My father blew my mind one day when he listened to me ramble on about something near and dear to my heart for a while and then pronounced, "You surprise me. You're a Christian, after all." I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that I was anything but. I left my faith behind some time in my twenties, and became a religion basher with a vengeance. How could my father be so wrong?
It took me years to realize what had happened is that while I had left the church, I still embraced the ethical values of the community in which the church had thrived. The Christianity I was inculcated with as a youth understood Christ to be the guy whose words were printed red in my Bible. Most of what we know of Christianity comes down from Paul and the originators of the Gospel whose writings have been credited to the Apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But the real deal, I was given to understand, was the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount. The guy who prioritized love and compassion and forgiveness for wrongs done to you. The guy who spoke of giving a stranger not only the coat that he asks you for, but the cloak off your back as well. The guy who performed miracles, raised people from the dead, walked on water, and turned water into wine. The guy who asked you to give all your belongings to the poor and walk barefoot through life with nothing but the clothes on your back - if you still had any that you hadn't already given away. People who tell me they want to follow that guy have all my support. Impractical. Probably unachievable, but hell, what's life if your reach doesn't exceed your grasp? Go get'em, kid, I want to say. More power to you.
Unfortunately, one of the things the Christians got right was that human beings are an imperfect lot, and most followers of this Christ figure can't hold a candle to him in terms of love and compassion. Some of them are downright mean and nasty, and some will actually kill you, given half the chance. When people tell me they are Christian, sometimes I think, "Where's my gun?" I don't carry one, and fortunately most of the Christians I know are mighty good folk. But some of them - Jeez Louise!
When I hear all this huff and puff about living "according to the Bible," I set it against what I remember from my Sunday School days, when I first discovered the gap between what the people around me practiced and what they preached. I realized very early on that the Christians couldn't possibly follow that red-letter Jesus. He was simply too impractical, too demanding. Nobody was going to give away all they had to the poor. Why were they so intent on pretending they believed in this guy?
I asked a member of my born-again family once if when Jesus said, "Let the little ones come unto me," he actually meant, "except the Mexicans," The response I got was, "Well, you have to take care of your own first."
Fine, I said. I can go along with that. I'm like most Americans in believing it is not practical, not realistic, for us to allow unrestricted immigration into the country. But then I am not a hypocritical (let me be a little less aggressive - a "conflicted") Christian. I know there are more ways than Sunday to interpret Jesus's message, but no matter how you cut it, I seriously doubt he meant to add "but not Mexicans" to that bit about bringing the children in.
What a tragedy, for Christians, for conservatives, for evangelicals, that so many of their number have tied their wagon to right-wing politics. Some of them - the Southern Baptists, for example, have a history of god-awful behavior, so it's nothing new that they should get behind the likes of a Nixon, a Reagan, a Huckabee, a Ted Cruz or a Donald Trump. But that they should want to go on defining themselves as Christians really blows my mind.
I've calmed down a bit in recent years and stopped church/religion bashing. I'm now in favor of not getting too upset when you discover some of your values contradict others of your values. It's part of being a work in progress. I'm OK with people who recognize that they cherry pick their religion, that they are "cafeteria Christians," people who identify as Christian and embrace the view that it's good to feed the hungry and clothe (and educate) the poor but they're not too sure about that virgin birth bit. They're OK with me. Sure beat the hell out of Cardinal Cordileone in San Francisco, for example, who mumbles mumbo-jumbo exorcisms to remove evil spirits and wants to limit the sex act to man on top of wife making babies. They are at least more aware of things than the evangelical types who claim they follow the Bible as the literal word of God, an admission that does little more than reveal how unfamiliar they are with its contents. The phrase "believing in the Bible," given that the Bible is not a book but an anthology of Hebrew and Greek literature, is kind of like saying, "I live my life according to the Library." Better than living it according to the gas station, perhaps, but no less silly.
