I was listening to culture war radio the other day. The talk show host was saying something like, “I’m going to help you combat the liberals in your families….”   He was making an excellent point.  The culture war affects families.  It inflames family tensions at family gatherings.  Enough of that for now, because families need each other more than ever.

I don’t know if you noticed, but everyone’s anxiety levels are higher now than they were a few months ago.  They don’t need to spend three hours a day listening to someone believing the worst about others and the best about themselves.  They don’t need to listen to passion stokers–they are already riled up inside enough.

I grew up with the “good war” mentality.  My father fought in the good war.  There was no doubt about which side was better in the cold war.  Vietnam shook that up, but by the time it arrived, the generational pattern was set.  We can fight (or protest) our way out of anything.  Not anymore.

I sat in on a discussion recently between some real high rollers–people whose names you’d recognize instantly–talking about the energy crisis.  One of the boomers stood up and said, “We need people marching in the streets over this issue! Where’s the passion?”   The young guy in his thirties said, “Actually, I take issue with that statement.  We don’t need people marching in the streets, we need engineers working on this problem to come up with some solutions.”  Everyone knew the young guy was right.

Love makes us smarter.  Anger makes us dumber.

We need the Golden Rule to build each other up, not the Golden Ruler to slap each other down.

We come by this metaphor honestly. We’re sitting ducks for it, actually.  Because the metaphor that rules our understanding of what it means to argue is “Argument is War.”  Sound extreme?  Consider our language: we “win” or “lose” arguments.  We “marshal” arguments.  We “defend” our “positions.”  We “skewer” our “opponents” with a good argument. We “shoot down” a lousy argument.  Someone “pokes a hole” in what we’re trying to assert.  It’s not an accident that these are all words attached to warfare.

This metaphor–Argument is War–profoundly affects the way we conceptualize and engage in arguments.  For many of us arguments stimulate the “fight and flight” system of the brain. We get riled up when we argue.  For some it’s invigorating, for others it’s unnerving.   The fact that we view argument through the lens of the warfare metaphor affects us deeply. As Lakoff and Johnson, the authors of Metaphors We Live By wonder: how would we argue differently if we believed “Argument is a Dance”?

who declared the culture war?

Who declared the culture war?  And who commissioned the disciples of Jesus to engage it as culture warriors?

So far as I know, the phrase first appeared with Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog.  He was an ardent supporter of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and wanted to use it to dislodge the Church of England from its position of cultural authority.   In more recent times, Pat Buchanan, an aide to Richard Nixon and later Presidential candidate made his famous “We’re in a Culture War” speech at the Republican National Convention in 1992.

Thomas Huxley, Pat Buchanan–note what names those are not: Jesus of Nazareth.  When did Jesus of Nazareth call us to view ourselves as culture warriors engaged in a culture war?

He commissioned us to proclaim the good news to every nook and cranny of creation.

He was surrounded by a pagan power–the Roman Empire.  Yet he reserved his most potent broadsides for the religious leaders of his day.

War may be necessary at times, but it is a lousy metaphor for the way we are called to interact with our neighbors.  War makes us stupid.  War forces us to suspend the Golden Rule.  War drowns out the Sermon on the Mount. War requires that we dehumanize ourselves and our enemies for the time it takes to abolish them or be abolished by them.

Are we going to have sharp disagreements with our neighbors about right and wrong and how to spend our tax revenue and who should serve in what position?  Yes.  But is “war” the way we are called by Jesus to engage those disagreements?

have we been duped?

Is it possible that we’ve been duped?  Is it possible that powers and principalities that inhabit the political parties of our day–which by definition are partisan and which tend to the raw will to power–have used this metaphor to appeal to the followers of the Prince of Peace, so as to enhance their own power?

I wonder, did Martin Luther King, Jr. ever employ the culture war metaphor in his just cause for civil rights?  If ever there were a man with a right to use the metaphor it would have been him.

No doubt he spoke of the battle for civil rights.  But his usual language, if I’m correct, was “struggle.”  A great evil needed to be overcome through a great struggle.  Something other than a war.

