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No one can identify who they are except in terms of their relationships with others. There’s no such thing as a pure individual existing solely by themselves, for themselves.  It’s true for even the most extreme cases: hermits, misanthropes, etc. I am unaware of any time in human history that people didn’t gravitate toward living in community.  It’s more than gathering for mutual self protection against danger.  There is something about community that fulfills what it means to be a healthy, fully formed person.  

I suspect it’s the reason why societies across the globe place a high value on the health and integrity of community as a prerequisite for the health and integrity of the individual.  Maybe it’s the inherent importance of community that lead to the development of tribes and tribalism. The very names conjuring images of hostile division and inter-tribal warfare.   America has stood apart as an exception to the rule. There’s a popular story that America was founded as a nation in which individuals were members of no tribe, each free to pursue their own destiny uniting with others only as members of a tribe-less nation.  The story of rugged American individualism and a myth with some merit. It rejected the European model that forced people to adhere to the standards of the class into which they were born. The idea of American individualism eventually morphed into  the cowboy myth of the West celebrated in story from “The Last of the Mohicans” to the recent t.v. hit “Yellowstone” and everything in between.  As popularly romantic as the story is, there’s a dark side that has corroded American democracy.

As scholar and historian Heather Cox Richardson has pointed out, the myth of American individualism has been politicized with great effectiveness by turning public opinion against the importance of strong, healthy communities essential for American democracy to be the engine of prosperity for all. Communities are described by how they are organized and sustained, in other words, how they are governed.  The politicized version of individualism claims to cherish community but not government. That the two cannot be separated seems to have escaped recognition.  

The corrupted version of American individualism values personal relationships but labels government as the enemy of individual freedom. In its abhorrence of tribalism, it has constructed an imaginary super tribe.  With two choices: join the tribe in obedient submission, or be labeled a troublesome outcast.  

It’s surprising how easy it is for exaggerated individualism to be turned into a tightly proscribed tribe of ubermenschen.  It’s not what the libertarians wanted so many decades ago when they named government the problem, not the solution.  Not really anti government, they wanted government as a private tool to enhance profit making opportunities with little regulatory oversight. 

It brings me back to tribes and tribalism.  Tribalism has gotten a bad rap of late, including from me.  It’s been seen as dividing the country into groups isolated from and hostile to each other. But there is another side.  Forming tribes is what humans do and America’s tribal history has some positive lessons.  In the broadest possible sense, I think American tribes were two basic types: American Indian and European settlers.

American Indian tribes appear to have established a remarkable equilibrium in which inter-tribal hostilities were resolved more with ritual than warfare, and inter-tribal commerce was optimized given the limitations of time and space. It wasn’t perfect nor romantic, but it demonstrated tribal communities could coexist in reasonable harmony, a lesson European settlers failed to recognize or learn from.  

Once the Indian wars were resolved (in the worst possible way), settlers also populated the land in their own versions of tribal units.  At first, by religious denomination: Puritans, Pilgrims, Anglicans, Catholics, Baptists, Quakers, etc. Midwest towns still bear the marks of having been German, English, Swedish, Norwegian, French or Polish.  California and the Southwest were Spanish from one end to the other. Americans had a hard time learning that tribes, Indian or European, could live in reasonable harmony as individuals in community acting for the good of the community and coexisting for the welfare of one nation.  Sorely tested over the years the nation and its ideals have endured, at least until now. 

I find it strange that so many Americans think not long ago there was a time when we were all one tribe epitomized by suburban Cleavers or rural Smallville folk.  To be American was to be one or the other and we should be that way again.  It never was.  We never were.

I could be wrong but I think today’s tribes are quite different. Skin color, economic class, educational status, career paths, and things like that are what divide us into tribes.  Tribal territories are marked by neighborhood and life styles. Political ideology has become a marker of tribal membership giving the impression of integration existing only in the political moment.  Even those most committed to a fully integrated society will treasure it in public places but accept the reality of self chosen segregation (not necessarily by skin color) in neighborhoods. I think it’s a tendency so ingrained in human nature that it’s unlikely to be eliminated anytime soon.

