the basis of the threat of international Stalinism, and these rightist regimes -- even though they may have been distasteful -- were preferable to leftist forces which tilted the balance of power against our side. This international Stalinist monolith has long since ceased to exist; however, despite detente with the Soviet Union and China, U.S. official hostility toward revolutions in the Third World has not changed. Moreover, is it well to remember that our belligerent spirit in relation to all communist regimes did a great deal to harden the world’s polarization between "East" and "West."

II

Now consider our own revolution. It was unusual in that it called for no radical social changes. Out of it came a new and independent political system but not a new society. American society both before and after the revolution was far more egalitarian than either British or European society in general. Our revolution, although anticolonial, was different from modern anticolonial revolutions in that it was a civil war between differing British peoples who claimed identical political rights. Samuel Eliot Morison says of the American colonists just before the revolution that, except for the minority among them who were in bondage, they were the "freest people in the world, and in many respects more free than anyone today" (The Oxford History of the American People, Oxford University Press, 1965). They had nothing in common with the peasants in Russia or China before the revolutions in those countries or with the large majority of people in Latin America today. For good reasons the colonists were irked, but they were not really oppressed.

The issues involved in the American Revolution were not so profound or fateful as those at stake in recent or contemporary revolutions. The significant differences between the spokesmen of the colonies and the majority in the British Parliament, and the debates about them, prepared the way intellectually for the formation of the American union. Bernard Bailyn in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1967) discusses three of these issues: different views of the relationship between the legislature and electors, different views of the legislature’s sovereignty in relation to a higher law embodied in a constitution, and different views of the relation between, the central sovereign and subordinate political units. The importance of the second and third issues is obvious for decisions about a written constitution, which later was interpreted as involving judicial review of acts of Congress, and for a federal union of states having partial autonomy under a national government.

However, with respect to the first of those issues, I find fascinating the British idea of "virtual representation," which meant that so long as Parliament was a mixed deliberative body of persons that represented a variety of interests and opinions, then representation was real and valid even though citizens could not vote for members of Parliament. The slogan "No taxation without representation" came up against this doctrine. Edmund Burke, who believed in the principle of "virtual representation" in other contexts, denied that it applied to the American colonies; he cited their distance, the size of their populations, and his trust in their own legislatures to take action on taxation necessary for the well-being of the empire. (In this bicentennial year would it not be appropriate to take note of our debt to the British statesmen who were on our side, among them Burke; Charles James Fox and Lord Chatham?) It is interesting that the British poor did not overcome the discriminatory effects of the idea of "virtual representation" until the third reform act in 1884.

Hannah Arendt, in her illuminating book On Revolution (Viking, 1965), exalts the American Revolution as the most successful one and traces that success to the fact that "it occurred in a country that knew nothing of mass poverty and among a people who had a widespread experience of self-government;" She says that one of the blessings in the American situation was that the revolution grew out of a conflict with a limited monarchy, for "the more absolute the ruler, the more absolute the revolution will be which replaces him."

Our revolution’s marks of success are that it was not accompanied or followed by systematic official terror and that out of it came an extraordinary achievement in nation-building and in the establishment of a new constitutional government. Regarding the first of these, opponents were harassed and many fled the country, often to the advantage of Canada, but we have good reason to rejoice that there were no mass executions and no organized persecutions of revolutionary factions. As for the second, Alexander Hamilton put the matter very well in the first of The Federalist Papers: "It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved for the people of this country, by their conduct and example to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force." We have every reason to celebrate this achievement.

III

Part of the explanation of our present counterrevolutionary stance and of our tendency to deliver self-righteous official lectures to most of humanity is that our revolution did not prepare us to understand these recent revolutions. Suffering from desperate poverty and oppressive social inequalities, and lacking the advantage of going against "limited monarchies," they had to be social revolutions. Ours was really the fulfillment of two previous revolutions in British history: the Puritan revolt and that of 1688, which salvaged some of the former’s gains from the effects of the Stuart restoration. Furthermore, revolutions of our time generally have not had the advantage of the opposition’s being located 3,000 miles away and being without much counterrevolutionary zeal.

We were fortunate that, because of the historical circumstances and some of the spiritual and intellectual preparations for our revolution, our founding fathers avoided the absolutistic utopianism that so often distorts revolutions. There is a famous passage in The Federalist Papers (No. 51): "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. . . . In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." The first sentence is much echoed today (California Governor Jerry Brown recently said that all government gives him a bad conscience!), but I think the statement is unbalanced. There is a necessary side of government as it maintains order to which the concept does apply. But it is not true when government functions as the instrument of cooperation in the community, often the national community. Although even this side of government -- as in its provisions for education and for many social services -- has to make use of coercion in the collection of taxes, it is highly creative, based on persuasion. and its coercion is secondary. This function of government is necessary even if there is much virtue in the population. The second sentence in the quotation above represents the best political wisdom, but unfortunately such wisdom does not often flourish in the midst of revolutions or of the struggles to defend the gains of revolution.

Our revolution prepared the way for two centuries of free economic enterprise with minimal checks on private centers of economic power. There was not even the slightest lead to give help in the struggles for economic justice as the nation became industrialized and as the frontier to which less fortunate members of society could escape became virtually closed. In this sense the American Revolution was one-sided, and today it is as important to take note of that one-sidedness as it is to celebrate the great things that were accomplished or for which the way was prepared. For example, only recently have white Americans come to realize with any adequacy the terrible racial blind spots of our founders. Even those founders who personally opposed slavery had no idea that races should be equal in a nondiscriminatory and nonsegregated society. As for native Americans, their story has been equally grim, and even less has been done to promote their equal citizenship.

Today, 200 years after the American Revolution, 25 to 30 million of our people live in poverty, most of them in decaying cities that blight their entire environment. Unemployment is regarded as a tradeoff for the values of economic freedom, but those. who by accident work in soft spots in the economy bear in their bodies and in their daily lives the chief burdens that come from that trade-off, and very little attention is given to this injustice. To me, the greatest scandal of all is the bland indifference to this fact on the part of those who have the most power in our country: in many cities, 40 per cent of the young people are without work and may well belong permanently to a subculture of unemployment even after the economy as a whole recovers from recession. Gains have been made since the depression of the 1930s, and the serious victims in our society are about one-sixth of the population rather than one-third; but one-sixth represents many millions, and its presence indicates the need for a continuing revolution.

We have been accustomed to assuming that our revolution and our way of life provide an example that other countries should follow. However, we have discovered in recent years that they are not following our lead, and our leaders’ reaction to this discovery has been to condemn rather than to understand. Daniel P. Moynihan gained great popularity from his self-righteous histrionics in the UN, but his stance in relation to the Third World is an example of what should be avoided by representatives of the United States.

This is a time to celebrate the many achievements of our revolution. We should be extremely grateful that our founders were able to establish a system of government that has made possible both stability and orderly change throughout most of our history. It proved to be remarkably resilient during the Watergate crisis. That the Bill of Rights and later the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment have been resources for both freedom and justice should be a source of pride. And yet, as we live with other nations whose histories have been so different from ours, we should recognize how one-sided our revolution was. Other nations have had to set different priorities, and their revolutionary experiments represent an opposite one-sided-ness. Their need has been to establish governments strong enough to preserve unity and order and to overcome the effects of centuries of economic stagnation and poverty. We had the advantages, usually denied today, of a small population, enormous resources, and a background of experience with representative government.

Humility before the immensity of the problems faced by many other nations should be the beginning of wisdom in American statesmanship, but this quality has been the one most lacking. President Ford, who is free from personal pretensions, nevertheless could say recently that "America is morally and spiritually number one and that will be the force to keep us moving so that America, and all its people, its government, will be number one forever.

If the United States is to commend what is true in its own relatively one-sided commitment to freedom -- and there is much in it that is true -- we shall need to demonstrate that, while maintaining the freedom of the Bill of Rights, American society will find it possible to overcome the poverty and the discriminations which, in the midst of our general affluence, still victimize many millions.

Morality and Foreign Policy

Is there a place for morality -- for any humane and universal morality -- in the making of foreign policy? Lately many people seem to be thinking that consideration of this question began with President Carter’s declaration about human rights. That has a very high moral priority, but certainly there are many other fundamental issues -- such as the prevention of war and greater economic justice between nations -- that raise this critical matter of morality in foreign policy. Would the survivors of nuclear war in any stricken country be likely to enjoy human rights?

Barriers to a Moral Policy

The obstacles to morality’s becoming a significant factor in foreign policy are so obvious that I need only mention them. The human relations between people across national boundaries tend to be very thin, ranging from ingrained hostility to the more comfortable relationships between people who share a common culture and many common purposes. It is also difficult for Americans to see the international situation as it appears to people in Cuba or Bangladesh or the Soviet Union. In this dangerous world, moreover, nations fear for their very existence -- if not apprehensive of invasion then of blackmail by other nations -- and it becomes easy for governments to justify any policy for the sake of national security.

In the United States responsibility for foreign policy decisions is diluted because those who make policy are often intimidated by a well-organized minority among the voters, while the rest of the citizens are often content to pass the buck to policy-makers supposed to be in the know. One result of this situation is that, with its eye on the politics of national opinion, an administration is tempted to postpone foreign policy decisions until after the next election.

Perhaps greatest of all the obstacles is the dilemma implied in Reinhold Niebuhr’s statement that “patriotism transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism” (Moral Man and Immoral Society [Scribner’s, 1932], p. 91). Individuals of fine personal character may receive their own moral satisfaction as active citizens while they are being used by a government in the implementation of narrowly nationalist, callous and even inhuman policies. This is made all the easier by governments’ use of ideals to disguise the immorality of what they do. “Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation,” Niebuhr said, “is its hypocrisy” (p. 93). This may not be always true, but it is so general that morally concerned citizens, loyal to their country, need to be on guard against it.

The most perplexing problem with morality in foreign policy lies on a somewhat different level. There is much experience to show that when nations become crusaders for moral goals, they often become intransigent or cruelly destructive in the process. In an article published in Harper’s in 1971 with the startling title, “The Necessary Amorality of Foreign Affairs,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote:

“The compulsion to see foreign affairs in moral terms may have, with the noblest of intentions, the most ghastly consequences.” Many of us believe that was part of the story especially in the early years of the war in Indochina; after 1967 we were no longer fighting to win a moral victory but to avoid defeat and the loss of American credibility. This general tendency has been very much emphasized since World War I. Moral stances which may be sincere may make policies rigid and may prevent compromises which are necessary for living with other nations; they also make it difficult to bring a disastrous war to an end. In fairness to those who share Schlesinger’s point of view it should be said that most of them do recognize moral limits. They often exalt the virtue of restraint or of the national humility that does not claim to know what is best for all other nations. Schlesinger himself says that moral values should be decisive “only in questions of last resort” and that “questions of last resort exist.”

‘National Interest’: Moral Considerations

These many obstacles to morality as an ingredient in foreign policy are formidable, but the problem is confused still more by the shortcut that is often advocated: foreign policy should always be controlled by the national interest. This argument cannot be summarily dismissed because there are ambiguities about it that need to be considered. The national interest in terms of the real welfare of the people of any nation is a part of a wider human welfare for which governments are the trustees. This real welfare does include freedom from attack, subjugation or destruction. It involves the economic viability of a nation, the protection of its citizens against poverty and hunger. But there are many real national interests which are shared with other nations -- the prevention of war, the achievement of greater decency, and justice in international relations generally. It is surely in the interest of the United States to avoid being a prosperous oasis in a world of misery.

We can push this matter further: it is in the national interest that most citizens be able to live with their consciences. Some of the thinkers who most stress national interest as a guide for policy make room for this. George Kennan, for example, writes that “we should conduct ourselves at all times in such a way as to satisfy our own ideas of morality.” He adds a strange sentence: “But let us do this as a matter of obligation to ourselves and not as a matter of our obligation to others” (Realities of American Foreign Policy [Princeton University Press, 19~j4], p. 47). I cannot believe that Kennan assumes that our own ideas of morality involve no obligations to others; but this way of putting it underlines my point that citizens should be able to live with their own consciences, and that this cannot be separated from our national interest. So, while governments are trustees for their respective national interests, it makes a great difference who interprets those interests -- whether they be nationalistic chauvinists or people who perceive that their country’s interest embraces global concerns as well as the quality of the moral life of citizens.

Hans Morgenthau, who is known chiefly for his emphasis on national interest, in many contexts emphasizes moral values. In a remarkable article entitled “The Present Tragedy of America” -- on the tragic moral incongruity of the Indochina war in relation to American values -- Morgenthau writes that “the United States, in a unique sense, is being judged by other nations, and it is judged by itself in terms of its compliance with the moral standards which it has set for itself.” A world-famous scientist with whom he had discussed Vietnam as early as 1967 told him, “You Americans don’t know how we have looked to you as the last best hope, and how we feel betrayed.” Morgenthau adds: “It is this betrayal, not only of the ethos of America but of the trust which, you may say, the best representatives of humanity have put in the United States, that constitutes the tragedy of America today” (Worldview, September 1969). It is important that Morgenthau, widely known as a political “realist,” makes such room for a broad and morally sensitive view of the national interest.

A sensitive, humane and universal morality should be related to foreign policy in three ways.

1. It should influence motives and the subjective side of decision-making -- the sensitivities, imagination and perception of those who wield power. The melding of moral concern with perception is central.

Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in his confirmation testimony before the Senate made a very frank statement about American policy in Indochina: “In the light of hindsight I believe that it was a mistake to have intervened in Vietnam.” Then he said:

“U.S. involvement was not based upon evil motives but on misjudgments and mistakes as we went along.” It is surprising that a statement that repudiated the policies of at least five predecessors and of as many presidents did not cause a ripple.

I agree that the persons who were originally responsible for policy believed that they were preserving freedom and self-determination in South Vietnam and that their policy was a contribution to world order, as Dean Rusk used to say. We may raise a question as to the status of these good motives when people persisted in the mistake for so many years, long after its disastrous human consequences were revealed. How far had they acquired a vested interest in the policy so that they could not reject it since they had been identified with it for so long?

Here the emphasis on perception becomes crucial for morality. There was a failure to perceive the full human significance of what we were doing both to people in Indochina and to the people of this country, especially to the sons of the minorities and the poor who bore so much of the burden of the war.