He was a wise man, and he got results.

What have we gotten with our culture war?

It’s time to turn our backs on the culture war.

It’s time to question the metaphor, to dislodge it’s rule in our hearts.

Lest we win a war and lose our souls.

Sadly, many religious people fell for this power grab, listening to voices of paranoia and fear. (Did anyone see the letter from James Dobson imagining 2012 if the hated liberals took over?  As paranoid as the anti-religion zealots who see faith as the root of all evil.)

But that era seems to be over–or fast ending. We have an economic crisis that is so severe it threatens everything.  We can’t afford to remain in cultural gridlock because the stable culture that allowed us to fight is threatening to fail.   When the boxing ring is shaken by an earthquake the boxers hop out of the ring,  take off their gloves, and seek shelter together.  We’ve reached a time when the words of Jesus apply: a house divided against itself cannot stand.

This economic crisis came at roughly the same time that it started to dawn on many that we have a slow fizz environmental crisis that can’t be resolved unless we find a way to work together across the cultural divide.  Some of the top environmental scientists, many of them secular, realized that without people of faith, which in the United States includes people of evangelical faith, the environment on which we depend will not sustain us at our current level.  This crisis didn’t have the same jolting quality as the economic crisis because the most severe consequences are fifty years away.   And many of its impacts are out of sight, out of mind.

how will people of jesus brand faith be perceived?

The question is, will people of Jesus brand faith be perceived by the newly frightened society around us as culture warriors, or as culture builders?  Will we, in short, be perceived as part of the solution or part of the problem?

Of course, those who are on the opposite side of this culture war–let’s call it the radical secular left–are facing the same challenge.   Will they be perceived by the surrounding culture as culture warriors or culture builders?

Trust me, I’m not thinking, we are one big happy family around here.  We have our sharp disagreements over important issues and will continue to have them.

But I’m thinking it’s time we stopped sharpening our knives and started strengthening the ties that bind.

The former is fueled by fear and hate, the latter by love.

It’s time to let the culture wars drift from center stage to the side show they are fast becoming and tend to the more important work of culture building.  Fellow boomers, if you don’t think so, ask your kids.

At least that’s the view from here.

But first: pause for a moment, lower your hackles, and consider the term, “war.”  What does it evoke?  A battle unto death.  Prepare to kill, prepare to die, that’s what war is about.  And there are times, perhaps, for war. But the followers of Jesus who care about the teachings of Jesus are not to be war enthusiasts. The war that counts, we’re told, is the one that is NOT waged against flesh and blood.  Can we agree on that?  So when we are talking with another human being, when we are struggling with other human beings over issues, war may be the LAST metaphor we should rely on to frame our discussion.   If the teachings of Jesus matter to us, that is.

Pro-life, pro-choice. The epicenter of the culture war. What would happen if two people, one pro-life and one pro-choice had a conversation in which each person worked hard at listening to the other’s concerns–something that the war metaphor doesn’t prime them to do. They would focus for starters on one of their most compelling points and ask that the other consider it thoughtfully, to see if it had ANY merit.

the pro-life person speaks

The pro-life person, of course, would talk about life.  Human life.  When does it begin?  One can certainly make a good case that human life begins at conception, the moment the egg of the human ovum is fertilized by a sperm.  Everything beyond that point is a simple matter of growing complexity.

The pro-life person would talk about the morality of limiting a woman’s choice to end human life before birth.  What’s going on in India and China?  Women (aided, and often pressured by men) are choosing to abort female fetuses at a higher rate than male ones, leading to a dangerous shift in the population of these two most populous nations.

The pro-life person would invite the pro-choice person to consider the implications.  Is unbridled choice always a higher good?  Should society step in and limit choice at times?  If abortion should be “safe, legal and rare,” why should it be rare? Are there moral reasons that should inform policies?

the pro-choice person speaks

The pro-choice person might talk about birth control, the prevention of pregnancy.  The pro-life lobby is dominated by the catholic church, which believes all birth control other than the “natural family planning” method to be a moral evil.  Even “natural family planning” [timing intercourse to prevent pregnancy] is ONLY to be employed when “grave” reasons justify it’s use.  This is the teaching of the catholic church, the most influential player in the pro-life lobby.  You may have noticed that the pro-life lobby, as a whole, does nothing to encourage increased access to birth control and often lends its weigh toward decreasing such access.  “Let’s make birth control more readily available to sexually active teens” is not a part of the pro-life agenda as expressed by the major right to life groups.

