Below is the text of a talk I gave at my school last night.  That it occurred in the bowels of a building bought and paid for by a Texas oilman only added to the irony.

Introduction

First, let me begin by shamelessly riffing off of Weber (1946a [1919] and 1946b [1919]).  You wish me to speak on the topic “Why Should a Christian be a Socialist?”  This lecture will, I am sorry to say, necessarily disappoint you in a number of ways.  For one thing, I shall say nothing that has not been said before – and no doubt far more eloquently than I can put it here.  Secondly, you doubtless wish me actually to answer the question, which involves taking a position on a thorny politico-theological problem.  This I shall do only in a purely formal way and toward the end, when I shall raise a certain question concerning the necessity of political action based upon a plain reading of the Gospel.  However, before I do that, I shall speak as a historical/comparative sociologist, and as such I shall follow a certain pedantic custom of beginning with the historical conditions.  In this case, we begin with an intellectual problem, again paraphrasing Weber (1996 [1930]), to wit, standing as a product of contemporary American culture, and studying such a question, one is bound to ask oneself: to what combination of circumstances should the fact be attributed that in the Anglo-Protestant tradition – and (I would argue) more especially within American Protestantism – this particular question has appeared, and has apparently come to bedevil us in such a manner that (we like to think) it lies at the crux of developments having universal significance and value. 

For it is not necessarily the case that this is an especially “problematic” question from a different cultural (or faith) tradition.  Take Catholicism, for instance.  While it would be misleading to state baldly that Catholicism is more theologically “friendly” than Protestantism to standard-issue state Socialism – one has only to recall Pope John Paul II’s clear and ringing tocsin-call against Communism as practiced in the Eastern bloc – it would also be more than slightly chauvinistic to assume that the question would evince the same, or even similar, answers from people of different Christian denominations.  Not only do Catholics consistently practice the principle of the “preferential option for the poor,” there is a long tradition – stretching back to St. Thomas More, if not earlier – that leads straight through to Liberation Theology and the sort of creative melding of Catholic liturgy, theology, and ritual practice with principles of economic justice for workers that we have seen enacted by lay activists such as Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez and prelates like Archbishop Romero.  Thus, let me first bracket this talk by saying that I will focus my remarks on certain theological and social-movement trends within the Protestant tradition – of which I would note this institution stands as the heir and repository, and of which I freely claim as my own personal heritage.  It is not that I think that the question is not relevant to Catholics, it is that I think the answer will look different to Catholics, and I am more prepared to speak in Protestant language, about Protestant traditions – which, for better or worse, are the language and tradition from which most Americans have historically approached this question. 

Now, by way of “previewing” my remarks – for as my middle-school social studies teacher, Ms. Bobbie Sykes-Perkins taught me, “tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, then tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you told ‘em” – I will suggest that in order to answer your question, one must parse it two ways: first with a lower-case “s” and secondly with an upper-case “s.”  By the former I mean to suggest that the question presumes acting as Christians, corporately, in the world, to build the Kingdom.  And doing that is not a question to which most American Protestants (especially those working within the Calvinist and pietistic traditions), would have historically answered in the affirmative.  In a phrase, the idea of acting “socially” as Christians – whether it be as part of a moral reform movement, the Social Gospel, Christian Socialism, Niebuhrian neo-orthodoxy, Dr. King’s Civil Rights movement, or contemporary conservative Christian evangelicalism – has always been problematic in our society.  In the back of all us who stand as heirs to the genius of Geneva and the prophet of Wittenburg has been a strict individualist ascetism – a tradition that always, already, questions any action for the purpose of taking this fallen and trivial world and making it meaningful and whole, a tradition that holds that the only actor responsible for redeeming this world is God, and God alone.  It is this view, and how it came to change, that I shall focus on this evening.  For it is only once you have begun to answer that question in the affirmative that you can then go to the second question, namely whether Christians should be Socialists-with-[Das K]apital-S’es.

