Jon Pahl: Four American Crises, Two Tea Parties — Lazareth Lectures

Four American Crises, Two Tea Parties: The Witnesses of William Allen (1701-1780), William Lazareth (1928-2008), and the Future of Lutheran Higher Education

By Jon Pahl, Ph.D. — April 14, 2010

Jon Pahl is a Professor of the History of Christianity in North America at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia.

Please do not cite in print without contacting the author for permission.

William Allen, in his passionate argument to keep the American colonies loyal to Great Britain, The American Crisis, published in 1774 shortly after the Boston Tea Party, began by describing his motives for writing. Please bear with me on this one, as we encounter together a little bit of 18th century prose. "The Author," Allen writes about himself,

was the more forcibly impelled to hazard his thoughts in public, from his being a witness to the violent and unjustifiable proceedings of New England, whom nothing could reclaim; at the same time, he saw that the most temperate clemency produced from her no better effect than the sneer of derision, and the defiance of contempt. Therefore the censorious are to consider the errors they may find in this [book], as the mistakes of the heart, not the deep-designing faults of the head. I hope, today, that I will not encounter the sneer of derision or the defiance of contempt, and that if you, my gentle audience, experience a temptation to be censorious that you will perhaps consider my errors also to be mistakes of the heart, and not deep designing faults of the head. (1)

That said, I want to invoke for you not just the legacy of William Allen and his commentary on the crisis produced by the first tea party movement, but also use some of the concerns of those in the new tea party movement to draw us into dialogue with the legacy of the Rev. Dr. William H. Lazareth — social ethicist, churchman, and your late colleague here at Carthage College. Moving beyond Allen's single American crisis of the eighteenth-century, I will discuss four contemporary crises and their challenges to our common life: first, the temptation to bombastic rhetoric and the challenge of civil debate; second, the temptation to evade civic responsibility in flights from death and the corresponding challenge to cultivate reverence for life; third, the postmodern preference for consumerist fantasies instead of sustainable social entrepreneurship, and, finally, the choice between religious violence or religious peacemaking. In relationship to these four crises, I will build on the legacies of Allen and Lazareth to suggest both challenges and opportunities facing Lutheran higher education in the 21st century.

Crisis One: Bombastic Rhetoric or Civil Debate?

I'll begin, however, with two little words: "You lie!" This succinct and calculated sound bite, uttered by U.S. Representative Joe Wilson on the floor of the Congress during President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address, signaled a decided low in the debasement of civility in America. With historical perspective, we can recognize that civility and incivility in public life are cyclic matters. It is inaccurate to describe the problem as a simple, linear demise from the glorious rhetorics of Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln to the evasive prevarications of Bill Clinton ("depends on what is, is") and the irrational screeds of Rush Limbaugh. Read some eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century political polemics, or even better, scan some early political cartoons, or best of all, listen to the ranting of Father Charles Coughlin, or, closer to home, of the Rev. Walter A. Maier of Lutheran Hour fame, to put these matters in perspective: the temptation to incivility in public life is perennial.

Even William Allen, in The American Crisis, resorted to some name-calling, while also calling rhetoricians to account. Most notably, Allen dismissed the leaders of the Boston Tea Party as "pseudo-Patriots." These pseudo-patriot tea-partiers, Allen went on "with studied Declamations harangue the audience ... [and] bellow till they crack their Lungs and burst their Sides." Such vivid metaphors aside, which we might certainly wish to apply to some of the blowhards in our contemporary debate, as well, Allen went on to contend that what motivated the original tea partiers was not an attempt to achieve civic aims by means of principled argument, but rather "to get into Place, and [to] serve the State with an 'honesty' that would astonish the World. Excellent Mummery!" Allen contended. The tea partiers manifested, he concluded, "a Spirit of Opposition."(2)

Allen pinpointed the contradiction inherent in any politically-motivated demagoguery, residing as it does in self-interest, craven ambition, and crass hypocrisy: "Can there be any Character more ridiculous in the political Drama," Allen wrote, "than a Person roaring aloud, with thundering Accents, against Government ... and endeavouring all he can to clog the Wheels of State, because he is not admitted to share the Favours and enjoy the Caresses of political Fortune?"(3) Incivility, if I can draw out the implication, is as sure a sign of self-interest at work as we have in our world. Mark this well: an uncivil voice is a selfish voice.

Writing in 1961 on the eve of the most crucial crisis that faced the nation in his lifetime, the crisis of civil rights, William Lazareth penned his own appeal for engaged Christian civility. Lazareth argued, interestingly, that racism is an uncivil form of Dionysian paganism. Racism and racial segregation were threats to civil society because they took root in a religiosity based on a frenzy of prejudicial hate and concentrated power that legally violated the neighbor with impunity. Racism was uncivil because it was, Lazareth suggested, Dionysian — it perpetuated an irrational frenzy. "The church is under orders to speak 'the truth in love,'" Lazareth began. Then, as if anticipating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from Birmingham Jail, Lazareth contended that "While we must remain loving and patient in the 'how' and 'when' of integration, the 'why' must remain clear and uncompromising." Christian communities — including colleges and other institutions of higher education — have a different standard than any partisan allegiance to what Lazareth derided as a "tribal god." "The Christian message," Lazareth argued, "assumes that the church is an inclusive community. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, Democrat nor Republican, Negro nor white, 'our kind' nor 'their kind.'"(4) Incivility betrays a partial perspective. Theologically speaking, incivility reveals idolatry. Incivility divides the world into a binary dualism, and then picks a side in a frenzied attempt to preserve one's precious (and always partial) identity. Incivility is a mark of the flesh, over the Spirit.

