Is The Religious Left Really The Fuzzy Middle?
Pagan writer and elder Isaac Bonewits weighs in on the “religious left” and their ongoing lack of influence on the political sphere. Bonewits claims that the typical Christian/Jewish “left” (expounded on by people like Jim Wallis) isn’t the “left” at all, but instead typify a sort of theological mushy middle.
“I deeply suspect that monotheism, with the almost inevitible dualism that usually accompanies it, is part of the problem, not part of a solution. The culture wars are between dualists and pluralists, with liberal monotheists stuck uncomfortably in the fuzzy area between. This may be an an area where liberal Neopagans, Hindus, Voodooists, and Native religionists of many lands may have a role to play in the coming years. We know that the universe can count higher than two, so we’re not necessarily stuck in the mainstream Western culture’s dualist worldview.”
For Bonewits, liberal monotheists have to overcome their fear of confronting conservative extremists to be effective.
“When will the liberal monotheists have the courage to loudly, publically, and repeatedly state that people who believe their scriptures literally, and who believe those scriptures give them the right to kill other people, are insane rather than “misguided”? Because that seems to me to be the meme they should be spreading. When will they (liberal religionists) understand that tolerating bigots is not only intellectually and spiritually bankrupt, but also suicidal?”
While I find Bonewits’ writing to be as entertaining as always, I have to say I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this take on monotheism (a take I have often adopted in the past). As the Republican party slowly implodes, the power of the “conservative” religious factions seems increasingly artificial. There is a growing sense among conservative-leaning evangelicals that they were being used to reap short-term political benefits instead of joining a (conservative) social revolution. The monotheist faiths are hardly monolithic, and terms like “liberal” and “conservative” apply less and less when it comes to matters of faith (this is true for Pagan religions as well). I don’t think the answer is the replacement of “dualistic” faith with “pluralistic” faith because I don’t think that any belief system is immune from corruption or selfish impulses.
2 responses so far
Well, if you look at your post from yesterday. . .
Anyhow: I love the atheists. They always seem to be on top of things and they keep everyone informed. That being said: the link to the article that I was e-mailed this week by the Kentucky Atheists was unavaliable, so here’s the text:
Disowning Conservative Politics Is Costly for Pastor
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN, The New York Times
MAPLEWOOD, Minn. (July 30) — Like most pastors who lead thriving
evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to
give his blessing — and the church’s — to conservative political
candidates and causes.
Bill Alkofer, The New York Times
The Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minn., lost about 1,000 of its 5,000
members after Rev. Gregory Boyd urged in June an end to sexual moralizing
and military glorification and said America should not be proclaimed a
“Christian nation.”
The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please
announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a
politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby
promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’
guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at
war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?
After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before
the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross
and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics,
give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a
“Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.
“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd
preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put
your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”
Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks
homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at
Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with
politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was
passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the
time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992,
had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.
But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were
moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.
“Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist
and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for
Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.”
Sermons like Mr. Boyd’s are hardly typical in today’s evangelical churches.
But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now
going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common
concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency
to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American
nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq. And Mr. Boyd has a new book
out, “The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is
Destroying the Church,” which is based on his sermons.
“There is a lot of discontent brewing,” said Brian D. McLaren, the founding
pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in
the evangelical movement known as the “emerging church,” which is at the
forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.
“More and more people are saying this has gone too far — the dominance of
the evangelical identity by the religious right,” Mr. McLaren said. “You
cannot say the word ‘Jesus’ in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage
going along with it. You can’t say the word ‘Christian,’ and you certainly
can’t say the word ‘evangelical’ without it now raising connotations and a
certain cringe factor in people.
“Because people think, ‘Oh no, what is going to come next is homosexual
bashing, or pro-war rhetoric, or complaining about ‘activist judges.’ “
Mr. Boyd said he had cleared his sermons with the church’s board, but his
words left some in his congregation stunned. Some said that he was
disrespecting President Bush and the military, that he was soft on abortion
or telling them not to vote.
“When we joined years ago, Greg was a conservative speaker,” said William
Berggren, a lawyer who joined the church with his wife six years ago. “But
we totally disagreed with him on this. You can’t be a Christian and ignore
actions that you feel are wrong. A case in point is the abortion issue. If
the church were awake when abortion was passed in the 70’s, it wouldn’t have
happened. But the church was asleep.”
