Written by David Talbert   

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not, Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan, suckled in creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. By William Wordsworth

Sir James Goldsmith’s says in ‘The Trap’ (1993) “Science, technology and the economy have been treated by modern societies as ends in themselves. The increase in scientific knowledge, the development of new technologies and economic growth are pursed as if they, and not well-being, should be objectives of human effort. Social stability and sometimes entire cultures are sacrificed in the pursuit of these goals. I believe that this inversion of values is the cause of many of our social ills.”

Christian’s may note a faint echo of the Apostle Paul’s admonition in Romans 12:2 where he says “Don’t be conformed to this world”.

Most readers of RSN and other progressive web sites have heard, read articles and or books by MIT scholar, activist and linguist Noam Chomsky, environmentalists Naomi Cline and Bill McKibben, journalist Glen Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and Amy Goodman, scholar, economist and professor emeritus Richard Wolff, politicians Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and other brave and intrepid souls who are currently commenting on the state of affairs in this nation and the world. It is not my intention to rehash what they have so eloquently and cogently expressed. The vast majority of us sense something is wrong but can’t quite put our finger on the reason why. I want to add my thoughts which I believe are missing in the current discussion. The poem at the beginning of the article speaks to this. We as human beings are out of balance and harmony.

I graduated from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA in 1997 with an M.A. in Theology; by no means a conservative Seminary like Bob Jones Seminary in South Carolina nor a liberal Seminary like Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, CA. I recall sitting in one of my Systemic Theology classes listening to Dr. Ray Anderson tell a story from his life as a boy on a farm in the Midwest (Iowa, I think). It was a story about a long dirt road heavily traveled by four wheel wagons. Over time these wagon wheels began making an indention in the road that became a rut. As time passed, the rut became deeper and deeper. If a wagon entered this rut, the wagon had to follow this rut to its end due to the rut being so deep the wagon could not detour right or left. This is an appropriate analogy/story, I think, for present day evangelical conservative Christians and the current Republican Party. Both are stuck in an ideological rut which doesn’t tolerate a detour right or left and thus doesn’t tolerate critical thinking. Over time conservative Christians and Republicans have created theologies and world views from which they cannot escape. In a nutshell with conservative Christians it’s about the resurrection and deity of Jesus and with Republicans it is about taxes and capitalism.

In November of 1992, Galileo was exonerated by the Catholic Church for his accused heresy, which held that the earth revolved around the sun. The investigation that cleared Galileo began in 1980 and lasted for twelve and one-half years. The work of the Inquisition in 1633 was finally undone three hundred and fifty-nine years later. Unfortunately, closed-mindedness is often undone even more slowly. Individuals who never question their assumptions and belief systems are similarly closed-minded. How can one assimilate new observations and new knowledge when one’s mind is blinded by old beliefs and by untested old ideas? Knowledge can only flow into minds that are open. Hermeneutics is a branch of theology that deals with the principles of Biblical exegesis and the interpretation of scripture. The hermeneutical horizon would be the ongoing (over time) interpretation of scripture. Once a horizon has arrived a new appears; and so on; you never actually arrive at the horizon as it is always in front of you. It is not a fixed point.

The story of humans is the story of ideas; scientific ideas that shine light into dark corners, ideas that we embrace rationally and irrationally, ideas for which we've lived and died and killed and been killed, ideas that have vanished in history, and ideas that have been set in dogma. It's a story of nations, of ideologies, of territories, and of conflicts among them. For many millennia, humans have been on a journey to find answers, answers to questions about naturalism and transcendence, about who we are and why we are, and of course, who else might be out there. Is it really just us? Humanities greatest wisdom traditions are given not to compete with each other but to complete each other. I am constantly amazed by the short-sightedness of most people and can’t help but think that conservative evangelicals believe that biblical interpretation is frozen for all time. I guess their theology gives them a sense of security/certainty in a frightening and complex world full of ambiguity. What we hear from evangelical conservative Christians today is similar to the Pharisees of Jesus’ time just repackaged 2,000 years later with Jesus as the focus instead of Jewish law. As has been said by Malcom Muggeridge ‘all news is old news happening to new people’.

“If Christians had actually done what Jesus taught us to do, namely love our enemy, the world would long ago have been transformed.” (Mahatma Gandhi) Phillip Gulley in his book ‘If the Church Were Christian?’ makes a compelling argument that counters the prevailing thought among modern day conservative evangelicals. The first chapter sets the tone stating Jesus would be a model for living rather than an object of worship. Ask any evangelical which is primary, the thought of living like a Christian or worshiping Jesus, I would wager evangelicals would say worshiping Jesus. My own reading of Jesus is that he never meant to be worshiped as a deity.

