| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"" |
| Date: |
15 Sep 2005 04:10:39 AM |
| Object: |
From Harper's: "The Christian Paradox" |
Interesting reading. American xianity is just like any xianity,
and all other religions for that matter: its believers rationize
their behaviour as "godly".
http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptTheChristianParadox.html
Bob Dog
Atheist #153 = 1^3 + 5^3 + 3^3
EAC's chief cook and brainwasher
-----
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work
within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
- Claire Wolfe
"I disagree with the second part."
- Detective Somerset of "Se7en", paraphrased
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The Christian Paradox
How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong
Posted on Wednesday, July 27, 2005. What it means to be Christian in
America. An excerpt. Originally from August 2005. By Bill McKibben.
Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten
Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors
of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's
wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian
heritage may be further evidence of our nation's educational
decline, but it probably doesn't matter all that much in
spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does
matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches
that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of
four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at
the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which
was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy
Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not
biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from
the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor.
On this essential matter, most Americans-most American Christians-
are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists
believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we say
we are a Christian nation-and, overwhelmingly, we do-it means
something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make
real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these
lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of
U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a
particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.)
When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite
philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting
the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.
And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most
professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least
Christian in its behavior. That paradox-more important, perhaps,
than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a
diet of chocolate and cheese-illuminates the hollow at the core
of our boastful, careening culture.
* * *
Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on
earth. Depending on which poll you look at and how the question
is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves
Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish. It
is true that a smaller number of Americans-about 75 percent-claim
they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent
say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that
85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents
aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than
four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about
American behavior is essentially also a measure of the behavior
of professed Christians. That's what America is: a place
saturated in Christian identity.
But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on
the heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had
in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion-
say, giving aid to the poorest people-as a reasonable proxy for
Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his
crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples,
he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was
by whether they'd fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the
naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What
would we find then?
In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last,
after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid.
Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official
development assistance to poor countries. And it's not because we
were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such
funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies,
to twenty-one cents. It's also not because Americans were too
busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American
children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in
Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the
least among us you want to propose-childhood nutrition, infant
mortality, access to preschool-we come in nearly last among the
rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just
that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly
in all these categories; it's that the overwhelmingly Christian
American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories
to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it's not as if the
numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture
reported last year that the number of households that were "food
insecure with hunger" had climbed more than 26 percent between
1999 and 2003.
This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to
political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon.
Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most
violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five
times that of our European peers. We have prison populations
greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations
(which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting
the prisoners). Having been told to turn the other cheek, we're
the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens,
mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically
strongest. Despite Jesus' strong declarations against divorce,
our marriages break up at a rate-just over half-that compares
poorly with the European Union's average of about four in ten.
That average may be held down by the fact that Europeans marry
less frequently, and by countries, like Italy, where divorce is
difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the
godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent.
Teenage pregnancy? We're at the top of the charts. Personal self-
discipline-like, say, keeping your weight under control? Buying
on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to ask?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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| User: "Tukla Ratte" |
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| Title: Re: From Harper's: "The Christian Paradox" |
18 Sep 2005 05:23:55 PM |
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wrote:
Interesting reading. American xianity is just like any xianity,
and all other religions for that matter: its believers rationize
their behaviour as "godly".
http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptTheChristianParadox.html
< snip >
When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite
philosopher, he may or may not be sincere,
But he was certainly an idiot, since he was asked to name his favorite
philosopher from the *second* millennium CE.
< snip >
--
Tukla, Squeaker of Chew Toys
Official Mascot of Alt.Atheism
"There are too many stupid people and nobody to eat them."
- Carlos Mencia
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| User: "Robibnikoff" |
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| Title: Re: From Harper's: "The Christian Paradox" |
19 Sep 2005 09:01:45 AM |
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"Tukla Ratte" <tukla_rate@tukla.net> wrote in message
news:r06103-p2n.ln1@stitch.tukla.net...
bg12345@apexmail.com wrote:
Interesting reading. American xianity is just like any xianity,
and all other religions for that matter: its believers rationize
their behaviour as "godly".
http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptTheChristianParadox.html
< snip >
When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite
philosopher, he may or may not be sincere,
But he was certainly an idiot, since he was asked to name his favorite
philosopher from the *second* millennium CE.
