Jamie Smith said something in his CPB interview on “Evangelicals Out of the Box” that has stuck with me. He was talking about how those on the left avoid like the plague saying anything that “Sounds like” the Right. It seems that there may well be a tendency to do this from those who consider themselves to be trying to follow a “Third Way” ; and thus a similar tendency to NOT echo things that the left is saying OR what the RIGHT is saying.
This was highlighted for me in the part of the interview where Jamie describes what he means by fundamentalism of the left:
There is within evangelicalism, a left wing version of [right wing fundamentalism], where there’s a party line, and you come to this set of conclusions and then you don’t question them, [ so that ] “the worst thing in the world would be to even sound like a conservative, therefore we’re going to take positions that run as far as possible from even the danger of sounding like conservative evangelical Christians, and I just find that equally maddening , frustrating and small-minded, in a way. It’s people who aren’t willing to risk identifying and affirming “what’s right” in the Right
I also take from this that this is also an issue when it comes to the left, from WHICHEVER direction they are being critiqued. I hava also noticed creeping into this great dialogue on Radical Orthodoxy, politics, and ecclesia, a dismissive attitude toward “the left”, and a forgetting of the very deep worries about where our country is headed. We don’t have to assume (and I certainly don’t) that this means that John Kerry would have solved most of those things, but I too felt very invested in the importance of getting the Bush administration out. I still feel a bit of kinship to some of the voices of “the left” like Al Franken, even though he doesn’t have, or doesn’t talk much about, the importance of faith communities in shaping us. I also have some sense that there are hidden spirtual sensibilities there that find SOME resonation with liberal-activist politics, and this loyalty thus engenedered in them is so strong becuase of the absence of other expeirnces of community in our society, a nd the absence of “resident alien” outposts. I feel fortunate to have been raised in the church, and devoted myself to some theological studies in Seminary after college, and following that for 10 years via readijng, and then again with Seminary studying communications (which also happened during the first Gulf War, which prompted numerous discussions about the way the media handled this, and the way the Churches jumped on the Nationalist bandwagon. It was then that my ties to Sojourners became strongest, as they were an all-too-rare voice of dissent.
This has been my only misgiving in all the dialogue since I began listening and reading Hauerwas, JKA Smith, and also Bonhoeffer, along with my previous year of such intense dismay over the things happening since Bush took office. As I have related several times since the election in 04, I realized then that a church-centric focus had to take center stage. Radical Orthodoxy was presented to me at just the right time, and I have that legacy of the Church of the Saviour that has been there reminding me acorss this disturbingly long period of time since I was exposed to their way of life as church, and find myself diving back in to re-consider their story and then slide back into work and family routines. It is a maddening experience to realize how seemingly impossible it is to break this cylce of being trapped in a life with deadening sameness with the culture, even though we as a family look at the world with such dismay and know that there lies within God’s people a better way, but find that churches with any inkling toward the idea of discipleship are discipling people in the ways of theraeutic religion rather than the life and resurrection of Christ as lived with his people, and churches with an awareness of the need to stand against so much that is wrong in culture are ignoring the need for our being shaped by one another in more persoanl and committed ways. The Journey Inhward, Journey Outward is sop badly out of whack. This is what is driving me to take a drive over and visit them once more and seek out how this problemn could be attacked. What can someone like me do when the people I conider to be my closest “spiritual relations” are spread out acorss the country?