In fact, the organized pro-life lobby tends to discourage rather than encourage access to birth control information and technology.  Shockingly, the distribution of condoms in Africa to limit the spread of AIDS is discouraged.  Here in the United States, it is more difficult rather than less difficult for sexually active people, especially young ones, to gain access to birth control information and technology.

Most human beings–it’s a simple fact–become sexually active before marriage.  This fact is ignored by many pro-lifers as morally irrelevant.  Not our problem.  They shouldn’t be sexually active before marriage.  (It’s a great irony that most of the people who have this view were themselves sexually active before marriage.  Just the facts, ma’am.)

As a result, more of these sexually active young people become pregnant, which makes it possible for them to have an abortion.  (Not a single non pregnant person has ever had an abortion.)

Is it moral, is it wise, to support policies that make it more difficult for sexually active people to prevent pregnancies, if pregnancy is the one condition that is required for an abortion to take place?   The pro-choice person would invite the pro-life person to consider: is there ANY  merit in this point?

but who is listening?

I’m not making a case here for any particular policy changes.   I’m not making the case here for overturning Roe v. Wade or for making birth control information and technology more available than it currently is to sexually active young people.  I’m making the case for having a different kind of conversation about abortion and birth control than we have had to date because we have swallowed the culture war kool-aid.  We’ve blindly accepted the wisdom of thinking about these things and engaging in discussion about these things as though we were culture warriors.  As those who only have eyes to see the morality of our own point of view.  As those who resist ever saying to the other side: “You make a good point; I should consider that more than I do.”

But that is changing.  A generation is coming of age with less enthusiasm for the metaphor of war. They are not impressed with the efficacy of the metaphor when applied to the problem of drug addiction or divides in culture.  The culture wars have been about as effective as the war on drugs, in their view.  They wonder what progress we might make in addressing some of these problems if we tried a different approach. Can you blame them?

The culture wars are boomer wars.  We inherited them from our fathers who lived in a binary world of good and evil neatly separated by geographic boundaries.  The evil empire was over there, far away from our fields of presumed good. I actually played cowboys and Indians assuming the cowboys were the good guys.  Pick up sides and duke it out; we boomers did it every day all summer long playing baseball in the streets.  May the best side win.  One side fits all.  Side in. Side out.  Are you on our side or the side of our enemies?  Neither, says this newer take on the world before us.  Maybe it’s time for us boomers to sit down, shut up,  and take off our shoes.

Rush Limbaugh (with a new 144 million dollar contract, I think he’s safe from my little critiques) is the culture warrior par excellence with a boomer point of view.  These efforts to match him bombast for bombast by a left leaning a.m. radio voice are doomed to fail, because the wind filling his sails is dying down, not gaining strength.  There’s just not enough bombast left to get Al Franken up and running.

My kids, though, and their friends, have their eyes on a different time horizon than we boomers can even visualize, we who have worshiped all our lives at the altar of the now, thanks to all that LSD in our youth. They see the debt we’ve been wracking up and won’t live long enough to deal with.  We boomers can only hear the piper piping. They will meet the piper in person. They will have to pay him off or do the jail time themselves,  but only after paying our social security benefits. Our full benefits which we will demand with our AARP cards in hand.

They see the strain we’ve been placing on the planet and they know we’ll be arguing about how bad it is or isn’t until the cows come home.  We don’t have the power to change the climate!  Yes we do!  No we don’t! Do to! Do not! Meanwhile, they are ducking out of our debates in order to make room for the cows.

