Economies of Salvation

Anthony Mansueto

Academic Dean, Collin College

and

President, Seeking Wisdom

“It’s the economy, stupid!” Or is it?

This slogan from the Clinton campaign of 1992 no doubt seems more relevant than ever after the financial meltdown of the past week. And there is, of course, a sense in which the dynamics of the global economy are fundamental to the current cycle, a sense which we will specify later in this article.

But if the dynamics of the global economy form the basis for the political dynamics of this (as of most previous) election cycles, the contest itself is being fought out at quite a different level, one which can only be called theological. I am not referring here to the role of social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, which remain important to many voters, or the comments of Barack Obama’s long time pastor regarding the place of the United States in the world, which became so controversial earlier this year. These are all political issues on which various which various religious communities have taken positions, not theological questions proper.

I am speaking, rather of the debate about soteriology which has been taking place just below the surface through at least the last three election cycles, and which gained renewed impetus with the nomination of Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate for Vice President. For those of our readers who are not familiar with this term, soteriology is the part of theology which deals with the question of how one is saved. As such, it was the principal locus of debate between the Reformers and the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, with the Reformers arguing that justification is by faith alone and Catholics claiming that faith merely opens us up to the emergence of new “supernatural” capacities which we must cultivate if we are to become capable of God and thus of authentic beatitude. Protestantism is unusual in regarding salvation as a free gift. Among the world’s spiritual traditions only a few forms of Mahayana Buddhism (certain Pure Land schools) and of Hindu bhakti devotionalism argue anything even comparable. The rest of us, while gratefully acknowledging the assistance of God and/or of those who have gone before us on the Way (the tzadikim and bodhisattvas), regard spiritual excellence as a condition of beatitude and beatitude, therefore, as something we achieve at least in some measure through our own effort.

What does this have to do with the election? Both Presidential candidates are, after all, Protestants (only Joe Biden is Catholic) and as much as the candidates have been “talking religion,” they certainly haven’t been debating soteriology.

Or have they? What else is behind the Republican assault on Barack Obama’s supposed “elitism”? And why would the Republicans have chosen a Vice Presidential candidate who is not merely a Fundamentalist, but someone whose “merits” are very much open to question and who presents a public face not of conquering virtue but of brokenness and struggle, especially when there were options available (e.g. Mike Huckabee) whose theological and political credentials were, from the standpoint of the evangelical Christians the Republicans sought to appease, apparently impeccable? And why did John McCain’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention emphasize not his heroism as a prisoner of war, but rather the fact that the North Vietnamese broke him? Indeed, McCain actually called attention to the fact that prior to his capture by the North Vietnamese, he had been living, at best, a less than serious life and was “saved” by his country.

In the political argot of the current electoral cycle, elitism is a substitute for “works righteousness” and brokenness for evangelical piety.

The principal contradiction driving politics in the United States has never been class, but rather ethnoreligious identity. The Republicans, and the Whigs and Federalists before them were historically the party of the Puritan elites and their allies; the Democrats the party of everyone else. In recent years this configuration has shifted somewhat, as global contradictions have reconfigured identities and shifted the boundaries between the two Americas. In the present period the sharpest contradiction in the United States has been between cosmopolitan urban centers which are linked to the global market and the nativist hinterlands which are being “left behind.” Living in a major cosmopolitan metropole means either that one has succeeded in the global market --or in some other civilization-building arena-- or that one could if only one had better access to the resources necessary to do so. This, in turn, creates the basis in experience for a spirituality of meaning and self-cultivation. By this we mean a spirituality confident in humanity’s ability to find meaning and in humanity’s capacity for excellence, secular and spiritual, and thus open to diverse forms of religious expression as the natural result of a search for meaning and excellence by many different peoples under many different conditions. This is true even of Protestants in the cosmopolitan metropoles, who tend to be liberal (stressing their usefulness to society as a mark of their election by God) or liberationist (seeing God’s grace primarily in the struggle for a justice which makes human flourishing possible). Living in the hinterlands, on the other hand, (at least in the United States) increasingly means that no matter what one’s resources, one is outside the network of capital flows and information exchanges which drive the global economy, and at a distance from humanity’s principal civilizational centers, and thus in perpetual danger of being left behind, whether by cosmopolitan elites or by someone in Bangalore or Shanghai who can do what you do better and cheaper and faster. (Things in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are different, where there are still traditional civilizational centers with their own elites distinct from those which drive global capitalist modernity and where living in the hinterland means you might just be that “someone” who can do things better, cheaper, and faster.) This creates a basis in experience for an evangelical spirituality which stresses human brokenness and emphasizes the role of faith and grace in salvation. Location in a major cosmopolitan metropole was the best predictor of a Democratic voting pattern and location in a rural hinterland of a Republican voting pattern in both of the last two general elections, with the only exceptions being a handful of rural areas which are themselves traditional civilizational centers in their own right: Hispano New Mexico and Colorado, Indian Country, the Rio Grande Valley and South Texas, the Mississippi Delta, and the Upper Midwest, with its dense network of monasteries and church related liberal arts colleges. Blue states are simply those dominated by cosmopolitan metropoles; red states those dominated by hinterlands.

