Andrew Sullivan sums up his argument with the Social Gospel variety of Christianity — which he equates with a cooptation of Christianity by socialism and redistributionism, a position towards which Obama leans, he claims – in this way:

[I]t isn’t about encouraging charity; it is about the enforcement of “charity” by the strong hand of the state. And in so far as it forcibly takes people’s property from them, it also diminishes their capacity for real charity.

Now, saints are very rare.

And the kind of voluntary communism of which Merton speaks likely only in monasteries and religious orders. In the world as it is, there should be some mandatory public provision for the poor, the sick and the indigent. But it should be a safety-net to avoid specific social evils, not a system of redistribution to construct some notion of “social justice” (see Chapter 6 in “The Conservative Soul”). In the end, the social Gospel can make Christianity less, rather than more, likely. The state cannot experience faith; and it cannot express charity. Only individuals can. One by one. (emphasis mine)

Is it really so self-evident that only individuals, and not collective entities, are capable of “experiencing faith” or “expressing charity”? And that Christianity is essentially a religion concerned only with the individual soul, the I-Thou relationship between One Supreme God and The Individual Soul? Andrew Sullivan, like many Christians, thinks so. But this assumption has been fundamentally questioned by many Christian theologians at least since the late 19th century (including the early but not the later Reinhold Niebuhr), and is explicitly disavowed by liberation theology, arguably the most significant paradigm shift in theology in the past 40 years. Today, many Christians believe that groups as well as individuals embody the Spirit and have a role in salvation (Matthew 18: “For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.”)

It may be literally true that a collective cannot “experience faith” or “express charity”, but can’t a collective embody greater or lesser degrees of cohesion, integration, and self-awareness? In fact, social scientists since Jean Gebser have argued that societies progress from archaic to magical to mythical to mental to integral stages of consciousness. Political structures, too, seem to range from those which enfold low to high degrees of consciousness (anarchic to tribal to authoritarian to democratic to social-democratic). One needn’t be an orthodox Hegelian–believing in the inevitable triumph of Absolute Spirit–to observe that some societies appear to experience and express greater complexity, harmony, and humanity than others. When a liberation theologian says that God is the force of expanding freedom and goodness in history, or when an integral theologian says that some social arrangements “enfold” more consciousness than others, they recognize God (or consciousness) as present in the empowering group, the virtuous neighborhood, the charitable organization, and–yes–the good state.

Christian Individualists will never look for God anywhere other than an individual’s own “personal” soul, and so they will never see God’s presence in and beyond individuals. More transpersonal thinkers–shifting from instrumental reasoning (orange) to vision-logic reasoning (green to turquoise)–know that God is neither strictly individual nor collective. We see that salvation is irreducibly relational and therefore Christian virtue expresses itself necessarily in individuals and groups. Government is, therefore, not an enemy of the soul, but a partner in the arising of the Christian vision of a “shining city on a hill” and “new heavens and new earth”.

Andrew Sullivan’s version of Christian Individualism says that the virtue of groups is likely in monasteries and religious orders, not civic institutions, and certainly not the dreaded federal government! His greatest fear, it seems, is Christianism–the ideology of wielding the Christian religion as a political force, conflating church and state. His criticism really only stings when it’s applied to pre-rational (amber or lower) ideologies: the Christian right, or Islamism, for example. Andrew thinks his critique of Christianism is damning also for the political left–Social Gospel Christians, Barack Obama, and so forth–but this misses the importance of the distinction between prerational and transrational religion. In its transrational forms, religion grasps the necessity to separate church and state by assuring an individual’s freedom of religion. But the spiritual left also sees that individual rights are best protected when they are legitimized and grounded in a theology of a liberating God (or a philosophy of evolving consciousness/Spirit). The spiritual left doesn’t want to impose its religion on everyone else. It respects religious freedom because it sees the arising of individual liberty itself as a reflection of the divine.

Christian Individualists will have none of that. They malign efforts to create a more virtuous government or a just society as somehow getting in the way. If government makes health care affordable, this is bad because it denies good people the ability to cultivate their individual virtue by giving charity to the less fortunate. If government does anything to address the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” nature of human existence, then this is bad because it makes faith in an otherworldly God and an otherworldly salvation less pressing. As Andrew says, “in the end”, Christianity becomes “less likely”. Or something like that.

Will solving America’s health care crisis really make Christianity less likely? Will making our taxation progressive? Will regulating carbon emissions? Will protecting children from toxins and overseeing food safety? Will enacting Barack Obama’s progressive agenda? I guess if any of these things will actually make Christianity less likely (and I see no real evidence), then that’s a price this Christian is willing to pay. Because in the end, a Christianity that is rendered unnecessary by an evolving social consciousness is no form of the religion worth keeping around.

