I want to offer a quotation sandwich. When I read these quotes Barak Obama came to mind as he appears to be running on the Jim Wallis “Religious Values Matter” campaign (check out Obama’s speech “Call to Renewal”). I have to be honest, I am very intrigued by Obama, but for all his talk of a change, I’m not at all convinced he is really proposing something that Christian radicals can sink their teeth into.
So in light of the upcoming elections and the buzz that is mounting about Obama, particularly from Christians, I wanted to offer some choice quotes from McCarraher and McCabe:
But as we look at a country frenzied and fatigued by the race for riches, armored and overextended in its expansive rage and fear, we will need, for lack of a better term, a new New Left, a movement of people who combine, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s wonderful couplet, “Trotsky and St. Benedict”; and I suspect that many of us, knowing in our marrow that business as usual cannot be allowed to continue, are more than ready for a militant renewal of the urge to make all things new (Eugene McCarraher, “The Revolution Begins in the Pews: Trotsky and St. Benedict” Books and Culture ).”
[The revolutionary] proposes to change not merely this or that detail within society, but the structure, and hence the values of the society itself. The revolutionary does not propose something that in terms of this society is better; he wants to change [t]he terms. He wants history to advance not [s]imply further along the established lines, but along new lines (Herbert McCabe, Law, Love and Language, p. 28).”
At a minimum, that means a metamorphosis in the ethos and curricula of business and professional schools at Christian colleges and universities. Christians should be pioneering a whole new economics, not just tacking “values” onto capitalism. They should be affirming abundance, not scarcity, as the primary ontological fact of economics. They should be offering courses, not in management, but in how to do without management as a distinct class. They should be offering courses and training in union organization, or in dispossessing those useless people otherwise known as stockholders and putting firms into the hands of people who actually work in them (Eugene McCarraher, “Britney Spears and the Downward Arc of Empire” in The Other Journal).”
Both McCabe and McCarraher use the word ‘values’, but they use it differently. I see the way McCabe is using it to denote a paradigm or ideological shift. McCarraher, on the other hand, is talking about the invertebrate Christian “values” we tack onto our inherently un-Christian political economy. In this regard, both McCabe and McCarraher would argue the the radical or revolutionary Christian will not settle for surface sentiments that we infuse our system with. Rather, what we need is to change our system from the bottom up.
Obama, on the other hand, is comfortable with tacking values onto the American political economy. And while I think Obama (and Wallis) are to be applauded for getting Christians who do not identify with the Religious Right to care about the relationship between religion and politics, my question remains:
For the radical Christian, is tacking Christian values onto our current system enough?
