The Post-Christian Christians

Wednesday, December 26 – another celebration of the birthday of the Prince of Peace has come and gone. The Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on January 7 – December 25 if you use the Julian calendar – but there are not enough of those folks to matter to us here in America. So it is over. All the talk of peace on earth and goodwill to men is being boxed up and shoved in the back of the closet. It was nice while it lasted.

The odd thing is that Christmas wasn’t always a good thing – during the Reformation some Protestants condemned Christmas celebrations as the “trappings of popery” and the “rags of the Beast,” so the Roman Catholic Church responded by promoting Christmas in a more solemn, religious way. It didn’t help. When the Roundheads got rid of Charles I during the English Civil War (they beheaded him) the new Puritan crowd just up and banned Christmas, in 1647. That led to pro-Christmas rioting – Canterbury was controlled by rioters who decorated doorways with holly and shouted royalist slogans. No one was happy. The Restoration of 1660 ended the ban, but the Nonconformist clergy still disapproved of Christmas celebrations, using the old Puritan arguments. It was “pope stuff.” In Colonial America the Puritans of New England also didn’t think much of Christmas – celebration of that nonsense was outlawed in Boston from 1659 to 1681. Down in Virginia and New York no one had a problem with it, but after our little revolution Christmas was considered a bit unpatriotic, an English custom. By the second decade of the nineteenth century people relaxed a bit and British writers began to worry that Christmas was dying out – so we got Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” in 1843, and it was off to the races, or to the mall. On this side of the pond add Washington Irving, Clement Clarke Moore and Harriet Beecher Stowe to the propaganda campaign. Christmas was declared a United States Federal Holiday in 1870, signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant. You could look it all up. It’s all very strange.

Now most people think it’s a big deal. Bill O’Reilly each December gets on his Fox News soapbox, vowing to fight the good fight in the War on Christmas. He doesn’t want the “secularists” to dilute the holiday – he goes after major retailers whose personnel offer a pleasant Happy Holidays and not a stern Merry Christmas. This is not the time of year to be courteous to Jews or Buddhists, and certainly not Muslims, even if Jesus is a major prophet in Islam. He gives a pass to the president, who says Happy Holidays over and over, and has those same two evil words on the White House Christmas card. The president is in a tight spot, after all. But Bill won’t let anyone else off that easily. He gets really angry. And it’s not a bad career move too.

So it is the big event of the year, even if out here some folks just go surfing.

On the other hand, one wonders whether Jesus would really want a big, worldwide birthday party each and every year, with major spending and all the rest of the commercial madness – and with those charming Coke ads with the cute polar bear cub hanging around with the lovable penguins, sharing a large cola to a Beach Boys tune (yeah, you’ve seen it). It just doesn’t seem like him (or Him, as O’Reilly would insist).

But then the message of Jesus – love your neighbor, turn the other cheek, forgive others, help those in need, be decent and generous as all men are brothers, be tolerant, and, by the way, do not kill – does present some problems. Would the guy want the good wishes of the O’Reilly crowd – pro-torture, pro-war, pro-capital punishment, anti-welfare, anti-immigration and really big on vengeance? Would the guy be hanging with the “values crowd” at all? It’s a banal observation, of course. Many have pointed out the inherent contradiction – all these folks tell us to get with God and accept Jesus as our personal savior, but understand when, it seems, Jesus was just kidding, or if he wasn’t kidding, how times have changed and if Jesus were to drop by today he certainly now would be pro-torture, pro-war, pro-capital punishment, anti-welfare, anti-immigration and really big on vengeance. He’d “get it.” Some pastors call the new view Muscular Christianity: Promoting Masculine Christianity Over Feminine Christianity – a tradition from Hitler calling his Jesus “a fighting Jesus” to many of the evangelicals today. Sigh. The idea has become mainstream Christianity – the new default.

You could call it post-Christian Christianity. Well, you could call it many things. Andrew Sullivan calls such stuff Christianism, to differentiate it from Christianity. But the angry, militant Christian, out for vengeance, is the norm now. And these folks think it’s time they ran the place.

This is worrying to some. If you bop over to BeliefNet and to their God-o-Meter blog you’ll find this – that although it’s one thing for “lefty atheists to ring alarm bells about Mike Huckabee’s use of religion in his presidential campaign” something else is going on. It seems a conservative evangelical former member of the Bush administration is worried. This would be Peter Wehner, a longtime Bush aide and fellow at The Ethics and Public Policy Center. The mission there is “to clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues.” They like mixing church and state, but it seems that in the Washington Post, Pete doesn’t like Huckabee “playing the Jesus card” at all, saying this –

This is a man who, in 1998, when explaining to a Baptist pastors conference why he got involved in politics, answered, “I got into politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives…  I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ.”

