The Left Hand of God

"The wind is changing. Folks--not just leaders--are fed up with what is being portrayed as Christian values," said the Rev. Tim Ahrens, senior minister of First Congregational Church of Columbus, Ohio…"As religious people we're offended by the idea that if you're not with the religious right, you're not moral, you're not religious," said Linda Gustitus, who attends Bethesda's River Road Unitarian Church…"
--"Religious Liberals Gain New Visibility," Caryle Murphy and Alan Cooperman, Washington Post, May 20, 2006.

"Are you a Christian who doesn't feel represented by the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them. The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many."
"My Problem With Christianism," Andrew Sullivan, Time Magazine, May 15, 2006.

"The GOP has built an intolerant, uncivil agenda from narrowly defined religious beliefs. Hardliners are deepening the social divide by imposing their minority views on a more moderate majority."
--former President Jimmy Carter, Baptist Sunday School teacher and author of OUR ENDANGERED VALUES.


Ever since I watched Ronald Reagan rather callously embrace religious fundamentalists to help him get elected--even though he and his wife Nancy never attended church and she was known to consult astrologists at the White House--and ever since I watched the Republican party clamp onto churches as their biggest voting block, complete with "voting cards" passed out to the pliant congregations on Sundays--I felt a queasiness grow into a full-blown sense of ongoing horror that the Christian faith I worshipped bore little resemblance to the self-righteous, moralistic preening I saw take shape in the political arena.

And if that's all there was to it--fawning politicians posing with churchy blowhards in order to get themselves elected--I could live with it. I could live with it even when one after another of those same politicians were found to be as immoral and hypocritical and sinful as they professed not to be as they stole money from well-meaning "people of faith" in the name of "family values" that valued little more than fattening the pocketbooks of their OWN families.

But as I watched the values I held dear get stripped away and replaced by a prostitution of what was, I knew, sincere beliefs, and saw a political agenda rammed through Congress time and again that had nothing or little to do with any actual faith and much to do with the same kind of high-handed moralism that marked the scribes and Pharisees who got Jesus crucified in the first place, I felt downright frightened with what I saw taking place in the name of religion.

The Jesus I have studied saved an adultress from being stoned to death and said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." He reclined at table with sinners and prostitutes and tax-gatherers, and incurred further wrath of church leaders by breaking all sorts of church laws, rules, and regulations so that he could feed the hungry and take in the poor.

I don't think He would concern himself all that much with a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. And I know for sure that He would not stand outside the funerals of fallen soldiers and Marines holding up signs that said things like GOD HATES AMERICA.

Granted, the tiny inbred church that has made a practice of stalking the funerals of fallen war heroes by claiming that they died because Americans have been too tolerant of gays is a very extreme example, and granted, not all Christian fundamentalists think they are right, any more than they thought those who bombed abortion clinics and murdered abortion doctors were right--but they have allowed that kind of atmosphere of hatred and intolerance to flourish, much like a night-time garden thrives in darkness.

It is the constant political emphasis on what the religious right regards as SIN--such as relationships between homosexuals--that has planted this weed-garden of hatred and intolerance that bears little resemblance to the example set by Jesus Christ.

In previous centuries, little-known scriptures gave tacit permission to citizens to own slaves--even though those scriptures had been written in a time 2,000 years ago when slave-ownership was common. Such bigotry was also condoned all through the Jim Crow years and up through the religious extremists who fueled the Ku Klux Klan. They, too, felt justified by the Bible.

And by the constant insistence that this kind of narrow moralism should be LEGISLATED, even amended into our Constitution--a vocal minority brand an entire religion with their own intolerance, leaving the vast majority of us feeling infuriated and frustrated and most assuredly, not represented.

Well, the rest of us out here who consider ourselves Christians have said--ENOUGH.

"Long overshadowed by the Christian right, religious liberals across a wide swath of denominations are engaged today in their most intensive bout of political organizing and alliance-building since the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements of the 1960's, according to scholars, politicians, and clergy members.

"In large part, the revival of the religious left is a reaction against conservatives' success in the 2004 elections in equating moral values with opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

"Religious liberals say their faith compels them to emphasize such issues as poverty, affordable health care and global warming. Disillusionment with the war in Iraq and opposition to the Bush administration policies on secret prisons and torture have also fueled the movement."
--"Religious Liberals Gain New Visibility; a Different List of Moral Issues," Caryle Murphy and Alan Cooperman, Washington Post, May 20, 2006.

