Religious Reclamation

All the polling is clear – Americans are turning away from religion, and as the visibility of nonreligious people increases, more and more Americans will just give up on all the talk of who is good and who is evil – all that irritating “holier than thou” stuff. That’s tiresome. Most current religious leaders don’t seem all that holy anyway – just wealthy and smug. No one wants to be scolded by the smug, and there’s the son of Ronald Reagan with his television ads for the Freedom from Religion Foundation – “Ron Reagan, lifelong atheist, not afraid of burning in hell.”

On the other hand, there are the defenders or Roy Moore:

Roy Moore, the Alabama Republican currently facing calls to end his Senate bid amid allegations of sexual misconduct with teenagers, was given a hero’s welcome Thursday by religious activists in Birmingham, Alabama, who blamed the news media for their candidate’s troubles…

Alan Keyes, chairman of Renew America and a former Senate and presidential candidate, said, “I stand with Judge Roy Moore, because he never leaves God out.” … Rabbi Nolson Shmul Leiter, of Help Rescue Our Children and Torah Jews for Decency, said that Roy Moore was working on behalf of religious leaders by standing up to “homosexualist gay terrorists” and “the LGBT transgender mafia.”

 THAT should settle matters, or so they say, but there are the defenders of Al Franken:

Shoplifting is not as bad as grand theft. Assault is not as bad as murder. Saying this doesn’t imply approval of either shoplifting or assault; it’s merely a statement of uncontroversial fact. Likewise, not all sexual abuse is equal. Harvey Weinstein’s rap sheet includes dozens of accusations of groping, forced massages, and possibly rape. Louis C. K. masturbated in front of actresses multiple times. Roy Moore routinely chased after high school girls when he was in his 30s and appears to have aggressively assaulted at least two of them.

By contrast, Franken thought he was joking around but went farther than he should have. It’s no whitewash to say that this is a considerably lesser offense. But if the only response we have to any kind of sexual abuse is to insist on resignation from office and expulsion from public life – mostly to protect our own reputations – we are not acting with any sense of proportionality.

Each side really doesn’t understand the other side, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are religious leaders who’d rather not defend Moore or Franken. They’d like to take their religion back from the likes of Alan Keyes and Rabbi Nolson Shmul Leiter.

They understand the problem, and one of those religious leaders is Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He’s also the author of Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel – “As Christianity seems increasingly strange, and even subversive, to our culture, we have the opportunity to reclaim the freakishness of the gospel, which is what gives it its power in the first place.”

Russell Moore wants to make Christianity strange again, in a good way, and he offers this analysis of the current moral standoff in America:

There’s a common denominator among Democrats and Republicans uneasy about the stories surrounding Sen. Al Franken and Senate candidate Roy Moore. Even those who are willing to speak consistently about both know that they will face fury from some in their respective bases who will tell them they shouldn’t do anything to jeopardize “our side.” This is a dangerous and reckless game, for all of us.

The problem is not that people are unwilling to make moral judgments. The moral relativists become moral absolutists in a moment, across social media or on cable television, and vice versa, and then both revert back again. This shifting of rhetoric isn’t even about differing views of the issues in question.

In short, there’s a lot of nonsense in the air at the moment:

Many progressives will denounce loudly the moral violations of conservatives, sometimes with all the moral certainty of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. Many conservatives who have spoken loudly about virtue and integrity will retreat to “Well, what about the other side?” when the question is about one of their own, with all the relativism of a postmodern deconstructionist in a faculty lounge.

Moore doesn’t like where this is headed:

This ought to alarm all of us, wherever we stand on the political spectrum, because it is an apocalyptic moment in American life – if we define “apocalypse” rightly as a revelation, pulling back the curtain on what has been unseen but present. What we are seeing is that politics is not about putting principles to work for the task of statecraft. Politics is more like a video game, in which the various players adopt parties and politicians as avatars of the self.

And one thing leads to another:

When this is true, it becomes easy enough to deify those on “our side,” because we never even seriously consider whether charges against them might be true. It’s all just incoming pseudo-warfare from the “other side.” That’s why – regardless of whether on the left or the right – many are willing to believe elaborate conspiracies are behind any suggestion of impropriety by someone on their “team.” The character issue doesn’t need to be worked through at all, if one already knows that those who are part of my tribe are saints and those who are part of the other are demons. That’s settled. The issues then are just used insofar as they are useful as footnotes to those already existing pledges of allegiance.