In contrast, principled debate and public reasoning recognizes what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called "the dignity of difference" and yet seeks the good (even the conversion) of the other.(5) Principled argument does not resort to name calling or shrill accusation, but imagines a common horizon to any debate. For people of faith, this common horizon comes from recognizing that God works in mysterious ways and that the Lord of history often uses the lowly and outcast, even one's enemies, to accomplish the divine purposes. "Perhaps," Lazareth concluded, "there is no better way to combat the intoxication of Dionysus and his cults of prejudice than to remind ourselves as Christians that we worship a Lord who was born a Jew in a church founded by Jewish apostles to include all the peoples of the world."(6) Such an inclusive vision suggests that by definition any Christian community, and especially institutions of higher education, must be centers of civility and public reasoning.

Contemporary Ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain, in her book Democracy on Trial, describes how the temptation always to pit issues in simple opposites and then to demonize one's opponents is both contradictory and a sign of crisis: "The language of opposition," Elshtain writes,

now appears as a cascading series of manifestos that tell us we cannot live together; we cannot work together; we are not in this together; we are not Americans [or, I might add, people of faith or even Lutherans] who have something in common, but [we are self-] identified clans who demand to be 'recognized' only or exclusively as 'different.' Think about how odd this is on the face of it: I require that YOU recognize that WE have nothing in common with one another. This demand is rapidly becoming a shared civic zaniness that threatens to implode our culture. We are in danger of losing democratic civil society. It is that simple and that dangerous, springing, as it does, not from a generous openness to sharp disagreement — democratic feistiness — but from a cynical and resentful closing off of others."(7)

Historically, institutions of higher education have been centers of civil, public reasoning. But under the sway of the identity politics of the 1960s, and the backlash to it that began in the 1980s, universities and colleges have also faced the temptation to tribalism and incivility, especially as manifest in a polarized dualism between various identity fundamentalisms (including religious) and what Muslim journalist Mustafa Akyol called "secular fundamentalism."(8) And Lutheran higher education can play a crucial role in promoting robust, yet civil, debate beyond these easy binaries of competing fundamentalisms.

At our best, Lutherans avoid dualistic thinking, and promote what Robert Benne called a "paradoxical vision." (9) A paradox, by definition, tries to hold together, to reconcile, or to transcend conventional binaries. Lutherans do not embrace paradoxes out of some abstract (much less ideological) love for dialectics, but because only a willingness to wade into the messiness of a paradox can produce in practice what historian of religions Mircea Eliade (and before him, Saint Bonaventure) called "the coincidence of the opposites," where a common horizon of apparently irreconcilable positions becomes clear. This is a matter not only of theology, but also of culture — of the ethos of a school and faculty. Although I have not, alas, conducted a rigorous sociological survey, I have visited more than a few Lutheran campuses — even schools only tangentially Lutheran in terms of numbers and explicit identity. The ethos at many of these schools, and even more the labor in the classroom and in research among faculty, and the administrative effort of many administrators, continues to manifest this "paradoxical vision." At our best, our schools hold together in common work Republicans and Democrats, left and right, Jew and Greek, black and white — and any other culturally constructed dichotomies we might like to pose. This paradoxical vision and its corresponding ethos not only strengthens the internal pluralism of our institutions, but also provides a significant service to civil society. If our students are one day to lift our collective discourse out of its current morass of incivility, they will need to be cultivated in the practice of civil, public reasoning. Claiming this legacy of a "paradoxical vision" seems to me a challenge facing, and an opportunity awaiting, Lutheran institutions of higher education in the twenty-first century.

For democracy is not the only thing at risk here. The ability to reason together robustly is also vital for churches — and other voluntary agencies. This is a matter, in short, of theology as well as ethics; of physics and metaphysics as well as rhetoric. Bill Lazareth, to wrap up our exploration of this first American crisis, put it this way: "Those who have succeeded in breaking bread together have been constrained by a power not their own."(10) The One who was broken for us, and who through Easter becomes for us the Bread of Life, invites, if not mandates, us to constrain our temptations to incivility in recognition of our own sinfulness. That same One calls us, in imitation of an infinite generosity, and in the words of the Apostle Paul, to "put the best construction on everything."

Crisis Two: Flights from Death or Reverence for Life?

The current debate over healthcare, which has been marked both mountaintops and valleys of civility, is not merely a debate over policy. It is also a debate about the ethics of living and dying. Historically, Americans have not been very good at facing the facts about finitude. Many years ago, Jessica Mitford described in vivid terms The American Way of Death, which centered primarily on avoiding it, sanitizing it, and denying it as long as possible in a ridiculous cult of youth that has since led us to the multi-billion dollar cosmetic surgery industry.(11) Around the same time Ernest Becker wrote a Pulitzer prize-winning book titled The Denial of Death that described how people construct what he calls "vital lies" to preserve our symbolic immortality.(12) This tendency to deny death at all costs is, of course, unrealistic. We share that common horizon. Yet death denial is pervasive in America, and it is precisely the spectre of mortality that is the unstated bugaboo behind the entire healthcare debate. When Sarah Palin and other tea party devotees invoked "Obama death panels for Grandma" as the likely outcome of the new healthcare policies, it was not only anxiety over Grandma's impending demise that made the charge resonate.

