[+] If You Read the Gospels, the Religious Right is Most Often Wrong

by Rick Mercier

Was Jesus a big winner in the last election?

You'd sure think so. If the pundits and Religious Right zealots are correct, the Son of God scored a knockout victory on Nov. 2. We've had it drilled into our heads that something known as "moral values" was decisive in the election. Some worked-up commentators have even said we're on the brink of a second Great Awakening.

All this hype about the God talk swirling around in our culture prompted me to do a little research (a big departure from how I usually prepare for writing a column). I cracked open my Bible and started rereading the Gospels.

And you know what? I can't see what all this sanctimonious values rhetoric has to do with Jesus. I've compared what I read in Gospels with what I've been hearing from the Religious Right, and I've concluded that the holier-than-thous must have traded in their red-letter editions of the Good Book for red-state versions that omit most of Jesus' teachings.

The truth is, if you depend on the Christian right for your theological sustenance, you probably won't recognize the Jesus of the Gospels.

Jesus was quite a troublemaker. In fact, I'm thinking the Bush administration would have a special place for Jesus were the swarthy Nazarene to take up his ministry today in the U.S. of A.-- in a cell with other Middle Eastern men awaiting deportation.

Let's recall what the Jesus of the Gospels espoused. "When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you," the sandal-wearing rabble-rouser was known to say.

That sounds pretty good, but it makes you realize that JC would never have reached "Ranger" or "Pioneer" status in the Bush fund-raising machine.

Then, of course, there's Jesus' encounter with the rich ruler who said he was a righteous man because he'd followed the Ten Commandments since his youth (though he gave no indication that he'd ever erected a monument dedicated to them in a public place).

Jesus told the ruler: "There is still one thing lacking. Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."

When the ruler started looking glum, Jesus responded with his famous kicker: "How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."

Holy class warfare! No wonder Republicans have switched out the Jesus of the Gospels for a low-rent moralizer preoccupied with what other people are doing with their bodies.

I've no intention of turning this column into a Sunday school lesson, so I'll ease up on the Bible quotes. But go ahead and read the Gospels for yourself, and see if you can reconcile the Jesus you encounter in those texts with the Jesus the Religious Right wields as a battle-ax.

If you're a thoughtful, independent-minded person, I'll bet you read the Gospels and wonder: Where in America does this Jesus dwell?

Where in America is the Jesus who sides with the poor and the outcasts? Where in America is the Jesus who disdains those who wear their piousness on their sleeves? Where in America is the the Jesus with the prophetic voice, the radical who dares to tell the powerful what they don't want to hear?

Is he in the pews that fill every Sunday morning with the smug and complacent? Is he in a political party that fights for tax cuts for the rich while neglecting the needs of decent, hard-working Americans? Is he among the "God-and-country" demagogues who push an idolatrous nationalism and who see military service as the supreme form of sacrifice?

Your questions might not end there. You may observe that other things are missing from our fashionable "moral values" rhetoric.

You may, for example, notice the absence of any critique of an economic system that turns Jesus' birthday into an opportunity to jump-start consumer spending. Or any critique of corporate control of the public's airwaves, which help censure the culture is saturated with sexuality and violence that appeal to the lowest common denominator but generate huge profits.

Where is the righteous conservative Christian politician who makes these things campaign issues, who talks about them as moral issues?

I have no doubt that the Christian right and their leader, George W. Bush, are sincere about their faith. But I also have no doubt -- to paraphrase one of America's pre-eminent theologians, Stanley Hauerwas -- that sincerity has precious little to do with Christianity.

This "moral values" talk doesn't do much to sustain Christianity, either. The phrase is as banal as the hacks (of both the political and journalistic variety) who are busy fetishizing it.

For political operatives, the phrase's beauty lies in its meaningless. It can be made to mean anything, and, in a culture with no meaningful moral narratives, it can be turned into a cudgel that's useful for political ends but has nothing to do with any coherent religious tradition.

