The problem with American civil religion is that it reduces faith to a particular brand of nationalism, which is precisely the opposite of the message preached by Jesus and the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. By ignoring passages about social justice and community and highlighting appeals to individual liberties, Deuteronomistic theology, the Exodus, and conquest narratives, Beck attempted to weave together a generic, nationalistic religion that he hopes will appeal to the lowest common denominator of both faith and politics – personal ‘salvation’ via individual liberties – and overlook the more pervasive themes of social justice, equality, and community – which all people of faith are called to do! We are called to live together in community together as one body, not as rugged individuals. Bob Cargill ☀
Often we are preoccupied with the question “How can we be witnesses in the Name of Jesus? What are we supposed to say or do to make people accept the love that God offers them?” These questions are expressions more of our fear than of our love. Jesus shows us the way of being witnesses. He was so full of God’s love, so connected with God’s will, so burning with zeal for God’s Kingdom, that he couldn’t do other than witness. Wherever he went and whomever he met, a power went out from him that healed everyone who touched him. (See Luke 6:19.) If we want to be witnesses like Jesus, our only concern should be to be as alive with the love of God as Jesus was. Henri Nouwen ☀
When the focus is narrowed to Republicans, a Harris poll finds 57 percent of party members believe he is a Muslim, 22% believe he “wants the terrorists to win,” and 24% believe he is the Antichrist. These figures sadden me with the depth of thoughtlessness and credulity they imply. A democracy depends on an informed electorate to survive. An alarming number of Americans and a majority of Republicans are misinformed. The man who was swept into office by a decisive majority is now considered by many citizens to be the enemy. Some fundamentalists believe he is the Antichrist named by Jesus in the Bible. This many Americans did not arrive at such conclusions on their own. They were persuaded by a relentless process of insinuation, strategic silence and cynical misinformation. Most of the leaders in this process have been cautious to avoid actually saying Obama is a Muslim. They speak in coded words and allow the implications to sink in. I recently watched Glenn Beck speaking at great length about Obama’s Muslim father, but you would not have learned from Beck that the father, who Obama met only once, was not a practicing Muslim in any sense. Rush Limbaugh has told his listeners he can find “no evidence” that Obama is a Christian. Roger Ebert ☀
The rally/revival may have been intended to showcase unity, resolve, and passion for more of God in our country but sadly it serves to be an indictment of evangelical disunity, ignorance and indifference with the gospel. So, instead of more of God it is more of us and less of Jesus. Many American Evangelicals were outraged over the plans for a mosque to be built near the site of Ground Zero in New York City. However, we are not so outraged about building a tower of morality on the sacred site of the church. This rallying pole of morals, God and country is a lot like the old city’s motto to reach the heavens with our hands and building (Gen 11.4). In so doing this new construction of a monument to ‘Moralanity’ is obscuring the cross, which is the gospel monument to Christ, and his Christianity. God calls the church to be a faithful bride to Jesus, his Son. Sadly, evangelicals are taking page out of the old Mormon playbook and practicing polygamy. American evangelicals need to repent and return to their first love. This running around with other lovers is unbecoming, embarrassing, and nauseating (Rev. 3.16) Evangelical Polygamy: The Conservative Honeymoon with Glenn Beck ☀
Beck’s history lesson is a rather confusing one. He states that he wants to restore America and return the nation to God. But when exactly did the United States abandon God? Was the abandonment present at the creation when the Bill of Rights provided for freedom of religion and a separation of church and state based upon colonial opposition to the established Church of England? Beck, of course, ignores the Founders’ attraction to Deism and the Enlightenment, including Benjamin Franklin’s questioning of Jesus’s divine origins. Instead, Beck proposes that America was founded as a Christian nation, and, indeed, some colonies proposed freedom of religion for all Christians in order to prevent the immigration of Jews. While Beck does appear willing to expand his religious boundaries to include a Judeo-Christian tradition, there is certainly no room in Beck’s America for non-Christians or those who might profess no belief in a supreme being. Thus, Muslims are left out of Beck’s national classroom, and he and his followers are able to embrace a clash of civilizations historical narrative which opposes the creation of an Islamic Center within blocks of Ground Zero, even though a gentleman’s club and lap dancing are tolerated. In addition, Beck’s religious history lesson omits the tradition of Christian socialism in the United States which helped foster the social gospel movement and combined fundamentalist tent revivals with socialist political meetings on the Oklahoma frontier in the period before World War I.
Beck’s notion of America as a capitalist, Christian nation allows him to endorse American exceptionalism and the concept of manifest destiny. In Beck’s world view, Americans are God’s chosen people, ant it is incumbent upon Americans to share the blessings of their civilization with the less fortunate peoples of the earth. Thus, the continental expansionism of the United States and formation of a global empire, in which American military personnel are stationed around the world, are the unfolding of God’s plan for the planet. Beck’s history does not allow for introspection or reflection. Instead, a blind patriotism is celebrated in which subjugation of the environment and Native Americans, racial slavery, intolerance, exploitation of labor, and global imperialism are glossed over in a story of triumphant expansionism. American soldiers and settlers brought the gifts of democracy to the Natives and Mexican peoples of the West and Southwest, while in World Wars I and II, the Cold War, and the War on Terror, America is exporting freedom to the world.
