If - in accordance with Christian self-understanding - there is a God who wills to be man's partner, human dignity is not an inconsequential postulate or a mere political slogan

Before I restart my Easter season posts [yes, we are still in the Easter season until the end of the month]  I will agree that there is an abundance of false profession of Christianity around.  If you can believe the TV and radio, the secular press, a lot of the nominal "Christian" media, that false profession might count for all of Christian identification.   That phenomenon isn't relegated to "white evangelicals" even when you include white Pentecostals under that often wrongly used umbrella.  

There are a large number of Catholics whose actions, especially their political actions, are not only NOT in line with the teachings of Jesus - which are definitive for anything that can logically be considered to be authentic Christianity - many of the core beliefs, values and stated positions of many of those who most strongly identify as Catholic or Christian, many of the clergy of those denominations, is more rationally considered anti-Christian, their interpretation of Jesus (who they largely ignore) the anti-Christ.  These days their lives and actions prove that they have replaced Jesus with Donald Trump as so many of them replaced him with George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan or whoever else their TV and hate-talk radio present them in that henotheistic pantheon of eutrophic capitalist Mammonism. 

And what we see here is certainly true in many of the other countries where something called "Christianity" is a significant phenomenon.   It is and has not been uncommon for "Christianity" to be all about a love of money, which Paul noted was a root of evil, all about NOT doing to the least among them as they would have done to them (which Jesus in one of his few allusions to something like hell, said was what led there) such Christianity is populated with would be and actual rich men who leave the starving and desperate to die on their very doorsteps, if they can't have the authorities remove them to die elsewhere.   

If such Christians want to complain as to why Christianity is despised and disrespected, their profession of it while they live the lives of through Mammonists in line with what the entire Scriptures that Christianity and Judaism rest on condemned and noted leads to downfall, plagues, famines, pestilence - something I once took as more or less metaphorical but in the post-democratic United States, I see were actual observations of what results from injustice,  they share in as much if not more blame than the professed atheist haters of Christianity and its moral teachings (not all do profess hatred of its moral teachings, some adopt a truncated version of those teachings, which I guess is sort of to their credit).   If Christians wanted to make a better name for their ideology, their history of holding worldly power in Europe and the Americas, exercising power through imperialism in the world was certainly not the way to do it.  That anti-Christian history has rotted out the reputation and cemented over what is the only legitimate identification of Christianity which is centered in The Gospel, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets as understood in light of the teachings of Jesus.  The harshness of Christianity took all of the most dubious aspects of The Law, the death penalties, most of all, and jettisoned all of the rejection of that in mercy and justice and love that Jesus interpreted the Law by.   If you want to know how male, white "Christians" in such large numbers voted for Trump, that vote was an expression of fury at the loss of a privilege that was enjoyed under anti-Christian history, privilege that would never have been unequally distributed if the words of Jesus really ruled their minds and hearts.  

In discussing Dying with human dignity,  Hans Kung relates that to the right to medical care throughout life, which would, in political terms in the United States, require universal healthcare of the kind that is rejected by Republicans and others. 

New Approach to Sickness and Therapy

In the light of the reality of God it is possible to substantiate what could certainly be defended in regard to sickness and therapy even without God, but would scarcely be justified without God beyond doubt, unconditionally and as universally binding;  imperatives of humanity.  Requirements, demands, invitations, not only for the sick but also for the healthy, not only for the patients but also and primarily for the doctors.  Imperatives of humanity as they are thrust upon us particularly in light of the God who we have come to know from the Jewish-Christian tradition. 

Note that Kung says "it is possible to substantiate what could certainly be defended in regard to sickness and therapy" which is to point out that what becomes a mere possibility, one option among others without framing the issue in the Jewish-Christian understanding of God, becomes an imperative if you take the Jewish God, interpreted in the teachings of Jesus, seriously. 

