By Jim Denison
Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat will be filled by a Republican. On January 19, a state that has not sent a Republican to the Senate in 37 years elected Scott Brown by a decisive margin.
Why? Newsweek offered a six-explanation post-mortem the day after the shocking election: (1) Martha Coakley, Brown’s Democratic opponent, was an ineffective candidate; (2) Democrats took victory for granted in the heavily Democratic state; (3) the Obama administration has been too aggressive in pursuing its agendfa and voters are alienated; (4) intraparty squabbling among Democrats made health-care reform less attractive to voters; (5) Democrats didn’t do enough to win the election; (6) the economic and political environment endangers incumbents.
Let’s explore the sixth explanation for a moment. Matt Bai, writing in The New York Times Magazine, makes a fascinating assertion: incumbency is a thing of the past. Our microwave, fast-food society wants what it wants, now. If a political party doesn’t deliver results today, we’ll find someone else to elect tomorrow. Democrats outnumber Republicans in Massachusetts three to one, but independents decided the election.
Our society has little apparent loyalty to brands of any kind. Corporations are following suit (just ask Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien). Denominations are especially feeling this slide from loyalty into consumerism. According to the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, Baptists have declined from 19% of the population in 1990 to 15.8% in 2008. Methodists have fallen from 8% to 5%, Lutherans from 5.2% to 3.8%, Presbyterians from 2.8% to 2.1%. The share of “non-denominational” Christians, by contrast, has soared in the last 18 years, as has the number of Americans who profess no religious identification.
Who is to blame? I nominate Immanuel Kant.
What does an 18th-century German philosopher have to do with the election in Massachusetts and the firing of Conan O’Brien? Kant, responding to the reason-versus-experience debate raging in his day, made an apparently simple but revolutionary assertion: Our minds process our sense impressions, resulting in knowledge. Reason and experience can be friends again.
Fine — but if your reasoning or experience differ from mine, who is to decide who’s right? Here originates the idea that all truth-claims are subjective and personal. Two centuries later, our culture takes it for granted that morality is individual and private. “You have no right to force your beliefs on me” is the mantra of our age. Tolerance is our highest value, intolerance our worst crime.
This seismic shift from objective ethics to personal morality has affected every part of our society. Take abortion as an example: A majority of Americans continue to believe personally that abortion is morally wrong, but more than half favor keeping abortion legal. Or consider homosexuality: According to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 56% of Americans believe personally that homosexual behavior is “always wrong,” but a contemporary Gallup poll finds that 57% say homosexuality should be considered an acceptable alternative lifestyle. The reason for such private/public disparity is clear: most Americans think that society has no right to legislate personal morality, even behavior with which they disagree personally.
Of course, to claim that there is no absolute truth is to make an absolute truth claim. An audience member once objected to a statement I made by asserting that there is no coherence in the universe. I asked him if he would like my response to be coherent. As C. S. Lewis points out, if the universe has no meaning, we would never have discovered that it has no meaning.
The good news is that our pluralistic, relativistic, consumeristic 21st- century culture looks very much like the culture in which Christianity was birthed. The Roman Empire was filled with philosophers debating the nature of truth, from Platonists and Aristotelians to advocates of the Greek pantheon, the mystery cults, and the Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics and Skeptics.
In such a maelstrom of mindsets, Christianity showed it was right by proving it was relevant. The church could not make child abandonment illegal, but it could rescue abandoned babies. It could not legislate against slavery, but it could buy slaves and free them. Early Christians demonstrated God’s love in theirs. They took to heart Jesus’ promise, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35).
The message of Massachusetts for Christians is clear: the best way to get God elected the King of our culture is for us to elect him the king of our hearts.