Struggling for the Soul of Our Country by Browning

Author:Browning [Browning]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781498209960
Google: f_mjDAEACAAJ
Publisher: Wipf & Stock Publishers
Published: 2016-01-15T00:14:16+00:00

My conviction is that to be worth its salt in the twenty-first century, any religion or system of beliefs that purports to offer its followers guidance and support in leading responsible, meaningful lives must assume as a major commitment diagnosing the sources of our culture’s soul-sickness and providing “medicine” for a cure. John Spong condemns the established churches for clinging to ancient myths; I condemn the established churches for failure to identify, challenge, and repudiate those aspects of American culture that foster the feelings of spiritual emptiness that afflict so many of our citizens.

There are exceptions, of course, and it should be stressed that the national headquarters of the mainline Protestant churches have year after year issued intelligent, carefully researched, sometimes passionate reports and calls for action about such subjects as racism, homophobia, the greed and waste of the American way of life, and the threat of looming ecological calamity. At the local level, however, I sense a reluctance on the part of clergy to speak what by this point in our history seems an irrefutable truth: most of us, Christian or Jew, believer or atheist, are entrapped in a way of life that is soaked in trivia and mind-numbing spectacle, often breeding apathy, despair and violence.

Here I should say that, despite having written an essay entitled “Why I Am a Christian Socialist,” I long ago gave up the hope, which so animated the Social Gospelers, of creating a society whose compassion and thirst for justice might serve as foreshadowings of the biblical kingdom. Yet I still adhere to the belief that it is possible to use science and technology and the best instincts of our citizens to dramatically alleviate human suffering and at least postpone some of the worst consequences of climate change. (In 2015, it is impossible not to acknowledge that we will experience some of the worse features of the devastation global warming will bring; and the pig-headed refusal of Republican legislators to accept the irrefutable evidence that the burning of fossils fuels is the major cause of global warming is simply further support for the argument that our existence as a workable democratic society is in great jeopardy.)

Clearly, this moment in our national history does not encourage facile optimism. Lewis Lapham is correct, of course, in reminding us that no period of our history has been free of threats to our democratic way of life.313 But today, I would argue, our democracy is more fragile than at any time since the Civil War. During the past several decades, a number of US writers, including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and more recently Christ Hedges have warned against what has sometimes been described as “friendly fascism.” Some years ago, Bertram Gross wrote a book by that title. That is, a slow but inexorable development in the direction of an authoritarian society where civil liberties are progressively chipped away, where the press is either in bed with those who control great wealth and political power or are too intimidated

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