In the midst of my 10 years as editor in chief of America, I even have sat on many a stage with a purpose to address this or that pressing issue on the intersection of the church and the world. The formal talk is generally followed by some type of a question-and-answer period, the a part of this system that’s less scripted but no less predictable. That’s because I’m often asked the identical questions. Indeed, over a decade, a strikingly consistent pattern of questioning lulled me right into a false sense that I used to be unlikely to be asked anything latest.
After which I used to be. I used to be chatting with a highschool audience about faith and politics. That exact topic normally prompts questions along the lines of how Catholics normally should approach politics, or how bishops specifically instruct us to approach politics. But this query was personal: “How does your faith, Father Malone, shape your approach to politics?” That stopped me cold, mainly because I actually needed to give it some thought. I don’t remember my answer—apart from its stammering quality—however the query has haunted me since. I’ve given enough mental energy to it, actually, that I even have begun to formulate a greater answer…. I hope.
While it’s immensely helpful, even mandatory, one doesn’t have to have a specifically Christian hope with a purpose to find any hope in politics.
As I considered it, I quickly grasped the primary obstacle: Most of the possible answers looked as if it would involve some eventual divorce of religion from politics, some moment after I would depart the realm of the “private” to enter the “public.” But I cannot divorce my faith from my politics any greater than I could divorce oxygen from my lungs. Faith and politics are usually not merely complementary; they’re inextricably intertwined. Each needs the opposite to be fully what each is supposed to be. For the raison d’être of all political questions is hope that the world can change; in Christian terms, that it will possibly be saved, that the world is, actually, price saving. That political hope finds its driving force in my ultimate hope, my faith within the one we call “our blessed hope,” the one who has already saved the world and thus conclusively demonstrated that it’s price saving.
Yet while my Christian hope can’t be separated from my politics, it is just not due to this fact the one cause for my hope. While it’s immensely helpful, even mandatory, one doesn’t have to have a specifically Christian hope with a purpose to find any hope in politics. For that, we’d like only look to our national history. Which may seem to be an odd thing to say, because for a lot of us politics has never seemed more hopeless. Yet while our country faces enormous challenges—chief amongst them the odious influence of ideological partisanship—the situation is just not all misery and decay. It could seem that way, of course, but that is simply because either side of the partisan divide have one thing in common: They each think that America is taking place the proverbial tubes. One side says the current is irredeemably corrupt and so looks to a mythological past for salvation. The opposite side, meanwhile, says our past is irredeemably corrupt and appears to some fantasy future for our deliverance.
That provides me hope—not an idealist’s fantasy, but a real hope—way more powerful that any partisan project, for it’s born of the hard-earned wisdom of the American experience.
All of the while, here in the current, the vast majority of the American people—good, decent people who find themselves attempting to profit from their lives—are only getting on with it, reassured by the knowledge that past, present and future are all more complicated, more intertwined than either ideological camp suggests. Yes, our history is pockmarked by evil and injustice. Yes, many—too many—died in chattel slavery, or through economic deprivation, social sins for which we should atone. Yes, America was often too fast with the fallacious query and too soon with the suitable answer. There have been many Good Fridays in our long history. And yet there have been many Easters too. I believe of the a whole lot of 1000’s who gave their lives to free Black slaves from bondage; of the sons of Iowa and Kansas, and Massachusetts and Alabama, who rescued Europe from the phobia of Hitlerism; of the generations of men and women, Black and white, gay and straight, wealthy and poor, who provided a lightweight for others during their darkest days; of the prophets who braved hatred’s onslaught amid the terrors of the night, or within the corridors of power or on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
I even have an ultimate hope because I’m a Christian. But I even have hope here and now because I’m also an American. I feel within the decency and wisdom of the American people. That provides me hope—not an idealist’s fantasy, but a real hope—way more powerful that any partisan project, for it’s born of the hard-earned wisdom of the American experience: The story of a people, who, though acquainted with the night, have all the time rallied at dawn’s early light.