The Location of Morality in Foreign Policy

2. Morality should be related to goals -- short-run and long-run. In 1964 Dean Acheson in a famous speech at Amherst College stated clearly the declared goals of American foreign policy since World War II: “The end sought by our foreign policy, the purpose for which we carry on relations with foreign states, is to preserve and foster an environment in which free societies may exist and flourish.” I quote from this speech because in it Acheson’s main emphasis was to criticize people who think of foreign policy in terms of morality. He dismissed a number of moralistic slogans which he felt to be one-sided and to hamper the conduct of foreign policy. Yet the objective he set forth is itself, as far as it goes, a moral objective. It is also “one-sided.”

One of the most important criticisms of U.S. foreign policy is that its moral objectives have been too one-sided. Not enough is said about justice. There is a defect in the traditional American scale of values in that we rank liberty so far above distributive justice. In our own society we rationalize this by assuming that justice will be a by-product of free enterprise; but gradually we have had to modify that assumption and take direct compensatory steps for the sake of justice. Even so, this basic rationalization with some modifications has not worked for 25 or more million of our people. We take moral satisfaction in committing ourselves to equal opportunity without ever taking seriously enough the fact that equality of opportunity is unreal if inequalities of condition are extreme.

In international affairs we have smiled upon free societies while we have tried to block efforts for revolutionary change that have had as their goal economic justice for a nation as a whole. We did all that we could, until very recent. years, to undermine or thwart the revolution in China, where the freedoms in our Bill of Rights are lacking but where there have been great achievements in the overcoming of massive poverty. In Latin America we have consistently opposed revolutions from the left, most notably in Cuba. In a summer 1976 Foreign Policy article, Zbigniew Brzezinski shows that the United States is becoming isolated in the world because it puts freedom so high above all other values, whereas most of humankind places equality above freedom. Were we to put on the same level with freedom not equality but justice that is always under the pull of equality, our foreign policy would be transformed. We cannot expect freedom to flourish wherever most people, no matter how politically “free” they are, face poverty and hunger as dominant realities.

There is great irony here. For all of our declared support of free societies, we so often favor governments which care nothing for either freedom or justice, which deal brutally with dissent and do very little for the vast majority of their people. (President Carter’s initiatives for human rights are bringing about some changes.) In practice we have had two criteria by which to determine policy in relation to Third World nations: Are they anticommunist? Are they receptive to American business?

What Is Not Permitted?

There are other goals to be emphasized. The prevention of nuclear war is already a declared objective of American policy, and gradually it has come to have a higher place than the prevention of the spread of communism. But much more than nuclear war should be prevented. Today there should be -- and to some extent there is -- a heavier burden of proof on all use of military force among nations. For the United States this has special bearing on our tendency to intervene militarily in the internal conflicts of other nations when there is a threat from the left. We should allow other nations to have their own revolutions.

The emphasis should also be on positive peacemaking, on the use and strengthening of multilateral institutions. Foreign policy objectives take on a new dimension with our responsibility to protect the global environment and to cooperate in the use of such unallocated resources as those in the ocean beds for the benefit of all the world’s peoples.

3. Moral limits must be set in regard to means. Ends do justify means, but there is no end that justifies every means. This is where we have the most difficult moral quandaries. Even with general agreement that everything is not permitted, where is the line to be drawn? There was great moral revulsion in the United States when it was revealed that the CIA had been involved in plots to assassinate Castro and other foreign leaders. Surely we can draw the line this side of assassination as a covert method of conducting foreign policy. When I first began to think of this I was reminded of the fact that I admired the Germans, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who were involved in the attempt to assassinate Hitler. It is not enough to say that Castro is no Hitler, although this is emphatically true. The formally more important point is that the plot against Hitler was an inside German act of rebellion and that such acts may at times be justified in extreme cases of oppression if one is not an absolute pacifist. When assassination takes place as an episode in foreign policy, however, not only does it raise the questions and arouse the revulsions which we should associate with all such acts of violence against persons, but also there is no way of containing the spreading distrust and the international poison which would follow it.

The Second Vatican Council stated a principle which has had a high place in the Western moral tradition and which sets limits to what is permitted. It said: “Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself” (Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, par. 80). I remember that at the time the statement was watered down because of pressure from American bishops who did not want the Council to appear to condemn the policy of nuclear deterrence. But our policy of deterrence raises a profound moral problem. The missiles of the United States and the Soviet Union are aimed to destroy indiscriminately entire cities. Whenever it is proposed that this strategy be changed and that such weaponry be aimed only at missile sites or armed forces of the potential adversary, this proposal is criticized on the ground that the strategy is believed actually to be more threatening, suggesting a “first strike” capability, and more likely to bring about the war in which the missiles would be used.

This is a horrendous moral issue which is seldom discussed. The strategy of deterrence is defended on moral grounds, for it is assumed to be the surest way of preventing nuclear war. This probably has been true in the past and in the short run it may still be true in the future. It is highly doubtful that it will remain true in the long run. But even in the short run we should try to estimate the moral effect of a people’s becoming accustomed to the idea that its government is poised to destroy populations. Must this not be morally corrupting? How long can we live with it? It puts upon us and upon the Soviet Union a moral responsibility of highest priority to find other means of preventing war. These should include both a radical reduction of armaments and reconciliation between the powers that may destroy not only each other but all the innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire.

The Church and the Good of All Nations

I have spoken about a sensitive, humane, universal morality. What does Christian morality contribute? I assume that no nation is a Christian nation, that governments have responsibility to the people of a nation in the light of the morality which that nation can recognize as having a claim. I believe that there is overlapping between the highest morality which has roots in the American tradition and Christian morality. The Christian citizen and the church should make the most of that area of overlap and should seek to strengthen the sources of national motive and national discipline which can give that highest common morality greater impact in the national life and among those who make decisions about policy.

Certainly there are and should be tensions between church and state on this subject, but we may see these tensions in terms of the following pattern. The church as a universal community should begin with the widest possible concern about the moral effects of national policy in the light of what it does to people in other nations, and it should help its members who are also citizens to share that broad perspective. The state begins as a trustee for the real welfare of the nation for which it is the political structure. But the wisdom that it may have about the conditions for that welfare and the moral sensitivities of many citizens and policy-makers may broaden their view of where the national interests lie. The perspective of the state will not coincide with that of the church; but there may be enough interaction between the two perspectives to reduce the tension between church and state and to raise the moral level of foreign policy. For this kind of development to take place, however, the independence of church and state and the distinctiveness of the perspectives of each should be maintained. One sure way to maintain them is for the church within the nation to keep alive the awareness of its membership in the larger church, which includes people in other nations affected by our policies and which is committed to the good of all nations.

The Church and Power Conflicts

Much of the debate about the Church and power conflicts now going on in many American cities seems very familiar because it is a replay of discussions in which I was involved in the 1930’s when the chief issue was the relation of the churches to the labor movement in its early struggles to achieve power. Almost the first article I ever published was on the subject "Christianity and Class Consciousness." (It was published in 1932 under the auspices of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.) Rereading it recently, I found it quite relevant to the present discussions.

I might say some things differently today, but I would still hold to the basic principle that an important aspect of Christian social responsibility is the organization politically of the victims of social injustice so that they can use their power to change conditions.

It was often assumed in certain circles in the Thirties that there should be labor churches, though it was also assumed that the Church at large should find ways of including all classes. In those days many of us thought in a more doctrinaire way about social classes than we do now. Those were the days of the Great Depression when the whole of American society was so stricken that one could think of organizing the many against the few. Such a pattern is no longer needed.

Rather, we need to find ways in which the comparatively few who are most neglected can combine the strategic forms of power they still have with persuasion in order to change those conditions in our cities that cry to heaven. In this process we need to find ways in which churches can help both in organizing political pressures and in using this as part of a broader strategy of persuasion—often persuasion of consciences within the Church.

Let me now mention several presuppositions that underlie what follows.

(1) Christian love must seek justice for the neglected and oppressed in our nation and the world.

We all take this for granted, but it has not generally been assumed. It probably would not be as widely accepted in the Church as it is if the neglected and oppressed had not in this country gained a voice and considerable power to make themselves felt. I doubt if the churches themselves have done very much to inspire the revolutions of our time even though the inspiration of the Gospel has been behind them.

One hardly needs to argue today for the revolutionary implications of our faith. God, as known to us in Christ, is seeking to raise the level of life everywhere. (I like the phrase of my colleague Professor Paul Lehmann, "God is seeking to make humanity more human.") God is acting in the "revolution of rising expectations" on other continents. But he is also active in the revolution of rising expectations in American cities where millions live in shameful ghettos.

Our civil rights revolution is a part of this worldwide revolution. While it must go on in Mississippi and the hard-core South, for most of us this revolution is concentrated in Northern cities where the racial factor is important but where there is also a broader rebellion against slums, schools that do not educate, poverty and unemployment. One of the most startling facts about America is the contrast between our great prosperity as a nation and these islands of misery in our cities, Why, with all our resources, initiative and ingenuity, do we do so little to solve these problems?

We seem to sacrifice these millions of people on two altars—the altar of prejudice and the altar of economic individualism. In the name of freedom of the individual, we sacrifice them to that caricature of Christianity that some people call "the Protestant ethic," an ethic that finds no way of dealing directly and massively with large-scale social problems.

(2) The Church should not choose to be a sect made up of those who belong to any one class or social group, or of those who hold the same opinions.

I am not suggesting that the Church should include everyone, all the slum landlords and all the members of the John Birch Society. If some people choose to leave the Church because it has come to stand for racial integration and for a dynamic approach to social problems, that may be a good sign. But let the Church still seek to be the mother of us all. Let it not exclude those who, because of many confusions, differ from one or another of its declared positions. Let it include people on all sides of the conflicts of power, seeking to be a pastor to them all. Let it go out to all men—poor and rich, in city, town and suburb—with the Gospel, seeking to change and heal them.

Think for a moment of what a policy of exclusiveness would mean. If we were to begin to divide the Church over differences of opinion about current issues, it would be split in the 1960’s over one set of issues and in the 1970’s over another. This is madness, and it must not be. We must still have a church that seeks to be all-inclusive and yet stands for something.

(3) We should be guided by a doctrine of man that sees our humanity as made in the image of God and as distorted by pride and egoism, and especially by that form of both that causes people to try to exalt themselves by keeping others in an inferior position.

All too often people are corrupted by the crudest form of greed, though they are skillful in covering this up with high-sounding defenses of the rights of property. My emphasis here is on the fact that all of us are strange mixtures of virtue and sinful distortions.

I want to stress two implications of this general view. The first is that people who have advantages and are complacent about their situation do not usually change unless pressure is put on them by those who, because of their suffering, need to have things changed. It doesn’t mean that those who bring the pressure are subjectively better people than those who have the pressure brought on them. The latter are in a different position, and it may well be that those who bring this pressure are, on the whole, on the side of an objective justice.

Persuasion is seldom an adequate lever; people do not even see the facts until they are forced to look at them. And the defenses of complacency are endless. In our society, pressure by itself is not enough either. One of our chief interests should be to make interpreted pressure an instrument of persuasion. Certainly this has happened on a very large scale in this country since the Montgomery boycott and the first sit-ins. People all over the country, North and South, were forced to attend to the problem; issues became clearer; many minds and hearts were changed.

Sometimes the changes have been accepted grudgingly, but they have come. There is a combination of pressure and persuasion when a candidate discovers that he lost because ninety-five per cent of the Negroes in his state voted against him. A shifting of gears is necessary, and then people can learn by doing. We need not take a cynical attitude toward this process.

The other implication of this way of thinking about human nature is that we must not separate groups, classes or races of men by assigning to one the image of God and to the other the effects of the fall. Martin Luther King’s strong statement in London expressing alertness to the danger of black racism as well as white racism is to be welcomed. In one moment almost all the virtue may be on one side in a conflict, but that moment will not last long, and it is the responsibility of the Church to help people on both sides realize that they have common temptations and weaknesses and sins. The outward expressions may be different, but the Church stands for the common humanity across the lines that divide people.

Herbert Butterfield in Christianity and History (Scribners) emphasizes the contribution of Christianity as an antidote to self-righteousness:

The more human beings are lacking in imagination, the more incapable men are of any profound kind of self-analysis, the more we shall find that their self-righteousness hardens, so that it is just the thick-skinned who are more sure of being right than anybody else. And though conflict might still be inevitable in history even if this particular evil (of self-righteousness) did not exist, there can be no doubt that its presence multiplies the deadlocks and gravely deepens all the tragedies of all the centuries. At its worst it brings us to that mythical messianism—that messianic hoax—of the twentieth century which comes perilously near to the thesis: "Just one little war more against the last remaining enemies of righteousness, and then the world will be cleansed, and we can start building Paradise." (p. 41)

The optimism of the last words has faded, but we still are inclined to assume that victory in this last battle against the one enemy in our minds at the moment will destroy the major threat to our society.

One of the major problems in Christian theology and social ethics is to relate this warning against the danger of self-righteousness on all sides to the necessity of taking a stand. We may have to risk a little self-righteousness to get a necessary job done, but if people recognize the problem, this will reduce the effects of self-righteousness.

So much for presuppositions:

Love must seek justice, often revolutionary justice.

The Church should seek to include those on both sides of most conflicts.

Our doctrine of man should help us to remember the need of combining pressure with persuasion, and it should warn against the self-righteousness on both sides of a conflict.

The most general definition of power is in Paul Tillich’s Love, Power and Justice (Oxford): "Power is being actualizing itself over against the threat of non-being." Another rather general definition is in Bertrand Russell’s illuminating book Power (W. W. Norton): "Power is the production of intended effects."

These definitions do not help us much with concrete problems, but they may help us to realize that power as such is neutral; it is always present when any of our purposes are actualized. Also, we need to remember the wide range of the forms of power, from pure persuasion at one end of the scale to what Russell calls naked power at the other.

One of the most important distinctions is between covert and overt power. The established forms of power are no less coercive because they get their way without very obvious use of power. Such power is exercised by the almost automatic enforcing of the accepted rules in the society. Those in power discharge employees; they evict tenants; they refrain from taking any positive remedial steps by dragging their feet.

They might take drastic action to change many things, but they prefer to do nothing or to take delaying or token action. It is in their power to do so, and it avoids the appearance of naked power. Protection of interests by foot-dragging is often the most pervasive form of power in our cities. Behind it is control, of votes, property, corrupted investigators and many opinion-forming agencies.

This power of the strong to protect their interests may be just as coercive as the most obvious form of violence. The weak who are trying to put together forms of power and to gain political strength are constantly forced into positions in which they have to demonstrate, strike, boycott or initiate events that may be accompanied by violence. This use of power may appear more bloody, but it is less coercive and less destructive than the power to prevent change.

