Faith and Politics (Again)

This Trumpian age is a tremendous challenge for us progressives. I find us encountering a polarization, confusion, and cynicism that is unparalleled in my 80 years. And as a progressive, I try to see it as an opportunity for unity, clarification, and hope. And I choose to take the steps to make it so. That's what I mean by faith.

Faith is a condition for politics. In other words, without faith no politics, i.e. no space of freedom and shared power. No time of institutional memory and reform.

Faith and its accompanying virtues, hope and charity, which are all dimensions of the same existential drive towards actualization, intends, inspires, institutions, and culminates in the space of freedom and shared power and in the time of communal memory and innovation that is politics in its purest form.

Love is commitment to the present and to presence that recollects the past and intends a common future. Hope is commitment to that common future. Faith is commitment to a shared history that brought us here together. Thus faith is a commitment to tradition, the great ideas, science, evolution, and creation. It is an embrace of who we are with all our limits and potential. And where we are and with whom we are. Faith alone will save us--that is, will bring us to act together for our common good.

Faith embodies itself in principles, beliefs, and ideas.  These express but can also terminate or "statisfy" faith which, unlike the belief systems it creates, is dynamic and transcends all its expressions. True belief is faith stuck. Faith is de-idolization of its beliefs.

We are now in a situation in which beliefs regarding our "exceptional" nation, our "free-market, trickle -down" economy, and our "straight, Euro-centered" cultural identity are held religiously, as eternal and absolute. Such religiously held beliefs--idols of nation, economy, and culture--destroy politics, a dynamic process opening space where all persons share power and a time that reaches beyond itself.

But as a progressive, I take this as an opportunity to recommit ourselves to extended community, to continued clarification, and to hope. I acknowledge the evidence for this happy outcome is not here in this Trumpian Age. Unless we choose to see it. Faith is that way.