Hey you!!! Were your ears burning?!? How the heck are you?!? :)
--
------
Robyn
Resident Witchypoo
#1557
Science doesn't burn people at the stake for disagreeing - Vic Sagerquist
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| User: "Mark K. Bilbo" |
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| Title: Re: From Harper's: "The Christian Paradox" |
19 Sep 2005 10:32:05 AM |
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In <r06103-p2n.ln1@stitch.tukla.net>, Tukla Ratte <tukla_rate@tukla.net>
wrote:
bg12345@apexmail.com wrote:
Interesting reading. American xianity is just like any xianity, and all
other religions for that matter: its believers rationize their behaviour
as "godly".
http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptTheChristianParadox.html
< snip >
When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he
may or may not be sincere,
But he was certainly an idiot, since he was asked to name his favorite
philosopher from the *second* millennium CE.
< snip >
AAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!
Don't sneak up on me like that!!!
--
Mark K. Bilbo
--------------------------------------------------
"We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long
after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have
been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing.
Many who could have been were not. That's to the
government's shame."
http://makeashorterlink.com/?F2D511CBB
.
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: From Harper's: "The Christian Paradox" |
18 Sep 2005 12:08:07 PM |
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On 15 Sep 2005 02:10:39 -0700, wrote:
Interesting reading. American xianity is just like any xianity,
and all other religions for that matter: its believers rationize
their behaviour as "godly".
http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptTheChristianParadox.html
Bob Dog
Atheist #153 = 1^3 + 5^3 + 3^3
EAC's chief cook and brainwasher
-----
"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work
within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
- Claire Wolfe
"I disagree with the second part."
- Detective Somerset of "Se7en", paraphrased
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The Christian Paradox
How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong
Posted on Wednesday, July 27, 2005. What it means to be Christian in
America. An excerpt. Originally from August 2005. By Bill McKibben.
Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten
Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors
of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's
wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian
heritage may be further evidence of our nation's educational
decline, but it probably doesn't matter all that much in
spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does
matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches
that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of
four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at
the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which
was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy
Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not
biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from
the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor.
On this essential matter, most Americans-most American Christians-
are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists
believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we say
we are a Christian nation-and, overwhelmingly, we do-it means
something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make
real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these
lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of
U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a
particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.)
When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite
philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting
the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.
And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most
professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least
Christian in its behavior. That paradox-more important, perhaps,
than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a
diet of chocolate and cheese-illuminates the hollow at the core
of our boastful, careening culture.
* * *
Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on
earth. Depending on which poll you look at and how the question
is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves
Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish. It
is true that a smaller number of Americans-about 75 percent-claim
they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent
say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that
85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents
aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than
four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about
American behavior is essentially also a measure of the behavior
of professed Christians. That's what America is: a place
saturated in Christian identity.
But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on
the heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had
in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion-
say, giving aid to the poorest people-as a reasonable proxy for
Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his
crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples,
he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was
by whether they'd fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the
naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What
would we find then?
In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last,
after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid.
Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official
development assistance to poor countries. And it's not because we
were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such
funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies,
to twenty-one cents. It's also not because Americans were too
busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American
children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in
Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the
least among us you want to propose-childhood nutrition, infant
mortality, access to preschool-we come in nearly last among the
rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just
that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly
in all these categories; it's that the overwhelmingly Christian
American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories
to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it's not as if the
numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture
reported last year that the number of households that were "food
insecure with hunger" had climbed more than 26 percent between
1999 and 2003.
This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to
political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon.
Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most
violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five
times that of our European peers. We have prison populations
greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations
(which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting
the prisoners). Having been told to turn the other cheek, we're
the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens,
mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically
strongest. Despite Jesus' strong declarations against divorce,
our marriages break up at a rate-just over half-that compares
poorly with the European Union's average of about four in ten.
That average may be held down by the fact that Europeans marry
less frequently, and by countries, like Italy, where divorce is
difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the
godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent.
Teenage pregnancy? We're at the top of the charts. Personal self-
discipline-like, say, keeping your weight under control? Buying
on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to ask?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The Christian Paradox
How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong
Posted on Thursday, September 15, 2005. What it means to be Christian
in America. An excerpt from this report appeared in August 2005. The
complete text appears below. Originally from August 2005. By Bill
McKibben.
Sources
Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten
Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the
Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. This
failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be
further evidence of our nation’s educational decline, but it probably
doesn’t matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is
a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the
Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is,
three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a
notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture,
which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy
Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical;
it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel
message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this
essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply
wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton
proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
Asking Christians what Christ taught isn’t a trick. When we say we are
a Christian nation—and, overwhelmingly, we do—it means something.
