AMERICA FIRST AND ST AUGUSTINE

As I fly home from Washington, D.C. where Bishops United Against Gun Violence has been advocating for expanding the requirement of background checks for gun purchases, I am studying St. Augustine’s City of God. 

This is happening in a time of American exceptionalism, summed up in the President’s favorite slogan America First. I recently saw a documentary film of an American Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in the 1930’s -- their slogan passionately chanted, America First. American exceptionalism, the aggressive assertion of our superiority, the demand for special status in the world is precisely the idolatry that the Roman Empire practiced and Augustine condemned. At the same time, he championed virtuous civic engagement in a necessary but necessarily flawed political order. 

This week as I walked the halls of Congress, waited in Congressional offices, met with office holders and their staffs in conference rooms, it was clear to me that power is the name of the game. Our rulers desperately need to rule, perhaps as a way to get other things they want, or perhaps to claim a sense that they matter in a mass society where we are all at risk of feeling insignificant. They seek public office where they can make the laws and policies that regulate our lives.

Once in office, they want to chair committees, the more important the committee the better. Representatives want to be Senators. Senators want to be President. Our Bishop group met two such Senators in a single day.

Having acquired some modicum of power, they aspire to more, and they live in fear of losing what power they have. The rational merits of a bill take second place to the political risk/ opportunity of supporting or opposing it. This is not entirely bad. It insures that citizens have voice, but it is not entirely good as it invites special interests and opinion shapers to distort governance. 

In his book Sex, Money, and Power, Phillip Turner argued that those three arenas are where our ethical conundrums arise and our characters are formed and deformed. He suggested that the three are somewhat intertwined. Is it therefore any wonder that people overtly and unabashedly driven by the lure of power would tend to step out of the line when it comes to sex and money? 

Are politicians bad people? Is political activity bad? If so, were we Bishops not bad as we consorted with Caesar and attempted to exert what power we could within the system, albeit to save lives and avert tragedy?

St. Augustine would say yes and no. A political order is a good thing because it insures the necessities of human life – clean water, sanitation systems, public safety, fire suppression, to name a few. It is bad, in fact not essentially different from a criminal gang, in that it is inherently awash in domination and cupidity. One might call any political order a necessary evil. But the emphasis is on necessary. 

Augustine insisted that Christians have a duty to support the political order and to participate in it, insofar as possible infusing the state with Christian virtues, to call the state to acts of mercy, justice, and even love – but never forgetting the state is the state and we should not expect too much, should not expect the state to be a shrine of virtue. 

The state with its grand architecture, its statues of secular saints, its patriotic rituals, its patriotic hymns, its hagiographies of the founding fathers (gender specificity intended), its litany of martyrs would claim a virtue it cannot in fact live up to precisely because it is a political order. 

At the same time nationalist passions seized Germany, Italy, and Japan, John Dewey and other Americans were doing all in their power to supplant the diverse (and, so they believed, divisive) religions of America with one unifying state religion, Americanism.[i]That 1930s American Nazi rally chanting America First was not as out of line with mainstream American political sentiment as we might want to believe. As we prepared to engage the enemy in World War II, we were sending Japanese Americans to concentration camps and we had previously sent Jewish refugees to their deaths in Germany. We were stoking passion not so much for democracy and human rights as for our nation, our collective power, viz a’ viz that of rival claimants to dominance. 

Like us, Rome thought rather highly of itself and equated its power with the best interests of the world, including those subjugated. Still, Augustine urged Christians to support Rome while not buying Rome’s propaganda about being the way, the truth, and the life for mortal happiness and peace (the Pax Romana they called it).

Why? Because as Aristotle said human beings are political animals. The truly human life is a community project. We need each other and the political order is how we make that possible. Our task, as morally muddled sinners striving to become saints, is to engage in civic life with as much virtue as God gives us the grace to practice. 

Augustine’s maxims  for Christian civic engagement – at least the ones that seem most important to me -- might be summarized as:

1.    Do engage in politics partly because it is your duty as a recipient of the benefits of civilization and partly so that you can infuse some Christian virtue and perspective into that realm.

2.    Don’t be naïve. Don’t expect too much of the state. You can help to make it a better state, but it will still be a state and a state is inherently a problematic system. Don’t make an idol out of a political order. Don’t worship politicians, the government, a political system, or any such creations of human imagination. They don’t deserve it. God alone deserves it.

3.    Support the government in its legitimate functions of dispensing secular justice, providing education, public health, and the necessities of civilized community life.

4.    Do not support the state when it attempts to assert dominion over others, maximizing its own power, and seeking a glory at the expense of other states. 

5.    When the state transgresses Christian morality, resist it. There is a time for civil disobedience. 

Certainly, there are other persuasive voices articulating different views of how Christians should engage the state – or not. There are those in the Anabaptist or Separatist tradition who would have Christians keep their hands clean of such tawdry business. Bishop John Henry Hobart said a real Christian should not even vote. Then there are those of a more theocratic leaning who believe Christians should exercise power as aggressively as possible in order to establish God’s reign through political power. And there are countless shades of gray and variations on any theme we might imagine. 

But Blessed Augustine in The City of God gave us the classic stance of the Church as to how we live in a flawed but necessary political order. Engage the political process, but do so humbly – not as a zealot too sure of your own wisdom and righteousness – and critically – not as a worshiper of the state but rather aware that it is a mixed field of wheat and weeds. 

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[i]It was then and it remains fashionable today to attribute the human propensity for violence to differences over religion and so to believe that the abolition of religion or at least its subjugation to secular authority will usher in the reign of peace. (Imagine all the people living for today, hey, hey.) Karen Armstrong’s history of so called religious violence, Fields of Blood, demonstrates that the impetus to violence has always been money and power, with religions being pawns in the game of the secular rapacious. The rise of secular states in the 19^th Century ushered in World War I, World War II, the secular genocide of the Khmer Rouge, the Cold War threat of mutual annihilation, etc.