There are those who are made uncomfortable with the suggestion that their own nation bears major responsibility for the sufferings of people. They recoil when others accuse their nation of military aggression, imperialism, or the exercise of mass violence for selfish interests. They are angered by the charge that their society is founded upon national arrogance and pride, racial privilege and. property values. They are defensive of the economic and political structures of their country that maintain and perpetuate injustice. They reject the notion that their nation uses propaganda to justify its actions and resorts to repression and naked force when necessary to protect its power.
They rather retreat to the more comfortable notion that their nation acts out of righteous or, at worse, mistaken motivations; that its basic values, institutions, and intentions are honorable and noble (i.e., that it acts only to protect freedom at home and around the world). These social mythologies of national pride have characterized all nations and have been strongest in those nations which have been most destructive and violent.
My basic disagreement with such views is not primarily a political one. In other words, it is not merely that we have a different political analysis. The basic flaw in such views is theological, in that those who hold such views are theologically naive by failing to take the fall seriously. Such views are therefore (at least in regard to the view of one’s nation) liberal rather than orthodox in a biblical sense. A recognition of the fall is prerequisite for responsible political action.
When I was in the student movement, I believed, along with most other young activists, that evil resided in the national leadership but that the people would make basic changes if they really knew what was going on. I no longer believe that. The issues that confront us, the human atrocities that plead for change, are due to more than a lack of information and technology; rather, they are moral and spiritual questions on which choices are continually made by both the national leadership and the populace.
The choices that are made have a great deal to do with what the Bible calls idolatry, the worship of idols. This worship takes many forms, some direct and unmistakable, some far more subtle. In our times, we witness persons, institutions, and nations in the grip of the contemporary idolatries--to name a few: a consumptive mentality; the will to power and domination; a dependence on violence; national pride and destiny; self-justifying ideologies and informational systems with the ability to turn falsehood into truth. The militant power of these contemporary idolatries has captured the corporations, the Pentagon, the branches of government, the universities, even the churches. Their presence is deeply felt in our social and cultural patterns affecting even the way we relate to one another. The Bible says that those who have experienced conversion through the gospel are to be separate from the world. But we don’t really believe that either. We are separate in small private ways that don’t cost us very much, but not in a way that makes serious demands upon our lives. Thus, being separate from the world--a break with the prevailing idolatries and mythologies of American life and society is a necessary part of any responsible political action.
The American public has developed an amazing capacity for tolerating contradiction; perhaps that is part of the price of domination. The ironies of it would be almost humorous were it not for the victims--those who suffer the consequences of American contradictions. The public grants extraordinary authority and power to the economic and political managers and gets, in exchange, unprecedented affluence and a protected sense of national pride and destiny. The nation is thus able to stay on top of the world heap and still hear its leaders continue to talk of our commitments to self-determination, freedom, and “peace with honor.” The government is able to kill a million Indo-Chinese and justify it with: “saving them from communism,” or “containing the Chinese threat,” or “protecting American lives,” or “destroying a village to save it,” or “not backing out of our commitments,” or “bringing our prisoners home with their heads high,” depending on the year of the war and the official administration line. The nation’s leaders are exposed lying, cheating and stealing while still keeping down the poor and repressing dissent to “preserve law and order.” The United States is able to maintain two dozen dictatorships and still be the leader of the Free World. The American people are able to gobble up over half the world’s consumable resources and still “praise God from whom all blessings flow.” The prophetic function of “truth-telling” is a central part of responsible political action.
This political awakening we have experienced, this new awareness that pleads for change, requires a rethinking of basic assumptions about our society and about ourselves. Yet our protest must include more than negation and refusal; it must also include affirmation and radical alternatives.
Our affirmation must have an adequate basis for values, vision and goals which can provide the motivation, direction, and self-criticism necessary in seeking radical change. It must provide a vision that can keep us from the bitterness, despair, hatred and desperation that causes some to drop out, sell out, or turn their fight for justice and social change into a murderous crusade. We require total transformation, a new understanding of society and ourselves. As the analysis of our dilemma must be radical, so must our solution, going to the heart, the root causes of our problems, and being comprehensive enough to avoid simplistic pitfalls.
Oppressive ego, hatred, greed, prejudice, and aggression lurk beneath the surface as motivations of our individual and corporate lives. We must escape the illusion of every simplistic group that looks only beyond itself for the sources of human misery. We must realize that the evil we oppose lies also within ourselves. Herman Hesse says it well:
Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation and every person would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that there lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war.
All this is to say that our affirmation must be a vehicle for personal transformation, the emergence of new people, as well as embody the basis for social liberation. To challenge the system, we must be willing to have our own lives changed, and become radical ourselves. To repudiate the old is not enough; we must act on the basis of a new reality that, we have experienced. The conversion of persons to the the gospel of Christ, that is to say, an evangelistic ministry, is central for responsible political action.
The gospel demands political involvement that addresses the needs of people, that is directed against all these things that bind and oppress people, that confront the political and economic causes of human hurt. In our political involvement, we must first seek to be a kingdom-conscious movement of Christian people who by their very existence, presence and action call into question the values, assumptions, and very structure of our society and free people to live in alternative ways. A danger in the growth of awareness in the church is the tendency to embrace a liberal political philosophy which also accepts the economic, political, and value assumptions of the status quo, as do conservative philosophies. We must put primary importance on the active affirmation of the new order in the midst of the old. The politicization of the church can result in the church becoming a power of the world and exercising her influence as such rather than seeing herself as that eschatological community that bears witness to the presence of the kingdom in the common life of the world. The fallenness of the world and the presence of the kingdom live in fundamental tension. The church must live in this tension and recognize the opposition between the world-system and the kingdom of God. The church is thus an inexhaustible revolutionary force in the world. Its mission is perpetual--not on behalf of nation, party, program or ideology, but rather on behalf of the kingdom of God, which may make it victim of the hostility of both the established order and of those who seek to overthrow it. Corporately, we must commit ourselves to build a church that is a sign of Christ’s presence in the world and thus a counter-sign to the values of American society and power. The recovery of the church’s true identity in the world is most basic to its political responsibility.
Jim Wallis was editor-in-chief of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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