In our day and age many Christians, including very prominent ones, have chosen a lifestyle that is fundamentally at odds with their claim to be Christians. This is a lifestyle choice I am talking about – it is not something genetic, something innate, something inevitable. It is a sin that is so abominable that it is condemned uncategorically in both Testaments. I am speaking, of course, of the tendency in particular among American Christians, and particularly among our leaders, to live in luxury while our brothers and sisters are starving, cold, and oppressed.
While some spend much time denouncing homosexuals as a danger to our society, the only sense I can make of this is an attempt to find some other sin that people will focus on, lest we realize that those who are pointing the finger are living much more blatantly in sin themselves. Homosexuality was a rather ordinary and relatively common part of the experience of many people in the Greco-Roman world, and yet Paul mentions it extremely infrequently, and in the cases when he does he may have in mind the element of pedophilia in traditional Greek education and be opposing that in particular. Be that as it may, it is noteworthy that with all his wonderful letter-writing skills he never appears to have written a letter to anyone complaining that homosexuality is too widespread, too influential. Instead he wrote letters to Christian communities focusing on other topics, and (if Acts 17 is to be believed) engaged in respectful yet powerful dialogue with those he disagreed with. The only real instances of his sounding intolerant are in his addresses to what might be called the religious right of his own time.
Right-wing religious leaders have often accused the homosexuals of America of wanting special favoritism under the law. This is incredibly ironic, given that these fellow citizens of ours have only asked to be allowed to have the same rights others already have. It is the religious right that really is asking for special treatment – it wants specifically Christian sexual mores of a specific sort that not all Christians agree with legislated and imposed on everyone else. Why is this so hard to see? Why is it so hard for so many American Christians to understand that when we complain about not being allowed to have our views imposed on others and mandated by the state, we are showing (1) intolerance of others, unwillingness to have them lead their own lives as they see fit, and more importantly (2) a complete lack in faith in the power and persuasiveness of the Gospel. It is only those who don’t think the Christian Gospel alone is enough that decide they need it bolstered by the state.
I originally wrote this post after having just read Mel White’s book Religion Gone Bad. It is well worth reading, and it persuades me that he is more truly a Christian than any of his opponents among the religious right. Mel White has grasped both the heart of the Christian Gospel, and has put his finger on the sins that sit enthroned as idols in the religious right and among Christians generally in our country, unacknowledged and unchallenged, as we sit in judgment on others and fail to see how far astray we have gone ourselves.
Although White tries to play them down, his book rightly highlights the similarities (many more than the ones I noted recently on my blog) between the religious right and the historic rhetoric of fascism. Perhaps the most moving moment in the book is when he tells how an elderly Jewish woman came to show her support for gays because “last time they came for you first…never again”. The way homosexuals are being demonized and made scapegoats for all our social ills is precisely the way the Nazis started.
There is also a wonderful treatment of the question of the founding fathers and their intentions. The big concern most of us have is not that somehow the religious right will manage to rewrite the constitution or remove the first amendment – I doubt that the majority of Americans would ever agree to that. But our fear is that they may not need to do that – it may be sufficient for them simply to convince a majority of Americans (or the majority of those who care enough to vote) that the first amendment never intended what historically all except the modern religious right have assumed, namely that it protects all religions from all others and from the state, as well as the state from religious dominance, and does not just protect Christianity from the state’s interference. There is a wonderful statement by James Madison, which can be read online and which is quoted in part in the book. Read it for yourselves. All I’ll say is that it is as clear as can be that the founding fathers foresaw precisely the sorts of maneuvers the modern religious right is attempting to use and they set in place in our constitution and in their own writings safeguards against them. As long as we have their bulwark protecting our freedoms, we ought to be safe, but the great fear is that while we finght wars allegedly defending our freedoms, individuals and groups in our own country may themselves succeed in undermining them, again not overtly and in obvious moves such as an amendment revoking the bill of rights, but in an attempt to persuade public opinion to ignore or reinterpret the foundational structures that keep us free and safe.
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