A Spiritual Awakening : Part 4

Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God with Politics and Losing Their Way
by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend

(Page 4 of 7)

Yet there are also forces working against achieving our full potential. Are religious leaders sufficiently emphasizing the obligation engendered in faith to work for justice? Are they insisting that our nation could do a better job caring for the hungry and homeless - and showing the way to do so? Of course there are traditions that claim we are saved through faith alone; but even in those traditions, faith has translated into good works here on earth that, in the doing, help us understand why we are on earth, how we can live a good life, how we can make something meaningful of our days, and what is the best way to find happiness. In so doing, faith offers us the ability to resist temptation, to go beyond selfishness and empty materialism, and to find something that grips our souls. As in the Prophet Micah's words, our belief helps us "To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God."

But these are fearful times. Few church leaders today connect religious teachings with a critique of the moral consequences of corporate greed, environmental degradation, failing schools, or lack of health care. Instead they preach - and Americans accept - a different and more privatized religion.

The term "privatized" might seem odd in this context, but it is a term for our times. I mean this in several ways. I mean that faith has become something you do personally, with eyes not toward earth but toward heaven, seeking a one-on-one experience with the divine. How many times have we talked about our "personal relationship with God"? Yes, everyone of faith strives for a connection to the divine. But too often we forget that this personal relationship can occur only through our connection to each person we meet. For it is they who carry the divinity within them.

Two interviews show just how far down this path the country has gone. In 1968, the British journalist David Frost interviewed my father and asked him, "What do you think we are on earth for?" My father answered,

I think you have to break it down to people who have some advantages, and those who are just trying to survive and have their family survive. If you have enough to eat, for instance, I think basically it's to make a contribution to those who are less well off. "I complained because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet." You can always find someone that has a more difficult time than you do, has suffered more, and has faced some more difficult time one way or the other. If you've made some contribution to someone else, to improve their life, and make their life a bit more livable, a little bit more happy, I think that's what you should be doing.

My father was speaking from his perspective - a Catholic one to be sure, but one that would be easily understandable to those who practiced the Social Gospel.

That same year, when Frost asked then California governor Ronald Reagan the very same question, he answered,

Well, of course, the biologist I suppose would say that like all breeds of animals, the basic instinct is to reproduce our kind, but I believe it's inherent in the concept that created our country - and in the Judeo-Christian religion - that man is for individual fulfillment; for our religion is based on the idea not of any mass movement but of individual salvation. Each man must find his own salvation; I would think that our national purpose in this country - and we have lost sight of it too much in the last three decades - is to be free - to the limit possible with law and order, every man to be what God intended him to be.

Ronald Reagan's words speak to many of us who understand the great value of a personal relationship with God. Feeling deeply that God loves you can help give you a sense that your life has purpose. That feeling can also give meaning to the toughest, darkest moments as God, all powerful and caring, holds you in His hands. It can give you a sense of inner peace, steadfastness, and confidence. But there are darker repercussions to Reagan's emphasis on the idea - central to conservative thought - that individual freedom is the root purpose of man (and, as it happens, of the American experiment as well). Out of this notion has grown an entire multimillion-dollar industry that treats God as little more than a self-help guru who helps you be all you can be. It smacks of Jesus' condemnation of the Pharisees, "For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanliness."

This instantly gratifying salvation can be mighty convenient. You can use your personal relation to give up drink, lose weight, and make money. It is a stunning and depressing reversal of the lesson I learned about our duty to God and country: As Charlie Peters, editor emeritus of The Washington Monthly, quipped, "Ask not what you can do for God, but what can God do for you?"

A darker side of this focus on private godliness is the right's total neglect of communal responsibility. Time after time, conservative policies, promoted in Washington with the language of "opportunity" and individual freedoms, have translated into disaster for the poor, the immigrant, and other disempowered groups, abandoned by the very government that should be protecting them. "Compassionate conservatism," it turned out, was just another way to put the wolf in sheep's clothing. Thirty-six million people are living in households where they do not know where their next meals are coming from. Poverty is on the rise.

But to blame politicians is too easy. Where have the churches been? What have they been teaching? If 81 percent of Americans call themselves Christian, what kind of Christianity blinds us to the needs of the homeless, the hungry, the stranger - the least among us?

Copyright © 2007 by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend

About the Author

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the eldest child of Robert F. Kennedy, worked in the U.S. Department of Justice before serving two terms as Maryland's lieutenant governor. She has taught at Georgetown University and the University of Pennsylvania, speaks regularly on political and religious issues, and is engaged in philanthropic work. She and her husband have raised four daughters and live in Baltimore.