The greatest commandment is one of, if not the, primary text of the Bible.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with your soul, and with your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Mt 22:37-40)

Have you ever stopped to dwell on the fact that there is no source of darkness? Darkness is only the absence of light. ‘God is light and in him there is no darkness’ 1st John 1:5 and ‘No one has ever seen God. God is love.’ Love is observable, powerful. Love is like fluid. It fills up crevices and empty spaces of its own accord. Humans did not create love. It is we, people, who stop it by erecting false barriers. When love cannot fill our hearts and our minds, when we are disconnected from our souls, which consists of love, then we all go CRAZY. I might add that modern culture is insane, at least in the U.S. French philosopher Simone Weil says ‘we are created for love. There is no other energy that can truly bring together, individually or collectively what has been torn apart by fear and hatred. Love frees us from our bondage to the ego.’ With love comes understanding and wisdom. You are beginning to touch God within yourself. Since everything is energy, and love encompasses all energies, all is love. This a strong clue to the nature of God. There is an ineffable difference between human love and God’s love. God’s love is ubiquitous and perfect beyond human understanding/imagination and forgiving of everyone and everything for eternity. Salvation is not an event it is a lifelong process that leads to understanding and wisdom: any of the major religions can lead one to believe she/he is saved. There will never be a universal theology. But, there can be a universal understanding: Only Love Is Real. This I believe is at the heart of the hypocrisy of conservative evangelical Christians. The Christian church has become so enthralled with the messenger it has neglected the message. The evangelical church has come to the point where believing in Jesus as the savior is paramount rather than understanding and living his message.

Denial, the act of not seeing what is in right before our eyes, because you really don’t want to see, is the greatest disguise. It is the foremost sign of addiction. All of us are equal beneath our exteriors. All of us are equally important. It is not only that we are capable of becoming loving and spiritual people who are charitable, kind and peaceful, filled with serenity and joy, we already are. We have just forgotten, and our egos and culture seem to prevent us from remembering. “Yes, if truth is not undergirded by love, it makes the possessor of that truth obnoxious and the truth repulsive.” (Ravi Zacharias) The so called moral issues which so anger the Christian right are not moral issues but human issues that demand understanding, inclusion and acceptance by all without judgment. LGBT’s as with each of us are part of the human family and equally loved by God. These so called moral issues are about the marvelous diversity of the human family.

Arendt's book “Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Banality of Evil” introduced the expression ‘the banality of evil’. Arendt says Eichmann's inability to think for himself (a rut) was exemplified by his consistent use of ‘stock phrases and self-invented clichés’, demonstrating his unrealistic worldview and crippling lack of communication skills through reliance on ‘officialese’ (doctrine) and the euphemistic that made implementation of Hitler's policies ‘somehow palatable’. This sounds so familiar of many conservative evangelicals I read and hear.

Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig says in his book Republic Lost “Yet today such agitation (protests) is not a sign of healthy life. It is a symptom of ignorance. For though the challenge we face is again the battle against a democracy deflected by special interests, our struggle is not against evil or even the authors of evil. Our struggle is against something much more banal. Not the banal in the now overuse of Hannah Arendt’s the banality of evil of ordinary people enabling unmatched evil. Our banality is one step more, well, banal. For the enemy we face is not Hitler. Neither is it the good German who would enable a Hitler. Our enemy is the good German (us) who would enable a harm infinitely less profound, yet economically and politically catastrophic nonetheless. A harm caused by a kind of corruption. But not the corruption engendered by evil souls indeed, strange as this might sound, a corruption crafted by good souls. By decent men and women. And if we’re to do anything about this corruption, we must learn to agitate against more than evil. We must remember that harm sometimes comes from timid, even pathetic souls, that the enemy doesn’t always march, sometimes it simply shuffles. We have created an engine of influence (special interest and money) that seeks not some particular strand of political or economic ideology. We have created instead an engine of influence that seeks simply to make those most connected rich.”

Russell Brand in his book Revolution says “When traveling in impoverished regions in galling luxury, as I have done, you have to undergo some high-wire ethical arithmetic to legitimize your position. If you cannot separate yourself from poverty geographically, then you have to do it ideologically. You have to believe inequality is ok. You have to accept the ideas that segregate us from one another and nullify your human instinct for fairness. This great sense of fairness we humans have is found in humans everywhere but studies show that it’s less pronounced in environments where people are exposed to marketing. Capitalist consumer culture inures us to unfairness”. Personally, human nature has not changed all that much in 3,000 years.”

“The great crisis among us is the crisis of ‘the common good’ the sense of community solidarity that binds all in a common destiny; haves and have not’s, the rich and the poor. We face a crisis about the common good because there are powerful forces at work among us to resist the common good, to violate community solidarity, and to deny a common destiny. Mature people, at their best, are people who are committed to the common good that reaches beyond private interest, transcends sectarian commitments and offers human solidarity.” Journey To The Common Good by Walter Brueggemann. For those not aware of Walter Brueggemann, he is arguably the foremost expert/scholar of the Old Testament.

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. (Exodus 20:17)

“This commandment is not about petty acts of envy. It is about the predatory practices and aggressive policies that make the little ones vulnerable to the ambitions of the big ones. In a rapacious economic system, nobody’s house and nobody’s field and nobody’s wife and nobody’s oil are safe from a stronger force” (Journey to the Common Good). My reading of Jesus is that he always, always put people before religious doctrine, religious laws and economics of the day.