Moore then suggests that this leads to nothing but trouble:

Everyone in American life at least pretends to believe in some objective moral norms. When forced to choose, though, between the objectivity of morality and the idolatry of politics, morality loses, more often than not. This is dangerous because, for one thing, it props up very serious predation on the part of leaders who know that, no matter what they do, there will be at least a fervent cloud of witnesses for their integrity, no matter the evidence to the contrary.

But even apart from the very serious moral damage, the crisis here is one that ultimately will undo even what the enabling moral relativists seem to care most about – their ideological movements. Once the next generation comes to see that progressives don’t really care about “social justice” or that conservatives don’t really care about “family values” except as rhetorical tools, they will walk away, toward something else. Note the collapsing trust in institutions, seen in virtually every survey of younger Americans. Many factors account for this, but one driving factor is cynicism, the idea that institutions are just about keeping power for those who already have it.

If so, Moore argues, the answer to all this cynicism is a simple acknowledgement that some things are right and some things are just wrong:

Moral clarity is its own justification. As an evangelical Christian, I believe we will all give an account at the judgment seat of God. But you don’t have to agree with me on that to see something of what’s at stake when the next generation comes to think that the society around them believes in nothing. When conscience means nothing, all that is left is power. The result is nihilism that, history has shown us, ends up nowhere good.

So this is easy. A thirty-year-old man groping a fourteen-year-old girl is wrong. See, that isn’t so hard. Russell Moore is obviously not related to Judge Roy Moore in any way. The two of them aren’t even distant cousins. Russell Moore wants to take back “Christianity” from the likes of Roy Moore – “Christian, if you cannot say definitively, no matter what, that adults creeping on teenage girls is wrong, do not tell me how you stand against moral relativism.”

On the other hand, there’s Jim Wallis – the president and founder of Sojourners and part of the often-overlooked evangelical left and the wider Christian left (there are such folks) and a “spiritual advisor” to President Barack Obama for those unusual eight years that Obama was in office. Wallis says forget Roy Moore. If Christians want to recover their former status in society, then deal with the real problem. The real problem is Donald Trump:

Many traditions in the history of Christianity have attempted to combat and correct the worship of three things: money, sex and power. Catholic orders have for centuries required “poverty, chastity, and obedience” as disciplines to counter these three idols. Other traditions, especially among Anabaptists in the Reformation, Pentecostals and revival movements down through the years have spoken the language of simplicity in living, integrity in relationships and servanthood in leadership. All of our church renewal traditions have tried to provide authentic and more life-giving alternatives to the worship of money, sex and power – which can be understood and used in healthy ways when they are not given primacy in one’s life.

President Trump is an ultimate and consummate worshiper of money, sex and power. American Christians have not really reckoned with the climate he has created in our country and the spiritual obligation we have to repair it. As a result, the soul of our nation and the integrity of the Christian faith are at risk.

In short, American Christians will never be taken seriously if they stand behind this guy:

Trump’s adulation of money and his love for lavish ostentation (he covers everything in gold) are the literal worship of wealth by someone who believes that his possessions belong only to himself, instead of that everything belongs to God and we are its stewards. In 2011, before his foray into politics, Trump said, “Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich.” And in his 2015 speech announcing his candidacy for president, he said: “I’m really rich. And by the way, I’m not even saying that in a braggadocio – that’s the kind of mind-set, that’s the kind of thinking you need for this country.” Later, during the campaign, Trump suggested that our country must “be wealthy in order to be great.”

Wallis sees that at play now:

Lately, faith leaders have spoken out against the proposed Republican budgets and tax plans. The Circle of Protection, a group of leaders from all the major branches of Christianity, of which I am a part, said in a letter to Congress: “We care deeply about many issues facing our country and world, but ending persistent hunger and poverty is a top priority that we all share. These are biblical and gospel issues for us, not just political or partisan concerns. In Matthew 25, Jesus identified himself with those who are immigrants, poor, sick, homeless and imprisoned, and challenged his followers to welcome and care for them as we would care for Jesus himself.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, too, has rejected the tax plan, calling it “unacceptable as written” and “unconscionable in parts” as it would enrich the wealthy and shortchange the middle class and the poor. And yet, much Christian support for Trump and his administration continues.

Then there’s sex. Before Trump, Republicans liked to suggest that theirs was a fairly Puritanical party of family values with high standards for its candidates (despite many embarrassing exceptions). But Trump’s boastful treatment of women – including bragging in a video about grabbing their genitals – and his serial infidelity and adultery are clear evidence of his idolatrous worship of sex.

