There aren’t many teenagers that tune into C-SPAN. For that matter, the majority of them don’t know what it even is. Many years ago I became acquainted with this television station that airs political happenings, particularly congressional hearings. It wasn’t very long before one day Ohio congressman David Obey was a guest on one of their programs discussing current affairs. When Representative Obey was asked what his thoughts were on the partisan lines between Democrats (his party) and the GOP he made a very revealing statement. He essentially said that while the people in the red states were entirely focused on all the social issues, those in the blue states were focused on the real issues: health care, the economy, foreign policy, etc. Unknowingly, this long-time congressman had revealed in one tacit sentence the problem that both major political parties have fallen prey to for a very long time: compartmentalization.
To compartmentalize is to separate ideas and issues into distinct parts or categories. In other words, one disassociates one idea from another as being altogether different. This practice happens constantly in public debate. Though it is conceivable that the majority of the time this occurs it is done unintentionally, one cannot help but wonder if man in his fallen nature (which includes a darkened mind and heart) compartmentalizes issues in order to keep them from being uniformly guided by one transcendent value or being.
Imagine a pastor who claims his ministry is going well, while simultaneously acknowledging that his family is falling apart. For some reason he has failed to see that his most important ministry in life is not to his growing congregation, but within his home. Consider a theologian who tries to put together a text for a course that he is teaching. As he is using the text and his students are studying the distinction between justification and sanctification, a student raises his hand to inquire of the professor what John Calvin thought about this matter. The professor who compartmentalizes would probably say, “Well, that’s more of a historical concern for your church history class. We focus on theology here.” Obviously this creates a whole set of concerns, considering the fact that Calvin’s most significant contribution to theology was distinguishing between the doctrines of justification and sanctification!
When individuals neatly tuck away the different facets of their life into narrowly-defined categories, they fail to see the big picture. They do injury to their own selves by failing to see what kind of life their ideas, beliefs, and practices will collectively lead to if they wear one hat while balancing their check book, another while attending church, another while attending a football game, and another when they are in the voting booth. Ignoring the theological and sociological overlap between these categories will continue to drive a person toward utter confusion as their life becomes more and more fragmented.
Though the primary purpose of this essay is not to explore the causes of this phenomenon, it would be appropriate here to remark that this is unquestionably a result of modernity. Modernity with its emphasis on efficiency, technique, and marketing has no interest in the individual consumer seeing the overriding implications of their tastes and purchases. The emphasis is not placed on the broader interest of the family, a culture, or a nation. Rather, the individual self is the sole locus of authority, and therefore any reference to a higher guiding moral or metaphysical truth is at least marginalized, and in some cases altogether ignored (though the Christian vision of life is a stark contrast to this modern perspective)
One of the clearest ways of countenancing the dangers of compartmentalization is to lend an ear to contemporary political rhetoric for a moment. This shortsightedness that I have described pervades both major parties. It isn’t the variety of shortsightedness that fails to look toward the future, for in this recent political season the predictions of an ideal future have been nothing short of obscene as unfettered optimism has reigned. Instead, these nearsighted tendencies are much more pernicious for society. Parties fail to see the big picture. This problem can be seen in the tendency to diminish political ideology to one-line catchphrases that hardly a crowd in any part of the country could dispute. Kierkegaard’s words here are as relevant as ever: “To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions.” But where the contemporary political scene has lost its way is the compartmentalizing of the issues. More specifically, by failing to see that so-called “social issues” aren’t simply of a moral nature, and that they do indeed intersect with and inform the other issues facing society, politicians have just added to the confusion.
Consider just a few examples that have become significantly more apparent in recent days. One cannot neatly separate matters of war and foreign policy from the ability to balance the national budget. If a war arises then each month millions of dollars will be spent that had not been figured into the federal budget for that year. This money will come from somewhere. As it does it will have a huge bearing on 1) the balancing of the already set annual budget, and 2) the overall National Debt.
However, the above example really isn’t hard to wrap one’s mind around. What of the so-called “social” issues that only those in the red states are concerned with? Rather than considering such typical issues as abortion and gay marriage, examining a more fundamental matter will drive the rest of this essay. Consider the matter of life in general. More specifically, think of birthrates. Does breeding have something to do with the economy, for instance? In recent days, as highlighted in suchworks as Philip Longman’s The Empty Cradle, it seems that in a number of industrialized countries the sharp decline in birthrates is finally causing some government officials to panic, realizing that the future workforce is in jeopardy. [Incidentally, Senator John McCain during his recent presidential campaign commonly used the phrase “the fundamentals of the economy.” He later clarified his phrase by saying it was a reference to the American workforce itself. In other words, workers are fundamental to the economy!]
These trends are rather startling in some cases. Global powers such as China, Russia, France, and Japan have all voiced concerns in some fashion or other about how their rapidly declining birthrates have and will inevitably hurt their prosperity in the coming decades. What exactly is to be made of this? Could it be that a society’s understanding of procreation has a bearing on their economy? No, it is much more fundamental than that. The way a society values or despises life will have a bearing on its domestic climate. When a country aborts approximately 40 million children over a 30-year period, perhaps they ought not be surprised when the Social Security fund is on the verge of depletion. Most of those 40 million children were permitted to be killed off by a government that would have had those people as tax-payers today. As long as politicians and other leaders fail see the organic connection between moral issues, economic and domestic matters, and foreign affairs, American will continue to doomed for an endless cycle of instability.
This problem of compartmentalization is one common to all areas of contemporary life. This problem, with modernity as the culprit, reaches outside of the political scene and has a massive bearing on all of life. Consider Francis Schaeffer’s prophetic words in decades past:
“Today we have a weakness in our educational process in failing to understand the natural associations between the disciplines. We tend to study all our disciplines in unrelated parallel lines. This tends to be true in both Christian and secular education. This is one of the reasons why evangelical Christians have been taken by surprise at the tremendous shift that has come in our generation. We have studied our exegesis as exegesis, our theology as theology, our philosophy as philosophy; we study something about art as art; we study music as music, without understanding that these are things of man, and the things of man are never unrelated parallel lines.”1
At the end of the day, whether we are speaking of politicians, educators, or some mid-level bureaucrats, they just aren’t putting the pieces together. And when this is the case, the citizens of American society are left picking up the pieces of the puzzle that their leaders have carelessly scattered all over the ground. May the Church hope and pray that the next generation of pastors and theologians do better than their secular counterparts in seeing the way history, theology, sociology, and other disciplines inform our thinking about the whole of life, and not just a few slices of reality.
1 Francis A. Schaeffer, “Escape from Reason,” in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer, Volume 1, 2nd ed. (Wheaton: Crossway, 1982), 211.