Now, death denial may be a human universal, but it has developed in a particularly concentrated form here in America. Harvard's President Drew Gilpin Faust, in her recent book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, has argued that it was that national trauma of America's second great crisis that is most directly responsible for the peculiarly American way of denying death. In that war, Faust points out, "the number of fatalities on American soil was approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined." Contrary to what one might expect, however, this trauma did not produce cultural awareness of our common fragility and mortality. Instead, civil war era Americans developed institutional, commercial, and symbolic means — with long half-lives — to sanitize dying and to shield ourselves from facing finitude. Faust explains: "Death created the modern American union — not just by ensuring national survival — but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments." Most notable among these national structures and commitments, Faust suggests, was a fusion of the nation and a religious rhetoric of "sacrifice." "Sacrifice and the state," Faust contends, "became inextricably intertwined." In other words, in the wake of the carnage of the Civil War, Americans North and South united around a sanitized religious understanding of suffering that subsumed human fragility under utopian nationalism and economic development. Death for the nation and its markets became "sacrifice." The twentieth-century world, with its own carnage of technologically-inspired genocides and world wars in the name of "progress," was the outcome. "We still struggle," Faust concludes, "to understand how to preserve our humanity and our selves within such a world."(13)

By way of contrast, and as an alternative to denying death by calling it "sacrifice," I want to turn first neither to William Allen nor to William Lazareth — although I will return to both — but instead to the Lutheran ethicist and Nobel Prize Winner Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer identified as the core of Christian ethics what he called "reverence for life." This ethic began, in typical Lutheran fashion — with the cross — with the honest recognition of human fragility and fallibility. In his address upon receiving the Nobel Prize in 1952, Schweitzer documented how in the first half of the twentieth-century technology and instrumental reason outstripped ethical wisdom, leading to the carnage of World Wars I and II. To solve this problem, Schweitzer turned, interestingly, not to Martin Luther, but to Luther's sometime nemesis Erasmus of Rotterdam. Erasmus in 1521 published Querela Pacis (The Complaint of Peace). In that treatise, Erasmus personified peace — in the same way that he did in his more famous Praise of Folly — to satirize the ways kings, princes, and priests perverted power. According to Schweitzer, Erasmus was the first to argue that the foundation of peace was an ethic. Laws alone would not bring peace. Laws needed to be grounded in some reasonable conception of the higher good — an ethic. For Schweitzer, only such an ethic — a vision of the good — could temper the runaway train of instrumental reason and destructive technology that had brought the world, as he wrote, to the brink of nuclear annihilation. And that ethic, beginning in humble honesty about our shared fragility, grows in the medium of compassion extending to all of life. Schweitzer wrote "compassion, in which ethics takes root, does not assume its true proportions until it embraces not only man but every living being."(14)

Now, if Erasmus was Schweitzer's primary source for an ethic of peace, Schweitzer also interpreted Erasmus as a good Lutheran. As an ethic, reverence for life translated Luther's paradox in Christian Liberty, published in 1520, into scientific terms. You will recall, perhaps, that Luther's argument in Christian Liberty is "a Christian is a perfectly free, lord of all, subject to none; and a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all." What Schweitzer did was to emphasize and intensify the second half of Luther's paradox. A Christian must serve all, revere all, love all of life. This is, of course, impossible. But that impossible demand is what follows from Christian freedom — from a theology of the cross in which we face death honestly and do not flinch. We are freed by Christ's crucifixion to be reasoning, willing beings. And reason shows that there's plenty of suffering around. And our will and feelings can be engaged to care for one another to alleviate suffering; in Luther's term, to serve all others.

Schweitzer wrote in ways that puncture illusions of death-denial and turn toward ethics at one and the same time:

I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live. As in my own will-to-live there is a longing for wider life and pleasure, with dread of annihilation and pain; so is it also in the will-to-live all around me, whether it can express itself before me or remains dumb. The will-to-live is everywhere present, even as in me. If I am a thinking being, I must regard life other than my own with equal reverence, for I shall know that it longs for fullness and development as deeply as I do myself. Therefore, I see that evil is what annihilates, hampers, or hinders life. And this holds true whether I regard it physically or spiritually. Goodness, by the same token, is the saving or helping of life, the enabling of whatever life I can to attain its highest development.(15)

Once more, an ethic or reverence for life sets up an impossible standard. The law, as Luther puts it, always accuses. There is also, however, a pragmatic side to reverence for life. Reverence for life means, in practice: do as little harm as possible. Reverence for life does not lead, Schweitzer makes clear, to a simple-minded pacifism or naïve idealism. Again I quote him at some length:

In practice we are forced to choose. At times, we have to decide ... which forms of life, and even which particular individuals, we shall save, and which we shall destroy. But the principle of reverence for life is nonetheless universal and absolute. ... Whenever I injure life of any sort, I must be quite clear whether it is necessary. Beyond the unavoidable, I must never go, not even with what seems insignificant.(16)

This ethic also emerged, it should be noted, not from some abstract philosophizing, but in the surgery tents of the medical clinics in Africa where Schweitzer operated as a doctor, and in his work as a parish pastor in helping families face difficult choices.

