Go West, Young Man

I note over the Memorial Day weekend Connie and I ventured out on another exploration of the Virginia Northern Neck. The featured roadside attraction was the mountain laurel in bloom. There was so much along Route 17, it looked like one long white hydrangea hedge.

Our goal was Urbanna, famed for an oyster festival, rumored to be quaint. A general goods store in an old brick building on main street exemplifies the way it was to shop before the big box era, though with jeans selling for $38 a pair, I can't see why I'd patronize it other than to preserve a small-town institution (sorry, too cheap).

Hanging startingly out of place in another store, though, was a t-shirt with quite a profound message: The Journey is the Destination.

That, indeed, is why we explore regions like the Northern Neck. It's the gist of this message, along the winding way, that ended in baptism, at age 43. That journey began with a Bill Moyers TV program called Genesis. Christians, Muslims, Rabbi's, professors, men, women, writers, poets, turned the stories of Eden, Abraham, the Flood and Exodus, upside down, right side up, in such compelling ways, it kindled a desire to know more. The desire to know became the desire to be; here I am, 10 years later, a veteran of the Christian wars.

I was reminded of Genesis this week when I accessed the transcript of a conference of scholars and journalists that was sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a philanthropic foundation. The kernel was Anglican schism. The exchange delivered much more, raising foundational questions as to whether the split is compromised of parties of temporary pragmatic alliances or whether the underlying causes will generate permanent West-Global South alignments, conservative and progressive. Will an interconnected world split down the middle into the two camps?

In some denominations, an influx of millions of Global South converts has already set the tone. The Seventh Day Adventists, for one, are now comprised of 1 million Americans and 14 million non-West newer adherents. The U.S. Branch is inclined towards female ordination; it's not going to happen now under a dominant culture that favors patriarchy.

I've read one third of U.S. CANA parishes are native Nigerian; will the same type of cultural gender class occur? One African Archbishop has been quoted: "Westerns think when these Africans get out of their grass huts and get some education, they'll be just like us. The more Africa develops, the more Africans will be about asserting African values."

Can a tactical alliance of outnumbered American conservatives, who turned to the Global South, for the numbers they needed to claim a majority, survive, in the long-run? If Global South members, for example, start to preach redistributive economics to their allies, could laissez faire Western free-market captialists stomach the radicalism, even after they've won or lost on domestic property issues, and don't need their new comrades as much any longer?

On the other side of the aisle, can American, Canadian and English progressives, aligned with world-wide liberal theologians, overcome the cultural divides? (I'd bank more on the progressives since modern liberalism is inherently inclusive, but nothing is certain; the New American Left fell apart when it wasn't able to contain economic, racial and gender differences.)

I note this week an editorial from the Dallas Morning News by Rod Dresher called How can we live with our roots cut off? He contrasts Russell Kirk, dean of post-War traditionalist small government conservatism, with Camille Paglia, a professor and writer, who happens to be, an atheist libertarian sexually-pagan Democrat, and that's just for starters. Dresher avows Kirk has more in common with Paglia than with the Urbana-busting statist coporate lobbying presumably conservative ilk of the day. "Kirk knew that culture was more important than politics," and "that reviving the moral imagination, meaning re-engagement with the art and literature of the West's cultural patrimony - in the face of the disaster of modernity, was vital to saving our civilization."

Paglia, in turn, writes, "I remain concerned about the compulsive denigration of the West and the reductiveness so many leading academics in the humanities have toward their own tradition - they reduce it all to the lowest common denominator or racism, imperialism, sexism and homophobia. That's an extremely small-minded way of looking at culture and a betrayal of the career mission of these educators, whose job is to educate students in our culture." Knowing her background, Paglia can't help but mean to say while she doesn't dismiss all those -isms as denominators, she doesn't attribute all the knowledge to be gleaned from the humanities to be all about them; there's also a larger contextual canvas upon which these are but some of the paints.

What better time than Memorial Day to reflect upon the broad panorama of Western values? I believe in an American exceptionalism; not promulgated and enforced from the tip of a gun, but, like Paglia, where educated citizens, schooled in the liberal arts, expect these values to naturally transcend the -isms as part and parcel of the general forward progress of humanity.

Like the progress represented by the happy-ending story of Gramoz Prestreshi of Kosovo who was granted political asylulm in the U.S. Wny? He was outted as gay by a family member, then beaten. He was forced to live in safe houses secretly leased by gay organizations. When he ventured out on New Year's Eve with his friend Lorik, they were beaten. The police taunted them; the hospital wouldn't treat them. After the story was leaked to the press, Lorik was beaten. He killed himself.

Gromoz Prestreshi's journey was filled with horror; for him, the destination of America was the destination. I have the luxury, otherwise, of living an American life where The Journey as Destination is possible and real.

How can an exclusive Christianity co-exist within a Western-American pluralism? A Scottish theologian, name of Lesslie Newbigin, may have an answer. In, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, he writes of three ways:

-exclusive in the sense of affirming the unique truth of the Revelation in Jesus Christ, but not in the sense of denying the possibility of salvation to those outside of the Christian faith.

-inclusive in the sense of refusing to limit the saving grace of God to Christians, but not in the sense of viewing other religions as salvific.

-pluralist in the sense of acknowledging the gracious work of God in the lives of all human beings, but not in the sense of denying the unique and decisvie nature of what God has done in Jesus Christ.

I note this week that Bob wrote in an email, "Think about this: as a result of the splits, there are Episcopal and Anglican parishes worshipping in Presbyterian, Methodist, Seventh Day Adventist, etc., churches. Why couldn't Anglicans worship in Episcopal churches and vice-versa? Sounds too easy. I must be missing something."

I'm only able, frankly, to accomodate the former and not the latter. Progressive parishes are inherently inclusive to diverse viewpoints; so it's no problem to welcome Anglicans.

I can't attend services, though, in Anglican parishes, where presence is implicit support for one view, one to which I'm diametrically opposed. I'm not sure what that says about me; perhaps more veteran Christians could overcome such qualms.

We all live within the gray of an unfinished high-stakes struggle. Yet it remains mostly within the province of Western values to sustain progress in preserving and extending human rights. I'm more than anxious for the rest of the world to catch up. It preserves the soul of America to offer sanctuary to those like Gramoz. Would attending an Anglican parish for services compromise this? Yes.