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God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It by Jim Wallis HarperSanFrancisco, 2005 384 pp., $24.95 
The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, From the Civil Rights Movement to Today by Charles Marsh Basic Books, 2005 292 pp., $26 |
I didn't vote last November 2nd. Not that friends and colleagues didn't beg me to perform my "civic duty." To them, Every Vote Counted in an epic conflict between the forces of light and darkness; to me, it was Imperialism, Plutocracy, and Capital Punishment versus Imperialism, Plutocracy, and Abortion. Eclipsed by those triads of iniquities, "my vision," to borrow Jim Wallis' words, "was not running in this election." So I stayed home on election night, watched a movie on the couch with my beloved wife, and retired in the knowledge that the empire would remain in someone's untrustworthy hands. (I also won $50 predicting both the winner and the margin of victory. Why should William Bennett have all the fun?)
The triumphant triad was the right-wing version of our nation's civil religion, the perverse religiosity of late-capitalist America, the current incarnation of the earthly city marked, as Augustine wrote, by "its lust after domination." That civil religion—whose sectarian disputes are the "culture wars"—defines redemption as inclusion in the capitalist market and pledges allegiance to what Philip Bobbitt has called a "market state," which facilitates capital mobility and labor "flexibility" while promising a bare and ever-shrinking minimum of justice and protection. Whatever the name of the covenant theology—"globalization," "neo-liberalism," "democratic capitalism"—its beatific vision is the worldwide expansion of individual "choices," whose mediation through "values" occasions the virulent but circumscribed sectarian differences. Its most compact creedal statement, promulgated by the Bush Administration in the fall of 2002, is the National Security Strategy of the United States, outlining the doctrines of "preemption"—what William Kristol of The Weekly Standard has candidly termed imperialism—and of "opening societies" to "the single sustainable model for national success": "free markets and free trade," i.e., deference to unfettered corporate prerogatives in investment and labor practices.
As its clerisy, the civil religion features a punditocracy whose job it is to control and patrol the borders of permissible discussion. These ubiquitous commentators do have their quarrels and indeed may be cast as bitter antagonists, conservative versus liberal, religious versus secular. And yet, oddly enough, wherever they take their stand in the culture wars, they never compromise their underlying commitment to the Empire of Expanding Choices.
Think of the wonderful disarray that would ensue if one violated the gravitational principles of this discursive universe and noted that "choice" is an ideological keyword both for defenders of abortion and for corporate elites; asserted that both groups ground their arguments in liberal individualist notions of selfhood at variance with Christian anthropology; and contended that any genuine "culture of life" requires a radical transformation of our political economy. If argued with skill, clarity, and force, these propositions would do more than reveal the profound affinity of factions now seen as enemies unto death, and expose the shabby foundations of contemporary political discourse. They would point to the possibility of a theological politics with its own laws of movement and inertia, a mode of critical and political engagement that uses but does not sacralize the foredoomed institutions of the earthly city.
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