It is often said that atheists can act morally without God, lists of atheist saints can be made and some of those lists are very impressive.  No one can deny many people who have professed atheism, who have denied the reality of God have been fine people - my observation would be that in most of the cases I find most convincing, their atheism was more passive than aggressively and viciously expressed.   The trouble is that atheism, taken as an intellectual stand, is far more useful for denying the "requirements, demands, invitations" to act, to make real the requirements of humanity beyond doubt, unconditionally and universally binding.  Atheism is far better at doubting than it is finding a commandment of a universal right to humane treatment.  So is agnosticism deficient in that.   Any  "Christian" who denies that requirement is adopting a position more suited to materialistic, scientistic atheism than to someone who professes to believe Jesus spoke with divine authority. 

Kung develops this, beginning:

1.  A new humanity:  If - in accordance with Christian self-understanding - there is a God who wills to be man's partner, human dignity is not an inconsequential postulate or a mere political slogan,  but - in the process of finding scientific expression and objectifying - a reality founded in God himself, one which for every human being is unrenouceable, never to be forfeited:

- humanity then means respect for the value of each and every human being as a person, whose dignity remains independent of his role in society, his proficiency or usefulness. 

- humanity then is never - as extremists on the right or the left think,  a weakness, but man's great task for man - whether healthy or sick, strong or weak, young or old, female or male, all of whom as creatures and partners of God possess an inalienable dignity which must be respected particularly at times of sickness. 

- humanity then holds particularly for the sick person, who must never be degraded in the process of medical care to an object - an object of research or treatment - but must always be taken seriously as a subject and articulate partner in the healing process, thus contributing to the humanizing of medicine in the process of humanizing men. 

It has been one of the things I've noted in reading more deeply in modern theology and in much of the theology of the past, is that many theologians, far from being narrowly focused, have some of the most expansive views of the topics they discuss which I have found.   I have, in most cases, found them to be far more comprehensive in their treatment of things than secular and, in almost all cases, modern atheist and agnostic writers are.  That is in no small part due to their interest in apologetics which force them to take the best arguments of their ideological opponents seriously, which they generally do with far more rigor than their opponents.   Thought, considering the scope with which people like Kung and Niebuhr, Brueggemann and others treat their non-opponents' thinking, I don't think they engage with atheist thinking in such depth reluctantly.   I say that to honor the intellectual rigor with which they treat what they address.  They clearly value honesty and the truth in ways that are unusual in even academic writing which is allegedly a pursuit of the truth.  

As a mere political blogger, I am pointed in a direction that is far more likely to find enduring ground to stand on through what Kung points out.  

Jefferson (Adams, Franklin, etc. his revisers) in their formulation that approaches what Kung starts to state

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

which are words of the Declaration of Independence were proved to be emptied of much of their meaning in the de-deified, secularized framing of the subsequent Constitution that has governed us in such inequality, rights and dignity never treated as universal endowments.  The Constitution which has failed us in so many ways but which is still a required object of worship in the "civic religion" (to use Sandra Day O'Conner's putrid phrase) that is the cultural requirement for respectability or even someone allowed in the discussion, left or right, in the United States.  No Constitution which denies the character of total equality to not only abstract "rights" but the very real economic necessities of a good and decent life will be durable in protecting even the unequal rights sought by the better sort of conservatives today.  Neither will it endure under the regime of secular, 18th century style liberalism secularized out considering the matter of equal endowment of rights which are only durably and absolutely addressed as a gift of God. 

You don't have to resort to just the very good examples of  the monarchies, the despotism and the inequality that abounded in them as they professed their "most Christian" identity even as their very existence negated the Gospel, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets in looking at what happens when the assumptions that Kung's arguments rest in are denied or ignored.  You can find a very good example of it in Jefferson, the author of the Declaration quoted above, who cut up the Gospels to deny anything divine in them as he expounded truths that are only durably established in that framing, in his fellow founders who, like him, clearly never intended anything like equally endowed rights and dignity and a right to happiness to really govern the new order of the ages.  

I don't think medicare for all will ever succeed unless its foundation is as secure as that stated by Kung, above.  I don't think secularism will ever produce such a secure statement of rights.   It certainly hasn't in Britain or the Soviet Union or China.  I am increasingly unimpressed with it in that imaginary paradise of socialism, Sweden which relies on enough people dying off in the Covid pandemic as a sacrifice to the atheist god of statistical averages.  Such examples are warnings of what to expect under the best outcomes without God, even as the United States is one under the effective rule of Mammon.