Heaven Above and Our Way on Earth
Second Quarter 2004
There is much more political talk about religion these days than there was 20 or 30 years ago. Most of it, however, is not on target. Politicians and the media talk as if prayers, piety, and creeds on holy days—along with pronouncements by clerics—represent religion. The core responsibilities of government, such as collecting taxes, conducting foreign policy, and promoting economic growth, health, and education, are not religious.
This is misleading, however, because it ignores the underlying religious dynamic driving the American way of life as a whole. Culture wars over same-sex marriage; fights over tax cuts, spending, and how to increase consumption and economic growth; and the "war" to defeat evil enemies in this world—all of these social, economic, political, and military actions are part of a deeper, more encompassing civil-religious struggle over how best to achieve America's and the world's destiny. Religions are ways of life and not only ways of worship.
St. Augustine (354-429), the most famous church father, believed that the city of God would be revealed as God's gift, in God's time, through the victory of Christ's redeeming love and final judgment. "Heaven" in that sense is not within our reach, not ours to fathom or to bring down to earth. In the earthly city, by contrast, Christians have no permanent citizenship and live as pilgrims oriented by God's love toward the coming city of God, which will be the true fulfillment of human life. The earthly city is, in fact, largely controlled by self-love, greed, jealousy, lust, and hatred, from which people should turn away if they want true fulfillment in life. Yet there is no cure for selfishness and self-destruction except by the redeeming grace of God.
By the time of America's founding, Augustine's view of reality had undergone radical revision and reformulation. The quest to achieve heaven on earth became a greater ambition than to perfect the art of pilgrimaging toward God's new city. From a more "enlightened" point of view, which was being ushered in by scientific progress and self-government, the idea of a pilgrimage toward heaven above was dismissed as a myth of the "dark ages." A new pilgrimage was now needed, one that would lead rational human beings to real happiness and fulfillment in this world. People needed to be liberated from religious distractions so they could concentrate on changing this world. At the very least, religion should be tucked away in private recesses where it would no longer cause war or disturb the public peace that rational, self-governing humans can achieve.
Even deeply religious people gradually agreed to privatize their religions. They agreed that the earthly pilgrimage should at least be as peaceful as possible, and the "secular" solution for peace on earth offered by the "enlightened" ones seemed to make sense. Thus, if one still felt a desire for heaven beyond, one could trust God for that, but for life on earth one should now learn to trust reason, and economic growth, and the democratic process.
What most people did not understand, and still do not understand, however, is that religion did not simply get privatized. The new, "enlightened" way of life that became the pilgrimage of modern humans is a new religion, derived by means of the secularization of Christianity. Only from the Enlightenment's point of view does the privatization of other religions make sense. In its early stages, the modern way of life depended on a deist god to get things started. But as the new faith in human self-sufficiency grew stronger, people found it easier and easier to discard God and heaven altogether. Or at least that appeared to be true. Underneath the appearances, however, substitutes had to be imported for everything that had been religious before: a new definition of earthly pilgrimage; a substitute for heaven; science as the way to overcome darkness; and proper self-love as the way to salvation.
In the simplest of biblical terms, in other words, new gods were substituted for the God of medieval and Reformation Christianity. The modern way of life is not unreligious or nonreligious. It is a new religion that offers an all-encompassing meaning of life and easily attaches to nationalism. It is also a big-tent religion, even to the point of making room on weekends—between sporting events and shopping—for traditional believers to celebrate their private religions with books and memories and worship aids handed down from ancestors.
When the New England experiment in Puritan cleansing failed to perfect the earthly city, the early Americans did not give up the aim of creating a new order on earth. To the contrary, they invested their hopes and energies in America as a whole. America became God's new Israel. Christians and people of other traditional faiths learned to live by two faiths: the old faith, now largely privatized, oriented them toward the next life, and the new faith, publicly viable, oriented their earthly pilgrimage progressively toward a historical destiny. The earthly, public goal of history will be achieved by the progress of science and prosperity, self-rule, self-sufficiency, and the achievement of happiness in an America understood to be the vanguard of history.
Impatience and Disappointment
However, after more than 200 years, Americans are apparently not happy about unfulfilled promises of heaven on earth. They are turning with renewed interest to thinking about heaven again, or so it seems. John Leland surveyed the American scene late last year (New York Times, 12/21/03), and was surprised by what he found. A Harris poll, says Leland, showed that "82 percent of Americans said they believed in heaven, and of these, 63 percent said they were likely to go there. Only 1 percent said they were going to hell." "Angels in America," "Bruce Almighty," and various accounts of the afterlife in other movies and a slew of books "portray heaven as in sync with the latest earthbound trends . . . [and] describe a pleasant neighborhood that reflects the society that produced them."
Leland quotes from Wade Clark Roofs book Spiritual Marketplace, showing how images of heaven have shifted in two directions. "On the one hand, [heaven has] become infused with ideas of affluence, a happy, consuming place . . . And at the same time, there's a sense that one will be rejoined with family and friends. Heaven is a projection of things that people feel deprived of in this life, and there's an unease with the lack of strong community ties."
Columnist David Brooks concurs: "the heaven that is apparently popular with readers these days is nothing more than an excellent therapy session" (New York Times, 3/9/04). "In this heaven," Brooks continues, "God and his glory are not the center of attention. It's all about you.... Americans in the 21st century are more likely to be divorced from any sense of a creedal order, ignorant of the moral traditions that have come down to us through the ages and detached from the sense that we all owe obligations to a higher authority."
Americans and other moderns, in other words, gave up the biblical vision of creation's fulfillment and decided to create heaven on earth. But now that the "heavenly" goal of earthly history seems to be unreachable, Americans are trying again to find "heaven above." In their search, however, they are able to imagine only a schmaltzy version of earthly happiness to project into the beyond, and that ephemeral video image will quickly fade into oblivion.
The conclusion to draw from today's talk of heaven, it seems to me, is that Americans are set on a collision course with themselves. No matter how powerful and prosperous America is, it has not yet been able to provide its citizens with the heaven they desire. They are still longing for fulfillment, for real human community, for real meaning in life, and the modern gods have failed to deliver. Personal wealth and America's dominant position in the world are not enough. There must be something more. Yet, to the extent that Americans continue to expect political and economic leaders to meet their needs and fulfill their desires, they place unbearable burdens on those who nevertheless keep promising to satisfy them. The end of this civil-religious spiral downwards will be political, social, and economic, as well as religious, disaster. As you make your way through this election year and watch the rise and fall of American candidates and officeholders, listen carefully between the lines for the religious cries and appeals, for the deep fears and superficial promises, for the naive faith and the tired cynicism. If you wonder why so much of the rhetoric has so little depth and seldom gives serious answers to serious questions about governance, remember that election-year rhetoric is mostly designed to win approval for the "good guy," who best represents the religion of America, and to expose the "bad guy," who is the false prophet and incompetent priest of this supposedly divinely chosen nation.
