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A Revolution that needs a little more hope October 25, 2007

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 9 comments

Walter RauschenbuschProgressives (Christian and secular) have lost faith in humanity’s ability to intentionally manage our economies.

I’m not talking about central planning, but I am talking about collectively guaranteeing that everyone in the world has access to means of making a good living that’s sustainable and doesn’t destroy the earth. That’s just not an acceptable goal anymore for respectable progressives.

We’re comfortable with the idea of society guaranteeing bare essentials like water access, education, healthcare and a few other baseline services. We’re comfortable with the idea of society creating incentives against socially or environmentally harmful economic activities and in favor of desirable activities. But when we think of society, say, providing the resources to completely overhaul a polluting industry and making it happen, we think of Stalin. Or at least we think that such an ambitious project would be doomed to fail spectacularly. Don’t we?

One hundred years ago, and for hundreds of years before that, progressives had complete faith that it was possible for humans to build and maintain a far, far better economy than we have today. They expected that, by the year 2007, there would be no poverty, no preventable illness, no illiteracy and no war. They were divided about how to get there—incrementalism, violent revolution, non-violent/democratic revolution, spontaneous/anarchist revolution, etc—but they all believed it was humanity’s job to make it happen.

Yesterday I got a remarkable reminder of that optimism while spending some time with Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis. It’s a 100 year old book from one of the leaders of the Social Gospel movement.

In some ways, it’s written with the same purpose as the other book I’ve been reading, Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change. But the difference in tone caused by the difference between the two worlds in which Rauschenbusch and McLaren worte could not be more stark.

Reading Rauschenbusch, you can feel how the whole world around him was on fire with change and hope. As bad as things were for the billion or so suffering poverty, a worldwide movement was in full swing to change everything. It was a real, practical movement with mass parties, some in power, and examples of societies all around the world leaping forward in development through various means—some lead by the movement, some desperately trying to stay ahead of it. Despite periodic setbacks, the direction was clear. And the endpoint was just as clear: no, not a Utopia, merely a world without poverty, unnecessary illness, illiteracy, etc…

Where Rauschenbusch wrote with the tone of being one voice in the cacophony of an already-500-year-old revolutionary movement, McLaren has to write—on his economic topic—with the tone of a lone voice in an almost silent wilderness.

Where you can feel Rauschenbusch’s confidence in humanity’s abilities to solve it’s economic problems bursting onto every page, McLaren can only offer beautiful but consciously irrational hope. He advocates resistance because it’s the just thing to do, but can promise nothing. At the start of a critical chapter named “A Revolution of Hope” he offers:

Can the suicide machine [of our economic system] really be stopped?…
The simple answer is that nobody knows. (p. 269)

There’s a new edition of Christianity and the Social Crisis out in print—peppered by (mostly condescending) essays from present-day thinkers. You can also download the full book for free thanks to Google books because it’s now in the public domain.

I clipped some interesting bits for you from Google books and put them here. Please take a look.

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Reading Everything Must Change October 16, 2007

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 4 comments

Everything Must ChangeI’m going to start digging into Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. He’s known as a “progressive Evangelical”—and there are even websites set up by fundamentalists calling him the son of Satan. But he’s been a huge influence to the broad evangelical movement. Young people especially have named his books as inspirations in all of the evangelical settings we’ve explored over the past couple of months.

One thing I’m hoping to get from this book is a better grip on the subtle (looking in from the outside anyways) theological shift beneath the surface of the revolution in evangelical Christianity.

It’s especially hard for me to grasp this moving target because I never knew the previous theology that they’re now shifting away from. So, what’s new? What’s the difference? What are the difficult parts for people to accept? What is scary about this?

All I can tell so far is that the shift is BIG. It seems to be shaking the very foundation of the faith. You can hear it in the tone of voice of preachers as they cross the line in a sermon…as they drop the bomb that questions people’s deepest assumptions. At Catalyst, you could hear it in the subdued Amens and muffled applause, when the speakers crossed these lines, as the crowd really had to think.

Here’s one way that Brian explains it in Everything Must Change:

As a follower of God in the way of Jesus, I’ve been involved in a profoundly interesting and enjoyable conversation for the last ten years or so. It’s a conversation about what it means to be a “new kind of Christian”—not an angry and reactionary fundamentalist, not a stuffy traditionalist, not a blasé nominalist, not a wishy-washy liberal, not a New Agey religions hipster, not a crusading religions imperialist, and not an overly enthused Bible-waving fanatic—but something fresh and authentic and challenging and adventurous. Around the world, millions of people have gotten involved in this conversation, and more and more are getting involved each day. (One reason we keep calling it a conversation is that we can’t find a short way of describing it yet.)

…the versions of Christianity we inherited are largely flattened, watered down, tamed—offering us a ticket to heaven after death, but not challenging us to address the issues that threaten life on earth. Together we’ve begun to seek a fresh understanding of what Christianity is for, what a church can be and do, and most exciting, we’re finding out that a lot of what we need most is already hidden in a trunk in our attic. Which is good news. (P. 2-3)

The most exciting and uplifting thing about this is the part about people being challenged instead of comforted by this new understanding of Jesus. If you’re looking to replenish your faith in humanity, especially the American people, then this is the jackpot: As these revolutionary Evangelical preachers make their messages and churches more and more challenging, more and more people show up.

Millions of kids are flocking to Christian conferences, music festivals and just plain church not to get their “ticket to Heaven” or learn how to hate gays, but to join an international movement of people ready to give their lives in order to redeem the world—both individual broken lives as well as whole broken social and economic systems.

So I’ll keep working on this book. On days when I don’t have any in-person encounters to report on, I’ll try to report on my progress through the book.

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