And then there’s race:

When 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump despite his blatant and constant use of racial bigotry for his own political interest, it showed that the operative word in the phrase “white Christian” is “white” and not “Christian.” When white Christians say they did not vote for Trump because of his bigotry but for other reasons, faith leaders of color answer with a damning question: His racial bigotry wasn’t a deal-breaker for you?

And then there’s the Sin of Pride:

Week after week Trump reveals that his leadership is always and only about himself, not the people, the country or even his party – and certainly not about godliness. During his recent whirlwind trip through Asia, for instance, he bragged constantly about his red carpet treatment, and seemed to thrive on the attention and flattery while putting precious little effort into diplomacy. (“They were all watching,” Trump gushed of people who he said called him in droves to congratulate him on the splendor of his visit to China. “Nothing you can see is so beautiful.”) The conflicts between his money, power and governing are always resolved in the same way – by his selfishness; by whatever happens to appeal to him, and only him, in that moment.

And then there’s a bigger issue:

All leaders struggle with these temptations, and public figures must wrestle with them the most. Christians, rightly enough, have never expected perfect leaders – just those who can keep up their end of the moral struggle. But for Trump, there is no moral struggle. He is not immoral – knowing what is right and wrong, and choosing the wrong – he rather seems amoral: lacking any kind of moral compass for his personal or professional life. That’s why the Christian compromise with Trump and his ilk has put faithful Americans at such serious risk.

Wallis argues that this has to stop:

Central to the health of our society is for American Christians to rescue an authentic, compassionate and justice-oriented faith from the clutches of partisan abuse, and from the idolatry of money, sex and power. The word “repentance” in Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions means much more than feeling sorry about the past; it also means “turning around” to equity and healing personally, and systemically in our institutions of policing and criminal justice, education, economics, voting rights, immigration and refugees, racial geography, housing, and more. Making repentance practical is the spiritual task ahead.

That’s a tall order. American Christians may not be able to rescue an authentic, compassionate and justice-oriented faith from the clutches of partisan abuse – not these days. It might be too late for that kind of religious reclamation.

But there was that New York Times op-ed by an evangelical law professor from Alabama, William S. Brewbaker III, who argued this:

To begin with, sin is a problem from which no one is exempt. If God’s love required the suffering and death of the Son of God in order to redeem us, we should not underestimate the consequences of sin in our own lives. The world is not divided into “good people” and “bad people”; to quote St. Paul, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Or, as the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.”

It is thus wrong to attack one’s critics, as Mr. Moore did recently on Twitter, as “the forces of evil” and attribute their questions about serious allegations to “a spiritual battle.”

Andrew Sullivan, the British-born gay Roman Catholic traditional (think Edmund Burke not Sean Hannity) conservative public intellectual is fine with that:

This is not just an evangelical truth. It is deeply embedded in all of Christianity. No party, no cause, no struggle, however worthy, is ever free from evil. No earthly cause is entirely good. And to believe with absolute certainty that you are on “the right side of history,” or on the right side of a battle between “good and evil,” is a dangerous and seductive form of idolatry. It flatters yourself. And it will lead you inevitably to lose your moral bearings because soon, you will find yourself doing and justifying things that are evil solely because they advance the cause of the “good.” These compromises can start as minor and forgivable trade-offs; but they compound over time. In the Catholic Church, the conviction that the institution could do no wrong, that its reputation must endure because it represented the right side in the struggle against evil, led to the mass rape of children and teens.

The religious right’s embrace of Trump is of a similar trope. It is not some kind of aberration in the transformation of a faith into a worldly and political cause. It is its logical consequence. The Christian right’s support for a sociopathic, cruel, and vulgar pagan was inevitable, in other words, from the moment the Moral Majority was born. If politics is fused with religion, and if your opponents are deemed evil, then almost anything can be justified to defeat them. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself defending the molestation of a minor – which is why I have long refused to call this political movement Christian, but Christianist. It is not about faith; it is about power.

Sullivan also doesn’t expect an authentic, compassionate and justice-oriented faith to pop up anytime soon, or ever. Jim Wallis is an outlier. That evangelical left and wider Christian left may be Wallis and Obama and maybe twenty other people. American Christians have become what Sullivan calls Christianists. There’s no Christian Reclamation Project afoot. There are only unhappy traditional Christians, writing passionate op-eds and a few books that no one reads. And there’s Ron Reagan, the lifelong atheist, not afraid of burning in hell. He’s the winner here.