Apply Liberally

I'm a liberal.

I know this because a helpful internets typology quiz has come my way and told me so. That label may need a good deal of conditioning, but, as far as I'm okay with labels, I am okay with being called a liberal.

Jerks, and by that I mean hyper-nationalist jingos (I guess I am pretty okay with labels) have been generally successful at making it a term of opprobrium, or if not scorn, at best it is a way for them to say, "La la la- I can't hear you." It's an odd thing to defend America from liberals or accuse liberals of being America-Haters when in actuality the term is at the heart of the American ideal (if there is one). For good or bad, liberalism is Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, The Bill of Rights et al. It's also Voltaire, Rabelais, and other priests in the cult of the individual for which America, or at least Americana, is its Zion. If there is an ism that undergirds American constitutional democracy it is liberalism.

Strangely, this is the weight of the label I would be most uncomfortable bearing. All of that Do What Thou Will faith in the individual and reason should seem unsavory, if not impossible, to anyone that has spent more than a day with a human being. I embrace being a liberal, but not to the degree that I think the individual alone is anything that is worth pretending exists.

That might not matter though. That's not the kind of liberal that people mean when they accuse someone or something of being liberal. I think they mean something like, "For some reason I disagree with you, but I don't want to figure out why that might be so I'll just say, 'You're a liberal.'" And really, that's just a genteel form of "gay"-

"You believe in not-for-profit healthcare? That's so gay."

Nonetheless, I embrace the label, as far as it is embraceable. And it doesn't stop with politics; I embrace it as a description of my spiritual outlook.

When I was applying to graduate schools I received a lot of helpful advice about what schools I should attend- or at least which I should fear. By helpful advice, I mean furrowed brows and whispers that seminaries are really cemeteries (get it?) and that secular schools are designed to destroy my faith. If I wanted to have anything worth believing at the end of the day, I'd better choose a conservative school.

I discovered I could know which schools were conservative if they held scripture in high regard. And because liberal schools might sneakily pretend they value the Bible, I had to be careful. There is a test to see how highly a school, or even a congregation, regards scripture. Only truly conservative schools hold scripture in such high regard, that, when it comes to women in positions of church leadership, they know to ignore the whole of the Bible and focus instead on two verses from two books of the New Testament.

I can't swing that way. I'm a liberal so I chose a liberal school. But I like to pretend it's more than a matter of how I swing. It seems that God's work in history is incredibly subversive. A lot of scripture seems to be almost insurrection. Israel seems to be constantly struggling against God (go figure), and God seems to be constantly over-turning their institutions of rule and dominance. That seems a strange position.

If there is a thing we call god, it seems like it should be something central and dominant. If we knew what this god wanted, followed its rules, and demonstrated intense loyalty, almost by necessity, we should be in positions of favor and control. We'd get to be this god's attorneys general, representatives to the UN, and presidents of the World Bank. Our houses would be big and our churches would be mega. I mean if a god is worth being called god, it seems the least it could do is set up some sort of universal order of tit for tat or provide the clear bureaucratic means for expanding our territory and living a life driven by purpose.

It seems instead that the God described in the Bible is a God of the fringe that stands apart from these institutions of power and undermines them. Even if they are set up for him or his people, this God doesn't seem to particularly care for them and these institutions of power don't seem to particularly care for him.

God seems to have a sort of oppositional relation to the way things are, even the way things are in the Bible. It kind of makes sense that his body, as it is present in the world would also have this oppositional relation to the conventional powers of the world. It would be fringe rather than central, subversive rather than dominant. It would challenge the assumptions and conventions of whatever historic conditions it is found. Of course by this I mean it would not bathe, have dreadlocks, and play hacky sack all day. Or something like that. I think in order to buck convention I will leave it at that.

Like I said, as far as labels go, I could be called worse things than liberal.