Faith-Based Blog a blog about faith from a believer with bandwidth

Resetting Boyd

Sometimes, a bit of repetition with the classics is a good thing. Here's a repeat posting of Greg Boyd's interview with Charlie Rose, discussing his book, "Myth of a Christian Nation."

A fair amount of what Boyd outlines is derivative of John Howard Yoder's thesis. There's two books by Yoder that I've been meaning to get around to reading: "The Politics of Jesus" and "The Christian Witness to the State". No luck so far, but there's a few resources here from his older material that I may work into the reading plan for what's left of this week.

A Wieseltier Reset: “Under God and Over”

An oldie, but a goodie in that it's stuck with me ever since reading this column. A full read is well worth the time spent, but here's a "Reader's Digest" version if I dare try to condense it ...

» New Republic: Under God And Over (Leon Wieseltier)

As I watched the Supreme Court discuss God with Michael A. Newdow, the atheist from California who was defending his victory in a lower court that had concurred with his view that the words "under God" should be stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance because it is a religious expression, and was therefore responding to the Bush administration's petition to protect the theism in the Pledge, I remembered a shrewd and highly un-American observation that was included among the aphorisms in Either/Or: "The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious."

The discussion that morning fully vindicated the majesty of the chamber, as legal themes gave way to metaphysical themes and philosophy bewitched the assembly. But something strange happened. Almost as soon as philosophy was invited, it was disinvited. It seemed to make everybody anxious, except the respondent. I had come to witness a disputation between religion's enemies and religion's friends. What I saw instead, with the exception of a single comment by Justice Souter, was a disputation between religion's enemies, liberal and conservative. And this confirmed me in my conviction that the surest way to steal the meaning, and therefore the power, from religion is to deliver it to politics, to enslave it to public life.

...

The solicitor general stood before the Court to argue against the plain meaning of ordinary words. In the Pledge of Allegiance, the government insisted, the word "God" does not refer to God. It refers to a reference to God. The government's argument, as it was stated in the brief filed by Theodore B. Olson, was made in two parts. The first part was about history, the second part was about society. "The Pledge's reference to 'a Nation under God,'" the solicitor general maintained, "is a statement about the Nation's historical origins, its enduring political philosophy centered on the sovereignty of the individual." The allegedly religious words in the Pledge are actually just "descriptive" -- the term kept recurring in the discussion -- of the mentality of the people who established the United States. As Olson told the Court, they are one of several "civic and ceremonial acknowledgments of the indisputable historical fact that caused the framers of our Constitution and the signers of the Declaration of Independence to say that they had the right to revolt and start a new country."

...

There is no greater insult to religion than to expel strictness of thought from it. Yet such an expulsion is one of the traits of contemporary American religion, as the discussion at the Supreme Court demonstrated. Religion in America is more and more relaxed and "customized," a jolly affair of hallowed self-affirmation, a religion of a holy whatever. Speaking about God is prized over thinking about God. Say "under God" even if you don't mean under God. And if you mean under God, don't be tricked into giving an account of what you mean by it. Before too long you have arrived at a sacralized cynicism: In his intervention at the Court, Justice Stevens recalled a devastating point from the fascinating brief submitted in support of Newdow by 32 Christian and Jewish clergy, which asserted that "if the briefs of the school district and the United States are to be taken seriously," that is, if the words in the Pledge do not allude to God, "then every day they ask schoolchildren to violate [the] commandment" that "Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord in vain." Remember, those are not the Ten Suggestions. It is a very strange creed indeed that asks its votaries not to reflect too much about itself.

Everytime I see the latest outrage of the day: some court case where the alleged rights of Christians are being chipped away at, I keep coming back to Wieseltier's column. Given the frequency of such outrages, perhaps it's no surprise that Wieseltier's argument has stuck with me since first reading this column. It's as if the only way to securely "take back America for God" is to first describe how God has nothing to do with it.

Back to Barton for a Moment …

Moving on, ever so slowly, I've got one and a half extra points to add to the David Barton catalog from last week.

The recent item comes from a recent radio show of Barton's, where he compared today's Tea Party activists to Jesus Christ Himself. The paranoid demonization of "the media" is added for good context, to boot. Remember, this is the same "non-political" David Barton that was offered up as one who should be guiding our opinions, if we're to be "good Christians."

The "and a half" is really a highlight of the two heftier reads that I offered last week for some additional context of Barton. You can take either or both profiles with as many grains of salt as you like. But toward the latter part of Nate Blakeslee's Texas Monthly profile, he gets at the core of what it is that Barton's really looking to "build" and ends with a particularly important point about the history he uses to build his argument on ...

