Back to Niebuhr
So finally (and thankfully) we have reached the end of this election season. Maybe it was my imagination, but my fellow voters yesterday were a subdued and somber lot, as well they should be. There have been not a few moments when our national "vaunt has been stilled." I would not. We all must pray for a renewal of the civic virtues presumed to some degree in our system.
At the very least we can say this: we live in a country where the safeguard of free speech still stands, where the foolish or the venal is protected, even if it is decried. In the halls of academia one can no longer assume the defense of this. And of course across the globe it is endangered - witness say Turkey.
I have been thinking recently about the specifically Christian support for this liberal aspect of our tradition. I believe it was Reinhold Niebuhr, the unofficial canon theologian of the American Cold War era, who said, in thinking about the dispersion of power, that human beings are good enough to make democracy possible and evil enough to make it necessary. Behind this was a distinctly Christian doctrine of the human person. In this our increasingly conflictual era may we hold on to both the commitment and its theological underpinning.
Peace,
+GRS
