Dialectical Democracy through Christian Thought

Dialectical Democracy through Christian Thought

OTHER WORKS BY DAVID R. BROCKMAN No Longer the Same: Religious Others and the Liberation of Christian Theology (2011) The Gospel among Religions: Christian Ministry, Theology, and Spirituality in a Multifaith World (2010), coeditor, with Ruben L. F. Habito

Dialectical Democracy through Christian Thought Individualism, Relationalism, and American Politics David R. Brockman

dialectical democracy through christian thought Copyright David R. Brockman 2013. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-34726-8 All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-46729-7 DOI 10.1057/9781137342539 ISBN 978-1-137-34253-9 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Brockman, David R. Dialectical democracy through Christian thought : individualism, relationalism, and American politics / David R. Brockman. pages cm 1. Economics Religious aspects Christianity. 2. Free enterprise Religious aspects Christianity. 3. Christianity and politics United States. 4. Individualism United States. 5. Liberalism United States. 6. Democracy United States. 7. United States Politics and government. I. Title. BR115.E3B665 2013 261.7 dc23 2013006567 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: August 2013 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Eleanor, once again, and always What thou lov st well is thy true heritage. Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI

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Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: The Impasse in US Political- Economic Discourse 1 1 Tensions in Christian Scripture 17 2 Tensions in the Western Christian Tradition 33 3 A Dialectical Approach to the Human Person 63 4 Leave Me Alone : The Insights and Illusions of Libertarian-Individualism 75 5 We re All in This Together : The Insights and Illusions of Reform- Liberal Relationalism 107 6 Getting Past the Impasse: Toward a Dialectical Democracy 145 Notes 173 Bibliography 211 Index 225 ix xiii

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Preface Since at least the 1980s, US political life has been the scene of an increasingly bitter fight over the role of government in economic life. Characterized as what one writer calls unending high- decibel partisan warfare, and much of it focused on this very issue, politics in the United States is now more polarized than it has been for the last century, and it is growing increasingly difficult for political leaders simply to govern, let alone address the serious long- term problems facing the country. 1 This book is a theological intervention into that political- economic 2 conflict. It aims to get past the polarization and advocate an alternative a system I call dialectical democracy. Drawn from the view of the human person that emerges from the Christian scriptures, this form of democracy would foster a creative dialectical tension between individuality and social relations. On the surface, a meditation on the political- economic might appear to depart from my previous published works, which focus on Christian relationships with religious others and the consequences of those relationships for Christian theology. 3 While the political- economic realm and its power relations hover in the wings particularly in my 2011 work, No Longer the Same: Religious Others and the Liberation of Christian Theology the political and the economic have not so far taken center stage, as they do here. However, my earlier work lays the groundwork for the approach I take here. In this book, I bring to the current political- economic debate some of the lessons many of us have learned from the ongoing dialogue among religions: the importance of listening deeply to those who are different, the need for openness to the possibility of mutual transformation, and the recognition that really listening to what others have to tell us can lead us to a more profound understanding of our own identity and witness. If such an approach can help members of different religious communities come to grips with disagreements over such matters as the nature of ultimate reality or the meaning of existence, surely it can help us get past our bitter disagreements over more worldly affairs. Furthermore, the religious world and the political- economic are not that far apart. For one thing, as this book will show, the dominant factions in

x Preface contemporary American politics reform liberalism and the increasingly libertarian Right have deep roots in the Christian tradition, however secular those positions may now appear. For another thing, as many scholars have recognized, politics and economics rely on assumptions that have the character of religious belief. 4 One example is the Right s libertarian faith in free markets as the solution to most social ills despite clear counterevidence, ranging from the tulip bubble of the 1630s to the 2008 financial crisis. But reform liberals exhibit their own faith commitments most prominently, the belief that the common good is best protected by what liberal economist Robert Reich describes as strong and compassionate government empowered by and dedicated to the common people to curb the power of economic elites. 5 Reform liberals often gravitate toward government solutions despite clear evidence that government is often more beholden to those very economic elites than to the common people and that a strong central government is likely to trample on civil liberties, which reform liberals also hold dear. 6 Reform liberalism and the libertarian Right resemble religious communities in another important sense: the tendency to absolutize their own beliefs and to exclude and reject those who believe differently. The result is political polarization. In recent decades, the US Congress has grown more and more polarized. In 2010, William Galston of the Brookings Institution observed, In both the House and the Senate, the most conservative Democrat is more liberal than is the most liberal Republican. If one defines the congressional center as the overlap between the two parties, the center has disappeared. 7 But polarization increasingly characterizes voters as well. Conservative columnist David Brooks comments on how voters increasingly tend to segregate themselves into ideological factions: Once you ve joined a side, the information age makes it easier for you to surround yourself with people like yourself... People lose touch with others in opposing, now distant, camps. And millions of kids are raised in what amount to political ghettoes. Brooks also notes that the current primary system exacerbates the trend toward self- segregation, by rewarding orthodox, polarization- reinforcing candidates. 8 Certainly we saw this borne out in the bloodletting of the Republican presidential primaries leading up to the 2012 election; Mitt Romney only survived by disavowing much of his own, more moderate record in an attempt to demonstrate his credentials as a member of the true Right. The more polarized we become, the less we are able, as Galston notes, to deal with large questions such as our fiscal crisis that cannot be solved without bipartisan cooperation and mutual compromise... When one party dominates both the executive and legislative branches, polarization often moves policy in directions that moderate and independent voters find troubling, which tends to

