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

Undermining Faith

Washington Post: In mosque controversies, some Christians undermine their own faith (Michael Gerson)

I'm not terribly fond of much of Gerson's writing (stylistically, great ... merit of the content, not so much). But there's something to be said for his take here:

In this debate, grace is in short supply but irony abounds. The Christian fundamentalist view of Islam bears a striking resemblance to the New York Times' view of Christian fundamentalism -- a simplistic emphasis on the worst elements of a complex religious tradition. Both create a caricature, then assert that the Constitution is under assault by an army of straw men. The debates within Islam on the nature and application of sharia law, for example, are at least as complex as the debates among Christian theologians on the nature of social justice. And the political application of Islam differs so greatly -- from Saudi Arabia to Mali to Morocco to Bosnia to Tanzania to Detroit -- that it defies easy summary.

Many Christian fundamentalists seem oblivious to the similarity of their own legal and cultural peril. In portions of America -- say San Francisco or Vermont -- conservative Christians are sometimes also viewed as suspicious, illiberal outsiders. Their opinions on gender roles, homosexuality and public morality are viewed as an attack on constitutional values -- much as fundamentalists view the threat from Islam. Some secular critics of Islam -- Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens come to mind -- explicitly argue that the real threat to freedom comes from the oppressive moralism of the entire Abrahamic tradition -- Jewish, Christian and Muslim.

Christian fundamentalists who undermine religious liberty in order to target Muslims are playing a game of intolerance roulette. That First Amendment might come in handy someday.

By all means, read the whole thing.

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.

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.