Would that today’s tribes might learn from the heritage of American Indians.  There’s nothing to prevent today’s tribes from living in reasonably harmonious and mutually profitable relationships with each other.  There’s nothing to prevent them from recognizing that their own well being depends on the well being of every tribe.  There’s nothing to prevent them from recognizing that individual rights and freedoms have obligations to the tribe and nation, with consequences for failing to meet them. It should be obvious that a strong federal government, as envisioned in The Federalist Papers, is needed to provide the rules,  structure and resources for all tribes to prosper as one. 

You might reasonably ask if I have a tribal preference.  Yes, I do.  I favor an economically and racially diverse tribe unified by intellectual curiosity.  Do I live in one?  No, not yet.

Public opinion polling, at least as reported in the media, seems to focus on single issues, voter attitudes towards them, and the likely effect they will have on general elections.  The recent midterms were defined by the media as a referendum on abortion and little else. The outcome of the 2024 presidential campaign has been said to depend on the mood of pro-choice and anti abortion activists.  Climate change and the southern border are two more single issues presumed to be the realms of rock solid single issue voters who will favor only candidates who agree to their non-negotiable terms and conditions. At least for the moment, news media is hyping public angst over the border and immigration, which only adds to single issue divisiveness.

I don’t believe the American voting public is so narrow minded.  At the same time, I have dozens of acquaintances who are so dedicated to one iron clad position on one controversial issue that it will determine their vote no matter what else is at stake.   How many among all voters are like that? I have no idea but imagine two things.  First, candidates can be lured into pursuing their favored single issue voters to the exclusion of the majority of voters and the general interests of constituencies. Second, there could be enough single issue voters whose self-righteous intransigence is sufficient to assure the election of candidates who will do no good for democracy or the greater needs of the nation.

I recognize, if not fully understand, the passion some voters have for a single issue. Each is of real importance to the country as a whole and worthy of advocates who will devote time and energy in pursuing a resolution leading to a better society for all.  But passion is taken too far when the world is divided into allies, enemies, and ignorant fools who don’t know what’s right. It goes too far when righteous indignation turns to violence rather than enduring the cost of radical civil disobedience.  It goes too far when dissenting  voices are silenced by prohibitions of free speech, which, parenthetically, is never a freedom without restriction. 

Why is it so easy to believe there are only two alternatives: fight like hell or lay down like a door mat and let others stomp on you? It seems to be the mindset of single issue voters and it can never lead to the common good.   But, one might object, what about the single mindedness of a Martin Luther King, Jr? He and other civil rights leaders were indeed singleminded but not about single issues.  For the common good of the nation, they were adamant about the particular rights of blacks, other people of color and the poor in general.  They were single minded in non-violence and paid the price for it.  They were single minded about entering honest conversation with anyone and everyone. Single issue voters, to the contrary, sit on their self righteous stools, refuse to move for anyone, and don’t give a damn about what else is happening as long as their issue is resolved according to their non-negotiable demands. 

Divisive single issue politics do not stand on their own.  They are supported by a complex network of racial and ethnic prejudices, corporate self-interests, and political movements such as Christian nationalism, isolationism, what Heather Cox Richardson calls movement conservatives, and others whose immovable adherents come from the extremes of the political spectrum and a sizable body of the gullible. What is difficult to keep in mind is that crackpot positions on issues do not mean the issues are crackpot.  Some may be but the majority have validity that must be taken seriously by those who would lead progress on their resolution through our democratic processes.

Epiphany is the odd season that can feel like nothing more than a place holder in the empty space between Christmas and Lent. It’s supposed to celebrate the light of Christ spreading into the gentile world.  The impact of God’s incarnation in Jesus changed first century lives and it should change ours, but let’s face it, there is an emotional letdown after “the holidays”.  It’s easy to put the babe, angels and shepherds away for another year.

Epiphany should be a time to turn to the greater question of what the season’s lessons might mean for everyday life in 2024. In what way will Christians bear the light of Christ into the new year?  It’s a question of mission.  The mission field is ripe and the laborers are few.  And with that thought, minds will turn to missionary stories of old, both the good and bad, about preaching the Word in farthest, darkest foreign places among uncivilized peoples.  Other minds might turn to more local missionary experiences like tent revivals, door knocking Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, or short term mission trips to underserved places. If presented with it, the dreaded push for more evangelism will be evaded with feigned enthusiasm for someone else to do it. What I would like to see us do more of is focus on what it means to bear the light of Christ into the ordinary daily lives we lead.

