“Who Will Win Out?”
Within the evangelical community, Dobson emerged as Obama’s fiercest critic. In June 2008 he lashed out at Obama on his radio program, accusing him of distorting the Bible to fit his worldview, of having a “fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution,” and of appealing to the “lowest common denominator of morality.” Dobson especially took issue with a speech Obama had given in 2006 in which he had defended the right of people of faith to bring their religious beliefs into the public square, while also pointing out that Christians disagreed among themselves on how best to do so. Whose Christianity would win out?
~Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes Du Mez
In the last 15–20 years, the American political scene has become more and more disastrous. The two main parties have widened the gap between them, with more and more extreme representatives winning elections. There is less cooperation between the parties. So much of what is going on now seems more like grandstanding for air time, or attempts to go viral on social media. Some of them do — mostly for the wrong reasons. The biggest problem in all of this, as far as I’m concerned, is the fact that faith has been weaponized.
Weaponization of Faith
Not that it hasn’t before. As long as there has been some kind of faith in the world, it has been used to divide and conquer. Goodness, look back at the Old Testament, and you see this concept at work. At the core of this weaponization is the fact that people simply can’t just be okay with other people thinking differently about things.
There is a jealous gatekeeping that takes place in the realm of faith that is extremely harmful because people have a tendency to take things too far. The history of religious differences is a bloody history that we don’t take seriously enough. It’s one we don’t talk about enough, and that’s probably because there is a good deal of shame involved (as there should be).
The easy targets of this discussion would be things like the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. There was terrible persecution that took place during the time of the Reformations in the 16th century and beyond — persecutions that went both ways, against Protestants and against Catholics.
We could look around the world today and come up with similar examples. Religious persecution is not a thing of the past, and, as much as contemporary American Christians want to complain about it, they (we) have no real idea what persecution actually is. Hint: it’s not “liberals” passing laws that evangelicals don’t like. Religious persecution today happens in places like North Korea where people are jailed, sentenced to hard labor, tortured, or even executed.
Faith in the Public Square
What I found really interesting in today’s quote as I was reading through Jesus and John Wayne is the fact that James Dobson went after Obama’s speech where Obama said we should bring our faith into the public square. Dobson would certainly agree with Obama on this point, though. After all, isn’t that what he is trying to do as part of his political activism?
But, here’s the problem: Dobson disagrees with Obama’s “brand” of faith. Obama is a person of faith, but he’s a person of the wrong faith, as far as people like Dobson are concerned. People who have a very limited view of faith. People who say things like, “Catholics are Christians,” or think that only their particular flavor of faith is going to be in heaven when it’s all said and done. It’s a very narrow, limited view. It’s a view that tries to decide who is in and who gets left out.
And it’s the same kind of narrow view that Jesus had to fight against in his own ministry.
Pharisaical Religion
Over and over again, throughout his ministry, Jesus is portrayed as being opposed by the religious leaders of the day. The teachers of the law, the scribes, the synagogue leaders, and the Pharisees are listed as among his opponents. Because of this, through the centuries, there is a lot of latent anti-Semitism that comes out in some Christian approaches to faith.
The “Jews” get blamed for everything that happened to Jesus, and this has not played out well in Jewish-Christian relations throughout history. Some of this, of course, comes from a face-value reading of the Gospel of John, where the author does indeed talk about the “Jews”. Of course, when we allow this to foster anti-Semitism, we forget that John was Jewish himself. A closer reading of the text would make it clear that he is not blaming all Jewish people, but that he is more specifically referring to the Jewish leadership of the day — a very specific group, not the broad generalization that the term would suggest.
We have also been very hard on the Pharisees through the years. We treat them as if they were these horrible people who just wanted control of the masses. But… what if I were to suggest that the Pharisees were the evangelicals of Jesus’ day? That’s going to get some blowback, but let’s think it through.
The Pharisees were a group that was very concerned with the holiness of the people. They wanted to make sure that everybody was following the letter of the Law. That’s why Jesus has so many arguments with them, isn’t it? They are very legalistic about what they believe, and if you believe differently, then you are wrong and a threat to their faith.
Please tell me how this is different from contemporary evangelicals, who seem to think that if you don’t believe exactly what they believe, then you aren’t a “real” Christian. I’ve seen too many social media comment sections to believe otherwise at this point. I’ve seen too many posts about how “progressive Christianity isn’t real Christianity”. I’ve seen too many church leaders doing exactly what the Pharisees were doing to Jesus. I’m living through a split in the United Methodist Church right now for these very same reasons.
So, Who Will Win Out?
Obama was right when he asked the question about whose Christianity would win out. Because that’s how people look at it. It’s about “winning”. It’s about their particular point of view being right and everybody else being wrong and bound for the pits of hell.
I don’t believe this is the kind of faith that Jesus was trying to promote. I don’t believe these are the reforms that Jesus was trying to bring about. And as long as we keep this rhetoric about winners and losers, we’re in for a lot of disappointment.
