Charles Dickens, Liberation Theologian

I suspect we'll be coming back to this perhaps epochal article again and again. Thomas B. Edsall argues that the United States is going through a period unlike any that its citizens, except for the very old, have experienced before. If economic growth remains anemic, tax revenues will as well, and deficits will continue to balloon. At the federal and especially state and local levels in an "age of austerity" and of rediscovered fiscal probity, Edsall argues, competition for scarce government largess will increase. Those with special influence and leverage (such as unions and large corporations) will have an even greater advantage than usual over constituencies, such as illegal immigrants and the poor, who can be easily scapegoated for gobbling up precious taxpayer resources (no matter how small a piece of the budget pie may actually have been set at the table for them).

We can hope that the mighty engine of U.S. productivity and growth (the last best hope of the material world, at least) will reignite and put the lie, as they say, to the doom-and-gloomers. Whether it does or not, it's important for everyone, from the humblest voter to the most exalted legislator, judge, pundit, and policy maker, to remember what the Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ proclaimed and the liberation theologians reaffirmed beginning in the 1960s: That God has a special place in his heart for the poor.

So I gave thanks when this passage from Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop came up on my iPod this morning as I drove between pastoral appointments. Those who were amazed a half-century ago to find such powerful faith burning in the darkest slums of Santiago said it no more powerfully. Nor has anyone ever written more beautifully about the roots of true patriotism:

[I]f ever household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the truer metal and bear the stamp of Heaven. The man of high descent may love the halls and lands of his inheritance as part of himself: as trophies of his birth and power; his associations with them are associations of pride and wealth and triumph; the poor man's attachment to the tenements he holds, which strangers have held before, and may to-morrow occupy again, has a worthier root, struck deep into a purer soil. His household gods are of flesh and blood, with no alloy of silver, gold, or precious stone; he has no property but in the affections of his own heart; and when they endear bare floors and walls, despite of rags and toil and scanty fare, that man has his love of home from God, and his rude hut becomes a solemn place.

Oh! if those who rule the destinies of nations would but remember this -- if they would but think how hard it is for the very poor to have engendered in their hearts, that love of home from which all domestic virtues spring, when they live in dense and squalid masses where social decency is lost, or rather never found -- if they would but turn aside from the wide thoroughfares and great houses, and strive to improve the wretched dwellings in bye-ways where only Poverty may walk -- many low roofs would point more truly to the sky, than the loftiest steeple that now rears proudly up from the midst of guilt, and crime, and horrible disease, to mock them by its contrast. In hollow voices from Workhouse, Hospital, and jail, this truth is preached from day to day, and has been proclaimed for years. It is no light matter -- no outcry from the working vulgar -- no mere question of the people's health and comforts that may be whistled down on Wednesday nights. In love of home, the love of country has its rise; and who are the truer patriots or the better in time of need -- those who venerate the land, owning its wood, and stream, and earth, and all that they produce? or those who love their country, boasting not a foot of ground in all its wide domain!

I'm listening to the novel. You can read it on-line here thanks to the University of Virginia.

Tell Laura I'll Miss Her

Laura Schlessinger, who's giving up her radio show after going on a tirade featuring the N-word last week, helped me be a better divorced dad and second husband. She's relentless about personal responsibility, especially when it comes to the conceiving and care of children, who are and ever will be victims of certain parents' selfish frivolity. If you don't think we need such teachers, please just look around.

Her unyielding testimony always reminded me of Hebrew Testament prophecy. In recent years the church has tended to define prophecy as broad statements about social justice delivered to friendly audiences. But back in the day, nobody liked prophets. They said radical things that put them in personal danger. Reading them for guidance today, we pick and choose. We prick up our ears when the prophets tell us to let justice roll down like a mighty stream but cover them quickly when we're commanded to slaughter the priests of Baal on the high places.