The mission field is not somewhere else.  It’s  where each of us lives and works among the people we encounter each day.  A missionary is not a calling reserved for a few men and women well suited to the task.  It is a calling of every Christian, each according to their abilities.  In my former congregation, a lighted candle was presented to each newly baptized person with the words, “Let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” (Matt 5). What good works?  Jesus sent his new, poorly informed, reluctant disciples into nearby villages. No doubt they were places well known to them in which they would be recognized as familiar faces.  What were they to do?  Extend greetings of peace, offer words of healing, leave with a word of blessing.  I think it was far from the door knocking calls we all know about. I imagine that when they were invited into a house it was because someone there had a story they needed to tell and a person to tell it to who would listen patiently as if Jesus himself was listening.  How simple is that?

You and I are unlikely to canvas the neighborhood in quite the same way, although we might.  What we will do, and do every day, is encounter strangers, friends, co-workers, and every other sort of person within our ordinary lives. It is each of those encounters that we can, if we will, extend a greeting in God’s peace more by our attitude than in anything we say.  When it is called for, we can listen patiently, as if Jesus himself was listening.  We can offer words of healing grace, less with advice than with empathetic presence. If asked, and if within our fields of competency, we may offer words of wisdom and counsel.  The kingdom of God will have come near just in doing these simple things in the course of the day. 

 In his letter to the Romans, Paul asked,”But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’” (Romans 10)

The curious part of Paul’s advice is that you don’t have to be a preacher like Paul.  You just have to ‘be’ in the way Jesus sent out his new disciples: offer peace, listen, provide words of healing either silently or aloud. No bible thumping, no problem solving advice, just your presence bearing the light of Christ. Questions will come in their own time. When they do you can tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love in your own words.  It will be enough.   The season of Epiphany is the perfect time to give it a try.  It’s a short season lasting from January 7 to February 14 this year.  Let the light of Christ shine in what you do and with whom you do it for a few weeks and see what happens. 

Share what you know about the year you were born.

DThe dawn of hpe broke during the early weeks of 1943. Britain had not fallen. America had been in th war for just over ayear. Early defeats had been followed by moments of cictory. By year’s end it would be clear that the Alllies would win, eventually, at great cost. I would be three years old by the time it was over. Blind guy Typiing: stevenwoolley.com

“I wonder as I wander out under the sky, ‘bout poor human folk like you and like I” is the refrain in an old spiritual.  Each year in the Christmas season I wonder as I wander out under the sky about the impossible thing that began its fulfillment in the annunciation to Mary so many centuries ago. Unlike the White Queen in Alice Through The Looking Glass who could believe in six impossible things before breakfast, I can believe in only two impossible things: that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, and that dead and buried he rose bodily, fully revealed as the Word of God made flesh.  Really impossible?  Of course they are, in human terms, but not for God, the great “I Am” through whom creation itself exists.  For Christians Christmas is the hinge on which all history swings.

The problem with the Christmas season is that we expect too much and it delivers too little. I suppose some of it is due to the romantic sentimentality made of it by stories and movies defining the “meaning” of Christmas that has dominated America’s entertainment for over a hundred years.  Even the annual remembrance of the birth of Jesus, the “prince of peace,” has become a disappointment because we are enticed to expect God will finally deliver peace on earth and good will to all, only to enter January and discover the same old broken and flailing world.  What happened to the promise of peace and good will?  Hallmark movies end in happy fulfillment of holiday wishes.  Why doesn’t Christmas?

God told us through the prophets of old what the way of peace and good will was and how to live into it.  When the time was right, the way of peace and good will was demonstrated in the birth, life and death of Jesus Christ whose authority as God incarnate was manifested in the Resurrection.  If the promise of peace and good will has not been fully received, it is because we expected it to be delivered to us as if a present under the tree.  We did not expect to have to live into it through our own effort aided by the Holy Spirit.   The gift of peace and good will can be received only by living into it. “It came upon a midnight clear that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold , peace on the earth, good will to ‘men’,from heaven’s all gracious king, the world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing. …“Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long; beneath the heavenly hymn have rolled two thousand years of wrong; and warring humankind hears not the tidings which they bring; O hush the noise and cease your strife and hear the angels sing.” 

