I’ve got it in the blog-roll on the right – a web site dedicated to a critical look of media coverage of religion called Get Religion. One of the contributors, a long time major newpaper religion beat writer, talks about the blind spot or the religious/theological ghosts in news stories. Reporters who don’t “get religion” often miss key drivers of the stories they are writing. They attempt to fit a type of secular framework that just doesn’t fit.
This article is by a very good columnist in the Wall Street Journal (just in case the article is behind a paywall here is a mirror). In it he is starting to make some connections, although he has probably missed the source in the Presidents thinking. This chart is in the President’s budget.
Mr. Henninger goes on to write that, “Whatever its merits, their “Top 1%” chart has become a totemic obsession in progressive policy circles.” And right there is the Theological Ghost. He also writes that “Messrs. Piketty and Saez have produced the most politically potent squiggle along an axis since Arthur Laffer drew his famous curve on a napkin in the mid-1970s. Laffer’s was an economic argument for lowering tax rates for everyone. Piketty-Saez is a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich.” The key question to ask here is why has this 1% chart become an obsession, and why is it a moral argument? Mr. Henninger even says, “What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.” What is that something deeper? The theological ghost.
Read Luke 4:16-21 and then read Isaiah 61 and finally Leviticus 25:8-55. That is the scriptural basis for the theological ghost. Those passages are the core of liberation theology. Liberation theology has been and largely remains the theology of the religious on the political left. And please don’t take this as the negative it might read as, but President Obama was listening closer to Jeremiah Wright than he might want you to believe.
The religious left reads those passages in a very “this worldly” economic way. The religious right tends to make them “otherworldly” or spiritualize them. The left views it as a Christian duty to work to correct the economic imbalance here and now often through governmental means. The right tends to read liberation as freedom from sin, and that the left’s readings are dangerous and miss the main spiritual point.
Many people probably don’t think: 1) that they have a theology, 2) that if they do it influences them in any solid way and 3) ignorance of theology is dangerous, or knowlege of theology is helpful in understanding our world and our existence. The above is an example of a theological debate. It just looks like an economic and budgetary debate. If you don’t know what you are debating, how do you even know what a good outcome looks like?
