Coming out of the election of a couple weeks ago it is clear
that America is, as it has been most of the past 12 years, is still a painfully
divided nation. Leaders in both parties
say they would love to unite us of course, because that is a surefire path to a
landslide (remember when we had to use that term?) election victory.
But there are two fundamentally different visions of how to
unite us on the table and neither seems to get it right. Let’s start with the fairly narrow vision
Mitt Romney put forth that was a complete miss.
Romney’s vision was we should unite because of our common desire for
more and better jobs. White, black,
Catholic, Protestant, stand shoulder to shoulder with Mitt for a good job. It was inspirational as you would expect that
to be.
But I also found in President Obama’s victory speech, an
equally erroneous view of what unites as Americans. He uttered lines like, “But despite all our
differences, most of us share certain hopes for America’s future”. The devil is in the details and while we all
do share, “certain hopes”, they are increasingly different.
There are a lot of people in this country who hope government will continue to expand
and provide more and more. There are a
sizeable number of people who hope
that government will shrink and allow the private sector to grow as people are
given more freedom to chart their own destinies. So the notion that shared hopes will hold us
together falls flat.
What he finally concluded with was, “We are greater than the
sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red
states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America,”
and therein lies the rub.
The tone of his speech, the language Democrats use when they
try to talk about us uniting seems to always rest on the notion that well, we
all live in the same land, the same geographic
proximity to each other, in the same sovereign state, we should unite. The logic of this is simply
non-existent. We were, “The United
States of America” when the first shot was fired on Ft. Sumter. Yet we had a fundamental difference over one
very specific core value that caused us to erupt into war.
What Obama’s words highlight, which should come as no shock
given he won re-election through a campaign designed to divide us, is that
fundamentally, Democrats don’t know what brings us together or why we should
stay together. This should scare the
daylights out of us. It may also speak
to the deeper reality that government, a political party cannot unite us.
We need to go back to 1776 and understand our roots, how we
came together in the first place. The
answer is relatively simple, it was religious freedom. The New World appealed to those individuals who
could not freely practice their chosen religion within the realm of the Church
of England. Quakers, Catholics,
Protestants of all forms came here to fundamentally be allowed to worship God
in their own way, but make no mistake, it was a God, and more than that, it was
always a Christian God.
So it really wasn’t a shock when, pushed too far by King
George, this group of people, who all answered to a higher authority, pushed
back and said we have certain God given rights as human beings that no
government has the right to trample.
That was what united this country. It wasn’t the desire to form a really big
government, it wasn’t the desire to redefine marriage, it wasn’t legalized
pot. It was about a Christian God and
organizing a nation that recognized that God as the ultimate authority. We began as a nation of people who had their
priorities in order. As importantly, we
kept them in order. Even through a
contentious Constitutional Convention and the Civil War. We always knew what and who was the guiding
principle for our nation because God was the guiding principle in the lives of
our leaders.
The Civil War is perhaps most instructive. It is, to my knowledge, the only time in
history that a nation has gone through a civil war only to immediately and
truly reunify immediately after. Vietnam
was divided for more than a decade after the end of that war, Korea is divided
today, but the North and the South came back together immediately after the end
of the war.
We were a nation at that point founded on Judeo-Christian
values. We’ve spent the last 50 years
now walking away from those values like Ben Affleck walking away from Fenway
Park in the movie “The Town”. Walking calmly
at first, then briskly, and then breaking into a run.
To an unprecedented degree, we cannot agree on whether there
is a God or what he/she might want us to do - 20% of voters this time around
reported no belief in God or no religious affiliation. Among the 80% that believe in a God, we don’t
even have a unifying Christian identity.
Some allegedly Christian denominations believe homosexuals
can marry and even be Bishops or Priests.
Many have no issues with birth control.
Most are eerily quiet on the issue of abortion. Organizations like Pew have tried to use
church attendance as a gauge of the level of piety in our nation, but that is a
horribly outdated measure.
Even within the Catholic Church, which has held steadfastly
to the same positions for over 2,000 years now, I have been to mass with people
who believe God is a woman, that women should be ordained, and one survey shows
38% of Catholics describing themselves as “pro-choice” – all things that are
squarely at odds with Catholic teaching.
The reality is we have never been more divided as a nation
across more issues. We are dangerously
close to coming unanchored from our Judeo-Christian moorings as a nation. Once that happens, where we go is anybody’s
guess. Germany was the first to try its
own flavor of Christianity, led by Martin Luther, and a few centuries later
they killed 6 million Jews. G.K.
Chesterton, among others, didn’t think that was a coincidence.
I have to let the President off the hook on this one, he
cannot unite us. When people in the same
parish no longer share common values, then those in a community will not find
common ground. If we can’t find shared
values at the community level, good luck doing it at the state or national
level.
No, we the people have to figure this one out for
ourselves. Do we believe in God, do we
believe in Jesus Christ and what does that actually mean? Does it really mean that two dudes can marry
or that I can kill my unborn baby? Does
it mean that I have to hand my wealth and destiny over to a large government
investing endlessly in infrastructure (King Herrod in Jesus’s time was also a
builder)? Do I believe I am in control
of my life? That government is in control
of my life? Heck, do we even know when
life begins or when it should end?
We would do well as a nation and as a people to spend the
next 4 years trying to figure out what our core values are (or were in 1776)
and how we want to orientate our lives.
As I’ve told many people in the past year, we think we have political
issues and the reality is we have a large, theological issue. If we solve that, if we come to a common,
Judeo-Christian understanding of life and the world again, then the political issues
will practically solve themselves. And
if we can’t solve our pressing theological challenge, nothing else matters.
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