Notes for a Speech

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I begin with the assertion that there is a role for faith in public life, but it is not always that easy to articulate that role in a way that even those who share the same faith can agree upon. For example, speaking from the point of view of one who is of the Christian faith, I have to say that I find one of the more outward and highlighted expressions of faith in public life, the National Prayer Breakfast, and the movement associated with it, to be an exercise in personal and public piety that I have difficulty with. For me it lacks a sufficient "prophetic" dimension.

At a recent national prayer breakfast, an M.P. who is very active in the prayer breakfast, said the following in the course of publicly outlining their mission statement: "Some people say it’s up to governments to get the poor out of the slums. But we in the prayer breakfast know that if we get Jesus into the hearts of the poor, they will get themselves out of the slums."

Here, it seems to me, we have a clear-cut example of the great divide that exists, at least within the Christian community. This statement contained not a hint of what I consider to be the fundamental insight of the biblical tradition, both within the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament, and in the teachings of Christ Himself; which is that what is needed in so many circumstances down through the ages, in order for the poor not to be poor, is for the rich and powerful to have Jesus in their hearts, or to put it in a more complex, modern way, not just for the rich and powerful to have Jesus in their hearts, but also for governments, and in a democracy, for the voters to have Jesus in their hearts. If Jesus was Lord in the hearts of the affluent and the powerful, and lord in the hearts of voters, do we really think that tax relief for high income earners would ever take precedence over lunch programs for hungry kids in inner city schools?

Did Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos, and other prophets bemoan and criticise the spiritual life of the orphaned, the widow, the stranger and the needy, and say that if only they turned to god, to Yahweh, they would be alright, or did they address the inadequacies and injustices of the king, and the elite, and the court prophets who told the powerful what they wanted to hear?

The role of faith or religion in public life cannot be and must not be, to dress up in religious language what really are sometimes our more fundamental commitments, i.e. ideological or other core public policy or political commitments. Nor, of course, should faith be an entirely individual thing, in which we allow our faith to challenge and shape our personal, familial, and even collegial relationships, but not to challenge and shape the relations between rich and poor, between the powerful and the powerless, between workers and owners, between landlords and tenants, between multinational corporations and democratically elected governments, between economic interests and environmental sustainability, between government and the governed, between citizens and society.

The Lordship of Jesus, the Gospel, for the Christian, is both political and existential good news. Existentially, we are to be set free from whatever demons are destroying our personal life, or our families, whether it be anger, despair, desire, pride, substance abuse, or whatever. Politically, we are to be set free from, and work to set our world free from the demons, the idols, that sanction ways of organising human life that stand in the way of God’s intention for creation and for humanity, that stand in the way of justice, and treating all humans for what they really are, not commodities, or units of productivity, but God’s children and image bearers of God.

A core Christian confession is that God so loved the "world." It is the world that God is concerned with. History matters to god, as we see in the parable of the sheep and the goats. God wants to know, did we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick, visit the prisoner, welcome the stranger.

God will not ask, did you please the money lenders, did you successfully impose austerity on already desperate peoples, did you balance all your budgets, and did you show proper deference to the sacred mystery of the market place and how all things work for the good with those who let the market have its way.

In my view the way the market has been elevated from one false god among many in the human political pantheon, to the false god of the post-Cold War era and the era of free trade, as if the market existed outside of our collective obedience to it, is an open and shut case of idolatry. It is our graven image. Yet it would be too easy to just talk about the market, and it’s existential credo, "I shop, therefore I am."

It would be a mistake to say only what I have said so far. Because what I have said so far could be very accurately construed as a far too single-minded attack on what might be called both the secular and religious right, the secular right for its worship of the market, and the religious right for its non-prophetic stance towards this false god. Because the left too has its way of banishing God from the conversation.

Right-wingers might like to banish religion upstairs, to privatise it when it comes to economics, and say that it only has to do with personal behaviour and not corporate behaviour, but left-wingers like to privatise it when it comes to questions of personal and social morality, and shun religious language which prescribes certain behaviour for everyone, which is normative in nature, and not just a religious version of a personal value system.

