Sam Smith
The death of the activist minister, William Sloane Coffin, propels a
troubling question to the front of my mind: where have all the cool
preachers gone?
It may seem an odd query for a Seventh Day Agnostic but I have always
tried to separate cause and character and have enjoyed a happy if
inconsistent relationship with those of the cloth. Besides, we are all
members of what Weber called the pariah intelligentsia, including
teachers, ministers, writers, intellectuals and activists. In other
words, moral outsiders of supposed integrity, passion, and faith
providing guidance to a market, politics, and culture that would often
just as soon do without it.
These days, however, religionists - as least as they appear in the media
- seem dominated by people-slaying dogmatists, thought-slaying
propagandists, morality-slaying hustlers and hypocrites, not to mention
those whose supposed spiritual concerns are merely tools to strengthen
their growing role as political insiders.
There are Islamic jihadists, a Judaism indentured to cynical and cruel
Israeli governments, a Pope more concerned with punishing the views of
American politicians than dealing with the personal habits of some of
his own priests, and Christian evangelists delivering to rightwing
politicians an economically endangered flock that has been sold the
absurd apostasy that abortion and gay weddings are more important than
pensions or healthcare.
Although I was raised in solemn and smug Episcopalism and educated in
solemn and stolid Quakerism, I soon discovered the alternatives. For
example, my father was involved in politics and so I quickly learned the
three major branches of Judaism: your orthodox, reform and liberal
Democratic, of which the latter was apparently far the strongest. I even
came to think that Jews were put on this planet to run progressive
organizations. In college, I picked up a book by a preacher named Martin
Luther King and learned that one could be both peaceful and political at
the same time. And, when I went to my friend Larry's house, an
occasional visitor for drinks or dinner would be Father Patrini, hardly
distinguishable, except for collar, from all the garrulous seculars in
the room.
In 1960s Washington, the preachers were everywhere. We had Father Drinin
in Congress, Father Baroni at HUD, and Father Kemp on the DC school
board; all three were as good company as you could hope to find.
Episcopal Reverend Jesse Anderson helped to kick off the DC statehood
movement. When I covered an anti-poverty meeting, there would often be
the Baptist Rev. Frank Milner, part preacher and part cab driver,
imploring the crowd with a white collar on his shirt and a change maker
on his belt. And there was the Presbyterian, Rev. Tom Torosian,
handcuffed at a protest and giving me a grin as I slipped a twenty for
bail into his coat pocket.
My first lawyer became a rabbi and my present lawyer is an ex-priest who
keeps telling me to go easier on the Pope. I once got an unrequested
grant from the Lutheran church for my community newspaper. I even was
invited to become Washington correspondent of the National Catholic
Reporter, although that journal - apparently remembering that it was
then the 1990s and not the 1960s - withdrew the offer without a word of
explanation. And when I was a member of the DC Humanities Council, I
happily supported funding a film on liberation theology right under
William Bennett's nose.
And I hardly thought about it all; I only enjoyed it. Regardless of
one's own beliefs, if you were active in any cause you expected to find
preachers, priests, and rabbis among your friends and allies. And they
were fun to eat and drink with, in part because they only witnessed and
never proselytized.
Part of it, perhaps, was the different role of the church in a majority
black town. In our community paper's two and a half square mile
circulation area, for example, we had over 100 churches including the
Revolutionary Church of What's Happening Now. I was reminded of this
while attending a performance of "Where Eagles Fly," a tribute to
Washington's Shaw neighborhood, once host to the nation's black
Broadway, U Street. The performers in the play by Carole Mumin were
better than five years worth of 'American Idol,' but the other thing
that caught me was how long it had been since I had seen that once
bandied word 'ecumenism' being so enthusiastically practiced. There
were, of course, the Baptists, but Abdul Majeed Muhammad sang a song in
praise of Islam, and Catholics, Episcopalians, and Jews all got their
props. A high point was the appearance of one of the great brass bands
of the House of Prayer for All People.
Here was religion in the hood rather than on cable TV. It's harder to
condemn someone to everlasting damnation when you see them a couple of
times a week or when your daughters play together.
On the other hand, the dominant religions we find on cable TV are
killing us, making us nastier, and erecting walls between alternative
meanings as rigid as those real barriers in Gaza.
So where have all the cool preachers gone?
About a decade ago, Jesuit Peter Collins described one manifestation:
"IN 1944 the first worker-priest missions were set up in Paris, and then
in Lyons and Marseille. Sharing the grime and toil of an often oppressed
social class was a frustrating mission, but gradually the barriers
between priests and workers broke down. This sometimes happened in
surprising ways. One priest, sacked in front of the workers, had a
fellow worker come up to him and say: 'You can stay with me. Now you are
one of us'.
"In 1944, Father Henri Perrin and other volunteers met, and with the
support of Cardinal Suhard of Paris, began working anonymously in
factories. There they emulated their previous life in the wartime camps.
By sharing in the labor and suffering of the workers, they hoped first
to gain interest in the Gospel by lives of credible witness, and then
(and only then) to draw people back to the Church. . .
"They began to see that the absence of the poor from the Church signaled
not simply a gap to be filled by 'bringing them back', but a radical
rethinking of the whole mission of the Church . . . Sharpest of all,
they discovered first-hand the complicity of the Church in injustice. .
.
"Catholic industrialists and factory owners, traditionally reliant on
the Church for support, complained bitterly to the French Bishops, and
then to Rome, accusing the priests of being partisan and divisive, of
being 'political' and Marxist because they belonged to the pro-Communist
unions. . .
"By 1953, the position of the worker-priests had become untenable. In
November, the Papal Nuncio in Paris passed on the Vatican's demand that
superiors of religious orders recall their priest-workers. Despite
protests from some French bishops, the priest-workers were instructed to
leave temporal responsibility to lay people. This meant leaving the
unions and their work." In 1980 another worker priest got the axe. Pope
John Paul II told all priests to get out of electoral politics. The most
visible example, Rep. & Rev. Robert Drinin, a progressive
congressmember from Massachusetts. Liberation theology got an equally
hostile reaction from the Vatican.
Clearly, churches of many stripes have pulled away from the spirit of
such things as worker priests and liberation theology. The preacher has
been put back in the pulpit where it is easier for words to replace
witness and propagation to supplant practice. And the industrialists who
make big contributions like it better that way.
This is not, however, unique to churches. For example, my own trade,
journalism, has erected huge barriers between itself and its own
parishioners both in who gets selected to write (post-grads being
favored) and what they get to write (filtered through the myth that
major corporations can truly practice objectivity). The worker priests
of journalism have disappeared as well.
Even secular non-profits have lost street cred as they have become
increasingly formal institutions based on a corporate model rather than
activist associations driven by the energy of those involved. A primary
characteristic of both the religious and secular groups is that their
programs have been increasingly dumped in a red wagon waiting to be
pulled by fundraising. Empathy, moral missions and integrity all come
later.
Oh, I know you're out there, Reverend Dude. That's not my point. My
point is that the system and its media only cares these days about
religionists who are out to kill, control, or defeat someone. The
worker priests, the cool preachers, the progressive rabbis are still
there but struggling in a wilderness of silence and indifference.
It's not my beat to tell you how to change this. I've got enough
problems of my own to worry about. But I just wanted to let you know
that I miss you badly.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment