A TALE OF TWO CITIES
by Forrest Church
September 8, 2002
I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to be back, not in the pulpit so much, as in the heart of this remarkable community. I wonder sometimes how people without a community such as ours make it successfully from one year to the next. That may sound silly to you or self-serving, but I really do wonder. For obvious reasons, I’ve found myself pondering this question all the more deeply over the past twelve months. Life is filled with so many trap doors and such odd passageways. We are tripping the light fantastic one moment, dancing on our pedestal, and then–bang–toppled into darkness the very next, shuffling through the wreckage, taking baby steps again, relearning how to walk. It is not an unmixed disaster when this happens by the way. Spiritually it is useful every now and again to be reminded that we are not in charge here. When our minds are preoccupied by illusions, displaced in an imagined future or trapped in an imagined past, it can be cathartic for a demanding present to blow our shuttered doors off their hinges. This is only true, however, when we are not alone. Disruptions are beneficial only to the extent that what otherwise could weaken us or pit us against one another opens our hearts instead and brings us together.
On September 12, I recalled the Chinese ideogram for the word "crisis," two word pictures, one meaning danger, the other, opportunity. In our personal lives and also in the life of our nation and the world, danger and opportunity come packaged together. If we focus only on the danger, we may miss the opportunity that accompanies it. This morning I shall begin with the larger picture, on Wednesday allude briefly to both the political and personal aftermath of 9/11, and next Sunday devote my full attention to our individual soul maps: where we are spiritually as individuals and where we might go from here.
Throughout, my reflections will be guided by the work I did this summer, putting the finishing touches on my new book, a biography of the Declaration of Independence that will be published later this month. In it I define the United States as a union of faith and freedom, in which faith elevates freedom and freedom tempers faith. The freedoms established in our War of Independence were based on a higher law than had ever before been invoked in the history of state building. The lofty ideals of the founders–that all are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–not only represent America at its best, but anticipate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and our own Denominational Principles, which you can read on the back of the morning calendar. I call this the American Creed. It has inspired and chastened our nation’s greatest leaders. In a way, our entire history can be measured according to the extent that our deeds have lived up the promise of our creed. In his "I have a Dream" speech, Martin Luther King, Jr., looked "forward to the day that this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed." The essence of that creed, is E pluribus unum, "out of many, one,"
Today this ideal is in jeopardy. With freedom in a pitched battle against faith–pluribus pitted against unum–we find ourselves in a situation where the sovereign individualism fostered by post-modernism and the totalistic imperatives of post-traditional fundamentalism are increasingly unable to co-exist. E pluribus unum may once have represented the founders’ idealism, but today–both for this nation and for our shrinking world–it signifies nothing less than hard-headed realism. In the nuclear age, either we learn somehow to co-operate or else we all perish. Given our technical capacity for murder-suicide, it can truly be said that a world divided against itself cannot stand.
E pluribus unum has redemptive consequence not only for America, but, with our shrinking globe, where discrete backyards no longer exist, for the entire world as well. Abraham Lincoln said, "that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence . . . gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time." Among the many ironies that followed hard on the premature declaration last fall that irony is now passe, is the irony that many in the world today perceive us not as a harbinger of hope but as a danger to world peace.
The United States should and must lead the world in the war against terror. We are the world’s only super-power. We also are founded on a set of democratic ideals that represent the world’s best hope. The irony, even tragedy, is that today we are more alone in the world and more hated, than we were before 9/11 united the world’s leaders against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and evoked enormous popular sympathy for our nation and its people. I spent a week this summer with Karen Armstrong, the great religious historian. She told me that when she visits places like Brazil and Germany instead of being called on to defend Islam by, as she does, differentiating it as a whole from the actions of its most zealous crusaders, she finds herself instead having to defend the United States. In short, our self-image and our image abroad are in sharp and increasing opposition to each other.
For this reason, I am particularly concerned–terrified might be a better word–by the administration’s apparent eagerness to instigate a war against Iraq. Not that the object of our aversion is in any way noble. On the contrary. Simply that this solution in so many ways seems to compound our own and the world’s problem. One only sets a backfire to control a burning forest when the conditions are favorable. Otherwise the backfire spreads the very flames that it was intended to quench.
