Revolution #032, January 29, 2006, posted at revcom.us
is highlighting the voices of religious thinkers and writers as well as
clergy people who are sounding the alarm on this danger. The views
expressed by these religious people are, of course, their own, and they
are not responsible for the views expressed elsewhere in Revolution and
on our website.
The following is the text of a talk given by Dr. Hubert Locke at
the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) in Berkeley on May 17, 2005. Dr.
Locke is a former trustee and acting president of PSR and former dean
of the Daniel J. Evans Graduate School of Public Affairs at the
University of Washington. The talk is reprinted here with the
permission of Dr. Locke.
I’m always delighted by the opportunity to come and visit my dear
friends at PSR but I’m a bit uneasy about what I have been asked to do
at the outset of this important meeting. A meditation, by definition,
is expected to be thoughtful and reflective; it should be a calm and
dispassionate discourse that helps set the mood and atmosphere for
whatever is to follow. I hope what follows is thoughtful but I have to
forewarn you that it is neither calm nor dispassionate, for I am
persuaded we face in our country a movement that is trying its best to
hijack this nation in the name of a set of ideals and values it claims
to be Christian but which, on examination, are the very antithesis of
the Gospel that our Lord preached and by which we, as Jesus’ disciples,
are challenged to live our lives in the world. If this movement is
successful–if it is not stopped in its tracks–it will transform the
United States into a political and cultural nightmare that not only
turns its back on two hundred years of American history, it will be
also one that leaves this nation unrecognizable from all that we have
been and all that we might aspire to be as a democratic society.
For me at least, this is the only way to interpret the current
campaign by the religious right–an assault on the nation’s courts and
its judges, an assault on the Constitutional principle of the
separation of church and state, an attack on science and its place in
the modern world, and an assault on the ideas of tolerance and
pluralism in American life. Only a year ago, we thought we were
confronting a movement fixated on the issues of abortion and
homosexuality as litmus tests of whether one subscribed to moral values
in our national life. These turn out to be only the hot-button topics
that are used to rally the troops; what is at stake and where the
battlelines are now being drawn today are over a wider set of issues
and processes far more intrinsic to the way in which this nation
conducts its business and makes its policy decisions. The not-so-subtle
assault on the principle of the separation of church and state, for
example, is an attempt to impose a notion of theocratic rule on this
country that died with the Puritan colonists. The attack on the
nation’s judiciary that takes the form of a crude attempt to pack the
courts with jurists who support the right-wing agenda seeks to wipe out
any legal opposition to the decrees of state legislatures and a
Congress that the religious right believes it has firmly under its
sway. And when the president of the National Religious Broadcasters
declares “Today, the calls for diversity and multiculturalism are
nothing more than thinly-veiled attacks on anyone willing, desirous, or
compelled to proclaim Christian truths,” his is a thinly-veiled cry to
return to a set of ideals and values that this nation demolished when
the South lost the Civil War.
The current issue of Harper’s magazine describes on its cover what
it terms “The Christian Right’s War on America.” That may be hyperbolic
for some but to the extent that it serves as a wake-up call to the rest
of the Christian community, I find it wholly appropriate. Let me risk
what some might find even greater exaggeration by a reference–not a
comparison, mind you, but a reference–to what, for me, has always been
the classic modern clash between Christianity and the modern state.
In the aftermath of World War I, the people of three European
nations–Italy, Germany and Spain–turned to fascism as a political
creed and proceeded to catapult into power governments which promoted
fascistic ideals–that peculiar set of notions which manage to combine
the interests of unfettered capitalism with excessive nationalism and a
totalitarian view of the role of the state that can enforce its will on
the populace. In all three countries but particularly in Germany which,
unlike Italy and Spain, had more than a single religious tradition
among its populace, the church found itself riven by two, diametrically
opposed views. One view held that it was the duty of the church to
support and uphold the policies of the state which, in turn, would be
expected to advance the principles and beliefs of the church; the other
that insisted the church owes its allegiance to a different and higher
power–one that sits in judgment on the state and on any government
that would presume to be a political manifestation of the Divine will.