Now isn’t that odd – a former pastor who leaves his ministry so he can get involved in politics because he “knew government didn’t have the real answers.”

But Pete doesn’t like it –

Invoking one’s faith is not unprecedented in American politics and is not, by itself, disconcerting. It can even be reassuring. But it is also fraught with danger. If certain lines – inherently ambiguous lines – are crossed and faith becomes a tool in a political campaign, it can damage our civic comity and our politics and demean our faith.

Religious beliefs should play a role in our public life, especially when it comes to great moral questions…. but there are no Christian or Hindu parties in America. That is as it ought to be.

And he turns to the “wimp, feminist Jesus” –

And for those of us who are Christian, there is an important context to bear in mind: Jesus’ entire ministry was directed against the pretensions of earthly power, and Christianity is trans-political, beholden to no party and no ideology. The City of Man and the City of God are different, and we should respect and honor those differences.

Mike Huckabee, by all accounts a faithful Christian, may not have crossed any bright lines yet – but he’s edging close to them. He should pull back now, before his political ambitions injure what he claims to care about, and undoubtedly does care about, most.

God-o-Meter –

Of course, one disgruntled member of the conservative elite does not an evangelical Huckabee backlash make. But God-o-Meter will be keeping its eyes open for other Christian conservatives raising the same kinds of red flags. After all, evangelicals advising Mitt Romney have been grousing for some time now that Huckabee is campaigning to be pastor-in-chief.

Sullivan –

The Republican establishment was fine with Christianism as long as they controlled it. But as soon as a Christianist comes along that they cannot control, like Huckabee, they rediscover secularism. How conveeenient. In some ways, I think Huckabee has a chip on his shoulder for a good reason.

It won’t be pretty. And Huckabee, bird hunting the day after Christmas, was saying odd things to the reporters –

Of four birds flushed by the party, three were felled. Huckabee claimed the third with his .12-gauge shotgun. He proudly displayed the birds and said jokingly, “See that’s what happens if you get in my way.”

… “It’s an opportunity to experience Iowa at its best,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll just shoot pheasants and not each other. We’ll name the pheasant for the other candidates. It gives us a real incentive.”

 

Jesus would smile, perhaps ruefully. But the there have always been Republican jokes about hunting and killing liberals. Add Republican primary opponents. Jesus.

Also in the Washington Post there was Sally Quinn with this –

 

How could this happen, in what will soon be 2008, in a pluralistic, multicultural, multi-religious society, a society based on the concepts of religious freedom and separation of church and state? What were they thinking?

This resolution was as anti-American as anything Congress has ever passed. It disenfranchised and marginalized millions and millions of men and women, reducing them to second-class citizens.

She didn’t like H.R. 847, passed on December 11 (previously discussed here) –

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—
(1) recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world;
(2) expresses continued support for Christians in the United States and worldwide;
(3) acknowledges the international religious and historical importance of Christmas and the Christian faith;
(4) acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the formation of the western civilization;
(5) rejects bigotry and persecution directed against Christians, both in the United States and worldwide; and
(6) expresses its deepest respect to American Christians and Christians throughout the world.        

 

She says –

Among those voting for the resolution was a Jewish member of Congress who has asked me not to print his name. He was outraged and appalled by the bill, he told me. But he was also afraid. He thought it would hurt him with his mostly Christian constituency if he voted against it. He told some of his colleagues about his anguish. They advised him not to be stupid. It would be better for him politically if he voted for it.

It’s possible that the 10 who voted “present” also had problems with the bill but decided it was safer not to vote against it. One could also assume that some of those who were absent were not there so as not to have to deal with the problem.

Earlier this year the House also passed resolutions honoring Islamic and Indian holidays but nothing that so equated a single faith with America and Americans.

Get used to it.

And she is co-moderator, with Jon Meacham, of On Faith, the Post’s online conversation on religion at http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith – so she’s been playing with fire. But then she has a story –

As a child, I went to a small school in rural Alabama near an Army post where my father was stationed. It was a very Christian town, and our teacher was “born again.”

This was decades ago, but I remember clearly how she used to tell us that we must accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior. Then she would ask for hands to see who had. By age 11 I had become a nonbeliever. My father was in the Army and had fought in World War II and Korea; I concluded quickly that no loving God could have allowed those atrocities to be committed.

But we had all seen our teacher, when crossed, call an unlucky member of our class up to the front of the room, make the student lie down on her desk and be paddled. The humiliation was worse than the pain. So, when she called on us to admit that we had accepted Jesus as our savior, I dutifully raised my hand.

Heck – that may become a national experience.

