The Desire for Security and Being Evangelical
Everyone has a story including a movement
Part II: Security Enjoyed
and Lost
Written By Dan McDonald
John Donne’s Meditation XVII is
introduced with the title that brings the hearer’s focus on a bell announcing
an unknown man’s funeral. Donne’s
meditation begins: “Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou
must die.” Donne sets forth his view
that all mankind is connected. He says, “All
mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is
not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language, and every
chapter must be so translated. God
employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by
sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation,
and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library
where every book shall lie open to one another.
As therefore the bell that rings a sermon calls not upon the preacher
only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all.”[i]
Donne went on in his meditation to
say “No man is an island, entire of itself.”[ii] If Donne had been a scientist instead of a
preacher and the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, he might have
described how like all objects in the universe our humanity acts and is acted
upon by all things into which we come into contact. It seems sometimes that in our estimate of
ourselves, when we are religious we are most prone to believe the sort of myth
which suggests that we are truly in an unhindered and unlimited manner the masters
of our own destiny and the captains of our fate. Surely we have choices and surely we act as
well as we are acted upon, but no man who has a mother who gave him birth is a
self-made man. That we as human beings
are both actors and those being acted upon is why we believe in education, in
making arguments for what we believe is true, and why we seek to act in a
certain way to be a good role model for others.
If we believed in absolute freedom of the individual none of these
things would be able to make a difference in another human life outside of our
own. If we did not believe in freedom of
the will then again we would not imagine that any of this mattered. We deem these things important because we
know in our hearts, souls, and minds that we as human beings are connected to
one another; and that we are both actors having an impact upon the creation
around us, and a part of the creation being impacted by forces including other
human beings acting upon us. This is why
so many discussions admitting only one facet of an issue will always lead to
some mistaken perspective. In every
discussion let every thought be guarded by the truth that in our humanity we
are always both the actor and the acted upon; for we are always being
influenced by a sea of humanity and we are always creating ripples in the sea
of humanity with our every movement.
If we understand this truth that all
humanity is connected, then we can understand that in virtually each and every
generation there are certain timely influences that have a deep impact upon a specific
generation. It is my suspicion that my
Baby Boom generation born in the years 1946-1963 were to a large degree shaped
by an era which began with America feeling optimistic, self-confident, and
secure; but was then later confronted by pessimism, self-doubt and grave
insecurities. Many of us baby boomers
were drawn into Evangelical Christianity perhaps partially because its doctrine
of sin seemed to explain the dilemma we had faced in our lifetime, and its
doctrine of redemption seemed to offer hope for a regaining of a sense of
security which had been taken from us. If
we found Evangelicalism seemingly fit for explaining what we had experienced in
life, then as we baby boomers swelled the numbers of Evangelicalism we also
acted upon Evangelicalism with our own desire to find a restoration of
security, a security we had at first enjoyed in American society but which we
had lost in American society. We began
to imagine that what we as Americans had lost could be restored first in our
faith, but then we began to also imagine through our faith we could restore
that security which America had lost. We
imagined in Evangelicalism that we both moved away from an America that had
become lost and we imagined in our Evangelicalism that we had the answers for
an America that could be restored. I don’t
think we thought of this in a conscious way, but I do think it was very much
part how we responded to what we experienced in our United States of America.
I am going to address this subject
matter in support of my general thesis that we baby boomers had experienced,
lost and wanted to regain a sense of security, with expressions of the arts
that reflected our early childhood, and the abrupt change that took place in
our years approaching adulthood, and then influenced us for the remainder of
our years.
It is hard for a young person living
today to consider the 1950’s. The United
States in some ways was enjoying the peak of its power in relationship with the
rest of the world. We led the Western
world. We led virtually all sectors of
global manufacturing. We seemed to be
the world’s greatest creator of new technologies and inventions. We were self-confident as a nation. If the television shows of the 1950’s seem
corny to a more critical population living in the early twenty-first century,
these shows are how Americans wanted to believe they were in 1950. We could laugh with “I love Lucy” and “the
Honeymooners” and we could see how a good American family handled things with a
touch of humor in “Father Knows Best.”
We believed we had won the Second World War because we believed in
freedom and in good values. When movies
depicted the sort of people that made America great it was John and Mary
Bailey, or Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Of course, it was especially white folk that
had reason to believe in the goodness of America. We white folk thought though that we were
finally addressing the imbalances of America’s offer of freedom in actual
practice in accord with Constitutional promises. There were the likes of Jackie Robinson,
Willie Mays, and a growing number of black sports figures. We white folk had no idea how far we really
had to go before we were really a color blind nation. In our naiveté we believed we were an ideal
nation.
The 1950’s was a time when America
seemed governed by a consensus that democracy and freedom were rooted in law,
and that law reflected not only man’s legislative capacity but also God’s
loving-kindness. This would later
influence how Evangelical Baby boomers would think about politics. But we baby boomers would forget that the
consensus of the 1950’s was a moderately liberal consensus rather than a
Conservative consensus. The Robert Taft
Conservative Republicans were disappointed that Dwight D. Eisenhower, a
moderate Republican gained the presidential nomination rather than Taft. No “truly Conservative” candidate would win
the Republican nomination until Goldwater in 1964. Eisenhower, while a moderate did not shrink
the size of government. He supported
interstate highways, the building of nuclear power plants, used Federal troops
to insure the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education,
and brought an end to the McCarthy hearings, as well as nominating as Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Earl Warren. This was a time when America was governed by
a moderately liberal consensus that believed that the power of the federal
government could produce much good in the United States. If you want to see how America thought about
life, perhaps no one said it any better than Cecil B. DeMille in the
introduction he gave to his greatest movie work, “The Ten Commandments”
starring Charlton Heston. I think that
perhaps the mood of 1950’s America, especially white America, can be best
appreciated by watching how Cecil B. DeMille introduced his movie to theater
goers in this introduction.