Technorati Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Christianity, integral, liberation theology, Obama, politics, religious right, social evolution, Social Gospel, social justice, spiritual left

Technorati Tags: afterlife, Andrew Sullivan, religion

One of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, recently published part of my letter as a “Dissent of the Day”. That makes two times! Cool. Here’s a longer version:

If you haven’t been living under a rock over the past few months, you know that Hillary Clinton has been taken a serious beating from the mainstream media and the liberal blogosphere because she has stayed in the race despite overwhelming odds.

A fairly typical heated response from an Obama supporter was Andrew Sullivan’s. On June 3 he wrote:

The speech tonight was a remarkable one for a candidate who has lost the nomination, though not remarkable for a Clinton. It was an assertion that she had won the nomination and a refusal to concede anything to her opponent. Classless, graceless, shameless, relentless. Pure Clinton.

Now — only about 24 hours after Obama was projected the winner of the Democratic primary by the AP and all the major news networks — the Clinton campaign has made its suspension official, and it has also said it will keep its promise to endorse Obama.

It is time for Democrats to take a deep breath, calm down, and be grateful that the process is coming to a close. I think Ross Douthat of The Atlantic set exactly the right tone:

It would probably been better for the party if Hillary had conceded defeat somewhat earlier … But I think that once a few months have gone by, at least some of outrage that Hillary Clinton has generated among liberal pundits by campaigning to the bitter end in a race that she ended up losing by just over a hundred pledged delegates and roughly half a percent of the popular vote will seem, in hindsight, faintly hysterical.

Tom Bevan also presents a considered, reasoned reaction to Clinton’s decision. He writes:

Clinton clearly could have been more gracious on Tuesday night in acknowledging Obama’s achievement, and she could have used softer language in describing her campaign. On the other hand, as a candidate who spent the better part of two years campaigning and who won 18 million votes across the country fighting her way to what was for all intents and purposes a tie, she also had ample justification for touting her accomplishments and for not conceding immediately on Tuesday night - despite what others may have wanted.

Sullivan, however, is not taking back anything he’s said. He digs in deeper, responding to Devan:

And historically, losing candidates concede after the last primary has delivered an insurmountable victory to his or her opponent - and usually long before. Those were the rules the Clintons set for Jerry Brown back in 1992; they are rules everyone else follows. I see no reason to acquiesce to the delusions and pathologies of Clinton entitlement.

However, the facts are not on Sullivan’s side. History teaches that Obama supporters who find themselves angry with Clinton for staying in the race have lost perspective.

It’s true that many presidential candidates drop out when it seems their odds of winning are insurmountable (think Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, etc.) But at least since Super Tuesday, it has been obvious that the Obama v. Clinton contest was altogether in a separate category.

Most careful watchers of the race have predicted for several months that neither Obama nor Clinton would have enough pledged delegate votes to “go over the top” and secure enough delegates to win the nomination. For this scenario, there is only one close historical analogy: 1984’s race between Walter Mondale and Gary Hart.

Like 2008, the 1984 race featured two Democratic frontrunners who finished the primary season without either candidate securing enough delegates to win outright. Therefore, vice president Mondale, leading in the pledged delegate count, worked the phones for superdelegate support.

Meanwhile, Hart, Mondale’s opponent, argued that superdelegates should overturn the results of the primaries because he was the superior candidate. He argued that polls showed him the superior general election candidate and that he won late primary successes — blowouts in big states like California — that he should be the nominee.

Of course, Hart’s arguments failed to win over the superdelegates. Mondale won the Democratic nomination with the help of a pledged delegate plurality and a few dozen superdelegates.

So, students of history, when did Hart drop out of the race? After Mondale named himself the victor, Hart challenged: “Welcome to overtime. It is not over.”

In fact, Hart took his race for the White House all the way to the Democratic convention in San Francisco. On June 3, 2008, Hart told the New York Observer:

“I think what I really was motivated by was the overwhelming sense of my delegates that they had worked very hard—some of them for a year or a year and a half or more—and that they wanted me to be nominated and to demonstrate their support even if I could not get the nomination,” Mr. Hart said.

Thus, as any objective observer would remark, it seems there are some key differences between 1984 and 2004: First, unlike Hart, Clinton faced tremendous pressure from the media, party elders, DNC officials, not to mention relentless criticism by the liberal blogosphere, to surrender early. Second, unlike Hart, Clinton has not responded by forcing the contest into “overtime”.

By historical standards, Clinton has ended her campaign speedily. This is not to deny that she is certainly due for criticism for many other reasons — for example, by continuing to wage certain “negative attacks” against Obama even as her chances seemed hopeless. But critics who say she overstayed her welcome in the race are subjecting her to historically unprecedented criticism.

Technorati Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Democratic, Hillary Clinton, politics