Marc and Marque-Luisa Miringoff’s book, The Social Health of the Nation: How America Is Really Doing, argues that while Americans receive constant reports on the nation’s economic health, reports on the nation’s social health are few and episodic. Social health is measured by assessing such factors as “the well-being of America’s children and youth, the accessibility of health care, the quality of education, the adequacy of housing, the security and satisfaction of work, and the nation’s sense of community, citizenship, and diversity.” Reports on these factors are not publicly and regularly available as part of our picture of “how we’re doing” as a society.

A culture of fear can paralyze our ability to address systemically the evils of poverty, hunger, desperation, and violent aggression in our homes, on our streets, and across the globe, convincing many of us that all efforts are doomed to failure. But passivity, a “helpless victim” mentality, and aggression resulting from fear, can be challenged by a committed practice of political and social engagement.

“Love,” in our media culture, is a much overused and abused word. Romantic love is the subject of most of our television and movie dramas. And we employ the word for even the most trivial of our fondnesses: “I love animals,” an HDS colleague once said, “I think they’re delicious.” Rather than attempting to define love, let us for the moment accept Augustine’s insistence that love is not primarily a state of mind or emotions, but an activity. He said: “Love has feet . . . love has hands, which give to the poor, love has eyes, which give information about who is in need, love has ears. . . . To see love’s activity is to see God.” Love is not a state one falls into passively, as usually represented in American media. It is something we, as individuals and as a society, can actively make. We make love. Love is not, in the words of the twentieth-century poet e. e. cummings, “Words, words, as if all worlds were there.” In short, love is not rhetoric, but what Pierre Bordieu called a “practice of everyday life.”

I suggest that the rhetoric of romantic love in our entertainment culture effectively functions as “misdirection.” “Misdirection” is a magician’s term referring to the dramatic gesture that attracts attention in order to prevent spectators from noticing what the magician is doing with his other hand. Our society’s preoccupation with romantic love takes our attention away from noticing that loving treatment of needy human beings, in the form of social services, health care, and support for education, is disappearing from our society.

Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ can be seen as another example of misdirection. In the context of a society that is becoming meaner and meaner—often in the name of Christian values—the movie invites spectators to contemplate the sufferings of Christ. Its focus on the last hours of Jesus’ life effectively erases most of his life and teachings. If attention were directed to Jesus’ own life and actions, instead of on what was done to him, a very different picture of Christ’s mission would appear. For, according to the gospels, Jesus spent his adult life healing sick bodies and feeding people, as well as teaching them. In the context of a society in which tax cuts ensure the wealth of the rich and the poverty of the poor, however, to claim that Jesus’ life and work represented the kind of compassion that would establish a more equitable distribution of resources may not be the basis for a box office hit.

The daily practice of love requires that we acknowledge that we live with our uncertainties rather than cater to them. As human beings with limited knowledge and perspectives, we are always uncertain, even about the most crucial matters. We do not know the generously responsible way to address particular situations. We always pursue the common good in the dark by faith, not knowing for sure what it looks like or feels like; sometimes we do not even recognize it when we see it. However, fear that we do not possess certain knowledge of the humanly good must not be allowed to prevent our passionate commitment to it.

Our religions have not helped us at this point. The numerically dominant religious and intellectual traditions seem to have neglected the urgencies of this world in favor of attention to another world of ideas or values. Christianity, like other world religions, has traditionally been very concerned about the danger of attachment to power and possessions. But the equal dangers of resignation, passivity, cynicism, and indifference to the suffering and struggling of other living beings have not been articulated as frequently or as forcefully. Christian scriptures use the phrase “the world” ambiguously and confusingly. On the one hand, Christians are enjoined to be “not of this world.” On the other hand, God so loved the world.

Similarly, Christians often emphasize the power and greatness of God in ways that de-emphasize human responsibility. Theologies that focus on child-like dependence on God fail to challenge Christians to mature activity and accountability. The feminist philosopher Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote, “We never feel as grown-up as we expected to feel when we were children.” Because we do not always, or perhaps often, feel confident and capable, we evade responsibility. Yet we are the grownups. No spirituality should help us transcend the needy world in which we live, a world that requires our attention, our love, and most of all, our work.

Margaret Miles, Emeritus Professor of Historical Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, was the Bussey Professor of Historical Theology at Harvard Divinity School. This article is excerpted from her address at HDS’s Alumni/ae Day on June 7, 2006.