More religious freedom would improve our attitudes toward the Soviet Union.
Last month’s superpower summit presents the Christian church an opportunity to be a positive force for both temporal peace and spiritual witness. To seize this opportunity we must define the role the church can play and offer its spiritual resources where appropriate.
Positive Signs
Overall, the tone of the meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev was positive. The fact of their meeting and their reasonably cordial relationship bode well for future discussions between the two countries. Face-to-face talk is far better than saber-rattling exchanges of memos between third and fourth-level bureaucrats.
Still, at various points during the meetings (Reagan’s speech on human rights, for example) it became obvious that a basic lack of trust between the two nations remains. And without some level of trust, all the verification procedures, necessary in their own right, will fail. So any progress that was made should be carefully qualified.
For instance, President Reagan’s dismissal of his “evil empire” comment from several years ago enhances the possibility of each side remembering that the other is, after all, human. We American Christians do well—as those who confess the sinfulness of all people—not to pretend that the United States has been truthful in all its dealings with the Soviet Union and other nations. But at the same time it is just and necessary to recognize that the Soviet Union’s history, including Stalin’s gulag, and its continuing totalitarianism make it a uniquely dangerous nation-state.
Perhaps that recognition accounts for the reluctance of the American people to embrace the peace process. In the minds of grassroots Americans, the distinction between the basic incompatibility of the Soviet and American way of doing things remains. Even as the summit meetings were taking place, polls showed the American people have a basic ambivalence to discussions with the Soviets. On the one hand, Americans would like nothing better than to come to agreement with the Soviets over nuclear weapon controls. On the other hand, a New York Times survey showed over half of Americans had little hope for the summit process, seeing it as little more than a symbolic gesture.
Most Americans see the basic distinction between Soviet communism and U.S. democracy as too wide a gap to overcome. Obviously, this distinction is an important one to maintain. Modern political history has shown the vast superiority of democracy over all the garden varieties of Marxist-Leninism. No matter what yardstick is used—economic, political, cultural—democracy is the clear winner worldwide.
For American politicians, this grassroots lack of trust is a formidable hurdle. Unless their constituencies wholeheartedly support discussions with the Soviets, senators and representatives face a political dilemma. Saber rattling still plays better in Peoria than do peace talks.
So if this distinction proves to be a roadblock to further progress with the Soviet Union on issues of crucial interest, perhaps it would be better to recalibrate the yardstick—remaining realistic but using markings less obscured by cant, sloganeering, and overly simplistic interpretations of history.
Enter The Church
At this point the church has something to offer. The Bible advocates neither modern democracy nor Marxism. Rather, it offers much more basic rules of thumb by which to measure the effectiveness of political systems. Paul says in Romans 13 that a good government does two things: it keeps the peace and promotes the common good.
If we could measure growing freedoms in the USSR by biblical standards instead of political ones, we would have a better chance of lessening grassroots distrust of the Soviets, without developing a dangerously naïve acceptance of a system that must always be handled with care.
Maintaining law and order in the Soviet Union is a task the government has executed with zeal—in many cases, a savage zeal. Public police, secret police, and military units are ubiquitous in the Soviet Union, keeping the lid on dissent and disorder. Even in an era of glasnost, such efforts may increase as tentative new policies will be tested by long pent-up freedom seekers. Increased sectarian interests in Armenian sectors of the country will also test existing and new policies.
From a biblical perspective, of course, the challenge in the Soviet Union will be maintaining law and order while at the same time providing basic human rights, both religious and civil. The big question is whether such is even possible in a country governed by a system that has always considered religion and individual rights to be subservient to the ideology of economic determinism.
There are some signs that this may be changing. Religious institutions appear to be moving toward government recognition as legal entities entitled to do charitable work and own property, rights that have been denied them since 1929. Some news reports say that the 71 bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church have revised its statutes and are ready for public debate on them this month. Restoring the church to a relatively independent status would give it an increased chance of being a leavening influence on civil rights in the USSR.
A Tradition To Work With
It would also give those of us in American churches a forum into which we could extend advocacy of the biblically ordained functions of government—both its responsibilities and its limitations. The tradition of religion in Russia is a long one. The recent celebration of the thousand-year history of the Russian Orthodox Church is symbolic of a faith that is still alive in Russia—to some extent in the existing state church, and even more so in the unauthorized underground churches.
Perhaps nothing would signal to the grassroots American public more about positive changes in the USSR than increased freedom of religion for all churches and all believers. There appears to be a spiritual hunger in the Soviet Union that 60 years of official suppression have been unable to eradicate. President Reagan’s references to God and divine guidance in his speeches before Soviet audiences were well received. Daniil Granin, a Russian novelist whose Bison was one of the major books in Russia in 1987, said of Reagan, “One thing pleased me especially—his religiousness. Hearing religious vocabulary from a politician is something we’re not used to.”
A positive change in the official religious climate of the Soviet Union would open the doors to a whole host of cooperative ventures between our governments. The differences between our systems and cultures are vast and will likely remain so. But the free worship of the one true God could establish a bond between the peoples of our countries that in the long run could have the most far-reaching effects.
By Terry Muck.
Suckers For The Zodiac
When For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington, Donald Regan’s exercise in kiss-and-tell, was published this year, American evangelicals were shocked and amused by the news that their First Lady consults a San Francisco stargazer to influence her husband’s schedule.
Were we entitled to our indignation? Yes, insofar as the Reagans have identified themselves with conservative Christianity. Biblical Christianity clearly condemns astrology.
Debunking the Barnums of this folk occultism is, of course, relatively easy. Their track record is notoriously poor. And their predictions alternate between the outrageous and the generic. But there is a more important question than astrological accuracy.
Why, we must ask, do modern Americans indulge in a wide range of occult behaviors, ranging from the apparently harmless habit of glancing at their horoscopes while reading the morning paper over coffee and cornflakes to the more serious involvement of paying serious stargazers to help them arrange date-books. (And if the Reagan involvement is any clue, those who indulge very likely include Christians as well as non-Christians.)
Perhaps what drives modern Americans to seek the stars is the innate human need to find meaning and transcendence behind the details of daily life. Science and the Enlightenment have given us the belief that human beings are responsible for their own destiny. They have stripped our lives of transcendence and put us in charge. But we certainly do not feel in control.
Meanwhile, a historically potent strain of American Protestantism has been for all practical purposes deistic. It has urged us toward belief in God with all the ethical freight that belief carries, but it has told us that we are largely responsible for our own welfare in the here and now. Hard work, honest dealing, and clean living are the controls we exercise over our short-term future as American Christians. But again, we certainly do not feel in control.
This has left us in a spiritual vacuum. The sense of transcendent meaning that drove the thunderstruck Martin Luther to cry out to Saint Anne and seek a monastery has been repressed in us, but it still lingers beneath the surface. We no longer look for elves and woodsprites. But neither do we expect the angel of the Lord to encamp round about us. We are easy targets for astrology (and astrologers)—just one of many forms of folk occultism waiting in line to fill the gap.
Looking for meaning and guidance in the stars is clearly not the answer to pressing national concerns or sorting one’s personal agenda. Indeed, it can often be detrimental. However, a renewed sense of the presence of God in the mundane would go a long way toward protecting us from hokum while renewing our ethical vitality. The burden rightly falls on the church. This society will never recover biblical transcendence unless a committed community of believers both talks about and acts out the truth.
By David Neff.