They grew up with abortion out in the open.  I didn’t hear about it until high school.  They look at the way the boomers have lined up on this issue and they’ve got their problems with both camps.  They grew up with the ultra sound images of what’s going on in the womb and they’re not buying the bit about a blob of tissue because they’ve seen the blob of tissue sucking its thumb. But they also think abortion in some form is here to stay. To them it’s a given; it has been all their lives.  They are turning their attention to reducing the numbers of abortions assuming the right to choose them, whether or not they agree it’s a right. Many of ‘em assume it’s a right and feel it’s a wrong. They are less concerned about using abortion to score points that elect politicians who won’t do anything about it one way or the other. They put the quotation marks around the pro-life label when they see their pro life parents unconcerned about getting health care to poor women so it would be easier to have the babies they conceive.  They don’t get why the pro-life lobby is working to limit access to condoms in AIDS ravaged Africa; they are not interested in the debate over whether or not it’s moral for a married man with HIV to use one of the darn things. But they have these conversations among themselves, knowing their parents will just get into another brawl over it.

They are the children of the highest divorce rate in history.  So it’s hard for them to see gay marriage as the greatest threat to the institution.  They are just tired of the fighting.

That’s not such a bad thing to be tired of, the fighting. Anger makes us stupid, a fact of neuroscience they have observed from the sidelines.  Now, lesson learned, they are ready to get into the game, which they are hoping to play by a new set of rules.  I say more power to ‘em.  And to us all.

This came to me a few years back when I went on this retreat with a bunch of evangelical leaders and environmental scientists. Two nights and two days in Georgia hanging out together. Lots of time for formal and informal interaction. Many of the top environmental scientists and conservationists, so a pretty representative group.

And I found myself during that retreat shedding prejudices that I had accumulated toward these people. I’ve never seen myself as an “anti-environmentalist.” I’ve always been mildly supportive of environmental concerns. Maybe with a capital “M” for mildly.

For example, my impression of people who were passionate about the environment was that they were more “extreme” in their views than I found them to actually be. I had the impression that they were more negative to my faith than I actually found them to be. I thought they were much less concerned about things like the economic impact of improving our care for the environment than I actually found them to be. And maybe I’m being hard on myself here–it happens now and again–but looking back, I think I was harboring in my heart, or rather hiding in my heart something much nastier than all that: contempt. I was hiding that from myself because I never would have copped to it, because I didn’t see it. But now I see it, because on that retreat I believe that God showed it to me. I think that might be understating it. It was one of the more vivid experiences I’ve ever had of being convicted of sin by the Holy Spirit, and believe me, like you, I’ve given the Holy Spirit plenty of occasions to convict me of sin!

Where did this come from, I ask myself? As I’ve said before, ad nauseum, I’m a Jesus freak. I came (back) to faith in Jesus in 1971 as part of the Jesus movement, which at that time was part of the leftward leaning, counter-cultural, ecologically concerned social time of the boomers coming of age. Growing up in Detroit, my inherited politics would have been if anything, liberal, rather than conservative. My parents were part of the young socialists club before the war, when that was much more common. My father voted for Nixon, though, and my mother for JFK, but on the whole, it was a liberal-democratic family, I’d say.

But I too would listen a fair amount to Rush once he came on WJR, mainly in the car when I didn’t like whatever NPR was talking about. I too found him entertaining because he is so provokative. Like any comedian, exageration is a huge part of his schtick, and of course, he never admits that while “in character” which is the only time we get to listen to him. (Does anyone really know what the man really thinks? Or how seriously he takes himself? ) And yet he’s talking for a couple of hours each day about substantive matters, politics, public policy, things that matter: immigration, foreign affairs, the economy, abortion, affirmative action, global warming, you name it. (And I’m guessing, like many of the fans of the Colbert report, there may be plenty of Rush’s listeners who don’t think he’s putting on an act. How does that affect the way they listen to him, especially if they tend to agree with him? Another question: what does two hours of the Rush Limbaugh act five days a week most weeks of the year do to Rush Limbaugh?)

