ken wilson online

I’ve had helpful conversations lately with some people pushing back on me for various things. Man, can you learn a lot from these conversations, especially when the people in question are mature, thoughtful, and friends. The kind of people you know are fundamentally for you. It’s what I love about being part of a church. A church is such a diverse place when it’s being true to its founder, so you find yourself loving, admiring, respecting people who have a very different take on the world regarding many different issues. So these conversations have helped me to zero in on the critique I have of the religious right. Sometimes in a sermon, I’ll make a passing comment, a sideways reference that impugns the religious right, and for those who identify with the religious right it can be quite annoying. So I’ve been challenged to state more clearly my concern. This post is one such attempt.

The rise of the religious right, or more specifically, the Christian right has led the evangelical church in America to adopt a political-cultural category as though it were a biblical category. I refer to the liberal-conservative category. All things conservative have been branded as Christian, and by a kind of default that is sometimes explicit and often implicit, all things liberal have been branded as anti-Christian.

This is false and misleading and provides a near occasion for the the very major sin of taking the Lord’s name in vain. That it is to say, of affixing the Lord’s name to something as though it were the Lord when in fact it is not. (This is the sin of the false prophets and what’s worse, boo-honkey.)

I think there are behind the scenes powers at work in the religious right that care nothing about the Lord’s name, and only see evangelicals as a power block to manipulate for their own purposes. (During the rise of the religious right, for example, Richard Nixon was engaging in a strategy to gain the South for the Republican party because many in the South were upset with the Democratic party’s support of civil rights legislation. Nixon was not a devout evangelical, but he saw that the evangelical movement could be swung toward the Republican party. That’s not the only factor, but it’s one.)

I think evangelicalism was set up to be naive about these powers because it came out of American Fundamentalism, which eschewed any involvement in the political sphere. (Jerry Falwell took a lot of heat from his fellow fundamentalist for his willingness to engage politically when he launched the Moral Majority.) American fundamentalists and evangelicals were powerfully motivated to enter the political sphere after 1973 in response to the Roe V. Wade decision that legalized abortion for virtually any reason and at any stage of pregnancy–still one of the most libertarian approaches to abortion in the world, much less restrictive than the European approach for example. But evangelicals came in without a coherent biblical theology of how a Christian engages in the political sphere. The Catholic and Reformed traditions had developed such a theology, but not American evangelicalism for the most part. The New Testament was written without such a developed theology because the Jesus movement grew up in the context of the Roman Empire. It was left to later generations, led by Spirit, drawing from biblical teaching, to determine how to engage a political realm much different than the ancient world.

This left evangelicals at a decided disadvantage and vulnerable to manipulation by powers that were just interested in gaining power and not interested in the Lord’s name at all. This left us, in other words, vulnerable to the powers and the principalities. Innocent as doves, but not wise as serpents.

(By the way, in reaction to the excesses of the religious right, evangelicals are now in a position to be vulnerable to manipulation by the powers on the other side of the aisle. Hopefully, over thirty years, we have learned some things about being manipulated, and we’ll be the wiser for the wear.)

The effect of this, is a massive confusion over categories. The liberal-conservative category is not a biblical category. Faith-unfaithful is the biblical category. It’s perfectly legitimate for Christians to be convinced conservatives in terms of political philosophy. Even to argue that on the whole political conservatism is more consistent with biblical principles. Certainly political philosophies are in the realm that Paul refers to as “debatable issues.” But to simply baptize conservative political philosophy as Christian is a big mistake. Because it can lead to taking the Lord’s name in vain. (The same would also be true of the attempt to baptize liberal political philosophy as entirely Christian, but liberals in recent years have not been inclined to wave the Christian flag–though this is changing.)

Let me offer an example of a conservative-backed position that has amounted to, in my opinion, the taking of the Lord’s name in vain, that is affixing the Lord’s name to something the Lord is not behind. A couple of years ago, I spoke with a leader of a Christian relief organization and asked him about distribution of condoms in the AIDS belt of Africa. He told me that leaders in the religious right had pressured their organization not to distribute condoms ever. Even though there were married women whose husbands had HIV, who had no access to condoms and Christian relief organizations were the only people in the area providing services. If Christian relief organizations didn’t make them available, they weren’t to be had.