People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions
based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their
politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were
urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004
election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus
Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but
he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of
Americans.
And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most
professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian
in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much
touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and
cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening
culture.
* * *
Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on earth.
Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked,
somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by
way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish. It is true that a smaller
number of Americans—about 75 percent—claim they actually pray to God
on a daily basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church
every week. Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice,
it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that
unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can
cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure of the
behavior of professed Christians. That’s what America is: a place
saturated in Christian identity.
But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on the
heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind
for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion—say, giving
aid to the poorest people—as a reasonable proxy for Christian
behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus
summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could
tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they’d fed the
hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger,
and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?
In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after
Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita
we each provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance
to poor countries. And it’s not because we were giving to private
charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average
daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It’s also not
because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18
percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8
percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for
the least among us you want to propose—childhood nutrition, infant
mortality, access to preschool—we come in nearly last among the rich
nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just that (as
everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these
categories; it’s that the overwhelmingly Christian American nation
trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid
particular attention. And it’s not as if the numbers are getting
better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last year that the
number of households that were “food insecure with hunger” had climbed
more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003.
This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to
political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon. Despite
the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation
on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European
peers. We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven
than other rich nations (which at least should give us plenty of
opportunity for visiting the prisoners). Having been told to turn the
other cheek, we’re the only Western democracy left that executes its
citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically
strongest. Despite Jesus’ strong declarations against divorce, our
marriages break up at a rate—just over half—that compares poorly with
the European Union’s average of about four in ten. That average may be
held down by the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by
countries, like Italy, where divorce is difficult; still, compare our
success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is
just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy? We’re at the top of the
charts. Personal self-discipline—like, say, keeping your weight under
control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to
ask?
* * *
Are Americans hypocrites? Of course they are. But most people (me, for
instance) are hypocrites. The more troubling explanation for this
disconnect between belief and action, I think, is that most
Americans—which means most believers—have replaced the Christianity of
the Bible, with its call for deep sharing and personal sacrifice, with
a competing creed.
In fact, there may be several competing creeds. For many Christians,
deciphering a few passages of the Bible to figure out the schedule for
the End Times has become a central task. You can log on to
RaptureReady.com for a taste of how some of these believers view the
world—at this writing the Rapture Index had declined three points to
152 because, despite an increase in the number of U.S. pagans,
“Wal-Mart is falling behind in its plan to bar code all products with
radio tags.” Other End-Timers are more interested in forcing the
issue—they’re convinced that the way to coax the Lord back to earth is
to “Christianize” our nation and then the world. Consider House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay. At church one day he listened as the
pastor, urging his flock to support the administration, declared that
“the war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse.”
DeLay rose to speak, not only to the congregation but to 225 Christian
TV and radio stations. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “what has been
spoken here tonight is the truth of God.”
The apocalyptics may not be wrong. One could make a perfectly serious
argument that the policies of Tom DeLay are in fact hastening the End
Times. But there’s nothing particularly Christian about this
hastening. The creed of Tom DeLay—of Tim LaHaye and his Left Behind
books, of Pat Robertson’s “The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in
Israel today”—ripened out of the impossibly poetic imagery of the Book
of Revelation. Imagine trying to build a theory of the Constitution by
obsessively reading and rereading the Twenty-fifth Amendment, and
you’ll get an idea of what an odd approach this is. You might be able
to spin elaborate fantasies about presidential succession, but you’d
have a hard time working backwards to “We the People.” This is the
contemporary version of Archbishop Ussher’s seventeenth-century
calculation that the world had been created on October 23, 4004 B.C.,
and that the ark touched down on Mount Ararat on May 5, 2348 B.C., a
Wednesday. Interesting, but a distant distraction from the gospel
message.
The apocalyptics, however, are the lesser problem. It is another
competing (though sometimes overlapping) creed, this one straight from
the sprawling megachurches of the new exurbs, that frightens me most.
Its deviation is less obvious precisely because it looks so much like
the rest of the culture. In fact, most of what gets preached in these
palaces isn’t loony at all. It is disturbingly conventional. The
pastors focus relentlessly on you and your individual needs. Their
goal is to service consumers—not communities but individuals:
“seekers” is the term of art, people who feel the need for some
spirituality in their (or their children’s) lives but who aren’t
tightly bound to any particular denomination or school of thought. The
result is often a kind of soft-focus, comfortable, suburban faith.
