Where in the world are the American people?

Stephen B. Young, The Daily Record Newswire

Over and over again, our evolving presidential campaign just seems to align with where the American people are. We Americans are a divided people. Mitt Romney’s private yet quickly made public comment on 47 percent of Americans being more on the entitlement side of our economic ledger than on the libertarian, struggle-to-win side tied our ideological division to underlying social realities.

Those who take out more from the system than they put in, Romney argued from his rugged individualist perspective, will always vote for the Democrats because they set up the system under which those voters benefit. Romney sees the politics of self-interest at work here.

And, sure enough, recent polls show that Obama is the favorite candidate of 47 percent of Americans, with Romney coming in at 46 percent.

But is there no larger story here? No story with deeper meaning? Is life about self-interest and no more?

In the world at large, we have just watched the passion of religious piety expressed in anger and violence. A movie filled with hate triggers a corresponding and offsetting outpouring of anger and rage. It’s zero-sum Darwinism between religions: Eat or be eaten; kill or be killed. And the anger seems directed mostly at us, at America. This is a sad but real part of the world in which we live.

It’s as if the past 10 years of effort since 9/11 — a war against terror, a war to bring “democracy” to Iraq, and other systemic and continuing confrontations — have left us right where we were vis-a-vis Islam when the Twin Towers came down.

Are we Americans trapped in a deadly sectarian rivalry with no light to be seen at the end of the tunnel?

I write these comments in Singapore. This morning my old friend Philip Pillai, a former partner in a most distinguished Singapore law firm, an expert on corporate law and now a judge in Singapore, took me to an evangelical church here to see the service. The visit was an eye-opener.

Here in rational, efficient, neat-and-clean Singapore, which has the fourth highest GDP per capita in the world, well-educated young Singaporeans seek more meaning and purpose in their lives. They find it in a personal religion, in Bible study that links them individually to a higher power with an express moral vision for humanity.

This Christian church service was post-colonial. I sense none of the dependency on European or American pastors, priests or church structures that once came to Asia to save souls as others came to make money and set up colonial administrations. The pastor was deeply studied in the Bible, as were his parishioners. He had personal ownership in the text; to some powerful degree, it was his and not something foreign. He did take the theme of his sermon from a book written by an American evangelical preacher but let his reasoning and passion flower on their own.

Such locally initiated Christian churches are growing all over Asia. In China they are called “house churches,” as they are not sanctioned by the government and spring up wherever people feel a call to get together and find inspiration in the Bible. Philip calls them Acts 2 churches in reference to the first Christians who came together, without structures and hierarchies, to experience a kinship with Jesus and his charisma.

Modern secular society, rooted in the French Enlightenment and devoted to social engineering of the majority by the wise ministry of a rational, well-educated minority, just misses out on something important that people need: a sense of purpose, meaning and direction that does not come signed, sealed and delivered from our parents, our schools, our governments or our jobs.

Singapore is a strikingly successful modern society, but as Philip remarked, too many Singaporeans are just not happy. They also need to be part of a transcendent dimension to life — something their government can’t give them.

Now the week just before I went to Singapore, I experienced something similar but in a different place. I was a visiting scholar at the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. While anti-American protest and anger at the recent video denigration of the Prophet Mohammad were spilling out in so many countries, I was sitting in a center of calm and friendship in a very conservative Islamic setting, though I was an American and not a Muslim.

My experience was in such contrast to what was happening elsewhere in the world I was a bit befuddled. Our world is complex, but evidently religion can have a tolerant and open-minded side to it.

This is not the time to share with you what I think we Americans have done wrong over the past decade in our engagement with Islam and Muslims. But what is relevant to relate is my observation of the meaning that Islam gives to its adherents. Islamic University students, like the young Singaporeans I watched in the church service here — well-read, polite, articulate, ambitious to succeed in secular professions — want more to life than materialism.

They want a moral order; they want ethics. They want to live by more than bread alone, as Jesus said in the New Testament when he rejected the appeal of Satan.
Islam, which provides spiritual sustenance for hundreds of millions, is not going to disappear. No matter how much its evaporation as a faith would please certain Christians and Jews, this will not happen.

No war on terror, or invasion of Iraq, or bombing of Iran, will change a geo-political equation based on faith and identity and personal meaning. Hard power seems to be quite useless when the realities of human civilization come to the surface as they do in religious faith.

Religion has not gone away, as Enlightenment scholars wished and predicted, and I don’t think it will ever go away. It is too much a part of what makes us human.
To bring America to a new place in history — one less divisive and polarizing — we need to vitalize somehow an humanly inherent, generic, religious instinct in ways that affirm and build constructively.

The image that comes to mind as a metaphor for where we are with respect to religions is a wheel with spokes and hub. The hub represents the core values and moral sense of all humanity; the spokes connote different expressions of that core and different ways of finding personal salvation, radiating outward to a rim that embraces all parts of our global community.