Being a Christian means that you have to be politically conservative
Where does this
perception come from?
I don’t have room here to say much about why the later New
Testament letters began to focus more one institutional maintenance and private
morality and less on the explosive message that “Jesus is Lord” (as opposed to
Caesar), nor on how the Roman Catholic priesthood came to be the overseers of
private morality in the medieval world, nor on how early American Protestantism
developed as a reaction to social decay in Europe in the 17th and 18th
centuries century. That would require more than a blog and probably a different
author.
The observation I can make here is that sometime in the last
quarter of last century, the GOP closed the loop on a brilliant ideological
move that it had been working toward for some time. They verbally linked the capitalistic
policies that the wealthy care about (lower taxes) to the conservative social
values that many poorer communities in southern and Bible Belt states care
about. Of course these two things have nothing to do with each other and many
sociologists will point out that they outright work against each other. But the
fact that that observation is so rarely made by their opponents in popular
discourse shows how effectively far right fiscal policies and conservative
social values have been made synonmous in our popular consciousness.
Tough to believe now, but as recently as 1972 the platform
of the Republican Party contained no references to God and argued for no
specifically religious issues. But the next year would be defining for politics
right up until today. Capitalizing on the outcry from the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 (Roe v. Wade), the 1976 platform
famously called for “a position on abortion that values human life.” By the turn of
the next decade, “family” and “human life” had become unlikely partisan
buzzwords in Reagan’s lexicon and the language was reciprocated by a whole new
spate of purportedly Christian movements—Jerry Fallwell’s “Moral Majority” in
1980, James Dobson’s “Family Research Council” in 1983, and televangelist Pat
Robertson’s rise in popularity resulting in a presidential bid in 1988—who throw
their unquestioning support behind Reagan’s party.
So popularly, in just a couple rhetorical moves, family is seen
as almost the sole moral concern of Christians and the GOP the official party
of family.
Is there a more
authentically Christian perspective?
I should say here that, while I do believe my faith has strong
political implications, I do not, with some of my liberal contemporaries,
flatly say that “Jesus was a socialist.” Whether we lean right or left, it is
an absurd case of apples and oranges to try to extract a comprehensive economic
structure from a the hand full of parables and aphorisms of a man speaking to a
two thousand year old, non-democratic society where official political agency
wasn’t even an option for his listeners. That said, if you’ve noticed how
rarely “Bible believing Christians” mention what’s actually in the Bible and
you yourself have skimmed the parable of the Rich Young Man or the account of
the early church in Acts, you’ve probably noticed how much easier it would be
to build that case than to build any case for either the nuclear family or
unchecked capitalism.
But again, I make no argument for extreme left-wing policy here.
What we can say without hesitancy is that the Jesus of the Bible shows
aggressive favoritism on the side of the poor and marginalized. He is obsessively
concerned with those who are on the outside even when it puts him at odds with
the people who are inside. We can also say that he is livid at individuals and
institutions—public, private, or religious—that profit on the backs of the
poor.
The sum of this observation is that, whatever we decide to do in
our private lives or in the institutions we support—public, private, or
religious—followers of Jesus had better also be aggressively on the side of the
poor and the marginalized. How we can best serve them in a non-patronizing and
genuinely beneficial way is on the table for debate. That we must serve them is
not.
Ethical concerns are black and white for a Christian
Where does this
perception come from?
I suspect that this partly comes from the rubber stamp
alignment of American Evangelicalism and the Republican party discussed above.
But a much more objective thing to comment on is the biblical literalism that
began to invade American Christianity in the 19th century. If you
think of the more “literal” way as the more traditional
way of reading the Bible, that’s likely because you’ve believed the rhetoric of
the Fallwells and Robertsons mentioned above who have needed to coopt biblical
authority to provide some basis for their unquestioning support of the GOP.
There is nothing traditional about it. In fact, it is a completely novel
innovation that we can date to fairly recent times.