Now, having cleared up how facing fragility and not denying death can lead to an ethic of reverence for life, we can turn again to the lives of William Allen and William Lazareth. William Allen proved to be on the wrong side of history, but his loyalist procilivities did not prevent him from contributing in manifold ways to the founding of the new nation. He was a philanthropist who supported with his financial resources the construction of the Pennsylvania State House (you know it as Independence Hall). He contributed to the sciences and education, most notably to the building of Pennsylvania Hospital and the Academy and College of Philadelphia (you'd know them today as the University of Pennsylvania Hospital and Penn). Allen was also a public servant — notably Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for 24 years — and a patron of the arts, notably in support of perhaps the most important early American painter, Benjamin West.

In short, Allen's reverence for life spilled over in service to all. Despite his errant judgment about the War of Independence, we might even remember him as a true patriot. Last Fall, the National Park Service installed a plaque commemorating Allen's life near the place where he died — in the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia — on a plot of land now occupied by the Seminary where I teach.(17)

Similarly, William Lazareth, as one of the leading Lutheran ethicists of his generation, would seem to have been very much in tune with Schweitzer's reverence for life. He was an ecumenist, committed to understanding through dialogue faith traditions other than his own. His work on the vital document Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry was a hallmark of ecumenical clarity and collaboration. He wrote an essay titled "Work as Praise," encouraging the wider recognition of Luther's central insight into the dutiful joy of vocations. He was a churchman — a Bishop, even, and an Administrator — the Dean of LTSP. And he was a pastor — of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in New York City. Like William Allen, and like Albert Schweitzer, William Lazareth was "life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live." He recognized the "dread of annihilation and pain" that is a mark of the law, and articulated in manifold ways the "longing for wider life and pleasure" that flows from the gospel of the crucified Christ who faced death and overcame it in Easter so that we might live, and live abundantly.(18)

And what does this mean for Lutheran higher education? Under the sway of instrumental reason and technological sophistication, colleges and universities have increasingly specialized to prepare workers for our complex economies. But this specialization can come at the expense of integrity, as scholars and administrators succumb to our own academic "vital lies" that perpetuate the privilege of our narrow domain of expertise and dominance as a way to stave off our own fears of finitude. But as I argue in my book Youth Ministry in Modern America, young people hunger for integrity.(19) When possible, they seek out mentors and models and life paths that will lead them not only to a good job, but also to a satisfying life. And what is a curriculum but precisely such a life path? Across our various fields of research and teaching, we can ask, ought to ask, how we can promote the honest recognition of human finitude AND simultaneously promote reverence for life in all of its biological and cultural diversity.

For instance, for the past five years at the Seminary we have partnered with Lutheran (and other faith-based) social ministry organizations to develop a number of initiatives, including a new degree program — the Master of Arts in Public Leadership.(20) I'd be happy to say more about this degree program in the Q and A session, but my general point is to highlight the possibility of collaboration between these agencies and institutions of Lutheran higher education to foster ways to engage students in practices through which they might learn in pragmatic ways an ethic of reverence for life. The history and development of Lutheran (and other faith-based) social ministry organizations is a truly remarkable (and largely unknown) story. The more than 300 agencies represented in Lutheran Services in America served 1/50 people in the U.S. last year. Along with other faith-based social service agencies, these non-profit corporations make natural partners with Lutheran institutions of higher education, and (along with advocacy and relief agencies such as Lutheran World Relief, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, and others) potent venues to engage young people with practices — across disciplines (business, healthcare, sociology, history, the arts and sciences, and more) by means of which they can learn reverence for life, by confronting honestly the suffering that is the lot of so many in our society, rather than the denial of death.

Crisis Three: Consumerist Fantasies or Sustainable Social Entrepreneurship?

In my book Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces, and even more in the film "Malls R Us," I develop a theological critique of the consumerist fantasies now spreading around the globe that shopping malls represent, and that point to our third American crisis.(21) Malls R Us is a feature documentary directed by Montreal filmmaker Helene Klodawsky. She filmed at shopping malls in Dubai, Delhi, India; Paris; Warsaw; London, and Osaka, Japan — and with me for three days in Philadelphia. Helene also interviewed mall designers — mostly architects, mall visitors, and mall critics — which is where I came in. The film opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and has played in theaters around the globe.(22)

My basic critique of malls is that they function as ersatz, or pseudo-sacred places in what Buddhist Professor David Loy called a "religion of the market."(23) Malls are temples of trade, cathedrals of commerce, Meccas of the market. People make pilgrimages to them, consciously or unconsciously, and through their design and function malls trigger the fantasy that the good life is lived by fulfilling what I call the "desire to acquire." The problem is that at the mall, there's always some new product that can come along; in consumerism the desire to acquire is literally infinite, which is why (as Augustine put it) our hearts are restless until they rest in God.

But the religion of the market is undoubtedly the leading edge of American empire, backed by ever-expanding military might. This is a spiritual problem — a disorientation of desire away from truly fulfilling relationships with living and breathing human beings and with all of life in exchange for enchanted commodities and market dominance. This disorientation was behind the first Tea Party movement, as Northwestern University historian Timothy H. Breen showed in his book The Marketplace of Revolution, and showed more recently in a column on the recent tea party movement in the March 31 Washington Post titled "Whose Revolution is This?"(24) Breen's point in both sources is that the first revolution was motivated by a desire for market goods, but he is also clear that the first tea party was not just opposed to taxes, as the current movement appears to be, but was opposed to taxation without representation. The first tea party patriots not only opposed the king; they also eventually forged a Constitution that established representative government and the rule of law, which is why to be effective and not just destructive the current tea party movement needs to move beyond sheer opposition to constructive policy recommendations. What does the movement truly stand for?