In labor disputes the workers are the ones who cause inconvenience to the public by denying services or perhaps creating a scene in which there may be some violence. Yet the employers may be the cause of the strike, or the responsibility may be divided.

Boycotters, sit-ins, freedom riders, demonstrators have for years been seeking to develop power in a weak minority to counteract the power of employers, local law-enforcement officers and state governments. They are accused of making a disturbance, of risking violence; but their activities have been a relatively weak form of power, in intention nonviolent, against the institutionalized violence of the police system of many a community, against the pervasive intimidation that is the next thing to violence.

Our Protestant constituency by and large does not understand this distinction between the overt force of the weak and the covert force of the establishment. They are all too ready to give low marks to the former and high marks to the latter. They can see the former because it occurs on the streets.

The famous study of Harlem entitled Youth in the Ghetto has a significant subtitle: "A Study in the Consequences of Powerlessness" (published by Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, 2092 7th Ave., N. Y., N. Y., $4.50 donation). Harlem "can best be described in terms of the analogy of a powerless colony." As a result, "the basic story of academic achievement in Central Harlem is one of inefficiency, inferiority and massive deterioration." How can this be true of a city in which there is so much wealth and which is sophisticated and liberal in so many ways?

I realize that the conditions described are not only the result of deliberate defense of greed or prejudice or foot-dragging. They also result from the sheer complexity of many problems, but this fact of complexity too easily becomes a kind of umbrella under which the more deliberate efforts to prevent change are the more effective.

The churches have the responsibility to help develop forms of power among the powerless in order to counteract the pervasive power of the strong. It is at this point that I reject the a priori arguments against the community development programs in Chicago and elsewhere. To say that they increase conflict need not be a valid criticism. (I do not deny the force of such criticism when this is done without restraint.) But there is a stage in which hidden conflict needs to be brought out into the open. It is a great advance when people who have been powerless and plagued by apathy or fatalism organize to improve their lot, and this means creating instruments of political and economic power that enable their interests to be felt by the community at large.

I realize that such methods have some unfortunate by-products: Concentration on a single issue, the tendency to use oversimplifying slogans, the tendency to turn other parties into provisional devils. But the intensification of conflict may be a necessary stage in the movement away from apathy and submission to injustice and oppression.

This was true in all of the early struggles of the industrial workers. It has been true in all the struggles of the new nations for independence. Anti-colonialism creates many devils; yet it is a by-product of a basically constructive impulse. This is true of the awakening of the younger generation of Negroes who decided that they have taken conditions of deprivation and humiliation long enough, and some of them are tempted to believe no good of any white man.

Most of the criticism of the community development movements is what might be called pre-Niebuhrian. The year 1932 is an important date in American theology and church history. It saw the publication of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, which contains basic diagnoses of tendencies in human history that are still true: One cannot escape from sin by refusing to relate oneself to movements that seek to develop the power of self-defense among the powerless. One becomes involved in some evil by-products, but one should also count up the evil by-products of refusing to do this: Hypocrisy on one side, apathy on the other, and the injustice that pervades it all.

Some critics charge that many of the processes of community development are "sub-Christian." Doubtless they are, and in some cases particular methods may be justly condemned. I am not asking for an uncritical acceptance of any policies, methods or movements. What I am saying is very similar to what Walter Rauschenbusch said in the context of the struggle of the industrial workers for justice:

We started out with the proposition that the ideal of a fraternal organization of society will remain powerless if it is supported by idealists only; that it needs the firm support of a solid class whose economic future is staked on the success of that ideal; and that the industrial working class is consciously or unconsciously committed to the struggle for the realization of that principle. It follows that those who desire the victory of that ideal from a religious point of view will have to enter into a working alliance with this class. (Christianity and the Social Crisis, Harper Torchbooks, p. 409.)

As we look back on all that has happened since 1907, we would now speak differently of "class." Many qualifications need to be made as a result of hindsight. But at the core of social advance there must be the dynamism that comes from the interests of those who know in their own lives the necessity of change. Today Negroes are the most readily organized group among those who feel the need for change. Their welfare depends upon broad solutions to the problems of urban poverty, unemployment, housing and education that will benefit all races. Here we do not want to play up the racial factor; yet we do need to allow the solidarity of a deprived race to open doors into which many others can enter.

This should not be a struggle involving the use of naked power. Organization to give dignity and morale so that the apathetic can help themselves, organization to bring economic pressure on the community, organization to make effective political decisions—these are all necessary, but we must remember that the world that needs to feel this pressure is itself very complex. Such organization would have many allies and potential allies; it may also count on others who have enough of a bad conscience or who are open enough to accept a changed situation without continued resistance. Also, our Federal Government can be a mighty force in taking the side of the weak and the poor.

The Church can bring essential resources into this struggle: Resources for the organizing of power and for the correction of the idolatries that often go with power. The local church in a neighborhood of deprivation and injustice should not hold aloof from this struggle. I admire what I have read of the work of some local churches in Chicago. Ministers and congregations have identified themselves with this struggle.

To be sure, this creates problems. Their action is no different in principle, however, from what many Negro congregations have done in Montgomery, Birmingham and many other places, for which they have been widely praised. It is no different from what happens in new nations where the Church identifies itself with the aspirations of the people.

The minister may play a provisional political role in these situations, since he is a visible spokesman for his own people who need his leadership. The ambiguities of this role are less than the ambiguities that surround the political silence of the minister in a homogeneous church that resists change, who allows the people to think that he agrees with them when he doesn’t.

The church needs many ministers who identify themselves with the efforts of the poor to gain power to balance the thousands of ministers who, implicitly, give their blessings to the way the strong keep their power. There are no clear roles in this area.

A person may rightly choose a role that had its limitations, its dangers, its by-products, all of which are ambiguous, but let us bring this out in the open; let him know about the ambiguities. And let the person who doesn’t know what his role is, except that he ministers to those who hold on to the status quo, also learn the ambiguities of his role and try to correct some of these.

But there are other dimensions: In no church should the Gospel be reduced to simple advocacy of this or that social goal. The preaching and the liturgy should clearly transcend the immediate teaching about the social issues. The minister and laymen who have been exposed to the full teaching of the Church should keep alive resources for criticism of their political involvement. They should not become intransigent in facing complexities that emerge as any community moves toward concrete solutions. Slogans are less and less helpful as guides as soon as real, constructive possibilities emerge.

The local church or a group of churches may move into various forms of action that from the purist position may seem problematic, but at a given moment these may be actions of enormous importance in giving dignity and opportunity to the people of the various congregations and their neighbors. Yet the local church should remain part of a larger Christian community.

Here we return to the emphasis upon the more inclusive church—inclusive of people in the suburbs and inner city, of all races, of people of many different opinions and on both sides of most conflicts. Churches must live with the problems created by inclusiveness.

But such inclusiveness may be good for both community and church. It may temper the partisanship on both sides. On central issues it may reveal many allies. But it may also help to correct one-sidedness in the understanding of the Gospel and prepare for a future in which the lines of conflict may well be drawn differently and perhaps modify future forms of intransigence. It may help Christians in many different situations with different experiences and interests to remain under a common judgment, to be open to each other in a common fellowship, and to recognize that they are objects of a common redemption.

What Can We Hope For In Society?

Within the past half-century, men in the Western world have plunged from the highest expectations that they have ever held concerning their future in this world to the darkest fears that they have ever known concerning that future. This change has taken place in the minds and hearts of many of us. In this country the change has been more recent than in Europe. Even now the older expectation lives on in the minds of many of the older generation who have not been able to revise their earlier hopes with consistency.

This change of outlook in regard to the future has taken place within the churches as well as in the secular mind. Liberal Christianity shared the belief in progress that came to dominate the culture. It often gave New Testament sanction to this belief by identifying the kingdom of God with a new social order in history. It is only fair, however, to recognize that much liberal Christian thought preserved some checks on this expectation.

There are at least three forms of optimistic belief in progress which we should reject.

  1. There was the tendency to make the expectation of progress the substance of religious faith in some Christian circles and to substitute it for Christian faith in a clear-cut manner outside the church. The idea of progress that had its source in the Enlightenment was deliberately conceived as an alternative to belief in divine providence and to Christian ideas of redemption. It became a selfsufficient faith. There can be no doubt that though this view of progress does depend upon the biblical assumption of the importance of human history, it is a complete distortion of the biblical outlook. It is opposed to Christianity and is the source of morally destructive illusions in its denial of a transcendent source of judgment upon history. One of the weaknesses of any such religion of progress is the sacrifice of most generations to those generations whose lot will fall near the fulfillment of history.
  2. We must reject the idea that progress is inevitable. This was given its strongest support by the conception of biological evolution. It often involved the tendency to deal with human history as though it were an aspect of nature. It left no clear Place for human freedom. And yet I think that such criticisms are not always applicable. The idea of inevitable progress was often no more than the belief that the right must prevail. This was not a denial of human freedom but rather confidence that men would come to see and do the right.
  3. The third type of expectation to be rejected is the assurance that the major sources of social evil can be removed in such a way that the gains we make in removing them are secure. This view does not involve the idea of inevitable progress in all respects and it avoids the excesses of utopianism. It is no more than the faith that the major obstacles to justice and freedom and peace among men can be overcome and that when they are overcome, there will be no danger of falling back into the darkness of earlier periods. I suspect that whatever conventional symbols of perfection in history may be used, most believers in progress would be glad to settle for this more sober expectation.
  4. But it is precisely this sober type of assurance along with all Utopianisms which has been taken away from our generation. As I reflect upon it, it seems clear to me that it is basically untenable and that our loss of it is not the consequence of some recent failure of nerve caused by Hitler or the atom bomb.

The classical Christian teaching about the universality and persistence of sin has not been the main cause of the rejection of this sober belief in progress though it is a ground for doing so. There are many shades of the historic doctrine, and its precise relationship to our problem was never fully developed in the New Testament because of a lack of interest in it. Not until men began to count on a future of indefinite length and not until they became aware of the degree of change possible in social institutions was the issue raised that we now face. When we consider some of the factors that make it difficult to believe in progress in this third sense, it becomes possible to see how they are related to Christian teaching about sin and especially to one element in that teaching: the recognition that the deepest roots of sin are spiritual, that it is on the higher levels of human development that the most destructive perversions of human life appear.

There are two contemporary experiences which very vividly bring home to us the truth in this Christian teaching, and these two experiences in themselves have done most to destroy in many of us the confidence in secure progress by which we had formerly been guided.

The first is the realization that at the very moment in which the technical means of developing world community are available and at the very moment when more people than ever are convinced that world community is essential if civilized life is to continue in the world, the division between two parts of the world has become so deep that we cannot now see any way in which it can be overcome. I do not say that it cannot be overcome, only that we cannot see the steps by which such a favorable change might come. The division is all the deeper because it is caused not only by differences of economic interest or by nationalistic rivalries, but by a spiritual chasm that for the present destroys communication between those on opposite sides of the conflict.

Other aspects of the situation illustrate the point that the most stubborn problems come at a high level of development. The very formation of larger and larger communities creates the possibility of more fateful forms of power. The world divided into two parts is in a more dangerous condition than if it were divided into many parts. Also, one result of man's scientific development has been the production of weapons of war which threaten the existence of every form of moral and social progress. To the increased size of the units of power and the increased destructiveness of the weapons of war we must add many techniques for controlling the minds of men which modern rulers possess. This situation which I have been describing results from perversions of reason and of idealism, from the misuse of some of man's most remarkable intellectual achievements.

My second contemporary illustration covers much of the same ground but it suggests to me even more poignantly the way in which the idealisms of men can become the instruments of terrible evil. There has been remarkable progress in the concern for social justice and, in many countries, in the social and economic institutions which give effect to this higher sense of justice. There are some quite remarkable advances in our own country in this respect for which we should be very thankful. And yet the just aspirations of the underprivileged and the generous idealisms of many of the privileged have been changed into the means by which the most efficient and most oppressive of all tyrannies has been imposed on many nations. This is the same development that divides the human race and threatens it with global atomic war. The totalitarian tyranny itself does not necessarily lead to anything better. It may be destroyed by revolution, but what will follow the revolution?

The point which emerges most clearly from these two illustrations is that the most destructive social evils of which we have knowledge appear on what, according to any previous conception of progress, have been high levels of intellectual and moral advance. It now seems all too clear that the various over-all solutions of the social problem which have been emphasized in the past two centuries by the believers in progress are not solutions after all. I refer especially to the belief that education, the development of the social sciences, the spread of democratic institutions, or the socialization of property would be the saving factor.

Each one of these factors is greatly to be desired. My point is that each one of them creates new problems and cannot by itself be regarded as a selfsufficient solution. Education, for example, is a great good, but it will always be difficult to get the right educators; and there is no way of insuring that the educational process will not be perverted by those who have the most political or economic power.

There are two other general considerations which support what has been said so far concerning the difficulty of believing in progress even in the third sense. The first is the fact that all solutions of social problems create unexpected new problems. The balance between such social values as freedom and order is very delicate, and it is natural that changes that seem good in themselves are made at the expense Of one of these values in ways that are not fully understood in advance. An experimental shifting of emphasis from time to time in a reasonably stable society is to be expected and desired. But hazards become greater as the units of power be come larger and the instruments of power more efficient. Such long-term trends as the development of technology, the increase of living standards, the growth of leisure, the elaboration of the mass media for entertainment and communication-all these create new and perplexing problems. But there is no turning back and it is our responsibility to do what is possible to redeem these instruments of "progress."

The second consideration is that spiritual advance from generation to generation is not dependably cumulative. Each generation has to learn its own lessons on the matters that are most important for its welfare. There is flexibility that is good in the fact that each generation rebels against its predecessor, but this very fact keeps moral gains from being secure. A strong spiritual impulse tends to lose momentum within a generation. If it is true, as I have suggested, that external gains are never secure gains, that institutional changes which promise much can be easily perverted if the spirit goes out of them, that in the precarious balance between freedom and order the responsible use of freedom and the self-disciplined exercise of power make all the difference -- then this fact that we cannot count with assurance on the preservation from generation to generation of the loyalties and the sensitivities and the faith which are the chief sources of the health of a culture or of a social system is the factor which, more than any other makes assurance concerning progress impossible.

So far I have been chiefly negative and have shown what we cannot believe about the future. Now as I turn to the things that we can believe, the result may seem less precise and, hence, anticlimactic. But my major interest in this article is to emphasize the elements of hope that remain.

