Theo-Politics: The Kind of Talk We Really Need (Keith Watkins, Guest Post)

Keith Watkins, Emeritus Professor of Parish Ministry and Worship at Christian Theological Seminary, father of the Rev. Dr. Sharon Watkins, General Minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and a friend, has launched a new blog -- Keith Watkins Historian.  I'm reposting his latest effort, a review and response to Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power.   Bacevich works with Reinhold Niebuhr's ideas, ideas that Keith reflected on in an earlier post.  I hope you will engage with this piece and make Keith's blog a regular stop -- whether you're interested in history, theology, or cycling!

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Theo-Politics: The Kind of Talk We Really Need

By Keith Watkins

How can religiously inspired ideas enter into political discussion so that theology transcends sectarianism and yet continues to be intellectually and emotionally potent? Often, this question has been answered by secularizing the discourse so much that theology virtually disappears, or by limiting the topics for which theology is allowed.

In The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Andrew J. Bacevich illustrates a better way. Using Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings as foundation, Bacevich translates a distinctively Christian theological view of reality into a public language that can be used by people who do not affirm Christian faith.

Niebuhr’s two principles were realism, which “implies an obligation to see the world as it actually is,” and humility, which includes the obligation to see ourselves “without blinders.” Hubris, realism’s enemy, “finds expression in an outsized confidence in the efficacy of American power as an instrument to reshape the global order.” Sanctimony, humility’s enemy, “gives rise to the conviction that American values and beliefs are universal and that the nation itself serves providentially assigned purposes.” Because realism and humility are in short supply today, Bacevich declares, American life and America’s role in the world are deeply flawed.

Bacevich uses the idea of freedom to explain the deep problems of American domestic affairs and world policy. Our mindless pursuit of freedom has led to its distortion and diminishment. The “central paradox of our time”—the exercise of freedom that demands that we fight around the world—undermines our capacity to fight, jeopardizes our freedom, and aggravates the disorders affecting our political freedom.

The result is that America faces crises in economic, political, and military affairs, each of which Bacevich discusses provocatively, as might be expected since he is both a retired military officer and professor at Boston University.

Half of the book analyzes political and military issues, but as a religious person I am most interested in his chapter, The Crisis of Profligacy. “For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors.” In addition to its negative impacts upon personal character and well being, this quest has created a powerful and mostly negative impact upon foreign policy and American relations with the rest of the world.

Between 1979 and 1983, Bacevich writes, Americans made a fateful choice. “They could curb their appetites and learn to live within their means or deploy dwindling reserves of U.S. power in hopes of obliging others to accommodate their penchant for conspicuous consumption.” During this four-year interval, “bookended by two memorable presidential speeches,” Americans chose the latter, making these years “the true pivot of contemporary American history, far more relevant to our present predicament than supposedly decisive events like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

In July 1979, when many were insisting that threats to America came from external powers, President Jimmy Carter declared that “the real danger to American democracy lay within.” He identified an American “crisis of confidence” as “an outward manifestation of an underlying crisis of values.” In a speech delivered on March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative. In earlier speeches, he had countered Carter’s glum analysis, but in this one Reagan proposed that America had to become invulnerable and that technology could achieve that goal.

“Carter had portrayed quantity (the American preoccupation with what he had called ‘piling up material goods’) as fundamentally at odds with quality (authentic freedom as he defined it)…In Reagan’s view, quality (advanced technology converted to military use by talented, highly skilled soldiers) could sustain quantity (a consumer economy based on availability of cheap credit and cheap oil).” Carter lost both the presidency and the argument. Most Americans have embraced the Reagan view and since then we have moved ever deeper into a morass with no exit in sight.

In his concluding chapter, Bacevich reaffirms his thesis that power is limited and he again calls Americans to realism rather than idealism. We should turn our attention to the two meta-challenges” of our time: “nuclear weapons and climate change.”

What Bacevich is arguing makes sense to me. The world is big enough for everyone, so long as each of us lives modestly—loving our neighbor as we love ourselves, all within the larger context of loving God with heart soul, mind, and strength.