Mr. Boyd, 49, who preaches in blue jeans and rumpled plaid shirts, leads a
church that occupies a squat block-long building that was once a home
improvement chain store.
The church grew from 40 members in 12 years, based in no small part on Mr.
Boyd’s draw as an electrifying preacher who stuck closely to Scripture. He
has degrees from Yale Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary,
and he taught theology at Bethel College in St. Paul, where he created a
controversy a few years ago by questioning whether God fully knew the
future. Some pastors in his own denomination, the Baptist General
Conference, mounted an effort to evict Mr. Boyd from the denomination and
his teaching post, but he won that battle. He is known among evangelicals
for a bestselling book, “Letters From a Skeptic,” based on correspondence
with his father, a leftist union organizer and a lifelong agnostic — an
exchange that eventually persuaded his father to embrace Christianity.
Mr. Boyd said he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique
of the Republican Party or the religious right. He refuses to share his
party affiliation, or whether he has one, for that reason. He said there
were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and
patriotism into “idolatry.”
He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship
service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus
singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill
silhouetted with crosses.
“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the
cross?’ ” he said in an interview.
Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across
town from Mr. Boyd’s church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church
was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for
a “freedom celebration.” Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into
the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a
Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was
spending “your hard-earned money” on good causes.
In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of
Christians was not to seek “power over” others — by controlling
governments, passing legislation or fighting wars.
Christians should instead seek to have “power under” others – “winning
people’s hearts” by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd
said.
“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by
people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a
Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our
Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.
“I am sorry to tell you,” he continued, “that America is not the light of
the world and the hope of the world. The light of the world and the hope of
the world is Jesus Christ.”
Mr. Boyd lambasted the “hypocrisy and pettiness” of Christians who focus on
“sexual issues” like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s
breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said
Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived
violations of their rights to display their faith in public.
“Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he
said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”
Some Woodland Hills members said they applauded the sermons because they had
resolved their conflicted feelings. David Churchill, a truck driver for
U.P.S. and a Teamster for 26 years, said he had been “raised in a
religious-right home” but was torn between the Republican expectations of
faith and family and the Democratic expectations of his union.
When Mr. Boyd preached his sermons, “it was liberating to me,” Mr. Churchill
said.
Mr. Boyd gave his sermons while his church was in the midst of a $7 million
fund-raising campaign. But only $4 million came in, and 7 of the more than
50 staff members were laid off, he said.
Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20
volunteers who had been the backbone of the church’s Sunday school.
“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which
is supporting the Republican way,’ ” she said. “It was some of my best
volunteers.”
The Rev. Paul Eddy, a theology professor at Bethel College and the teaching
pastor at Woodland Hills, said: “Greg is an anomaly in the megachurch world.
He didn’t give a whit about church leadership, never read a book about
church growth. His biggest fear is that people will think that all church is
is a weekend carnival, with people liking the worship, the music, his
speaking, and that’s it.”
In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites,
church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members
who live in the surrounding community – African-Americans, Hispanics and
Hmong immigrants from Laos.
This suits Mr. Boyd. His vision for his church is an ethnically and
economically diverse congregation that exemplifies Jesus’ teachings by its
members’ actions. He, his wife and three other families from the church
moved from the suburbs three years ago to a predominantly black neighborhood
in St. Paul.
Mr. Boyd now says of the upheaval: “I don’t regret any aspect of it at all.
It was a defining moment for us. We let go of something we were never called
to be. We just didn’t know the price we were going to pay for doing it.”
His congregation of about 4,000 is still digesting his message. Mr. Boyd
arranged a forum on a recent Wednesday night to allow members to sound off
on his new book. The reception was warm, but many of the 56 questions
submitted in writing were pointed: Isn’t abortion an evil that Christians
should prevent? Are you saying Christians should not join the military? How
can Christians possibly have “power under” Osama bin Laden? Didn’t the
church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?
One woman asked: “So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love
and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn’t we be the ones involved in politics
and setting laws?”
Mr. Boyd responded: “I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on
society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and
justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”
Thought you might want to know. It’s swinging a different direction in some places. Perhaps getting more set in others, but still.
“I don’t think the answer is the replacement of ‘dualistic’ faith with ‘pluralistic’ faith because I don’t think that any belief system is immune from corruption or selfish impulses.”
I think this is the crux of the problem, and I think that the severity of this problem is directly proportional to the degree in which politics and religion are mixed.