We find ourselves in the midst of a radical awakening, among people who are raising basic and critical questions about the nature of our society and about the quality of life in the world we inherit. The questioning of a new generation has generated a new awareness and activism which poses a direct challenge to the American status quo. We are characterized by our protest and our frustrated search for counter-cultural alternatives more amenable to justice, peace, human values, and spiritual meaning.
We have become disillusioned, alienated, and angered by an American system that we regard as oppressive; a society whose values are corrupt and destructive. We have unmasked the myth of the American Dream by exposing the reality of the American Nightmare. Establishment speeches ring hollow in our ears in the face of a society cancerous with racism, exploitation, repression and war. Our revolt is against the deception and hypocrisy that divides America's rhetoric from its actions; from Watts to Saigon, from Columbia to Chicago, from Wall Street to South Africa, from Mississippi to My Lai, from Kent State to Jackson State and Orangeburg, from the FBI to the Pentagon papers. We have learned most about this country not from Presidential press conferences but from the suffering faces and sad eyes of the oppressed, exploited, and hopeless, locked in dark ghettos of human misery, rat-infested tenements, rural prisons of poverty, and concentration camps called reservations. We recoil from a perverted mentality that destroys Asian villages to "save them" and judges its success by inflated body counts of peasants and children whose country is being napalmed, burned, defoliated, and bombed out of existence to "protect it." Our moral sensitivity is wounded by student cries of human anguish and death which rise from the graves of a million Vietnamese, from fifty thousand American boys used as cannon fodder for generals, politicians, and corporate profiteers, from students beaten and shot for opposing the madness, and from the Black Panthers murdered in bed to "secure law and order."
Our ethical revolt against systematic injustice, militarism, and the imperialism of a "power elite" is accompanied by our protest of a technocratic society and a materialistic profit culture where human values are out of place. We see that suffering is not confined to the exploited classes, but exists throughout society as people experience the meaninglessness and oppression of their own lives. Obedience and conformity are the price of a "success" that is defined as nine-to-five corporate jobs and lives of quiet desperation in split-level suburbia. Money is a measure of status and worth in a society of created needs and garbage heaps of wasted abundance in the midst of want; a society in which things are valued more than people. The ulcerating drive for air-conditioned affluence has not given satisfaction or fulfillment, but has instead produced lives that are hollow, plastic, and superficial; characterized by economic surplus and spiritual starvation. Fundamentally, we protest a society that stresses "having" rather than "being." We see American society as rich and full of everything but justice, meaning, and spiritual consciousness. Recurrent themes of life without purpose and direction, alienation, lack of identity, meaninglessness, and existential despair, are clearly seen in our media and culture, in the confused lives of people around us, and in our own frustrated searching. The black person suffers, but the life of the white person is not as beautiful as the oppressed sometimes paint it. We are all prisoners, victims of our society and ourselves, struggling to find the humanity that has eluded us.
This radical awakening that we have experienced, this new awareness that pleads for change requires a rethinking of basic assumptions about our society, about ourselves. Our protest must be more than negation and refusal; it must also include affirmation and radical alternatives.
Our affirmation must have an adequate basis for our values, vision, and goals which can provide the motivation, direction, and self-criticism necessary in seeking radical change; a vision that can keep us from the bitterness, despair, hatred, and desperation that causes people to drop out, sell out, or turn their fight for justice and social change into a murderous crusade. We require radical transformation, a new understanding of society and ourselves As the analysis of our dilemma must be radical, so must our solutions—going to the heart, the root causes of our problems, being comprehensive enough to avoid simplistic pitfalls. Clearly our liberation must be personal as well as social. Marcuse has said, "Political radicalism thus implies moral radicalism: the emergence of a morality which might precondition humanity for freedom." Humans must be changed as well as their social structures. It is humans who built oppressive social structures, humans who exploit and kill their brothers and sisters. The brutality and stupidity of the twentieth century have painfully revealed humanity's inhumanity to humans, and rudely shattered our naive illusions about ourselves. Humanity's oppressive ego, self-centeredness, hatred, greed, prejudice, and aggression have again surfaced as motivations of our individual and corporate lives. We must escape the illusions of every simplistic group that looks only beyond itself for the source of human misery. We must realize that the evil we oppose lies also within ourselves. Herman Hesse says it well:
Now and again I have expressed the opinion that every nation and every person would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political catchwords about war guilt, to ask himself how far his or her own faults and negligence's and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other wrongs of the world, and that there lies the only possible means of avoiding the next war.
