In a recent poll 61% of American voters want ICE agents to not wear face masks because covering their faces and granting them immunity makes it hard to hold them accountable.
The framers of the Constitution included a series of checks and balances and a provision that the president could be impeached in order to hold the executive and all officials accountable.
The founding fathers had a view of human nature which saw us mortal humans as flawed, especially when we have power. Lord the Acton’s famous 1887 dictum is a comment regarding human nature, i.e. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
I’m afraid that we progressives can be naïve when it comes to human nature. We are strongly influenced by the Enlightenment which emphasized reason, individualism, and scientific skepticism over traditional authority and religious dogma.
H. Richard Niebuhr in The Kingdom of God in America (1937) criticized liberal theology which was part of the intellectual foundation of the Social Gospel Movement a hundred years ago and the Progressive Movement today as creating “a God without wrath which brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
In other words no accountability.
The appeal of Liberal Theology is that it focuses on the goodness of us humans. If individuals commit crimes, we assume that the fault lies outside themselves —poverty, lack of education, racism, and insensitive toilet training. The Progressive assumption is that we humans are perfectible. All we need is to do is close the income gap, provide for healthy diets, fund good schools, teach the correct interpretation of history, eliminate racism, and overturn Citizens United to create fertile social soil in which every flower will bloom.
The Enlightenment world view, in my view, can’t explain why Jeffrey Epstein went bad. He grew up with virtually all of his needs met in Maslow’s Hierarchy: Physiological, Security, Belonging, Esteem and Personal Accomplishment. He nevertheless chose to inflict terrible pain on many people. I spent over an hour online trying to find psychological, sociological or environmental explanations for his immoral, sadistic, cynical, criminal behavior.
Couldn’t find one.
Then I looked in the Bible.
In just the third chapter we read that Eve and Adam lost paradise because they fell for the serpent’s lie that if they disobeyed God’s laws they “would become like God.”
They were seduced into believing that they would not, should not be held accountable, that there was “a God without wrath which brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment.”
Accountability puts restraints on our freedom and thereby frees us to live within the limitations that go with mortality.
In a Greek myth, Icarus flies too close to the sun — ignoring his father’s warning to not fly too high — causing the wax holding the feathers of his wings together to melt, which resulted in a fall to his death. Sound familiar? Hubris. Conceit. Pride. Vanity. Self-importance. Pomposity. Sin.
President Obama in his Hiroshima Speech called it “humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species — our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will — those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.”
Karen Carpenter put the human conundrum this way when she sang,
All my love I give gladly to you
All your love you give gladly to me
Tell me why then, oh, why should it be that
We go on hurting each other
Making each other cry
Without ever knowing why?
We all need to be held accountable because we all choose off and on not to live up to the image of God, to use a biblical metaphor, in which we were created. The long confession I will say along with the congregation this evening includes some of the following sins, a few of which convict me.
pride, envy, hypocrisy, apathy, self-indulgent appetites, exploitation of other people, neglect of human need and suffering, indifference to injustice and cruelty, contempt toward those who differ from us.
For us progressives that last one can sting.
And tonight we will not blame any of those sins on dysfunctional parents, bad schools, racism or poverty. We will say, “By our fault, by our own fault, by our own most grievous fault.”
Fundamentally, this is not a negative view of human nature at all. On the contrary, it is an exalted view that we are confessing what we have not lived up to. We have been created to be so much more than just “nice people.”
As our foreheads are smudged with ashes, we will be voluntarily putting ourselves in a place where we as individuals will be held accountable.
In the campaigns leading up to the primary election on March 17 candidates will blame our problems on the other candidates and broken systems. There will be little self-examination or confessing. That of course is needed and appropriate.
Necessary, but not sufficient.