CAPITALISM, DEMOCRACY & EMERGING CHRISTIANITY As the world seems to be self-destructing with war, social upheaval, terrorism, rapid ecological damage, global warming, financial meltdowns, dire poverty, and increasing disparities of wealth, humankind is being forced to mend its ways or become an extinct species. There is also emerging in the world a higher consciousness that can be said to be the evolutionary destiny of humankind in providing for its own survival. It is about seeking a more just, sustainable, and compassionate world. It is "the great turning" that social scholars are speaking about, like David Korten, Paul Hawken, Eckhart Tolle, Wendell Berry, and Leonardo Boff. Many Christians also view this emerging higher consciousness as the incarnate spirit of the risen Christ now dwelling within all of humankind. To the author, this evolutionary shift in human consciousness is challenging and delegitimizing the forces of global corporate capitalism throughout the world. This higher consciousness is beginning to challenge these forces with the spiritual dynamics of democracy. The author warns us though that the continuous waging of war by the U.S. will probably never end without persistent and massive creative nonviolent civil disobedience. The author also speaks of the emerging Christianity movement as being part of this shift in global consciousness. Also within this challenge is the dysfunction of the human ego. Institutional consumer capitalism feeds on the human ego. This is what makes for a dysfunctional society. The power of the human ego can only be dealt with through a contemplative mind. Thus, emerging Christianity, with its more prophetic and contemplative faith, can serve as an important praxis to this shift in global consciousness. The author summarizes his essay with the thoughts that universal justice and democracy should be a major focus of the emerging Christianity movement. This is to engage all of humankind. The freedom to think great thoughts is what will give credibility to the emerging Christianity movement.
Capitalism, Democracy & Emerging Christianity
An Essay By A Catholic ActivistBy Stephen V. RileyAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2010 Stephen V. Riley
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4520-0567-6Chapter One
EMERGING CHRISTIANITY
The emerging Christianity movement, to my mind, is about a bold voice for universal justice. It is about the Christian obligation to seek a higher level of social awareness in order to reach an honest discernment of the spirits. It is about Christianity becoming a healing force in the world rather than a divisive force. It is about religious tolerance and encouraging dialogue and partnerships with other Christian denominations and other religions. To share one's sacred energies with people of other faiths takes humility and open-mindedness. The world desperately needs more of these attitudes.
My spiritual journey for peace and justice over the past ten years has led to deep social awareness and personal discernment. Great joy, hope, and personal fulfillment are found in sharing powerful energies with like-minded people of faith. Such sharing has always been a transformational experience for me.
This essay has been written as my own personal spiritual exercise to discern for myself where the emerging Christianity movement should be going. I am also compelled, however, to share some thoughts that go unarticulated in Christian conversations today. I believe that these thoughts should be articulated.
I believe the emerging Christianity movement is attracting like-minded people of faith who seek to invest their activist energies in a particular spiritual place, the place where they believe Christianity should be in the twenty-first century. Their quest is not about forming another denomination. There are enough divisions of faith. I believe many of the progressive faithful who choose to be part of the emerging Christianity movement are concerned with the increasing conservative forces within their own Christian denominations. Too many Christians are turning a blind eye to that wounded world where Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, showed humankind how to heal with love, compassion, and forgiveness.
A DIVIDED NATION AND A DIVIDED CHURCH
I believe the Catholic Church has become as divided and confused as the United States, and for many of the same reasons. Both view the world through the eyes of power, privilege, and wealth, and each has its own vision of empire. In turn, both the U.S. government and the Catholic Church are greatly divided by dominant conservative forces and struggling progressive forces. In both cases, the conservative forces are becoming less tolerant of dissenting viewpoints. These conservative forces are the great protectors of the unjust status quo. In contrast to this conservative stance, in coming to know the mind of Christ, one realizes that Christianity was meant to be a countercultural faith.
THE FUTURE CHURCH
John L. Allen, the astute Vatican observer and writer with the National Catholic Reporter, has recently authored a book, The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church. I have excerpted those thoughts that I believe are relevant to the development of the emerging Christianity movement.
Generally speaking, with strong influence from the global South, John Allen sees the Church becoming more conservative on moral questions such as abortion, homosexuality, and the family. However, in regard to economic, political, and military matters, the Church will be more liberal. Allen writes, "In non-Western nations, religious bodies are sometimes the only meaningful expressions of civil society-the only zones of life where protest can take shape, and where concern for the common good can be articulated."
