Diana Butler Bass: September 2008 Archives

Over the summer, a seventy-year old family member has struggled mightily with the possibility of losing her home.  For many months, she has been in a financial meltdown, one unnoticed by politicians claiming that the economy was "sound."

Washington politicians were not the only ones ignoring the growing economic worries.  Churches and religious institutions have been oddly silent about the economy, too, except in theoretical ways.  The Vatican recently condemned the immorality of the new economy; Protestants have been working on the Millennium Development Goals.  Neither of these lofty projects addresses the fears of a retired seventy year old watching everything she worked for slip through her fingers.

Eighty years ago, churches largely failed to address the economic and social problems of the Great Depression.  In the face of America's worst economic crisis, the churches slid into religious depression.  Even before 1929, religious leaders noticed faith ebbing into ennui--a decline in church membership, missions, religious education, seminaries, stewardship, and justice ministries.  In 1927, Reinhold Niebuhr remarked on "a psychology of defeat" that had "gripped the forces of religion."

This "psychology of defeat" had been aided by a sustained fundamentalist attack on mainline churches during the twenty years prior to the Depression.  This theological conflict weakened the denominations.  When the 1929 crash occurred, America's leading churches had been so battered by arguments over the Virgin Birth and biblical inerrancy that they lacked the resources to mount a meaningful response to the economic crisis.  While the economy spiraled, Christians succumbed to, what historian Robert Handy called, "a nationally observable spiritual lethargy" where people even ceased to expect that churches could help them.

At the time, the editors of Christian Century wondered why the Depression had not sparked a renewal of the churches.  After all, in tough circumstances people often turn to God for relief.  "But this depression is different," they wrote.  It was "due to the failure of human intelligence or the blind power of entrenched privilege, or both."  It is a bit difficult to figure out how to spiritually stir people out of a crisis caused by greed.   

If this isn't depressing enough, the most vigorous forms of faith that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s were also the most extreme--this period marked a high point of Christian nationalism, Aryanism, and religious fascism in the United States.  Demagogues like Protestant preacher Gerald Smith and Roman Catholic Father Charles Coughlin fired populist passions against Jews, the government, and liberals.  

The parallels between religious events of the 1920s and 1930s are painfully obvious and not terribly comforting in our current situation.  However, if we understand how the churches failed our great-grandparents, we might have the foresight to do better.  

Thus, I offer a 5-point spiritual bailout plan for churches:

1)  Stop fighting about issues like gay and lesbian people in church.  People are sick and tired of it.  God loves everybody, OK?

2)  Repent.  Greed is a sin.  I think we forgot.    

3)  Preach hope.  Defeat has no place in church.  I haven't heard a sermon on hope in ten years.  Let's get to it.  

4)  Avoid the temptation to scapegoat others.  No crusades allowed.

5)  Read the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-13; Luke 6:20-31) and take them literally, especially when Jesus says, "Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again."    

I pray that churches find this plan more palatable than Congress found the $700 billion bailout plan.  Even if this is only a great recession, we've got to do better this time.




 
 

With media attention directed toward the largest economic story in recent American history, other stories are falling by the way.  One of the most interesting--and surely least understood--is the story of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's religious faith.

As a mainline Protestant whose faith values pluralism, I confess that I have been reluctant to blog on Ms. Palin's religion or to make that an issue.  But a small turn of phrase in her Katie Couric interview has given me pause and underscored the importance of Ms. Palin's theology in relationship to her politics.

In Part II of the CBS interview, Katie Couric pressed Ms. Palin on the issue of Russia and how Alaska's proximity has an impact on her experience in international affairs.  Her answer, like her answer to Charlie Gibson to the same question, was awkward.  In the midst of it, she proffered a strange expression to explain her worry about a resurgent Russia: "as Putin rears his head."

To most observers, that phrase may seem an unusual way to talk about increased Russian military activity in Eastern Europe and Asia.  However, what secular observers do not know is that the specific phrase is also theological code for "as the Anti-Christ rears his head."  

For most of the twentieth century, American evangelicals and Pentecostals believed that the Anti-Christ would, most likely, come from Russia--as would the army to lead the Anti-Christ's legions at the Battle of Armageddon.  With great regularity, fundamentalist and Pentecostal pastors identified Soviet leaders with the Anti-Christ, believing that with Russia's every military move the apocalyptic clock ticked closer to the end of the world.  A common way of talking about Russia and the apocalypse was, "as Russia rears its head."  Ms. Palin used the phrase in the exact way, with the exact intonation, as had millenarian pastors for decades--belying a kind of theological connective tissue between her church and her geo-political worldview.  

Alaska played an important role in this theology.  As the United States' closest geography to Russia, it stood as a buffer to the advance of the Anti-Christ's army.  With its oil resources, it also provided a kind of domestic reserve of energy supply when anti-Christian political forces cut off God's chosen nation from the rest of the world.  Some strands of millenarian Christianity in Alaska came to identify their state as a "refuge" during the tribulation, as hundreds of thousands flee Russia's oppressive dictatorship.  Thus, Alaskan millenarianism is a sort of theological stew of apocalypse, oil, and survivalism--themes all echoed in Governor Palin's stump speeches.

In the last twenty years, many evangelical leaders have explicated rejected this sort of theology--most respectable evangelical colleges and seminaries do not teach it any longer.  But this sort of millennialism remains a formidable shaping influence in many congregations, especially Pentecostal ones.   And, for those with longer political memories, it is the same theology that shaped John Ashcroft.  

Ms. Palin has rather cleverly avoided issues related to her church, staying instead to populist rhetoric about reform and taxes.  However, her home church is a Pentecostal congregation with extremist theological views, including an apocalyptic vision with potentially dangerous implications regarding key issues in today's world.  As Pastor Rick Warren pointed out in the recent forum at Saddleback Church, a candidate's "worldview" is an important part of evaluating his or her fitness for office.  It is high time for the media to examine Governor Palin's theology fairly to allow voters to make a more informed choice about the woman who may be a single heartbeat from the presidency.