The Road to Hopelessness

By DON ROLLINS

One hundred years after the unofficial death of the once hopeful social gospel movement, there may be reason to stop hoping once and for all.

For the uninitiated, social gospel theology was fixed in a particular reading of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, taking as its core authority the God that sides with the oppressed and against the oppressor.

Shaped by the mass suffering of the postwar South, and intent on ameliorating the indignities of those who supplied the sweat and labor for the Industrial Revolution; social gospel proponents took to the slums, company shacks and halls of power, energized by the vision of a just and peaceful “kingdom here on earth”.

Then came the brutal, sacrificial War to End All Wars. Trenches. Mustard gas. War from above. And sadly fitting, the 1918 deaths of the two most important figures in the social gospel movement, Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden.

The theology of the God that sides with the downtrodden would survive the global trauma of Great War atrocities (see the various forms of liberation theologies); but less so the stubborn “better every day, in every way” ethos of hope that had, for 60 years, been party to American government, education and religion.

The demise of social gospel theology turned on its inability to reconcile a theology of hope for an earthly paradise with the proliferation of such ghastly warfare: What chance does a theological crossing of the fingers stand in such a world?

Among the more recent (2017) and provocative attempts to answer the question is Miguel A. De La Torre’s “Embracing Hopelessness,” a bold treatise against hope itself.

De la Torre, a Cuban-American professor of social ethics at Illif School of Theology, finds the belief that everything-is-going-to-work-out-in-the-end is a Eurocentric construct created by and for the privileged - the luxury of a middle-class insulated from the dehumanizing reality of most of the rest of the planet, yet holding out for something positive despite all evidence.

As a corrective, De la Torre counsels a deconstruction of history as told by those at the apex of power, past and present, including such meta-narratives as Manifest Destiny — proof positive to elitists that hope in the right outcome will be blessed by God.

For De la Torre, the arc of American history can be traced to how much power, money and time are concentrated at any given moment: for better and for worse, our shared story was written by the victors (political, military, economic, religious, et al.) and only through a retelling from progressive thinkers outside the prime narrative will the privileged be able to confront their need to feel hopeful about something. Anything.

The takeaway is that elitist hope for a happy ending is by no means the only motivation for standing with the oppressed. In De la Torre’s view, the better option is to own the falsehoods we’ve been telling ourselves, work for change and let go of outcomes.

De la Torre’s cosmology will seem utterly bleak to anyone unburdened with the daily grind of subsistence living. And even as he distinguishes hopelessness from despair, the prospect of a life without expectations is a spiritual accomplishment most of us will never achieve.

Yet there is deep truth in the argument that safety and plenty serve to keep the true cruelty of injustice at arm’s length. Maybe that’s the first step on the road to hopelessness.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister and substance abuse counselor living in Pittsburgh, Pa. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2018

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