By David Gushee
For those who care about the current state of American democracy, last week was both fascinating and deeply troubling. For Christians who seek to contribute to “the peace of the city” in which God has placed us, we have an obligation to do what we can to encourage the healthy functioning of our political institutions before it is too late.
If we try to think in Christian rather than partisan terms about government, we can start with the belief that God wills well-functioning governments that advance the common good within the limited but significant scope of their responsibilities. Government is needed to provide order, peace and public justice, preventing chaos and disaster on the one hand and advancing the common good on the other. Those who like to scoff at the significance of well-functioning government might want to pause to compare the history of governance in the United States, and, say, Haiti. Which of us would make that trade?
The American political system has for generations been the envy of much of the world. The elegant design of our Constitution and democratic institutions has been imitated by dozens of nations. But for decades it has not been working very well here, and now the consequences are becoming painfully visible.
Historian Alan Brinkley has written that Congress has failed to deal effectively with any major national problem for 30 years. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman this weekend reported from the Davos World Economic Forum that influential international observers are seriously wondering whether our political system is breaking down.
As I watched the president speak at the State of the Union speech last Wednesday, and observed the split reaction in the room, my primary impression was of a nation divided, paralyzed, and in decline, and a president pleading for America’s political leadership to get its act together. In the beginning of his speech, Obama tried to appeal to our history of meeting big challenges to say that we can do it again, but once he outlined the current list of challenges we face, his hopeful words seemed drowned by our current realities:
- an economy not producing enough jobs for its citizenry;
- opportunities to innovate being lost to China and other competitors;
- financial institutions that produced a near-killer crisis and desperately need reform;
- an education system that has fallen badly behind other nations;
- a health-insurance safety net full of holes;
- a housing market full of empty houses while millions are foreclosed out of their homes;
- huge government deficits due to a series of decisions over a decade to borrow and spend trillions without raising the money to pay for it;
- and an ailing environment and a need to respond quickly and effectively.
A well-functioning government exists to address problems like this. But what all of these problems have in common is the utter failure of our government to address any of them effectively.
In speaking of the scorched-earth, every-day-is-election-day, deficit-of-trust political environment in our country, the president offered at least one part of a diagnosis. The split reaction in the room, and later in the commentary about the speech, incarnated the analysis. The same superficial, point-scoring, name-calling junk that has paralyzed our political culture was on offer — as it always is.
Before James Cameron made Avatar, he directed Titanic — and the latter seems like the appropriate image these days. Our nation suffers the slow death of multiple iceberg gashes in the hull. Meanwhile, the well-dressed leaders — the gentlemen and gentlewomen gathered in that historic old House who are supposed to be in charge of this ship — seem to be capable of nothing better than endless stalemates over the best procedures to employ in deciding upon the protocol to be followed related to debating which committee might be charged with developing a plan for a solution.
I can’t quite figure out whether the problem is that the two sides genuinely and in principle disagree over the best way forward (about everything) and the system is set up in such a way that such disagreements prevent action, or if the two sides are stuck in a demonic default mode of doing everything possible to thwart the will of the other side, no matter the consequences for the nation.
When your ship is going down, it really matters far less who is in charge than whether whoever is in charge finds a way to deal with the crisis in a timely fashion.
To the extent that politically engaged Christians have contributed to this disaster by getting mired in partisanship, we must repent. We have a transcendent reference point theologically that can contribute to national political renewal. Let’s offer it.