There are no Christian guarantees of any particular good to be realized in the secular order, but there are Christian grounds for hope that man's cause in this world is no lost cause and that there will be significant embodiments of God's righteous purpose in human society. We cannot be sure of secure and cumulative progress in the moral quality of life or in the over-all welfare of the race. But every act of social justice, every corporate encouragement to the spiritual freedom of men, every achievement of true community is a gain even if we cannot promise that it will be followed by more and, more of the same. The enormous technical advance creates possibilities of good that did not exist before. Take as an example the extraordinary extension of the life span, the improvement of health, the relief of suffering which are the results of the advance of medicine. All this is mostly gain though length of life may often lead to greater frustrations, and in the total picture the means of healing may be outweighed by the instruments of destruction.

History is not merely a platform on which individuals are prepared for inward blessings or for eternal life. Nor, as a record of man's collective life. is history a story of a vast and unified success. But within it there have been and there will be many communal and institutional embodiments of justice and fraternity which have value to the Lord of history. They are all of them partial and marked by man's sin as well as by true loyalty and love. If they pass away they remain as possibilities to be realized again. The record of them inspires generations that know them only as a memory. To work for such communal and institutional embodiments of justice and fraternity is to serve the kingdom of God, even though that kingdom far transcends them and all are judged.

The grounds for social hope which we find in Christian teaching are of two kinds -- one related to God’s creative work and the other to Christian redemption.

If we take seriously the idea that God is the creator and Lord of history, it is natural to infer from this that the structure of life is favorable to the continuation of his creative work. The belief that all men are made, in God’s image and the fact that Christians are encouraged to stress their own sin rather than the sin of other men, should undercut any tendency to cynicism about humanity in general, Calvin was surely right, as far as he went, in allowing for "common grace" in social life. In spite of a very dark view of the deformity of fallen man, he was able to writ: "…as man is naturally a creature inclined to society, he has also by nature an instinctive propensity to cherish and preserve that society; and therefore we perceive in the minds of all men general impressions of civil probity and order." Augustine’s insistence that there is no man "so wholly abandoned to turpitude, but he hath some feeling of honesty left him" is similar. Augustine goes on to say that the devil must "change himself into an angel of light (as we read in the Scripture that he will do) if he is to effect fully his intention of deceit."

A somewhat different phase of this basis for hope in God's creative work is the tendency of evil to be self-destructive. This has long been emphasized as a phase of the divine judgment in history. There is no comforting assurance that the process of judgment may not destroy most of the forces that make for good as well as those that make for evil, but there is strong pressure at work upon men today which causes them to see that they must find ways of living together more justly or perish. This kind of pressure by itself is not likely to bring men to a better society, but it has its positive value when combined with other motives.

We can see this process at work in international relations today. I have emphasized the tragic character of the East-West split in the world, but in spite of that we can say that the world has been brought closer than ever before to a recognition of the futility as well as the moral horror of war. There is fear in this and there is sheer fatigue in it. But there is also a widespread will to peace, the importance of Which can be seen from the fact that the Communists can play on it so successfully. All this is important of the institutions preparation for the development of world community.

The interaction between these broad grounds for hope that we find in the creation itself and the redemptive forces that have been released as the result of the , work of God in Christ is the heart of the matter. if we had only the redemptive forces to which to appeal, it is likely that we would think only in terms of a remnant to be saved out of the world. But it is the faith that the God of redemption is also the creator of the world which enables us to hope for more than that.

There is a quite remarkable converging of Christian thinking today, including New Testament studies, on the idea that the powers of the kingdom of God are already present within history. This emphasis upon the present kingdom is a more significant development in contemporary theology than the more widely publicized emphasis upon the hope for a future kingdom beyond history or a sophisticated conception of the "second coming." This idea of the present kingdom often takes the form of the rather difficult conception of the invasion of the future into the present, or the overlapping of present and future. We have to put the New Testament faith into a context that differs from the New Testament context at two points: the expectation of a, indefinitely prolonged future and our better knowledge of the population of the whole world.

It seems to me that the strongest New Testament basis for hope for society is to be seen in the broad implications of this idea that the redemptive power; of the kingdom of God are present in history. The interaction of the redemptive powers of the kingdom with the factors that are favorable to social good in creation becomes relevant to our social hope when we see it in the context of an indefinitely prolonged future.

As I have warned so often, there is here no guarantee of any particular social good, but at least there is ground for hope that in ways beyond our present understanding the powers of the "age to come," the work of the living Christ, the influence of the Holy Spirit, the impact of that within the church which Paul Tillich calls the "New Being" will break through many of the obstacles in the secular order to transform and transform again the kingdoms of this world. Within human history we may not see the kingdom of this world become the kingdom of God, but we may see among them many places and at many times communities, institutions, and corporate acts of justice which truly embody the grace and power of that kingdom.

To make this idea concrete I shall refer to a recent event which had in itself some of the characteristics that such embodiments of the kingdom must have. It is an event that took place outside the sphere of what is usually regarded as Christendom. It is an event that seems to me to symbolize most of the real gains that have been made in recent history. I refer to the recent Indian general election in which a large proportion of the electorate voted and which was remarkably free from corruption. Let us grant that universal suffrage is no panacea, that the new institutions of India are quite precarious, that the people may vote themselves into totalitarianism. I accept all those reservations. But does it not remain true that this event was a symbol of the human dignity of all persons, of their participation in the common life, of their will to be free from the control of another people? What had the redemptive work of Christ to do with this event? There was little direct influence from the church in bringing it about, but it is unlikely that such an election could have taken place without the indirect influence of Christ upon Indian leadership and, we may add, without a Christian conscience in the country that yielded in time to Indian demands for independence. The acceptance of the importance of political action and the recognition of the essential equality of all human beings can be understood best against the background of such Christian influences. This event illustrates two aspects of every gain that is made in history. On the one hand, we know that it is insecure; on the other hand, we have good reason to thank God for it.

In conclusion, I shall bring together several considerations that need to be emphasized together.

  1. The future should be regarded as open. There is no place for fatalism or for a dogmatic pessimism. Reinhold Niebuhr's phrase, "indeterminate possibilities," is a good way of indicating what we should think about the future. We must not face particular problems, no matter how difficult, with the idea that nothing constructive can be done about them.

  2. We should not put any less emphasis than in the days of liberal optimism on the importance of large-scale events, of institutions, of the behavior of social groups. These are important because of what they do to persons.

  3. We should avoid the tendency to allow many particular disappointments with the results of the great drive for social revolution, of which communism is but one expression, to cause us to swing to the conservative extreme. In particular, this means that we should distinguish between communism and the many efforts to bring about deep social changes which actually are an essential antidote to communism. Disappointment with the poor when they gain power should not tempt us to be less critical of the older forms of privilege. Disappointment with the results of social planning should not send us back into a one-sided emphasis on the freedom of the individual. We should have known long ago that the social revolution in any one of its many forms is no panacea, that it brings with it many new problems, but that these problems are on a level on which new and precious possibilities of justice for the vast majority of human beings are present for the first time in history.

  4. The meaning of what we do does not depend only or even chiefly upon our correct calculations about future consequences. Our intentions must be directed toward the future and we have a responsibility to seek the best possible consequences. It is not enough to satisfy ourselves that our intentions are good. Something more is necessary to save us from the anxiety which accompanies such decisions if we are to have Christian wholeness of spirit or even a troubled peace. This something more is faith that God will forgive us for the evil in our decisions and actions, that God will use them and us for the fulfillment of his purpose in ways beyond our calculation. The motive for action should not be hope, but love for all the people whose welfare is at stake in what we do or leave undone. The direction of action does depend upon some measure of hope, for if there were no hope of results we would in most cases change the course of our action. The morale for action depends upon faith. Hope is important but it is subordinate to faith and love.

Christian Ethics and International Affairs

Three elements of the Christian message should continually illuminate the mind of Christians as they deal with the problems of world politics.

(1) Each nation is under the judgment, providence and mercy of God. This is a corrective for the most common temptation of any nation—to make itself absolute. But the mere affirmation of an ultimate deity may have little effect, because it is easy for the nation to assume that such a deity is on its side, especially when the adversaries are avowed atheists.

To see the nation under God as revealed in Christ, however, gives a different perspective. God is no vague Almighty who can be made over in the image of one’s nation. God as he comes to us in Christ can be seen to be the Father and Lord of all communities of men, who has no favorites among the nations, who cares about justice, about the freedom of men to develop their capacities and to be true to their consciences.

Christians who affirm the transcendence of God above every human group and earthly power must also affirm their faith in the divine involvement in the history of mankind. The Incarnation is the central demonstration of this involvement. Christian understanding of God’s transcendence raises questions about the extent of the claims of every historical community or movement or ideal, but these questions are given clearer focus by the fact that they are asked in the light of the revelation of God’s solidarity with all men in Christ. The fact that the Church exists in every country points to the revelation that comes to each from beyond its history and culture, and it is another way of expressing God’s transcendence of the nation.

(2) The commandment of love for the neighbor, for all neighbors. Christians are expected to reflect in their lives God’s love for all mankind. This seems obvious, but it cannot be left unsaid or taken for granted. Love, in terms that are relevant to international politics, means caring for the welfare and the dignity of all—those at a great distance, those on the other side of every boundary, those whose interests may conflict with our national interests, those who are enemies or opponents. It must be translated in terms of empathy, humaneness, a sense of justice, the development of mutual relations between peoples.

Love should inspire Christians as they form or support policies, though of itself it does not determine policy. It should, however, set limits to policy. In this context love should set up a moral obstacle to any policy that assumes readiness to destroy the populations of other countries.

(3) The understanding of man that is implicit in Christian teaching about man’s creation in the image of God and the depth and universality of sin. Granting differences between traditions, there is still much that can be said by those who have learned to criticize the one-sided historical optimism of liberal Christianity.

The revival of Protestant theology and the events of our time have encouraged a view of man that respects human dignity but takes a sober view of historical developments. Panaceas and utopias are no longer credible. We now know we live with permanent problems that are the result of man’s finiteness and sin. The Christian warning is just as much against cynicism or a fatalistic pessimism as it is against confidence in over-all rational solutions of international problems.

At least two implications for foreign policy may be deduced from these convictions. Both have been illumined by the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr. One is the recognition that schemes of world government are no short-cut to the solution of the problem of international anarchy. For three reasons: First, world community of the sort necessary to sustain an effective world government cannot be created by a constitutional fiat. (One of the strong points of the United Nations is that it is based upon a recognition of the given situation. This situation need not be static, and the moment the nuclear powers reach agreement on arms control or disarmament the UN can assume new functions that might be the functions of an incipient world government.) Second, no legal changes can of themselves change the location of the substantial forms of power, whether military, economic or demographic. Third, the road toward world government must not be taken under the illusion that concentration of power at the center would in itself be an ultimate solution, for it might raise new problems of a tyranny on a world scale or of a world-wide civil war to capture the centralized organs of power.

The second implication is a critical attitude toward pacifism as a self-sufficient political party. Pacifism as personal witness or even sometimes as the witness of a Church may serve as a corrective. But pacifism as a political party does not take account of the limits of what a government can do; nor does it take account of the need to find ways of checking power by power if the world is to preserve freedom of choice for nations.

What has come out of all of these considerations is often called Christian political realism, a position that recognizes the limits of rationality, the fact of finiteness and sin, and the reality of power that cannot be wished away but which must be checked and used. I have regarded myself as a Christian political realist. However, this realism has often gained too much momentum of its own and has not been kept under a sufficient degree of Christian criticism.

The original proclamation of this approach was against the background of a too moralistic or idealistic form of Christian social ethics. It emphasized the necessity of choosing between evils, and there was a genuine emancipation in the idea of taking responsibility for the lesser evil and living under the mercy of God. But years of living with this realism during a period in which most of the voices of moral criticism have been silent have too often made it little more than a rationalization of whatever has seemed necessary for Western strategy. What began as a corrective now stands in need of correction.

What are the implications of these theological and ethical convictions for the pressing problems of American foreign policy? I shall deal briefly with three areas: (1) The role of nationalism in the emerging nations; (2) The present conflict of ideologies; and (3) The dilemma of nuclear deterrence.

(1) Nationalism has a bad name in Christian circles in the West. It is associated with the familiar chauvinisms, the absolutizing of national sovereignty, the overripe nationalism of National Socialism and Fascism, the grandiose pose of General de Gaulle and American isolationism or self-righteousness. Nationalism in any of these forms must be criticized as a kind of idolatry.

But nationalism in the emerging nations has a constructive role—so long as it avoids idolatry and is open to accommodation and cooperation with neighboring states. The temptation to chauvinism is always present even in the new countries. However, nationalism may often be the means of overcoming tribal conflicts, providing the incentive for loyal and responsible citizenship, and causing people to sacrifice narrow interests for the welfare of the larger national community.

One of the most important meanings of nationalism is that it inspires movements for independence that may lead to significant forms of human freedom. One must walk warily here in view of the danger of the balkanization of a continent.

No Christian answer can be given to the question of which political units are viable or whether one kind of federation or another should become the political unit. These are all relative matters; each case must be discussed on its merits. Yet nationalism can be a great good when it inspires a particular national community to win freedom from external control for the development of its own national life.

Christians must preserve some detachment from the fierce passions of nationalism, but they should not reject the goal of independence that enlists these passions. They need not reject in principle all revolutionary violence, but they should seek to neutralize the hatred and vindictiveness that often accompany it. This is no easy task.

If the most extreme nationalists have the dynamism that is creating the new political community and Christians must choose between supporting their policies or detaching themselves from the forces that are realizing the aspirations of the nation, their dilemma is grave indeed. Both individuals and churches face this predicament. They must live with it and, without separating themselves from their people, find answers that may not satisfy the absolute partisan who claims that he is the only true nationalist.

(2) The relationship between Christian faith and ethics and the ideological conflict of East and West. There is no question that communism, as a total system of life and thought, and Christianity are in radical opposition. Rationalized political terror is the chief symptom of the evil in the Communist absolutism we reject. While much terror exists or is perpetrated in non-Communist nations today, it seldom becomes a system supported by an interpretation of history.

The struggle will continue within nations and across national boundaries between Christian faith and Communist faith. The religious aspect of the struggle must be carried on by Christians through their witness to the truth as they see it and by deeds of love.

I am concerned here especially with communism as an international force, and I want to address myself to the relationship of the churches to the Cold War as an ideological conflict. I have said on many occasions—usually I am scolded for saying it by American Rightists—that we should avoid identifying the conflict between Christianity and communism with the international conflict. One reason for this has become increasingly clear in recent months. The clash between Christianity and communism is a reality within the Communist nations, and nothing can handicap churches in those nations more than for them to appear to be allies of the West in the international struggle.

