is the subtitle of a piece,”American Salvation” appearing in The Boston Review. It is written by Albert J. Raboteau, the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion at Princeton University and the author of Slave Religion and A Sorrowful Joy. He is a communicant of the Orthodox Church in America, originally spun off from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1970. It contains over 500 parishes which are a mixture of ethnically oriented and non-ethnic parishes, almost all of which outside Alaska and parts of Canada follow the revised Julian Calendar (Christmas on December 25) and use English.
Raboteau is a careful scholar of African-American religion. My wife,like Raboteau an Orthodox, suggested this piece might be useful given recent discussions about religion and related matters here. I will offer, without comment, several selections below the fold to whet your appetites. I encourage reactions.
DISCLOSURE — I spent 14 years through 1990 as a communicant (member) of the Orthodox Church in America, during which time I held elective and appointed office at local, state and national levels.
If after you read the selections below you wish to read the entire article, here is the link
G.K. Chesterton once called America “a nation with the soul of a church.” He was referring, in part, to the habitual tendency of Americans to cast political and social events as scenes in the drama of salvation. From the start America’s story was a religious story. In the 1630s English Puritans represented their journey across the Atlantic to America as the exodus of a New Israel out of Old World slavery into a promised land of milk and honey. And through the centuries, the story of the American Israel would serve as our nation’s most powerful and long-lasting myth.
African-American Christianity has continuously confronted the nation with troubling questions about American exceptionalism. Perhaps the most troubling was this: “If Christ came as the Suffering Servant, who resembled Him more, the master or the slave?” Suffering-slave Christianity stood as a prophetic condemnation of America’s obsession with power, status, and possessions. African-American Christians perceived in American exceptionalism a dangerous tendency to turn the nation into an idol and Christianity into a clan religion. Divine election brings not preeminence, elevation, and glory, but–as black Christians know all too well–humiliation, suffering, and rejection
Out of this prophetic tradition the civil-rights movement emerged in the 1960s to offer one of the most powerful critiques of American society, including not only Jim Crow in the South but eventually what Martin Luther King Jr. would call the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” King, the most eloquent spokesman of the movement, clearly drew upon the resources of black religious protest, but he also drew upon the critical thought and action of a variety of figures from other traditions, such as Thoreau, Gandhi, Rauschenbusch, and of course the Hebrew prophets. The prominent presence of such figures as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Greek Orthodox Archbishop Iakovos, and Roman Catholic priests and nuns in the front lines of civil-rights marches demonstrated the deep moral resonance that moved peoples of different faiths to protest injustice, based upon the age-old call of their traditions to seek justice and show mercy
The principle of religious freedom provided a powerful opportunity for religious-based dissent. In addition to democracy’s inherent capacity for self-criticism and renewal, the mobilization of the prophetic role of religion in the political life of the country has served as a critique of national ambition and hubris, from the Puritan Jeremiad to the Abolitionist Movement to Lincoln’s Second InauguralSpeech to the anti-Vietnam War protests.
In the world, but not of the world. These words capture the antinomical relationship of the Church to human society and culture. On the one hand, the incarnational character of the Church establishes her in history, in this particular time and place and culture. On the other, the sacramental character of the Church transcends time and space, making present another world, the kingdom of God, which is both here and now and yet still to come. Throughout the history of Christianity, the temptation to relax this antinomy has led Christians to represent the Church as an ethereal transcendent mystery unrelated and antithetical to human society and culture. Or, alternatively, it has prompted Christians to so identify the Church with a particular society, culture, or ethnicity as to turn Christianity into a religious ideology. Because we are “not of the world,” Christians stand against culture when the values and behaviors of the culture contradict the living tradition of the Church.
Orthodoxy in particular offers, I believe, a distinctive view of the human person that can serve as an important critique of the definition of the core American value, freedom, the principle upon which Americans are most likely to agree.
The American idea of freedom is centered on the rights of the individual person, but with the premise–more strongly observed at some times than others–that the respect due to the individual makes possible his participation in common, public, civic life. Freedom of conscience and freedom of choice enable individuals to participate in civil institutions, which exist to serve the commonweal.
It is easy to criticize the vulgar consumerism of mass-media advertising; religion alone does not necessarily defend us against it. Religion itself can be another form of ego gratification–a kind of spiritual consumerism that focuses on having spiritual experiences to aggrandize the self, spiritual hedonism, but hedonism nonetheless. Behind the drive for self-aggrandizement, whether material or spiritual, is a distorted sense of the person as an individualized ego–the self as the source of freedom and value. To the contrary, Orthodoxy views the person as ineluctably interpersonal. The very purpose of our being is to commune with others–to commune with the Divine Persons of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to commune with our fellow human persons. We stand not alone, as solitary individual selves, but in compassionate solidarity with others, the saints, who have gone before, our ancestors in the faith, whose icons surround us at church and at home–a cloud of living witnesses. And we stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the present, especially with those who suffer.
For Orthodox Christians, as for all people of faith, beliefs about the nature of the individual and society shape a political agenda; integrity requires that we argue not just with words, but with our lives as well. But those beliefs must make their case within the pluralistic agora of American society. The freedom of exercise clause of the First Amendment offers religion the freedom to live and express its values, and the non-establishment clause guarantees that each has to do so in the midst of supporting and conflicting claims.
If American democracy offers religion an opportunity, American pluralism offers it a challenge. Pluralism challenges us to experience religion as more than a cultural identity. Pluralism means encountering the values and attitudes and beliefs of others with respect for those who hold them. Pluralism, when taken seriously as respect for difference, rejects relativism for avoiding the hard truth that we do indeed differ.
I am troubled that there is no political home for my consistent ethic of life, but I also take comfort in the knowledge that electoral politics is not all there is to politics. If Chesterton’s idea of an America with the soul of a church has any validity, I believe it lies in our tradition of voluntary activity, through which faith can mobilize people to participate in the long and difficult grassroots struggle to transform our communities into a more just and peaceful society.
If you have read these scattered selections, hopefully you will be enticed to take the time to read the entire article.