Accepting and tacitly (banal) participating in an evil, no matter how small is nothing less than a denial of truth. It is commonplace in the U.S. to ignore or fail to understand how the policies, both business and political, of the U.S. towards other peoples and even its own citizens are harmful to human beings and the planet we live on. In the United States, the Republican Party, capitalism and conservative evangelicals have for far too long adamantly maintained the exceptionalism of the United States in the world. We are commonly against ‘the endless war' of course, but we do a lesser job on the sense of consumer entitlement that we and our children inhale daily and that we take thoughtlessly as our birthright.

Brueggemann says “If one studies the Old Testament, one can see a collision course in ancient Israel, long in coming but certainly not to be escaped. The Jerusalem enterprise was increasingly narcotized by its sense of entitlement; it imagined itself exempt from the starchy requirements of the historical process, and so delivered its beneficiaries wondrous privilege and security under the aegis of a patron God.” That entitlement is alive and well today in the United States.

Transferring costs from the rich to the poor or moving business oversees to exploit a local population is the standard device of improving efficiency and profit. I believe the authors of WHY NATIONS FAIL have something to offer in the discussion of current economic and social strife. The book’s thesis centers around nations with inclusive economic and political structures vs nations with extractive economic and political structures. History is littered with examples of reform movements that succumbed to the iron law of oligarchy and replaced one set of extractive institutions with even more pernicious ones. What is common among the political revolutions that successfully paved the way for more inclusive institutions and the gradual institutional changes in North America and England in the nineteenth century is that they succeeded in empowering a fairly broad cross section of society. Pluralism, the cornerstone of inclusive political institutions, requires political power to be widely held in society, not as in extractive institutions that vest powers in a narrow elite. This requires a process of empowerment. This nation seems to be in a slow process (a shuffle to use Lessig’s language) of moving the national narrative of economic and political inclusion toward a state of economic and political exclusion. Witnessed among other things by the rise of the oligarchy of the rich, influence of money in politics, growing income inequality, taxation policy (present and proposed by republican candidates), war on women, mass incarceration, a growing police state, austerity politics/economics and voting right suppression.

Citizens must agitate (protest), agitate (march) and agitate with purpose, knowledge and with an understanding that Republican ideology, capitalism and the evangelical right are deflecting a conversation on human wellbeing toward the pernicious denial of the common good. As Noam Chomsky has said in a recent article ‘Corporations and the Rich Viscerally Oppose the Common Good’. This journey must be made again and again because the kingdom of power and inordinate self-interest has an immense capacity to nullify the alternative of good, inclusion of all and to obliterate the journey to the common good. The journey to the common good must be taken again and again, lest we submit to the kingdom of oligarchy that would have us believe what is normal, have us join the rat race, and imagine that living in a national security state is a normal environment for humanness. Such captivity of the human spirit must be again and again challenged, for its that captivity that makes it possible to commit aggressive brutalizing war in the name of democratic freedom, to tolerate acute poverty in an economy of affluence, most especially without an adequate health-care system, and to sustain policies of abuse of the environment, all in the name of nurturing the economy. We are in a contemporary contest of narratives in the world today as old as civilization itself, a contest in which the shape of our society is at stake, one in which the character and the conduct of the church is at stake. Forces at work, in my thinking, are: big business, capitalism (in its present form) and their supporters in politics and the religious right.

The journey from anxious scarcity to neighborly common good has been peculiarly entrusted to the church and its allies. This is where I believe ‘The Banality of Evil’ enters the picture and precisely where conservative evangelicals stake their claim: JESUS. Contestation for the common good is an endless project. That contest is a summons and a vexation in the church, because of our own double-mindedness. When the church only echoes the world’s kingdom of self-interest and the Kingdom of Oligarchic control where economic power becomes political power, then it has failed in its vocation. But if the faith church keeps the task of living out a journey that points to the common good then it is fulfilling its purpose.” Yet, presently, the church is silent. I have heard little to nothing that challenges the prevailing world view and practices of modern culture, except perhaps the Pope’s recent encyclical and his recent message to both houses of congress and the UN General Assembly.

Shortly after graduating from Fuller Seminary in 1997 I came to believe Republican ideology and big business (corporations, domestic and international) are anti-family, anti-human and anti-environment. Conservative evangelicals who support and adhere to this ideology of extractive capitalism (see Richard Wolff’s ‘Democracy at Work’ for a possible alternative) must be grouped with this movement whether or not they consider themselves to be Christians. Current Republican ideology and current evangelical Christian theology are both exclusionary, self- centered and elitist. As a contributor to Reader Supporter News has said Republicans are using the evangelical right. “We have allowed an economy of influence to evolve in our government a dependence on the influence of corruption”. (Republic Lost) Actually, it is also a corruption of our soul, individually, collectively and corporately. Over time, humans seem to take a good thing and corrupt it. We can’t seem to help it. Humans need an outside source, God, to give commandments and humans need a democratic functioning government (with a moral core based on fairness and justice for all) to make regulations that are enforced. Both to deal with spiritual and existential issues.