MysteriousFaith

Give Us Our King

Has President Bush’s Christian faith given him the selfless courage to rise above the politics of our day and do what may not be in his best political interests but is purely in the country’s best interests? Can you really look at President Bush and see a man who has set aside aspirations for his own legacy or a second term in the interests of what should be most important to our country? Once you admit that President Bush is really little different than Politician Bush, you may begin to see the freedom of thought that is born of recognizing a Good President may not necessarily be a Christian President.

Give Us Our King

“Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, ‘You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.’ But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, ‘Give us a king to govern us.’ Samuel prayed to the Lord, and the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. Just as they have done to me, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so also they are doing to you. Now then, listen to their voice; only - you shall solemnly warn them, and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.’ … And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.’ But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, ‘No! But we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.’”

I Samuel 8:4-9, 18-20

The current Bush administration should be a not-so-subtle reminder of the truth within the axiom “be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.” As with the ancient Israelites who demanded of Samuel a King, many modern day Christian Americans implored their churches, communities and ultimately their God to remove from them the yoke of the Clinton legacy and give to them a leader from within their own midst - a leader they could agree with, understand, connect to, and battle evil with. Coming as it did after eight years of mean spirited, dishonest and hypocritical attacks on then President Clinton, such a request - while no doubt heart felt, was deeply misguided - its emphasis being on politics as the key to saving America, setting aside the obvious Scriptural emphasis that the Church is to change hearts, not laws.

It is unlikely that my comments will find many receptive ears within the Christian evangelical community. This is, in part, because the grip with which most American Christians have around the “good” of the Bush Presidency is a knee-jerk response to what they perceive as the “evil” of the Clinton Presidency. Until American Christians, who rightly have in part the responsibility of moral authority on their shoulders, come to terms with the misguided motives and dark hearts that led to the machinations of the Clinton scape-goating and impeachment, little chance exists that we can move forward from the morass we find ourselves in.

The longer it takes for American Christians to wake up and relinquish old and tired political affiliations and ideological sacred cows, the more severe the final day of reckoning is going to be for people of all stripes and faiths. America stands at the precipice of imperial decline for a number of reasons - and whether or not American religious fundamentalists wish to understand this - such a decline is not based only in the loss of morals and values with the fabric of American society. While such reductionist arguments are politically valuable, they are simply false. Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire argues for no such simple single causality when seeking to understand the fall of the Roman Empire. In like fashion, the ultimate loss of our status as the world’s only superpower will not be the result of the Ten Commandments being removed from a courthouse in Alabama.

Simple reductions almost always allow bad men in positions of leadership to provide scape-goats when the system finally implodes - a reality American Christians should spend more time thinking about - will they be the persecuted or will they be the persecutors? If the narcissist momentum within the American fundamentalist movement is any indicator, it would not be surprising to see the tide of persecution sweep over the more temperate and moderate parts of American culture at the hands of religious fundamentalists’ zeal. Such becomes less likely to see when one grasps the fact that already our society is becoming acclimated to the idea that we are at “war” with Islamic fundamentalists - and what better response to their fundamentalists than to let ours loose for just long enough to booger up the lot.

As with any collapse of complex societies, the demise of American hegemony will not be for any single reason. When history writes the reasons for the loss of American dominance, historians will comment on basic foreign policy mistakes related to the traditional over-reaching any imperial power is guilty of; the epochs-old mistake of political systems over-promising on entitlement programs only to under-fund them; the very-prescient problems caused when government becomes less about service and more about power and politics - a reality that across all of history always rapes a country of its social altruism and sets a country down the path towards disarray, reduced dialogue and polarized opinions.

American Christians are guilty of the same simple reductions that the balance of our society is. In our case, this mistake is seen most obviously in the blind belief that a Christian President can set our country down the right path better than can any other type of leader. Within most strata of American political groups, a simple set of fixes is “sure” to set the country right. However, in the case of the evangelical church, the mistake is the belief that all we need to do is to return the country to Christian values - something a Christian leader can surely do better than any other leader. What is missed in this is the threat such reasoning poses to those who do not hold to the same religious affiliations or who would humbly suggest that the political version of American evangelical activism and ideology is less than perfect.

Rooted in Paranoia

The movie The Passion did over $370 million in the US alone this year. Almost every city in the US with its own set of television stations has a minimum of one religious programming channel. Christian bookstores are a ubiquitous feature of American consumerism offering shoppers books on every theological niche you could imagine. These same stores offer to outfit parents with entire systems of entertainment that are Christian - from pajama outfits to action figures to videos, DVDs, CDs, computer games, music videos, calendars, coffee mugs, wall plaques, chewing gum, refrigerator magnets, t-shirts, bracelets, bumper stickers and really awful movies.