And what does it really mean to have a government “firmly rooted in biblical principles,” as one of WallBuilders’ mottoes goes? Barton told me repeatedly that he would oppose the establishment of a state religion or direct funding of religious activities. But what does he want? It was a discussion he seemed surprisingly reluctant to have. When I asked him what an ideal state would look like, it occasioned a long pause. He finally described a place where outsiders could not impose their will on cohesive communities and where losers in the democratic process could not simply run off to court and undo the will of the majority. “It’s not that I want prayer back in every school,” he said. “It’s that I want every community to have the right to decide.” Barton quoted Washington to me: “The fundamental principle of our Constitution enjoins that the will of the majority shall prevail.” That is certainly true, but losers in the political process still have rights; part of the genius of our Constitution is how it protects minority interests.

In an ironic way, Barton’s earnest—and frequently convincing—portrayal of the founders as deeply religious undermines his larger point. These were men, after all, who failed to even mention God in the Constitution. If they had wanted to make the United States a Christian republic, they could have done so. Indeed, in many of the colonies the idea of secular government was anathema, as Barton correctly points out. The earliest settlers may have come to America in search of religious freedom, but on these shores they established their own state religions and began lashing, jailing, and excommunicating one another for the same thought crimes they had once been found guilty of.

Beginning in their home state of Virginia, men like Jefferson and Madison led the fight against this combine of government and religion. They were reading the Bible, certainly, but they were also reading the ancient Greeks and the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers. They were interested in a wall that worked both ways; through Madison’s careful crafting of the First Amendment, that’s what they got. This is the big picture that Barton’s books deliberately ignore: that the views on religion and government of figures like Benjamin Rush fell into obscurity not because of some conspiracy but because they failed to carry the day.

There's a point in that that almost always sticks with me whenever I hear this argument - the need to impose one's Christian faith on others. This comes out in ways big and small, but it's a recurring theme. As if our faith will fail unless we can force rooms full of pre-teens to mope through an organized prayer (not to be confused with the prayers sent up individually before a math test); as if our faith will amount to nothing unless we can stake our dominance over a packed football field of parents and students alike; as if our identity in Christ is any less if we can't savor the victoriousness of a manipulative prayer of disagreement at a graduation ceremony. And let's not even go down the road of what happens if the Wal Mart greeter suggests we have a mere Happy Holidays.

And yet, for all of that concern, no such forced prayer is demanded at the local Chili's before dining ... no similar insistence in our neighbor's homes, at least not outside of fellow churchgoers ... and with only minor exception, few Bible study groups demanding rights at the workplace. It's as if the less personal the situation gets, the more Christian we insist the moment be.

It's that aspect that still puzzles me to this day. As if I should really be insistent that a 10-yr old learn reading from a Bible story because I can't live out Jesus and Paul's teachings on free will? This is where I tend to break from my own habit of not getting into too many theological particulars with a lot of ministries that I honestly question. Instead, I don't see anything Christian about what David Barton does. It's not a Christ-centered nation he seems to be arguing for.

Which, of course, is why I argue back.

Deconstructing Barton

Just to get the ball rolling (ever so slowly) on the topic I've now threatened to devote a bit more time and attention to, here's two backgrounders on David Barton of Wallbuilders. Both are from 2006 - the first by Texas Monthly magazine; the second from the Texas Freedom Network, a group devoted to tracking the religious right in Texas.

The nickel version (for those looking to save some reading time) is as follows: Barton makes up history, selectively quotes, and even more selectively omits a lot of history in order to arrive at one central conclusion. And that conclusion is that the Declaration and Constitution are, essentially, Biblical documents; the founders essentially the equivalent of Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy in terms of both theological and civic thought; and if you vote the way they suggest you vote, we'll have a government that 'restores' that misunderstood reading of history. If there's any doubt as to how you should vote, it's not hard to figure out. Barton, himself, served as vice-chair of the Texas Republican Party and also worked under contract with the Republican National Committee to recruit pastors for delivering the very message that was delivered on my last night at Lakewood. Like I said ... if there's any confusion as to how they want you to vote, it's not hard to figure out.

Anyways, enjoy the extended read for some more detail on David Barton. There's far more out there. I'll eventually get around to picking up Chris Rodda's "Liars for Jesus," which does a more thorough point-by-point rebuttal of Barton's central argument. Even I can't claim to being quite ready to dive into that right now.

Texas Monthly

TFN profile

Two Things You Never Talk About At the Dinner Table

One thing that I've been very reluctant to spend an exorbitant amount of time blogging despite having an acute interest in: faith & politics. Yes, I've dipped an occasional toe into the subject matter. I've read quite a bit. But I've also avoided going into any great depth here in terms of the historical understanding of it's roots in European and American history and the theological debates that have buzzed around that bit of history. For starters, it was never my intention of boring people stiff. Besides, I tend to view it as being more important to begin a journey (physical or intellectual) as an explorer rather than an interpreter. So I didn't particularly care to dive into the deep end of that pool on Day One. More importantly, I never viewed the arguments as central to one's faith. I still don't. But they are an impediment to a lot of people's faith. I know because that used to be me. And running into it head-on in recent days has given me enough impetus to expend a bit more effort in explaining, rebutting, and clarifying a lot of bad information I've seen taken as Gospel over the years.