A few years ago it may have been plausible to dismiss this consideration on the ground that the leaders of the churches in the Communist countries, especially the Orthodox and Protestant leaders, were collaborators with their governments. Now I am convinced that, however much some of these leaders may be criticized on particular counts, their churches have in important instances preserved independent Christian vitality, and they remain the major organized force bearing witness to the ultimate criticisms of what intends to be a Marxist culture.

The role of these churches is not to serve the policy of the United States but to keep alive in their own societies a deep challenge to the official ideas of God, man and history. In the Soviet Union and in some of the Eastern European countries the Communist ideology is losing much of its power for post-revolutionary generations. We have reason to hope that the Christian churches in those countries, while they may have no direct political influence, will help many people to rediscover God and the true humanity of man.

Another reason for emphasizing the distinction between the international conflict and the religious conflict is that we need to avoid the hardening of differences between nations. Such hardening usually results when the passions of religion and of politics are united. Today we have new opportunities for constructive relationships with Communist countries, and we should be able to deal with them as human communities not fully controlled by any ideology.

One hopeful development in this area is the gradual change that has taken place in the Roman Catholic Church. That Church had seemed to be engaged in a holy war against communism as an ally of the West in its political conflict, but now it seems to have accepted the reality of coexistence. No diatribes against communism were issued by Vatican II. There are many indications that the Roman Church will no longer be a spiritual arm of the West in the Cold War. (The World Council of Churches has sought to avoid that role.)

It is significant that, while McCarthyism was in large measure a Roman Catholic phenomenon, today Catholic authorities seek to discourage Rightist movements. Unfortunately these movements now seem to be a Protestant phenomenon, though it is a sign of the health of Protestantism that its national institutions are under attack by these Rightists.

When we speak of ideologies I must note a development that has become very dangerous to our national sanity and to the peace of the world. It is a type of anti-communism distinguished by the following characteristics: it has no understanding of the causes of communism and emphasizes only self-defeating methods of opposing it; its starting point is a type of economic individualism that cannot tell the difference between the modest institutions of the welfare state in this country and the first stages of communism; and it closes minds to the changes that have taken place in the Communist world. This wild confusion is present in the minds of a small but financially powerful minority, though a much larger part of the population has a tendency to hold rigid ideas about the kinds of economic institutions in other nations with which we should cooperate.

Another problem is our obsession with fears of Communist military attack. A frontal military attack that would destroy the world the Russians hope to change makes no sense from the Communist point of view. These obsessive fears have crowded out all awareness of the degree to which our own immense military superiority is regarded as a threat by the Soviet Union. We have no empathy for the Soviet Union as a human community, and herein, too, lies a great danger to peace.

In discussing this American ideology it is important to emphasize how little the assumptions that govern our policies are publicly debated. People are afraid of being considered soft on communism if they raise serious questions about national attitudes and policies in the Cold War.

An important difference exists between our ideological blinders and those characteristic of the Communist world. Here they are not primarily the creation of the American Government. Indeed, those most responsible for our governmental policy seem to be struggling for freedom to maneuver against the limitations imposed on them by our popular ideology. In the Communist world, blinders are in large part the result of government education, propaganda and censorship.

Our churches, as members of the universal Christian community, may make their major contribution to better international relations by helping the American people to think with greater freedom about the world in which they live. They should tear off all Christian wrappings from the individualistic American ideology. In the context of the Church Americans should be helped to adjust to the fact that many nations with which we must cooperate are in revolutionary situations, and their governments are certain to be Leftist by our standards. Americans should be helped to see the world as it appears to the Communist nations and to take more seriously the changes that have taken place, especially in the Soviet Union, Poland, and even Hungary. On the political level the most important change in the Communist world is the split between Russia and China, but perhaps on the cultural level the fact of Poland has greater significance.

(3) The dilemma of nuclear deterrence. The dilemma is easily stated: The non-Communist world needs nuclear power to deter Communist nuclear power (to prevent nuclear blackmail and pressure in the interests of Communist expansion) ; but if we ever use our nuclear weapons, they are likely to destroy all that they defend as deterrents. The dilemma has another dimension: If the deterrent is to be credible, we must not give the impression that under no circumstances would the weapons ever be used.

We can no longer take comfort in the belief that the deterrent will certainly deter and that there will therefore be no need to use the weapons. The chief danger of nuclear war is that it might develop by escalation from a limited military operation.

Not being a pacifist, I cannot suggest an absolute solution of this problem. I can only present considerations that, if taken seriously, might result in the reduction of the number of occasions that could lead to war and in keeping down the degree of violence if war should come. This is not very satisfactory, but there is a vast difference between those who emphasize restraint and those who keep pressing for more provocative and reckless action.

Two aspects of nuclear war need to be emphasized. The first is that nuclear war would not only result in hundreds of millions of casualties and in the material destruction of nations; it would also probably destroy the institutions of freedom and the moral, cultural and political conditions on which our values depend. If we do not realize this, we are likely to say too easily, "Let us accept the casualties for the sake of freedom." But what if freedom is also a casualty?

Secondly I want to emphasize the moral necessity of shifting the emphasis from the fear of being destroyed to awareness of the moral meaning of our being destroyers. Talk about destroying the population centers of other countries springs from a combination of fatalism and callousness. There is much emphasis on a counterforce strategy in the Government, but many people are skeptical as to whether it would be possible to adhere to this. The tendency of both sides to stress invulnerable retaliatory forces undermines this more limited strategy.

Against this background I want to raise several questions.

How can we justify the assumption that we should, at a given point in a military conflict, initiate the use of nuclear weapons in order to avoid a conventional defeat? The possession of nuclear weapons that are kept to deter their use by the other side has some justification, but the moment we accept the actual possibility of our using them to initiate the nuclear stage of a war, we are taking upon ourselves an unexamined moral responsibility. We find ourselves thinking in strategic not moral terms, and we are not very realistic about the consequences of such a choice for the people we might be defending.

When will we cease threatening the use of ultimate violence every time there is a crisis involving Russia? We pride ourselves on being less ruthless than the Communists, but actually our threats seem to presuppose that any violent action is permitted, no matter how destructive, if it serves our political purposes. How is this different in principle from the Communist assumption that anything is justified if it serves the revolution?

When will we take seriously our moral responsibility for the effects of our actions upon the hundreds of millions of people who have no part in the decisions and who do not even share our view of the issues at stake? A demonic pretentiousness has developed that needs to be examined. There may have been and there may still be justification for our taking upon ourselves this responsibility in some cases, but there is a danger that it may become an unexamined habit. The same thing can be said of the decision to engage in nuclear tests that have consequences not foreseen by the scientists who plan them and affect distant nations that have no part in the decisions.

When will we begin to evaluate the world conflict in the light of the changes in the Communist world? This means, for one thing, reconsideration of the military threat to us in view of the fact that Mr. Khrushchev has a better understanding of the meaning of nuclear war than either the Chinese or some American Senators. This does not erase the need for a deterrent, but it may affect the degree of power that is needed. It may also help us to keep in view the risks of an unlimited nuclear arms race as compared with the risks involved in disarmament. Perhaps the most important practical point is the need to assure the Administration of support if it does secure agreements on nuclear tests and the reduction of arms. The danger is that such an agreement might not be upheld by the Senate.

Another consideration growing out of the changes in the Communist world is that new alternatives are available. The assumptions underlying our country’s attitudes and strategies were based upon the realities of Stalinism. We feared that if we let down our guard we would be inviting the extension of Stalinist terror from country to country. While we still need to preserve deterrent power in the non-Communist world, there can be a gradual change in the feelings on both sides concerning what is at stake in the Cold War.

Such a change may well go with a shift in emphasis from all-out nuclear deterrence to reliance on limited military methods and with a shift away from preoccupation with the military to a search for political and economic alternatives to communism. These shifts have already taken place to some extent, but as "our side" ceases to feel surrounded by a monolithic "slave world" the public may be ready to accept much greater changes in policy.

Though it is difficult to measure the effect on public opinion of the present dependence of our economy on defense spending, this is one factor of great importance in supporting the psychology of the cold war. I do not mean that we are confronted by a capitalistic plot to preserve the arms race. Rather, we face the combination of many local pressures to keep the factories open for the sake of employment. Such pressures can only be met by a national plan not now in sight.

I have moved here from the theological and ethical convictions that should guide the mind of the Church to many concrete issues about which there is no uniquely Christian guide.

I have concentrated on issues that require changes in assumptions. These issues call for wisdom on the part of policy-makers, but my chief concern is to counteract pressures upon the Government by vociferous elements in the public.

The churches at this point have a great responsibility not to advocate over-all idealistic solutions but to emphasize the distinctively Christian message that is relevant to these issues, to help their members to see the world without the characteristic American ideological blinders, to challenge many of the prevailing assumptions about the cold war and nuclear armaments, and to encourage the debate on public questions about which most people prefer to be silent. In this way our churches can be, more clearly than they are at present, part of the world-wide Christian community that never allows us to forget the humanity of those beyond the barriers that limit our understanding.

The Church as Prophetic Critic

The role of the church as the prophetic critic of society is neglected today; instead, the chief emphasis is on the healing ministry of the church, on Christianity as the antidote for anxiety, on the gospel’s promise of peace of mind. There is a prophetic No which still needs to be said, but there is a tendency to omit it, in part because of our preoccupation with the "positive" message and in part because in the nation’s present state of mind prophetic criticism is more than usually misunderstood or resented.

I am not suggesting a one-sided return to what I call here prophetic criticism. My only concern is to call attention to the fact that things are now out of balance. Is it not of the essence of the Christian gospel that healing and judgment belong together? The deepest source of healing is the forgiveness that follows confession. At the heart of our faith is the cross, which is at the same time the demonstration of the consequences of sin and the revelation of God’s forgiveness. In the light of the message entrusted to it the church is called to act as prophet, pastor and priest at the same time for the same people. There was a strong negative note in almost all the prophets of Israel; and, while Jesus showed only compassion toward all who recognized their weakness and need, his words to the hard and self-righteous were as negative as anything that we find in the prophets.

There are two good reasons for shrinking from the role of negative critic. One is that the prophet who assumes this role easily becomes self-righteous and unlovely. Prophets who emphasize the negative side of their message often become single-track and very poor guides. They are inclined to identify their own convictions, even on difficult political issues, with the will of God. There are in the Christian faith correctives for these tendencies, but only too often they do not take effect. The prophets should realize that they also are under judgment, that they have their own special temptations. Most often confession with the people rather than denunciation of the people should be the way in which the prophet speaks. I have in mind here the church and its representatives in their prophetic role.

The deeper reason for shrinking from this role today is that we realize the real difficulty in relating negative judgments, which create in people a sense of guilt, with the healing of their souls. The emphasis on the destructive effects of guilt feelings and anxiety seems to point the church away from stressing negative criticism. We may admit that most guilt feelings which disturb the deeper level of the soul are misplaced, that they are a holdover in mature life from experiences in childhood which are irrelevant to the moral experience of the adult. The warning of psychiatrists and educators against instilling in children feelings of guilt which can have these later disturbing effects is much needed. But this does not mean that there is no place for the kind of moral judgment that is relevant to mature experience and that makes men uneasy, more fully aware of the consequences of their decisions, more sensitive to the dark side of their culture. The appropriateness of such moral judgment is merely the other side of the reality of moral obligation and of human freedom.

There are three conditions in our country today which make it difficult, but all the more necessary, for the church to give emphasis now to the negative or critical elements in its message.

First is our national tendency to develop a shell to protect us as a nation against criticism. It is imperative for the church to break through this shell. Recently I became vividly aware of this problem when I was in a group of about a dozen churchmen who were trying to agree on something to say together on social problems. Two of those present objected to a simple statement to the effect that our responsibility to God rises above all other claims and responsibilities. Their reason for objecting to this idea was that it might make room for treason.

The first thing to say about this is that Christians can expect at times to be regarded by some people as taking positions which are treasonable. Ever since the first apostles said "We must obey God rather than men" this has been a possibility. The Christian, when he so acts, is trying to be loyal to what he believes is God’s purpose for his country and to his country’s true welfare.

One view of this fear of treason is that Americans have received such a shock because of the revelation of actual cases of Communist-inspired treason that they are now a wounded people and need to be dealt with very gently. There is some truth in that contention, and the church should take it into account. The other side of the picture, and at the moment the far more important side, is that, while there have been real wounds, there are today powerful men in our country who specialize in reopening those wounds, not to help them to heal more completely, but for quite other purposes -- to gain a partisan political advantage or to secure personal publicity; but most often in order to discredit by insinuation, if not by direct charges, all who believe in some changes in the economic order. These men use the conflict in faith between Christianity and communism to give a Christian sanction to the most conservative interpretation of the American way of life.

There is so much activity of this kind that, while some consideration should be given to the sense of having been wounded in the past, our greatest emphasis should be on the new wounds that are being inflicted in the name of national security, in the name of anticommunism, in the name of patriotism. Our country has almost lost the capacity for self-criticism or for listening to criticism from others. The church is the one voice in our national life and in our local communities that is under no American authority. Its duty today is to seek to counteract the fog of fear and defensiveness which envelops our national life.

The second factor in our culture which makes it difficult, but extremely important, to give more emphasis to the church’s role as prophetic critic is the habit of viewing most things from the standpoint of "public relations." Now responsible and honest public relations are a necessary instrument in our complicated society, and there is no institution that does not need to make use of this instrument in order to communicate to the public the things it stands for and the reasons for supporting its work.

There is, however, a false type of public relations in America which is the result of the attempt to apply to human groups and institutions the methods of advertising which may be suitable in selling soap or automobiles. There may be kinds of soap which are 99 or 100 per cent pure; there may be automobiles which are mechanically almost perfect; and claims for either the soap or the automobiles may not be exaggerated. I pass over the insinuations of superiority to all other products, which often are less than honest.

But "public relations" becomes absurd when we apply the same kind of advertising and promotional techniques alike to the American economic system, to business in general, to labor, to a political party or candidate, to the policies of a government, to a public utility, to a book, to a church. All these things are very human and very mixed, and there is always another side that is carefully suppressed. We Americans have formed the habit of selling things to each other in this way. I often wonder how far people discount what others say when they remember what they have themselves said or left unsaid on another occasion. It often seems that people who are otherwise discerning believe their own propaganda. I have had the privilege of meeting with representatives of business and labor and various agricultural groups and have often noticed how very sensitive each group is to any criticism. They like to draw pretty pictures of themselves which are too good to be true.