A New York Times reporter visiting one booming megachurch outside
Phoenix recently found the typical scene: a drive-through latte stand,
Krispy Kreme doughnuts at every service, and sermons about “how to
discipline your children, how to reach your professional goals, how to
invest your money, how to reduce your debt.” On Sundays children
played with church-distributed Xboxes, and many congregants had signed
up for a twice-weekly aerobics class called Firm Believers. A list of
bestsellers compiled monthly by the Christian Booksellers Association
illuminates the creed. It includes texts like Your Best Life Now by
Joel Osteen—pastor of a church so mega it recently leased a
16,000-seat sports arena in Houston for its services—which even the
normally tolerant Publishers Weekly dismissed as “a treatise on how to
get God to serve the demands of self-centered individuals.” Nearly as
high is Beth Moore, with her Believing God—“Beth asks the tough
questions concerning the fruit of our Christian lives,” such as “are
we living as fully as we can?” Other titles include Humor for a
Woman’s Heart, a collection of “humorous writings” designed to “lift a
life above the stresses and strains of the day”; The Five Love
Languages, in which Dr. Gary Chapman helps you figure out if you’re
speaking in the same emotional dialect as your significant other; and
Karol Ladd’s The Power of a Positive Woman. Ladd is the co-founder of
USA Sonshine Girls—the “Son” in Sonshine, of course, is the son of
God—and she is unremittingly upbeat in presenting her five-part plan
for creating a life with “more calm, less stress.”
Not that any of this is so bad in itself. We do have stressful lives,
humor does help, and you should pay attention to your own needs.
Comfortable suburbanites watch their parents die, their kids implode.
Clearly I need help with being positive. And I have no doubt that such
texts have turned people into better parents, better spouses, better
bosses. It’s just that these authors, in presenting their perfectly
sensible advice, somehow manage to ignore Jesus’ radical and demanding
focus on others. It may, in fact, be true that “God helps those who
help themselves,” both financially and emotionally. (Certainly fortune
does.) But if so it’s still a subsidiary, secondary truth, more
Franklinity than Christianity. You could eliminate the scriptural
references in most of these bestsellers and they would still make or
not make the same amount of sense. Chicken Soup for the Zoroastrian
Soul. It is a perfect mirror of the secular bestseller lists, indeed
of the secular culture, with its American fixation on
self-improvement, on self-esteem. On self. These similarities make it
difficult (although not impossible) for the televangelists to posit
themselves as embattled figures in a “culture war”— they offer too
uncanny a reflection of the dominant culture, a culture of unrelenting
self-obsession.
* * *
Who am I to criticize someone else’s religion? After all, if there is
anything Americans agree on, it’s that we should tolerate everyone
else’s religious expression. As a Newsweek writer put it some years
ago at the end of his cover story on apocalyptic visions and the Book
of Revelation, “Who’s to say that John’s mythic battle between Christ
and Antichrist is not a valid insight into what the history of
humankind is all about?” (Not Newsweek, that’s for sure; their
religious covers are guaranteed big sellers.) To that I can only
answer that I’m a . . . Christian.
Not a professional one; I’m an environmental writer mostly. I’ve never
progressed further in the church hierarchy than Sunday school teacher
at my backwoods Methodist church. But I’ve spent most of my Sunday
mornings in a pew. I grew up in church youth groups and stayed active
most of my adult life—started homeless shelters in church basements,
served soup at the church food pantry, climbed to the top of the
rickety ladder to put the star on the church Christmas tree. My work
has been, at times, influenced by all that—I’ve written extensively
about the Book of Job, which is to me the first great piece of nature
writing in the Western tradition, and about the overlaps between
Christianity and environmentalism. In fact, I imagine I’m one of a
fairly small number of writers who have had cover stories in both the
Christian Century, the magazine of liberal mainline Protestantism, and
Christianity Today, which Billy Graham founded, not to mention
articles in Sojourners, the magazine of the progressive evangelical
community co-founded by Jim Wallis.
Indeed, it was my work with religious environmentalists that first got
me thinking along the lines of this essay. We were trying to get
politicians to understand why the Bible actually mandated protecting
the world around us (Noah: the first Green), work that I think is true
and vital. But one day it occurred to me that the parts of the world
where people actually had cut dramatically back on their carbon
emissions, actually did live voluntarily in smaller homes and take
public transit, were the same countries where people were giving aid
to the poor and making sure everyone had health care—countries like
Norway and Sweden, where religion was relatively unimportant. How
could that be? For Christians there should be something at least a
little scary in the notion that, absent the magical answers of
religion, people might just get around to solving their problems and
strengthening their communities in more straightforward ways.
But for me, in any event, the European success is less interesting
than the American failure. Because we’re not going to be like them.
