The Gospel of the Bumper Sticker
Traffic was at its usual rush hour standstill, so I had plenty of time to read all the bumper stickers on the truck in front of me. Most were of the “I’m more Christian than you are” variety, with declarations as to “God is my Co-Pilot” and “Jesus is Lord.” However, pride of place, right in the center of the tailgate, was an oversized sticker that proclaimed: “May God Have Mercy on Your Soul, Because I Never Will.”It made me wonder. Isn’t it the fundamentalist belief that the Bible is the revealed word of God, perfect in every way? Why then, boast of a sentiment that is the antithesis of everything spoken by Jesus? Indeed, is even directly disputed by the God of the Old Testament as well?
Although I would never be confused with a Biblical scholar, I am a graduate of numerous religious classes in high school and college, and a veteran of years of Sunday School both as student and teacher. I’m quite comfortable in my reading of the New Testament, because it isn’t very nebulous to begin with. When Jesus was asked which was the most important of the commandments, he didn’t weigh one of the 10 Commandments against the other. No, he was quick to reply, I give to you a new commandment, that you love one another.
That’s a pretty clear call for mercy to me, but I admit that the word is not used. So we turn to other texts, like the Beatitudes, where it is written “Blessed are the merciful.” When a follower whined, “how many times must I forgive my brother? As many as seven?” The reply was direct and swift, “as many as seventy times seven,” which was meant to imply that we must be ready to forgive as many times as it takes. And then there is the passage on turning the other cheek, and the one on “he who is without sin shall cast the first stone,” or “why do you seek the mote in your brother’s eye, and not the log in your own?” Even more pointed, when asked about what one does about one’s enemies, the answer came: “Pray for those who persecute you.” And for those who loudly pray for their enemies in language couched in insults and self-righteousness, you won’t find approval from Jesus on that one. He said to pray for forgiveness, both that you may forgive others and that you may be forgiven. It was the most direct opposite from conflict and arrogance he could come up with.
What about the famously vengeful and punitive God of the Old Testament? He may not have been consistently merciful, but he was consistent in demanding mercy from His followers. The famous saying, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” is meant to convey that humans should have no part in revenge, but must leave judgment and punishment to a Higher Power.
However, this is a moot discussion, because, as the bumper sticker indicates, mercy has already been banished, and is not the calling card of the fundamentalist Christian. Following the wake of Hurricane Katrina, our aggressively Christian neighbors have been flooding our newspaper letters column with venomous attacks on those who are victims of the hurricane. Those victims deserved whatever they got, because they had already been shown to be unworthy of God’s or man’s love. After all, they were poor, black, and probably had too many children at too young an age. It was their fault they didn’t have resources to flee the storm, and it’s only a shame more weren’t drowned. If they had been, we wouldn’t have had so much looting and vandalism.
In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Nickled and Dimed in America, the author speaks of attending revivals while working at low-end service jobs. She was struck with how silent Jesus was at these revivals. He was never quoted, His precepts totally missing from the texts. Everywhere He was depicted at the moment of His death, crucified, bleeding, and mute. The true Jesus, the homeless vagrant, the nomad dependent upon the charity of others, the apostle of love and grace, has no home in the fundamentalist Christian church. Indeed, if our refusal to help our homeless, and begrudge those who are vulnerable is any indication, He is indeed the enemy, just as was written by Dostoyevsky in the “Grand Inquisitor.”
I’m not certain when and where Christianity got hijacked in the popular mind as relating solely to the study of Revelations, a book that can clearly only be viewed as an outlier, having no particular connection with the Gospels or the acts of the Apostles. I’m not certain when the focus switched from Christian charity to self-righteousness and moral smugness. But I am certain that this trend can only lead to the death of the Christian faith if it continues.
posted by Lenore Wilson @ 6:10 PM
4 Comments:
Wish we had more people has well informed about the difference in Christianity as per Christ that is based on loved for one another regardless of race and sexual orientation.
Wish we had more people has well informed about the difference in Christianity as per Christ that is based on loved for one another regardless of race and sexual orientation.
Karen Armstrong has written extensively on the major religions and come to some interesting observations and conclusions. Interestingly, she points out, over and over, that religion and compassion are meant to be intertwined.
>>The main thing I want them to get is this idea of compassion. That's what we need now.
Q: Everything boils down to the Golden Rule.
A: I'm convinced of it. It's in all the traditions, and it's what the world needs now more than religious certainty, more than doctrinal statements or more rules about what people can do in the bedroom and who can get married and who can be bishops or priests. All this is like fiddling while Rome burns.
