Does Occupy Hold The Secret To Keller's Plea?

A while back, Tim Keller (click here for a bio) wrote a blogpost that repeated Rodney King's plea that we all get along. Keller wrote this blogpost in the month preceding the 2016 Presidential election as he called for 'civility in the public square.' What Keller was pleading for was what a book by John Inazu called for. Inazu called for a 'confident pluralism' (click here for info on the book). Such pluralism, according to Inazu, would result from people demonstrating to their neighbors virtues such as tolerance, humility, and patience (click here for Keller's blogpost). Keller went on to define those virtues

In making a genuine plea, Keller avoided the mistake that political elites who opposed Donald Trump made: he acknowledge the faults and sins of his own group. This should come as no surprise to those who are familiar with Keller's writings. Keller acknowledged that some of the blame for the lack of public civility rests with his own tribe, his fellow Christians. He shows no interest in blaming any other group. Keller readily acknowledges that during the 1980s and 1990s when Christians had more positions of influence, they showed little interest in creating a confident pluralism where they failed to practice the virtues of tolerance, humility, and patience.

Keller goes on to say that to develop public civility, we must first practice those virtues in our neighborhoods. He also said that churches should be molding their members to practice these virtues in the public square not just for the sake of creating a truly pluralistic society, but to remedy the association that those Christians from the 1980s and 1990s made with the Gospel. Because of their arrogance and intolerance, Christianity was perceived as being a toxic religion--a not so new development in Church history when one considers how the Church has often supported wealth and power despite the suffering for the rest such supported caused.

So far so good for Keller's message about civility in the public square. Keller correctly identifies an important problem that existed then and is with us now. Thus, Keller answered the what question. In addition, Keller points to his fellow believers as partially creating the problem. By doing that, Keller partially answers the who question. And really there is nothing wrong with what he wrote.

But of course there is a problem. The problem lies with what Keller did not say, he did not address the why question. Why have people, including my fellow Christians, worked against a real pluralism that includes civility in the public square. And here, perhaps a lesson from Occupy would help us to do better. For the decision making process in Occupy did not revolve around conquering by winning some majority in order to push one's own interests to the exclusion of the interests of others. Instead, the decision making process practiced in many Occupy meetings revolved around keeping people together by identifying and removing what an individual or group would regard as a deal breaker. We made decisions that 100% of the participants could stand behind.

It's not that we were perfect in how we tried to address the legitimate concerns of member in our groups. I remember from my days with the Global Justice Working Group of Occupy Wall Street, we had to learn how to disagree with one another. But once we did that, we learned how to work out our differences. And the structure of our meetings revolved around making decisions that could either be supported by everyone in the group or avoided any deal breaking positions.

Certainly we can't use the same processes and structures in our nation's political processes that were employed by Occupy. And it is unrealistic in such a large and diverse nation to expect the kind of consensus agreement we used in Occupy. However, the goal of caring for both our own interests and the interests of others in the decision making process so that we can produce as much consensus as possible is a worthy goal that not only contributes to, but requires civility in the public square.
 
Now so far, I have, while praising some of the practices of Occupy, failed to answer the why question that Keller did not address. Why has the land of the free and the home of the brave so miserably failed at sustaining civility in the public square? I believe that if we look at America's two most important institutions, one answer is more than apparent. Those two institution consist of our democratic processes and the free market. The former, perhaps to an inadequate degree, promotes egalitarianism with a one-person, one-vote system. And if we think about democracy as a state of being for the nation, then there should be egalitarianism in terms of how we share society with others. That we should want America to equally belong to all of its citizens rather than allowing America to belong more to some than to others.

But the free market is not about egalitarianism, it is about competing with and defeating others and even making conquests. There is no egalitarianism in the free market because in that market, we have a one-dollar, one-vote dynamic where one is only responsible to advance their own interests. Thus, as one wins, they earn more dollars that, in turn, gives them more power. And to maximize one's profits, one must eliminate at least some of one's competitors. And that will result in gaining even more power that leads to gaining more profits.

So the why question can be answered by answering the following question: Is our democracy more influenced by values promoted by the free market or is our free market influenced more by democratic values? The more our democracy becomes a gateway to conquering our opponents and winning power and control, the more our democracy is influenced by the free market. Similarly, the more we share our wealth rather than accumulate it, the more our free market is influenced by democratic values.

At this point, the why there is such little civility in the public square is answered. That the why has more to do with how the free market influences our democracy more than with how our democracy influences the free market. Our growing wealth disparity supports this point as with wealth disparity comes power disparity. And it's not that Keller's admission about fellow Christians is wrong. It is that such a truth bears less relevance to the problem of our lack of civility in the public square. And that can be seen in how many conservative Christians from the 1980s and 1990s both were strong supporters of the free market and looked at our democratic processes as a way to consolidate power and advance their own agenda only rather than to share power with others as equals and advance their concerns as well.

What He Was Really Talking About Was Democracy

Collin Hansen, a bigwig at the Gospel Coalition (click here for a bio), while recounting the end of a successful trip to Israel, captured a moment of reflection that should be treasured as he took note of a very insightful comment made by the Hebrew University professor, Moshe Halbertal. The line that caught Hansen's ear was this:

As Jews in Israel we don't know how to be a majority.