All this is simply to say that our new vision must be a vehicle for personal transformation, the emergence of the new person, as well as providing the basis for social liberation. To challenge the system, we must be willing to have our own lives changed, and become radical ourselves. To repudiate the old is not enough, we must act on the basis of a new reality that we have experienced. We must not merely suggest radical alternatives, but rather, we must live and be those alternatives.
We contend that the new vision that is necessary is to be found in radical Christian faith that is grounded in commitment to Jesus Christ. "If any person be in Christ, he or she is a new creature; the old has passed, the new has come." We believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a liberating force which has radical consequences for human life and society. However for the radical nature of the Christian faith to be realized, it must break the chains of American culture and be proclaimed to all peoples. The offense of established religion is the proclamation and practice of a caricature of Christianity so enculturated, domesticated, and lifeless that our generation easily and naturally rejects it as ethically insensitive, hypocritical, and irrelevant to the needs of our times.
We find that the American church is in captivity to the values and lifestyle of our culture. Institutional Christianity in America has allowed itself to become a conservative defender of the status quo, a church largely co-opted and conformed to the American system in direct disobedience to Biblical teaching (Romans 12:2). The American captivity of the church has resulted in the disastrous equation of the American way of life with the Christian way of life. This cultural captivity has caused the church to lose its prophetic voice by preaching and exporting a pro-American gospel and a materialistic faith which supports and sanctifies the values of American society, rather than calling them into question. By its implication in the American status quo, by participating in the anti-Christian mindset of our society (racism, materialism, nationalism), the church has lost its ethical authority and has become the chaplain of the American nation, preaching a harmless folk religion of comfort, convenience, and presidential prayer breakfasts.
We fault a narrow orthodoxy that speaks of salvation but is often disobedient to the teaching of the prophets, the apostles, and Christ himself, who clearly state that faith divorced from a radical commitment to social justice is a mockery. Salvation never occurs in isolation from one's brother or sister. True spirituality manifests itself in active concern for the needs and rights of people. We fault also a naive and inadequate liberal theology which neglects humanity's need of personal transformation and liberation, perverts the historic content of the Christian faith and reduces Jesus Christ to a Galilean boy scout. Our Christian messages are incomplete, hollow shells, manipulated by the forces of nationalism, wealth, and conformity into helpless captivity. Our church needs to be de-oriented from American culture and reformed biblically. A faith rooted in biblical data must stress both personal liberation and dynamic commitment to social justice that contains the seeds of social liberation.
A new generation of radical Christians is coming together to decry the church's accommodation to non-Christian ways, to reach out to others who have become aware of the radical implications of the Christian faith, and to commit ourselves to discipleship to Jesus Christ and the proclamation of the total Christian message of personal and social liberation. To be Christian is to be radical—it is to know the central biblical expectation of the death of the old and the birth of the new. "Behold I make all things new." Christian radicalism provides the vehicle for people willing to change their own lives, to challenge the system, to take the problem of change seriously. Radicalism is revelational in its basis and revolutionary in its consciousness. The good news of the gospel is the entrance of Jesus Christ into history, the inbreaking of a new order, the proclamation of a message of reconciliation and new life to alienated humans. The revelation of God in Jesus Christ and his kingdom provides our basis of value, hope, and a radicalism that cannot be crushed. Radical Christians seek to recover the earliest doctrines of Christianity, its historical basis, its radical ethical spirit, and its revolutionary consciousness. The radical Christian must resist those who would equate Christianity with the American way of life or baptize American foreign policy, or agree with those who compartmentalize religion and so emphasize the personal Savior as to mitigate his being Lord over all life. Radical Christians view the personal and social dimensions of salvation as integrally related in biblical definitions. The biblical concepts of rebirth, new life, and justice, point to fundamental change from sin to grace, from selfishness to love, from captivity and oppression to freedom and liberation.
Christians must be active in rejecting the values of our corrupt society, radical in our resistance and activism against the injustice of a racist society, warfare state, and materialistic system. We must be people of God, "salt and light," those of a new order who live by the values and ethical priorities of Jesus Christ and his kingdom. We must be radical disciples applying the comprehensive Christian message to all areas of life, culture, and human need—committed to reconciliation, justice, peace and faith which is distinctly Post-American.
Jim Wallis is the editor in chief of Sojourners magazine. This is the inaugural article in the first issue of The Post-American, the predecessor to Sojourners.
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