Where is the peaceable kingdom?  Jesus said it was near at hand for those willing to receive it.

To be certain that one is right and never back down sounds virtuous and courageous but that may not be. It might be nothing more than stubborn refusal to challenge one’s own long established beliefs and attitudes regardless of evidence to the contrary.  It might be steadfast adherence to social and political conditions that benefit one’s self regardless of the harm caused to others.  For too many it is determination to remain loyal through a leader or cause out of ambition, fear, emotional appeal or ignorance, unwilling to do the hard work of close examination of underlying values and intent.

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Political moral courage demands that public officers be present not only for their own sake, but for he sake of all others. It is a form of courage that cannot be unwavering in loyalty to an ideology or any single political leader.  That sort of loyalty is not courageous. It can turn out to be a pigheaded, obstinate refusal to hear the voice of the other or respond to the multiple needs of society —a society that yearns to be secure, free and able to pursue happiness, without discrimination and for the common good.

Any act that dehumanizes the other, especially the vulnerable other, is an act of moral cowardice, not courage.  As important as a secure border is, the failure to recognize the alien immigrant as a potential source of energizing renewal of society is not political courage but political avoidance of America’s historical truth – every flow of unwanted immigrants has strengthened the nation.  Steadfast defense of a sanitized “patriotic” version of American history is not political moral courage. It is moral cowardice fearful that a more honest history will undermine fundamental American virtues.  It won’t.  It will strengthen resolve to more fully live up to them.  

It takes moral political courage to confront those who would highjack the needs of the people and the legislative process, demanding ransom in the form of capitulation to non-negotiable ultimatums that cause harm to the nation’s best interests.  Above all, political moral courage is made evident by a determined willingness to enter good faith negotiation with others to resolve what is possible now while looking forward to what may be more possible in the near future. It is recognition that urgent demands of justice can make the impossible, possible.

A final note.  Moral courage is not a virtue that can be exhibited at all times, under all circumstances.  Courage is tested each time an important decision has to be made. Courage sometimes fails and sometimes the courageous decision is unclear. It fails sometimes in even the most virtuous, and few of us are among the most virtuous.  Ego, self interest, parochial demands, and unexamined assumptions work to check moral courage.  To honestly recognize failure and strive to do better is what makes political moral courage possible. 

Country Parson explores the relationship between religious faith, public policy, and politics. Conventional wisdom declares that pastors should stick to religion and leave politics to others. It can’t be done.  God has a great deal to say about public policy, what is moral and what is not. Failure to heed God’s words never leads to the good of the people and history is the story of peoples refusing to do just that. God has given us the way to godly justice and opportunity for wide spread prosperity.  Yet what God has revealed in holy scripture has nothing in common with today’s so-called Christian nationalism.

2024 will be the most important election year in my lifetime. By the end of November we will know whether we still have a democracy or  something more like fascism under a false flag of Christianity. 

What God has said about public policies leading to godly justice is revealed in stark words through the prophets and sealed by the words of Jesus Christ. In short, the rich are not to take advantage of the poor, no one is deprived of their human dignity, and justice is to be utterly impartial, always erring on the side of mercy.  More specifically and in summary, God’s prescriptive commandments are:

• To honor the right of the less affluent to be secure from efforts of the wealthy depriving them of their means of livelihood.
• Without discrimination, to assure security of person for all.
• Even against enemies, the food of the people is not to be used as a weapon.
• To refrain from ethnic cleansing.
• To maintain integrity in international dealings.
• To respect legitimate civil authority.
• Insure taxes and related economic policies are fair to all.
• Usurious banking, loan and credit practices are not to be used against the poor.
• To assure fair and honest practices in all areas of trade, commerce and personal relations.
• To remove public and private barriers preventing anyone from the opportunity to succeed.
• To receive the alien, for we have all been aliens.
• To demand integrity from public officials and a moral standard expected of all persons.
• To see that taxation is equitably and fairly distributed.
• To prevent anything that places undue burden on the poor.

“Ah, c’mon, “one might say, “God didn’t really command any of this.”  Oh yes, God did, in great specificity.  It’s articulated all through the prophets and is tightly condensed in the prophet Amos.  God has left little waffle room for our usual menus of ‘yes, but’ and ‘nice sentiments but impractical,’ and ‘God belongs in church, not on Wall Street or Main Street.’ God reveals no preference for and form of government, but has high expectations for the moral content of what government does. 

