Kindergarten rules. . .

I was listening on the radio and there was a report of some phone call of supporters of Kamala Harris.  It was about white privilege and women of white privilege and how they can support her candidacy.  In the beginning of this conference call or zoom meeting -- whatever it was -- a voice came on to issue the rules of this conversation.  There were the obligatory warnings about distancing yourself from your white privilege and other such things.  What struck me, however, was the call of the rule maker for the participants to put on their listening ears and to pay more attention to hearing than to speaking, thus giving women of color a larger part of the conversation.

Listening ears. . .   It reminded me a while back of an ELCA female pastor who warned that the feminization of the clergy would eventually result in "the pastoral office speaking with the moral authority of kindergarten teachers."  Yes, sometimes we do need to hear in plain and easy to understand words the questions, answers, and rules of a polite society in times not so polite.  That said, her words were initially lost to me until I heard again the conversation mentioned above.  

While there may be some who think that this is exactly what we need today in our world of conflict, suspicion, and violence, the problem is not listening ears.  The problem lies much deeper.  There is a rather strange arrogance in the presumption that the problems of our unjust world lie in the unwillingness of the privileged to hear out the oppressed and to give them space.  It is a further extension of the kind of victimization culture that has come to define us and people in general today.  We are not responsible for ourselves but are all victims in one way or another to the unfortunates who went before us (including our own parents).  How sad it is that have come to think that the problems of America are the result of people who refuse to hear instead of an honest disagreement over what is good and right and beneficial for the state of things in our land!  If we disagree over basic values and in particular over moral values, that is not a matter which will be solved by listening.  Either one is right and the other wrong or there is no resolution.  Competing values cannot exist side by side within one community without there being conflict.  The world is not a kindergarten classroom where problems are solved by distraction or diversion or sitting in a corner or a nap.  We are not a conflicted society because we are not listening.  We have stopped listening because we are not speaking the same language.

The role of religion and faith was once a key factor in the common bond of a people who were from everywhere but who were united into one community.  The values that once united us were not all that religion specific -- life, family, work, etc...  Even when we did not practice it, we believed that life was sacred and cherished it.  Even when we failed at it, we valued marriage as the noble goal and estate of life and the family as the central structure upon which any society could or should be built.  Even when we struggled for equal access to jobs and the marketplace, we believed in that marketplace and in the dream of a home, a job, and a means of providing for your family and helping your neighbors.  As imperfect as we were at these goals, the values were held in common. It is the disintegration of these values that has become our undoing.  We no longer value life but have treated it as a commodity at best or a burden at worst.  We no longer value marriage and family but have elevated the individual over all other estates.  We no longer value work but leisure and entertainment and pleasure above all things and tolerate work as a means to pay for what we really value.  Listening ears cannot repair what now lies broken nor can hearing each other out replace the common values and truths that once united us.

Whether you believe the doctrines of Christianity or not or believed them all the same or not, America expected faith to influence values and the common values of life, marriage, family, home, and work to be the bonds that bound us diverse peoples into one nation.  No, it is not the job of the Church to restore these to America as a nation but as a Church we would lie to our people if we denied how faith expected and supported these causes of life, marriage, family, home, work, and personal responsibility.  As the Christian faith has been co-opted into something that leaves people to do what seems right in their own eyes and in the moment, we have less and less to offer people and a nation in search of real unity.  Traditional Christianity was never an easy partner with the culture but it now seems we have little choice but to war with the voices of those who insist that life is a relative value, marriage is what we define it to be, family is not as important as the individual, home is a state of mind and not real, work has to be enjoyed to be worth anything, and personal responsibility is less important than acknowledging how we are victims of someone or something.  In the end, the Olympic controversy puts on display how distant culture is from the Christian roots that once grounded our life together in the West.  Our cultural decline is revealed not by the way the West has rejected Christianity but by the way the West has repudiated the values that once united us all as a people and replaced it with a false concept of diversity, equity, injustice, and access that can do little more than accuse and offers the pathetic solution of listening voices as what we need to repair what is broken.