A Mike Lux Golden Oldie
From Mar 15, 2010. Original HERE I have done a lot of writing, in my blog posts and my book, about the historic differences between conservatives and progressives in political battles, but almost equally fascinating to me is that between conservative and progressive religious traditions. The exact same fault lines, most importantly in terms of individualism vs. community, play themselves out in theological debates which sound very much like our political debates- and indeed, a lot of the same people operate in both realms.
Glenn Beck and Jim Wallis got into this debate over the last few days, and because Jim actually knows something about the Bible, he easily won the debate. Beck's classic conspiracy-minded starting point- that because both Nazis and Communists have used the phrase "social justice", that any religion that uses the term must be bad too- has a similar logic to saying that if a really bad teacher said two plus two equals four, because he or she was a bad teacher it must be false. Or saying that if a politician you don't like says "God Bless America", then any politician who says that is terrible. But leaving aside Beck's incredibly stupid logic, the point he makes about "social justice" is in keeping with conservative ideology: it is all about a self-focused view of religion and politics that, like Beck's ideological hero Ayn Rand, proclaims selfishness as the ultimate virtue.
Conservative Christians manage to ignore the literally many hundreds of Biblical quotes about social justice by making Christianity a religion solely focused on one very selfish goal: whether they get into heaven or not. That's it, that is the entire goal and purpose and meaning of their faith. And because St. Paul argued that faith is more important than "works" (what you do good in the world), they think that believing a certain doctrine is the only thing that matters in terms of whether you make it into heaven or not. Since everything is about getting themselves to heaven, and the Earth will be destroyed soon in Armageddon anyway, nothing that happens here matters very much. The one thing that matters to their God is having more people worship Him, so they try to convert people, but all that other stuff Jesus and the Old Testament prophets and Moses and James and all those other folks in the Bible talked about in terms of kindness, mercy, forgiving debts, being your brother's keeper, helping the poor, and all that other liberal socialistic stuff just isn't much of a priority to them compared to: me getting to heaven, and (second most important) converting others to my God. These so-called "Christian" conservatives live in a state of paranoia that somewhere, somehow some dollar of their taxes might go to some undeserving poor person, ignoring the fact that Jesus' entire ministry was targeted to the "undeserving" poor.
Not all Christians think this way, of course. There is another kind of thinking about the Christian faith: one that actually takes what's written in the Bible (beyond the Book of Revelations) seriously. The Jewish Torah (for Christians, that's their Old Testament) and the Christian New Testament have a wide variety of ideas and voices in their pages. Written by scores of authors over a span of probably a couple thousand years, one of the things I love about the Bible is the wide range of beliefs and perspectives within it. A lot of fundamentalists are desperate to find ways to explain away the contradictions in the Bible, because they believe every word is inspired by God and it's all literally true, but in fact the authors of the Bible disagree on both the details of what actually happened and the interpretation and philosophy behind the events they write about. If you take the Bible seriously, you see the debates and differing perspectives. Some Biblical writers were more conservative in their thinking, and some were more progressive. But the most consistent and enduring theme that runs through virtually every book in the Bible is that we are expected to love and be kind to our neighbors, especially the poor, hurting, and oppressed of the earth.
From the God of Genesis punishing Cain for not being his brother's keeper to Nathan the prophet rebuking King David for taking from the poor; from the Psalms that over and over proclaim the need to help the poor, and condemn those who judges, government officials, and wealthy people who mistreat them, from the prophets like Isaiah and Amos who deride those who engage in ritual sacrifice while refusing to help the oppressed (Isaiah I: "Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.") to Jesus very first sermon proclaiming that he had come to "bring good news to the poor" and "liberty to the captives"- virtually every book of the Bible demands justice and mercy and community.
People who take the Bible seriously and respect its words, as opposed to being obsessed with whether they personally will get into heaven by following a certain kind of dogma, understand that community and compassion are in fact far more central to it than any specific metaphysical belief system. And that is what the Pat Robertsons, Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins, and the other false prophets of conservatism don't understand.
While we have already posted several telling interviews from our filming at Glenn Beck's 828 Restoring Honor Rally, but we haven't yet posted our most emotional, interactive, and intense experiences. Towards the end of our day downtown, we stopped to chat with some folks from the crowd- as we did throughout the day. When we began our interview with Madonna from Indiana, we were in the exact center of a circular cement area that is the entrance way to the World War II Memorial. Our conversation started with Madonna, the only person in her group of 5 or so who decided to stop and chat with us. Quickly, however, not only did several of her friends decide to join our discussion, but several onlookers decided that they belonged in our conversation as well. Before we knew it, we were encircled by 30 or so rally goers who decided to engage us (verbally) in an effort to try and convert us to Glen Beck's White Christian Civil Rights Utopia. Below is the majority of the half hour experience in 6 parts and at the very bottom is all 30 minutes of our discussions unedited.