In the spiritual vacuum that exists in this country, the Christian right is well-positioned to argue that its menagerie of fears and chauvinisms -- piled into a box labeled "moral values"-- constitutes a serious moral narrative. It doesn't, but the Religious Right's contribution to the denigration of Christianity will continue unabated until other Christian communities come up with a compelling alternative.

The trouble is, our society seems to lack the kind of exemplars who could build that alternative. What we need are the spiritual descendants of Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day, people who are willing to endure the enmity and scorn of the political establishment and mainstream culture.

Maybe those people are out there, but I don't see them. That's why I'm not optimistic about the survival of the Christian tradition in our culture. What many view as a great spiritual revival looks a lot to me like another stage of rot in American Christianity's corpse.

Can the cadaver rise up? It doesn't seem hopeful. In contemporary America, the Jewish Palestinian whom many call their messiah has become just another Middle Easterner to be ignored or reviled.

[Rick Mercier is a writer and editor for The Free Lance-Star. He can be reached at rmercier@freelancestar.com.]

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1129-24.htm
Published Monday, November 29, 2004 by the Free-Lance Star / Fredricksburg,Virginia
© Copyrighted 1997-2004 http://www.commondreams.org/

Fwd: "Failure And The Second Half Of Life"

Thanks to Dominick Di Noto:

Date: Wed, 24 Nov 2004 06:35:50 -0800

Failure And The Second Half Of Life
October 17, 2004

"During the second-half of life, success no longer teaches us anything. It
still feels good, but we don't learn from it. Now we learn more from
failure."

Richard Rohr says that. What's meant by it?

Some years, I was preaching in a church. The Gospel that day was the famous
Martha-Mary incident, where Mary sits at the feet of Jesus, doing nothing,
while her sister, Martha, is busy with all the necessary tasks of
hospitality and serving. Martha asks Jesus to reprimand Mary for her
inactivity, but Jesus, in a now-famous phrase, tells her: "Mary has chosen
the better part!"

Homilizing on this, I quoted some pretty credible sources: Mother Theresa,
Henri Nouwen, and Jean Vanier, all of whom point out that we need to develop
our sense of self-worth not from what we do, but from what we are, namely,
from our innate dignity as human beings. What we are is more important than
what we do, and it's dangerous to rely on achievement and success in order
to feel good about ourselves.

A man approached me afterwards and asked: "Have you ever noticed that the
people who tell us that it isn't important to achieve anything are mostly
great achievers? Mother Theresa has won a Nobel prize and Henri Nouwen has
written more than fifty books and receives invitations from all around the
world. It's easy, I suspect, to feel good about yourself after you've done
something, but how am I supposed to feel good about myself when I've never
done anything that's impressed anyone?"

He makes an important point, namely, that there's a season for everything,
including achievement and success. That season is the first- half of life. A
healthy self-image isn't just handed to us on a platter. Part of the task of
our youth is to do the kinds of things that not only build up the world, but
also help us build up ourselves. One of the lessons in the parable of the
talents is that there are penalties too for not being successful.

Thus there's a time in life when doing things is mandated, even by the
Gospels. That time is the first-half of life (all those years when we're
active in the work-force, caring for family, paying a mortgage, giving
ourselves over to the service of others, and trying to build up the world
and find meaning for ourselves). It isn't our time then to simply sit at the
feet of Jesus.

But, as James Hillman says, "Early years must focus on getting things done,
while later years consider what was done and how." During the second-half of
life, success loses its importance. Why?

First, because to rely on success to feel good about ourselves becomes, at a
point, a cancer: If we only feel important when we've achieved something of
importance then we need to continue, over and over again, to achieve
something of importance, an impossible task.