This tendency is quite different in origin from the defensive shell which we develop because of fear of communism. It has independent roots in our habit of selling things, which is so large a part of our life. But it has the effect of reinforcing the defensiveness which is due to fear. Together these two factors exaggerate perennial tendencies among men to resist self-criticism and to concentrate on the beam in the brother’s eye.

Surely within the church there must be a definite attempt to counteract this tendency to deceive others and ourselves, and especially to oppose the use of the Christian religion as a means of commending ourselves, our policies and our institutions to ourselves and to the world. The use of our religion as a sanction for what we ourselves desire most to preserve leads easily to American forms of idolatry which may be more treacherous enemies of Christian faith than explicit denials of it.

The third factor which is both obstacle to and reason for giving new emphasis to the neglected function of the church as critic grows out of the fact that the churches reflect the assumptions and attitudes of particular communities, often of a particular social class or residential area. The democratic structure of many of our denominations suggests that the church should do no more than echo the attitudes and convictions of its members. Some denominations are more inclined than others to suggest that Christian truth is established by majority vote.

To speak of majority vote in this way may be an unfair caricature, but it does call attention to a real problem in Protestantism. Even our denominations which are most democratic in their form of government and which stress as much participation as possible by all their members must recognize that, if a church is Christian, it is confronted by a revelation of God’s truth which it did not create and which no majority vote can cancel. It is confronted by a word of judgment from beyond the desires, expectations and ideals of its members. The preaching of the Word of God is one method by which the church provides for the hearing of this judgment. It is often very difficult for the church to accept this judgment when it concerns the social institutions with which the church lives and the culture which surrounds it and almost saturates it.

The freedom of the pulpit is freedom to be responsible to the revelation of God in Christ and not to any national or socially dominant ideas concerning what is good. Like other forms of freedom it is easily abused, and the interpretation which individuals give to the revelation needs to be checked by various forms of corporate prophetic teaching. One of the finest examples of such corporate teaching in the church was the letter from John Mackay and the General Council of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. to the ministers of that church. Fortunately, while this letter was addressed to the church, the world was allowed to read it, for it was published in full in the New York Times.

This letter brought a Christian judgment to bear on the greatest moral threats to our national life and on our favorite self-deceptions. It dealt chiefly with the false ways in which we respond to the menace of communism. It dealt very forcefully with the disregard of human rights in the current inquisitions and then spoke of the fanatical negativism without any constructive program of action which is leading the American mind into a "spiritual vacuum." It said: "Our national house, cleansed of one demon, would invite by its very emptiness the entrance of seven others. In the case of a national crisis this emptiness could in the high-sounding name of security, be occupied with ease by a fascist tyranny."

In calling attention to the present lack of balance in the message of the church and, perhaps even more, in the current popular interpretations of Christianity, I want to emphasize something more than the need of preserving both the prophetic role of the church and its role as healer of the soul. Criticism or the prophetic No should always be in the context of the total gospel so that men will not be afraid to hear it or defend themselves against it. Only as people are helped, even while the No is being spoken, to see beyond it to God’s love for them and for the world can they really receive the word of criticism. Let the positive word come first, so that the gospel may undercut the fears which cause men to harden their minds and hearts against any criticism; but then the word of judgment is needed to prevent all that is positive in the gospel from creating false peace of mind in personal life or complacency about our national culture.

Measure of Success

Be like Mike!" A famous and successful television commercial used that slogan to invite viewers to emulate Michael Jordan -- simply by purchasing the same brand of sneakers he wore. This is rather like suggesting that one could be like Jesus of Nazareth simply by wearing sandals like his.

But perhaps one can derive a more encouraging lesson from the success of the slogan "Be Like Mike": many people wish to be as gifted and as disciplined as Jordan is as an athlete, and their hopes and dreams are informed by an image of what they would like to become. The success of the ad further suggests that people still believe that it is possible to recognize excellence, They can say with great confidence, "Michael Jordan is a great basketball player." Basketball fans believe that they can be as certain about judgments of better and worse as chemists are in deciding whether a given compound is sugar or salt.

But are people as ready and able to judge the relative excellence of whole lives as they are to judge the exercise of particular skills? When it comes to assessing the relative worth or significance of lives, our culture seems both hesitant and confused.

Some people believe that excelling in any skill leads directly to an excellent life overall. Others act as though popularity and virtue are one and the same thing. They consult rock stars and movie actors for advice about politics and religion, apparently believing that mere fame evinces wisdom about everything that matters in human life.

Many social observers think that the growth of such confusions in our culture has created a cult of celebrity, the worshipful adulation of men and women whose only claim to honor and respect is popularity. These confusions have created a desperate situation. We want to make good judgments about how we should live, and we want to learn how to lead lives that really matter, but we don’t know how to talk very well or think very well about these things. Our inability to articulate the point and importance of our own lives may go far to explain why many feel that their lives do not really have a point or that they do not finally matter at all.

Some of our best philosophers and social critics have thought that our troubles do indeed stem from our loss of any consistent and coherent way of talking about the things that matter deeply. We have several vocabularies that have developed over the years. and we cobble together words and ideas from these different vocabularies to try to make sense of our lives, even though the terms sometimes conflict. Confusion is built into this effort to think in several languages at the same time.

Perhaps more than any other contemporary philosopher, Charles Taylor has helped us understand the way people think about how to live. One prominent ethical model of our time is what Taylor calls the ethics of authenticity. Authenticity means being true to ourselves. We must, according to this way of thinking, look within ourselves to find what authorizes our choices and thereby determine what we should do and what we should wish to become.

Taylor claims that people in Western democracies value free choice above almost anything else. We are prone to talk as though a way of living is good or significant simply because it is one we have freely chosen. We worry over whether any choice that we have made is "really our choice" more than we worry over whether what we have chosen is really choice-worthy. So we try to help each other to "get in touch with ourselves." We want to be as sure as we can be that our life choices are not made for us by someone else -- parents, friends, peers or teachers. And we are very uneasy about the idea that someone who has made a free choice might also have made a bad choice.

Do we feel awkward about criticizing someone else’s life choices? Do we doubt whether some free choices are better or worse than other ones? If so, we are manifesting what Taylor calls soft relativism, which is a degraded form of the ethics of authenticity.

Taylor wants not simply to show us how we think and talk about what matters, but to help us see what assumptions are behind that particular way of talking. Do we really believe that all ways of living are equally choice-worthy, equally significant? And when we look into ourselves, what do we find? Do we find just one authentic voice -- our own -- or do we find many that together make up the selves that we are?

The ideal of authenticity has been liberating for many and various oppressed groups. As Taylor has shown, the vocabulary of choice and the solitary self has been linked to ideas of individualism. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speaking before a congressional committee at the end of the 19th century, invoked ideals of the self, free choice and individualism to defend and advance the cause of women’s liberation. She argued then, following the logic that Taylor would describe a century later, that we are all sovereign, independent selves and that our relationships to others are secondary, often instrumental, to our personal choices and purposes.

Stanton used another vocabulary, however, when she began to sketch the kind of character that human beings need to have in order to live well and responsibly. This vocabulary suggests that some selves might be more admirable than others and that some ways of living might be more choice-worthy than others.

When we begin to talk and think like people who believe that some choices really are better or worse than others and that some lives really are better or worse than others, we use another vocabulary, words like virtue and excellence. This vocabulary goes back at least as far as 400 BC. Aristotle, for example, believed that there is only one way of living that is best for all human beings, and he provided a sketch of such a life to show us why, if we are thinking honestly and carefully, we should all choose that way of life over others. He argued that such a life would have happiness as its end, but he meant something very different from what we mean by happiness. For him, happiness was not a feeling; it was activity in accordance with virtue. Leading a life that mattered meant leading a life that exhibited a firm, admirable character. Like most of us, Aristotle admired people who lived honestly, courageously, justly, wisely, moderately and generously. He also admired people who enjoyed very good and enduring friendships.

We are not, in other words, as far from Aristotle as we might think, even though we do sometimes use slogans that he would have disdained, such as "Do your own thing." As much as we may pretend that it is bad to "be judgmental," we are always making judgments about other people. Are they trustworthy? Should we befriend them? Can we rely upon them to help us in dangerous situations? Should we lend them money? Would we rather be like Jill or like Sarah? Our lives sometimes literally depend upon how well we make these judgments about others.

These judgments always consist of two parts. First, what is this person really like? Second, is this person admirable? Is this a person of good character?

We might wonder why so many of us make judgments all of the time even as we insist that it is not good to be judgmental. Or why do so many of us say that one way of living is as good as any other even as we privately believe no such thing? It may be that we lack confidence in the judgments we make, so we refuse to make any. Or perhaps we don’t want to offend people, and we think that most of our contemporaries would be offended by the idea that some people really do lead more admirable lives than others. Whatever the case, we cannot think very long or very well about how to lead lives that matter without using some of Aristotle’s vocabulary of virtue.

Nor can we think very well about the idea of success without some of Aristotle’s vocabulary of virtue and character. Theodore Roosevelt, in his autobiography, wrote about two kinds of success, a kind that a few people achieve effortlessly through the exercise of extraordinary gifts, and another kind that all people can achieve through the diligent and arduous development of those gifts that they do possess. Roosevelt counted himself as part of the latter group, and he, like Aristotle, spoke of the cultivation of aptitudes in terms of virtue and character. We should ask ourselves whether we think of success as something absolute and objective, involving the satisfaction of a common standard, or whether we think of it as something relative and partly subjective, involving a level of achievement different for each person depending upon his or her natural talents and aptitudes.

Though many of us will agree with Aristotle when he argues that some lives are more virtuous or more excellent than others, and agree with Roosevelt when he argues that some lives are more successful than others, we may well doubt whether some genuinely virtuous or successful lives are more significant than others.

Whom would we admire more: a generous person who gives 10 percent of her $20,000 yearly income anonymously to a campus beautification project or a person who gives 10 percent of his $500 million fortune to fund on the same campus a concert hall named after him? When students in a college seminar discussed this question, almost all admired the first person more than the second, First, they argued, she had less to give, so her 10 percent was marginally more generous than the 10 percent given by the multimillionaire. Second, she was not at all moved by a desire for recognition or gratitude. The multimillionaire may have been moved by such considerations, since the concert hall was named after him.

But were these students right? Aristotle would argue that the woman is generous, whereas the man might well be both generous and magnificent. Should his gift, because of its magnitude and because it was given to what many would deem a worthier cause, be more admired than the woman’s gift? If both the man and the woman were habitually and happily charitable, they would be equal in generosity. But only one of them could be, in addition, magnificent.

Before we reject Aristotle’s view, we should ask ourselves what we would do if we were choosing a basketball team. If we wanted to win games, would we choose people who tried hard but were relatively short, slow and weak or people who tried hard and were relatively tall, fast and strong? Which type of player would be more worthy of regard, more significant to the success of the team?

Now suppose that our decision about whom to admire more, the generous man or the generous woman in the example above, depended upon which one of them was more important to the functioning of a good college. Would that decision depend upon the size of the benefaction, upon its objective, upon its motive or upon some combination of these considerations? And when we are thinking about lives that matter, can we escape altogether the idea that one measure of a human life’s significance is the number of people whose lives have been improved for the better by that life’s actions and benefactions? Can we assess the relative significance of a life by inquiring into its relative importance to a well-functioning society or political community?

Suppose now that our frame of reference for making such judgments expands from our society or state to a larger horizon of meaning and significance -- to the "kingdom of heaven," for example. The vocabulary of Christian vocation assumes exactly this frame of reference, and it stands in sharp contrast to Aristotle’s notions of magnificence or greatness.

Christian writers have not been in agreement about the concept of vocation, however. Martin Luther, the first of the Reformers to formulate a radically new understanding of the Christian idea of vocation, argued that any kind of regular and legitimate work in the world -- manual labor, parenting, civic activity -- could be a vocation or a calling so long as the Christian did that workout of love for Cod in service to humankind. Most Protestant writers have agreed with Luther on this point.

Seventeenth-century Anglican divine William Perkins argued that all Christians have two callings: a general calling to the Christian life and a particular calling to some kind of productive work. Others have insisted that we have only one Christian calling. So, for example, Gary Badcock has argued that all Christians are called to share in Christ’s mission of love and service to the world, but he does not believe that we should think of all particular jobs as callings. The contemporary philosopher Lee Hardy agrees with Luther in thinking that we have multiple callings as workers, children, neighbors and citizens, but he also believes, like Perkins, that our primary, particular calling is our paid employment and that our problem is to discern and to help one another discern what kind of work we are really called by God to do.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer thought that the idea of vocation had been deeply misunderstood, especially by those among his fellow Lutherans who had used the concept as a way of vindicating the status quo and validating such institutions as marriage and wage labor as preferable to all other social or economic arrangements. Like Badcock, he stressed the "cost of discipleship" wherever we might find ourselves "stationed" in the world. Beyond this, Bonhoeffer also argued that God’s call summons us into responsibility to and for our fellow human beings and for all of creation.

Thus Christians are constantly summoned to break through the sometimes rigid circumscriptions of their roles as parents, citizens or professionals. The responsibilities of a doctor, for example, might at some point include defending medical science itself, not simply caring for the patients.

Authenticity, virtue, vocation: all are widely used vocabularies by which people speak and think about who we are and what we should do. For Christians and for some non-Christians, the vocabulary of vocation holds out the greatest promise for naming and exploring our deepest aspirations and longings. Unlike the vocabulary of virtue, the vocabulary of vocation links questions about paid employment to questions about overall identity. And unlike the vocabulary of authenticity, the vocabulary of vocation suggests that the horizons of meaning that frame our choices lie outside of ourselves.

Moreover, for the Christian, vocation incorporates words and ideas from the other two vocabularies. Following the call of Christ includes the constant exercise of the Christian virtues, along with the classical ones. Like the ethics of authenticity, the vocabulary of vocation also foregrounds the question of our deepest identities, forged finally in communion with others. Nevertheless, Christians insist that we become what we in some sense already are, living out an identity bestowed upon us in baptism, ever mindful of the fact that our own exertions are not by themselves the motive power of sanctification. Our lives are not primarily about us, nor are our lives finally our own. Contrary to the other vocabularies of our culture, the vocabulary of vocation informs us that we are not self-made men and self-made women after all.