While it is true that some left wing political traditions proudly boast of their origins in movements like the social gospel or Christian socialism, or liberation theology, it is also true that God language, and moral language, the language of right and wrong, are not welcome ways of speaking within much of the left. This is not to say that the God language of the right, or the moral language of the right is on the mark. Quite the contrary. But it is to say that there is a problem on the left.

I heard this said in a variety of ways at the Summit on Meaning in Politics organised by Michael Lerner in Washington, DC a few years ago. One Rabbi said, the problem is that fundamentalists quote proof texts and get it wrong, whereas liberals, in the American sense of the term liberal, don’t quote any at all. Or, as somebody else said, the right offers false boundaries, but the left must get beyond the image of having no boundaries at all.

Harvey Cox, who recently wrote an article in Atlantic Monthly entitled, "The Market as God," rightly notices the religious nature of the claims now being made about the market, about trade liberalisation and capital flows. It is the language of salvation, and I have heard it myself at meetings of the World Trade Organisation that I have attended as NDP Trade Critic.

But Harvey Cox also said, and quite appropriately, at the same summit in Washington that I referred to earlier, that it is legitimate for the right to ask how much moral consensus is needed for democracy, and whether religious pluralism leads to moral relativism. He also reported that amongst young people there is a desire for moral reflection and moral guidance. They are looking for something, I would say, that goes beyond the increasingly empty rhetoric of choice, of a consumer view of values. They may want to be free to make choices, but as Charles Taylor, the renowned Canadian philosopher, says in his book, Malaise of Modernity, there needs to be a moral horizon, if choices are to be meaningful and not a-moral or arbitrary in nature.

The language of choice gives rise to an irony that should give cause for reflection to both the religious right and the religious left. To the extent that the whole question of values, which is the politically correct, morally neutral or non-judgemental way, of talking about morality, to the extent that the question of values is increasingly seen as one of personal choice, both the religious right and the religious left are caught in a world not wholly to their liking, but somewhat of their own making.

The religious right lament the language of choice but are guilty of promoting it with their songs of praise to the market and the market mentality towards everything that such a focus on the market brings with it. The political left, which criticises the market, ends up advocating a form of market mentality, or consumer choice, when it comes to many personal and social issues and sometimes seems to hardly notice the absence of the kind of moral framework that they would like to see imposed on economic behaviour.

In the end, what should unite the faithful on both the right and left is the way in which those with no faith perspective, or at least none that they would call as such, seek to relegate faith and religion to the purely private realm, and banish religious argument from public discourse. To do this both the religious right and the religious left need to abandon their own self-serving partial privatisations of religion, and then engage each other in an authentic dialogue.

If the Canadian Catholic bishops are to be quoted, then let them be taken seriously, which is not to say uncritically, on both abortion and the economy. Instead what happens is that the religious left quote them on the economy, and not on abortion, and the religious right quote them on abortion and not on the economy. But worst of all, as I said, is the fact that the bishops’ opinion, and the opinion of other churches, is dismissed by too many people on all issues because it is a religious point of view, as if this somehow disqualifies it.

What the Christian community needs is a robust faith and a robust politics within which we do not shout challenges or slogans at each other from various camps, but wherein we meet, question, examine each other’s foundations, undergirding where appropriate, and undermining when appropriate, trying to construct common ground without being limited to the common denominator, asking ourselves always, what would the world be like if God were in charge and the rulers of this present age were not.

In this way, the religious community could challenge the world we live in, whether we call it secular, humanist, pluralist, relativist, or whatever, in an integrated and effective way, as both challenge and example of how to deal with conflicting perspectives. We are not an example at the moment. We could reverse the judgement of the enlightenment that religion is the cause of war, and should be privatised for it is certainly the case that the ideologies, imperialisms, industrialisms, and other idols spawned by the enlightenment have hardly led to a peaceful world.

And we would establish once and for all that there are no split-level universes. The realm of God and the human sphere are inseparable. As New Testament scholar N.T. Wright reminds us, the Lord’s Prayer teaches us to pray, "thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Not, "in heaven when we eventually get there," or "in heaven where we enjoy our private spiritualities," but on earth, in the here and now.

We must always seek to avoid the twin evils of a faith divorced from politics, or a politics divorced from faith. Only a life in which the two are constantly interacting with each other is a faith which takes God’s love for the world seriously.