As a pastor I know the power of a crowd laughing. I’ve had frightening to me moments when I’ve said something really funny in a sermon, maybe an extended little comical riff that tickles the collective funny bone, and then in the middle of the laughter, I’ve dropped in some what I perceive to be dead serious truth. And I can feel it when that happens, the perceived to be dead serious truth lands in those moments. Like I said, it’s a little frightening. Laughter seems to open up some channels in the heart. I imagine there’s something going on in the brain that might even be closely related to crying, but at any rate, the heart seems to be engaged when we’re laughing. Or so it seems.

So I just wonder, and now I know I sound like a complete prude, like someone who thinks that all video games with violence in them make people violent themselves, but I just wonder how much of the chaff slips into our hearts when we’re being entertained? You need (or rather I need you) to understand: I know I sound like my wife here. Nancy hates (not too strong a word) to listen to any talking heads yelling at each other on the cable news shows. I find it entertaining, relaxing, even. It’s been a real blessing to our marriage that we don’t get Fox News and MSNBC and CNN on our television. That tells you how culture current I am.

It’s an honest question. If you’re a big fan of Rush, and a big believer in Jesus, what do you think? Do you find yourself thinking to yourself while listening to Rush: “What he’s saying about liberals or environmental whackos or whatever is so funny but it’s so grossly overstated that to call it true is a real distortion?” Or “That contempt he’s showing is entertaining, but these are real people, and I don’t want to let that poison into my heart.”

I honestly don’t know. I only know how my own wheat-from-chaff-separation powers let me down.

And then a second question: Is it a good thing for our culture, for our political discourse, for our working together to solve problems, that Rush Limbaugh has such a powerful voice in our culture?

I think back to the political conversations on the radio or television decades ago–back when politics and public policy were treated more as important matters to be taken seriously and less as fodder for entertainment. What if, like the fabled character whose name I can’t spell but starts with “R”, you fell asleep for forty years or so, and woke up to the cable news programs and the a.m. talk radio programs? Would it be startling? Would you feel like this is helping us face tough problems together? I don’t know, which is why I’m asking.

It’s pretty shocking how many evangelicals have their view of what it means for the Christian to engage Christianly in the public square shaped by Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh is viewed by many Christians as “Christ-Friendly” or at least as “Christian-friendly.” But read the Sermon on the Mount, which doesn’t take too long. Then picture yourself sitting next to Jesus of Nazareth himself and listen together to Rush for an hour. Is He laughing right along, enjoying the show, nodding his head in eager agreement?

This isn’t about liberal or conservative. There are plenty of conservatives like David Brooks and George Will who aren’t anything like Rush Limbaugh in tone, in approach. They don’t refer to those who disagree with them in disparaging terms. They don’t call people “femi-nazis” or “environmental whackos.” They don’t trade in contempt as the lingua franca of politics, or deride people who use phrases like “lingua franca” as “limp wristed, lisping liberals” for example, mocking the effeminate.

I met a thoughtful and well placed Republican recently. I told him that I had voted for my share of Republicans over the years, but as a Jesus follower, I’d about had it with Rush Limbaugh as someone who is a defacto spokesperson for the Republican party. “When are Republicans of standing going to stand up in public and say, ‘Rush Limbaugh doesn’t define what it means to be a Republican.’” His downcast look told me it might be a long time.

The most popular spokesperson of political conservatism is Rush Limbaugh. People in power on the conservative end of the spectrum don’t want to cross him. As a result, his voice is a powerful branding voice for what it means to engage in political discourse as a conservative. In spite of the fact that Rush himself seems to view himself first and foremost as an entertainer, as an act.

That’s a Republican problem.

But when we give thoughtful people every reason to think that within vast stretches of the American Christian landscape, Rush is viewed as a model of what it means for the Christian to be engaged in the public square, we’ve got a trademark infringement problem.

What do you think?

Believe me when I say that I didn’t expect to hear anything of the sort when I heard this. Also believe me when I say that I’ve spent well over thirty years of my life listening for the voice of Jesus. And I was as sure as I’ve ever been that this was his voice. And that I had little idea what was meant by such a message.