It is a type of unthinking patriotism which renders Americans incapable of comprehending why some in the world might question the commitment of the United States to democratic principles. Thus, professor Beck refuses to consider how the Cold War implementation of the Truman Doctrine led to the support of dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in the Philippines, Indonesia, Nicaragua, South Vietnam, South Africa, and Iraq. Beck’s myopic view of history makes it difficult for his students/ followers to understand that Iranian resentment toward the United States is fueled by a CIA coup in 1953 which removed a democratically-elected government and installed the despised Shah who was overthrown in the Iranian Islamic Revolution. To raise such issues is unpatriotic and not allowed in Beck’s “democratic” classroom.
Despite this historical celebration of America’s civilizing and democratic mission, accompanied by a failure to acknowledge that there might be any historical failings in American foreign policy—even in the jungles of Southeast Asia—Beck and his prize pupil, Sarah Palin assume that the United States somehow got off course and that God and honor, along with traditional values, must be restored. Accordingly, we must return to the 1960s and redeem the Civil Rights Movement, for that seems to be where the nation got off course in attempting to bring the promise of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to all Americans regardless of race, gender, class, or sexual orientation. Rather than a period in which America got off track, the 1960s commitment to a more egalitarian society may be perceived as the moment when the nation returned to its founding principles.
Since when did “we the people” become synonymous with Socialism? How can we convince people that “loving their neighbor” means more than just praying for them, that it means supporting a system that raises each of us up through access to education, health care, jobs, and a livable life? How can we encourage people to stop thinking of themselves as living in subdivisions and start living in neighborhoods? How can we shift from the Jesus of the comfortable to the “sell all your possessions” Jesus? I don’t think we change the nature of the conversation by berating those with whom we disagree, further sowing the seeds of resentment and faction. We change the nature of the conversation by connecting our own work to the values or faith by which it is motivated. The Christianity I practice requires that I love my neighbor even when it isn’t easy, that I work for “the least of these” even when I want to quit, that I give my two coins even if they are the last two I have, and that Jesus died not only for my sins but also those of the tax collector, the Samaritan woman, and the Pharisee. I cannot, in good conscience, profess to be a Christian and not see the world as composed of a “we” rather than just “me.” It is also, because I am a Christian that I cannot dismiss the Tea Party outright as I hear their cry of suffering. Me the People: A Day with the Tea Party ☀
Instead of taking social cues from people your age, take cues from people ten and twenty years older than you. Are you looking for a church that has a lot of people who are your age so you can hang out? That’s fine, but try looking for one where most of the people have families and perhaps a little grey hair. Why? Because the sooner you can relate to their priorities, the sooner you’ll be ready for the next stage of life. I’m in my late thirties but I’m more interested in hanging out with people who are retired. What’s it teaching me? It’s teaching me what matters later in life is friendships, family and love. In matters of faith, what matters to them is not theological debate, but closeness with Jesus and unity with believers. Donald Miller ☀
The insidious message of the Lucifer Effect is that systemic poverty is not our problem, that we have enough to do taking care of ourselves, our families, and the individuals to whom we are charitable. This is a self-focused, narrow benevolence. It’s much easier to be merely charitable than to accept personal responsibility for social systems that perpetuate poverty. And when celebrities like Glenn Beck label social justice un-Christian, the Lucifer Effect encourages us to go along with the behavior and advice of an outspoken leader who offers us the easier path.
So take a look around. We’re all on the Jerusalem road, and in many ways it’s not a safe place to be. It may be OK for the well-to-do, who can hire private security guards, send their kids to the best schools, and pay for good medical care. But for the vast majority of working people—whose income simply isn’t enough to pay the bills and whose kids are trapped in dead-end schools—the Jerusalem road can be deadly.
WWJD and WWLD. Is the only difference between Jesus and Lucifer that Jesus would help the occasional victim while ignoring the unsafe conditions…and Lucifer would ignore both? Or should we read Jesus’s message of personal transformation in the larger context of social justice, the context Jesus himself established by choosing the words of Isaiah as his first public teaching?
As we support and pray for the victims of Sept. 11, we must remember that this was not the first act of terror and evil perpetrated on American soil. The forced removal of Native Americans from their land is tragic, and the consequences of this act are still felt generations later by the remnants of Native American tribes. Some churches and Christians played a part in this tragedy. Could not the same logic be applied to prohibit the construction of churches within a few blocks from the Trail of Tears?
Slavery once existed in every American colony, and persisted in the South until the end of the civil war. Few can argue that the legacy of slavery still marks this nation, and that churches and Christians often supported this peculiar institution. Could not descendants of slaves ask for a moratorium of new Caucasian churches near former slave auction sites, plantations, and even the locations of thousands of lynchings?
Obviously most Christians today are deeply saddened by our historic complicity in the forced removal of Native Americans and the enslavement and segregation of African Americans. To ban churches from sites that once perpetuated these evils would be an absurd response to historic tragedies that instead demand confession, repentance, and transformation.
