Re-imagining the Social, and Theology
“There is within Christianity a breathtakingly powerful way to imagine and enact the social, to imagine and enact connection and belonging.” This claim, found in Willie James Jenning’s recent monograph, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale 2010), captures the most hopeful realization I have garnered during years of formal theological study. Like Jennings, however, I recognize Christianity’s imaginative social potential always in view of its long history of occupation: discourses of domination have occupied the Christian imagination, just as the Christian imagination has occupied discourses of domination. As theologians constructively offer the church, academy, and wider society alternative visions for our life together, we must do so with the cautious and critical conviction that the tradition is not itself neutral, and even its seeming virtues have been employed for social malice.
The global Occupy Wall Street movement offers a sharp critique of how the US imagines and enacts the social. As a theologian, I commit to engaging the Christian tradition for alternative visions of community in response to this critique. I also commit to offering a language for, and contextualization of, the alternative communities that already burgeon from the protest marches and Occupy camps. At the same time, I must interrogate the ways Christianity imagines and enacts the social in light of Occupy Wall Street’s critique: How has contemporary Christianity accommodated the dehumanizing ethos underlying many US economic and political policies? Does Occupy Wall Street confront contemporary academic theology with its own complicity in structures of injustice?
We may need to re-imagine the church and the discipline in order to re-imagine society with Occupy Wall Street.
From my observation, Christianity has been contributing to the imagining and enacting of social since the start of the Tea Party movement. Look at the recent fight over the debt ceiling. Public officers have been more vocal about returning to Christian values. Today, we are a society of debtors and not savers, and we are now witnessing the effects of uprooting Christian values from our public and social policies. The bible is offering a language for, and is contextualizing our current events. “Proverbs 22:7 – The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.” “Proverbs 14:23 – All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.” Contemporary Christianity has accommodated the dehumanizing ethos underlying many US economic and political policies by its apathy. Perhaps the bible can offer wisdom in how to better craft public and social policies.
Thanks for your comment, Jacob. I agree and hope with you that the bible, and Christianity as a whole, has wisdom to offer society for crafting new public and social policies. And, of course, I agree that Christianity positively and negatively contributes to the imagining and enacting of the social, though I think Christianity had this influence long before the appearance of the Tea Party only a few years ago.
The passages you extracted from scripture could have very problematic implications for our Christian and larger social imaginaries, I think. They showcase the difficulty of engaging religious resources for our present world: How am I to understand Proverb 14:23 in light of our current economic situation? I can derive various interpretations from this verse (at least when it is extracted from the larger context of scripture), and some of them seem to be on the side of the poor, and others do not. I think theology has a responsibility to grapple with the ambiguity of verses like this one, and to engage them constructively so that they are not used as justifications for dehumanizing structures but rather for the crafting of better polities, as you exhort.