Nothing in God’s holy Word suggests the U.S.A. or any nation should be a Christian nation, nor can anyone slap a Christian label on any social value they want to specifically impose on someone else.   What God has said is neither conservative nor liberal. It is godly, plain and simple. Under the American form of democracy, Christians are to hold themselves and the candidates they support to God’s standards of godly justice regardless of the religion they might follow.

Doing that runs into several obstacles. Candidates tend to present themselves as icons of civic virtue with high moral standards. Verifying their integrity means examining the track records of their lives and the wisdom they have demonstrated in their relationships. Any candidate, charismatic or not, assuming the persona of political messiah or promising to personally solve problems only addressed through democratic negotiation, cannot be trusted.

“All we like sheep have gone astray” and that includes candidates for public office. Never expect perfection, but do expect informed empathy for constituent needs and determined effort to work for the common good.  Voters mislead themselves when single issues determine who they will or will not vote for.  No single issue, no matter how important, is the linchpin on which the nation’s well being depends.  Too many voters are swayed entirely by emotional appeals that prey on their fears and prejudices.  Christian voters must weigh emotional appeals against the commandments to love God, neighbor, and self in the way Jesus loved them.

Demanding instant solutions to issues or inerrancy in public policy is a non sequitur in American democracy and has led only to national ruin in every authoritarian regime. It can be said of  every administration at every level of government that the best record always leaves behind important matters of justice and the public good that have not been addressed.  It’s not failure, it’s life.  We keep  at it, sometimes making huge leaps forward, sometimes only small steps, and getting this right more than half the time is success by any standard.   

Celebrating Jesus’ birth first began in Egypt around 200 c.e. with an emphasis on the visit of the Magi and the holy family’s time in Egypt.  Christmas on December 25 began in Rome about 336 c.e. with the expectation it would replace the traditional festive holiday honoring the sun gods. It didn’t work. The sun gods may be gone but the old Roman festival is still with us as the secular side of Christmas. We can enjoy both.

The Christmas story will be told time and again over the next few weeks.  The most familiar will be the children’s pageant that packs in every gospel theme rolled into one story. Others will be entertained by Hallmark movies revealing the true meaning of Christmas with sentimental romance, lots of magic, and not a mention of Jesus.  Skeptics will proclaim the whole thing is a fabrication third century Christians made up to explain where Jesus came from.  After all only two gospels have a birth narrative, each quite different from the other. 

I doubt that any follower of Jesus used their imagination to make up the Christmas story. The record indicates determination to tell the true story as best they could with what they had available. Let’s take a brief survey to see what was going on at the time.  

Neither Mark nor John has a birth narrative.  Mark’s gospel is short and spare. He wrote it five or six years after the execution of Peter and was possibly the one who had recorded Peter’s teachings. It was in the middle of the Jewish war or rebellion against Roman rule and shortly after the destruction of the temple.  My guess is that the writer was unsure whether he would live to complete a full gospel narrative so concentrated on sketching out the core facts as he knew them. Whether or not he intended to fill it in later, he didn’t.  

John was written very late in the first century.  He was well aware of what Mark, Matthew and Luke had written and saw no reason to repeat them.  More important to John was to expand on events and teachings to clearly illustrate that Jesus was the Word of God made flesh. 

Matthew and Luke did not make things up using their imaginations.  They knew Jesus was born in Bethlehem of an unmarried virgin.  They knew that Mary’s pregnancy was not natural and came through the power of God’s presence taking form in her womb. Skeptics have a problem with that because it introduces the supernatural, and it doesn’t even follow the myths about gods seducing women to produce semi-divine godlets.  Well, that’s their problem. Our religion is supernatural and understands the indwelling of the supernatural with the natural. 

That Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, would enter the world in the most vulnerable way possible, dependent entirely on Mary to nourish him with her own body and blood, and on Joseph to protect him when he was a defenseless baby and toddler is a really shabby way to invent a new myth about the savior of the world. No one would write it if there was no truth in it.  The whole idea is too preposterous.