But to listen to many American Christians talk, you would think they were suffering a persecution the likes of which the Chinese house-church movement would do well to appreciate. Take a moment and really listen to The 700 Club, TBN or reflect on the writings of many of our current-day evangelical political authors like Ralph Reed or Pat Robertson. It smacks of a paranoia that is deeply disturbing. Here we are in a country where religious freedom is an absolute guarantee, where not one of our meaningful freedoms is infringed upon, and yet a normal part of the average Christian dialogue revolves around a soon to come persecution, the imminent loss of liberties and the irredeemable path of contemporary culture. It is not surprising at all to see how such paranoia leads to the vitriol with which American Christians attacked the Clinton Presidency: what are we so afraid of? Are we so afraid of admitting the breadth, freedom and responsibility of our contemporary Christian culture that we are willing to set up cheap enemies and petty ideological interests in the hopes they will fill up our time, our life and our passions - leaving us little need to explore our inner selves, our own hearts, our own motives and our own responsibility to be involved in thorny social problems?

President Bush represents to many American Christians our last, best hope at reclaiming our country. For those who are unclear to what shared past we must reclaim - that of slavery, prohibition, or discrimination against women - you may join me in shared confusion over what they mean by such statements. Even profoundly insightful evangelical thinkers like Francis Schaeffer have been guilty of setting evangelical Christians up for such thinking. In Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There he argues for a “line of despair” between traditional Western thinking and Enlightenment, modern and certainly post-modern thinking. Such statements are too simplistic and overly dangerous in their reasoning: they assume at a very real level that one can hearken back to a point in time when our society was “more Christian” than it is now. Such arguments may carry some weight in a philosophical discussion, but they have little-to-no place in a meaningful review of history. More importantly, such distinctions establish not only a “line of despair” but also a line between “them” and “us”; between “prejudices that made me comfortable” and “challenges of living in a pluralistic society.”

To see a country with such strong fundamentalist evangelical tendencies crying out for political leadership that is “Christian” based on fear of losing control is indicative of a deeper paranoia - a malaise that bodes ominously of the future religion will play in our politics and culture. In business, is a Christian CEO always the better choice? Based on my own personal anecdotal experience: certainly not. In sports, is a Christian coach always the most effective motivator? Without a doubt this has nothing to do with effectiveness. Why is it that within politics, Christians assume a Christian politician is intrinsically better? Why is it assumed that Christian leaders are always better than non-Christian leaders? This is an inherently prejudiced assumption. I want the best cardiac surgeon operating on me when I have heart surgery, not the most Christian cardiac surgeon. When the time comes to send our troops into battle, to commit funds to social programs and to set a vision for our country, I want the smartest, most capable, most visionary leader we can find. If he is a Christian so be it, but he need not necessarily be a Christian. We need the best leader, the most qualified, the leader most willing to be honest with us relative to what we must change and the means by which these painful changes must be enacted.

Suggestive of a Deeper Spiritual Problem

American Christians no where show their lack of depth more clearly than in the political arena. No where in Scripture are Christians advocated to become political figures or to view political action as the means of enacting social reform. The constant insidious hyperbole of American evangelicals seeking to reinforce “Christian” values into the political landscape is symptomatic of a deeper problem - their implicit realization that they have lost hold on what spiritual truths initially changed their own heart, and those truths that have the potential of changing the hearts of others.

If Christianity offers anything unique to the annals of religion, it is the belief that a personal relationship with Christ changes lives. We do not hold that government can or should do anything that can make Christianity easier to access, tolerate, or live by. In point of fact, times of persecution have almost always caused the church to be purified. Where American Christians seek political power to accomplish their goals, they do so at the alter of power, not at the feet of their Creator. This mish-mash of religion and politics is not unique to American thinking - it is a part of a deeper confusion that is also manifested in the evangelical interweaving of consumerism and actualized faith.

I will end my thoughts with this question: has President Bush’s Christian faith given him the selfless courage to rise above the politics of our day and do what may not be in his best political interests but is purely in the country’s best interests? Can you really look at President Bush and see a man who has set aside aspirations for his own legacy or a second term in the interests of what should be most important to our country? Once you admit that President Bush is really little different than Politician Bush, you may begin to see the freedom of thought that is born of recognizing a Good President may not necessarily be a Christian President.

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• July 6, 2004

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