When I went off to university, I got involved with United Campuses to Prevent Nuclear War, which title pretty much explains the organization's purpose and constituency. Lest anyone think this will be a rueful look back at youthful folly, rest assured I continue to believe the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction to be about as sane as its acronym suggests. Moreover, our nation's determination to go into massive debt in order to finance weapon systems designed to devastate civilian populations is, in my humble estimation, a self-evident abomination. I very much enjoyed being a part of UCam, as it was known, for its clarity of purpose and for the sober strategies (such as education and lobbying legislators) it employed.
Then 1989 happened, and shortly thereafter the first President Bush grounded the bombers which, the more mature reader might recall, had to that point always been up in the air. With that, all the urgency left the movement. The national organization simply disappeared (which was a more than a little disorienting), and, a little while later, so did our campus chapter.
I focused my attention on homelessness and poverty, but struggled to understand how either of those issues could be addressed by direct political action. In conjunction with my social sciences degree program, I began exploring how my activism could (or, more fundamentally, whether it should) be integrated with my Christian faith.
I still ran into my UCam friends around campus, and began noticing something strange. They had all the anger and passion of our anti-nuclear campaigning, but it seemed to lack any focus. A few turned their attention to the university itself, trying to persuade the student body that the administration was up to something nefarious. (This was James Madison University in the early nineties: the administration’s most nefarious scheme was to fence off the quad to reseed the dirt trails beaten down by too many students cutting across the grass.) The activist community, such as it was, turned in, and on, itself. I remember a self-published “literary journal” in which an “Open Letter to a White Male Activist” asserted that caucasian men, no matter what their actions, could escape or exculpate the stigma and guilt of being representatives of the oppressor class. It occurred to me that this might not be the best approach to recruiting volunteers to the cause.
But of course, that was precisely the problem: what cause? My friends were activists who believed, as a matter of principle, that the world’s ills could be solved by political action and they were thus obliged to take action. However, they struggled to define what those ills were, precisely, and what political action would be able to address them. They knew there is something wrong, terribly wrong, with the world as it is, but were unable to say what exactly that is.
In the meantime, I got permission to sit in a class for graduating sociology majors so I could write a research paper on Christian political activism. In the process, I realized that what is fundamentally wrong with this world is sin, and that while political action might redress some of sin’s symptoms and effects, it can never cure sin. Only Jesus and the Spirit-empowered Gospel of the Cross can do that. I didn’t know it then, but that minor epiphany was what set me on the path which would eventually lead to the ministry of Word and sacrament.
All this came to mind when the “Occupy Wall Street” movement erupted a couple years ago. Say what one will about the efficacy of public protest, I agree with rest of my white middle-aged male compatriots that the “Occupy” movement’s great and fatal weakness was its inability to articulate what, precisely, its goals were and/or how those goals might be accomplished. It seemed instead to be saying litttle more than “Something is wrong, very wrong, with our society.”
And there I agree with the Occupy movement and my undergraduate activist friends. Something is terribly, terribly wrong with America and the world today. However, it’s what’s been wrong with every society and the world itself since the shortly after the beginning of human history: sin. People sin, and world is under the curse because of sin. No amount of political action can fix that. I’m thankful God has provided a solution through the Gospel, and look forward to its final implementation when our Lord returns for us in glory.
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