The “Standing Order” of American Calvinist orthodoxy 

“Orthodox” Protestantism in this country – the so-called Puritan “standing order” of the New England colonies especially – was a hard-nosed, hard-bitten distillation of Calvnist theological individualism.  As summarized by C. H. Hopkins (1940), most American Protestants – which is to say, most Americans, for before the 1830s there simply weren’t very many Catholics in this country – ascribed in a greater or lesser degree to a “well-articulated body of doctrines…insulated against the corrosive forces of the new science and of social unrest by an otherworldy dualism that resulted in a… preoccupation with the salvation and perfection of the individual (1940: 14).”  As Hopkins notes, most denominations in the pre-Civil War era held that, to the extent that Christians might be concerned with the problems that attended industrial development (e.g., widening gaps between the wealthy and the poor, increasing numbers of poor people, urban slums, immigration – the whole panoply of subjects that would form the core of the yet-to-be-founded discipline of sociology), “orthodox” Protestantism provided only one answer: “individual regeneration and the bolstering of the old sanctions.”  The Calvinist and pietistic view of things held first and foremost to the promise of heaven as a reward for individual virtue or suffering.  As a Presbyterian divine noted, if the poor received unfair treatment here on earth, they should lay up their treasure in heaven and look to the next life for their reward (Atwater, as quoted in Hopkins 1940:15).  The focus lay heavily upon individual reformation, redemption, and social consequences were left to “take care of themselves” (Ibid: 16).  Most American Christians in the early history of our nation, in Hopkins’s words, were “bound by the habits of morbid introspection inherited from a decadent Calvinism.”

Now, it has been noted by many, many, sociologists – Weber (1996) not least among them – that there is a certain elective affinity between this sort of theological individualism and the restless creative entrepreneurial activity that lay the groundwork of, and continually contributed to, the development of capitalist economics.  For with the doctrine of predestination came the ever-present anxiety over the state of one’s soul – and the ever-present necessity to seek assurance of God’s grace (as for instance, in the imperfect signs provided by this-worldly rewards).  With this idea that success in this world might, just perhaps, be a sign one’s pre-ordination as a member of the elect, comes the logical flip-side: that worldly failure (poverty, most especially) is probably a sign of the imperfect state of one’s soul, of a lack of commitment to Christ, and therefore the foregone conclusion of damnation.  It is perhaps also worth noting that theological individualism is no doubt useful as a tool of capitalist hegemony – for if we shall know them by their fruits, how is it that we dare to question the accumulated signs of God’s favor toward the elect?

Two circumstances contributed to change this view.  The first consisted of those moral reform movements that shook the early Republic: elimination of the Sunday mails, the abolition of lslavery, and temperance.  While most of you are no doubt aware of the broad outlines of the second two, I should like to remind you of the importance of the first.  For we take it as a given these days that mail is not delivered on Sunday.  What an odd and peculiar thing, when you think about it, for a capitalist society; what, business is not transacted at all on Sundays?  Posh – nonsense when you consider how many of us race out of church in an often futile effort to be the first at the buffet, beating the Baptists to brunch.  Even odder when you consider that we have separation of church and state in this country – why thus a federal policy that forbids the circulation of the blood of commerce on the Sabbath?  For there was a time when mail was delivered on Sundays – deep in the misty orthodox Calvinist past – for most of the pre-Civil War period, in fact (John 1995).  What changed?

A social movement happened, and then ultimately the weight of federal bureaucratic decision-making.  This particular social movement was led by a group with the somewhat uneuphonious acronym “GUPOCS” for General Union for the Promotion of the Observance of the Christian Sabbath.  But the Union faltered early, bedeviled by controversy over the manner and appropriateness of social agitation for this most imminently Biblical of goals: honoring the Sabbath and keeping it a day of rest.  Once advocates moved from the position that one should honor the Sabbath to the idea that we should honor the Sabbath, a great many persons (lay, clerical, and especially business leaders) saw a theological problem.  Even the idea of agitating in a purely institutional, non-threatening manner – signing petitions to Congress for the passage of a law – was problematic.  Whether you observed the Sabbath was your own call, your own salvation or damnation.  And because the banning of the Sabbath mails was a “conservative” position, it was a particularly thorny problem for the orthodox to whom GUPOCS appealed for support.  Ultimately the Sunday mails would be banned, but only long after GUPOCS had collapsed under the weight of orthodox criticism.

