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ESSAY:
"On Prayer and Politics" by Robin W. Lovin
January 9, 2004 Episode no. 719
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On Prayer and Politics
by Robin W. Lovin
This might be a good time to reconnect prayer and politics.
It is fortunate that Elisabeth Sifton picked the beginning of an election year to remind us that her father's famous Serenity Prayer, which our culture has made into a program for self-improvement, began as a prayer for political wisdom in a time of war. Reinhold Niebuhr offered this prayer on behalf of people who remembered the First World War, felt the effects of the Great Depression, watched the rise of Hitler and Stalin, and now found their nation tested by a second global conflict.
No doubt people in Heath, Massachusetts, the small town where Niebuhr wrote the prayer, also had more intimate, inward problems in 1943, but they surely understood that the preacher meant this prayer to connect them to the wider world around them. In the decades since, the Serenity Prayer has done a lot for individuals who were in turmoil in their own lives. It might do even more for us today if we followed its author's intent and prayed for a discerning realism about the turmoil in our world.
The problem for most of us is that we don't see politics as part of real life. It is something that intrudes on us occasionally, while we are otherwise involved with career goals, consumer choices, and family life. (Many of us experience the war on terrorism primarily in terms of its effect on waiting times at the airport.) Politics is a civic duty to be dispatched in a few minutes in the voting booth so that we can get back to the choices that really matter to us. Who today can look at politics and believe what Aristotle told us when he wrote western civilization's first systematic treatise on the subject -- that politics is the way we do ethics as a community?
So when we pray for "serenity to accept the things that cannot be changed," we're likely to assume that the things that can't be changed include most of the big questions about the way the world is organized and how our institutions work. Quit worrying about those things, we think, we can get on with changing what can be changed, which we locate for the most part inside our own heads.
Reinhold Niebuhr had a larger picture of what should be changed. He and his generation of religious activists refused to accept economic insecurity, racial tension, and war as inevitable. To be sure, Niebuhr is remembered today for Christian realism, a tough-minded approach to social change that rejected the sentimental hopes of earlier Christian reformers. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Protestant Christianity had been so successful at reshaping the cultural landscape that people could believe our problems would all be solved if people would just ask, "What would Jesus do?" (That popular slogan among today's evangelicals actually originates in a Social Gospel novel from 1905.)
Niebuhr understood that real change is difficult. It involves complex questions that don't already have answers. Real change is risky. You may get peace and justice, but you may also get new conflicts and problems that you did not anticipate. The Christian realist can't presume to tell you how it will all turn out in advance, but the Christian realist also knows that the only people who will say that the risks of change are so great that the present evils should be accepted are those who are benefiting from the present evils.
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Reinhold Niebuhr never became serene about injustice and the misuse of power. Where serenity comes into social ethics is in understanding and accepting where we begin. We cannot change the particular form that injustice takes in our time. We might have made great abolitionists, attacking the cruelties of plantation slavery, but the present challenge lies in the complex interaction among immigration policy, welfare programs, workers' rights, and global commerce. UNCLE TOM'S CABIN will not unravel those complexities. We cannot change the unique mix of evils that we have to face. Health care and the social safety net demand attention, but we had better turn some of our energy to the questions of terrorism and civil liberties. We cannot even change our own perspective on these problems, the blend of prejudices and insights and blind spots that we bring to these issues from our own particular social, economic, and ethnic origins. Serenity is not a matter of getting comfortable with doing nothing, but of doing what we can without being paralyzed by anxiety about where we have to start or blinded by defensiveness about what we haven't done.
So there is a kind of political serenity that frees us for change, just as there is a false kind of personal serenity that frees us from it. But there is also a false kind of political courage that substitutes readiness to impose change on others for the courage that accepts it for ourselves. Perhaps that is where the connection between prayer and politics becomes most important. To seek courage to change may be nothing more than a declaration that I have a plan and a warning that, if I am able, I will impose it on the world. To pray for wisdom to know what to change opens me to judgment. It is a confession that at the point where I begin this prayer my plans are at an end, and I have to find direction for the future in a wisdom I do not yet possess.
Can we really pray that kind of prayer today? Can we pray it politically? In personal life, I may have self-destructive habits that I need to face and conquer. But in politics, it is all too clear that there are others who would conquer us if they could. Can we pause to ask for wisdom before we answer that challenge? And in any case, isn't the evidence of history that we already have a plan that works? Those of us in the developed West with functioning market economies and secular, liberal democracies seem already to know how to produce what everyone else apparently needs. We are not where we were in 1943, when we were at war to vindicate democracy against totalitarian alternatives that had come within reach of overrunning the world. We are not even where we were in 1963, when rival superpowers faced each other with equal and opposite claims about the human future. If there's a judgment here, hasn't it already been pronounced on the alternatives to freedom and prosperity? We need political courage and a kind of political serenity perhaps, but don't we already have wisdom?
Of course, it's precisely at such a moment that wisdom becomes politically relevant. Because there are no eternal truths in politics, it's just when we are most successful that we need to start asking what needs to be changed. If we ask the question soon enough, if we face the limits of our starting point with a serenity that pre-empts anxiety and defensiveness, we may receive wisdom that we do not yet possess to show us what we need to do next and what we need to do differently.
Then, and only then, will it be safe to pray for courage to change what needs to be changed.
Robin W. Lovin is the Cary Maguire University Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University and the author of REINHOLD NIEBUHR AND CHRISTIAN REALISM (Cambridge University Press).
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