John Allen speaks of the internal life of the Church as ad intra and the broader religious and social questions outside the Church as ad extra. To John Allen, the ad extra liberal camp is unlikely to make much headway in terms of setting ad intra policy. "On issue after issue, whether it's women priests or birth control, the tide is running decisively in the opposite position. He fears that
"liberal reform movements in the twenty-first century will find themselves in a `catacomb period' ... Given those realities, some progressive Catholics believe that their future lies in engaging social and political questions outside the church-shifting to ad extra rather than ad intra causes ... Ironically, the Catholic conservative identity impulse, which is by intent and design an ad intra phenomenon will likely have the effect of producing a boom period of ad extra Catholic activism."
John Allen points out that the aggressiveness of evangelical Catholicism and Pentecostalism will force the Catholic Church to a new imagination. This new imagination is that the Church will embrace more of the aspects of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity and yet become ever more conservative and protective of its own distinctive Catholic identity. As John Allen writes, "there will be no dissent on the Church's payroll ..." and "the Bishops will be the teachers-in-chief."
John Allen also brings up another important point. "If liberals are more likely to work in secular or ecumenical settings, to know the argot of modernity, and to know how to move the levers of social power outside the Catholic Church, they will arguably be in a better position to wield influence. Professional migration outside the Church may enhance the capacity of the Catholic left to build coalitions, and to argue persuasively with those who are not formed by the Catholic tradition. Ironically, evangelical Catholicism could end up giving a boost to the social capital of Catholic liberalism."
John L. Allen discusses, as well, how the Catholic Church's hierarchical mode of operation may lack the flexibility needed to keep up with the intense pace at which issues mutate in a globalized world. "To expect the hierarchy to be the primary "change agent" is both unfair and unrealistic. ... Radical change has to well up from grass roots activism. ...Ultimately, time and the tides stop for no one, and good ideas will endure whatever their initial reception by the powers that be." John Allen makes another powerful point when he states, "The real question, therefore, is not whether the bishops are up to the challenges of the 21st century. The question is whether the rest of us are." The us, to me, means all Christian denominations.
The future direction of the Catholic Church that John Allen writes about certainly provides more than a few thoughts that are fertile ground for an emerging Christianity movement. I stress, however, that I believe John Allen has overlooked the influence of a higher social consciousness that is rapidly developing in the world. It is a far more powerful force for radical social change than the "exclusive" forces of Catholicism can now play. I believe the Catholic Church feels threatened by this secular force, not humbled by its powerful spirituality. This is understandable, considering the ego of any institution accustomed to such power and control. For these reasons, I believe the emerging Christianity movement will find its own humble place in recognizing this emerging higher global consciousness as the work of the Holy Spirit and become an influential partner in this fast-developing shift in global consciousness.
BLESSED UNREST
This emerging global consciousness is best described in Paul Hawken's book Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World. Paul Hawken has given nearly one thousand talks about the environment to hundreds of thousands of people who are working on climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, and human rights. They come from the nonprofit and nongovernment world known as civil society. Paul Hawken estimates there could be as many as one to two million organizations in the world that are working toward ecological sustainability and social justice. The movement, though, doesn't fit the standard model, as it has no manifesto or doctrine, no overriding authority. It is almost mysterious, a sacred act emerging as a global humanitarian movement arising from the bottom up. It is engaged in protecting citizens, workers, and environments from the juggernaut of free market fundamentalism. Paul Hawken refers to this movement as the Blessed Unrest.
Paul Hawken looks at the entire movement from two perspectives: that of "immunity" and that of environment and social justice. "Immunity" uses the cellular metaphor of how an organism defends itself as a plausible way to describe the collective activity of the movement The terms environment and social justice encompass innovative organizations that are redolent of ideas and inventive techniques.
"Nature works in cycles and so does a healthy society. A self-correcting system thrives because of feedback. The movement is composed of small organizations because it is on the ground, with its people at the scene-a scale at which information can be generated and acted upon. At this level, organizations quickly adapt. Mistakes are hidden treasures because we learn from our failures. The opposite of learning is a runaway system where mistakes are relegated to file cabinets and ignored. When government, corporation, financial institution, or religious organization insulates itself, its initiatives, however well intended, create uncontrolled outcomes and second order effects that generate new problems. The current state of the world reflects a problem solving methodology never seen in nature: remedies from above imposed on the excluded. The movement offers a solution creating methodology from below that is inclusive, a process that mimics biological adaptation and evolution. Every physical activity of the human body sustains is part of a cyclical, biological system with a self-correcting bias. The same should be true of every social activity with a system called democracy."