Is not the politicization of a community center that includes a place of worship in lower Manhattan similarly absurd? While terrorism and violence need to be condemned at every turn, intolerance and vilification of the practitioners of other faiths does not strike me as living out the love of Jesus. Somewhere I can hear Jesus saying, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”
The earliest representations of Jesus show him eating and healing. In both instances, those who shared the scenes with Jesus included misfits, outcasts, the infirm, and the impoverished. These bodies were considered ugly and broken, but to Jesus, they were as beautiful as (if not more beautiful than) other “normative” bodies. Those who were rejected at society’s table –– such as women, lepers, and Gentiles –– always had an open spot at the diverse and beautiful table of Christ. Apart from the economically impoverished, today’s marginalized “ugly” bodies include the handicapped, elderly, obese, and foreigner. It’s sad that many today fail to open their tables to society’s marginalized, to those who are especially hungry for fellowship and compassion. Even more distressing is that churches fail to address the ethical dilemmas inherent in the contemporary cult of bodily perfection. We should be addressing and halting the violence that “ugly and broken” bodies encounter daily. César Baldelomar ☀
If the second coming happened right now, Jesus would probably show up as an app.
It seems everything these days is an app, or awaiting approval, so don’t be surprised. You read it here first.
What’s funny is that we’ve had a killer app for the internet all along, no need for a second coming. It’s called the web.
Publishers have gone down the app road before. The idea of putting out periodicals as executable files is as old as the “disk magazines” of the 1980s and 1990s. These were delivered on floppies via snail mail with custom editions for the Commodore 64 and Apple II, for example, since there were no cross-platform standards at the time outside of text-only ASCII.
What happened? The web.
Daily news reports remind us that Christian pastors and leaders are just as sinful and fallen as those they disparage for not being a Christian, One thing I learned as a Pastor is that people with seemingly perfect lives are not telling the truth about their lives. I used to say that the hardest thing to do is convince a person they are a sinner and need Jesus. The second hardest thing to do is convince Christians that they still are sinners. As Christians get older then tend to forget their own frailness and often become quite self-righteous. Our Life is PROOF that Christianity is the Real Deal ☀
The basic point is simply that everything we do is tied in some way to our culture. And this is not a bad thing. The creation of “systematic theology” is due to a certain cultural location (if you don’t believe me, try to find a Jewish systematic theology). The use of the word euangelion (good news) is due to a certain cultural location and carried overtones that “Jesus died so God might forgive my particular sins” almost never conveys to modern ears. Culture is not bad. We all do things based on culture. But the danger is when we start looking at the culture we’re comfortable with and start considering that it is not only normal but also normative. When I see someone critiquing Emergent for simply wanting to be cool, or critiquing books with “sex” in the title assimply trying to be provocative, what I see going on is someone who doesn’t understand how deeply contextualized his own assessment of Christian normalcy is. Traditional Christian culture is its own culture, with roots in various Eurpean and American movements that gave birth to its current incarnations. Hip Christianity ☀
Sociologist Rodney Stark has argued in his numerous books that the Christian Church has always been strongest when it has faced a challenge. It grew amidst the hostility of the Roman Empire and entrenched paganism. It flourished when it was forced to clearly define itself and live out of its unique and powerful convictions about the nature and purposes of the God of Israel and Jesus Christ, Messiah and Lord. Stark suggests that when the church lacked the challenge of opposition and the necessity of clear self-definition it became flaccid, colorless, and empty. The challenge of the Reformation made the Catholic Church clearly define itself and clean up accumulated abuses. The challenge of varied denominations and traditions made the smaller Protestant churches more effective in mission. It was religious competition, Stark argues, that made the church in the United States strong when the state churches of Europe were shrinking. The challenge of the other made the church pay closer attention to its identity and mission. Why are Christians So Afraid of Muslims? ☀
The “Gospel” response to Prop 8? “How do I love my homosexual neighbor as myself?”
Each generation we look back in horror at the things that have been done in the past, taking refuge in the thought that, had we been there, we would have defied the majority and fought for what’s right. How easy retrospect is!
- “If I had been in Calvin’s Geneva, I would never have approved the burning of Servetus!”
- “If I had been at the Westminster Assembly I would have stood against the regicide!”
- “If I had been alive in the Middle Ages I would never have gone on crusade!”
- “If I had been alive during the Spanish Inquisition I would have been a voice for grace!”
And, every generation we are given a mirror in the issues of our own day to reflect back to us that, no, had we been alive we would have capitulated to power and injustice–would have refused to ask, “What does it mean to love my neighbor?”–just like those who came before us did.
Oh no, if I had been alive in the first century I would never have participated in his crucifixion. And I know that because I faithfully hold fast to everything that’s written in the scriptures and pour my life into seeing that it’s upheld!
Yes, there were those in the first century as well. And they weren’t the followers of Jesus but the Pharisees who went off with the Herodians to plot how to kill him.
If I had been alive in the 21st century, I would have forced the Christians in my community to ask, “What does it mean to love your homosexual neighbor as your Christian self?”
No, you didn’t.
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