More importantly, while success builds self-image it doesn't necessarily
build character or soul. Bluntly put, too often success inflates rather than
mellows the soul. Failure, while always containing the danger of hardening
the soul, is more naturally suited to deflate the ego and mellow the heart.
The major task of aging is that of mellowing - grieving, forgiving, letting
go, accepting vulnerability, and moving beyond the greed, ambition,
competitiveness, and perpetual disappointment of youth. Like a good wine,
the soul needs to be mellowed in cracked old barrels (an apt image for aging
bodies) to bring out its warm, rich character. After a certain age, failure
more than success is more likely to help us do that.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, when we're young and success still
teaches us something, too often even our best work is motivated more by our
need to prove something (ourselves, our talents, our goodness) than by any
genuine altruism and concern for others. Our successes may actually be
helping others and doing a lot of good, but, in the end, we're trying to
prove ourselves. We're still not, in essence, making love to the world, to
art, to education, to technology, to church, to a cause, or even to another
person. We're making a statement: "I count, I'm worthwhile, I'm talented,
I'm good, I'm loveable, notice me, love me." There's nothing wrong with
that, up to a certain age, it's how we grow, and the taste of some success
is often useful precisely in moving us along towards a purer motivation. But
there comes a point when life is no longer about proving ourselves, or
anything else. The task now is to become selfless, beyond proving anything,
least of all our own worth. A healthy dose of failure is often quite useful
in teaching us this.

Success always feels good, but at a certain age it no longer works its
magic. That doesn't make it wrong to continue to be successful, it only
makes it wrong to need to succeed in order to feel good about ourselves.

Interesting new articles at PeacePolitical News (formerly Ecumenical News) -- see continually updated list, with my favorite articles marked with a [+]. Look now at www.Peacepolitical.com :-))

 

Progressive faith did not lose this election

by Jim Wallis, Editor, Sojourners Magazine

Religion was a big factor in this election, and "moral values" were named as a key issue for voters in the exit polls. On the Republican side, George W. Bush talked comfortably and frequently about his personal faith and ran on what his conservative religious base called the "moral issues." On the Democratic side, Senator John Kerry invoked the New Testament story of the Good Samaritan, talked about the importance of loving our neighbors, and said that faith without works is dead - but only began talking that way at the very end of his campaign.

We've now begun a real debate in this country over what the most important "religious issues" are in politics, and that discussion will continue far beyond this election. The Religious Right fought to keep the focus on gay marriage and abortion and even said that good Christians and Jews could only vote for the president. But many moderate and progressive Christians disagreed. We insisted that poverty is also a religious issue, pointing to thousands of verses in the Bible on the poor. The environment - protection of God's creation - is also one of our religious concerns. And millions of Christians in America believe the war in Iraq was not a "just war."

So in this election, one side talked about the number of unborn lives lost each year, while the other pointed to the 100,000 civilian casualties in Iraq. But both are life issues - according to the Pope, for example, who opposes both John Kerry's views on abortion and George Bush's war policy. Some church leaders challenged both candidates on whether just killing terrorists would really end terrorism and called for a deeper approach. And 200 theologians, many from leading evangelical institutions, warned that a "theology of war emanating from the highest circles of government is also seeping into our churches."

Clearly, God is not a Republican or a Democrat, as we sought to point out, and the best contribution of religion is precisely not to be ideologically predictable or loyally partisan but to maintain the moral independence to critique both the left and the right.

It is now key to remember that our vision - a progressive and prophetic vision of faith and politics - was not running in this election. John Kerry was, and he lost. Kerry did not strongly champion the poor as a religious issue and "moral value," or make the war in Iraq a clearly religious matter. In his debates with George Bush, Kerry should have challenged the war in Iraq as an unjust war, as many religious leaders did -- including Evangelicals and Catholics. And John Kerry certainly did not advocate a consistent ethic of human life as we do - opposing all the ways that life is threatened in our violent world.

We didn't lose the election, John Kerry did, and the ways in which both his vision and the Democratic Party's are morally and politically incomplete should continue to be taken up by progressive people of faith.

