The term intersectionality has been popularized in the past few decades. It refers to the effect the confluence or intersection of various traits such as sex, age, race, ethnicity, and education has on an individual or group of individuals. It is especially applicable in sociology and the study of economic disparities among different social groups. Perhaps the term is useful in other disciplines as well.
The days between Thanksgiving and the first Sunday of Advent provide an appropriate opportunity to ponder a pertinent question. What, if any, is the connection between our national gratitude and our national destiny? What is the intersectionality of our politics (how we live and function as a nation) and eschatology (the ‘end times’ to which we both individually and as a people strive)? Do we Americans who believe in the existence of some transcendent reality acknowledge that there is – or should be – a relationship between our political lives and our religious expectations? Do they intersect? Or are they independent of each other? In our nation, is there a connection between Thanksgiving and Advent. Does the way we live (our ‘experiment with democracy’) reflect our anticipation of the way things could be?
For Christians, these questions are as old as the Church/State relationship birthed in the Roman empire. For us Americans, they were provocatively addressed by the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray sixty years ago in his book “We Hold These Truths”. What is the common ground between our pledge of allegiance to an indivisible Republic and our prayer that “thy will be done on earth as in heaven”? Are we exclusively ‘sojourners and exiles’ in this world (1 Pt. 2:11), or are we called to be productive stewards of creation (Genesis)? Do we contend that our nation will flourish endlessly without our recognition of divine guidance? Or, is our political experiment somehow related to the Second Coming? Following Fr. Murray’s lead, does any of us ask these questions of late?
In the first two centuries of our nation’s history, a shared religion of sorts prevailed and was referred to as a civic religion. Basic beliefs common to all faiths were for the most part genuinely and ostensibly recognized: belief in God, the sacredness of life, justice, divine providence, responsibility for one another, the efficacy of prayer, etc. This was one manifestation of the ‘Unum’ in our ‘E Pluribus Unum’, common beliefs shared by a multitude of disparate faiths. In our more recent past, however, our civic religion has – as did the religion of the wayward Israelites on the way to the Promised Land – turned to false gods, the gods of power, pleasure, wealth, vanity, etc. In a sense, the practice of civic religion has turned to civic apostasy. Do we expect the providence of these false gods to assure the flourishing future of our nation?
Philanthropists who are religiously rooted understand the intersectionality of faith and politics. In anticipation of the kingdom yet to come. They apply themselves to the betterment of the kingdom already here. Certainly, this is the shared ethic of the donors who exercise their philanthropy through community foundations such as NCCF.
The supreme example of intersectionality, of course, occurred two millennia ago in a Judean stable. Then the eternal infused the temporal. God became man, and the shadowed light in this world revealed promising glimpses of the dazzling effulgence in the next.