Christianity and Academic Soul-searching



With the boom times in higher education over, colleges and universities have been working to renew and sometimes redefine their identities and missions. Within the past few years almost all Christian colleges and universities have sought fresh ways to articulate their religious identity. Simultaneously, large and vocal elements within the secular academy have begun to lose confidence in the Enlightenment conceptions of rationality, objectivity and science that have given intellectual inquiry coherence and vitality. From any number of vantage points, people are wondering whether the American academy is losing its soul.

Such a climate is ripe for the production of jeremiads, and authors such as Page Smith (Killing the Spirit) and the late Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind) have obliged. In comparison to such works, George Marsden's book is a model of judiciousness. Though it has its own prescriptive agenda and point of view, the book is primarily an intellectual history of the development of the modem American university. Its ambitions scope, its thorough research, and its carefully balanced and highly nuanced narrative will make it one of the primary sources of reflection about the shape of higher learning long after many contemporary diatribes have faded from the scene. The book nevertheless is controversial both because of its major historical thesis and because of its prescriptions for what ails the modem university.

Marsden begins with one of the most remarkable events in American history: the founding of a reputable English college (Harvard) on the rim of the North American continent in 1636. Coming only six years into the colonists' massive work of civilization-building, this act expressed the zeal for higher learning that characterized their Protestant faith and social vision. Marsden concludes by reporting on sociologists David Riesman and Christopher Jencks's study of American higher education in the 1960s, which found that Protestant churches were "hardly consequential for the system as a whole." And, as Marsden notes, what they described, others celebrated, including a young theologian soon to join Harvard's faculty. "The whole idea of a 'Christian' college or university after the breaking apart of the medieval synthesis has little meaning," declared Harvey Cox in The Secular City. Thus, Cox argued, the process by which the contemporary university had won its liberation from religious influence could not and should not be resisted.

The Soul of the American University is an account of how an institutional world of overwhelmingly Protestant lineage could become so estranged from the substantive intellectual presence of religion. What changed "the relationship of dominant American academia to American religion" between the founding of a Christian colony's college and the emergence of the secular city's multiversity?

The crucial years were those between 1870 and 1914, when the modern research university emerged. The leading institutions -- Johns Hopkins, Yale, California (Berkeley), Michigan, Harvard, Princeton and Chicago -- set the pace, initiating an academic culture that is with us still. These schools broke from the model of the Christian college that had held sway before the Civil War: they avoided denominational restrictions, abolished the senior course in moral philosophy that had aimed to integrate collegiate studies with a Christian world view, and validated specialized empirical research as the prototype of higher learning.

But why did the fledgling universities take this form?. Why were they "designed in a way that would, virtually guarantee that they would become subversive of the distinctive aspects of their Christian heritage of learning"? Enlightenment philosophy, industrialization, professionalism and the advance of the sciences set the stage, but Marsden's plot does not focus on such impersonal forces.. Instead, the leading characters axe the educators who built and governed these universities -- virtually all of whom were earnest liberal Protestants. These Christians, Marsden argues, gained the world for the American university but lost its soul in the process. What had begun as "Protestant establishment" ended as "established nonbelief."

Initially, the modern university was "part of a single Protestant hope to uplift humanity and usher in an age of redemption." For progressive northern elites, high moral ideals and unfettered intellectual advance went hand in hand. Michigan's President James Angell declared at his 1871 inaugural that "the Christian spirit; which pervades the law, the customs, and the life of the State, shall shape and color the life of the University, that a lofty, earnest, but catholic and unsectarian Christian tone shall characterize the culture which is here imparted." At Johns Hopkins,. President Daniel Coit Gilman authorized the autonomy of science with the declaration that "science simply is an expression of Christianity." At Harvard, Charles W Eliot proclaimed adherence to Christianity but altered its meaning by subordinating "the letter of traditional Christianity to its moral spirit." For Eliot, all creative expressions of the human imagination and all inquiry were manifestations of Christianity.

Princeton's James McCosh objected to such latitude and kept his college closer to the Presbyterianism that had spawned it, but even at Princeton the unsettling effect of scientific reason on religious tradition began to appear.

The impetus to move fully into the liberal Protestant camp came under Woodrow Wilson, who wanted to place Princeton firmly "in the nation's service." Though the roots of this impulse toward service were Protestant, its fruits were more broadly moral and less distinctively Christian.

Time and again liberal Protestants' commitment to serving the public as well as the church provided the theological rationale for decision-making. University leaders resisted denominationally specific theological constraints, devising along the way a civil, understated religious language. As the specificity of their Christianity became diluted, liberal Protestants' identity in the universities rested increasingly on ethnic and class alliances, or on the alliance with secularists against fundamentalism and other perceived bigotries. By the time the 1960s arrived, liberal Protestantism lacked credibility: it was tied historically to a discredited establishment; its claim to be "nonsectarian" was untenable amid the wider pluralism of the late 20th century; and consensus in any form had become suspect. What might in hindsight seem like a subversive design was rather the ironic outcome of an establishment's confidence. Like Gibbon's Roman Empire, the Protestant establishment fell as a result of its own immoderate greatness. That an exclusivist and elitist establishment fell was, Marsden believes, a good thing. That it took theology down with it was not.

Marsden describes himself as a "fairly traditional Protestant of the Reformed theological heritage." He asserts the importance of linking faith to scholarship "not only in theology, but also in considering other dimensions of human thought and relationships." This, he contends, the modern university does not allow. He does not. want a return to the Protestant establishment's hegemony over universities as a whole. .Moreover, to refute historical methodology of his books bears witness to his own embrace of one of the keftenets of modern academic life: "procedural rationality." And yet Marsden writes as one aggrieved at the religious outcome of the development of the university.

For instance, although Marsdens narrative absolves liberal Protestant educators of deliberately causing secularization, his portrayal of their active complicity in the process suggests that the outcome might have been different had developments rested in more theologically astute hands. But was a Christian university under the auspices of "traditional Protestantism" ever possible in the post-Civil War United States? And is one possible now? Marsden's answer to these questions is not entirely clear. He works hard to develop a feeling of contingency, a sense that the process of secularization or the disestablishment of religion was not inevitable. This effort is undermined by his elaborately defended decision to exclude from his discussion any sustained attention to either Catholic or Protestant church-related colleges. Though his focus on the "flagship" universities is otherwise sensible, these omissions make it nearly impossible for the reader to imagine any plausible historical alternative to the scenario he presents.

When Marsden does turn to alternative institutions, the results of the survey are not encouraging. He looks briefly at Abraham Kuyper and the Free University of Amsterdam as an "alternative to the American

model," but his examination is so hurried as to tacitly concede its irrelevance to the American context. Roman Catholicism did manage to maintain a distinctive identity during the period of liberal Protestant capitulation to secularism, but according to Marsden it did so "at the price of accepting Roman authoritarianism and severe restraints on its intellectual life." The difficulties with "strongly religious" colleges even today, much less between 1870 and 1920, are sometimes buried in Marsden's notes, as when he admits that academic due process is often absent from such schools and "dictatorial rule is particularly common."

Are there churches willing to contribute their members, riches and practices to an essentially public venture of the human mind which they judge to be good but which they do not seek to control? Those concerned about contact between higher learning and Christianity need to examine not only the condition of religion in dominant intellectual centers but also the condition of intellect in dominant religious centers. It takes two to make a marriage, even a strained one. Marsden believes that "the free exercise of religion does not extend to the dominant intellectual centers of our culture." To which one must respond: the free exercise of intellect often does not extend to the dominant religious centers of our culture.

Stating the converse is more complicated than it might seem, however, because of hidden in the little word "free." In current discourse it carries Enlightenment connotations of autonomous rationality that many religious groups would not include in their understandings of the intellectual life. Confessional and hierarchical traditions, including Catholic and some Reformed and Lutheran traditions, contain ways of construing "freedom" that do not equate it with autonomous rationality. At their best, such traditions have maintained a rationality that is inseparable from religious starting points (a rationality such as that discussed in Nicholas Wolterstorff's Reason Within the Bounds of Religion Alone), and have also sponsored intellectual work that can bring a critical intelligence to bear on nature, human society and the arts. They are not only confessions; they are also traditions of discernment and critical self-reflection. When they operate authentically, they genuinely seek knowledge, in full awareness of the distorting effects of interest on inquiry. We agree with Maxsden that within the pluralism of the modern academy, scholarship and teaching that draw upon these intellectual traditions are likely to add to the common store of knowledge and should be allowed.

But whoever advocates a greater play for religion within the academy must also see that these intellectual perspectives can and often do manifest themselves in "dominant religious centers" -- actual ecclesiastical entities - that can unacceptably constrain the inquiry to which intellectuals, including Christian intellectuals, are committed. Ask the scholars who, despite their deep loyalty to the long-term heritage of their tradition, have fallen victim to fundamentalist opponents.

The estrangement between academy and church recounted in The Soul of the American University has implications not only for the position of religion within the university, but also for the position of intellectual life within the church. This estrangement takes different forms and causes different problems in diverse segments of American Christianity. For liberal and other oldline Protestants, one highly significant result has been theology's professionalization, specialization and detachment from the churches. The greatest theologians in this tradition, up to and including Reinhold Niebuhr, were parish pastors without Ph.D.s; their educators once envisioned an alliance between university and church for the sake of lay education in biblical studies. Now most first-rate theology is written for academic readers, while pastoral theology often tips toward unsophisticated humanistic psychology, and there is a huge gap between lay and clerical views of the Bible. In more conservative circles, the estrangement between the church and the academy can take the form of various intellectual tribalisms. Whether on the left or on the right, laypeople who do not understand that the Christian life requires hard thinking are easy prey to the enthusiasms and idolatries of class, ethnicity and mass culture.

Though Marsden may think that the secularization of the American university was inevitable, he definitely does not think that the "virtual exclusion of religious perspectives from the most influential centers of American intellectual life" was either inevitable or justifiable. In his conclusion he advocates two strategies of modest opposition to the dominant orientation of academe. Leveraging the pluralistic stance of the contemporary academy to the advantage of faith-informed scholarship, he argues that academic freedom must be granted as fully to Christian scholars as it is to feminists and other committed researchers. And he encourages institutional pluralism -- the development of a variety of colleges and universities that permit religion to shape their central activities.

Marsden claims that academics who openly demonstrate and defend the connections between their religious convictions and their scholarly work have been excluded or persecuted in the academy. He has eloquently presented this claim in various forums, but thus far his evidence has been anecdotal and somewhat impressionistic. Some Christian scholars believe that Marsden has exaggerated the extent of such persecution, while others argue that the main problem is not persecution but Christian self-censor-ship. On the other hand, Marsden offers convincing evidence of discrimination against excellent Christian colleges and universities, especially Catholic ones, by honor societies like Phi Beta Kappa, by various accrediting agencies and by the American Association of University Professors.

Marsden's pleas for genuine pluralism within and among institutions of higher learning are attractive: Yet they ought to lead him to a greater measure of sympathy for the liberal Protestant figures he has studied. After he has argued convincingly for authentically pluralistic communities of inquiry that include forceful and articulate religious perspectives, he grants that, without the Enlightenment consensus that for so long supplied the common ground upon which academics fought out and sometimes settled their intellectual conflicts, his prescribed academy might legitimate outright nonsense or deteriorate into warring tribes. He therefore insists that "what may be called procedural rationality is still crucial and that "religious viewpoints" must be "willing to operate within the procedural rules of universities." This is well and good, but Maxsden should acknowledge that the shift from substantive to procedural rationality -- one of the crucial features of modernity -- was one of the key steps taken under liberal Protestantism's stewardship of academic life.

We could add to Marsden's proposals a third constructive approach to engaging Christianity and academic institutions-one that addresses the relationship between the intellectual life of the churches and the religious life of the university. This might be done by highlighting the ways in which university-based intellectual work can serve the intellectual integrity of religious communities. In Marsden's account, as in that of other historians, the most transformative force in higher education has been the political economy. "The bottom line was that the new universities were designed to serve an emerging industrial technological society. The professionalization of the universities was part of the much larger process of differentiation and specialization necessary for industrial and commercial advance." The university's liberal Protestant leaders supported this national economic purpose not only by virtue of their class location but also as an extension of their religious hopes. Not realizing that they were sowing the seeds of their own displacement, they contributed the theme of "service" to describe the role of the university in fulfilling this need of a privileged constituency

Whom does the intellectual work of today's academics serve? In many fields, business and industry are still high on the list. In all fields a great deal of research merely fuels the engines of tenure and promotion. Excellent research can, however, influence public policy or increase public understanding of important issues. Some research serves in yet another way -- to deepen, stimulate, challenge or correct the memory, the imagination and the analytical skills of specific groups. Feminist scholarship provides the most obvious example of this today. Marsden and several other fine historians have served in just this way through their scholarly studies of American evangelicalism. They demonstrate that university-based research can indirectly serve religious movements and institutions without being subservient to them, and without losing its character as scholarship worthy of the university.

Many other academics, including some whose work appears in the CENTURY, devote their skills and insights to serving the movements to which they axe committed. Such efforts themselves smack of liberal Protestantism: they seek to put the university, or at least some scholars within it, in the service of the public good. American intellectuals have a stake in the intellectual integrity and thoughtfulness of American churches and synagogues, and of a wide range of other cultural groups as well. These groups need accurate, critical research on the society and culture within which they operate, and on the intellectual and institutional resources they have inherited and will carry into the future. And the society as a whole needs to be reminded that investigation, deliberation and disciplined conversation axe vital to its well-being.

A fourth constructive step we could take would be to look back beyond the birth of the modern research university to reclaim some of the aims of earlier Christian colleges in forms appropriate to our time. The hegemony of the secular research university has proved more durable and imposing than even Riesman, Jencks and Cox could have imagined in the 1960s. But our culture longs for models of human excellence that extend far beyond mere technical competence and that temper the pride of intellect with wisdom and charity. We also long for discerning people who are trained to see life steadily and to see it whole. Some Christian colleges and universities seek to nurture such excellence in their students and in themselves. In order for such aspirations to be credible, however, these schools must construe their existence as an interminable struggle between faith and reason rather than as the articulation of settled, clear positions. They should be identified more by the questions they keep alive than by the answers they give. And they must attend as much to the formation of character as to the cultivation of intelligence. To paraphrase Whitehead: Christian colleges must seek Enlightenment and then distrust it.

Marsden might well agree with much of this, even though the stance we advocate bears the unmistakable marks of liberalism. In any case, his book should be a major stimulus for thinking through the relationship between religion and higher education. The attention Marsden's book will receive in the secular academy will challenge his claim that universities largely ignore or denigrate scholarship explicitly informed by religious perspectives. As academics articulate their yearnings and wage their conflicts, he may find that he is not as embattled as he thinks.