For matters better or worse, I've had a pretty long-standing interest in politics and history, both before I was born again and after. When you share a common name of someone who's signed the Declaration of Independence, I'm going to suggest it's hard not to take an interest.

But I've also spent a fair amount of time following and struggling with many of the questions raised over the current arguments over how faith and politics intersect. Perhaps when you're born again in a time when conservative theology weds itself to conservative politics as it did in the 30+ years, I should also suggest it's hard not to take an interest.

As it happens, I was born again in 1987 after my first semester in college. By this time, the Jimmy Swaggarts, Jim Bakkers, and Robert Tiltons of the world were in full bloom and quickly sinking into a morass of corruption and hypocrisy. The political wing of the church had also had a substantial impact and I'd already endured numerous high school encounters whereby I was told in no uncertain terms that voting Republican was the only one true way to vote in agreement with God. Now, I was truly blessed to have other Christian friends at the time, who did cast a far more favorable impression on what a walk with Christ might look like. So it wasn't all bad. But the debates and arguments that I've witnessed in more recent years are by no means new to me.

In fact, the arguments were vivid enough for me in 1987 to know that finding a church home represented a herculean task. I'd met a smattering of people in similar situations to mine: wanting to walk with Christ, but not looking for the extra baggage that many of our Christian friends seemed eager to add to the yoke. We might have been vaguely aware that there were believers out there who didn't hew perfectly to the GOP party line, calculate the earth's age at ~5000 years, or find evolution incongruous with belief in God's word. But short of walking into the weirdness of a Unitarian church, it wasn't entirely clear where a church home might be found.

What I didn't get too indepth with back in the day was the more historical work of the early church leaders (Augustine, Luther, Calvin, etc...). And the "rebuttals" of the modern right wing church hadn't exactly gotten as much attention until recently. So it wasn't until reading Greg Boyd's "Myth of a Christian Nation" that I became aware of people like John Howard Yoder. And it wasn't until Shane Claiborne that I became aware of people like Daniel Berrigan. Now, that said, I don't necessarily agree with all of the "contra right" thinkers on this list. But they do help fill in some of the blanks and highlight many of the weaknesses that I've long felt existed in the more right wing interpretation of God's kingdom.

All this to say ... I think it's time I wrote a bit more on the topic. Don't say you weren't warned.

By way of full disclosure, I offer nothing more than the spirit of a student toward the topic. I'm not a professional historian, theologian, or even a bonafide pundit on the subject. But nor would I qualify as much of a pilgrim on some journey. I've been down this road in years past and know a bit of where I stand on some of the debates and interpretations of years past. While the journey may not be perfectly defined at every turn along the way, it's pretty clear to me where I'm headed with it.

So for the sake of filling anyone in who wishes to either follow along or avoid altogether, I'll summarize accordingly:

- We don't operate in the realm of perfect information. As such, I don't think God particularly cares much for how you vote. Certainly, I don't. While it may sound perfectly logical from a Christian perspective to vote for those candidates we feel either "stand for Christian values" or "inhabit Christian values" (note: there's a huge difference), I don't think we're capable of knowing either.

- My word <> God's word.

- Your word <> God's word.

- Opinions are allowed (and I think it naturally follows from the above two points that more of what we say should be considered opinion), but it's important to distinguish between opinion and anything else. We can vote on those opinions. We can change those opinions. But my opinion (or anyone else's) on the appropriate level of taxation or regulation should not be confused with "God's word." If you have a differing opinion with regard to anything I say, feel free to chime in.

- Original thought is highly valued. If I suggest something is highly influenced by someone else's thinking ... usually I'll state that. It'd be great if that were reciprocated. We're all influenced by what goes on around us. Let's just be honest and admit it more freely.

- Intellectual consistency will be checked for. Both in terms of my own thinking and anyone else's. There are some easy targets for this that I'm sure to take a shot at from time to time. Just wait ... you'll see.

- The ability to discuss differences openly and civilly says more about where one is with God than the particulars of the opinions we differ on. That doesn't mean emotions or strong attachments to those opinions are unwarranted. But knowing how to have those discussions matters. In other words, feel free to chime in for conversation - screeds, diatribes, and namecalling can go on behind closed doors if necessary.

- Of course, staying out of those discussions is also allowed ... and usually indicative of a higher level of intelligence to the people doing the talking/writing.

Now, with the ground rules somewhat in place, I'll go about re-arranging the dinner table for the two topics of conversation that mom & dad always say never to bring to it. If it's something more light-hearted that you're after ... there's this.

The “Non-political” Steve Austin

Comments from the individual who described his message to a Lakewood ministry as "non-political" despite instructions on the type of candidate to vote for and dropping two partisan group names as guides for people to inform them. Safe to say, I feel even more secure in my decision to walk away from a church that would have someone like this in leadership.

ADD-ON: Here's a backgrounder on the issue that got this started.