I wouldn’t mind if the United States decided all together that we’re a Christian nation, as long as we started acting…well…Christian and conducted ourselves according to Christian principles.
Do unto others…
Turn the other cheek…
Do not store up treasures on earth…
Whatever we do to the least of His brethren…
The trouble is that the people who most fervently believe this is a Christian nation and want this declared a fact and expect the rest of us to accept it without comment or complaint are also adamant that the country not act on any of the above principles at all.
The Jay-sus lovers don’t seem to think anything Jesus actually said means what it appears to mean or they think that if it does then it doesn’t matter.
Blessed are the peacemakers? Fine. As long as we understand that the peacemakers are those who bring about peace on their own ungenerous terms by squashing all perceived enemies wherever and whenever they’re perceived.
The thing about Christian Fundamentalists and biblical literalists that’s so infuriating is that few of them seem to have read the Bible at all. The Bible lovers and thumpers never quote Micah or James or Peter or Jesus Himself for that matter. The only parts of the Bible the ones who have read it, or at least skimmed it from time to time, take to heart are the least charitable and most insane passages from Paul's epistles and the bloodier books of the Old Testament in which Jehovah’s favorite past time is smiting the enemies of Israel and then turning right around and smiting Israel for the pure fun of it.
They also have a fondness for the Psalms but only the ones that let them indulge their self-pity and sense of persecution and encourage their fantasies of violent and terrible revenge.
As far as they’re concerned, Jesus didn’t come to teach anything. He just came to save them. Read save as promise them first class staterooms on the luxury liner to heaven and comfy deck chairs from which they can look down at the water where the unsaved are being sucked into whirlpools at the bottom of which Hell and everlasting torment await.
New Testament vs. Old Testament? Forget that. It’s all the same. The point of it all is that God chose the Jews as His favorites and when they didn’t live up to expectations He replaced them with Christians.
Christians---their sort of Christians---are God’s chosen people and if the United States is a Christian nation---their sort of Christian nation---that makes it God’s chosen nation.
Which gives us the right---the right? The responsibility---to establish God’s kingdom on earth, mainly by lording it over everyone who is not our sort of Christian and smiting whatever enemies we decide God would want to have smited.
We’re a shining city on a hill from which we are free to throw stones from the porches of our glass houses down on any and every sinner passing below, as if we are the ones free from sin, which of course we are because, after all, God chose us, didn’t He? You think he would choose sinners to give dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth?
What the Christianists want when they demand that we acknowledge that this is their sort of Christian nation is a general acceptance of the fact that they’re right and the rest of us are wrong and therefore whatever they say should go, even when the rest of us have gotten together and outvoted them.
Christianity, their sort, trumps democracy.
In their minds, the founders established a Fundamentalist, authoritarian, Christianist nation, and threw in the democratic bits as an afterthought without really meaning any of it.
They make a big deal out of the historically contingent fact that the founders, including Jefferson, were nominally Christian, but they never bother to look into what kind of Christians they were.
Most of Founders, especially the more devout ones like John Adams, would have been appalled by the sort of Christianity the Christianists practice. They’d have regarded it as a version of what they dismissed contemptuously as “methodism”---incoherent, intellectually undisciplined, self-indulgent, superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
The Chrisitianists have a point when they argue that when the Founders established the separation of church and state they didn’t intend to ban religion from the public sphere. What the Christianists don’t get is that what the Founders intended was to prevent exactly what the Christianists are trying to do---the Founders weren’t about to let one sect of Christianity get control of the government and use it to tell all the other sects what do believe and how to behave.
The “Christian” nation the Christianists want us to be is not one that would take into account what Catholicism teaches about poverty and immigration and the death penalty or what Episcopalians believe about the rights of gays and lesbians. Non-Missouri Synod Lutherans, most Presbyterians, contemporary Methodists, Orthodox Greeks, New England Congregationalists, non-Southern Baptists and plenty of Southern ones (Psst. The African-American sort.), and even Evangelicals like Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter don’t count as “Christian.”
What they want is a nation of Right Wing Fundamentalist Christians, by Right Wing Fundamentalist Christians, for Right Wing Fundamentalist Christians. The rest of us will be allowed to live here in peace as long as we understand and accept that they are the only real Americans and theirs are the only views and votes that matter and they get their way on every issue.
That’s why there’s no talking to them, no finding common cause with them, no appeasing them at all. They demand universal, unconditional surrender. Anything less leaves open the possibility that they aren’t right in all things, that they aren’t God’s chosen people.
Find one who is willing to sit down and talk, who’s sincerely looking for common ground, and you’ve found one who sooner or later is going to find that he or she is no longer considered a Christian by the Christianists.
This is easy to say. It’s hard to know what to do about it.
Here’s a starting point though. Keep an eye on your local school board.
Here in Liberal Blogtopia (TM Skippy) we’re so focused on national politics that we tend to think and talk as if all the battles and all the solutions are in the hands of the politicians in Washington.
But the Christian Right knows different.
“I would rather have a thousand school-board members,” Ralph Reed once said, “than one president and no school-board members”.
Well, no. That’s a lie. Reed, like all his fellow Christianists, wants it all. But he knew that school boards were a useful and easy place to begin.
Local school boards are an objective. Even better, though, is a state school board. Best of all, is the Texas Board of Education, because as Texas goes so goes the nation…a lot of it, anyway, when it comes to what textbooks wind up on the desks of our children.
As you might have guessed, this whole post has been leading up to a link, and it’s a link to this article in the upcoming issue of the New York Times magazine, How Christian Were the Founders?
Yes, it's hard to be a Christian these days, with so many professed Christians giving the faith a bad name. Count me among those who don't count.
Posted by: Ralph H. | Friday, February 12, 2010 at 01:59 PM
Don't forget Revelation. That's how they trump "Blessed are the peacemakers" and manage to be so stridently "pro-Israel" despite the doctrine of supercession, aka
which used to be the justification for out-in-the-open fundamentalist anti-semitism, as opposed to the modern Palinesque "We lurve Israel, and hope the day comes quickly when most Jews will be exterminated, and the remainder converted to Christianity."
Yeah, I think it's funny how in Adams' letters to Jefferson, there's a bit where he's mocking the end-of-the-world types who thought Napoleon was the Antichrist. Then again, he was a Unitarian, and we all know what they're like.
Posted by: mds | Friday, February 12, 2010 at 04:52 PM
The problem is not with Christ or true Christians, but with the subsect of Dispensationalists.
Those are the pricks who create people like David Koresh, mass-killers hiding in sheep's clothing. If that group was treated like Charles Manson, it would give a clearer picture of the abomination they've created.
Posted by: actor212 | Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 10:24 AM
"The thing about Christian Fundamentalists and biblical literalists that’s so infuriating is that"......is that they're actually complete nihilists and not actually any sort of Christians at all (indeed, they don't have any religion whatsoever). But it's interesting to see that the nihilism of capitalism spread so strongly into religion under capitalism too, no?
Posted by: burritoboy | Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 06:51 PM