Rhetoric Race and Religion
For many of us who grew up evangelical, the word “compromise” has always been a bad word. It means to allow non-Christian values and influences to corrupt your devotion to Biblical truth. Frank Schaeffer, the son of the evangelical leader who started the modern Religious Right, claims that our government shutdown and its Tea Party architects cannot be understood apart from this fundamental characteristic of the evangelical ethos. Insofar as the Tea Party is an evangelical phenomenon, I think he may be right. Evangelicals are raised to be a people of no compromise. And it all starts with an understanding of Jesus’ cross that makes God into Darth Vader and turns us into cookie-cutter stormtroopers devoted to His imperial cause.
Why did Jesus have to die for our sins on the cross? For most conservative evangelicals, that question has a very simple, straightforward answer: because God has zero tolerance for sin. God is holy, and what holiness means is God’s refusal to compromise His expectations for perfect adherence to the laws He lays out in the Bible. Since no human being other than Jesus has ever been perfectly obedient, God had to create a means by which His expectations for perfection would not be compromised by showing mercy to an imperfect people. So instead of torturing every human being forever because of their imperfection, God pours out His wrath on His own Son to show the world that He is a God of no compromise who will pour out the same wrath eternally on people who won’t accept Jesus as their Lord and savior.
One of my favorite movies, The Usual Suspects, is premised on a similar gesture of no compromise. The main character, Keyser Soze, is a Turkish gangster whose rivals kidnap his children and hold guns to their heads, demanding that he give their business to them. To show that he is a man of no compromise, Keyser Soze shoots and kills his own children rather than capitulate to their demands. Similarly, Darth Vader’s uncompromising obedience to the Emperor is measured by his willingness to kill his own son Luke Skywalker. Vader’s ethical system measures “good” as uncompromising obedience to his master’s will; it is irrelevant whether this “good” harms or benefits other people.
A cross whose purpose is to uphold God’s uncompromising intolerance for imperfection creates a God in the image of Keyser Soze or Darth Vader, because it defines God’s goodness not according to any sort of benevolence towards humanity, but as His demand for nothing less than perfect conformity to His will. In such a view, goodness is whatever God wills, as opposed to God’s will being expected to reflect a goodness that could be considered independent of its association with God.
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