My previous post about Olbermann’s comments was trying to articulate a “that’s good but not quite there” kind of reaction I had,  very similar to the reaction I have to a lot of media people whose stuff I tend to read and to like,  such as Bill Moyers, William Carroll, Frank Rich, Seymour Hersh, Ron Suskind,  and Jon Stewart.  Keith Olbermann is in that category too. 

But I’m afraid that the church in America has failed to give us words to speak on such matters,  since it usually ends up appealing to all those “agreed upon” values,  and couched in terms of “the ideals of democracy” and “founding fathers”,  on both the left and the right. 

From the article from Cavanaugh that started me down this road :

Regardless of the facts of this particular case, moral judgments about war, like all moral judgments, are not primarily a matter of good information. Good information is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for sound moral judgments. Sound moral judgments depend on being formed in certain virtues. Why a Christian should assume that the president of a secular nation-state would be so formed – much less enjoy a certain “charism” of moral judgment – is a mystery to me. “Charism” is a theological term denoting a gift of the Holy Spirit. To apply such a term to whomever the electoral process of a secular nation-state happens to cough up does not strike me as theologically sound or practically wise.

American Christians seem to be left with no distinct vocabulary outside of the expectations of political discourse, or “the public square”.  This is why so many in the Progressive camp can be rightly accused of sounding more like Democrats than Christians (of course,  this accusation usually comes from those whose “solution” is to sound more like Republicans).

I’m still trying to figure out how to articulate this.  There’s this big “gap” of communication, people talking past each other.  It seems that the lack of embodied Christian community is a key to the lack of corresponding discourse. Or if we had more of such embodiments,  then language and narrative about them could come more naturally,  and the hearers of that discourse would be more adept at understanding us if they could SEE what we mean.  I know of some exemplary churches who often say “come and see”.