Until about a century ago, respect for the overall authority
of scripture was high but respect for inappropriately simplistic
interpretations of scripture was low. In the middle ages, reading multiple
layers of figurative meaning into a line from the Bible was not only
permissible in the Christian tradition, those were considered more weighty than
the literal meaning with the “allegorical”
reading taking the most prestigious spot in a sophisticated ranking system.
Reformers in the 16th century called for a more “literal” reading,
but they only meant to put a check on some of the wildly imaginative nonsense
that came out of the medieval church; they did not mean, in the modern sense,
that obviously mythological or poetic language in the Bible should be applied
in some stupidly matter-of-fact way.
As we’ve seen already, religious views in America tend to
take their queues from political concerns; not the other way around. It was not
just Christians’ but everyone’s paradigms that Darwin’s theories initially
challenged after the publication of The
Origin of Species in 1859 (some obscure anatomists had proposed similar
things and the scientific community was not enraged by his theories, but his were
the first that were readable at the popular level).
It would be another decade and a half before theologians,
politicians and popular commentators began to see its full implication for
human origins. It is sheer coincidence that around the turn of the century,
debates over whether to teach Darwin’s theories in schools coincided with
concern in American churches that modern historical criticism of the Bible
(e.g. analysis of original manuscripts, historical context, dating
inconsistencies, etc.) was eroding the authority of the good book.
Two huge tectonic shifts in our perception of ourselves and
our Bible at one time proved too frightening for a certain personality type. A
reactionary group called the “Niagara Bible Conference” formed in 1878 and
drafted the principles that would eventually morph into “The Five Fundamentals”
of the 1910 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church from which we get the
word: fundamentalism. All of these five had to do with some kind of
supernatural belief that they felt was under attack in modernity. One of these
five fundamentals was a dogma that Christianity had never before bound itself
to in the 19 centuries of its existence: the inerrancy of scripture (assumed
but not written alongside this, was belief in the easy and straightforward
interpretability of scripture).
The older Christian tradition of serious and intelligent
ethical reflection that had only just escaped a longstanding obeisance to the
“infallible” Pope four centuries earlier was being relinquished once again, and
American protestants were once again kowtowing to an even more inflexible
“paper Pope.”
Is there a more
authentically Christian perspective?
If you’ve ever been to a Lutheran worship service, then from
the very first words out of your mouth after the opening song, you have
foresworn any chance that your political leanings, ethical insights, lifestyle
preferences, biblical interpretations or anything about you might be one
hundred percent right and without fault. We call this part confession and
absolution.
It might sound pessimistic at first, but in fact, when the
wrongness of the state of our world and our place in it are realities that
continue to intrude on our subconscious even when we choose not to acknowledge
them, then telling the truth about these things actually comes out as a hopeful
sigh of relief. It’s our way of forcing the issue and saying from the outset
that our doctrines, stances, and ideologies get us nowhere if there is no God
behind them actually doing stuff. And if God actually does stuff, then anything
we think or say about what God is doing is of secondary importance at the most.
We then spend the rest of the service proclaiming that God has, in fact, begun
doing something to set the world right.
Having confessed that whatever seeds of rightness we’ve ever
planted will ultimately wither in the holy sunbeam of God’s presence,
-
we can get on to a more serious and complex
ethical conversation about the relative rightness of a certain choice given the
alternatives;
-
we can admit to the huge grey areas of a world
that often doesn’t give us a choice between right and wrong but between wrong
and less wrong;
-
we can argue an issue with someone else without
attacking their basic humanity, as if they had taken the dark side in some
dualistic battle;
-
and when the time for deliberation is over, we
can actually act toward whatever limited good we’re able without getting
hamstrung thinking that we need to find some panacea option that will fix
everything;
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and we can actually do what we do for the sake
of someone else, since the issue of justifying ourselves with our actions is
not on the table.
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