Changing the Script: An Authentically Faithful and Authentically Progressive Political Theology for the 21st Century
By Daniel Schultz
Softcover, 220 pages, $15.95
Ig Publishing
September 2010
Note: Author Daniel Schultz will be participating in comments below to answer questions of readers.
Proposals to make our economic system "more Christian" ultimately miss the point. Even to call for more fairness or more generosity or more concern for the poor without fundamentally altering the way the system works are mistaken. Perhaps the most radical thing that a religious left can proclaim is that God is for us, and will not tolerate dehumanization, the "objective, systemic anonymous" violence of capitalism.
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…the religious left is meant to ask the questions, not line up behind the answers. What I am suggesting is less an agenda than an orientation, a disposition to the "damnably disruptive questioning of the seemingly self-evident way things must be." The work of the religious left is not to produce shiny new technical solutions or to support the false equivalence of charity and justice. It is to participate in the creation of a "consciousness and perception" alternative to that of the dominant culture, to challenge the assumption that consumerist capitalism can truly make us happy, and yes, to stand in service with the poor.
This work is also about offering hope in our speech, to "speak the language of amazement" and so create the energizing alternative tot he dead promises of the current order. The hope that emerges from this speech begins with the audacity to contradict the claims of the current order, to find joy where there ought to be only despair."
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The truth, as Cavanaugh points out, is that the church has allowed its imagination to shrivel into a privatized faith with nothing to say to the "real" world. It is a measure of Christianity's ineffectiveness that its adherents continue to dwindle in the United States even as real freedom, equality, and peace are threatened by the ever-increasing violence of the American political imagination. If Christians cannot voice the radical alternative their faith presents to the seemingly obvious way things must be, why should anyone listen to us? Likewise, a religious left that prefers moral suasion and easy reconciliation cheapened even further by a refusal to address real differences of power cannot hope to find traction in the public realm. Nor can it offer hope to "the invisible, the oppressed and the exploited."
Daniel Schultz, our own Pastor Dan, released a complex, provocative, paradigm-shifting book this past month that explores the calling and role of the Religious Left in today's political landscape. In Changing the Script, Schultz uses the work of theologian Walter Brueggemann as a springboard to explore the unquestioned narratives that underlie our political assumptions and actions--what the author identifies as the therapeutic, technological, consumerist, militarist and conformist scripts that dominate our lives. He chooses three current hot-button issues--abortion, the economy and torture--through which to build upon Brueggemann's critique of society, culture and politics.
In many ways, Changing the Script is a remarkably radical book, not radical in the usual political sense, but radical in terms of digging deeper and deeper and then deeper again beyond what seems like easy and predictable liberal solutions to societal structures and individual pains. It was the kind of reading experience I can best describe as my "Slow! Wow!" one, in that I'd read a few pages, have my mind blown by the implications of some of what Schultz was saying, put the book down to think for a few minutes, then pick it up again. It is a book that lays to rest any preconceptions one may have about the nature of all church-going progressives. The author is fiery, unabashedly disdainful of the "finding common ground" argument with the radical Religious Right and unafraid to challenge the loose confederacy of the spiritual left to get its act together and quit surrendering the public square to fundamentalists, who have, by default, become the idealized "political Christian" in this country.
In the past week, the author and I have had an in-depth email exchange about the meaning and implications of the ideas in his book. This exchange is reproduced below, and the author will answer questions in comments today.
Give readers your 30-second elevator pitch for the book.
Look, we all know that our politics have been well and truly stuck for something like 30 or 40 years. It doesn't take a prophet to see that. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the little people have been getting screwed for at least that long. Our social and economic order keeps making these promises: that if you only work hard enough and spend wisely, you'll be happy. Or that if you serve your nation and support the boys overseas, the military will keep you safe. Those promises can't be kept, of course. Not by a long shot. But how to change the situation? The social order is so strong, and we are so compromised by it, that we can barely imagine a different world, let alone find the strength to fight it. Changing the Script is first of all a reassurance that things can be different, and an attempt to think about how they might be at least nudged in the right direction. I use religious thought to do that, but you don't have to be religious to get something out of it.
As a secular liberal, I found the book really pushing me out of my comfort zone in a couple of areas--in a good way, mind you. But still, pushing me beyond my … well, scripts. Are you getting the same reaction from religious liberals?
No, not really. They eat this stuff up. If religious liberals don't feel bad about themselves, they really lose focus, don't know what to do with themselves. It's all "We repent of this" and "Lord forgive us for that." I threw in a whole chapter on why Birkenstocks help the cause of empire, just to provide them with some red meat.