Most Protestant Evangelicals have no moral objection to using condoms in order to protect against diseases like AIDS. Roman Catholic teaching forbids the use of condoms for any reason whatsoever. A married woman whose husband is infect by HIV is forbidden from insisting that he use a condom. And the Roman Catholic church is a powerful voice in the pro-life movement. Futhermore in American culture, the distribution of condoms is associated with a liberal cause. All this adds up to evangelical power being used to keep condoms away from people who need them, including married women whose husbands are infected with HIV. (Married or single, if you had a daughter who was having sex in a region ravaged by HIV, would you want her partner to use a condom or not?) But the liberals are for ‘em? Then we’re against ‘em and so is God. This is called taking the Lord’s name in vain and it is a moral issue.

[Having criticized the Catholic teaching on this point, let me hasten to add that the Roman Catholic teaching on War, called Just War Theory, is an example of something we evangelicals could learn from Catholics. When confronted with the possibility of war in Iraq, we had no developed thinking on when a war is justified and when it isn't. The Catholics did and in this case it led them to oppose the war in Iraq at the official level of the Vatican and the U.S. Bishops.)]

It gets worse from the perspective of someone who cares about the gospel. Because the religious right has been perhaps the most powerful voice in the media for representing the name of Jesus in American culture, thoughtful people on the outside of faith looking in make the assumption that in order to be a Christian in America you will be expected to support the entire conservative agenda. But let’s say you live in an inner city and your brother was murdered in gang violence involving an assault weapon. The religious right has been part of a political power bloc that is allied with the National Rifle Association whose mission is to protect at all costs, the Second Amendment, even if that means banning the sale of assault weapons. (As a Christian, one could argue that this is justified, but would it be too much to suggest that it’s a debatable issue?) So now, we have evangelicals involved in branding the Christian faith, such that people who have no intention of becoming politically conservative view the Christian faith as something that is not for them. Is this not equivalent to putting millstones around the neck of little ones?

I’m saying this is a severe weakness, a very serious mistake in the approach of the religious right. Not on the part of people who simply want power. It’s been very effective for that. But it’s been a serious mistake for Christians, whose loyalty to Christ is supposed to be paramount, to make. I’m not saying the religious right is always wrong or hasn’t been a voice for truth. After Roe V. Wade, what was virtually the only organized movement saying the obvious–that abortion involves the loss of a human life and this makes it a moral issue, not simply a health issue. Not the religious left. Who warned against the unbridled power of the state and the value of limited government? Not the religious left. Who was willing to apply the category of “evil” when assessing empires like the Soviet Union. Not the religious left.

But it’s dangerous when Christians get involved in party politics naively. When Christians don’t realize that a “party” by definition is related to what Paul calls, “the party spirit”–something he warns against. Political parties operate by cobbling together interest groups and it restricts their truth telling capacity. Why do you think so few Democratic politicians are able to answer the question, “If abortion should be safe, legal and rare, can you say why it should be rare from a moral perspective?” Party politics.

When voices like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh speak about liberals the way the do–with, shall we say, a lack of charity about the people?–they are simply engaging in the party spirit. Just because they wave the Christian flag doesn’t make it otherwise. Do the Christian voices in the Christian right speak out against the party spirit when they see it at work in their preferred party? Not vigorously. Not often. At all? You tell me.

In recent years the voices on the Left have tended not to wave the Christian flag. There hasn’t been a very powerful religious left or Christian left. It’s mainly been a secular Left. So there is less taking the name of the Lord in vain. It can flip fast. But so far it’s not been a huge problem. In the United States at least people don’t assume that support for gun control, affirmative action, and more government programs to help the poor are Christian perspectives per se. People on the outside of faith looking in are not saying, “In order to become a Christian in the United States, I’ll be pressured by my Christian friends to support gun control, affirmative action and more government programs to help the poor, plus I’ll have to take a softer stand on supporting the military.”

So this is my concern as a pastor: not political conservatism per se, but the naive (and on the part of some, not so naive) blending of the name of Jesus with one particular political persuasion, baptizing virtually all the positions of that persuasion as ultimate truth. Much of it isn’t well thought out by Christians, and for that reason not especially intentional–it just occurs by going along–but it can lead to something that we ought to be concerned about: taking the Lord’s name in vain.

So what I propose is that we explicitly view the liberal-conservative category as a political and cultural category and not a faith-based category; that we make efforts not to confuse it with the biblical category, which is faithful-unfaithful; that we not use it as a short-cut to discerning what is faithful and what is not faithful; that we get off this train this not bound for glory, so as not to take the Lord’s name in vain so often; that

Taking the name of the Lord your God in vain–that’s a moral issue isn’t it?

Tags: boo-honkey, category error, conservative, liberal, moral issues, party spirit, powers that be, religious right

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under beyond conservative-liberal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.