Because of the cataclysmic devastation that the fascist government
of Germany wrought on the world, our attention has tended–and rightly
so–to focus on the twelve-year period that it was in power. During
that period, James Luther Adams–one of the revered theologians of my
generation who taught at Chicago and Harvard–went to Germany as was
then the tradition among all newly-minted PhDs where he pursued
post-doctoral studies. Adams saw the clash of the church with German
fascism first-hand. A quarter-century ago, as he watched the emergence
of the religious right in this country as a political force dedicated
to “taking back the nation for God,” Adams said to his students that
they would find themselves having to fight “the Christian fascists” in
this nation. He warned that the American fascists would not come
wearing swastikas and brown shirts. The American variety, he said,
would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.
We should make no mistake about what is at stake in this battle with
the religious right. It is not happenstance that it is a movement that
draws its strength and finds its support principally in the so-called
heartland of the nation and especially in its southern precincts. This
is the portion of the United States that has never been comfortable
with post-WWII America. The brief period of normalcy after the war was
followed within a decade by a pent-up and long overdue racial
revolution that overturned centuries of culture and tradition,
especially in the South. The disillusionment, two decades later, with
an unpopular war in southeast Asia shook the foundations of
traditional/conventional patriotism in American life; it was followed
in the next decade by a sexual revolution that upset deeply entrenched
views among this portion of the American populace about the subordinate
place of women in society and the non-place of gay and lesbian persons
in American life. These political and social and cultural defeats have
now erupted into a pitched battle to turn back the clock on the last
half-century and return America to its pre-war purity. It is not
without significance that teaching creationism in the schools, for
example, is such a prominent part of the religious right agenda. That
was a battle the right lost in the mid-1920s but it is not one that the
right ever acknowledged losing–just as some die-hards have never
acknowledged losing the Civil War. Consequently, the restoration the
religious right seeks is one that would recapture a way of life that
disappeared in this nation a half-century ago.
Were all this only a battle for the hearts and minds of the American
people, we could wade into the conflict with a great deal less concern,
confident that good sense and human decency would ultimately triumph
over ignorance and bigotry. But this is a battle for power–it’s about
seizing the reins of government, manipulating the courts and judicial
decisions, controlling the media, and making incursions into every
possible corner of our private lives and relationships, so that what
the religious right perceives as the will of God will reign in America.
Our discussion this afternoon and evening, as I understand it, is to
determine how this school responds to this situation. It is a
discussion that is, thank God, beginning to occur across the country
but it is one which has a special compelling urgency for this school.
There are at least two reasons for that urgency. In Germany, when the
National Socialists came to power and the noise of fascism began to
echo throughout the country, the response of the churches came mainly
from the pulpits. Here and there, individual theologians spoke out,
offering guidance to church councils and synods but by and large the
theological faculties were silent, as were the voices of the
professoriate in general. That’s the first reason why it is important
that the seminary be heard early and clearly in this struggle. What is
needed is clear theological reflection, theological argumentation,
theological challenges to what I believe are the false doctrines, in
some instances, and the rank heresies, in others, of the religious
right. Those reflections, arguments, and challenges can come best from
the theological faculties who can help preachers, parsons and the laity
in the mainline Christian community gird themselves for the struggle
before us.
Second, this school has staked out for itself a special place in the
effort to aid and encourage a religious understanding and embracement
of gay and lesbian members in our society. It is, to my knowledge, the
only theological institution that has taken up this special challenge
and task. The importance of that task has taken on an heightened
significance in this larger struggle that I’ve just tried to describe,
and James Luther Adams offers us a poignant reminder of why this is so.
Let me cite the last paragraphs of the Harper’s article:
Adams had watched American intellectuals and industrialists
flirt with fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini’s “Corporatism,” which
created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, had appealed
to many at the time as an effective counterweight to the New Deal. In
1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his
defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists at the
expense of workers. Then as now, Adams said, too many liberals failed
to understand the power and allure of evil, and when the radical
Christians came, these people would undoubtedly play by the old, polite
rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the
democratic state. Adams had watched German academics fall silent or
conform. He knew how desperately people want to believe the comfortable
lies told by totalitarian movements, how easily those lies lull
moderates into passivity.
Adams told us to watch closely the Christian right’s
persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us,
promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933,
then imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations and
publications. Then came raids on the places where homosexuals gathered,
culminating on May 6, 1933, with the ransacking of the Institute for
Sexual Science in Berlin. Twelve thousand volumes from the institute’s
library were tossed into a public bonfire. Homosexuals and lesbians,
Adams said, would be the first “deviants” singled out by the Christian
right. We would be the next.
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolution Online
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