Quotations Courtesy of Robert Bellah
This society is a cruel and bitter one, very far, in fact, from its own higher aspirations.
The only remaining category for the analysis and evaluation of human motives is interest, which has replaced both virtue and conscience in our moral vocabulary.
Chosen-ness that slips away from the controlling obligations of the covenant is a signpost to hell.
The energy of creation and the energy of aggression are often only a hair’s breadth apart.
If we allow the external covenant to be subverted utterly, then our task is infinitely greater: not to renew a republic but to throw off a despotism.
There are enormous concentrations of economic, political and technological power that will react harshly to any challenge.
We have plunged into the thickets of this world so vigorously that we have lost the vision of the good.
No one has changed a great nation without appealing to its soul, without stimulating a national idealism.
We are not innocent, we are not the saviors of mankind, and it is well for us to grow up enough to know that.
It has been one of the hallmarks of the current US administration that it is constantly referencing a history about which it (and especially its leader) seems to know shockingly little. Over and over, we hear that so and so is the worst president “in history;” that no one has been persecuted like the current office holder “in the country’s history;” that no one has done more for “the blacks than I have in history.” There are so many more examples of the current president, his loyalists and even at times his dissenters making slanted or even outrageous claims about a “history” which they have done virtually nothing to investigate and which they are using primarily as a tool to whip up political support, much like a preacher who enthusiastically misquotes the bible in order to send his/her parishioners into a frenzy right before the collection plates come out.
I am no historian but have studied enough of our history to know how complex that history has been, a strange brew of idealism and brutality, devotion and indifference, caring for neighbor and foreclosing on neighbors, piety and hypocrisy, opening our doors to others and then punishing them when they arrive, affirming the dignity of all humans while consigning some to be treated like cattle or violently displacing others from their ancestral homes.
These contradictions are part and parcel of all nations to some degree, but not all nations have had to traverse the wide gap we have had to navigate between our myths and our practices. As I have been reminded while revisiting texts from my graduate school past, including Richard Hofstadter’s “Social Darwinism in American Thought” and the text from which today’s quotations have been mined, Robert Bellah’s “The Broken Covenant,” from the beginning of our national experiment, we have over-assessed our national uniqueness, our erstwhile special relationship to divinity, the abundance of our piety and virtue. Indeed, and certainly in recent times, we have turned “virtue-signaling” into an art form, and not at all to our credit. At the same time, we have sought to cover or ignore our bursts of utter brutality, our preoccupations with money and the power it can coerce, our sometimes harshly restrictive notions of “neighbor” than our alleged covenantal relationship with any deity would ever endorse, our willing acceptance of a faith which stresses personal conversion to the virtual exclusion of social obligation.
Indeed, as Bellah points out, those who formed our nation began to erode the covenant almost as soon as it took effect, setting ourselves on a path at times divine and at other times ruthless in pursuit of national conquest and fortune. As a country we have consistently talked a good game – indeed at times inspiring other nations to rethink their own oppressive preoccupations – but have surely not always played one. In practical terms we have sewn together self-interest and idealism in a way which consigns the latter too often to rhetoric while providing a kind of plenary indulgence to the former, a license to accumulate and then lord worldly “success” over others within and outside our own nation with little restraining force or friction.
Bellah noted with sadness our long, national pathway to what was for him a present moment where “once born” people have taken advantage of a covenant that they themselves no longer abide by or otherwise take seriously, people who have decided that owning neighbors’ properties is preferable to having neighborly obligations and that religion to the extent it is practiced at all is confined to personal rather than social consequence, all about the maximizing of self-interest rather than the practical, virtuous intensification of a wider ministry to others.
Bellah wrote this book in the 70st and we must confess that much of what he identified, both past and in his present, now stalks our own present a half century later. We have steamrolled much of our national complexity and allowed partisan rooting interests to replace thoughtfulness about ourselves and our place in the world. We are all-too-willing to parrot unverified assumptions and positions if they suit our increasingly narrow frameworks. Even 50 years ago, it was clear that “we are not innocent, we are not the saviors of mankind,” and even more clear that we stubbornly refuse to own up to that reality. Other peoples and other countries, even those who rightly admire us in a variety of ways, figured that out some time ago.
Fifty years on from Bellah’s contributions, we face another “time of trial,” another period of straying further and further still from a covenant the non-fulfillment of which has become less our collective measure of success and more akin to a “signpost to hell.” We have allowed the external covenant, the means for keeping our nation on some semblance of course, to crumble thus risking what Bellah posited as “an infinitely greater task,” not to renew a republic so much as to “throw off a despotism.”
That degree of difficulty is defining our current moment. However, this moment is not entirely an aberration but a continuation of a pervasive national trend. We are living now through the implications of a long brokenness, a long period of lying to ourselves about our values and our virtue, a long habit of affirming an exceptionalism that, despite our considerable national achievements, many around the world no longer see as fundamentally exceptional. At official level and beyond, we have embraced what has become a recognizably cruel form of social Darwinism – the notion that “godliness is in league with riches” and that those who can play in that league deserve a free pass to improve their positions at the expense of those less exceptionally endowed. To those who have much, even more will be given. To those who have not? That’s their problem.
What is true of this current iteration of our broken covenant is not only its utter contempt for those who suffer but its phobia towards any effort to diversify and/or balance society and unlock the potential of all who reside within its confines. On this Mothers’ Day, while this posting is not exactly a Kay Jewelers moment, it seems relevant to point out the desire of current officialdom to roll back much of what women have gained in large measure through their own talents and efforts. From restricting voting rights, childcare options and reproductive and other health access to the thuggery of deportations violently separating mothers and children, and the obsessive scrubbing of women’s contributions and leadership from government websites, the options and images of an entitled, smug patriarchy have sought to relegate many women, many mothers, to places they never thought they would visit again in their lifetimes. Happy Mother’s Day indeed.
For Bellah, for many others, this is just one consequence of a covenant which is now little more than a “broken shell,” taking down with it the care and solidarity for one another which was once recognized as our covenantal obligation, but which has long been buried under an avalanche of greed, projection, indifference and exclusion. As brokenness gives way to more despotic influences we will need to summon larger quantities of energy, courage and mindfulness to restore bonds of liberty and solidarity that we surely should have done more to protect in the first place.
gapwblog 