THE FIRST EMERGING CHRISTIANITY CONFERENCE
The first conference then called "emerging church" was held in March 2009 at the Center of Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (www.cacradicalgrace.org). There were about a thousand people in attendance, and about half were Catholic; the other half were from about twenty-five denominations. The conference presenters were well-known Christian scholars. Many of their thoughts had been previously presented in the CAC Radical Grace publication (October-December 2008, vol. 21, no. 4).
About a hundred and fifty people attended the immediate postconference discussion, and I sensed that about half were active clergy from many denominations. This meeting was about a cornucopia of thoughts and ideas stimulating the convergence of like-minded people of faith. The conference concluded with a very appropriate Thomas Merton prayer.
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
The next emerging Christianity conference is scheduled for April 9-11, 2010, at the Center of Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It will be most interesting; everyone will be anxious to get clearer sense of its direction. It is my hope that the emerging Christianity movement will become a Christian vanguard for a higher social awareness and a progressive force for radical social change. Certainly, though, there will be many other suggestions.
In the first conference, there was much discussion about the faithful being more prophetic and contemplative. Being prophetic is about the role Christians need to play in healing a broken world. It is to do the very work of the Hebrew prophets and a willingness to see through new eyes and not content to be silent. As Sister Joan Chittister often says, we're in this mess because we no longer have any Isaiahs, Esichias, Samuels, or Malachis to set us straight. So I see prophecy as a vital component of emerging Christianity. In turn, Christ was all about healing and driving out demons. We must now recognize the demons within our own humanity, the human ego, and the demons within the American capitalistic culture.
By being contemplative, we try to recognize our own human shortcomings. In contemplation, we deal with our inner violence, which is the work of the human ego. At times the personal ego can be our worst enemy, expressing itself in vanity, pride, arrogance, envy, exaggerated individualism, the lust for power and wealth, rage, violence, war, scapegoating others, the need to be right, and the me against you and us against them mentalities. The dysfunctional nature of the personal ego is addressed by the foundational teachings of most of the major religions of the world. Christ had the perfect nonegotistic mind. Christ also had a hard time getting this point across to the minds of his disciples.
In a September 4, 2009, article in the National Catholic Reporter, Father Richard Rohr, founder of the Center of Action and Contemplation, stated that another term for contemplation is non-dualistic thinking. "That's what makes people able to be merciful and forgiving. You can't love your enemies with a low level dualistic mind. It's impossible. You don't have the software to know how to do it. So we tell people to love your enemies. A normal Catholic can't do that with the software that he or she has been given. Catholics were never taught they need a different consciousness to understand the Gospel." I so often reflect on Richard Rohr's wise words from past conferences-"Christianity has become a belonging system, us against them, rather than a system for personal transformation." Emerging Christianity should be increasingly conscious of this contradiction.
Meditation and contemplation are the best ways to overcome the dominance of the personal ego, at least partially, at times. Meditation becomes a quest for wisdom by putting oneself in the Presence, in deep prayer, setting aside one's personal interest and seeking wisdom though spiritual discernment. With much practice in meditation and contemplation, spiritual discernment can become a gift of the Holy Spirit. To me, spiritual discernment is the essential path to the maturity of humankind. This path teaches us that everything is not black or white. It cautions us that one cannot be tied down by all-knowing absolutes.
DEMOCRACY, SPIRITUALITY, AND NONVIOLENT CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
The civic challenge of democracy is a somewhat similar spiritual exercise. The vast majority of the U.S. Congress and federal government agency leaders are led by huge egos and questionable obligations to the powerful. In the U.S. Congress, those who lead with wisdom and honest personal discernment can be counted on one hand. The majority of the U.S. Congress is simply not free to think great thoughts for the common good. This is why the spiritual dynamics of participatory democracy are so important for a free society. A healthy democracy is meant to bring about a public consensus and discernment that questions the controlling forces of institutional power.
But public awareness and discernment has been seriously hindered by a corporate TV and news media that relies exclusively on advertising. This tips the scales to favor corporate interests and corporate spin. The lack of public awareness is also reinforced by a corporate media that controls the national conversation and distracts American society with unrelenting entertainment. Neal Postman speaks of this so well in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
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Excerpted from Capitalism, Democracy & Emerging Christianityby Stephen V. Riley Copyright © 2010 by Stephen V. Riley. Excerpted by permission.
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