Building community through reconciliation is a central motif of the incarnational and Trinitarian theology to which Cultural Encounters is dedicated. It is also a theme that resonates with a thoughtful pursuit of civic life. Consequently, this current issue of Cultural Encounters explores the theme of “Building Beloved Community: Calling for an End to the Culture Wars.” Essays in this issue were presented in October 2005 at a conference by the same title under the sponsorship of The Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins of Multnomah Biblical Seminary in Portland, Oregon. The editorial team has sought to preserve the allusions and styles of presentation at those proceedings wherever possible. Not even the names have been changed to protect the “innocent”!
While the conference allusions and styles may be evident, what may not be so evident is the charged atmosphere surrounding the conference in Portland and Multnomah County in Oregon. Multnomah County made the national news in early 2004, following the county’s decision to award marriage licenses to gay and lesbian partners. Tensions escalated during and after the November 2004 elections. My friend, Kyogen Carlson, a Zen Buddhist priest, contacted me that winter to see how we could partner together—“with hands palm-to-palm,” to use his words—to build bridges of compassion and mutual respect between our liberal and conservative communities. The “Building Beloved Community” conference was one of several bridge-building actions—small steps in efforts toward more reconciled civic life, while still informed by differing convictional rationales.
The culture wars did not begin in 2004. In many respects, the warfare can be traced back to the Scopes Monkey Trial over creationism and evolution in 1925. In the opening essay, Brad Harper helps us understand this history so that we will not repeat it. American historian George Marsden has claimed that one can hardly overestimate the significance of the Scopes Monkey Trial for understanding the emerging Fundamentalist psyche. Harper helps us see how the trial continues to shape the Fundamentalist and Evangelical sub-cultures, impacting their engagement of the culture at large to this day.
Following the Scopes Trial, the Fundamentalist movement became relegated to the cultural fringe in popular perceptions, fueled by the vitriolic rhetoric of writers like H. L. Mencken. In reaction, isolationist practices and attitudes of the Fundamentalist Right sowed seeds that have grown into recent attempts to “take back” America from the Left. Both Left and Right were wrong, Harper argues, and both sides must work together to right the wrongs. Each side must complicate its tactics and its outlook. The secular (and in some cases religious) Left, for example, must cease calling for the privatization of religion, and the Right must move beyond balloting their beliefs. Both sides must reject settling for “stereotypes and straw man arguments” and begin recognizing the complexity of other people and their positions. To quit repeating the harmful patterns established during the Scopes Trial, both Right and Left need to imagine being in the others’ shoes and stop trying to force “them” to come over to “our” side.
Christopher Zinn, a self-professed secular humanist, certainly made the effort to cross over to the other side by stepping onto Multnomah Biblical Seminary grounds in the conference’s shared quest for common ground. Zinn’s essay urges that we not shy away from conflict. He appeals to Martin Luther King Jr., who employed Josiah Royce’s phrase “Beloved Community” in his own culture war with his opponents in search of America’s greatest ideals that would ultimately bind all of them together. “King was prepared to fight whatever battles were called for in order to achieve ‘beloved community.’” Following King as well as Abraham Lincoln, Zinn pursues beloved community, not through avoiding conflict, but through a better, more discerning practice of conflict. Conflict is not the problem. The problem stems from styles of conflict which lack charity, and from tactics of conflict which neglect “the tools of liberal study,” among other things. For Zinn, the toolbox of liberal study includes “critical thinking, historical understanding,” and “an appreciation for the variety of ideas.”
In their call for an end to the community-crippling practices of the culture wars, conference organizers shared the sense that we all need deeper awareness of what we are really fighting about. Zinn quotes Mick Jagger responding to the bloodshed at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, “Who’s fighting and what for?” Zinn urges us to ask the same question today. Unlike many, Martin Luther King Jr. fought not simply for rights for his people, but also for reconciliation between warring peoples. Better conflict means moving beyond battling for special interests to fighting for grander, nobler human ideals—including reconciliation.
Such moves will certainly entail maneuvering wisely in traffic, avoiding bumper-sticker rhetoric, and accounting for the whole of Jesus’ life and teaching. Communication professor Nathan Baxter and Unitarian Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell help us on our way. While King played the role of prophetic warrior, he always called people to look upon the Promised Land from mountain heights, not valleys of despair. In his constant efforts to love his enemies, King inspired his hearers by the vision of promise that tempered the potential harm of what Baxter terms “repeated recourse to the language of war.” King’s communication practices made it possible for people to envision the beloved community. Baxter explores how better listening skills (quicker ears and slower tongues) and reflex actions can help us “become less inclined to bump into each other’s roadwarrior slogans, and more likely to bump into each other in growing friendship, more accepting and accepted as the complex people we are, flawed but far more alike than our bumper stickers make it seem.”