Now the Republican Party does not really represent or respond to the interests of all of those who are being “left behind” by the global market, but only a small handful of backward sectors of Capital threatened in one way or another by the information economy: the extractive sector, aerospace and defense, medicine and related insurance interests, and domestic low technology, low wage manufacturing. It builds its base by presenting the Democrats, who actually offer more to those being left behind, as spiritually foreign and even dangerous.

When Republicans charge Barack Obama and other Democrats with being “elitist,” what they are really saying is that he is excellent, intellectually, morally, and spiritually. Those are excellent are read in the current political context as representing a “works righteous” spirituality. That is why they are held to impossibly high standards: in evangelical theology a single sin, because it is an affront to the sovereignty of God, is sufficient to warrant condemnation and thus undermine the candidate’s claim to spiritual legitimacy. But in the case of Barack Obama is especially galling to the Republicans. After graduating from Columbia, he devoted his life to the dangerous cause of empowering the poor, working as a community organizer (a path which, I can tell you from personal experience, is rarely a promising career move) and managed to become a prominent attorney and an Illinois and US Senator anyway.

John McCain had historically also tried to present an image of excellence: a maverick war hero who was, first and foremost, his own man. But the Republican base will not respond to a candidate with this profile and he would have difficulty defeating a truly outstanding candidate like Barack Obama on this terrain. Thus his choice of Sarah Palin for Vice President, someone whose life story must seem surprisingly familiar to struggling families in the hinterlands. There is no Ivy League pedigree here, but rather a string of community colleges and state schools. Her career path was marked by neither selfless devotion nor extraordinary achievement, but rather by a very ordinary effort to survive and support her family –and by odd strokes of luck, which are read in the evangelical vernacular as “blessings” from God in a way that gifts of talent or the grace to use it well never are. And her spirituality explicitly disavows any claim to merit in the theological sense. Thus McCain’s re-invention of himself as one broken and saved. (We should note, however, that he could not bring himself to say that he was saved by Jesus, but only by his country).

How should the Democrats respond to this strategy? Partly it is just a question of organization, at which Barack Obama excels. Organize and mobilize the metropoles, as well as the handful of rural areas which have voted Democratic because they represent traditional civilizational centers of their own, as noted above. Partly it is a question of offering those left behind real worldly hope which can restore their confidence in their own potential for excellence, secular and spiritual. What sets Obama apart from Gore and Kerry, who also represented a spirituality of meaning and self-cultivation, is his commitment and his ability to do this, precisely because his theology is liberationist rather than merely liberal and because, as an organizer, he knows how to find excellence in hidden places. This means something different, to be sure, on the level of global economy policy than it did on the streets of Chicago’s South Side two decades ago. He will have to generate economic policy proposals which speak to those for whom education is not the most obvious road forward, but who are inclined instead to building small businesses which capture local comparative advantages. And (unlike Bill Clinton) he will have to be frank in confronting the fact that a couple of years at a community college are not going to do the same thing for a displaced textile, steel, or auto worker that eight or ten at Chicago or MIT do for those with the preparation for and access to our country’s best universities. Nothing angers the “left behind” like telling them they could catch up if only they studied a little harder. They know better than that and we should too.

So this election is about the economy. But all economies are ultimately economies of salvation. Work is not just or even primarily about survival or consumption, but rather about our contribution to the universe and whether it has some larger spiritual meaning on which we can rely to help us grow towards God. Can we be excellent? Does it matter, especially in some ultimate sense? Or is salvation simply a free gift from God, a “blessing” like the odd strokes of luck which took Sarah Palin from a community college to the Governorship of Alaska and the Republican Vice-Presidential nomination, rather than a beatitude for which we struggle and prepare? This election is about the economy in this broader sense, the material economy which also always an economy of salvation, our position with respect to which is woven into the very fabric of our identity. It is a struggle over where America stands with respect to that economy, and must be fought as such. While the Democratic Party focuses primarily on organization and policy, it is our task both to make this debate conscious and explicit and to make the case for a spirituality of meaning and self-cultivation, a spirituality which alone will make possible the full flourishing of human potential.