Posted on 12/05/2001 5:05:48 AM PST by LarryLied
NOT ONLY WERE America's love of progress and modern ideas under attack on Sept. 11. Also under siege was America's own apocalyptic faith. Osama bin Laden totally miscalculated and underestimated it, if he was aware of it at all.That faith is not characterized by unrestricted reason nor untrammeled scientific inquiry. Nor is it inspired by carefully wrought constitutional safeguards.
The American faith I refer to sees the world in climactic, often incendiary terms, punctuated by crises that no mind can adequately comprehend. It's the sort of religion that does not succumb to the claims of the intellect or the comfortable assumptions of reasonableness, but invests itself unreservedly in emotion and passion and life-long commitment.
That faith has its moment of origin in an undeniably, unexplainably certain experience of salvation. That phenomenon, tantamount to a divine visitation, is believed to overcome whatever records of depravity may have impeded human life before conversion.
This is the religion that began to gain momentum in 1740, when Jonathan Edwards preached in Enfield, Conn., about sinners in the hands of an angry God, and reached a crescendo in 1755, in Guilford County, N.C., through the enormously successful efforts of Shubael Stearns, who focused his revivalistic messages on his parishioners' heartaches, family dissensions and unfulfilling, dreary years of emigration to Southern mountain frontiers.
In Providence, this is the religion that prompted Joseph Snow, first pastor in 1743 of the church that would be named Beneficent 50 years later, to challenge his successor, James E. "Paddy" Wilson, to ask whether the monumentally large Meeting House on Weybosset Street was a fair approximation of the humble stable of Bethlehem.
From 1985 through 1987, this is the religion that motivated Beneficent Church, over considerable community disapproval, to replace its badly tarnished gold-leafed dome with a more practical, economical and ethically appropriate copper material. "Copper is for the poor, whom we represent and serve. Gold has another connotation," said Beneficent. That was a voice that bin Laden never heard.
This is the religion that defined the real horror of America's Civil War. That war, particularly in the South, turned neighbor against neighbor, and ran barricades through families traditionally close in affection and loyalty. But somehow, because of a deep undercurrent of religious bonding, the need for survival in a primitive environment transcended that shattering crisis.
So it was also in the North, as people began to envision what life would be like in a new mercantile, diversely defined culture.
Finally, and paradoxically, this is the religion that confronted Auschwitz and Hiroshima through the brilliant, supremely rational theologies of the Reinhold Niebuhrs and Paul Tillichs. They felt in the bestial world events of the 1930s and '40s a repudiation not only of the mind but also of the spirit of everything human. And, as a follow-through of that revolution in theology and religious life, this is the force that fought American abuses of civil rights and led the fight on our soil over Vietnam.
All of those dramatic punctuation marks in America's history remind us that there is a force in American religious faith that produces a fury when confronted with anything incomprehensible. Osama bin Laden didn't reckon on that. He thought he was dealing with Western challenges to the Islamic high-water marks of civilization, when Islam provided a counter-culture to Europe's Middle Ages.
What he ignored to his peril were the several centuries of Western struggle with the conflicting forces of Zeus-like order and Dionysian intuition that reasonableness has its painfully clear limits. What completely eluded him was America's own counter-culture to rationalism, a counter-culture aroused to enormous anger when something basically human is violated.
Perhaps it will not sound too preachy to suggest that America's often wrenching struggles with irrationalisms will evoke not a response of terrorism to match bin Laden's, but rather deeply spirited prophetic fervor.
Sept. 11 was a watershed in our lives, as were the infernos of the preceding two centuries. What lets history tell the story of our ethical nature in those years was our inherently impassioned commitment to justice, not retribution. Somehow retribution just does not express the depth of our anger.
A. Ralph Barlow is minister-emertius of Beneficent Congregational Church, in Providence.
The forces against America have tried to reduce us to many tribes, and have succeeded to a point, but 9/11 killed a lot of that effort. If America is ever to fall, it will be because we no longer are one but are hyphenated Americans.
Certainly the Civil War and its quintessential manifestation in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," is right on the mark. Before you confront Americans in war, you should listen to that hymn. "In the Beauty of the lillies, Christ was born across the sea" has always been, for me, the most beautiful and chilling line in that great hymn.
I agree with you about Tillich. A towering intellect but misguided.
Thanks for the bump.
patent
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