Anyone who glibly claims to know for sure what we should or should not do in response to the menace posed by Saddam Hussein possesses a knowledge that simply does not exist. The situation is exasperatingly complicated. It would be naïve and irresponsible to ignore his apparent attempts to develop instruments of mass destruction. The question is not whether to respond to the threat Iraq poses, but how, and for this there are no easy answers.
Before acting, however, we must ask ourselves some hard questions, the very questions our allies are asking. Would a war on Iraq, even a successful way, impede terrorism or foster it? Would it stabilize or de-stabilize the Middle-East. Would it keep Iraq from employing biological and chemical weapons, or prompt Iraq to use them on our own soldiers? What if an American invasion of the Middle East leads to revolution and a new anti-American government in Pakistan, which already has nuclear weapons? Do we then take out Pakistan, which would be, by our own definition, a much greater danger to world peace than Iraq is? What if Israel, as they have said they would, retaliates against an Iraqi scud attack with nuclear force? And that is just the war. What about the peace?
I wonder sometimes whether those who are shaping our nation’s foreign policy are suffering from ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder. The present administration ran on a platform of no nation building, no foreign adventures that were not easily explained to and broadly supported by the American people, and clear exit strategies for any overseas engagement. In response to 9/11 that policy was abandoned, in part for good reason. But our first experiment in nation building is hardly promising, the first war against terrorism has certainly not proved victorious, and the American people are more divided than they have been since Vietnam. Yet today all we hear about is Iraq.
As great a concern, and one that surely affects America’s stature overseas, is that while we proclaim ourselves ready to act unilaterally if need be against Iraq, we are more doggedly isolationist and imperious than ever before in all the collegial work being done by the world’s leaders in response to the shared environmental threat, racism, the establishment of a workable world court, and so many other area of joint concern. At a time when E pluribus unum–however idealistic, however difficult to accomplish–is becoming the world’s motto, the United States, whose founders gave this vision as a gift to the world, stands apart.
This explains the greatest post-9/11 irony. Why we, in so short at time, have moved from a position of leadership in a world-wide campaign against terrorism, in to one of isolation. In the weeks after 9/11, we won not only unprecedented sympathy around the world, but also the support of almost every world leader in our campaign against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Were we to give as much attention and provide as much leadership in fostering democracy in Afghanistan as we did in toppling tyranny there, however difficult the challenge, we might still be in that same position. Moreover, we would be working to establish a model that would inspire aspirations for democracy throughout the Arab world. We would be modeling our values of liberty and justice for all, not applying them rhetorically and hypocritically only when they suit our nation’s self-interest. Almost everything our leaders have said in condemning Iraqi tyranny could as easily be said of Saudi Arabia, whose outrages against human rights go almost unmentioned. It is hardly surprising that many in the world see the United States not as a beacon of liberty and hope but as a self-serving super-power bent on revenge and insensitive to any but our own economic concerns.
I can understand those who want to attack Iraq. Not only are hurt national pride and chauvinistic expressions of patriotism understandable following the first foreign attack on the continental United States in almost two centuries, but Iraq does pose a danger to world peace. We should be doing everything we can, together with the United Nations and our allies, to disarm Saadam Hussein. If this effort fails, as well it may, we will then be in a much stronger position convincingly to muster an international coalition as we did the last time we invaded Iraq. Beyond this, there is no moral equivalency between anything America has done and the slaughter of innocents on September 11. We do no honor to the memory of those who died by indulging in paroxysms of guilt. But there is some truth in how America’s critics view our influence in the world. The United States exports no goods or services more intrinsically valuable than our standard of living and dedication to liberty. Yet, when the former can be caricatured as decadence and the latter as libertinism, the immense moral capital we have to offer is squandered. Faith, as we know too well, can serve as the handmaiden of terror, but freedom alone offers insufficient moral sinew to answer faith’s critique. Freedom finds its meaning–moral, amoral, or immoral–in the nature of its expression. Though predicated on the virtue of freedom, both untrammeled free-market capitalism and unfettered personal liberty can have unintended consequence. Free markets open themselves to exploitation; free morals contribute to social dissolution.