Seriously, it's a bit disorienting when you realize just how hip-deep you are in consumerism, or how complicit you are in something like torture, even when you're opposed to it. We're all sort of half-aware of that, and ambivalent about it, which provokes a good deal of anxiety. It only gets worse when it's brought to our attention. But understanding the "scripts" we live by is the only way to live outside of them.
The first place you really pushed me was on the abortion issue. I've become so used to the "safe, legal and rare" line that I found myself brought up short when you challenged the "rare" part by pointing out that a negative judgment is involved regarding the procedure that we, as liberals, have unquestionably accepted. Can you expand on your thinking a bit here for readers?
I can't claim that insight as original to me. My ethics professor in seminary asked me once: "Why should something that is safe and legal be rare?" (Actually, I think his exact words were, "That's a nice slogan. But if that's your ethical position, you haven't thought the issue through.") He was right; you can't have it both ways. But that's what Democrats have been trying to do ever since the Catholic bishops went after Geraldine Ferraro with hammer and tongs. Social conservatives have been saying for decades that the sluts deserve to get pregnant, while liberals say, "Abortion is icky, but we have to let them have it" without stopping to think that it subtly reinforces the conservative perspective.
Where I take that is not to say that there should be no restrictions on abortion at all—-it is and should be regulated, just like any other medical procedure—-but to say that abortion is, of course, a medical proxy for other battles about the place of women in society. That won't come as much of a surprise for the feminists reading this. Point is, until progressives get out of the "abortion is icky, but…" frame and start focusing on empowering women, abortion is always going to be a problem for them.
That seems like so much common sense, but when we hear about religion and politics from a liberal perspective, it seems like the line is exactly the opposite. The Democratic party is heavily invested in the "common ground on abortion" strategy, which is essentially using "safe, legal and rare" to attract ostensibly swing Catholic and Evangelical voters. It doesn't work, it's never worked, and I hope my chapter provides the math to prove that assessment.
Yet on the matter of standing in judgment in general, you write: Prophets who are unwilling to judge present realities against a vision of God's possibilities are by definition unnecessary. Unfortunately, standing in judgment goes against the grain of many progressives. Developing a righteous anger therefore may well be the most difficult change to make, but also the most necessary. How does a person, religious or non-religious, discern when it's appropriate to stand in judgment and when it is not?
That's a complex question, and honestly, I have become progressively more conflicted about the subject ever since I wrote that bit you quote.
On the one hand, as Mark Sumner pointed out to me on Twitter the other day, if you've got one side of the political equation talking very reasonably about bridging policy differences and the other side screaming "BRAINS!!" it creates something of an imbalance. Not everything and not everyone can be reconciled. Acting as if all we needed to do was focus on "truth and civility," as if everyone were people of good will, winds up letting some people off the hook. The fact of the matter is that while we all helped to get ourselves into the mess we're in today, some people are more responsible for it than are others. So yes, sometimes you have to get pissed off and say things are not okay as they stand. More to the point, you have to say, things are not okay and this person or these people are responsible. That's being appropriately judgmental.
Christians in particular have something to learn from secular bloggers on this score. When I read somebody like Meteor Blades or Digby, they are often very judgmental, and very very angry. I mean that as a compliment, not as a criticism: I mean that they have felt the pain inflicted by our political system, and they respond to it in an evaluative sense. They are prophetic in the best sense of the word. In fact, one way you could read the book is something like the dissertation I wrote for them.
But the flip side to all of this is that it's possible to be too judgmental. It's possible to get too focused on what the other side is doing. I'm honestly not a fan of the title of Markos' new book. Not because I think it's mean or rude, not because it's inaccurate, but because I think it doesn't supply what Habermas calls the "good reasons for our positions" that citizens owe to one another. That the Republican party is overrun by barking mad crypto-fascists may be true, but it doesn't say very much about what we believe. And if the great progressive hope is based on the idea that our guys may be liberal-ish douchebags, but those other guys are fucking nuts, well, that's not really much hope. For that reason, I tried to stay away from criticizing the Religious Right as much as I could in my book. I wanted it to be about what religious progressives believed, not about how we reacted to somebody else's sins and idiocy.
I had the opportunity to meet Walter Brueggemann back in August, and I asked him about this pretty specifically. He had a very good answer that I think I agree with. People want us to be good advocates for our perspectives, he said, and that's okay. But we should be mindful that we carry on some of these debates as a way to distract ourselves from the bigger questions that we're all afraid to take out and look at: questions about life and purpose and "this awful narrative of death that hangs over us all."
You write: The main function of the Religious Left is to ask the questions, not line up behind the answers. Where the Religious Right has been the cash machine and ground troops for the conservative movement, the Religious Left can and should be the engine for transformational progressive politics. What would a transformational progressive politics look like? What would be its visible outcomes? And how does questioning, rather than the certainty presented by the Religious Right, lead us there?