Preface xi produce abrupt lurches from one off- center majority to another. When power is divided, polarized parties find it hard to agree on much of significance. 9 Thus there are some very practical reasons to move past the rancor that divides us. Yet it will not be easy to do so. For, as I mentioned earlier, the conflict is between fundamentally different beliefs about how society and economic life should be organized. If we consider only the two dominant political positions, one treats government as, at best, a necessary evil (and often much worse) that must be prevented from interfering with essentially good markets; the other sees the capitalist system as innately fallible and government as a force for good that can and should protect citizens from the market s erratic behavior. (Indeed, as I will argue, the disagreement goes even deeper, reaching down to the very nature of human personhood itself.) Partisans consider these beliefs to be fundamental and nonnegotiable, just as religious adherents cling to their sense of ultimate reality as personal or impersonal, one or many, and transcendent or radically immanent. National Public Radio editor Ron Elving recently remarked on the religious character of polarization in the current political debate over government and the market: We have to get away from looking at it in strictly economic terms and think of it more in terms of the beliefs... The debates in Washington recently... have become increasingly of the language of religion... They don t talk so much about evidence. They don t talk so much about some attempt to find some ground in the middle. It s more like a religious struggle, where there are two sides that have just fundamentally different beliefs. 10 If Elving is right and I believe he is then why not apply to the current political- economic context the lessons many of us have learned from interreligious dialogue? As I argue in No Longer the Same, when those of us who are Christian block dialogue with religious others, we not only exclude their witness but also impair our own self- understanding insofar as we define ourselves against those we exclude. Perhaps more critically, we cut ourselves off from the Divine Other to whom we seek to be faithful, for we rule out a priori what that Divine Other might be saying and doing in religious others. Accordingly, I argue that Christians must be open to the truth- event of encounter with religious others. As a 1971 World Council of Churches consultation on interreligious dialogue put it, dialogue... involves the risk of one partner being changed by the other. It implies a readiness to receive an enrichment and enlargement. 11 Surely this same logic applies to political and economic others those with whom we disagree and with whom we compete in the public policy arena. If we can t learn at least something from those who differ most from us, then there is something wrong with our own position.

xii Preface My own encounter with those who see the world differently has shaped this book. For as long as I can remember, the Left has been my home. It still is. I have critiqued the leave me alone individualism that underpins both capitalism and Christianity in the United States. I believe that a democratic government can and must serve to increase both political and economic equality; so long as we are short of that goal, government must protect and defend those who are vulnerable to the whims of the market. 12 When I began work on the current book, I intended to write a rather straightforward relationalist critique of libertarian- individualist strains in contemporary American politicaleconomic discourse. Yet as I undertook my own interreligious dialogue with the libertarian Right and, more important, considered it in terms of the person- relations dialectic (discussed in Chapter 3) I encountered important insights into the libertarian- individualist tradition insights that tend to be lost in the more relationalist reform liberalism. These discoveries changed my mind and my theological approach. I found that pure relationalism could not solve the problems in contemporary political- economic discourse. As the rest of this book makes clear, this rethinking has by no means converted me to libertarianism any more than my ongoing dialogue with Buddhism has converted me to that religious tradition. But it has helped me to examine some long- held assumptions and commitments and perhaps to see more clearly what it is I really believe and hold dear. This book is the result of that rethinking process. I hope that it contributes to a similar rethinking for my friends on the Right and the Left.

Acknowledgments Work on this book has placed me in debt to a number of fine people. Burke Gerstenschlager, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, has backed the project vigorously since the time I first pitched it to him; he has shown admirable patience in shepherding me, a relative novice, through the publication process. It was Burke s suggestion to include a discussion of the federalist/antifederalist debate in the introduction, an addition that I believe substantially strengthens the argument. I also appreciate the support of Lani Oshima, Erin Ivy, and the rest of the staff at Palgrave Macmillan, as well as Sarah Rosenblum of Scribe, for their help in turning manuscript into book. It was Joerg Rieger who first brought me to Palgrave Macmillan and connected me with Burke and his team. Besides directing my PhD dissertation and serving as my editor for No Longer the Same, Joerg has been a continual source of inspiration for me over the years, particularly in his laser- like focus on justice. Although he may differ with some of the positions I take here, his landmark God and the Excluded paved the way for the present work by showing that it is crucial for the theologian not only to critique the blind spots of those with whom we disagree but also to bear witness to their visions. Joerg also offered helpful feedback on the preface and introduction to this book as well as other sage advice. An anonymous reader deserves my heartfelt thanks for carefully reading an earlier version of this book and for several constructive suggestions. Every writer should be blessed with at least one such reader. I am deeply grateful to Kenneth Cracknell, not only for supporting my work generally, but particularly for taking time out from his well- deserved retirement to give this book a close and careful reading and to offer insightful comments and warm words of support. Thanks are also due to Catherine Keller, whose work embodies the best features of relationalism, for several helpful suggestions. I wish to thank the two schools that have kept me gainfully employed as an adjunct instructor over the past three years and thus have enabled me to bring this project to fruition. I am grateful to the religious studies department of Southern Methodist University s Dedman College and especially former

xiv Acknowledgments department chair Mark Chancey and current chair Johan Elverskog. Brite Divinity School not only kept me employed but also gave me the chance to test- drive this book in a special course in theology and politics in fall 2012. Particular thanks are due to David J. Gouwens, Joretta Marshall, Nancy Ramsay, and Jeffrey Williams for these opportunities. I also wish to thank my students in the 2012 seminar for their comments on an intermediate draft of the book. Above all, without the encouragement, help, support, and patience of my dear spouse, Eleanor Forfang- Brockman, I could not have written this book. She has been an active participant in this project from the start, not only helping me work out the initial vision, but also reading and marking up various drafts along the way. Her critical eye and perceptive comments have helped me to sharpen my argument and clarify my presentation. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for the ideas presented here and for any imperfections in the way they are presented.

Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me... I am the vine, you are the branches. John 15:4, 5 NRSV