Maybe we’d be better off if we abandoned religion for secular
rationality, but we’re not going to; for the foreseeable future this
will be a “Christian” nation. The question is, what kind of Christian
nation?
* * *
The tendencies I’ve been describing—toward an apocalyptic End Times
faith, toward a comfort-the-comfortable, personal-empowerment
faith—veil the actual, and remarkable, message of the Gospels. When
one of the Pharisees asked Jesus what the core of the law was, Jesus
replied:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all
your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first
commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as
yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Love your neighbor as yourself: although its rhetorical power has been
dimmed by repetition, that is a radical notion, perhaps the most
radical notion possible. Especially since Jesus, in all his teachings,
made it very clear who the neighbor you were supposed to love was: the
poor person, the sick person, the naked person, the hungry person. The
last shall be made first; turn the other cheek; a rich person aiming
for heaven is like a camel trying to walk through the eye of a needle.
On and on and on—a call for nothing less than a radical, voluntary,
and effective reordering of power relationships, based on the
principle of love.
I confess, even as I write these words, to a feeling close to
embarrassment. Because in public we tend not to talk about such
things—my theory of what Jesus mostly meant seems like it should be
left in church, or confined to some religious publication. But
remember the overwhelming connection between America and Christianity;
what Jesus meant is the most deeply potent political, cultural, social
question. To ignore it, or leave it to the bullies and the salesmen of
the televangelist sects, means to walk away from a central battle over
American identity. At the moment, the idea of Jesus has been hijacked
by people with a series of causes that do not reflect his teachings.
The Bible is a long book, and even the Gospels have plenty in them,
some of it seemingly contradictory and hard to puzzle out. But love
your neighbor as yourself—not do unto others as you would have them do
unto you, but love your neighbor as yourself—will suffice as a gloss.
There is no disputing the centrality of this message, nor is there any
disputing how easy it is to ignore that message. Because it is so
counterintuitive, Christians have had to keep repeating it to
themselves right from the start. Consider Paul, for instance,
instructing the church at Galatea: “For the whole law is summed up in
a single commandment,” he wrote. “‘You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.’”
American churches, by and large, have done a pretty good job of loving
the neighbor in the next pew. A pastor can spend all Sunday talking
about the Rapture Index, but if his congregation is thriving you can
be assured he’s spending the other six days visiting people in the
hospital, counseling couples, and sitting up with grieving widows. All
this human connection is important. But if the theology makes it
harder to love the neighbor a little farther away—particularly the
poor and the weak—then it’s a problem. And the dominant theologies of
the moment do just that. They undercut Jesus, muffle his hard words,
deaden his call, and in the end silence him. In fact, the soft-focus
consumer gospel of the suburban megachurches is a perfect match for
emergent conservative economic notions about personal responsibility
instead of collective action. Privatize Social Security? Keep health
care for people who can afford it? File those under “God helps those
who help themselves.”
Take Alabama as an example. In 2002, Bob Riley was elected governor of
the state, where 90 percent of residents identify themselves as
Christians. Riley could safely be called a conservative—right-wing
majordomo Grover Norquist gave him a Friend of the Taxpayer Award
every year he was in Congress, where he’d never voted for a tax
increase. But when he took over Alabama, he found himself
administering a tax code that dated to 1901. The richest Alabamians
paid 3 percent of their income in taxes, and the poorest paid up to 12
percent; income taxes kicked in if a family of four made $4,600 (even
in Mississippi the threshold was $19,000), while out-of-state timber
companies paid $1.25 an acre in property taxes. Alabama was
forty-eighth in total state and local taxes, and the largest
proportion of that income came from sales tax—a super-regressive tax
that in some counties reached into double digits. So Riley proposed a
tax hike, partly to dig the state out of a fiscal crisis and partly to
put more money into the state’s school system, routinely ranked near
the worst in the nation. He argued that it was Christian duty to look
after the poor more carefully.
Had the new law passed, the owner of a $250,000 home in Montgomery
would have paid $1,432 in property taxes—we’re not talking Sweden
here. But it didn’t pass. It was crushed by a factor of two to one.
Sixty-eight percent of the state voted against it—meaning, of course,
something like 68 percent of the Christians who voted. The opposition
was led, in fact, not just by the state’s wealthiest interests but
also by the Christian Coalition of Alabama. “You’ll find most
Alabamians have got a charitable heart,” said John Giles, the group’s
president. “They just don’t want it coming out of their pockets.” On
its website, the group argued that taxing the rich at a higher rate
than the poor “results in punishing success” and that “when an
individual works for their income, that money belongs to the
individual.” You might as well just cite chapter and verse from Poor
Richard’s Almanack. And whatever the ideology, the results are clear.