I work off Eric Schneidermann's definition of transformational politics as the work you do to make sure the deal you get down the road is better than the deal you can get today.
Sometimes that looks an awful lot like not taking "yes" for an answer, but it's not, really. It does involve asking some tough questions, though. Why are we putting prisoners in Guantanamo Bay through trials in a kangaroo court? How is that going to keep us safe? Why are we even considering the notion of cutting food stamps in this economy? There are an awful lot of politicians who call themselves Christians—-on both sides of the aisle—-but they act like they've never heard of the God who hears the cries of the poor. Somebody needs to stand up and demand that the people on food stamps get better treatment down the road, instead of getting the shaft time and again. Somebody needs to ask the transformational question. The religious way of asking that is, "Does this policy or set of policies bring us closer to God's vision of what the world could be? If not, what needs to happen so that we do get closer?" The secular way of asking it is, "Do these policies bring us closer to the Good Society we say we want?" It's different lenses, but the same basic questions.
We know what this looks like historically: Martin Luther King began to connect the dots between racial injustice, economic injustice, and the war in Vietnam. What finally got him killed was the threat he posed to economic interests who had used racial divisions to keep labor cheap. So there's a need to look at the entire system, to think about how the military machine weighs down the economy and crowds out any kind of social or economic compassion, for example.
We also need to articulate new possibilities, particularly where other people don't see any hope. This is sort of difficult to talk about, because of course these new possibilities come about as a surprise, even to people like me who are on the lookout for them.
But let me give you two examples, one from history, and one that's taking place right here, right now. If you look at the Exodus narrative carefully, one thing you notice is that nobody—-not even the Israelites—-thought that emancipation was a real possibility. Everybody thought the best they could hope for was a kinder, gentler slavery. It's only God who believes that the slaves could be free, and who sets things in motion to bring them to that freedom. Fast forward a couple of thousand years, and you find Abolitionists in America who know that slavery can be ended, in part because they read Exodus and took it seriously. Nobody else thought it could happen, but they knew different. I don't think many of them could have dreamed that America would become as racially integrated as it is today, with an African-American president. In the same way, I think not many of us dare to dream that the work of racial reconciliation can ever be completed in the US. We have a long ways to go on that score, but it can be done. We have to affirm that, and see the hope that nobody else sees.
In the here and now, you have the Community Quilt Project run by Sara Reed, whom I am proud to say took over the reins at Street Prophets when I left. Who could have guessed that a project like this could raise money for progressive candidates, provide comfort to ailing members of the community, and potentially provide a livelihood for the quilters? It's astounding!
On the smallest of scales, then, that's the measurable outcome. Having slept under one of Sara's quilts, I can tell you that the measure is warmth and softness, which are both abundant. Questioning got us there, because Sara didn't crack open a Bible and say, hmm, God commands me to make a quilt. She started asking questions about what she could contribute to making the world a better place, and that's where the quilt project came from.
On a much larger scale, look at the military budget and income inequality. If you see the military budget get slashed and the money redirected to provide more economic opportunity and fairness, then you'll know that the transformational process has really taken hold. It will take years, if not decades to get there. So what? It took the Israelites forty years to make it through the desert. If we're really committed to what is right, we'll be in the game for the duration.
You seem to be saying, when you reference the Exodus story and the abolitionists, that we should dare to dream big. Yet you also hold up the work of Sara and her quilt project as a model. I'm intrigued by the scale here, of the big and the comparatively seemingly small acts. How do you see big visions and smaller acts moving toward the same goals? Isn't there a danger of getting so caught up in immediate ameliorative acts that one loses sight of the bigger vision? How does one keep a balance between the two?
Go back and look at that Exodus story. It begins on this incredibly small and inobvious scale: Moses' mother wants to save his life, so she sends him down the river, where Pharaoh's daughter finds him. Meanwhile, the Israelites are so oppressed that they "cry out"—-to whom or to what they don't even know—-and that's when God hears them and sets the Exodus in motion—-decades later! The little things we do can have a big effect, but it takes time for them to ripen. People will say, but we need relief right now! Yes, and there's no reason not to press for it. But while you do that, take some small steps too. You never know what they're going to lead to.
It's worth noting as well that this early part of the Exodus story prominently features women. That's counter-cultural in that era: what you would expect is the story of Brave Male Warriors duking it out to decide the fate of their nations. Instead, what you find is the delicious irony of Pharaoh's daughter giving him the finger and rescuing the savior of the Israelites.