Power, Virtue, and Common Sense -- (Keith Watkins)

My friend and mentor in all things related to worship and church, Dr. Keith Watkins, Professor Emeritus of Parish Ministry at Christian Theological Seminary, has launched a new blog -- Keith Watkins Historian:  Religious Historian; Aggressive Cyclist.  He will be posting essays that cover matters of religious history, practical theology, and cycling.   Keith is the author of a number of important books, including The Great Thanksgiving:  The Eucharistic Norm of Christian Worship (Chalice Press, 1995).  I offered to re-post some of his essays to introduce his new blog to readers.  I hope you will follow the link to Keith's blog and become a follower.  In this essay, Keith picks up the question of power as analyzed by Reinhold Niebuhr in his The Irony of American History.

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“The most important book ever written on American public policy,” if we can believe Andrew J. Bacevich, began as lectures delivered on college campuses shortly after the close of World War II. The lecturer was Reinhold Niebuhr, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and his speeches were published in 1949 as The Irony of American History.

President Obama is well versed in Niebuhr’s ideas, which may be one reason why the University of Chicago Press has reissued the book, sixty years after its first appearance. It has a new introduction by Bacevich whose 2008 book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, draws extensively upon Niebuhr’s work.

Niebuhr’s organizing motif is irony, which he describes as a situation with incongruities that on the surface seem unrelated, but upon closer examination are closely tied together. “Virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue,” and “strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt” the person or nation that is strong.

Applied to American life, irony comes in two patterns. First, the good in American life—our scientific developments, our emphasis upon the dignity of every person, our freedoms, our preeminence in world affairs—carries with it unrecognized tendencies which, if allowed to develop unchecked, undercut or destroy the good. Second, certain elements of American society that are undervalued or scorned—the young, the deviant, the culturally dispossessed, the uneducated—possess within themselves the possibilities of contributing new strength that can make the nation better.

Irony helps us understand that America’s necessity to exercise power carries with it the inescapable development of guilt.

Niebuhr’s illustration is the threat to use atomic weapons after World War II. As Americans, we had always thought of ourselves as a most innocent and virtuous nation, but after the war we also found ourselves the world’s most powerful. We were custodians of the most destructive weapon ever developed, and we could not disavow its use in order to maintain our virtue. Yet if we had used it, we would have covered ourselves with a terrible guilt.

For Americans, the irony is that “the greatness of our power is derived on the one hand from the technical efficiency of our industrial establishment and on the other from the success of our natural scientists. Yet it was assumed that science and business enterprise would insure the triumph of reason over power and passion in human history.” We know that this assumption was (and is) ill founded.

The ironic dimension of American foreign policy helps us understand current efforts to protect the world from forces that threaten freedom, dignity, and life itself. The exercise of power has been defended as the action of a nation that believes in freedom and wants to extend it to people around the world. Yet, the defense of freedom, supported by a significant body of intellectual analysis, has led the nation into preemptive wars in the Middle East.

Not only has this warfare brought violence and suffering; it has also caused our military forces to engage in actions that emulate many of the most coercive tactics of those whom we battle in the name of our superior freedoms and way of life.

Toward the end of his book, Niebuhr writes that in America common sense trumps theory. Truth “becomes falsehood, precisely when it is carried through too consistently.” Common sense prevents both of the primary theories (Niebuhr calls them wisdoms) now operating in America from being carried through to their logical conclusions.

Niebuhr writes as a theologian, often drawing upon the Bible in order to show the ironic point of view in full operation. His book is a splendid example of how theological ideas can be brought into public discourse in ways that transcend sectarianism. Social policy and political action would be improved if more of our public discourse were of this kind.

In the nation’s capitol and in legislative assemblies around the country, let this be remembered: Carried too far, held until the bitter end, our virtues become vices. When we are most certain of ourselves, those things we demean or despise may lead to positive change.

Niebuhr is right. A renewed awareness of the ironic character of American culture and politics could allow common sense to trump our ideologies again. The result: foreign policy and political action at home would both be much improved.

Keith Watkins Historian

Professor Emeritus

Christian Theological Seminary