In my previous post, I wrote of “an absolute sham of the “democracy” to which they give lip service”, referring to the Bush administration. In my reading over the past 6 months, in various Stanley Hauerwas books and essays and also in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, I have grown sensitive to the issue of just what constitutes that democracy, and the appropriateness of arguing for something so abstract, and so ultimately unworthy of being on a level with “truth”. I have long believed that it is not the forms of government or social arrangmnents like democracy, socialism, communism, or others that is the object of standards of “truth”, but the kind, Hauerwas would say, give our allegiance and recognize authority first and foremmost on the Kingdom, and the Jesus who announced that Kingdom. Therefore, “democracy” , as I use it here, is an attempt to appeal to one of the many stories competing in our world, and to the one story under which most Americans would recognize as appealing to “truths” widely construed as “the way it should be”. Indeed, I believe that such values as “freedom”, “rights”, “justice” and “liberty” have a deeper set of definitions under the authority of the Kingdom of God. Their notions are “transformed” in the context of the gospels and the call of God to be a people who see a wealth of such transformations of life and language taking place. I always intend to imply a thouroughly Christian notion of “democracy’s highest ideals” by representing such lofty notions as fulfilled and extended and elaborated by Kingdom values given focus by Jesus. In the intro to an essay on “Character, Narrative, and Growth in the Christian Life” (which is also included in A Community of Character), the editors give this insight into Hauerwas’ foucs in this essay.
our character is not the result of any one narrative; the self is constituted by many different roles and stories. Moral growth involves constant conversation between our stories that allows us to live appropriate to the character of our existence By learning to make their lives conform to God’s way, Christians claim that they are provided with a self that enables the conversation to coninue in a truthful manner.
In America, Christians (including myself)find themselves wanting to appeal to some common language and extend on some of the more worthy notions by appealing to the sense in which God’s Kingdom gives articulation to what the people aspire to; to that which people are drawn to as a more “just” notion of community than that offered by the failing apparatus of society and politics around us. A politic truthfully aimed at seeking a just society more elaborate than the simplistic notion of what ends up seeming like “to each his own as long as it doesn’t infinge on someone else’s life”, which actually ends up defining what is “infringement” upon some as “not really our fault”, but just “the way the system works”, or “It’s not personal, it’s just business”. And “individual rights” is an illusion if it is constituted and preceived in such a way as to eschew community ties and the interdependence we all seek, and yet avoid out of fear.