At the time, I suppose I had been paying attention, if anything, to what God wasn’t doing among liberals, or maybe to what the devil was doing among liberals. So this was a message out of left field spoken into my right mind, so to speak. No, it wasn’t out of left field, center field, or right field. It was out of home field. But I’m allowing this lame metaphor to lead me from what I’m trying to explain.

So years have passed since then, and I notice that this voice that I have taken to be the voice of Jesus….actually that’s understating it and what I mean to say is this voice that I believe to have been the voice of Jesus, or maybe better said, what I cannot doubt despite efforts to the contrary to have been the voice of Jesus, has born out. That is to say, this voice has adjusted my perceptions.

Like when I was at a retreat with some of the top environmental scientists a few years back and I saw their flat out love of nature and their concern for what human beings are doing to disregard nature, I saw their love as something Jesus was doing among them and I paid attention. There have been other things as well. And whenever I mention these things, there’s often a little hornets nest gets agitated. Maybe you’ve noticed.

I understand the agitation, having occupied the social-cultural-spiritual space from whence it comes for many years. I’m entirely sympathetic to the agitation. It comes from the view that liberal is Christian unfriendly and conservative is Christian friendly. There’s plenty of evidence for the view if you’re looking for it. It’s just that this little vacation message was telling me to look for something else than what I had been looking for. Or more specifically, to pay attention to something that I had trained myself not to pay attention to. “Pay attention to what I am doing among liberals.” Sounds innocent enough, doesn’t it? Unless it doesn’t.

Just that, nothing else. No elaboration per se. Not, “Become a liberal rather than a conservative”–no, it wasn’t even in that ballpark of meaning. Not, “Pay attention to what I am doing among liberals and ignore what I am doing among others.” Certainly not, “Pay attention what I am doing among liberals and stop paying attention to your wife.”

But for all that wasn’t said, there was plenty that was said in that message. Pay attention. Pay attention to what I am doing. Pay attention to what I am doing among liberals.

But I’ve noticed that often when Jesus speaks, his speaking–as much as we say we want to hear him speak–is also a testing. We want the speaking more than the testing. Maybe this is why he doesn’t speak as often as we would like.

“Whose voice are we paying attention to rather than the his voice?” is a good test question. We come to faith in Jesus and quite properly we attach ourselves to others who also have faith in Jesus. That’s part of the Jesus faith in fact. We get him and we get his friends, whether or not we like them at the time.

Attaching ourselves to his friends, we sometimes–and who can blames us? it’s inevitable, we’re just humans, after all–confuse their voice for his. We hear warnings from his friends, warnings about the dangers lurking in various movements and groupings and political parties and cultural institutions. This happens without our even being aware of it happening–it’s that powerful and pervasive. It embeds itself in our assumptions, this warning. And then you, or at least in my case, I, hear something like, “Pay attention to what I’m doing among liberals.” And it becomes a kind of test.

Like Peter and John and James underwent up on that mountain. Jesus was praying and they were with him. His face got dazzled and they got sleepy. But then they become wide awake and alert and see Moses and Elijah–yes of “the Law and the Prophets” fame–standing with him and his glory. Moses and Elijah begin to depart and Peter says, “Lord, let’s not break up this party! It’s just getting interesting!” and then a cloud covers them all and scares them as such clouds do, and a voice comes from the cloud saying, “This is my son, my chosen. Listen to him!” After that, there is Jesus only.

No I’m not saying that what happened on vacation several years ago was as vivid as that. But I’m saying that if we believe Jesus to be living, not dead, then we believe he has a voice, and he is entitled to use it. And what’s the point of counting ourselves as his followers if we don’t at least have the hope of hearing his voice so that we can listen to him?

This transfiguration event is meant to shake us up like it shook them up. Listen to him. Pay attention to him. Moses was pointing to him. The prophets were pointing to him. I am now pointing to him. So listen to him. Don’t chase after Moses or Elijah when it’s time for them to go and he’s standing here before you.

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?

So this past week has conspired to get me listening to my life. A talk given at the Great Lakes Regional conference on the treasure buried in the field of Vineyard, one of those melt down experiences during a time of extended worship after one of the main sessions, some offspring and friends from afar coming in this weekend to celebrate the release of Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back.