True, Matthew and Luke have different versions.  In Matthew, Joseph is the lead character.  He has little to say but makes all the decisions. The Annunciation comes to him, not Mary. There is no mention of Nazareth as the starting point.  Jesus may have been two or three years old when the Magi visited.  After a sojourn in Egypt the holy family did settle in Nazareth.  Who knows? Nazareth may have been the starting point and Matthew just didn’t mention it. 

Luke’s birth narrative is more familiar because it’s the foundation of our modern day “Charlie Brown’s Christmas.”  Mary is the lead character in Luke.  It is she to whom the Annunciation is made; she travels south to visit her kinswoman Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist.  The journey to Bethlehem, the birth in a stable, the visit of shepherds and angel choirs singing in the sky are in Luke’s account. 

I believe Mary and Joseph stayed in Bethlehem for at least forty days or so.  Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day and thirty days later Mary, Joseph and Jesus were in the temple for the rites of purification for a new mother.  Luke says nothing about whether they stayed longer or went to Egypt before going home to Nazareth.

We take the two accounts as bearing truth according to facts as the writers were able to gather them. Frankly, for all the differences, the two stories are more coherent than some of the stories my wife and I tell about events we’ve attended together.  The two versions do not have to be the same to be true.  

In the end, what bothers skeptics the most is God’s invasion of ordinary human life. It just doesn’t make sense, but God is not bound by human limitations and what makes sense in the ordinary way of things.  Well, so be it.   When will we learn that God does not conform to our expectations?  We are expected to conform to God’s expectations as best we can. As for our household, we rejoice in celebrating the nativity of Jesus Christ who came to serve and save in the most improbable way possible.

I have heard the argument that religion is the cause of war, but for religion the world could find a way to live in peace.  I find that thought lacking in merit. Since the beginning of recorded history, war has been the pastime of kings and tribal chiefs fighting to defend and extend territory from a position of dominance over their own people. To be chief of chiefs and king of kings you have to, in the words of one recent wannabe dictator, “dominate.”  It’s the driving ambition to dominate others that paves the way to war.

Religion, as causation, has seldom been more than a useful crutch. The favor of the gods was sought as a pretext for moral justification.  Did chiefs and kings take the gods seriously?  I imagine some did, but they all knew that the gods had to be paraded before the people if an army was to be raised and motivated. What ever roles the gods played in getting things off the ground was reinforced by appeals to tribal honor and the glorification of courage in battle against an evil enemy to be subjected to harsh rule or eliminated.  The assurance of a god’s help against an evil enemy is the same propaganda appeal made to the emotional fear of the ‘other’ that has motivated military conflicts in our age. 

The late medieval and early modern era European wars of religion used religion as the moral justification for plain old greed, selfishness, lust for power, and position.  If the masses could be convinced they were doing God’s work, so much the better, but that was just the hook to get things going.  There have been exceptions. 

The Crusades were, in some sense, religious wars.  The lower classes were incited by appeals to recover the Holy Land for Christianity.  The upper classes were in it for the glory.  Too much of it devolved into barbaric pillaging and murder along the way.  

The ancient Islamic empire was created on a religious foundation, but conquered peoples were seldom forced to convert and most established religions were tolerated, their adherents living in reasonable security. The empire was, in the end, about empire not religion.  The horrific wars of the 20^th century were entirely about empire and global domination on one hand and rebellion against colonialism on the other. 

What about Christianity?  Political leaders and operatives have often used appeals to promote or defend Christianity to whip up emotional fervor for war. But the prophetic theme of holy scripture, the life, teaching and example of Jesus Christ, and the inspired guidance offered through the letters to the early church by his apostles go in another direction. They reveal that God’s way is for healing, reconciliation, economic and social justice that works for peace on earth and good will to all humanity.  They take the form of commandments, not sentimental platitudes.  To believe that Jesus is the Word of God made flesh who was crucified, died, and is resurrected, and to follow Christ in his way of love provides no excuse for war or the justification of war. 

Humanity, it turns out, has proven itself unable and unwilling to live in harmony. To accommodate the predictable outcome of humanity’s brokenness taking the form of greed and lust for power, the church worked out a just war theory. Yet, a just war theory cannot defend war as a moral good. It can only minimize the evil when war is the lesser of evils that cannot be avoided.

I’ve written several times recently about the importance of a broadly shared sense of the common good in order for democracy to flourish.  It’s been the ongoing subject of conversation between me and friend Tom D., a retired professor of philosophy.  We’ve come to the recognition that a broadly understood sense of the common good is lacking and is one reason why democracy is in jeopardy. 