And to return to our historical investigation, where did William Allen stand on the matter of market forces and their spiritual effects? Where did Bill Lazareth stand? And where should we?

Obviously, Allen had no problem with the accumulation of wealth: he was one of the richest men in the colonies. Yet he hardly hoarded his wealth, but shared it in projects devoted to the common good. Even in the matter for which he is most notorious, his Tory support for the King, Allen showed an open mind, subject to change. Listen to how he concluded The American Crisis:

If in the midst of a great hurry of business, and a multiplicity of affairs where attention is divided, and where errors will arise against the nicest circumspection, I am materially mistaken; ever open to conviction, if candour will take the trouble to confute me, I shall be ready to make every requisite concession.(25)

Allen was not, in short, an ideologue — of either Tory politics or of the so-called free market. Had he been alive during the current economic downturn, I suspect he would have been among those calling for attention to the mistakes made by economists, bankers, regulators, and ordinary citizens. I suspect he would have been encouraging us rather than to replicate the precise patterns of conspicuous consumption whereby a CEO of a corporation could earn, on average in 2003, 531 times the salary of the average employee of the same corporation, he would counsel that we practice public responsibility, and with circumspection attend to the limits on the great hurry of business and multiplicity of affairs that led to the current debacle.(26) He would advise, in short, that we find ways to practice sustainable economics and to encourage social entrepreneurship where the bottom line of the commonwealth is part of what constitutes corporate and individual success along with the bottom line of the quarterly profit margin. This is the logical extension of his willingness to take on public responsibility during the American crisis of his life — even if we see him, today, as landing on the wrong side of that debate.

As with William Allen, Bill Lazareth enjoyed the benefits of living in a free market economy, while also being throughout his life a clarion voice for public responsibility by people of faith. An essay he edited in 1960 explored simply "Ethics and bigness: scientific, academic, religious, political, and military," in ways akin to Dwight Eisenhower's prophetic warning about the "military-industrial complex."(27) Unfortunately, few heeded Eisenhower's warning, and the resulting concentration of wealth and power has produced the largest gap between the haves and have-nots in American society since the Great Depression — as profiled in eloquent detail by Kevin Philips in his prophetic 2002 book Wealth and Democracy.(28)

In contrast, William Lazareth wrote and spoke in 1960 about "Corporation Ethics: The Quest for Moral Authority."(29) That sounds almost Quixotic today, doesn't it? Lazareth also spoke in the 1960s about "Economic Ethics," anticipating the ELCA Social Statement that came four decades later. And he wrote, in his magnum opus, Christians in Society: Luther, the Bible, and Social Ethics, about the "post-Nazi recovery of Lutheran public responsibility."(30) What Lazareth meant by a "post-Nazi recovery of Lutheran public responsibility" was anticipated in an argument in a volume he edited in 1976 titled Left Hand of God: Essays on Discipleship and Patriotism.(31) Lazareth admits, at the outset, that Lutherans were often isolated from social engagement in America by ethnicity, and by a misunderstanding of Luther's Two Kingdoms Doctrine that led to quietism. Instead, Lazareth develops a thesis as follows: "Luther had to put the church back under God's gospel; we must put the state and society back under God's law." For Lazareth, economics (like all of the matters of historical contingency that constitute social organization) fell under the "civil righteousness" of God. This "civil righteousness" does not concern salvation, but concerns the just and peaceful ordering of society, insofar as possible. We always fall short here, but "the answer to the world's false secularism," Lazareth wrote — in which I take it he would include rapacious banking and corporate greed — "is a restoration of the church's sacred secularity." In short, Lutherans ought to "organize for justice." "Our real question today," Lazareth wrote, "is not, 'What should Christians be doing in the church? It is rather, What should [we] be doing as the church ... in the broken world of God?"(32)

Bill Lazareth wrote those remarks during the tough economic times of the mid-nineteen-seventies, with compassionate, even prophetic, awareness that consumerist fantasies produce economic brokenness with spiritual consequences. Today, Lutheran institutions of higher education might help fulfill both Allen and Lazareth's legacies by helping to cultivate a generation of social entrepreneurs. The story of Habitat for Humanity and its founders, Millard and Linda Fuller, is illustrative of the power of social entrepreneurship — of a non-profit agency that is sustainable AND promotes the common good.

