I never thought I’d be feeling sympathy for–let alone offering advice to–those political and theocratic conservatives we have come to call the “religious Right.”
But I do feel sympathy and I do offer advice: Back off a bit, and stop making it so difficult for those religiously tepid souls who, nonetheless, share your hunger for a return to old values.
The fact that I’m backing into my subject is some indication of how hard a thing it is for people who imagine themselves modern and intelligent to talk about.
Here’s how it came to me: I was talking with futurist Robert Theobald when I mentioned my consternation at the disconnect between the soaring stock market and the economically anxious American middle class. Two economic thermometers–the broadly held securities that constitute the market and the personal behavior reflected in tempered optimism and reined-in spending–give very different readings. But if the middle class is anxious, the upper class must be elated. Corporate bonuses are up, big business is booming and the pay of top executives is virtually off the charts. What gives?
Theobald, whose training was in economics, thinks that what I have observed is simply one aspect of a more general disconnect.
“It’s really a disconnect between the power elites and the rest of us,” he said. Power elites, he said, believe in maximum economic growth, international competitiveness–all those things–with small regard for the impact of maximized growth either on the world’s resources or on the psyches of the people. The rest of us want a higher quality of life, healthier relationships and a more compassionate society. They want maximum productivity; we want a life that makes sense.
The problem, says Theobald, whose latest book, “Reworking Success,” is out this month, is that we don’t even know we’re disconnected–until some signal event reveals the chasm. Our reaction to the deaths within a week’s time of Princess Diana and Mother Teresa provides one such glimpse.
“What has been exposed,” he says, “is our hunger for compassion. Princess Diana had an almost miraculous ability to make people believe she cared.. . . Mother Teresa, a totally different woman, likewise called upon us to care for those least able to care for themselves. We are all afraid of the uncaring world which economic forces are bringing into existence all around us, and so people everywhere seized the opportunity of their deaths to express their inchoate longing for a world where the old virtues reign.”
Which brings me to the so-called religious Right. These earnest men and women care deeply about the old virtues, about a life that has meaning beyond maximized economic growth. But they express that caring with a doctrinal and ideological particularity that either shuts the rest of us out or frightens us into opposition.
My unsolicited advice is not that they should change their beliefs, only that they might connect with the rest of the anxious class if they sought points of connection rather than points of difference. The “old virtues” can exist among those who don’t consider themselves “born again”–and on either side of the “school choice” divide.
We used to understand that fealty to the old virtues–what Robert Bellah calls “civil religion” and what Theobald calls “global spiritual values”–did not require that we all become members of the same religion.
America, I believe, is hungry for the spirituality we used to take for granted. The religious Right wants to feed that hunger, but, like all religious fundamentalism, it insists on limiting access to the table.
In one direction lies a self-righteous theocracy that knows Truth and would impose it on us–for our own good, of course. In the other lies the civil society that so many of us yearn for–where people truly care for one another and where the barriers between us are razed by mutual consent.