All the world religions developed in violent societies like our own. All of them came from societies where civilization seemed on the point of collapsing under the weight of aggression and violence. Where old values were going out, no new ones were coming to take their place. The first impulse in many of these religions was a revulsion from violence. That's what we need now, to get back to some of that.<<
In the same interview
http://www.powells.com/authors/armstrong.html
she made these comments:
>>Dave: But in regards to fundamentalism, as differently as it may have manifested in each religion, something all fundamentalists share is the fear of annihilation, the fear that their way of life will not survive. And it's a legitimate fear.
Armstrong: It's true. In the Muslim countries, that has been immensely true. In Judaism, fundamentalism took major leaps forward, first just after the Holocaust, then again after the 1973 war when Israel suddenly felt vulnerable again and felt its isolation in the Middle East. Then look at Muslims whose modernizers were aggressive and mowed you down in a mosque if you didn't wear modern dress; or took women's veils off in the street and ripped them to pieces in front of them with a bayonet; tortured mullahs; abolished Sufi orders and forced them underground. This is experienced by the ordinary Muslim in the street as an assault against religion, and yet what are these modernizers supposed to do? They've got to modernize fast. They've got to secularize. Somehow we've got to see that this has been counterproductive.
What we know from the past is that when fundamentalists are attacked, whether they're Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, they become more extreme. Certainly that happened in this country at the time of the Scopes trial. The ridicule they faced at the hands of the secular press led fundamentalists to go from the left of the political spectrum to the right, where they've remained.
Dave: You compare the Industrial and now the Technological Age to the Axial Age. Underlying economic and cultural changes are essentially forcing religion to adapt.
Armstrong: Religion speaks to contemporary conditions or it dies. The difference is that in our current pivotal period of major social, technological, and economic change, which has transformed the world, our geniuses have mostly been scientific. We've had no spiritual geniuses of the stature of the Buddha or Muhammad or Jesus or Confucius or Lao Tzu or the prophets of Israel ... I won't go on. There was a galaxy of spiritual stars in the Axial Age. We don't have our own. We still rely on those original insights.
My book, I hope, will be a critique of the way we're religious today. It often seems to me that in our various religious institutions we're producing exactly the type of religion that people like the Buddha wanted to get rid of. Buddha and Isiah and Socrates, all these people, who said, "Question everything. Never take anybody else's word for it. Never take anything on faith. If a religious belief doesn't conform, if it doesn't work for you, leave it, that's fine. Question everything, even utterly sacred truths." Like the prophets of Israel saying that God is not reflexively on the side of the Israel, as he was at the time of the Exodus.
And compassion is the key. No interest in doctrinal formulations, very little interest in the afterlife ... most of those religious leaders were just concerned with living fully. All this is very different from the way people conceive of religion today.
In the absence of religious geniuses, let's make good use of the ones we had at the time of the Axial Age and try to get back to some of those great insights that in fact chime really well with modernity.<<
A good interview on the subject of fundamentalism, including Jim Wallis, can be read at
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0203&article=020310
I think these observations may point the way to some framework of understanding, but it still leaves the question, how do you challenge an inerrant POV without it being seen as an attack from a secularist POV, or worse yet a sinner.
Jim Wallis has answered my question this way (also in the interview cited above) and leaves us with different question:
>> Conventional wisdom suggests that the antidote to religious fundamentalism is more secularism. That's a very big mistake. The best response to bad religion is better religion, not secularism. The traditions we are looking at are religions of the book, and the key question is, how do we interpret the book? In Christian faith, we have the interpretation of Martin Luther King Jr. and also that of the Ku Klux Klan. Better interpretation of the book, in my view, is a better response to fundamentalism than throwing the book away.
Fundamentalism, it is often said, is taking religion too seriously. The answer, in this view, is to take it less seriously. That conventional wisdom is wrong. The best response to fundamentalism is to take faith more seriously than fundamentalism sometimes does. The best response is to critique by faith the accommodations of fundamentalism to theocracy and violence and power and to assert the vital religious commitments that fundamentalists often leave out—namely compassion, social justice, peacemaking, religious pluralism, and I would say democracy as a religious commitment.
Fundamentalism betrays true faith by its devotion to an easy accommodation to the state. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state." That is often missed by this move to theocracy, particularly to a theocracy that is intended to enforce the dictates of the faith. In my view, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and American fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are indeed theocrats asking that their religious agenda be enforced by the power of the state. That is primarily a religious mistake.
Fundamentalism too easily justifies violence as a tool for implementing its agenda. Genuine faith either forbids violence as a methodology or says that violence must always be limited and lamented, never glorified or celebrated. Genuine faith always seeks alternatives to violence that seek to break its deadly cycle. Fundamentalism, instead, offers what Walter Wink calls "the myth of redemptive violence"—that somehow violence can save us after all.
Some will say that after Sept. 11 we must keep religion safely relegated to the private sphere. That again is a mistake. The question is not whether religious and spiritual values should inform public discourse, but how. Separation of church and state does not require the removal of religious values from the public square.<<
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