Millard Fuller was a classical entrepreneur — he made millions in the 1960s in the first direct mail businesses in the country. He was living the American consumerist dream — big houses, big cars, big vacations. I'm sure he shopped at malls. But then he discovered that his wife, Linda, was having a sexual affair. The couple met, and decided that if they were going to rescue their marriage (another matter under the civil righteousness of God), they needed to change their habits. They pledged to give up their frantic quest for more wealth, and live a more Christian lifestyle. They moved to Koinonia Farm in Georgia, and there the idea for Habitat was born.(33)

What Habitat does, amazingly, is to take perhaps the most rapacious form of capitalism, the pyramid scheme, and Christianizes it through what Fuller calls "the economics of Jesus." The more houses Habitat builds, the more it can build. Habitat homeowners buy their houses, and pay their mortgates (at 0% interest) into an ongoing "fund for humanity." This fund, controlled by local affiliates in company with local banks, then allows Habitat affiliates to buy more land and supplies and (with volunteer labor, donations, and sweat equity by owners) build more houses. For the last years of his life, Millard Fuller made a salary of well less than six figures per year, and when I heard him speak at the 20th Anniversary of the founding of Habitat in 1996, he said simply: "We live a much more fulfilling life now, for having given away our millions."(34)

We need many more Millard and Linda Fullers, and many more social entrepreneurial agencies to solve the social problems of American society. Habitat focuses on housing — why not similar agencies attending to healthcare, and hunger, and clothing, and agriculture, and infrastructure repair — you name it. Lutheran colleges and universities, precisely because they are NOT completely caught up in the desire to acquire and what Laz called the temptation of "bigness," are perfectly situated to cultivate such agencies in the future and the people who will lead them.

Just last week I met with a potential student for our MAPL program. Her name is Joanie Cross. She's an African American woman from Baltimore who has been a faithful Lutheran for over thirty years. She is also a graduate of culinary school with a recent BA from Towson University in Urban Planning. Her life-long dream has been to start gospel-centered cooking schools for ex-offenders from America's massive prison population. These schools could then provide employees to the millions of restaurants, soup kitchens, and social service agencies around the country. She's been a Lutheran, I repeat, for over thirty years. What if she had attended a Lutheran college or University with programs in social entrepreneurship where she could have learned models for starting such an agency? For the past thirty years she has worked sixty hours/week as a cook/chef without knowing how to realize her dream. I'm delighted she will be joining us in our MAPL program, but it has become one of my dreams to see Lutheran colleges and universities become places where vocations as social entrepreneurs become possible for the students who study with us. This would quite directly fulfill the legacies of both William Allen and William Lazareth, and help to solve the crisis of consumerist fantasies that have produced such havoc in our society, and around the globe, by engaging people with more fulfilling ways to live.

Crisis Four: Religious Violence or Religious Peacemaking?

Finally, recall with me, if you can, the first words I quoted to you from William Allen. What motivated him to write The American Crisis was not dumb devotion to King George, but in the words I quoted: "the violent and unjustifiable proceedings of New England." Eyewitnesses, and recent historians, can help us to confirm Allen's judgment about the violence of those tea-partiers he called "pseudo-patriots." The American Revolution, far from a glorious and harmonious stroll to liberty by peace-loving freedom-fighters, was in fact was a series of bloody battles, or what we would call today terrorist actions, marked by savage disregard for persons and property that mark the trauma of any war.

Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, for only one example, described in his journal how the patriots of the Continental Army took over Augustus Church in Trappe, Pennsylvania on September 27, 1777. Muhlenberg wrote: "the church was crowded with officers and privates with their guns. The organ loft was filled, and one man was playing the organ while others sang to his accompaniment. Down below lay straw and manure, and several had placed the objects of their gluttony, etc., on the altar. In short, I saw, in miniature, the abomination of desolation in the temple."(35) More recently, a book by historian Russell Bourne makes the same point well. The title says it all: Cradle of Violence: How Boston's Waterfront Mobs Ignited the American Revolution.(36) The book is about, in particular, the Boston Tea Party.

More to my point, as I argue in my recent book Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence, there were religious elements at work behind the violence of the American Revolution, as there have been in many cases of violence in American history.(37) More than three decades ago, my colleague (and fellow Martin Marty student) Catherine Albanese described how the patriots of the American Revolution were motivated to undertake violence by religious discourses and practices, and how they shrouded their actions in myths and rituals oriented to their so-called "sacred cause" of "liberty." The Revolutionary leaders imagined themselves as agents of divine providence, and they repeatedly invoked biblical tropes, and especially millennialism, to warrant the violence that they explicitly claimed would lead, somewhat contradictorily, both to a new Israel and to a new Rome.(38)

Today, religious violence tends to be associated, here in the U.S., with the suicide bombings of young Muslims that are dressed up by terrorists as sacred causes. Yet, it may be important for us to recall that American young men and women are also dying in battle these days, and their causes also tend to be shrouded in sacred rhetoric. To just state the facts: the average age of a recruit who graduates from the Marine Corps training facility at Camp Pendleton is just over 19, and the median age of a Palestinian suicide bomber is 20.5. In both cases, the young men (usually) are indoctrinated to "sacrifice" themselves for a cause. Now, discourses of "sacrifice" are conventional in warfare. Yet, it may be precisely the widespread and unquestioned use of this euphemistic religious language that makes the practices of killing and dying in warfare and terrorism palatable or even attractive to youth.(39)

What kind of ethic or religion is at play, for example, when political leaders invoke a discourse of "sacrifice" to explain and justify sending youth to die in war — which is (of course) a policy decision? In a speech on September 7, 2003, President Bush claimed in relationship to the war in Iraq that "these months have been a time of new responsibilities, and sacrifice, and national resolve and great progress," thus associating warfare with all kinds of loaded ethical discourse.(40) More recently, in an interview on BBC Radio on July 23, 2009, Vice President Joe Biden claimed that the war in Afghanistan was "worth the effort and the sacrifice that is being felt," and that "more will come."(41) Such language, again, associates a religious practice (sacrifice) with killing and dying in warfare. Classically, of course, sacrifice is often linked to projects of purification, cleansing, or catharsis. Sacrifice for the nation thus takes on utopian connotations. The state symbolically hijacks the power of transcendence traditionally identified with religion in the service of warfare.

