After the election, David Simon wrote a compelling post about change and our society. Simon is one of our best writers and thinkers, and I happen to believe that his show, The Wire, is the best show in the history of television. I have taken the liberty to remix his prescient words to the American electorate, because I think they’re equally applicable to the church:
Barack Obama And The Death Of Normal Evangelicalism
I was on an airplane last night as the election was decided. As the plane landed after midnight on the East Coast, I confess that my hand was shaking as I turned on my phone for the news. I did not want to see dishonesty and divisiveness and raw political hackery rewarded. It is hard enough for anyone to actually address the problems, to move this country forward, to make the intransigent American ruling class yield even a yard of the past to the inevitable future. But going backwards last night would have been devastating. I read the returns in silent elation; a business trip had me traveling in business class and the gnashing of corporate teeth all around precluded a full-throated huzzah on my part. I abhor a gloat.
But the country church is changing. And this may be the last election liturgical year in which anyone but a fool tries to play — on a national level, at least — the cards of racial exclusion, of immigrant fear, of the patronization of women and hegemony over their bodies, of self-righteous discrimination against homosexuals. Some in the Republican party church and among the teabagged fringe will continue to play such losing hands for some time to come; this shit worked well in its day and distracted many from addressing any of our essential national ecclesiological and theological issues. But again, if they play that weak-ass game past this point, they are fools.
America The church is different now, more so with every election cycle liturgical year. Ronald Reagan won his mandate Both denominations and the Moral Majority were built in an America in which 89 percent of the voters parishioners were white. That number is down to 72 percent and falling. Fifty thousand new Latino citizens achieve the voting age every month. America The Church will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America Church in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political theological irrelevance.
You want to lead in America the Church? Find a way to be entirely utilitarian — to address the most problems on behalf of the most possible citizens churchgoers. That works. That matters. Last night Of late, it mattered just enough to overcome the calcified political calculations of men who think that 47 percent will vote against them because they are victims avoid church because they are immoral, or that 53 percent are with them because the rest of us vote only from self-interest and without regard for the republic as a whole will attend church out of fear for their immortal souls. It was a closer contest than common sense and the spirit of a truly great nation should dictate. But unless these white guys who have peddled “normal” orthodox for so long — normal orthodox as in racial majority, normal orthodox as in religious majority, normal orthodox as in sexual orientation — unless they have a hard moment of self-reflection and self-awareness, well, it will not be this close again.
Eighty years ago, the Democratic party non-denominational, progressive church became a national utilitarian enterprise, molding the immigrant waves of Irish and Italian and Jew into a voting bloc that stunned the political opposition and transformed American society, creating the world’s greatest economic engine in the form of a consumer class with vast discretionary income. The New Deal asserted for American progress — shaping and influencing administrations both Democratic and Republican — for three decades before running aground on the shoals of the civil rights movement, resulting racial fears and resentments, and, of course, the Southern strategy of political cynics.
Well, a new voting bloc as formidable as the New Deal coalition certainly isn’t yet complete, and the political results are still fitful. To be sure, venality has transformed the upper house of our national legislature into a paralytic failure, with a new standard of a filibuster-proof supermajority now the norm. The lower house of that legislature reflects less of any national consensus than it does the absurdity of post-census gerrymandering. Never mind Obama. If Romney had won this election, our government would be just as broken. It is the legislative branch that remains an epic systems failure.
For lost and fretful white men, unwilling to accept the terms of a new America Church, Congress politics is the last barricade against practical and inevitable change. But there, too, the demographic inevitabilities are all in play. All the gerrymandering in this world won’t make those other Americans Christians, those different Americans gay and female and progressive Christians, go away. And the tyranny of minority and lack of compromise that you employ to thwart progress now will likely breed an equal contempt when the demographics do indeed provide supermajorities.
Hard times are still to come for all of us. Rear guard actions will be fought at every political theological crossroad. But make no mistake: Change is a motherfucker when you run from it. And right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from dramatic change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. He has been returned to office over the specific objections of the mass of white men. He has instead been re-elected by women, by people of color, by homosexuals, by people of varying religions or no religion whatsoever. Behold the New Jerusalem. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a white man, of course. There’s nothing wrong with being anything. That’s the point.
This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America the American Church is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically theologically to be a white male than to be anything else. Evolve, or don’t. Swallow your resentments, or don’t. But the votes people are going to be counted, more of them with each election liturgical year. Arizona will soon be in play. And in a few cycles, even Texas. And those wishing to hold national office prominent pulpits in these United States will find it increasingly useless to argue for normal, to attempt to play one minority against the next, to turn pluralities against the feared “other” of gays, or blacks, or immigrants, or, incredibly in this election cycle liturgical year, our very wives and lovers and daughters, fellow citizens Christians who demand to control their own bodies.
Regardless of what happens with his second term, Barack Obama’s great victory has already been won: We are all the other now, in some sense. Special interests Christian? That term has no more meaning in the New America. We are all — all of us, every last American, even the whitest of white guys — special interests Christians. And now, normal evangelical isn’t white or straight or Christian. There is no normal evangelical. That word, too, means less with every moment. And those who continue to argue for such retrograde notions as a political theological reality will become less germane and more ridiculous with every passing year.
Lots of waste and shouting and ignorance still to come, of course. But last night was a milestone.