This introduction was the actual opening to the movie in its theater
showings.
I think many of us growing up in the
1950’s, even though many of us were hardly able to remember those years, were
deeply influenced by America’s self-confidence, and the sense of a national mission
to provide for and protect freedom and faith.
But the optimism was eventually to be tested and the decade of the 1960’s
brought that whole fifties’ optimism into question. The decade did not begin that way. We sometimes forget that America’s entrance
into the Vietnam War, at first seemed to reflect our desire to support
democracy throughout the world. If there
were some voices which seemed to speak against the Civil Rights movement,
especially in a few southern states, most of America supported the movement and
Johnson’s support of Civil Rights in 1964 as compared to Goldwater’s
conservative dislike of federalizing the Civil Rights movement resulted in an
overwhelming Johnson landslide against Goldwater. In the early days both Vietnam and the Civil
Rights movement were popular movements.
We can still feel a sense of the optimism that characterized the Civil
Rights march on Washington in 1963 as Peter, Paul and Mary can be seen singing
a freedom song to the marchers in this video.
But as the decade of the 60’s continued,
the nation’s cultural consensus seemed to crumble. The Vietnam War became a long drawn out war,
and there were doubts about the government in South Vietnam which seemed
corrupt and led by a few wealthy families not representative of the Vietnamese
people. Furthermore it seemed that
America’s poor and underprivileged were doing more than their share of the
fighting and dying in the war. The Civil
Rights movement began to attract more radical elements, while whites often
imagined that enough had already been done by writing new laws. White northerners had never viewed themselves
as part of the Civil Rights problem.
When riots broke out in Watts, Detroit, and Newark; many northerners
began to feel the Civil Rights movement had gotten out of hand.
But perhaps the most striking blow
that altered the self-perception of Americans was the assassination of three
national leaders in five years. Dion was
a singer known, in the early 60’s for the happy beat and mood of Doo-wop. He can be heard singing this cover of Bobby
Darin’s hit “Dream Lover.”
But in 1968 he sang this
song of an America stunned by the deaths of so many political leaders in
such a short time. There were still
songs testifying of the good life offered in America as expressed by Sonny and
Cher telling us of how the
Beat goes on as the automobiles continued to move faster and faster, and as
electrically they kept a baseball score.
But doubt had crept into the American dream. The liberal consensus was unraveling. A generation that had been brought up
watching “Father Knows Best” and “The Ten Commandments” was trying to figure
out what to do with race riots, war protests, and political leaders being assassinated
on a regular basis.
We had been introduced to life as
something as secure as the American dream, and that security was now gone. We didn’t want to believe that life offered
no security. We wanted to believe that
there was a security to be found in life.
Many of us found it in the life of faith. We discovered again the promise there was in
building on the solid rock of Jesus Christ and not upon sinking sand. In the 1970’s we, who were Evangelicals,
generally withdrew into our secure faith and kept a distance from the dangerous
world around us. But by 1980, some
Evangelical leaders were calling for us to believe that what we had found in
our faith could become a blueprint for the renewal of America if only America’s
silent majority acted on the power of their Christian faith. But this meant we had to forsake the politics
of the past where America had been built on a liberal consensus. We needed to take our conservative Christian
values and overcome a secular America in a war for America’s culture. We had to provide a new consensus, one based
on Biblical principles.
We had come full circle from being
born to expect security in America to losing that sense of security, to finding
security in our faith, and finally to believing we could provide security for
America through a Christian triumph in the culture wars. But how much did we in that process lose the
reality that Christ offers a kingdom not of this world? How much did we exchange the Gospel’s offer of
Christ to men and women of all political, social, and economic backgrounds; for
a different sort of Gospel largely connected with a political vision based in
the experiences of white men and women that had lost their sense of national
purpose and security? How much did we
turn the Gospel from a vision of security in a world where suffering abounded
to a vision for a world protected by Conservative values and making sure
America remained the most powerful military in the world? How did we in our thirst for security begin
to trade the Gospel of Jesus Christ for a majority in the House or Senate or
for a presidential candidate that could give us that elusive fifth vote on the
Supreme Court? I fear we hungered and
thirsted for security a lot more than we realized. I fear we began to lose the capacity to preach
Christ to all men and women in all places and situations in American life. I am sure others will disagree. I don’t mind.
I do hope that everyone who reads
this will wonder if I am not at least partially correct. I can also hope that others who are looking
at Evangelicalism will see how we were tempted with an earthly success and
vision that eventually clouded our judgment.
Think not that you somehow will not also be tempted in a similar
manner. We have an enemy who has always
wanted us to look away from the kingdom that is a prayer away every time we
begin to recite the words, “Our Father who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…” We have an enemy who always wishes to change our
attention focus to his offer that we might have, in our little movements, power
and dominion over the kingdoms of this world.
But such a vision is not to be seen looking across the horizon in search
of political power, but into the heavens in search of the Living God, who sent
His Son into the earth and sends His Spirit to renew the earth and to redeem
that which is lost. That is our Gospel
and it is a shame we left it so easily for a few seats in Congress, for a few
pieces of legislation, as we imagined that God’s kingdom was dependent on the
outcome of American elections. I fear
our judgment was clouded by our desire to institute our own brand of security
into this world in which we dwell.
No comments:
Post a Comment