Religion, if it’s any good at all,
has always been under attack. Not
because of its claim of righteousness, or its attempts at some lofty holiness,
or because of its fundamentalism.
Historically, the best religion, the healthiest and courageous and most dangerous
religion, has been attacked because of its struggle against systems of
corruption, of injustice, of brutality, of exploitation and other crimes
against humanity.
Jesus was crucified for these very
reasons. People of religion over the
years created these elaborate and complicated and puzzling and sometimes
preposterous doctrines and ideologies about salvation and atonement and the
rapture and the second coming and eternal damnation and so forth as a way of attempting to interpret scripture. But Jesus was not killed for any of
that. He was killed for attempting to
stand against the cruelty and injustices and inhumanity of the Roman
Empire. He was killed for his impatience
with institutional religion and his call to reform it. He was killed by politicians and the most
religious people of his day.
They are still threatened by him. By the real Jesus.
All of the mean hyped up
Christianity of today has nothing really to do with the historical Jesus. It’s mostly selfish and phony, shallow and
close minded, and often harmful and destructive. Robust Christianity, courageous real Jesus
following Christianity, should clearly and courageously be for civil rights,
gay rights, abortion rights, and women’s rights. It should be a forceful influence on
government. It should be a healthy
example to society. But it has no
business running the government, which too much of contemporary Christianity
seems obsessed with doing. Government has
always worked best when it has been allowed to be a secular, human institution
of laws and services for its citizens.
It is weakened and corrupted when it attempts to be the voice of any
religious persuasion.
If you are opposed to gay rights,
to abortion, to equal rights because of your religious views then fine, stand
your ground defending your views—in your church, in your life. But don’t go be a politician or elect a
politician in order to get the government to promote your religious
viewpoints. And if you’re going to be a
Christian then at least study the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. He was not a fundamentalist right wing
Republican Tea Party millionaire capitalist.
He was not a person of means. He
wasn’t even married. He was humble. He was intelligent and well educated. He taught simple lessons of compassion and
grace. He fought for the sick and the
left out, for children and widows, for people possessed by addictions and
mental illness. He loved others with
gracious generosity. He had no ambition
for power, affluence or control. If you
tell me he would turn away gays or women who have had an abortion or people
struggling with alcohol or not fight for the rights of minorities, or be
callous towards women and their right to care for their own bodies, then I
would tell you go back and read your New Testament. If all you read is the Sermon on the Mount and
the Beatitudes (Matthew 5-7), then you cannot morally defend the loud hostile
cries of Christians today against the most vulnerable in our nation and in our
world.
We’ve been through Easter and
Passover and believers are back to the hard task now of living out their faith,
of putting into practice all of that death and resurrection and high festivals
and holy days, living it out in the home and the workplace and wherever
humanity meets them. That is where the
real tests happen and where if you have any faith at all it should unfold in
acts of love, of courage, of standing for the vulnerable and the hurting, and
standing against the corrupt and angry and selfish and exploitive systems of
our day.
The late British philosopher, Karl
Popper, once wrote, “I am therefore in favor of democratically elected,
constitutional government, which is quite different from rule by the
people. And I am in favor of accountable
government—accountable first of all to those who elected it, but also, perhaps
still more, morally responsible to humanity.”
Accountable government morally
responsible to humanity. That is far
different from rule by the people, which has become a fascination with
fundamentalist right wing religion and politics.
Religion that stands for the former
will most likely get attacked, and for all the right reasons.
© 2013 Timothy Moody
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