It was about a week ago that we saw the ruling throwing out California's Prop 8; that decision has now been appealed, and we will see, at some point in the future, how the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handles the matter.
A couple of days later, I had a story up that walked through the ruling, describing the tactics used by the Prop 8 proponents, which, in the opinion of the Judge who looked at the evidence, were basically to try to scare Californians into thinking that gay people, once they're able to get gay married, will somehow now be free to evangelize your kids and make them gay, too.
In the course of answering comments on the several sites where the story is up, I noticed that there were those who felt the Bible should be guiding our thinking here...that if it did, we would be better off than where we are today, with all those immoral gay people running around free to do all those immoral gay things.
This led me to an obvious question: are those who have been using the Bible as a sort of "divining rod" to figure out who is immoral and who is not...actually any good at it?
Conservatives have historically argued against progressive policies on a variety of fronts: the unintended consequences of change, the primacy of the individual over government, the dangers of a growing bureaucracy (or more generically, "big government"), the importance of traditional values and local control, the worry of people growing too dependent on government, etc. With increasing vehemence, though, conservatives have begun to argue that kind-heartedness, compassion, and a sense of community are actually evil: that they lead inevitably to Nazism and death camps.
Political debate has always been hot and heavy in this country, with conservatives swinging hard and heavy and making some pretty wild claims: the pro-British Tories in the 1770s decried the "rats of democracy"; the pro-slavery Southern planters in the first half of the 1800s said that slaves were better off than if they were free; the Social Darwinists said society would be better off if the poor were allowed to starve to death, because their death would improve the gene pool. But the compassion equals evil argument didn't really get laid out in detail until Ayn Rand's writings, where she actually did argue that people with compassion and concern for others were leeches who drained society of its competitive life blood.
Just as Ayn Rand took the Social Darwinist argument and made it more virulent, the conservative author Jonah Goldberg brought a new, more extreme twist to the argument, literally saying that progressives like FDR were ideological soul mates of Hitler and Mussolini's brand of fascism. This easily debunked book has become the right's excuse for accusing everyone arguing for progressive causes of being a Nazi.
Glenn Beck is, of course, the present day leader of the pack when it comes to this kind of invective. Here's his latest insight on the subject:
Much to my amazement, a post I did on Christianity and conservatives on May 10th has generated as much buzz and reaction as anything I have ever written. I have been quite surprised by this, as it was a post I wrote as much for myself, my family and a few old friends as it was to generate a wider debate. The issues I raised go over well-covered ground by many other writers and preachers: that Jesus identified far more with the poor than the rich, that he treasured the beloved community far more than rugged individualism, that he would be appalled by the Social Darwinist, selfishness-is-a-virtue brand of conservative politics currently in vogue in the modern conservative movement.
But it did get people going. There have been at least a half dozen posts written in response; I have gotten hundreds of email and Facebook responses, many by people I don't know; I have been asked by bloggingheads.tv to do a debate with a conservative minister tomorrow- Bill Shuler- and as of this post, there are more than 2,300 comments on the post at Huffington Post, which blows by my old record for post responses by close to 2,000. Apparently, this post really touched a nerve.
The responses I enjoyed the most were the foul mouthed, sometimes even threatening, nasty grams from all those "true Christians" who look forward to seeing me in Hell. That's always fun. But I was also touched by the large number of warm, thoughtful responses who wanted me to know that they agreed with me and were glad someone was saying what I said. I got the sense that there are a lot of people who are tired of conservatives loudly quoting the Bible and claiming to speak for all Christians when they really don't know much about the religion they claim to speak for. I also did have some Christians write me who misinterpreted my post, and thought that I was saying that all Christians are conservative-they wanted to assure me that was definitely not true, as they were both a committed Christian and a strong progressive. Since I have a lot of family members and dear friends who are both of those things, I did not think that, but was glad to get the additional reassurance.
The funniest response someone sent me was from a man who, among other things, asked if I was anti-Jewish, because some people when they move to the left go against Jews and Israel. I hadn't heard that one before, but its always refreshing to get some completely new (and utterly off the wall) question or response.