In a deeply polarized country, commentators reported that either political outcome would "crush" the hopes of almost half the population. So perhaps the most important role for the religious community will come now, when the need for some kind of political healing and reconciliation has become painfully clear. In the spirit of America's greatest religious leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the religious community could help a divided nation find common ground by moving to higher ground. And we should hold ourselves and both political parties accountable to the challenge of the biblical prophet Micah to "do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God."

[+] Rod Romney: The Great Religious Debate

by Rev. Dr. Rodney Romney
November 2004

The great debate in the Christian church today is more sociological than theological. It is a debate over homosexuality, referred to by some as the last legitimate prejudice. Christians who reject homosexuality as a sin simply quote a few passages from the Bible to justify their attitudes. As a result, denominations are splitting over the issue, individual churches are being torn apart and losing members, and a host of people with no particular religious conviction have joined in affirming the belief that homosexuality is a perversion of what God intends for human beings.

Why this debate, and why now? Homosexual men and women by and large are becoming more honest and less willing to remain unnamed in the shadows. As a result, social acceptance for them has expanded in nearly every arena except in the church. A radical tension exists today between the common Biblical understanding of homosexuality and the modern consensus of the scientific community. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association deleted homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, and in 1984 researchers on the subject said that certain biological markers at hormonal levels had been discovered which affect lifelong sexual orientation. In other words, sexuality in all its forms is now being viewed as a matter of biology, something over which persons have no real choice.

The Bible carries very few references on the subject, and where it does these are usually incidental to other matters. In biblical times the anal rape of male foes as an _expression of domination and scorn was not uncommon (the Holiness Code in Leviticus commanded that those engaging in such practices should be put to death.) Male prostitution and pederasty were regarded as sinful (Paul referred to these as forms of the sin of idolatry along with a host of other things, which indeed they are). However, if we insist today on a literal obedience to all the scriptures, we will need to change our diets, reinstitute slavery and the subjugation of women, and stone to death prostitutes. Jesus, on the other hand, never once mentioned homosexuality. His mandate was simple but clear: we are to love everyone, even those we might otherwise label as our enemies. Jesus condemned no one who came to him in faith and honesty. He even accepted those who the religious community had shut out. His commandment to his followers was simple but profound: love one another as I have loved you.

Homosexuals will affirm that they never had a choice over their sexual orientation. It has been with them from the beginning of their sexual awareness. They will also tell you that their sexuality has often occasioned them with great pain because of prevailing social and religious attitudes. We who seek to unite our lives with God's purposes have no right to add to that pain. We have only the commandment to love them and to help them live out their humanity in a way that will be fulfilling for them and not harmful to others. We should welcome them into our churches, help them celebrate marriage with another when they choose to do so. Above all, we must do nothing that would add to the sense of pain and alienation that has been inflicted upon them most of their lives.

The unifying theme of all religions and forms of spirituality is compassion. A once faceless minority called homosexuals is now emerging into men and women we see every day. They are precious human beings, members of the family of humankind, part of the world that God created and sustains. They are our brothers and sisters, our children, our neighbors, our fellow workers. They are fully loved by God; they want to be loved by us and to give their love in return.

The task may initially confuse us and call for a compromise of our old convictions and an end to our debates. We shall certainly cry out to God for wisdom and courage, but we cannot turn back. To be thrust into the place where we are asked to declare that every man is our brother and every woman is our sister may be intimidating and frightening at first. But such broad concerns are part of the higher way of love to which God is calling all of us. In the end, we are all one, part of the same human family, and we all want the same thing: to be loved and affirmed, so that we can grow to be who we really are and to do what we came here to do.

[The Rev. Dr. Rod Romney, now retired, was a former pastor of the Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church in Oakland, CA and of the Seattle First Baptist Church in Seattle, WA. He now lives with wife Beverly in Idaho Falls, ID.]