And as for Jesus and capital punishment, see Matthew Yglesias here. He reviews how in the modern period just five states – Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Florida, and Missouri – were responsible for some huge proportion of total executions. And he offers a map. And it is commonplace that the death penalty is being applied very differently from place to place. But he notes that now, in 2007, as Adam Liptak points out in the New York Times, Texas alone accounted for 60 percent of total executions in the United States, and Yglesias adds –

I used to be a death penalty proponent. And I still think, in principle, that it’s not always wrong to execute people. But at the systems level, actually existing capital punishment in the United States is clearly a mess. Your odds of dying for your crime have much, much, much more to do with where you committed your crime and your socioeconomic status than anything about the nature of your crime. In theory, I think you could have a fair system that involved some number of executions. In practice, though, it barely seems doable and Harry Blackmun’s conclusion that he had to simply refuse to “tinker with the machinery of death” seems more and more sensible to me as time goes on.

New Jersey just abolished capital punishment, but the Times item gives us this –

This year’s death penalty bombshells – a de facto national moratorium, a state abolition and the smallest number of executions in more than a decade – have masked what may be the most significant and lasting development. For the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, more than 60 percent of all American executions took place in Texas.

Over the past three decades, the proportion of executions nationwide performed in Texas has held relatively steady, averaging 37 percent. Only once before, in 1986, has the state accounted for even a slight majority of the executions, and that was in a year with 18 executions nationwide.

Steve Benen adds this –

 

As it turns out, it’s not that Texas has experienced a sudden boost in blood thirst; it’s that most of the country has stemmed the execution tide. There were 42 executions over the last year, from a total of 10 states. Nine states carried about a combined total of 16 death sentences, while Texas executed 26 people. No other state killed more than three.

University of Houston law professor David Dow, who has represented death-row inmates, told the NYT we will likely reach a point in which practically all executions in the United States will take place in Texas.

“The reason that Texas will end up monopolizing executions,” he said, “is because every other state will eliminate it de jure, as New Jersey did, or de facto, as other states have.”

So as for Harry Blackmun’s conclusion that he had to simply refuse to “tinker with the machinery of death’ seems more and more sensible to me as time goes on” – “I’m not sure about the possibility even existing of a fair, error-free system, but the latter point certainly rings true.”

Digby –

I don’t know about that; all it takes is one trigger-happy governor who mocks inmates by saying “Please, don’t kill me,” and that doesn’t necessarily have to confine itself to one state (Brother Jeb did his share of killing in Florida). In addition, Texas has followed the nationwide trend of far fewer death sentences, suggesting that people may approve of the death penalty in polls but not when they have to face it up close.

Maybe the wheels of justice in Texas are greased so nobody will notice the brutal inequities in the system, which include defense attorneys falling asleep during trials, elected judges with an interest in appearing tough on crime ignoring the law to ensure quick executions, the lack of a public defender system (the judges appoint the defense lawyers, and most of them are incompetent), and a spectacularly failed appeals process.

The prison crisis and how it cuts against the poor is one of the great untold stories in America right now. But in Texas, people are being killed to pump up judges’ political track records. That’s out of step with the prevailing trend of the nation.

It is? The new Jesus would argue otherwise – if He existed.

“Our ancestors… purged their guilt by banishment, not death. And by so doing, they stopped that endless vicious cycle of murder and revenge.” ~ Euripides

 

“‘It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.” ~ Albert Camus

It’s old ground, see this discussion in these pages, from October 2003, a discussion of Scott Turow and his book Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty. The basic question –

Should a democratic state ever be permitted to kill its citizens? If the people are the ultimate source of authority in a democracy, should the government be allowed to eliminate its citizens?

 

It’s not easy – unless you listen to the “new Jesus.” And yes, capital punishment is “consistent with the Western moral tradition, with the idea that God meant us to slay the evildoer, and I respect the rights of the individual to hold that view.” On the other hand, “there’s a moment when reason and humanity part company, and that’s the moment of execution. It doesn’t matter that this is authorized. It doesn’t ameliorate the horror of doing it, the deep intuition that there is something wrong with taking a life on whatever terms.”

There’s much more at the four-year-old column, but you get the idea. Turow points out on the one hand that murder is a crime so extreme that it requires the most extreme retribution. On the other, state-sanctioned killing reduces our society to its lowest common denominator, making all of us complicit in the taking of a life. And as for those enthusiastic about the death penalty as “a statement of moral value” to be applied widely and often to say who we are – to clearly show what we just won’t tolerate – those are the new evangelicals, the “values voters,” the Jesus people.

And they celebrate his birthday – the Prince of Peace and the God of Love. Yeah, right. Things have changed. The post-Christian Christianity is a bit depressing.