Sewell points to the complex nature of Jesus, who “turns everything upside down—all our normal expectations,” and who is so unlike us in so many ways. Jesus challenges structures and laws that run counter to the law of love, calling us to give ourselves away on behalf of the poor and hungry, the sick and imprisoned. Sewell contends that we are all too comfortable with the prosperity gospel and children living in poverty in this nation. We fund soup kitchens, but rarely ask uncomfortable questions about structures that sustain poverty. As a “Christian” nation, we are all too comfortable with war. While religious in many ways, we fail too often to recognize the uncomfortable truth that Jesus often associated with the unreligious: with prostitutes and the tax-collector traitors of the nation. We are all too comfortable with hate crimes committed against gays and lesbians, and I would add, with the uncomfortable fact that Jesus died not simply for his friends but also for his enemies.
Christian radio show host Georgene Rice helps us see that Christians are called to be counter-cultural, but not called to be hostile toward opponents. Rice understands how hostile things can get in live dialogue. Yet she also understands the call to respect opponents. Such respect entails “humility, a willingness to admit mistakes, and the intent to resolve conflicts quickly. We need to acknowledge our tendencies to want to be right all the time, to stick with the familiar, and to be defensive.” Rice’s own story of vulnerability and weakness in attempting to treat her political opponents with respect, and of the response it generated from the other side of the debate is encouraging. Such stories offer paradigms for navigating the culture wars, and more importantly, they signal hope for more meaningful engagement in the midst of our various conflicts.
One of Rice’s, and conservative Evangelicalism’s, opponents in local and national culture wars has been Portland’s leading alternative weekly newspaper, the Willamette Week. Zach Dundas, who until recently worked as a writer for the Willamette Week, alludes to these tensions in his essay about venturing out of his comfort zone. Wedding wit to wisdom, Dundas tells the story behind the story that he wrote about Portland’s Evangelicals following President Bush’s reelection and the passage of the state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Dundas winsomely reveals how researching the story helped him recognize that his own preconceptions of the movement lacked complexity. The media’s coverage of religion, remarks Dundas, “is often riddled with generalizations and lacking in nuance.” From his brief sojourn into Evangelicalism, Dundas draws lessons as a citizen and human being from which we can also benefit: “All Americans now exist in a crazily diverse society full of segmented pods of special interest, with a perpetual invitation to cocoon ourselves with others who share our values, interests, and tastes. That is okay—as long as we remember there are other worlds out there, just as valid and rich as our own. We should all, every one of us, make periodic efforts to learn a little bit about people who are not like us.”
The remaining essays reflect on such periodic efforts to learn a little bit about those who neither share nor “validate” our views. As Donald Miller points out, Jesus was comfortable hanging out with people who did not validate his views. Miller explores attitudes that hinder and those that help bridge the cultural divides that became entrenched after the Scopes Monkey Trial. “Building the bridge back,” as Miller puts it, is a kind of action Evangelicals are attempting, but are not yet fully comfortable doing.
Some hopeful attempts at building bridges back to the broader culture are underway right here in Portland, some of which have been initiated with our Buddhist friends at Dharma Rain Zen Center. Kyogen Carlson, mentioned earlier, and many of his fellow Buddhists at the temple have been intentional about building relationships with those of us in Evangelical Christianity. Carlson’s essay, the coauthored piece by Domyo Sater and Matthew Farlow, and my own article speak to these attempts. Sater writes that in Buddhism, “there is no other” in the ultimate sense. Thus, she can say of her engagement with conservative Christians, “I met the ‘other,’ and they were me.” While orthodox Christian theology conceives of otherness in the ultimate sense, it could still in certain respects affirm Sater’s point. For orthodox Christianity avows a shared solidarity among all humans—all are created in the image of God, and all participate in primal sin and its impact. Carlson highlights solidarity metaphorically in terms of “the ecology of society.” The “toxic waste” of our culture-war hostilities does not go anywhere. Past culture-war toxins “remain with consequences in the future.” While the Right has had the upper hand in the recent past, Carlson cautions that the pendulum-swing back toward the Left may be perceived as an opportunity for “payback.” True to his Buddhist tradition, he warns, “With the illusion of repaying others, karma goes on unendingly.” For Carlson, those in positions of power on both sides of the chasm may have too much invested to lay down their arms. “The best chance to reduce the extremes in this oscillation may be for moderates on both sides to speak out for reconciliation as the pendulum moves toward the center” on its way back toward the Left. “I hope we make the best of this opportunity.”
Two hope-inspiring Christian leaders with little time for payback are the late Dr. King and Dr. John M. Perkins. In my essay, Perkins especially provides a model of compassionately caring for the “other,” a theme Farlow connects with St. Francis of Assisi. Compassionate care involves seeking more to understand than to be understood, seeking more to love than to be loved. For Farlow and for me, the triune God is an overflowing communion of divine persons who makes relational space for otherness in the divine being and in God’s engagement of otherness in the world. This same God pours out the divine love into the world through Christ’s incarnate work and into human hearts through the Spirit’s work. In turn, Christ’s followers—such as King or Perkins or St. Francis—pour out their own lives as witnesses to Christ as they seek to build beloved community inside and outside the church’s walls. Such followers of Christ build bridges back in cruciform fashion by laying down their lives over the chasm for their enemies inside and outside the church to cross for the greater good of all.
—Paul Louis Metzger, Editor