In a stunning symmetry, the actions of suicide bombers have often been described as directed toward a similar sacrificial cause. Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, founder and spiritual leader of Hamas (who was assassinated by Israel in March 2004), once claimed that "[When] we have warplanes and missiles, then we can think of changing our means of legitimate self-defense. But right now, we can only tackle the fire with our bare hands and sacrifice ourselves." Note well the parallelism Yasin sets up between the weapons of a State — "warplanes and missiles," and the actions of sacrifice in suicide bombing. Closer to home, Osama bin Laden's description of the suicide attacks of 9/11 manifests this identical rhetorical tendency: "A group of young believers," bin Laden wrote, "sought to be with God, and ... poured out the water of life."(42) And closest to home, this mentality of sacrifice motivated individuals like Timothy McVeigh, is explicit in the recent rhetoric of the Hutaree militia not far from here in Michigan, and is implicit in the rhetoric of some current tea-partiers, who like to quote Thomas Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and of tyrants." This mentality of blood sacrifice is religious, whether articulated by Presidents and vice-Presidents, by terrorists, or by pseudo-patriots, and it promotes violence — whether by militaries or by suicide bombers.

Now, what does this have to do with William Allen, William Lazareth, and Lutheran higher education? Building on my remarks in the first section about how schools can strive to be centers of civility, I also believe institutions of Lutheran higher education can be places of peace-building. They will do so when faculty and administrators embrace the deepest truths of our traditions — Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian — and put into practice the ethical wisdom that our traditions convey. My model here is the University of Notre Dame, which features far and away the most impressive Peace and Justice studies program in the country — the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies (featuring yet another Martin Marty student as its Executive Director, R. Scott Appleby).(43)

Over the course of the twentieth-century, faith traditions and faithful individuals have increasingly disentangled ourselves from illusions that we must be custodians of the State and its monopoly on violence. More and more Christians are coming to realize that our post-Constantinian context is an opportunity, not a loss, and that it frees our traditions to distinguish between true power — which builds people up and allows them to flourish — and force — which exacerbates suffering and kills.

Mohandas Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Rosa Parks, Lech Walesa, Desmond Tutu, Leymah Gbowee of Liberia — and millions of women and men around the world — have activated the deepest truths of our faith traditions and our shared ethics of nonviolent social change to topple empires nonviolently, to end wars, and to transform nations and societies in the direction of justice. In light of such movements, to ally religion with an unjust State — whether conservative or liberal — is to prostitute the faith. Bill Lazareth made exactly this point in what must have seemed to some to be a most "unpatriotic" Bicentennial essay. "There is a demonic whore at work," Lazareth wrote, "who is still trying desperately to destroy the unity of the family of God." According to Lazareth, that word "whore" was in fact an acronym for, and I quote: "W for War ... H for Hunger ... O for Overpopulation ... R for Racism ... E for Eco-crisis." "It is [this] multifaceted 'whore of Babylon,'" Lazareth went on,"war, hunger, overpopulation, racism, and eco-crisis — which poses the chief threat to the bride of Christ, the church, as she tries to love a broken world as she herself has been loved by her divine Beloved."(44)

Of course, Lazareth was clear that any "political ... activities for social justice" cannot be unambiguously identified with the "in-breaking new age in Christ." We see through a glass darkly. But the entire trajectory of his career aimed to promote faithfulness to tradition AND activism on behalf of human rights and justice, as the working out of what he called "worldly discipleship." "Our plea," he wrote, "is for Lutheran Christians to maintain their ecclesial integrity amid more intensive social ethical involvements."(45) That paradox — worldly discipleship, where we are as gentle as doves, but wise as serpents — is the way Lutheran institutions of higher education can become centers of peace-building. As we establish programs in peace and justice studies at our schools, we will also discover (as my research on youth ministry in modern American suggests) a ready pool of students across traditions ready to learn with us the ways toward more just and peaceful societies.

To conclude — joining the legacies of William Allen and William Lazareth with the future of Lutheran higher education is a broad, and deep, stream of Augustinian public theology, which infuses the ethos of our schools across disciplines in the arts and sciences. This public theology, which engages us as citizens, is realistic about limits, but bold about grace. The current tea party movement, like some manifestations of the original one, can foster violence and a sheer "opposition Spirit" that demonizes "government," while abdicating responsibility for collective action through reasoned, public debate. But ultimately the movement's members can contribute, through our representative government, in building a society where reverence for life, sustainable social entrepreneurship, and religious peacebuilding mark our life together. Such a vision of American society would recognize with the Jewish Augustinian (and there's a wonderful paradox for you!) Hannah Arendt that this side of heaven true power is the ability of people to act in concert, in contrast to the usual assumption that identifies power only as force.(46) Or, as another Augustinian, Martin Luther King, Jr, put it, we are truly woven together in a web of mutual responsibility. It has been my pleasure to spend some time with you here at Carthage College today, weaving together history, ethics, and cultural criticism in a call for a thriving future for Lutheran higher education in America. Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.