This simple idea, that people could gather together for the pursuit of the social redemption of a purer American Republic, blessed by God with the opportunity to build a shining City upon a Hill – this simple idea then accelerated with two additional movements: abolition and temperance.  Both movements faced this problem – individual vs. social redemption – squarely almost from the very beginning.  This fight rent the nascent temperance movement within a decade of its founding in 1826: where the earliest advocates – the Tappans, Dodge, Phelps, Rennselaer, wealthy capitalists all – sought to spread the gospel of temperance through pure “moral suasion” they were soon outvoted by those that would (gasp!) actually change the law to make drinking more difficult[1]  The earliest anti-slavery advocates similarly favored individual redemption in the form of voluntary manumission and transportation “back to Africa” – it was as a result of the efforts of these fair folk that we owe the existence of the poor step-child, the abandoned Ishmael of America’s imperial household, Liberia.  But these orthodox Calvinist individualists – the same names, not surprisingly, turn up among the officer lists of both the Anti-Slavery and the Temperance Societies – were horrified at the thought of agitating for abolition per se, of using the full majesty of state authority to intervene in history and bring God’s manifest purposes to nearer fruition.  When faced with this call – by the fiery William Lloyd Garrison and the even more fiery freed slave Douglass who together lit a pillar of flame to lead the exiled out of bondage – the individualists retreated to other causes (peace, the publication of Bibles and religious tracts, missionary activity).  What is important to note for our purposes here, however, was what resulted from the efforts of the abolitionists (and their opponents, the so-called “fire-eating” nullificationists); to wit, the great purgatorial conflagration of Fort Sumter, Gettysburg, Antietem and Appomatox.  A turning point, a moment where most religious commentators did (and perhaps still would) argue that America was cast upon the threshing floor of history to redeem itself from the great error of slavery.  That experience left us – by which I mean Americans and Protestants – at the end of Reconstruction with the great question “what next?”  And not just “what next” in terms of issues (though many proposed answers, and among the loudest voices were calls for temperance), but also “what next” for theology and this incipient dichotomy between emphasizing individualist versus “social-ist” redemption.

The second circumstance consisted of those brave liberal voices crying in the individualist wilderness, the liberal Congregationalists and Unitarians, along with some Episcopalians, who would first lay out the principles of what would become the Social Gospel.  Partly as a result of the social movements to which they contributed – abolition, temperance, female suffrage – and partly as a result of the fact, perhaps, that it was these denominations who inherited the state-church tradition of a responsibility for public morals (Hopkins 1940).  But as argued by several authors (Hopkins 1940, others?), these nascent social gospel trends grew in the context of the developing iron cage of industrial capitalism, and the increasing obviousness of the plain simple fact that merit (deserved or not) or grace (prevenient, justified, or sanctifying) alone could not explain why some were poor and remained so. 

The greatest exponents of these views – Gladden, Ely, Rauschenbusch, and Sheldon among them – articulated what we would perhaps now recognize as a coherent justification for acting in a concerted, corporate manner to build the Kingdom according to, as Sheldon first articulated in 1896, the principle “What Would Jesus Do?”  Now, it is true that most of what they had to say strikes many of us as rather soft sentimentalism – the cumulative effects of individual redemption (as in Sheldon’s drippy novels) or an ameliorative, peaceful, evolutionary (what Marx would know as Fourierest) effort to move the world toward a “fairer” economic order (as in Rauschenbusch’s sermons).  But we now live a century after they wrote, a century that saw the revolutions of 1917 (Russia), 1927-1949 (China), 1953 (Cuba), not to mention the New Deal and the Great Society.  It is worth noting here, by the way, the clear connection between the social gospel and early American social work and sociology.  This movement – the Social Gospel and the Christian Socialism that grew out of it – fell apart in the 1920s and 30s, for reasons that need not detain us here.[2]

But the germ of the idea – that we must act in this world to build the Kingdom – steadily became a staple of what would become known as the “mainline” Protestant denominations.  And even with the rise of Neiburhian “neo-orthodoxy” in the 1930s, the idea of structural critique (as articulated in, for instance his 1932 work, Moral Man and Immoral Society) became a part of how many (if not most) Protestant Christians saw the world.  These two ideas – concerted social action by Christians, and an understanding of the inherent sinfulness of certain social structures – were then put into practice by the man most would agree was one of the 20th century’s greatest theologians, namely Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  It would then take another couple of decades for “conservatives” to appropriate the idea of concerted social action for the redemption of society – in the form of the Christian Coalition and its allied organizations.  Of course, Falwell, Reed, Robertson et al. had to do a lot of heavy lifting to get those who had been schooled in the old individualist Calvinism to sign on to the idea of engagement in social action.  It was not until the 1980s – with the election of Ronald Reagan (a mainline “liberal” Protestant, a Disciple of Christ who then joined the Presbyterians, no less) as against a self-professed born-again Southern Baptist evangelical – that the Moral Majority, the Eagle Forum, Focus on the Family, etc. really got going.

The Current Crisis

We thus find ourselves at the present day, and the current question.  To which I would say that to the extent that Christians (especially Protestant Christians) engage in any kind of collective action – regardless of the issue – they already are socialists-with-a-small-s.  The idea of the Kingdom, that we are, in the words of my own faith tradition, “called to be the church, to seek justice and resist evil” – that we are called, not you alone in the closet of your heart, but us, individually and corporately – is now central to most American Protestants’ understandings of their faith.  And that theology, grounded as it is in the long tradition of Sunday Mails agitation, abolition, temperance, the Social Gospel, and Niebuhr’s re-working of the doctrine of original sin into structural critique, has left us with a kind of restless do-gooderism (Chavez 1998), the emotional spark that led to the New Deal, the Great Society, anti-communism, the Civil Rights Movement and even (I must admit) current efforts to re-criminalize abortion and homosexuality.  The real dividing line is not between mainliners and evangelicals (or people of faith versus “atheists/homosexuals/and secular humanist sociologists,” for only the mostly blinded-by-the-beam-in-their-own-eye partisan would fail to see that competing visions of the Kingdom are just that – visions of the Kingdom, all inspired by the same faith).[3]  The real dividing line is one that we have long crossed – for the old standing order of Calvinist individualism is, by and large, a minority view nowadays, mostly held by Seventh-Day Adventists, certain non-denominational sects, and a remnant of black and working-class white “other-worldly” Pentecostal-type churches.  And even those folks are being recruited, and rapidly, into the new conservative evangelical movements of the day, largely around issues of the social control of personal morality (viz., abortion, homosexuality). 

The second way of asking your question – the way the question was presumably intended by the students who put together this panel – is to ask whether Christians should be Socialists-with-a-capital-S.  It is to ask whether we Christians must acknowledge, yes, that the poor are always with us, but precisely because they are always with us we must, on pain of eternal damnation, throw the money-changers from the temple and call to account the rich young rulers of the world.  To answer that question requires taking off my Weberian “science as a vocation” cap and answering as follows: to the extent that you think that the Gospel does not call for economic justice, you do violence to the text.  Once you’ve accepted the point of joint social action, to not engage in agitation for economic justice – is, to be quite blunt about the matter, to sin.  To know what God has called us to do – in the plain words of the text – and to do otherwise, is to put our own selfish will against what God has ordained.

 

[1] This glosses over other aspects of the 1833 convention fight: not only was the issue over moral suasion vs. legal coercion, it was also over “ardent spirits” versus all forms of alcohol.  It is easy to forget that there was a time when we simply did not know, from a scientific perspective, what alcohol was.  Thus, the earlier moral suasionists were mostly concerned about liquor (whiskey and rum) – the booze of choice of the lower- incipient working classes.  When the newer, less wealthy legal coercionists entered the fray, they demanded the control of wine as well.  This view the champagne- and claret-quafing commercial elites would not stand for.  The fact that the upstart total abstinence advocates also wanted to (shockers!) incorporate women into the movement, even suggesting that they be allowed to speak at public meetings, put them beyond the bounds of bourgeois, orthodox, acceptability.

[2] Basically, the leaders of the movement got caught up in the nationalism of World War One, then realized almost immediately what terribly hypocrites they were for doing so – and this took away their moral steam.  That, along with the incredibly pro-business agenda of the Harding and Hoover administrations, not to mention the concomitant resurgence of individualist ideology in theological circles with the “fundamentalist/modernist” fights.

[3] Simmel’s (1971 [1908])  point here – that those who are engaged in the most bitter conflict are in fact those who share the most – is worth repeating here.

 

 

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So, I used this movie as a teaching tool in class today.  While I’m not sure everyone got the point, the movie ended up being a lot better for my purposes than I had expected.  As I had originally intended to show “Fight Club,” (but chickened out), I was glad this worked out well.

See, the point I wanted to make was how the available narratives and mythic tropes we have in our society (esp. individualism and meritocracy) prove inadequate to the task of explaining why, for instance, work sucks for the vast majority of us. 

Why does work suck even though it’s supposed to be our vocation?  Why don’t we succeed even though we’ve been trying again and again for years?  Why is that others appear to get ahead faster despite being dumber/lazier/rule-breakers?  When faced with an inadequate narratives for why the world operates the way it does — when faced with the reality that working hard and playing by the rules at a job we despise is emotionally deadening and perhaps counter-productive — we turn, perforce, to alternative narratives. 

In the case of men, the alternatives tend to group around the following three stories:

a.) the “other” took my job/is getting something unfairly/is making my life miserable (that dumb black guy got it because of affirmative action, that castrating bitch of a secretary hates me, that fag in accounting is sucking the boss’s dick, etc.);

b.) one of these days I’m just going to blow this place up;

c.) or, I’m going to become a gangster/shaolin master/samurai/cowboy, and operate as a completely autonomous agent, under no man’s thumb, constrained by no structure, outside of all the rules and free of all the ties that bind.