I'd be quite happy to see Christian doctrine go the way of astrology and flat-earth theory, so long as we remembered the contributions through the centuries of what inspired Michaelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel and Brahms to compose the German Requiem and gave them their just due. And I'm quite happy to reconstruct the word "Christian" to mean "somebody trying to tie their wagon to Jesus Christ" and to leave the speculative theology to others. I'm always annoyed when people refer to the U.S. as a democracy. It isn't a democracy. It's a nation aiming for democracy. In the same way, I'm happy to accept as "Christian" a person who makes an effort to nudge their own behavior more and more in line with the other-orientation of Jesus, as they understand it, even if they're not all that good at it. It's not that different from me trying to be a socialist, and using what little influence I have over my representatives in Congress to stop bombing people with drones and supporting the bastards of the world simply because they further American business interests. As I said in a blog entry the other day, I'm not there yet. I'm still voting for candidates who most closely represent my ideas of social democracy and justifying it as the "next best thing." Voting for an outright rejection of capitalism in this country is the best way I know to squander your vote.
The collapse of the Republican Party saddens me and I think the evangelical zealots of America are in large part responsible for it. Throwing their weight behind a stunningly self-serving narcissist because their religious leaders told them he was anointed by God has to be the greatest folly of modern times. They, along with the greedy corporatists who thought they could ride the tiger, are now fighting it out between a lesbian trying to represent the homophobe party and a total wacko imagining Jewish laser beams in space causing forest fires. The nighttime TV satirists are having a ball yucking it up over the circular firing squad the Republicans have become, but I'm not into schadenfreude at this point. I'm not feeling a connection with Democrats who feel like celebrating the collapse of that bunch of retrograde folk who prioritize self interest while mouthing platitudes about freedom and democracy. I argued all during the Trump nightmare that Trump wasn't the problem, but the tiger-riding me-and-mine-firster Republicans who believed that desperate times call for desperate choices. I think we should not be celebrating the fall of the Republican Party. As long as we stay committed to a two-party system, wishing for one of them to fail is self-destructive.
Morality, for me, is not a bunch of static concepts, but an approach to life requiring endless negotiation. I proceed from the assumption that none of us is in command of the total truth, and what we know today can easily turn out to be wrong tomorrow. I think the only way to run a country is to provide a forum for people of good will to speak their minds and hope that the truth spills out in the exchange of views. I want the folks on the left to be challenged by folks on the right, and vice versa. I want to hear argument. Endless argument. I want folks to be able to see how they occasionally bark up the wrong tree and need to change their minds. This situation we are in now, where the Republicans have lost all integrity and become a mindless mob following an incompetent would-be fascist (if he knew how), egged on by greedy corporate leaders interested only in profits brings home day after day the fact that the American pursuit of democracy has gotten off the track. I want to get back to a situation where people work to keep each other honest, speak truth as they understand it, and are willing to change their minds when people on the other side convince them they have gotten things wrong. I don't want a stunted Republican Party. I want a Republican Party that gives Democrats a run for their money.
And I want Christians to get their church back. It's a toss-up whether it's their religion or to their country that the mad men and women calling themselves "prophets" have done more harm to. Once truth went out the window and the self-serving politicians and hypocritical fundamentalists climbed on the back of the tiger, both took a big hit.
It's ironic. I know all the reasons so many Americans were persuaded that government is the problem. The long spell of ever-increasing inequity as the rich got richer in America and the poor got poorer made this anti-government upsurge inevitable. As a democrat, I call this ironic because I see tax breaks for the rich, which throw the burden for filling the potholes onto the poor, as the reason for this inequity. Some say it's mostly about white racism, this desire to bring back the happy 1950s, but I think it's also about how we divide up the American pie.
Hopefully this is a time for restoring balance. For shutting down the political Christians and allowing the spiritual ones to be heard again. For getting back to addressing global warming and the need to make education and health care more affordable.
We're still here. The latest American political experiment with neo-fascism seems to have petered out for now.
Time to get back to a place where Christians (real ones, not authoritarians masking as Christians), Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists and non-theists and fans of the Great Spaghetti Monster in the Sky can all get along. Time to find the parents of those kids taken from them by this administration credited with being God's anointed. Time to get the country vaccinated against the virus our Leader told us would die out by the summer of 2020.
Time to be able to go to sleep and no longer feel the need to pray for the Lord "my soul to keep if I should die before I wake."
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