1 — William Allen, The American Crisis: A Letter, addressed by Permission to the Earl Gower, Lord President of the Council, &c. &c. &c. on the present alarming disturbances in the colonies. Wherein Various important Points, relative to Plantation Affairs, are brought into Discussion; as well as several Persons adverted to of the most distinguished Characters. And An Idea is offered towards a complete Plan for restoring the Dependence of America upon Great Britain to a State of Perfection. By William Allen, Esq;. London, MDCCLXXIV. [1774]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. Temple University Libraries. 12 Apr. 2010, p. iv, as accessed at http://find.galegroup.com.libproxy.temple.edu/ecco/infomark.do?&contentSet=ECCOArticles&type=multipage&tabID=T001&prodId=ECCO&docId=CW106070751&source=gale&userGroupName=temple_main&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE

2 — Ibid., pp. 3-4.

3 — Ibid.

4 — William Lazareth, Man: In Whose Image (Philadephia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961), pp. 36-8.

5 — Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (NY: Continuum, 2002).

6 — Ibid.

7 — Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (NY: Basic Books, 1995 ), p. xii.

8 — Mustafa Akyol, "The Threat is Secular Fundamentalism," The New York Times, May 4, 2007, online at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/opinion/04iht-edakyol.1.5565938.html?_r=1, as accessed 4/12/10.

9 — Robert Benne, The Paradoxical Vision: A Public Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1995).

10 — Lazareth, Man: In Whose Image, p. x.

11 — Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (NY: Fawcett Books, 1981).

12 — Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (NY: Free Press, 1978).

13 — Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (NY: Random House, 2009), pp. xi, xiv, xii, 270.

14 — Albert Schweitzer, "The Problem of Peace," online at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1952/schweitzer-lecture-e.html, as accessed 4/12/10.

15 — "Reverence for Life," online at Association Internationale Schweitzer Lambarene, at http://www.schweitzer.org/index.php/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=61%3Aehrfurcht&layout=blog&Itemid=58&lang=en

16 — Ibid.

17 — There is no adequate biography of Allen. Succinct information is available online at http://www.bookrags.com/wiki/William_Allen_%28loyalist%29, and, of course, at Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Allen_%28loyalist%29, as accessed 4/12/10.

18 — Similarly, there is no biography of Lazareth, 'though I would love to be able to supervise a dissertation that would remedy this omission at LTSP.

19 — Jon Pahl, Youth Ministry in Modern America: 1930-the present (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, Publishers, 2000).

20 — Basic information about the program can be found at: http://www.ltsp.edu/publicleadership, as accessed 4/12/10.

21 — Jon Pahl, Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces: Putting God in Place (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2003).

22 — The homepage of the film, including trailer, is http://icarusfilms.com/new2009/mall.html, as accessed 4/12/10.

23 — David R. Loy, "The Religion of the Market," in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 1997 65(2):275-290.

24 — T. H. Breen, "Whose Revolution is This?," The Washington Post, March 30, 2010, online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/30/AR2010033003252.html, as accessed 4/12/10. See also his The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (NY/London: Oxford University Press, 2004).

25 — Allen, The American Crisis, p. 72.

26 — A helpful website is the AFL-CIO "CEO Executive PayWatch," online at http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/paywatch/ceou/database.cfm, as accessed 4/12/10.

27 — Lazareth, et al, eds., Ethics and Bigness : Scientific, Academic, Religious, Political, and Military. Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life (16th : 1960 : Jewish Theological Seminary of America).

28 — Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (NY: Broadway Books, 2002).

29 — George W. Forell and William H. Lazareth, eds., Corporation Ethics: The Quest for Moral Authority (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1960).

30 — Christians in Society: Luther, the Bible, and Social Ethics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2001), p. 2.

31 — ["Sentinels for the Tricentennial," in Left Hand of God: Essays on Discipleship and Patriotism, ed. William H. Lazareth, et al. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976). ] — source needs verification

32 — Ibid.

33 — Frye Gaillard, If I Were a Carpenter: Twenty Years of Habitat for Humanity (NY: John F. Blair, 1996).

34 — Millard Fuller, The Theology of the Hammer (NY: Smyth and Helwys, 1994).

35 — Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, The Notebook of a Colonial Clergyman: Condensed from the Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, ed. Theodore G. Tappert and John G. Doberstein (Portland, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005), p.

36 — Russell Bourne, Cradle of Violence: How Boston's Waterfront Mobs Ignited the American Revolution (NY: Wiley, 2006).

37 — Jon Pahl, Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence (NY: NYU Press, 2010).

38 — Catherine L. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977).

39 — For a fuller argument along these lines, and for the sources of data in this paragraph and the next, see my essay "Dying for a Cause: Youth, Violence, and the Gülen Movement--Beyond Tolerance and Dialogue," online at http://en.fgulen.com/conference-papers/gulen-conference-in-washington-dc/3113-dying-for-a-cause-youth-violence-and-the-gulen-movementbeyond-tolerance-and-dialogue.html, as accessed 4/12/10.

40 — Ibid.

41 — Alan Cowell, "Biden Warns of More Sacrifice in Afghanistan," in The New York Times July 23, 2009, online at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/world/europe/24afghan.html, as accessed 4/12/10.

42 — See again my essay "Dying for a Cause."

43 — See http://kroc.nd.edu/, as accessed 4/12/10.

44 — ["Sentinels for the Tricentennial," pp. 114-5] — source needs verification

45 — Ibid.

46 — Hannah Arendt, On Violence (NY: Harvest Books, 1970).