carapace – Not your father's america

How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong

Posted on Wednesday, July 27, 2005.
What it means to be Christian in America. An excerpt.
Originally from August 2005.
By Bill McKibben.

[Excerpt]

SourcesOnly 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation’s educational decline, but it probably doesn’t matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.

Asking Christians what Christ taught isn’t a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation—and, overwhelmingly, we do—it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.

And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.

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Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on earth. Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish. It is true that a smaller number of Americans—about 75 percent—claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure of the behavior of professed Christians. That’s what America is: a place saturated in Christian identity.

But is it Christian? This is not a matter of angels dancing on the heads of pins. Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion—say, giving aid to the poorest people—as a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they’d fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?

In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it’s not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It’s also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose—childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool—we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it’s that the overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it’s not as if the numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last year that the number of households that were “food insecure with hunger” had climbed more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003.

This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon. Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers. We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners). Having been told to turn the other cheek, we’re the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus’ strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate—just over half—that compares poorly with the European Union’s average of about four in ten. That average may be held down by the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by countries, like Italy, where divorce is difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy? We’re at the top of the charts. Personal self-discipline—like, say, keeping your weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need to ask?

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To read the remainder of this essay, pick up a copy of the August issue of Harper’s Magazine, on newsstands near you. Looking for a newsstand?

About the Author
Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the author of many books, including The End of Nature and Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape. His last article for Harper’s Magazine, “The Cuba Diet,” appeared in the April 2005 issue.

This is The Christian Paradox, a feature, originally from August 2005, published Wednesday, July 27, 2005. It is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.

http://harpers.org/ExcerptTheChristianParadox.html

July 18, 2005 latimes.com

MICHAEL MCGOUGH

Liberal Christians can wield two weapons against conservatives on the issue of homosexuality.

By Michael McGough

Justin R. Cannon, a student at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., is one of the youngest combatants in the Christian culture wars. But he’s a happy warrior because his contribution to the debate — an illuminating online analysis that argues the Bible doesn’t condemn faithful gay relationships — has piqued the interest of clergy and laypeople across the country.

“I have received all sorts of positive letters and e-mail from pastors, bishops, Bible study teachers, seminary professors, gays and lesbians, as well as a few straight allies,” the seminary-bound Cannon told me, referring to his study, “The Bible, Christianity and Homosexuality” (www.truthsetsfree.net). (Some responses, he conceded, “weren’t so friendly [but] I have tried to … be loving and gracious in my replies.”)

Cannon’s website makes use of etymology and history to cast doubt on the prevailing antigay interpretations of several Bible verses. It is only one front in a robust theological counterattack against Christian conservatives who insist — as a 1998 statement from Anglican bishops puts it — that same-sex relationships of any kind are incompatible with Scripture.

Revisionists such as Cannon are ingenious and often persuasive in arguing that strictures in both the Old and New Testaments that have been read to broadly condemn homosexuality were actually directed at particular offenses — male prostitution, a breach of hospitality (the real “sin of Sodom”) or the insult to patriarchy represented by a male lying “with a man as one lies with a woman” (Leviticus 18:22).

In seeking to have antigay Christians reexamine their prejudices, the revisionists are doing the Lord’s work — literally, because Jesus said a great deal about love and nothing at all about homosexuality. But arguing about whether particular passages in the Bible condemn homosexuality — “proof-texting,” in the jargon of biblical scholars — may not be the best way to counter conservatives.

For example, the gay British theologian Jeffrey John says that in St. Paul’s time, “prostitution and pederasty (in the sense of the Greek practice of a temporary pupil-tutor relationship between a teenager and an older man) were the standard forms of homosexual practice, and those are the forms which were likely to be uppermost” in his references to homosexuality.

But suppose they weren’t? Suppose Paul also would have condemned permanent, faithful, stable same-sex relationships? After all, Paul, a religious genius but a man of his time, professed more than a few beliefs that are anathema to many contemporary Christians.

Sophisticated Christians have long recognized that, as a colleague of mine put it after launching his own Scripture study, “there’s a lot of wacky stuff in the Bible.” For example, Cannon points out that the same holiness code in Leviticus that prohibits men from lying with each other “as with a woman” also forbids the shaving of beards and the sowing of two kinds of seeds in the same field.

Conservatives argue that this doesn’t mean that we’re not to take Scripture literally, but only that some Old Testament rules are superseded by the Christian Gospel. But that thinking runs aground because the New Testament itself contains its own literal conundrums. In the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul asserts that “a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.” But in the Epistle of James, he says: “A man is justified by works and not by faith alone.”

There is an alternative to passage-by-passage literal arguments — one that calls for the courageous assertion that Scripture can be reinterpreted, and sometimes repudiated, on the basis of the lived experience of Christians, guided by the Holy Spirit.

This is the approach taken by the Episcopal Church, which decided to ordain the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, a priest in a committed same-sex relationship, as bishop of New Hampshire.

The Episcopal Church’s report on this decision, submitted to its fellow “communicants” in the international Anglican Community (some of whom are none too happy with Robinson’s ordination), tellingly quotes Jesus’ words as reported in the Gospel of John: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you…. ”

The report notes that the Bible records how St. Peter was guided to the truth that Gentiles could become Christians without becoming Jews and compares it to the Episcopal Church’s “discernment” that same-sex relationships can be holy. The Book of Acts recounts how the church (Peter and friends) are prompted by the Holy Spirit “to question and reinterpret what they would previously have seen as a clear commandment … not to associate with a particular group of people who were considered unclean.”

The fact is, liberal Christians can wield both approaches against the hard-line right. The “clobber passages” cited by John and Cannon can be shown to be less than weighty when read in their proper cultural context. But however you read them, they were never meant to be the end of the lesson.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-mcgough18jul18,0,4109333.story?track=tothtml