Can Religion Change Society?
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This blog, Skeptical Faith, is not about
politics. I know some of the issues I discuss seem to favor one party over the
other, but it’s not because of loyalty to a political party. It’s because I
believe some issues, which happen to sometimes align with a political party,
are an important part of the search for God.
They’re mostly social justice issues about
which religion, particularly Catholicism - the religion I confess - cares
deeply because the issues reflect gospel values expressed in such exhortations
as the Beatitudes and parables such as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.
Nonetheless, I follow politics and have
been particularly struck during the past decade by the extent to which
political campaigns show the stark failings of politics in particular and
American society in general. It was particularly evident in the last two
presidential campaigns, in 2016 and 2020.
Excluded
The campaigns of Donald Trump, the 2016
winner, and presidential contender Bernie Sanders showed the extent to which a
huge segment of the population feels left out, excluded from full participation
in the American dream. This was equally evident in the 2020 campaign.
In many cases, the politics of the left-out
reflects bitterness, resentment and frustration. In my opinion, it also reflects
the value society places on “success,” money, status and possessions and its
rejection of people who don’t measure up.
I believe the government can, and should,
do what it can to alleviate their feelings of exclusion through social and
justice measures, but that won’t solve the deeper problem that is shared by
Democrats, Republicans and Independents: the failure to recognize the dignity
of all, which is an ethical, not a political problem.
So what has this got to do with the search
for God? Everything, because as I’ve mentioned before in these blogs, the
search for God cannot be a “Jesus-and-me” thing. Genuine religion, as the
letter of James in the New Testament says, is “to visit orphans and widows in
their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”
In other words, religion is communal. It
fosters the common good. It can’t exist without a sense of solidarity,
particularly with people who are on the margins of society: the unemployed, the
poor, the immigrant, the elderly, the person of color. This is a constant theme
of Pope Francis and of many religious leaders.Google Image
A recent article in the magazine Commonweal by David Albertson,
associate professor of religion
at the University of Southern California, and Jason Blakely, associate professor of political science at
Pepperdine University, points this out.
The pandemic placed a mirror in society’s face, they write, revealing “just how many pathologies were afflicting us: an economy in which “essential” workers are often the least well paid; steep racial hierarchies defended by militarized police forces; an electoral politics engulfed in spectacle and money; and social solidarity so tattered that fellow Americans could view one another as members of enemy camps.” What is needed, they point out, is an ethical transformation.
“Oh, sure,” you might say, “but that’s simply an unrealistic, Utopian idea. People are what they are. You can’t change them.”
Belief in Human Change
Well, that’s certainly true if you ignore the ethical problem and the human capacity for change. Could
it be that that religion, that much-abused and abandoned step-sister of
society, points the way to inclusion and a just economic system? Who or what else
believes that humans can change and is talking about the need for ethical reform?
It’s religion that, day-in, day-out, is an agent of change, pointing
out the need for an interior conversion, for the need for human beings to be
transformed spiritually, to see things differently, to broaden our horizons, to
recognize the benefits of a relationship with the Author of life and with each
other. Neither politics nor most other institutions are capable of doing what’s
needed.
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