All of which got me thinking about my earliest imprinting as a newbie on the Jesus path. Imprinting, like what happens to baby ducklings. There’s a short period after their birth when whatever they look at tells them what they are. More times than not, it’s their mommy duck and they get it straight: walk like a duck, talk like a duck, must be a duck. Species identity confirmed and secured.

I’m a Jesus freak. I got it from Brian Martin, a Jesus freak from my high school days in Detroit. One of the original Detroit Jesus freaks, back when the hippies and druggies and high schoolers of Detroit, city of, were discovering Jesus as if for the first time. Part of the Jesus movement in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Sandal wearing Jesus freaks with blue jean jackets and all that. He talked with me about Jesus of Nazareth, star of the gospels. Like he knew the man, which he did, if through a glass darkly. And I was moved to read one of those gospels and felt my first haunting from Jesus of Nazareth.

Brian put me on to a backyard Bible study happening in Detroit at the time. Nancy and I walk into this scene: maybe 75 or so young people sitting around on the grass in a smallish backyard, with a middle age Jewish guy named Haskell Stone, sitting in a lawn chair teaching from one of the gospels. While smoking a cigarette in one of those FDR plastic cigarette holders, I think, I remember, wondering now if I made that part up.

Listening to the guy, imprinting was happening without my knowing it. As follows: the center-piece of Christianity is Jesus of Nazareth, star of the gospels; the point is to find and follow him; the treasure buried in the field that Jesus wants us digging around in is the kingdom of God.

I thought at the time, it was the obvious center. But then as I mixed it up over the years with many other Christians, I realized it’s not so obvious. The Lutherans seemed centered on the book of Romans and Galatians and insisted that every sermon be structured around an explication of the law and the gospel. And the Presbyterians were centered, it seemed to me, and this may be unfair, on the sovereignty of God as demonstrated in their willingness to wade into the waters of predestination. And the Catholics seemed to be centered on the sacrifice of the mass. And all it was lovely in it’s way and good, properly understood, but I couldn’t properly understand it, because I had imprinted on this other center.

Through no fault of my own, I might add, and no credit either, but simply as a result of what happened during that window of time when a duckling imprints on her mother duck and forever after knows she is.

A Jesus freak, swept into a theological undercurrent called the kingdom of God. See, Haskell Stone, it turns out, after coming to faith in Jesus as his messiah–a step that cost him dearly, being Jewish, and remaining so, but unrecognized by his Jewish friends and family–went to Fuller Theological Seminary back in the day. And studied under George Eldon Ladd, who in turn was being influenced by Oscar Cullmann. Scholars who were dusting off the gospels and saying, “Hey! The organizing motif of the Bible is the theme of the coming kingdom of God! The “already and the not yet” kingdom of God. The treasure buried in the field that Jesus counseled us to sell all in order to purchase.”

Which is why a few decades into my following days, I heard John Wimber speak and said, “Oh my! This is what I’ve been missing!” Wimber was one of the first to popularize the work of George Eldon Ladd, and Wimber’s wake left a new association of churches called Vineyard. Something that feels a little different when it’s being itself. Because it has as it’s theological center, this theme: the kingdom of God.

And in time the church that started in Mark Kinzer’s dorm room (Kinzer was powerfully influenced by Haskell Stone) and moved to our living room, through a long circuitous route became a Vineyard church. And a seminary professor from the Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit came to my office one day and handed me a paper that he had written in his own seminary days. It was a paper about the kingdom of God using Oscar Cullmann as it’s primary source. With tears in his eyes, he told me that he had been looking for a church that was centered on this understanding of Christian faith, and he could feel it in this church, the one I also attended.

Which made me feel incredibly good, when he said that. Because you just never know if the scent is strong enough in any church. This treasure seems to be buried deep most of the time, and you wonder how findable it is, sometimes. The gap between the pulsating presence of Jesus himself and the community that forms around him being greater than one would hope most of the time. And then someone like Brown Kinnard comes along with dirt on his knees from digging and says he thinks he found something. And you say to yourself, I knew this was real.