Many of today’s students, I am told, have no idea what a common good might be.  Apparently they have been raised in an environment that lionizes individualism to the exclusion of any sense that the individual might have a duty to consider the common good ahead of one’s own desires.  I’m unsure how true that is, but I see it pop up in higher education online posts.  It certainly doesn’t mean commitment to a common good is absent from American society.  There are many common goods, each expressed in a way limited to particular places, ideologies, and circles of like minded people.  For example, we live in a small enclave of fifty townhouses and we share a strong sense of the common good for “The Close.”  Fraternal orders and athletic teams understand what their common good is.  Communities brought together by shared tragedy understand their common good, at least for the moment.

The common good of isolated neighborhoods and small like minded groups cannot add up to a national consensus about a greater national good but there have been times when one was broadly understood. The 20th century experienced several of those times. None were uncontested and each had a lifespan beyond which it could not hold.  The Great Depression brought the New Deal which became a broadly shared understanding that “we were in it together” and the federal government was “our ally.”  It was a broadly enough shared sense of the common good that FDR won elections by enormous margins. Just the same it did not go uncontested. Big business complained about creeping socialism interfering with their right to do whatever they wanted, however they wanted to do it. Fascists organizations promoted fear of immigrants, colored people and Jews as threats to white supremacy. In the end, the New Deal triumphed.

The WWII era united the country in a focussed determination to real threats to national security and Western democracy. What gave it a deep and lasting moral purpose were the Four Freedoms illuminated in FDR’s January 1941 address to Congress: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear.  They were embedded in the American ethos by Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers depicting each freedom – paintings that even today remain icons of American values.

The war was followed by two decades during which the American Dream of ever greater prosperity for each succeeding generation became a possibility for all, a reality for many, and a sense that it was among the unalienable rights of (white) Americans.  If the era was symbolic of a broadly shared sense of a national common good epitomized as The Life of Riley, Nelsons and Cleavers it was shattered by Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement. Nixon’s ignominious administration managed to corrode trust in the federal government as well. What has followed are decades of government portrayed as the problem that keeps Americans from enjoying what is rightfully theirs.  What are rightfully theirs are their individual rights. Individualism has long been an American trait, but in recent decades it has become a dominant theme of political life.  Rights are understood to adhere to the individual, not the community.  What is rightfully mine is mine to be shared only with people like me.  Communal rights accruing to the entire nation can lead only to communism, or so the propaganda says.

The trend is obvious.  In a nation as diverse as ours, a sense of a national common good emerges when a genuine threat to national security or the livelihood of all is present.  Such is a time we now face.  The possibility that American democracy could fall to an authoritarian regime is a real and present danger. It would impose on the nation a demand to submit to a restrictive ideology demolishing the freedoms we have so long cherished and fought to retain. Some of its first victims would be the very people who now make up the MAGA base, lumping them in with unwanted immigrants and people of color.  Moral justification  would be achieved through the imposition of Christian nationalism replacing the traditional creeds of the church with an oath of allegiance to a political power.  The obligation of orthodox Christians to see the face of God in every person, no matter who or what they might be, would become a threat to authorities, as would adherents of any other religion.

Uniting to defend American ideals behind the shield of a new broadly shared sense of the national common good would require that it be articulated simply, clearly, and be easily understood.  Something drawn from the Declaration of Independence, preamble to the Constitution, the Gettysburg address, and FDR’s Four Freedoms would be a good place to start building a 21st century American dream in which it is broadly understood that one’s individual welfare depends on the general welfare of all, without discrimination.

Government of the people, by the people and for the people is the product of democracy, not authoritarianism.  It must be fought for and defended, not with swords but words. Consider lessons from the run up to the adoption of the Constitution.  It wasn’t clear that a strong democratic federal government could be a broadly shared common good.  Proponents used the social media of the day to make their case.  It took the form of speeches given in every possible venue and pamphlets put into the hands of as many people as possible. Newspapers were inundated with guest columns. Today’s social media must be employed with the same determination.  To do less is to surrender.  The alternative is to cede the battle to the propaganda skills of the MAGA leadership and their allies. Truth is never self evident.  It must be made known through bold stands on behalf of the people.