Liberalism’s chickens are coming home to roost and, without serious electoral reforms, our nation is on the edge of losing all hope for renewal.
Here’s a brief overview of what’s been driving things toward this sad reality.
Attributed to 16th century British philosopher John Locke, liberalism was designed to neutralize opportunistic wars of religion. These peppered the landscape after the Protestant Reformation undermined Catholic based governing authority. The kernel of liberalism’s approach to life is that “truth starts with the individual,” not God. This, thankfully, gave us popular elections over so-called divinely sanctioned, perpetual rule by families of kings and queens. All good.
What liberalism did that was destructive was its neutralization of religion by privatizing it as mere public worship. This permitted slavery to be amoral and helped advance the assumption that it’s OK, even a right, to exploit and mistreat people to gain wealth. Regular people have been fighting against this mean spirit ever since. Fast forward to now.
Many wealthy whites and those who need to demonize people of color to feel good about themselves, are trying to solidify their fake king- and queen-like superiority. So they are passing laws that make it more difficult to vote, especially for disadvantaged people. Additionally, in what seems like a throwback to the old fundamentalism of dont’s (don’t drink, dance, smoke, play cards, go to movies or dance) there is now the big “don’t” of abortion. Being against that seems to validate a person’s status a serious Christian and lets one off the hook for a deeper and broader look at what’s needed to bolster healing and justice for both people and planet.
Robert Heilbrunner released “An Inquiry into the Human Prospect” in 1974. Using computer modeling of that day, he and his team predicted that if the world continued a coal and oil based industrialization path, the earth would no longer be habitable in 500 years. In only 50 years we are seeing the warming of the planet and extreme weather. Rising temperatures also make it possible for the release of disease carriers previously suppressed by “normal” temperatures. An uninhabitable earth is where we’re now headed. Is God to blame for what humans have wrought?
The Christian right has no clue about the big picture. They seem to see all abortions – even those necessitated by rape, incest, a mother’s health or lack of access to people that care – as evil personified. One wonders what they think about mothers worldwide who breathe in’s highly polluted coal and oil based industrial air. This poison ends up killing their babies before they’re born. Is this unworthy of being noted?
Dogmatic secularists aren’t much better. Many care about our shared physical plant but not so much about unwanted babies. Of course life is multifaceted, interconnected and can’t be reduced to any one issue, no matter how important.
What’s at stake is what’s left of a workable future.
My fellow Christians, in their over-focus on lost souls, have either forgotten, or their leaders have cheated them out of knowing that salvation is holistic. It’s about the fullness of authority in the diverse structures of human experience (“All power has been given to me” – Matthew 28:18). That comprehensive sweep includes Jesus’ love for persons and tolerance for other types of believers, all situated within the framework of earth’s riches, meant to be rightly stewarded and developed by us for the common good. (Genesis 1:28)
All this underscores liberalism’s core problem. It can’t tolerate what doesn’t support its invented authority. And that leaves us either hopelessly doomed or poised to do what it takes to reinvent what justice for all means when agents of hate, violence and fear try to take down what’s still possible. We now live in a time when collaborating and talking to one another, regardless of belief systems, is no longer an option but a necessity. We need champions not charlatans.
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