One of the most interesting blog posts published in response was by a conservative writer named Jameson Graber. He contended that I had made two mistakes. The first, he said, was that I viewed economics as a "zero-sum game". The second thing he talked about as a mistake was creating a false dichotomy between rich and poor, because "prosperity comes from all of us".
I respond to these, and talk more about this, in the extended entry.
I have done a lot of writing, in my blog posts and my book, about the historic differences between conservatives and progressives in political battles, but almost equally fascinating to me is that between conservative and progressive religious traditions. The exact same fault lines, most importantly in terms of individualism vs. community, play themselves out in theological debates which sound very much like our political debates- and indeed, a lot of the same people operate in both realms.
Glenn Beck and Jim Wallis got into this debate over the last few days, and because Jim actually knows something about the Bible, he easily won the debate. Beck's classic conspiracy-minded starting point- that because both Nazis and Communists have used the phrase "social justice", that any religion that uses the term must be bad too- has a similar logic to saying that if a really bad teacher said two plus two equals four, because he or she was a bad teacher it must be false. Or saying that if a politician you don't like says "God Bless America", then any politician who says that is terrible. But leaving aside Beck's incredibly stupid logic, the point he makes about "social justice" is in keeping with conservative ideology: it is all about a self-focused view of religion and politics that, like Beck's ideological hero Ayn Rand, proclaims selfishness as the ultimate virtue.
Conservative Christians manage to ignore the literally many hundreds of Biblical quotes about social justice by making Christianity a religion solely focused on one very selfish goal: whether they get into heaven or not. That's it, that is the entire goal and purpose and meaning of their faith. And because St. Paul argued that faith is more important than "works" (what you do good in the world), they think that believing a certain doctrine is the only thing that matters in terms of whether you make it into heaven or not. Since everything is about getting themselves to heaven, and the Earth will be destroyed soon in Armageddon anyway, nothing that happens here matters very much. The one thing that matters to their God is having more people worship Him, so they try to convert people, but all that other stuff Jesus and the Old Testament prophets and Moses and James and all those other folks in the Bible talked about in terms of kindness, mercy, forgiving debts, being your brother's keeper, helping the poor, and all that other liberal socialistic stuff just isn't much of a priority to them compared to: me getting to heaven, and (second most important) converting others to my God. These so-called "Christian" conservatives live in a state of paranoia that somewhere, somehow some dollar of their taxes might go to some undeserving poor person, ignoring the fact that Jesus' entire ministry was targeted to the "undeserving" poor.
Not all Christians think this way, of course. There is another kind of thinking about the Christian faith: one that actually takes what's written in the Bible (beyond the Book of Revelations) seriously. The Jewish Torah (for Christians, that's their Old Testament) and the Christian New Testament have a wide variety of ideas and voices in their pages. Written by scores of authors over a span of probably a couple thousand years, one of the things I love about the Bible is the wide range of beliefs and perspectives within it. A lot of fundamentalists are desperate to find ways to explain away the contradictions in the Bible, because they believe every word is inspired by God and it's all literally true, but in fact the authors of the Bible disagree on both the details of what actually happened and the interpretation and philosophy behind the events they write about. If you take the Bible seriously, you see the debates and differing perspectives. Some Biblical writers were more conservative in their thinking, and some were more progressive. But the most consistent and enduring theme that runs through virtually every book in the Bible is that we are expected to love and be kind to our neighbors, especially the poor, hurting, and oppressed of the earth.
From the God of Genesis punishing Cain for not being his brother's keeper to Nathan the prophet rebuking King David for taking from the poor; from the Psalms that over and over proclaim the need to help the poor, and condemn those who judges, government officials, and wealthy people who mistreat them, from the prophets like Isaiah and Amos who deride those who engage in ritual sacrifice while refusing to help the oppressed (Isaiah I: "Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.") to Jesus very first sermon proclaiming that he had come to "bring good news to the poor" and "liberty to the captives"- virtually every book of the Bible demands justice and mercy and community.
People who take the Bible seriously and respect its words, as opposed to being obsessed with whether they personally will get into heaven by following a certain kind of dogma, understand that community and compassion are in fact far more central to it than any specific metaphysical belief system. And that is what the Pat Robertsons, Glenn Becks, Sarah Palins, and the other false prophets of conservatism don't understand.
"Act as if ye had faith, and faith will be given to you."
This quote is a very late addition to the Christian religion, and although almost everyone who hears it or reads it assumes that St. Paul wrote it, it was apparently first pronounced by St. Paul Newman in the role of "Frank Galvin" in 1982, and later repeated and popularized by "Leo McGarry" on The West Wing.