It also goes to show that God works in surprising ways through people who have no obvious power. Which is not to say that they're powerless: they find creative ways to make things happen. The takeaway from all of this is that if you're waiting for Pres. Obama or Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi to change the world for you, you're looking in the wrong place. Real change comes from ordinary people working creatively in the margins. I think the person who's going to save this nation isn't going to be an elected official at all. It's going to be an ordinary woman, maybe black, maybe Latina. We may not even know her name when it's all said and done. But she will be the one God chooses to work through, of that I have every confidence.
One of the things I wrestle with as an individual, and I know the institutional religious left wrestles with on a larger scale, is the question of who is responsible for what liberals view as a societal injustice that needs to be rectified. In other words, acting as a fallback for the hungry is an obviously laudable and necessary activity (through soup kitchens and related projects). Yet I always wonder if such stopgaps, which I believe should be the permanent project of society as a whole, end up justifying the cramped conservative view of our duties to each other: "See! We don't need poverty programs! Churches and private charities will fill the need!"
Ministry as we traditionally understand it—-that ameliorative work you mention—-and the work of transformation cannot be divided. You have to work at the soup kitchen and press for better food stamps benefits and ask why the system is set up to screw so many people in the first place. It takes a long time to bring people to that point, which often frustrates pastors such as myself. We have to battle sometimes just to get people off the dime and offer some help without expectation of return. It's a slow process.
But to your point, I think what people sometimes miss is those stopgaps should be witnesses to how screwed up this system is. Every time there's a recession, there will come along news stories about how food pantries and soup kitchens are seeing a spike in demand. Sometimes they'll be written from the perspective of, Gee, isn't it great when People of Faith® step up to the plate and take care of the least of these? It is, but every last food pantry and every last soup kitchen is a testament to the fact that Americans don't take care of their own. If we did what was right, if we actually practiced just economics, we wouldn't have any need for them. The same is true for welfare and food stamps and other parts of the social safety net. They're necessary, I'm glad we have them, and they should be strengthened. But let's not kid ourselves: the presence of the social safety net, whether in the form of charity or government programs, isn't a compliment to our virtue. It's a sign that we still have a ways to go until our economic system is actually fair. Everybody needs to understand that, and our leaders need to do a better job of articulating it.
From your view, does the current Religious Left--acknowledging its pretty far-flung diversity and realizing it's difficult to speak for the whole--have more in common with secular progressives than with the view of the world presented by the Religious Right?
Let's do a little math before I answer that question. About 25 percent of all Americans are Evangelicals. Another 25 percent (roughly) are Catholic. Mainline Protestants are about 18 percent of the population, religiously unaffiliated are 16 percent, black Protestants about 7 percent. Add that up, and that's something like 90 percent of the population. Everybody else—-Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, and so on—-make up the remainder. While not all Evangelicals and not all Catholics are conservatives, their leadership tends that way, and we've seen what happens when Catholics and Mormons, for example, team up to fight marriage equality. Just from the perspective of pure numbers, then, the religious left and secular progressives have something in common: we're smaller groups who don't want to be dominated by the big players. We don't want the US run according to the dictates of the Southern Baptist Convention or the Catholic bishops. That's not in our interests.
In addition, if you look at that segment of the religiously unaffiliated, only about a quarter of them (4 percent of the total population) describe themselves as "atheist or agnostic." The rest say they're "nothing in particular." Many of those are people who grew up in a liberal religious tradition, but have fallen away for one reason or another. There's some cultural affinity there too, in other words.
But from my perspective, what religious and secular progressives really have in common is this: we don't believe in a God who guarantees the social order. The Egyptian gods, as Brueggemann likes to point out, sponsored an unchanging social hierarchy, with Pharaoh on top and the vast majority of people on the bottom. And there were no rebellions against this order, because to do so would have been to go up against the gods themselves. That was unthinkable. But Yahweh, that strange and angry god of the Exodus, is more interested in justice than he is in keeping things the way they've always been. This God changes, and is not afraid to change things in the social order. Specifically, he doesn't work for the rich and the powerful. When they do wrong, he opposes them, which is a very naughty thing for a god to be doing in that era. God is free, in other words, and so are we. So a secularist might talk about the social compact that can be rewritten to serve the interests of the marginalized. I agree, even if for different reasons.
How has your congregation reacted to the publication of the book?
They're proud of their pastor, naturally. And as long as I avoid putting partisan labels on the issues, they're in more agreement with me than not. That's a surprise, given how rural and conservative this area is. (As I like to point out, F. James Sensenbrenner often attends our annual pancake breakfast to talk to his constituents.) That the people in the pews can agree with me at all is a testament first to the bind we all find ourselves in. Presidents come and go, political parties rise and fall, but Wal-Mart is eternal. So's the Army. But I think it's also a testament to a God who sponsors and promotes change in surprising, unlikely ways, even among the people who aren't supposed to "get it." The scripts may get changed at a maddeningly slow pace, but they do change, and that's the good news.