 

Educational Process, Feminist Practice

Concentrating on the "practices" of Christianity enables us to think about education in new ways. Identifying practices as the sites of learning in theological education allows us to avoid some common "divisions" in thinking about education and calls for the development of new language to name the process of education.

In most contemporary views of theological education, the task of education is to provide the individual with some sense of ordered learning. The focus is on the transmission of ideas. Many curriculums and pedagogics follow this assumption: that one begins with foundational courses that provide introductory materials and then directs students up the ladder, so to speak, in more and more advanced mastery of the subject matter.

In recent work on theological education the constructive suggestions usually return or remain limited to questions of how to order cognitive learning. Edward Farley, for instance, suggests the notion of theologia as a type of reflective wisdom, a suggestion quite close to feminist concerns for education as a whole process. But when Farley provides his own constructive hints at how to accomplish this process, his suggestions are about cognitive ordering. As Craig Dykstra has observed, Farley tends to limit the scope of his understanding of "cognition" to linguistic and logical -- mathematical realms. Howard Gardner, whom Dykstra cites, has identified seven kinds of intelligence, or what we might call ways of knowing: linguistic, musical, logical -- mathematical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, and two personal forms (that might be called feeling and intuition). While Farley's call for theologia invites an expanded vision of education beyond a new rearranging of "ordered" learning, his constructive suggestions, at least thus far, are limited to revisions of cognitive learning.

The same type of criticism of unrealized potential can be made against David Kelsey's constructive suggestions in To Understand God Truly. Though Kelsey draws attention to practices when he moves to issues of actual change and transformation in theological education, his concern is mainly with disciplines. And though he accepts Farley's aim of habitus, he argues that the way to achieve such reflective wisdom is to continue the types of critical thinking that have dominated modernity.

The advantage of focusing on the practices of a specific movement, within theological education such as feminism is that it both requires and allows a fuller range of forms of knowing. To focus on practices shifts our gaze away from the gap between ideas and their applications and causes us to look at how people are already engaged in a set of practices in and through which they are constructing and organizing ideas. Feminist practices as social activities require us to be sensitive to "knowing" as an intersubjective and embodied process; knowing appeals to an anthropology that is both communal and physical.

Feminist theorists of education have often pointed out that "knowing" for women has to be understood in terms of physical presence, relationships with students and faculty and connections between feelings and ideas. The book Women's Ways of Knowing identifies the following kinds of knowledge: received, subjective (in terms of the inner voice and the quest for self), procedural (reason as well as separate and connected knowing) and constructed. The text then offers some suggestions for reconceiving knowledge and education based on the actual practices of women. Likewise, Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought develops what she calls an "Afrocentric feminist epistemology" based on the practices of concrete experience as a criterion of meaning, the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims, the ethic of caring and an ethic of accountability.

In an investigation of feminist practices at least three themes emerge within each practice: justice, dialogue and imagination. Utilizing these themes, I want to move toward conceiving education as a process and not merely a product. I want to contend that feminist theology both requires and contributes a process of education that is a training in justice, dialogue and imagination, even as it is an implantation of ideas from the past.

Justice. At the conclusion of God's Fierce Whimsy, the women of the Mud Flower Collective contend that "the fundamental goal of theological education must be the doing of justice." Likewise, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza places the doing of justice at the center of theological education:

I have argued that theology and theological education must be conceived as a transformative discursive praxis that critically reflects on the concrete historical -- political configurations and theological practices of Christian communities which have engendered and still engender the exclusion and dehumanization of "the others" of free born, educated and propertied men in Western society. At the same time it must seek to articulate alternative communal visions and values for the human community on the brink of atomic annihilation.

Justice, as a basic theme of theological education, is central to each practice of feminist theological education. In narrativity -- the practice of composing a new narrative of one's life, one that is different from the one originally scripted -- a communicative possibility of justice prevails: each person gets a voice in self -- determination. The activity of writing one's life in relation to self, others and earth is an act of being drawn out, learning to shape and be shaped in right relationship. In the creation of a new egalitarian community, the church as a counter --public of justice names a space in which ways of justice are modeled and formed. Justice defines the nature and mission of the ekklesia. And in the feminist practice of theology, justice is central to the braiding together of ethics and epistemology in the formation of new meanings and functions of symbols and in the development of new discursive practices.

Visions of justice are central to the new symbols and new meanings of symbols in theology. Justice as a key to the symbolic life of Christianity is represented not only in feminist theology but also in African -- American, Latin American and other forms of liberation theology. Within the various theologies of liberation movements, the symbolic construction of justice seeks to express the dialectical movement within the function of Christian symbols: justice enables us to name faith, and faith symbols reconceived as justice allow us to envision new spaces of life together.

But theological education is not just about justice; it is, in a sense, justice itself. We need to conceive of theological education as the doing of "ordered" learning, imaginative envisioning and dialogue. In American history the parallel referent, and that which feminist theology continues, is the understanding of education as the training of citizens. Justice names not simply the goal but the process itself.

Sharon Welch has called for a contemporary sense of this same notion of education in her language of communicative ethics. Welch argues that justice can be central only with the material and discursive relations between different groups. And this communicative ethic, as a basic shape of the education process, is based on solidarity. Solidarity, according to Welch, includes both the granting of mutual respect by different groups and, at the same time, recognition of the interdependency of different groups.

Dialogue. Justice, as a theme of education, is intertwined with solidarity, communication and dialogue. Welch is critical of Jürgen Habermas and others who focus on the ideal of conversation, assuming that the "other" has simply been "excluded" from the conversation. Welch asks, "If the inclusion of women and minorities is simply a matter of extension, why has it been so long in coming?" Dialogue requires real interaction among embodied persons, with openness and respect for mutual critique.

In theological education this material interaction might be envisioned as the creation of dialogical spaces. Theological education involves a series of quite physical spaces: classrooms, hallways and worship places, and sites of spirituality groups and committee meetings. These physical spaces are filled with the bodies of students, faculty and staff representing many differences that have come to define American Christianity and American culture.

The spaces of theological education, filled with persons who are different and seeking justice, are already "dialogical" places where lives meet and where bodies interact on physical, emotional and linguistic levels. In feminist theological education, these spaces are places where solidarity begins and where freedom occurs. As Maxine Greene has suggested, "We might think of freedom as an opening of spaces as well as perspectives." Within feminist theological education, education is a dialogical process of concrete encounter enacted through classes, worship and committees. Education is about social interaction, and even reason within education is dialogical and communicative.

"Conversation" has become a key term in analyzing the reading and writing of texts. David Tracy suggests that reading a text is like having a genuine conversation and must be distinguished from idle chatter, debate, confrontation and gossip. Tracy's model of conversation, which he adapts from Hans-Georg Gadamer, is defined as letting the subject matter take over, forgetting one's own self and, letting understanding occur. Tracy's conversation model provides us with a way of regarding understanding as not merely getting the facts in, but as a "disclosive" encounter. Conversation entails risk and leads to transformation.

As a kind of model for dialogue, Tracy's notion gives us key ingredients: understanding, risk and transformation. Yet in relation to the theme of justice, Tracy's model needs to be challenged at an essential point: the emphasis on forgetting one's self. At least within feminist practices of theological education, true understanding occurs as the "concrete" self is affirmed and understood. Dialogue that attempts to abstract from concrete selves too often results in a privileging of a particular self who becomes the ideal model of conversation. Justice and the quest for emancipation require that dialogue is always among embodied and embedded selves who speak in their own voices and develop connections, including struggles and conflicts, within their actual context.

Imagination. With the stress on material as well as discursive practices leading to transformation and the struggle and desire for new hope of justice, imagination is central to education. Imagination, the ability to think the new, is an act of survival. Yet the imagination is rarely explicit in the educational process and is usually relegated to a few elective courses emphasizing how to use music in worship.

Feminist theology makes imagination central, since the saving work of theology requires new imaginative visions. Central to feminist theological practice is recognizing the unrealized possibilities in a situation. Imagination, Iris Young tells us, "is the faculty of transforming the experience of what is into a projection of what could be, the faculty that frees thought to form ideals and norms." And feminist ecclesiology is based on imagination in terms of envisioning the church in new spaces. The practice of narrativity -- writing new life scripts-is also imaginative: it entails the ability to imagine new possibilities for our lives and for the world.

Within feminist theology and feminist practices of theological education, this need and quest for reimagining means not only specific acts of reconstruction but also the inclusion of literature and poetry as sources of theological reflection. In many cases these are the written documents by women, and their use is central to the inclusion of "tradition" in feminist theology. Such prose and poetry not only represent what women wrote but also teach us an imaginative process of reconstructing women's lives, the church, and the very nature of reflection as aimed toward the future. Feminist theology includes poetic revisioning, aesthetic production and imaginative construction.

It is ironic, in some ways, that modern theology and theological education have paid so little explicit attention to imagination and methods of imaginative revisioning. Modern theology, in thinkers such as Barth and Schleiermacher, Tillich and Rahner and the Niebuhr brothers, used imaginative revisioning to allow theology as the discourse of faith to survive the onslaught of modern rationality. Yet with the rare exception of thinkers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jonathan Edwards, the dimensions of imagination, beauty and aesthetics were not emphasized as central to theological method.

The emphasis on imagination must not be seen as some romantic turn in any negative sense. Indeed, contemporary epistemologies increasingly emphasize the metaphorical and aesthetic bases of all forms of knowing. To bring imagination to the center of the educational process may well be one of the most crucial requirements of forming new ways of knowing and new ways of learning.

Feminist practices of theological education point us toward the conversation that needs to occur about theological education. In feminist practices the intertwining of the theological and

the educational in specific practices means that rather than hold only to the narrow notion of "ordered learning" as the product of education, we can begin to experiment and explore a broader and more creative notion of education as process. If we examine other practices of theological education, we can extend and enrich this view of education as a process, rather than a product. Central to my suggestion is the belief that change and transformation in theological education will never be achieved through curriculum reform alone. Rather, we must expand our discourse about theological education into the fuller range of educational process.

I suggest we begin to redefine "theological education" in at least three ways. First, theological education is about relationships formed, the style of teaching, and the extracurricular activities as well as the curriculum. The question of pedagogical styles to encourage and train the imagination requires attention both because of emergent practices and because of the desire for change and transformation. Or, to take another example, the notion of all education as individually focused may need to be decentered (not necessarily replaced) with a notion of education as communal cooperative activity. There is an enormous range of practices, relationships, activities and structures that are as important in theological education as is the curriculum. We need ways to speak of these from within particular movements and ways to speak on a more general level.

Education may well be about "what we do" as well as "what we say." If theological education is about merely the ordered learning of cognitive ideas, then finding the right curriculum will solve all the current problems in theological education. But if knowing God is as much a matter of right relationships as it is a mastery of correct ideas, then the present crisis of theological education cannot be fixed merely by reordering the curriculum. New relationships of imagination, of justice, of dialogue must be formed in the midst of a pluralistic world and new forms of relating, teaching and community building will have to be developed. The how of learning is directly related, in this notion of theological education as a process, to the what of learning. Indeed, the task for the subjects of theological education may be as much the making of new forms of relationships to God, self, others, traditions and society as the articulation of right ideas.

Second, theological education is formed in and through cultural problematics -- such as the tremendous changes in women's lives, the problems of binary ordering and patriarchal oppression, and the role of intellectual work as "saving" work. Furthermore, central to my focus on practices and theology within these practices is an emphasis on cultural contexts within education.

A great many other "cultural" problematics or issues must also be addressed -- global concerns

and concerns of racism, multiculturalism and technology. To ignore or belittle these cultural

problematics in theological education is, to use the old proverb, like trying to ignore the elephant standing in the middle of the living room. These issues are present in the lives of students, teachers and staff. They represent the dominant questions and possibilities for reflection and construction; they provide the material through which learning can be about praxis, or reflective, intentional living in Christian community.

In the tradition of pragmatist John Dewey, education is always a "public" activity, concerned with providing people with resources for reflection on and transformation of the environment. In feminist practices, theology itself is about such "saving work." To learn to address the current issues of the day in light of the past, present and future reality of Christian praxis is to make education a process of doing, rather than merely learning about, theology. And to take seriously the cultural problematies through which specific practices are formulated is to begin to explore and identify connections between theological education and the local community from which the students (and often faculty) come and to which they return.

Third, the symbolic patterns of religion and culture are inherently a part of theological education and need careful attention. Thinking about theological education as a participation in the symbolic will include the construction and engagement in present and future symbolic patterns as well as understanding and interpreting symbolic thought in past centuries. Students are taught the symbolic patterns of past centuries, and they should be taught how these symbols and ideas functioned within the practices of the time. But students and teachers also need to engage in the symbolic struggles of our day. Education, at least within a feminist vision, is about forming persons to be symbolic constructors, about training persons to be poets as well as interpreters.

One pressing issue in newly envisioning the symbolic patterning of Christianity is the concern for patterning that is open to bicultural and bilingual forms. As Christians in the U.S. learn to live with many different voices and cultures, one of the greatest needs in theological education will be to form persons in symbolic biculturalism -- the ability to move and flourish amid various symbolic patterns. If students and faculty can learn how to read and anticipate the symbolic structures of their cultures, and to read and anticipate symbolic constructs in a bicultural fashion, theological education will speak to the needs of the day. To compare different cultures, past and present, in terms of how Christ, for instance, is imaged, functions, conceptualized and so on is to enter a kind of bicultural symbolic analysis.

By thinking about theological education as a process of the intertwining of theology and education, in and through practices, within which different voices reflect and, construct practices of theological education, we can arrive at some sense of how to transform theological education. As I have indicated, change and transformation will be offered from new voices and new perspective -- new voices representing the pluralism within culture as a whole and within theological education, and new perspectives that allow us to speak about practices and utopian visions within these practices. Change and transformation occur, within this model, by tracing out the unrealized possibilities in the present.

The way forward is through a thick description of the present, including identifying emergent possibilities in the present. Clifford Geertz defines thick description as "an elaborate venture in" the "piled -- up structures of inference and implication" in human events and structures. To discuss change and transformation in theological education will be an elaborate venture of hearing different voices speak from their perspectives. Within all this speaking and hearing, creating thick descriptions of theological education will lead us not to an idea about ultimate aims (though that inference may also be included!) but to pile up structures of inference and implication within an intricate network of education as a process.