Not so with many religious conservatives. The past is much like the present, they must think, with the exception that people in olden times had different hairdos, talked funny, and wore strange clothes. Besides minor changes in wardrobe, hair, and speech, they imagine, the circle is unbroken. The inability to understand change over time is a basic blind spot for a range of evangelical conservatives and right-wingers of various stripes. Whether they’re talking about the inerrancy of Scripture or the original intent of the founders, what’s missing is a real appreciation for historical processes or an understanding of the uniqueness of the past.
I conclude with one example: Marriage. Historians would appreciate that marriage in nineteenth century America is really not the same as marriage in twenty-first century America. One hundred and fifty years ago a woman’s legal identity was an extension of her husband’s. She was a dependent. Before 1848 in New York a married woman lost the right to control any property owned before the union. A woman could not acquire land in her own name. Neither could she make contracts or bring a lawsuit into court. Late in the century women gained greater property rights, but full legal equality in marriage would take decades to achieve. Added to all that, state laws could dictate who could marry whom well into the twentieth century. As many know, the case Loving v. Virginia (1967) challenged Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924.
Marriage gets more complicated, foreign, bizarre in contemporary eyes the further one looks back. The Old Testament patriarch Jacob had four wives. King David’s eight wives are named in the Bible, though he had many more. The book of I Kings describes the amorous King Solomon, who “loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites.” He took seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Wives and women in general were subject to a range of Bronze Age laws. Codes and regulations for concubines, spelled out in Exodus 21:7-11, were a whole other matter.
In the West women are no longer property to be hoarded by kings or jealous leaders of tribes. That historical context is either ignored or lost on advocates of traditional, changeless marriage. Here’s conservative Christian psychologist and bestselling childcare expert James Dobson on the subject: Gay activists “do not have the right to define marriage….For five thousand years in every continent on Earth, marriage has been the standard between a man and a woman.”
To be a Christian — a follower of Jesus Christ — is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom … If Christians do not exemplify this love and freedom, then we side with the nihilists of the Roman empire who put Jesus to a humiliating death. … To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely — to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. This is the kind of vision and courage required to enable the renewal of prophetic, democratic Christian identity in the age of the American empire. Cornel West ☀
It takes tremendous discipline, tremendous courage to think for yourself. W.B. Yeats said ‘It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.’ Courage to think critically. Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for an human being. Courage to think. Courage to love. Courage to hope. And scientists can talk about this in terms of producing evidence or reliable conclusions. Religious folks can talk about this in terms of surrendering ones arrogance and pride in the face of divine revelation and what have you, but they’re all ways of acknowledging our finitude. Our fallibility. [I think of] truth as a way of life, as opposed to a set of propositions that correspond to things in the world. Human beings are unable to ever gain any monopoly on Truth (capital T), we might have access to truth (little t), but they are fallible claims about truth and they could be wrong, and open to revision and so on. So there is a certain kind of mystery that goes hand in hand with truth. This is why so many existential thinkers whether they be religious or secular… have worked to accent our finitude and our inability to fully grasp the ultimate nature of reality and truth about things. And therefore you talk about truth being tied to the way to truth, because once you give up on the notion of fully grasping the way the world is you’re gonna talk about what are the ways I can sustain my quest for truth. How do you sustain a journey, a path, toward truth? The way to truth? The truth talk goes hand in hand with talk about the way to truth. Cornel West ☀
Frederick Douglas’s agenda was an agenda, not for black people to get out of slavery. It was for America to become a better democracy. And it’s spilt over for women’s rights; it’s split over for worker’s rights and so forth. Martin Luther King Jr’s agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity. And that black agenda included a love of Vietnamese people, who were being bombed by American airplanes and repressed by gangster communists, right? Cornel West ☀
I think there are two senses of secularization that are important. One, I think it’s very important to acknowledge the moral and political breakthrough of liberalism against the kings, because when you provide that space for rights and liberties across the board, especially if it’s broad in its empathy and imagination—all-inclusive in that sense—that is a breakthrough. At the same time, it’s clear that the Weberian thesis about the disenchantment of the world resulting in fewer cognitive commitments to God-talk—that’s not true. It was never true in the United States, but it’s certainly not true around the world now. So we’ve got to hold onto the liberal political-moral breakthrough and try to make the breakthrough on the economic level, in terms of democratizing, but also acknowledge that Durkheim was actually more right than Weber. Durkheim talked in The Elementary Forms—think about page 431—he says, there’s something eternal: individual worship and faith. And if you shift from God-talk, you end up worshipping the market or its accompaniments and accoutrements. You can end up worshipping a lot of things. It’s Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. You are going to treasure something. What is it? Is it Kurtz and the ivory? That’s Conrad, 1899, the critique of idolatry. Christians like myself say you must forever be vigilant in critiques of idolatry. Why? Because idolatry is shot through all of us. But you’re going to treasure something. If you treasure something that pulls you out of yourself and makes you love more and sacrifice for justice, that’s going to be better than the next Lexus that you get. There’s no escape from the fiduciary dimension of being human. Cornel West ☀
