thoughts on political culture
Posted by DLW in Uncategorized at 2:51 am | 
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I’ve been reading, Understanding Third World Politics, a book that Christian musician Steve Camp should read before he starts to speak out on int’l politics…In its chapter on political instability and revolution it discusses the importance of political cultures for political stability.
Political culture is usually defined as the way people evaluate and judge political acts and institutions. It is a system of beliefs, values and ideals about the way a system of government should function. It also is the standsrds of evaluation for the rules of the political game. This includes the means for transferring power, the legit boundaries of the state, who is entitled to participate politically and whether political action is likely to be effective within a given system. It also includes people’s attitudes toward other participants and their roles as political actors.
This matters because political cultural “conflict” is seen as a significant source of serious political instability. Although, stability is not just due to shared values, but whether the right values are shared. I.e., if everyone believes that you need to monopolize political power to protect your interests, rather than trusting the other group to share some power with you, it will cause longstanding political instability. And that will kill the possibility of significant economic development in your country for perhaps an extended period of time.
We definitely have very heterogenous political cultures in our country and this raises the notion of what may happen if we do not seek a detente in the cultural wars or a reduction in the acrimony between the different cultural groups within our system. I think there is obviously a need for cultural change on both sides. I have been rereading Jim Wallis’ book, “God’s Politics” and, to his credit, he definitely does call for political cultural change from both sides, particularly in his chapter on poverty. Wallis promotes a form of political cultural change by leading by example and pointing to the ethos he and others have perpetuated at Sojourners for more than thirty years.
Wallis is right in that a theological change is needed to improve US Christianity’s witness before the world. A key theological change that is needed is for us to escape from the secular/sacred dichotomy embraced by the neo-pietism that has prevailed in the US for so many years(see Mark Noll’s address on the matter.). This includes the church decrying clearly sinful acts conducted in public service as well as people’s private lives. This includes us seeking to hold politicians from all parties accountable for their conduct during elections and to oppose corruption with the support of organizations like Transparency International. It also includes supporting individuals like Joe Carson engineer and head of the Affiliation of Christian Engineers who has accepted hardship for his decision to become a whistle-blower and who has recently been nominated for Transparency International’s Integrity Awards.
I hope people can try and email TI in support of Joe or at least post a comment supporting him for his actions.
dlw
The 27th of July, 2005 at 12:58 pm
You make a point that stands very much in line with Augustine’s “City of God.” In his distinction of the Heavenly City from the earthly one, it is the attitude and disposition of the Heavenly City’s residents that play the predominant part in the city’s blessedness.
The 18th of September, 2006 at 6:24 pm
[…] I wrote a comment that was somewhat critical of Wallis’s framing of the dialogue as first and foremost one of values. It seems Reed has also responded. Thoughts: Right Political Action is never simply a matter of values, it’s also a matter of strategy. The value implicit with abortion is not its criminalization. The value is the sanctity of human life or more concretely whether and when we shd grant to the unborn legal protections similar to what we currently give to newborns. When shd we first treat the unborn as legally-protected-persons? or Under what defined circumstances may women choose to elect an abortion? This gets at the differences in values between autonomy and responsibility for the other. I would say that responsibility for the other is a very important value, which does not necessarily simply mean males lording it over females and taking their rights away from them, nor does it mean making women bondage-servants who must carry to term whatever human life has been conceived in her after her consent to sexual intercourse. It is at root of the need to love our neighbors as ourselves and fallibly answer the question of who is our neighbor. The acid test I commonly apply to the morality of statements about the politics of abortion is whether they could be used to justify the decriminalization of infanticide. Jim Wallis’ frame fails in that regard. This is why I am calling on both Wallis and Reed to consider my Pragmatic Prolife Manifesto. Another failed frame, in my mind, is to impugn the religious right for casting the values debate too narrowly. At the end of the day, we Christians have the right to decide what values will guide our political activism, though we shd be able to irenically and publicly dialogue about values/strategy as part of our witness to others. My problem with the religious right is just as much their strategies as their values. I tend to believe, along lines with what Saul Alinsky wrote in his Rules for Radicals, that we shd take people’s existing values as given first, seek to help them improve upon their strategies wrt their existing values and thereby win the right to help widen their priorities. IMO, If the religious right had trusted their leaders a bit less and pursued their agendas with better chosen strategies, we wouldn’t have seen so many other issues crowded out from being important in elections by the wedge issues of the religious right. And that for me is why I quibble with how Wallis frames the dialogue as first and foremost about values. Hopefully, there will be more talk about values and some of the bad political theologies current among many in the religious right will get confronted and transformed. But if the matter is one more fundamentally of political cultural change, which encompasses both values and strategies, then I would say Wallis’ dyed-in-the-wool blue state political culture hampers his effectiveness in changing the direction of the wind politically by changing the existing red-state political culture. For me, my position is one where I want both to affirm Wallis’s leadership and the importance of a Generous Orthopraxy for Christian Political Involvement, with the main supposition being that as Christians we need to assess and consider how our political involvement impacts our witness about our shared faith to the rest of the world. […]
The 2nd of October, 2006 at 9:42 am
Hi everyone! I just wanna say that politics is a favorite subject matter of all people—from youth to elders. When it comes to the topic of Politics, each individual is anxious to speak his mind and so are squabbles that are ready to explode. For all we know, Swiss politics has been silent in the global village; whereas U.S. and Asian politics are so alive. On the contrary, Swiss politics is also an extraordinary hotspot of debate and a favorite past time of each opinionated Swiss inhabitant.
The 11th of March, 2007 at 7:17 pm
[…] This is fundamentally a matter of political culture, though no doubt the existence of campaign finance restrictions, competitive party-systems matter. […]