So it was with Schlessinger. When I listened, sometimes I winced because of what I was doing, other times because of what she was saying. She expected more from women than men in the emotional nurturing of relationships, for instance. If you were a single mother of small children, she said you could date again more or less when they were old enough to be sworn into the United States Senate. She was rightly criticized for stridency about gay and lesbian people, which, I'm told, she had abandoned. When revealing photos from her own reckless youth were circulated, critics said her sneering at callers' foibles was hypocritical, while she admitted her mistakes and said she felt called to share the lessons she'd learned from them.

At times, her righteous anger seemed to get the better of her. In 1998, she went tubular on a Coast Mesa surf shop for stocking a racy magazine. On bad days, when she seemed to find it unendurable to listen to yet another person who desired affirmation for poor choices, her icy contempt was hard to hear. Sometimes her frustration bubbled over, as when she tried to make a complicated semiotic argument about the most dangerous word in American discourse by repeating it 11 times on the air.

While it may be time for Dr. Laura to take a break, I'll miss her, as will all those who called with a real problem and constructive attitude and encountered a stranger with an amazing capacity for making a connection and dispensing useful advice within a few precious minutes. Her gift of instant empathy is an underrated but vital one in our self-fixated times. I always felt she cared about her listeners, especially those who evinced deep emotional pain or seemed to be in danger from themselves or others. Her focus and attentiveness at these moments was stunning, her compassion profoundly moving. Yes, she's said a lot of outrageous things and hurt many people's feelings over the years (though often, when their own actions were under discussion, they've deserved it). She's also helped millions in ways we'll never know. She'll be welcome back prophesying in my Saturn anytime.

A Prayer On Both Your Houses

E. J. Dionne, Jr. (that's Isaiah at right, not E.J.) argues that the increase in the percentage of Americans who say they aren't religious is related to the pervasive association of Christianity with the evangelical, politically activist, generally Republican faction of the faith:

Religion is always corrupted when it gets too close to political power. It's possible to win a precinct caucus and lose your soul, to mistake political victory for salvation itself.

While he may be right, he overlooks what happened a generation or two ago to the mainline Protestant denominations, which began to lose adherents as they become more closely associated with so-called liberal causes such as opposition to the Vietnam war and equity for women and gay and lesbian people. Would Dionne say that religion can be corrupted if it advocates too aggressively for politicians who support green energy and world peace instead of (as in the case of the evangelical cohort) oppose abortion?

As an alternative to spending its time and energy worrying about the swinging ecclesiastical pendulum, I would like to see the church simultaneously become more knowledgeable about politics and policy and yet less emotionally engaged in outcomes, which actually aren't our job. Studying Matthew's account of the Resurrection this Easter, I was struck by what happened to the guards (possibly Roman, but more likely working for the temple authorities) when the angel rolled away the stone in front of Jesus's tomb:

⁴For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men.

Likewise, in Isaiah's Fourth Servant Song, which Christians take to be an anticipation of Christ, the prophet says:

Kings shall shut their mouths because of him.

That would be something to see, huh? Secular authority staring divinity in its face and being struck dumb with terror. Obviously the church has spent much of its life promoting fear and guilt, often in a self-serving and emotionally destructive way. And yet there is still something to be said for the fear of God (as opposed to fear of the Pope or parish priest). After all, continues Isaiah, God's ways are not our ways nor God's thoughts our thoughts. It seems to me that politics at its best is inherently cultural, the gospel inherently countercultural. So perhaps the church should be less focused on trying to refashion the state in its image than on modeling a radically different way of living, interacting, and building and sustaining community even in the throes of conflict.

Some in the church love justice, righteousness, and mercy so much that they find it unbearable when governments and political leaders don't do all they can do promote these virtues. The difficulty is that prophecy can breed pride, even zealotry. So today, prophetic Christendom is as fractured as politics, with one faction promoting justice for those who have been born and the other for those who have merely been conceived. Don't we see that in our divisions, we are aping the very secular leaders we so often scorn?

A Voice That Crieth In The Wilderness

A visionary Roman Catholic priest, his heart full of wisdom and love, would've rescued generations of victims from sexual predators, if the Church had only listened in 1952. Whose unheeded prophetic voice is speaking today?