I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts. I don’t want to make it just urban; you can have life in the streets in the country. But it’s fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth. See, I put it this way: that—for me—philosophy is fundamentally about our finite situation. We can define that in terms of we’re beings towards death, we’re featherless two-legged linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That’s us; we’re beings towards death. At the same time, we have desire while we are organisms in space and time and so it’s desire in the face of death. And then, of course, you’ve got dogmatism, various attempts to hold on to certainty, various forms of idolatry. And you’ve got dialogue in the face of dogmatism. And then of course structurally and institutionally you have domination and you have democracy. You have attempts of people trying to render accountable elites, kings, queens, suzerains, corporate elites, politicians, trying to make these elites accountable to everyday people, to ordinary people. So if you’ve got on the one hand death, dogmatism, domination, and on the other you’ve got desire in the face of death, dialogue in the face of dogmatism, democracy in the face of domination, then philosophy itself becomes a critical disposition of wrestling with desire in the face of death, wrestling with dialogue in the face of dogmatism, and wrestling with democracy, trying to keep alive a very fragile democratic experiment in the face of structures of domination, patriarchy, white supremacy, imperial power, state power, all those concentrated forms of power that are not accountable to people who are affected by it. Cornel West ☀
That’s why I was so surprised when Barack Obama chose him to be the national economic adviser. I said, here’s somebody who has no history whatsoever of sensitivity to poor people or working people, who had been supporting deregulation for a long time as a Clintonite, in the Clinton administration. What is going on here? Or has Obama already become so comfortable with the establishment that you had to have an economist who was legitimate to the establishment in order for him to get his regime off the ground? OK. I mean, if that’s the kind of argument you have, then put it forward. But don’t tell me you’re a progressive, then, and generate that kind of support or major advisers speaking to you—speaking to you every day. Now, if he had Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz or Sylvia Ann Hewitt, I’d say, “Hey, you got something going here. I think we’ve got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people.” But I do forgive Larry Summers for this reason: that I think we all ought to have joy in life, and you can only have joy when you overcome arrogance and open to your own ignorance, because you end up being smart and brainy, but suffering from spiritual malnutrition, emptiness of soul, you see. Cornel West ☀
It has everything to do with taking the Christian gospel seriously by trying to take love seriously, connecting love to justice, and recognizing what Martin Luther King Jr. rightly said, that justice is what love looks like in public. Therefore, looking at the world through the lens of the cross means putting a premium on the least of these; to echo the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, it means looking at the prisoners, the widow, the orphan, the workers, gay brothers, lesbian sisters, people of color, indigenous peoples, and so forth. Whatever kind of theology you want to call it, I’m just trying to be truthful to the gospel. If we take the cross seriously—which has so much to do with unarmed truth, and the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, and the cross has so much to do with unconditional love—then we can’t love people simply by hating when they are treated unjustly. If we take the cross seriously, we must consider how we understand the world, think about the world, and act in the world? Then, certainly in that regard, my attempt to live the Christian life is at the center of what I think and do. Cornel West ☀
We have to pay debt to the sources of our being. That includes mom and dad. That includes the community that shaped you. That includes the nation that both protects you as well as gives you some sense of possibility. And for religious folk, of course, it includes God. Now, the problem is there has to be some Socratic energy in one’s piety. Piety ought to be inseparable from critical thinking, but the critical thinking is parasitic on who one is and where one starts. And who one is and where one starts has to do with what has shaped you from womb to tomb. Part of the hollowness and shallowness of some of modern thinking is to think that somehow one gives birth to oneself and therefore one has no debt to anybody who came before—as if you can have a language all by itself, as if you could actually raise yourself from zero to five, and so forth and so on. Cornel West ☀
You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people. You can’t save the people, if you don’t serve the people. Cornel West ☀
The cross signifies unarmed truth and unconditional love crushed by the Roman empire, embodied in the flesh of a first century Palestinian Jew named Jesus. So that you can be a non-Christian, concerned with poor people. Sometimes some of the greatest defenders of our poor brothers and sisters have been secular and pagan and Hindus like a Gandhi, and so forth and so on. But for me as a Christian, it means I’m looking at those in the prison industrial complex. I’m looking for the children in our dilapidated school system, in the decrepit housing, those who don’t have health care and child care. So that Tom Friedmans and others, they’re looking at the world from the vantage point of the top. Very much like brother Obama’s economic team. They’re not looking at the world through the lens of poor people and working people. They got Wall Street elites as their buddies, their cronies, intimate ties, so the vantage point through which they look at the world is very, very different. Christians begin with the catastrophic. Cornel West ☀
Indifference to injustice is more insidious than the injustice itself. Cornel West ☀
Democracy is not my faith. And American democracy is not my idol. To see the gospel of Jesus Christ bastardized by imperial Christians and pulverized by Constantinian believers and then exploited by nihilistic elites of the American empire makes my blood boil. To be a Christian- a follower of Jesus Christ- is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom. This is the radical love in Christian freedom and the radical freedom in Christian love that embraces socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope. If Christians do not exemplify this love and freedom, then we side with the nihilists of the Roman empire (cowardly elite romans and subjugated jews) who put Jesus to a humiliating death. Instead of receiving his love in freedom as a life-enhancing gift of grace, we end up believing in the idols of the empire that nailed him to the cross. I do not want to be numbered among those who sold their souls for a mess of pottage- who surrendered their democratic Christian identity for a comfortable place at the table of the American empire while, like Lazarus, the least of these cried out and I was too intoxicated with worldly power and might to hear, beckon, and heed their cries. To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely- to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. This is the kind of vision and courage required to enable the renewal of prophetic, democratic Christian identity in the age of the American empire. Cornel West ☀
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