Why the Christian Right is Wrong

In my latest book, Why the Christian Right is Wrong:  A Minister’s Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future (Jossey Bass, 2006), I expand on a brief anti-war speech given on the campus of the University of Oklahoma in 2004.  Students turned the speech, which lists 17 reasons why I believe the Bush administration is acting immorally, into an internet phenomenon.  As the speech spread through cyberspace, hundreds of people reacted with relief and gratitude—telling me that the speech put into words what they had been thinking, and renewing their hope that the church may yet be able to recover the world’s most famous missing person:  Jesus.

The book explores the immorality of:  starting a war on false pretenses in the name of Jesus, taunting enemies instead of praying for them, violating international law in defiance of the UN we established, reversing the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, demonizing the enemy, helping the rich instead of the poor, winking at torture, piling debt on the heads of “little ones,” using gays as political scapegoats, favoring the death penalty, destroying the environment, mangling the word “compassionate,” refusing to reform health care, appointing judges who are racist, and carving up the world into a crusade of Godly Good Guys vs. Evil Doers.

But the book is not just a rant.  The final section includes suggestions for positive, proactive steps that everyone can take to save both the country and the church.  As a long-suffering member of the Democratic Party, I even have a few suggestions that might help the party of FDR to recover its soul.  Here is an excerpt from a section called; Will the Real Democrats Please Stand Up?

I am old enough to remember when Democrats were Democrats.  They stood solidly behind working people and protected the weak from the ravages of the strong.  They knew that unions were a necessary evil to protect the middle class and that the market place does not solve all the problems of life.  They believed in the minimum wage, a safe shop, clean water, independent churches, and a strong defense.  They remembered the Great Depression and were vigilant about the dangers of too much wealthy and too much power falling into too few hands.  They distrusted big business, fought for the American farmer, and prayed to Jesus privately.  They believed in hard work, family values, and defending America against “all enemies, foreign or domestic.”  They were blue-collar, mainstream, and deeply religious. . .

Now, in order to save the country from a host of imaginary evils, the poorest Americans vote against their own economic self-interest and seem more fervently committed to the Republican agenda than society’s winners are.  How did this happen?  The backlash is the cleverest bait-and-switch to come along since the Trojan Horse.  While systematically downplaying economic issues and focusing on “values,” the preachers and pundits of the Right work average people into an apocalyptic fury.  Once the votes are secured, Republican politicians go to work on the real agenda:  low wages, lax business and environmental regulations, and cutting taxes on the wealthy.  Thomas Frank put it perfectly:  “The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate.  Values may ‘matter most’ to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won”. . .

The deadly mistake of my beleaguered Democrats is that they tried to ride the Republican horse with a softer saddle.  Democrats pretending to be “Republican Lite” have only solidified the power of the extreme Right by abdicating their position as a true opposition party.  As middle-class Americans have watched their incomes stagnate, even working two or three jobs, and seen small towns dry up and blow away as manufacturing jobs were “outsourced” in the name of free trade, Democrats have answered with a deafening whimper.  Their message often sounds like a dull lecture, a bloodless resolution written by a policy wonk using long compound-complex sentences and words like enabled and empowered.  Meanwhile, the Republicans are leading an altar call with God, guns, and guts.

If the Democrats want to reinvent themselves, if they want to resist the choreographed media sideshow that modern politics has become, they must begin with an old idea:  government “of the people, by the people, and for the people—so help them God.”  That’s right, as difficult as it is for modern Democrats to talk about faith, the truth is that their own party’s history of fighting for those who are left out and protecting those who are powerless is in fact one long, tortured, inspired act of faith. . .

The Democrats will have to say, plainly and with passion, that we are for universal healthy care, and Jesus would be too.  That we are for a living wage, and Jesus would be too.  That we invented “family values” by giving the country a forty-hour work week, laws against child labor, and Social Security—so that everyone’s family, and not just ours, could live in dignity.  When the Right calls us “liberals,” we should smile and say thank you.  As retired Lutheran pastor Daniel Bruch put it, “I don’t know if Jesus was the first liberal, but he was an important one.”

We are the party that believes the government should not restrict personal freedom but increase it, not spend our children’s money but save it, turn our back not on the poor but on the rampant individualism that is undermining the American dream.  We are the party that believes in plurality, tolerance, and the separation of church and state.  We love Jesus the Jew, but also all Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and those wonderful pagans.  Is this a recipe for disaster?  No, it’s our only hope of survival.

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Dr. Robin Meyers has been the senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC Church of Oklahoma City for 20 years, and Professor of Rhetoric in the Philosophy department at Oklahoma City University for 15 years.  He is a syndicated columnist for the Oklahoma Gazette, a commentator for NPR, and the author of three previous books:  With Ears to Hear:  Preaching as Self-Persuasion (Pilgrim Press, 1993); Morning Sun on a White Piano:  Simple Pleasures and the Sacramental Life (Doubleday, 1998); and The Virtue in the Vice:  Finding Seven Lively Virtues in the Seven Deadly Sins (HCI, 2004).  He lives in Oklahoma City with is wife Shawn, a professor of Art History, and their three children, Blue, Chelsea, and Cass.