The great thing about this movie is that it pits options (b) and (c) against each other — the hero, obviously, adopts option (c), while the bug-eyed guy with the stapler adopts option (b).  Option (a) is hinted at in some of the throwaway lines (especially the numerous derogatory references to homosexuality).  The use of violent rap songs (”Gee it’s good to be a Gangster”) then becomes icing on the cake of the visuals (the three musketeers appearing suddenly in the middle of a rural fantasy space, far away from the urban panopticon, where they proceed to balletically destroy the totem of technology).

Yeah, good stuff.  I’ll definitely use it next year.

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So a friend of mine asked me the respond to the following two questions (she is a PhD student at the Divinity School here):

“How have you been influenced by the story of the friendship of Jonathan and David in the biblical books of Samuel?  When (if ever) and how did you first entertain the notion that they were a couple?”

This was my reply:

I guess I didn’t think about D&J as a couple seriously until (a) I came out (freshman year of college), and (b) started thinking about myself being part of a couple.  I did not really grow up in the church — I was not confirmed until graduate school — and so for me reading the Bible has mostly been from a queer perspective.  It wasn’t until I was already quite comfortable with my queer identity that I began to grapple with the text (”wrestling, I will not let thee go/ ‘Til I thy name, thy nature know…”).  Perhaps in this I was somewhat lucky, as I could come to it “fresh,” without a lot of fundie garbage to purge from my system before I could make the story my own. 
 
There are really three pieces of text that come to mind when I think of reading the Bible from a queer perspective; the story of David and Jonathan is one of them.  The others are, not surprisingly, Ruth and Naomi, and Jesus and the Beloved Disciple (note: following Jennings’s exposition, I tend to identify the Beloved Disciple with Lazarus and the Rich Young Ruler).   In all three cases I take comfort in the imagery, the narrative, and the beauty of the language.  A key piece of that comfort lies in the knowledge that our affection is, in fact, described in The Text (caps intentional) and not (to use a phrase that comes from a collection of essays edited by Duberman, Vicinus, and Chauncey) “hidden from history.”  So much of gay and lesbian history is hidden, unspoken, and cached away in the corners of everyone else’s narrative.  Finding a story we can call our own then becomes like finding a small jewel while you’re being taken on a tour of the “big house” — perhaps a rare coin that fell out of the pocket of the guide, or more likely a gem deliberately stashed under the candelabrum by another, earlier, visitor.  Those little glints become what I look for.  Not so much that I stop paying attention to the crowd around me, or to the nattering of the docent — those are inescapable.  But the little glints of my story, the fact that they are usually there if you look hard enough, become the reward for going on the tour. 
 

But I would also mark that in all three textual cases (R&N, J&BD, but especially with the David and Jonathan story), I am always troubled by the association within the text of same-sex love with, well, separation and death.  Ruth declares her love for Naomi on the occasion of her widowhood.  Jesus loved Lazarus so much that he wept on hearing he had died.  And Jonathan, poor Jonathan, whose soul was knit to David’s, gets his reward by becoming a brother-in-law to his beloved (one wonders what poor Michal thought of this arrangement), followed by the irreparable separation occasioned by Saul’s jealousy and hatred.  And then, of course, Jonathan dies.  Leaving us a beautiful lament (I am a fan of Peter Abelard’s hymn on this subject: “Low in thy grave with thee/ Happy to lie/ Since there’s no greater thing left Love to do/ And to live after thee/ Is but to die/ For with but half a soul what can Life do?”) and an apparently inescapable logic. This connection between same-sex love and death is part of the reason I had a hard time with “Brokeback Mountain.”  Their souls were knit together, but then they watched each other marry, and to what end?  To the only ending the story ever has: Jack/Jonathan’s death at the hands of Philistines.  It is not true that Proulx was revolutionary in what she wrote: what she wrote was a beautiful, heartrending update on a very, very old story.  For that matter, D&J aren’t even the first version of this: Gilgamesh also lamented the death of Enkidu, the wild-man who came out of the wilderness for the love of a rich young ruler.
 
So, I look for the story in the corners of everybody else’s narrative.  And I find comfort in the rare and precious glints I see there.  But when I think about the content and the implications of those stories, I find myself, thinking in Durkheim’s words, that we gay people are “obliged to submit ourselves to rules of conduct and of thought which we have neither made nor desired, and which are sometimes even contrary to our most fundamental inclinations and instincts… We speak a language we did not make, use instruments that we did not invent, invoke rights that we did not found.”    

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