Christianity vs. "Christianity"

[published in "The Flatland Oracles," my previous blog, on August 11, 2005]

Reflections on Bill McKibben's article in the August 2005 Harper's Monthly [THE CHRISTIAN PARADOX:  HOW A FAITHFUL NATION GETS JESUS WRONG]. Christianity (as opposed to 'Christianity') is hard.  No wonder we're basically a 'Christian' nation.

 

I am indebted to Alice Cowen for directing me to Bill McKibben’s article in this month’s Harper’s, The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong. Bill McKibben is ‘a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College.’ The article (cited below) appears in the August 2005 issue of Harper’s Monthly.

This article---which, sadly, will never even come to the attention of the people who most need to read it because of course they probably don't read Harper's Monthly----discusses the widening gap between the ‘Christianity’ of the right wing of the political spectrum and actual Christianity based on the actual teachings of Christ.

One aspect of ‘Christianity’ as opposed to Christianity is that those who practice ‘Christianity’ base their beliefs primarily on what they’ve been told it’s about. They freely mix together elements derived from political theory and political writings that are not in fact essentially Christian in origin. McKibben states, and I am going to take his word for it that ‘Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves” is a a teaching of the Bible, as opposed to a teaching of that jolly old freemason Ben Franklin.

“That is, three out of four Americans believe this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture…actually appear in the Bible. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love the neighbor.” McKibben, Harper’s Monthly Essay at 31 (August 2005.)

Our culture is of course deeply infused with Puritan ethics and the remnants of Puritan doctrine. The Puritans were not proponents of religious freedom---anything but, as you’ll find out if you explore the history of Quakers in America---or freedom, period. They did believe, as I recall---feel free to correct me if I’m wrong--- that the elect show that they are the elect by working hard and that God shows that they are the elect by granting them the fruits of their labors. 

You may therefore know the elect by the fruits of their labors (as opposed to, say, the fruits of their deeds, which is what Christ was concerned with and which means something else entirely). The notion that Jesus loves a capitalist isn’t new; it goes back to the roots of our culture and is doubtless responsible for its material prosperity. In Babbit and in other works from the Thirties, just for example, Sinclair Lewis makes very savage fun on the notion of religion as a path to temporal prosperity.

I suppose the same sense that a Christian life is a materially prosperous life, and that ‘the good life’ is one involving the maximum amount of material prosperity goes back to those roots, because it certainly doesn’t go back to Christ’s personal take on wealth and its appropriate uses. Despite his words to the rich man who wanted to know how to enter the kingdom, Christ seems to have had well-to-do supporters such as Joseph of Arimathea and the Bethany family; but those were people who used their personal wealth in the service of his mission, so to speak. If there is a constant message in the Gospels and in Acts, it is the responsibility of the Christian to others.

As the McKibben articles point out, even Christians who do read the Bible simply ignore the accounts we have of the actual teachings of Christ. For example, the ‘End Times’ Christians are so anxious to bring about the result they crave that they completely forget to ask themselves whether, if Jesus does appear, he would actually like them or approve of them. That whole apocalyptic mindset baffles me; I can’t get my head around it. It’s not the first time in history that ‘Christian’ communities have attempted to force God’s hand, but it appears that these people have very little interest in the history of Christianity between their time and the time of Christ, so they are retreading the same old ground with the same scary intensity.

Consider House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. At church one day he listened as the pastor, urging his flock to support the administration, declared that ‘the war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse.” Delay rose to speak, not only to the congregation but to 225 Christian TV and radio stations. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “what has been spoken tonight is the turth of God. The apocalyptics may not be wrong. One could make a perfectly serious argument that the policies of Tom DeLay are in fact hastening the End Times. But there is nothing particularly Christian about this hastening. McKibben, Harper’s Monthly Essay at 33 (August 2005.)

Among other things, some of these people believe (as McKibben points out on page 33) that they can bring about the End Times by creating the circumstances for them. If stirring up violence and strife in the Middle East will create some sort of ‘AntiChrist,’ that’s okay with them if it will force God’s hand. In short, they believe (though I’m sure they’d explain it differently) that they can make Jesus return to Earth.

And though I roll my eyes, I find the End Times rhetoric terrifying, in a Handmaid’s Tale sort of way. Will the more fanatical of these emerge with the guns that God also lets them have and force their ‘Christianity’ on those of us who see Christ quite differently? No, probably not, because Americans, including some of these, aren’t going to easily give up their material comforts to wage war at home even in the name of God, though the thought that a few fanatics among them might be quite willing to do so is definitely worrying.

Again, none of this fixation on Revelations or fevered preparation for the End Times has much to do with Christianity. For one thing, it’s all about looking out for yourself and making sure that when God calls his own, you personally get to go to Heaven. Even if you believe that the world is about to end, you can’t make it all about you, surely?

As for helping to bring about the End Times by creating conditions of distress, violence, and misery for others, nothing could be further from the central message of the actual Jesus.  As McKibben explains:

The tendencies I’ve been describing---toward an apocalyptic End Times faith, toward a comfort-the-comfortable, personal-empowerment faith---veil the actual, and remarkable, message of the Gospels. When one of the Pharisees asked Jesus what the core of the law was, Jesus replied:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Love your neighbor as yourself: although its rhetorical power has been dimmed by repetition, that is a radical notion, perhaps the most radical notion possible. Especially since Jesus, in all his teachings, made it very clear who the neighbor you were supposed to love was: the poor person, the sick person, the naked person, the hungry person. The last shall be made first; turn the other cheeck; a rich person aiming for heaven is like a camel trying to walk through the eye of a needle. On and on and on---a call for nothing less than a radical, voluntary, and effective reordering of power relationships, based on the principle of love. 

McKibben, Harper’s Monthly Essay at 33 (August 2005.)

And that is the exact distinction between Christianity and ‘Christianity.’ In Christianity, you are asked to do something which is almost impossible---to love the guy who sits in the library all day because he has nowhere else to go, who hasn’t had a bath, is possibly insane, and who has no one else but us. 

You’re asked, in other words, to do the things that we American fear the most: get involved with people who might then expect something of you. They might depend on you. They might even---and I know the very thought makes me go hot and cold all over----sue you and make you stand up in court on television and be publicly lectured and derided  for being a soft-hearted chump by Judge Marilyn Milian or Judge Judy Sheindlin. (Okay, that's my personal nightmare. But how many acts of Christian charity are deterred by fear of a lawsuit?)

No good deed goes unpunished.” I hear that all the time. But it is not always true---some good deed do go unpunished and for a Christian, doing the deed is the important thing (or should be the important thing) in any case; whether you get a reward, or even ordinary gratitude or whether your good work even appears on its face to have done any good ought to be beside the point. In fact, it’s none of your business.

Real Christianity---unlike ‘Christianity’---is difficult, demanding, uncomfortable, and never lets you alone. It brings you in contact with people you don’t like and who aren’t respectable and who might hurt you in some way. It’s something you have to force yourself daily to do. Since you are bound to fail repeatedly, it doesn’t make you feel self-satisfied; it makes you feel inadequate.

I’m not saying I’m any better at it than the average ‘Christian.’ I’m as lazy, complacent, fearful, and selfish as the next, but I am trying to change because I know the actual job description.

It’s no wonder, though, that we’re a ‘Christian’ nation.