“I’m tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad,” said
Governor Riley, “and last in things that are good.”
* * *
A rich man came to Jesus one day and asked what he should do to get
into heaven. Jesus did not say he should invest, spend, and let the
benefits trickle down; he said sell what you have, give the money to
the poor, and follow me. Few plainer words have been spoken. And yet,
for some reason, the Christian Coalition of America—founded in 1989 in
order to “preserve, protect and defend the Judeo-Christian values that
made this the greatest country in history”—proclaimed last year that
its top legislative priority would be “making permanent President
Bush’s 2001 federal tax cuts.”
Similarly, a furor erupted last spring when it emerged that a Colorado
jury had consulted the Bible before sentencing a killer to death.
Experts debated whether the (Christian) jurors should have used an
outside authority in their deliberations, and of course the Christian
right saw it as one more sign of a secular society devaluing religion.
But a more interesting question would have been why the jurors fixated
on Leviticus 24, with its call for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth. They had somehow missed Jesus’ explicit refutation in the New
Testament: “You have heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye and a
tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But
if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”
And on and on. The power of the Christian right rests largely in the
fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their very
boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they’re
talking about. They’re like the guy who gives you directions with such
loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be
turning into a faint, rutted track. But their theology is appealing
for another reason too: it coincides with what we want to believe. How
nice it would be if Jesus had declared that our income was ours to
keep, instead of insisting that we had to share. How satisfying it
would be if we were supposed to hate our enemies. Religious
conservatives will always have a comparatively easy sell.
But straight is the path and narrow is the way. The gospel is too
radical for any culture larger than the Amish to ever come close to
realizing; in demanding a departure from selfishness it conflicts with
all our current desires. Even the first time around, judging by the
reaction, the Gospels were pretty unwelcome news to an awful lot of
people. There is not going to be a modern-day return to the church of
the early believers, holding all things in common—that’s not what I’m
talking about. Taking seriously the actual message of Jesus, though,
should serve at least to moderate the greed and violence that mark
this culture. It’s hard to imagine a con much more audacious than
making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or
war in Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are
Christians woke up to that fact, then the world might change.
It is possible, I think. Yes, the mainline Protestant churches that
supported civil rights and opposed the war in Vietnam are mostly
locked in a dreary decline as their congregations dwindle and their
elders argue endlessly about gay clergy and same-sex unions. And the
Catholic Church, for most of its American history a sturdy exponent of
a “love your neighbor” theology, has been weakened, too, its hierarchy
increasingly motivated by a single-issue focus on abortion. Plenty of
vital congregations are doing great good works—they’re the ones that
have nurtured me—but they aren’t where the challenge will arise;
they’ve grown shy about talking about Jesus, more comfortable with the
language of sociology and politics. More and more it’s Bible-quoting
Christians, like Wallis’s Sojourners movement and that Baptist
seminary graduate Bill Moyers, who are carrying the fight.
The best-selling of all Christian books in recent years, Rick Warren’s
The Purpose-Driven Life, illustrates the possibilities. It has all the
hallmarks of self-absorption (in one five-page chapter, I counted
sixty-five uses of the word “you”), but it also makes a powerful case
that we’re made for mission. What that mission is never becomes clear,
but the thirst for it is real. And there’s no great need for Warren to
state that purpose anyhow. For Christians, the plainspoken message of
the Gospels is clear enough. If you have any doubts, read the Sermon
on the Mount.
Admittedly, this is hope against hope; more likely the money changers
and power brokers will remain ascendant in our “spiritual” life. Since
the days of Constantine, emperors and rich men have sought to co-opt
the teachings of Jesus. As in so many areas of our increasingly
market-tested lives, the co-opters—the TV men, the politicians, the
Christian “interest groups”—have found a way to make each of us
complicit in that travesty, too. They have invited us to subvert the
church of Jesus even as we celebrate it. With their help we have made
golden calves of ourselves—become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed
idols. It works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come.
When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only love of self,
they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back
for more of the same.
About the Author
Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the
author of many books, including The End of Nature and Wandering Home:
A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape. His last article
for Harper’s Magazine, “The Cuba Diet,” appeared in the April 2005
issue.
This is The Christian Paradox, a feature, originally from August 2005,
published Thursday, September 15, 2005. It is part of Features, which
is part of Harpers.org.
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the White House will be adorned
by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
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