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

Originally posted May 12, 2007.

A few words about the Christian notion of the “preferential option for the poor,” a central concept in much Latin American liberation theology. This theological method assumes that God favors the poor and marginalized in history, and “God is on their side” in very real power struggles on earth. Theology is done from the margins; practice is emphasized over theory; “base communities” (small gatherings of believers) complement the institutional church as a place for discussing the Bible. According to Wikipedia, there are 80,000 base communities operating in Brazil alone.

As I see it, the “preferential option for the poor” simply doesn’t jive with Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory. Evolutionary theology is thought produced by the cultural elites; thinking done from the margins–the poor, the oppressed, the illiterate–is reduced to lower levels of theological discourse. Liberation theology is acceptable to Integral theory on the basis that it’s a reflection of red and green altitude perspective whose claim on evolutionary theory must be included and transcended as merely a step in an ongoing process.

In Soulfully Gay, I tell a story that partly bridges the gap between liberation theology and mysticism. My central theological claim is that feminine and homophilic types have been marginalized by contemporary perspectives, and that a proper understanding of God will restore the balance created by the currently out-of-whack perspective that emphasizes agentic and homophobic modes of relating. If communal modes of theology are out of balance, homophilic modes are neglected even more so. (Communal and homophilic perspectives are even more neglected. However, not being a lesbian I feel rather unqualified to discuss this topic in depth.) So in my estimation, doing theology from the point of view of disenfranchised or underrepresented voices is critical to forming adequate conceptions of the relationship of God and Creation.

And yet as I see it today, my remarks in Soulfully Gay are only the beginning of a more comprehensive critique of Integral religious thought. As a Christian, I intuit the necessity to give greater value to perspectives of the least, the poorest, the most simple, feeble, and meek. This is the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ. To not be faithful to the notion “Blessed are the poor…” is not a viable option.

And so my perspective on evolution is more or less the opposite of the approach taken by Integral religious thought (specifically the most rigid and elitist varieties). Their approach tends to favor the perspectives of the most highly sophisticated, evolved, and elite. In my blogs (particularly those posts related to Kronology), I have suggested a way beyond the deadlock. To bring the “preferential option for the poor” into Integral theology is to take an additional perspective not already included within mainstream Integral theory.

Consider Ken Wilber’s three fundamental perspectives on value–Absolute (the absolute value of an object for God), Intrinsic (the value of an object in itself), and Relative (the value of an object for others). I suggest that the “preferential option for the poor” demands at least a fourth perspective: Relatively Absolute (the relative value of an object for God). This perspective involves seeing the world through the prism of involution, not evolution (generally defined esp. as “regressive changes” and a “function which is its own inverse”). We must trace God’s footprints in history by positing the involutionary footprint that accompanies every evolutionary development.

Assume hypothetically that there are 10 stages of development–say: 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 6x, 7x, 8x, 9x, 10x. Then the Absolute perspective is 0. The equation for solving the Absolute perspective is, e.g., 1x = 0. x = 0/1 or x = 0. The Absolute perspective is solved by dividing the stage by the Absolute perspective. The result is always 0 (x = 0); hence it is accurate to say that in the absolute perspective all stages are equal in God’s eyes (0/1 = 0/2, etc.). The involutionary footprint acknowledges the validity that in God’s eyes all are equal, because it understands the leveling and equalizing power of 0 in the equation of life. Before 0, all relative value distinctions are obliterated.

However, there are other ways to solve for x=0. For it’s true that 1x = 0, but it’s also true that 1x + (-1x) = 0. The involutionary footprint is the negative value added to the evolutionary stage in order for the sum to result in x = 0. Thus, 2x + (-2x) = 0, 3x + (-3x) = 0, etc. The positive value represents a stage of development in an outward or other-centered direction (Eros); the negative value represents a stage in vertical development in an inner or immanent direction (Agape). Or to use the biased language of evolutionists, Agape is regression. By analogy, for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction.

The implications of seeing an invisible trail of Agape as a footprint in evolution are enormous. It only scratches the surface to note that evolution is not merely a march forward to greater progress. It is accompanied at every stage of growth by increasing involution. The higher we appear to ascend, the deeper God appears to fall. The lower we appear to ascend, the less God seems to decline. From God’s relative point of view at 0, evolution and involution are equivalent, merely twin sides of the coin. Not only is one level of development not greater than any other, but the greater the apparent value the deeper the descent of God. By analogy, the negative numbers closest to 0 are prized, just as the poorest of the poor are the closest to God.

Thus, we can begin to understand the “preferential option for the poor” as something like a “preferential option for the underdeveloped, the lesser evolved”. From God’s relative point of view, the least feeble and weakest among the creatures are those who are less in “need” of God’s help, guidance, and comfort. They get more from God because they have less. God’s preference, God’s leveling and balancing act in History, is to give more and more of God’s self in self-sacrificial love (Agape) to the porrest, the meekest, and the least evolved. Relatively speaking, God’s love for the marginalized is greater than God’s love for the sophisticates and the realizers. It’s not fair, but this is part of the proclamation of Jesus’ teachings of the Reign of Heaven.

The involutionary insight of Christian theology can be appreciated from an Integral lense, but only by turning the scales of evolution upside down, and reimagining the universe from God’s point of view. God is not neutral in the conflict between the sophisticated elites and the marginalized poor. God is on the side of the lesser developed. It’s not an easy truth; it’s not fair (to our eyes most likely), but it’s the nature of the Reign of Heaven.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, God, liberation theology