Posted on 05/10/2006 6:28:01 AM PDT by bondjamesbond
A believer spells out the difference between faith and a political agenda
Are you a Christian who doesn't feel represented by the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.
The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power. There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women's equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is. They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them--and respecting their neighbors' choices. That doesn't threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.
And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.
I would say a clear majority of Christians in the U.S. fall into one or many of those camps. Yet the term "people of faith" has been co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy for everyone. "Sides are being chosen," Tom DeLay recently told his supporters, "and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will." So Christ is a conservative Republican?
Rush Limbaugh recently called the Democrats the "party of death" because of many Democrats' view that some moral decisions, like the choice to have a first-trimester abortion, should be left to the individual, not the cops. Ann Coulter, with her usual subtlety, simply calls her political opponents "godless," the title of her new book. And the largely nonreligious media have taken the bait. The "Christian" vote has become shorthand in journalism for the Republican base.
What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either. In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones. "My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?
So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.
That's what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back.
I don't think so.
The Bible is a library. Each book was written independently. To say that Revelation, which was written on the Isle of Patmos, prohibits changing the words of other books of the Bible is to add words to the book of Revelation. If this phrase was in the original writing, it didn't apply to any other book. If added when Revelation was included in the Canon, it was violated.
1 Corinthians 11:5-6. If you read down, long hair is considered a covering. But an uncovered woman with short hair is not allowed, and neither is long hair for a man. And I sure hope you don't have any female leaders in your church, because women are supposed to be submissive to the male leaders of the church.
It's not OT, so the out of "We don't have to follow those rules anymore" doesn't exist.
>> Someone who thinks that anyone disgreeing with him is "attacking" him, for starters.
> And who would that be?
Anybody who would respond to: "And I bet you slam the door in the face of every Mormon, Jehovah Witness, and every other person of faith that visits your home."
With: "Why do you attack me?"
Notice that you didn't refute "Lunatic Fringe's" bet.
And exactly how are these contrary to conservatism? They're at the heart of conservatism. It's liberals who betray the ideals of equality, love, compassion, tolerance, and peace. Time and time again.
By the way, Jesus was also big on intolerance. Tolerating evil, after all, isn't tolerance, it's just apathy.
Jesus dared to say that no one could come to the Father but through HIM. He also called religious leaders of the day "slimy snakes," smacked people around in the temple, told some it would be better for them on the day of judgment if they had millstones wrapped around their necks and were tossed into a lake, talked about evil, called some "dogs," and so on. But I suspect you know all this.
I believe it has been taken to mean that the Bible (as a collection of books) comprises a single entity and is not to be changed.
>>This is Andrew Sullivan's problem, not mine.
Let's just get that put away from the very start.<<
Its a shame you post this part but this is exactly the sort of thread that gets out of time.
> My logic is faultless.
No, it isn't. A group that adds new books to the bible (see: "Mormon") may not be "Christians" afterwards, btut hat's not the same as declarign them "cultists."
Note that Protestants and Catholics have somewhat different Bibles. That means someone there is a cult, by your "faultless" logic.
Your stance would imply that the Bible is a living document that can be added to or deleted from at will.
I reject that.
Well, gee...
Mormons believed that God The Father physically impregnated Mary.
That changes one of the basic tenents of Christianity (Immaculate conception).
That is the hallmark of a cult.
Nice try.
>> The First Amendment is *explicitly* non-Christian.
> Really?
Really. The first amendment allows anyone to worship as they please... they can even make a graven image if they so choose. This goes against several Commandments.
> why the atheists are working so hard to infringe on the free exercise of Christians.
I'm sorry... when are the atheists bursting into your church and tackling the preacher? Or shutting down religious cable channels? Or taking Bibles out of your home?
More martyr-mongering.
> When the atheists implement a system, the first thing they do is stamp out the Christians.
Never happened. Atheists rarely attain any sort of power whatsoever. Perhaps you are thinkign of the Communists, who were about as atheist as *you* are. They simply replaced a supernatural God with a "historical dialectic" god and a State-god.
> If it is any other non-Christian philosophy, show me one of the major religious movements in the world that tolerates individual free will as Christianity does.
Buddhism springs immediately to mind.
> Any other belief system seeks to dominate.
Sigh. Strap on those blinders a little tighter.
Your belief is illogical... but you are entitled to it.
> That changes one of the basic tenents of Christianity (Immaculate conception).
> That is the hallmark of a cult.
Again you persist in the faulty belief that a religion that has different tennets than yours is a "cult."
No. I believe in what the Bible says to be true.
All beliefs and religions are not of equal veracity or value.
On topic:
Andy's main problem with "Christianists" is that they won't be good little boys and girls and agree with him that Paul didn't really mean what he wrote about the buttsex. And they aren't likely to anytime soon, if ever. And that comparing them to the nutters with the Koran in one hand and the detonator button in the other on that basis is, if anything, going to make it even more unlikely than before.
Uh... no. You infer too much. Who am I to alter God's Word? That also means that I can't give my own meaning to His Word as many Protestant denominations have done (and not just with this phrase).
Again, logically... if the Book of Revelation was written on the Isle of Patmos before there was a Canon of the Bible (and it was), then EITHER:
1. The phrase was written to apply to its own writings
or
2. It was violated when added by those who compiled the Canon.
Simple logic.
If this is not a personal attack then what is it?
With: "Why do you attack me?"
Notice that you didn't refute "Lunatic Fringe's" bet.
And you didn't bother to read and notice that I was not fully quoted in the original post where I said:
"If my neighbor is hopping and skipping his/her way toward Hell, I am compelled by my faith to try and make them see the error of their ways in a compassionate way WITHOUT beating them over the head with my faith.
Where are these people who are "incessantly evangelized?" I've never heard of such a thing.
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