There is a given in that line that renders its intelligible. That given can be expressed by providing a conjunction. Below is one way of expressing what I think Halbertal was getting at:

As Jews who live in both Israel and a democracy we don't know how to live as a majority

Confirmation of the above modification can be found in a Hansen description of the voyage Israel is currently taking:

But now as Israel nears 70 years as a sovereign nation, Jews continue to debate how to operate a democracy.

As Hansen later reflected on what was said, he concluded the following:

if Israeli Jews don’t know how to be a majority, then American evangelicals don’t know how to be a minority

The article in which Hansen recalls all of this can be found here.  And what I would like to suggest, depending on the definition of democracy,  is that the words 'majority' and 'minority' should be interchangeable.

The basic question around which the above quotes revolve is the definition of democracy. And what Halbertal presumed with his quote was that democratic processes alone do not make a democracy. Now such must seem foreign to most Americans. But that is because, despite the many counterexamples that have existed in the world, we equate our democracy with elections. And we insist on that even though the former U.S.S.R, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and Iran had or has elections and we would  never consider any of those countries to be democracies. However, when it comes to us, we assume that because we have elections, we have a democracy.

So what is a democracy and do either Israel or the US have one?  Here we should note that elections are a necessary but not sufficient condition to being a democacy. That means that we can't be a democracy without having elections, but having elections does not make us a democacy.

What is a democracy? In terms of a state of being, a democracy exists depending on how the people of given nation share society with others. Does each of group  in a given society share that society with all the other groups as equals? That is that the nation, regardless of the demographics belongs equally to all of the groups that reside within. Jeff Halper, an Israeli activist and founder of ICAHD (click here) wrote the following in his book entitled An Israeli In Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel (pg 74 of the book):

An ethonocracy is the opposite of a democracy, although it might incorporate some elements of democracy such as universal citizenship and elections. It arrives when one particular group--the Jews in Israelf, the Russians in Russia (and, more evidently, in the former Soviet Union), the Protestants in pre-1972 Northern Ireland, the whites in apartheid South Africa, the Shi'ite Muslims of Iran, the Malayin Malyasia and, if they had their way, the white Christian Fundamentalists in the US--seizes control of the government and armed forces in order to enforce a regime of exclusive privilege over other groups in what is in fact a multi-ethnic or multi-religious society.  Ethonocracy, or ethno-nationalism, privileges ethnos over demos, whereby one's ethnic affiliations, be it defined by race, descent, religion, language or national origin, take precednece over citizenship in determining to whom a country actually "belongs." Israel is referred to expllicitly by its political leaders as a "Jewish democracy."

And so the question that is being implied here either to the Jews in Israel or Christians in America is this: Are we sharing our society  and nation with all others as equals?  

If the Jews in Israel and the Christians in America are sharing society and the nation with all other groups as equals, then living as a majority in a given society or nation is same as living as a minority. The only time when living as a majority is not the same as living as a minority is when different hierarchical statuses are assigned to the different groups which thus gives the different groups different roles in society.

It should be obvious that neither a signficant portion of the Jews in Israel nor that of certain Christians in America favor democracy over ethnocracy. Why? Because each group has felt entitled to reign in various degrees over their respective society and nation. The need for a Jewish homeland, which was very urgent even before the rise of the Nazis ,enabled some Jews to believe that, in the name of security and self-protection, they had a right to maintain a privileged status in Israel over all other groups. And though such a belief is wrong, it is more than understandable independent of the Holocaust--though the Holocaust increased that urgency exponentially. We Western Christians should never forget the gross atrocities that our ancestors would constantly visit on the Jews in Europe for almost 2,000 years. And even when there were no atrocities being practiced, Jews were rarely made to feel welcomed as equal citizens of the countries in which they resided. See, today's modern Zionism started as a secular European venture. It was never a sequel to the possession of the Holy Land by the Old Testament Israelites.

The source for the Christian sense of entitlement to take possession of America started with the belief that we were God's new chosen people who were entering into our own "Canaan." It continued along an assumption of our moral superiority, and now our "democracy" has been corrupted by greed and competition so as to deceive us as to where democracy's "finish line" is located. Thus, we have thought nothing of it when we have used our democratic processes to rule over others as a dominating majority--this is the concept on which the title of Hansen's article is based. Here we should note what is more important to us. Is sharing more important to us than greed and competition? If so, the egalitarian values of democracy would corrupt our free market. Or is greed and competition more  important to us than sharing? If so, then our democracy will be looked at as providing opportunities to compete for more and more power.

Returning to Hansen's article, other points could be added especially to the approach that churches in nations like Syria and Egypt take in interacting in their nation. Hansen continues along a partially different line of thought about the first Halbertal quote than what was pursued in this blogpost. And I think that his article is well worth reading and serves as a positive indicator that the Conservative Church in America could still change constructively in how it interacts with society. At least, that is my hope. For without it changing, calls for resistance and even revolution will sorely miss a Christian influence that Liberal Christianity contributed  to the anti-war and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s.