This bogus commandment is probably an appropriate motto for those of us who post readers' blogs on political websites, because all the evidence suggests that everything we write is absolutely useless, and we can barely influence each other, much less anybody else...
...but if an imaginary lawyer in an almost forgotten movie can introduce new dogma into Christianity after 2000 years of heresies and Crusades, who can say that even we may not rattle the foundations of such another historical institution, or alter the course of apparently ineluctable historical forces?
I am seething with anger at Romney's speech, which rolled non-Christians (and especially non-believers like myself--atheists and agnostics) under the bus for the sake of portraying Romney and the evangelical Xtian community as being on the same side in an overarching culture war. I want to come out stomping and spitting and embrace the corresponding ideological demagogues on "my side," like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. (See? My reaction is so irrational that I'm ready to don the same jersey as Hitchens, despite his obvious derangement.)
>deep breath<
But that's what Romney wants. His speech is the rhetorical version of a terrorist attack on an iconic building (like, say, the Golden Dome mosque); he wants a passionate reaction from us because victory in the argument over the separation of religion and state is not important to him. What he wants, what he needs, is for the discourse about this issue to devolve altogether from a rational argument about such separation to a verbal conflict between all the "people of the Book" and everybody else. The more vicious that conflict becomes, the better for him, because such conflict will reinforce the (ludicrous) evangelical Xtian sense that they are collectively threatened by a "secular" serpent. The harder we lash out at him with our indignation, the easier it will be for him to make an appeal of unity to the religious right, and thus turn them out to vote.
So how do we respond? Some suggestions:
1) Focus on the enlightenmentfounding fathers' ideal of separation of church and state--especially the ideal that no one religion should be endorsed as a national faith. That language should help remind the faithful that we are talking about multiple, conflicting religions (some of which they disagree with!) rather than a monumental struggle between believers in Christ and everyone else.
2) Take every opportunity to remind people of the weirdness of Mormonism. Not that Mormonism is necessarily any weirder than any other religion, but its particular weirdness creeps out our evangelical right, and we should use their religious bias to our political advantage. It's a wedge, but wedges only work if you hit them with a hammer.
3) Resist the urge to lump all believers together as superstitious sheep. Remind yourself of the people of faith you know who are decent, generous, well-intentioned, smart, and intellectually honest. They don't deserve to be lumped in with Mitt and the people whom he hopes will respond to his dog-whistle appeal. Attacking them all as a single class would a disservice to many people of faith who deserve better, in addition to reinforcing Mitt's frame.
I'm sure there's more to say, but that's all I have for now.
The most common perception of Christianity among young people (16-29) today is that it is "anti-homosexual," a view subscribed to by 91% of young non-Christians and 80% of young churchgoers, according to a recently-published book unChristian, from The Barna Group, the leading Christian polling organization. According to a "Barna Update" describing the book, unChristian paints a striking picture of American Christianity in crisis, suffering a major reversal of its positive image:
a decade ago the vast majority of Americans outside the Christian faith, including young people, felt favorably toward Christianity's role in society. Currently, however, just 16% of non-Christians in their late teens and twenties said they have a "good impression" of Christianity....
only 3% of 16 - to 29-year-old non-Christians express favorable views of evangelicals. This means that today's young non-Christians are eight times less likely to experience positive associations toward evangelicals than were non-Christians of the Boomer generation (25%).
Add to that the facts that (a) the number of non-Christians is steadily rising (from 23% among those over 50 to 40% for those 16-29), (b) more Christians know non-Christians than ever before and (c) many Christians share those perceptions, and you have a major shift in attitudes underway that our political masters in Versailles have totally missed:
The 'UnChristian' Label
When young people were asked to identify their impressions of Christianity, one of the common themes was "Christianity is changed from what it used to be" and "Christianity in today's society no longer looks like Jesus." These comments were the most frequent unprompted images that young people called to mind, mentioned by one-quarter of both young non-Christians (23%) and born again Christians (22%).
[Author David] Kinnaman [president of The Barna Group] explained, "That's where the term 'unChristian' came from. Young people are very candid. In our interviews, we kept encountering young people - both those inside the church and outside of it - who said that something was broken in the present-day expression of Christianity. Their perceptions about Christianity were not always accurate, but what surprised me was not only the severity of their frustration with Christians, but also how frequently young born again Christians expressed some of the very same comments as young non-Christians."
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