If free global markets have a stabilizing effect on the world (and in many ways they do), economic efficiency is independent of civic responsibility. Democracy may be naturally suited to free market capitalism but free markets in no way guarantee democratic ideals. Corporations have a more natural affinity with stability than they do with democracy. The transnational corporation has no home and no loyalty beyond the bottom line. In oppressive societies that collaborate efficiently with global free market forces, to the extent that Western culture is identified with Western commerce America is more likely to be perceived as the oppressor than as a liberator
Beyond this, any struggle to the death between faith and freedom can only cripple both. When Osama bin Laden said of the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center that America was "hit by God in one of its softest spots," he may actually have been right–not in imputing this act of terror to God, but in recognizing that American economic power alone, uncoupled to an underlying trust in something higher and more eternal, is indeed vulnerable to the hatred that it, as an idol, can inspire. By the same token, the radical faith that bin Laden confesses and enforces may also prove to be one of fundamentalism’s softest spots, for it too inspires an international backlash dedicated to its eradication. A year ago, the world’s anger was pointed at bin Laden. Today it is pointed at us. We might be wise to remember the greatest lesson that history teaches: Choose your enemies carefully for you will become like them.
In 410, Alaric and his Goths sacked the city of Rome. Four years later, St. Augustine began writing his response to the end of the world as he had known it. The City of God is, in fact, a tale of two cities: the Earthly City (which he calls the City of Man) and the Celestial City (or City of God). These cities, Augustine argues, are ruled by contrasting loves. Citizens of the Earthly City are driven "by the love of self in contempt of God;" in the celestial city, they are lovingly "united in the enjoyment of God and of one another in God." To Augustine, Rome’s ruin was a foregone conclusion.
At the turn of the third millennium, Islamicist Fundamentalism and Western modernism epitomize equally conflicting worldviews: the City of Faith versus the Secular City. The increasingly explosive struggle between their citizens can be summed up, respectively, either as a war between freedom and evil or one between faith and evil. Though one could argue that today the barbarians and the faithful are one and the same, unless common ground can be established, this tale of two cities is a preordained tragedy.
So long as the City of Faith and the Secular City are trapped in a zero-sum game, there is little hope but that the tale of two cities will continue to be a tragic one. Benjamin Barber argues that "Democracy remains both a form of coherence as binding as McWorld and a secular faith potentially as inspiring as Jihad," but a "secular state" without spiritual underpinnings lacks the grounding necessary to answer the language of faith. Mark Juergeusmeyer comes closer to the vision of America’s founders when he concludes, "Religious violence cannot end until some accommodation can be forged between the two–some acknowledgment of religion in elevating the spiritual and moral values of public life . . .. The cure for religious violence may ultimately lie in a renewed appreciation for religion itself." Fortunately, our nation does have spiritual underpinnings. We were founded as a union of faith and freedom. E pluribus unum is a sacred construct. Our freedoms are based on a higher faith, one that should, as Abraham Lincoln said, "give hope to all the world, for all future time."
St. Augustine (whose City of God was a city of peace) set down his vision as the walls of Rome were crumbling before the onset of barbarian hoards and Rome itself crumbling within, a victim of its own decadence. Today, he would have recognized his Celestial City neither in the metropoli of modernism nor in the citadels of fundamentalism. If the former show little respect for God, the latter show as little respect for humanity. Augustine would call on both parties to answer to a higher law.
Even the Celestial City in its pilgrimage makes use of the earthly peace and guards and seeks the convergence of human wills concerning what is useful for man’s mortal nature as far as sound piety and religion allow, and makes the earthly peace minister to the heavenly peace. This is so truly peace that it must be considered and called the only peace, at least of a rational creature, since it is the best ordered and most harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God and one another in God.
I can think of no more eloquent summation of E pluribus unum,, in which the City of God and the City of Man (to use Augustine’s language, might become one city), a city in which freedom and faith are united. Rather than faith smothering freedom or pluribus undermining unum, E pluribus unum offers a spiritual template both for the nation and to a riven world. Only by the cultivation of such harmonious fellowship will our tale of two cities find a happier ending.