"Faith for many of us is inter-woven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else."
--"My Problem with Christianism," Andrew Sullivan, Time Magazine, May 15, 2006.

My question is…when did it come about that if you did not sign on to the conservative Christian agenda--the Republican plank--of intolerance and hatred that you were an "enemy of the people of faith," or, as Republican hate-meister Ann Coulter titled her most recent book, GODLESS--that we are godless?

When did the idea take hold in our national imagination that if you were a Democrat, you were godless?

I remember a poignant essay by Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlan about how, whenever she writes an essay that is pro-choice or otherwise goes against the political agenda of the religious right, she gets swamped with hate-mail about how she is "godless" and an "atheist" and "hates God." She went on to describe how she grew up in the Catholic church, and how each and every one of her children had been christened in the church and had celebrated first communions.

In the book he wrote with former Democratic advisor James Carville, TAKE IT BACK, Paul Begala, one-time advisor to President Clinton, described how, when he was invited to speak on his religious beliefs on a right-wing talk show, the host mocked him and dismissed his Christianity, assuming--wrongly--that because he was an active Democrat, he was an atheist. Begala politely, and furiously, informed the talk-show host that he was a devout and practicing Catholic and did not appreciate that assumption. The host apologized to him.

But the point is, the ASSUMPTION.

Listen, just because we don't make it our life's work to insist that gays can't be married has absolutely nothing to do with our own faith and our own idealism.

What ABOUT the fact that there are millions of children in this country who are not covered by health insurance, more who go to bed hungry at night? What ABOUT the fact that thousands of church-goers all over this country sat through countless PRO-WAR SERMONS in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, because the idea was that Bush was a man of God who took his marching orders directly from the Big Man, and that if God told him to invade Iraq, then so be it. Nobody in the religious right questioned that assumption, and the rest of us sat captive, held hostage by a belief we did not share.

What ABOUT the fact that this administration has overseen an unprecedented incursion into national parks and public lands for oil-drilling, coal-mining, and old-growth timber-cutting, a travesty on the environment that we are supposed to have good stewardship over?

And what ABOUT the ridiculous co-opting of scientific inquiry and thought by blind obedience to a doctrine that is so narrow and rigid that most thinking people of faith simply choose to accept some flexibility and symbolism that allows for proven fact?

"A faith that requires you to close your mind in order to believe is not much of a faith at all," said Episcopalian Rev. Patricia Templeton…"There was a growing need to demonstrate that the loud, shrill voices of fundamentalists claiming that Christians had to choose between modern science and religion were presenting a false dichotomy," said Michael Zimmerman, dean of the College of Letters & Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the major organizer of the letter project…

More than 10,000 ministers had signed the letter, which states, in part, that the theory of evolution is a 'foundational scientific truth.' To reject it, the letter continues, 'is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.'

"We believe that among God's good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator."
--"At Churches Nationwide, Good Words for Evolution," Neela Banerjee and Anne Berryman, The New York Times, February 13, 2006.

What's terrifying about religious fundamentalism replacing scientific analysis is when, as a political arm of government, it is instrumental in setting policy that has a direct bearing on the lives of each and every one of us. Since Bush was put in office by this very vocal minority, he has proceeded to put in place political hacks in government offices who attempt to engineer rigid obeyance to this religious train of thought.

To that end, we can't offer information to third-world countries on birth control. Simple birth control in areas where starving mothers can no longer feed the starving babies at their breasts or the other starving children at their feet because we are prevented from offering them aid IF we also discuss birth control with them.

This is a fake-religious Bush policy that has now been in place for almost six years.

It was Republican fundamentalist flunkies who intervened in the intensely personal family drama of the tragic Terry Schiavo case. The party of "less government" has no problem forcing government into our bedrooms and hospital rooms to tell us what they think we should do about things that are not the business of government, even though the Republican Senate Majority leader, Bill Frist--who, as a physician, should have known better--claimed that, according to the video snippets he'd been shown, Shiavo should be kept alive. Only the autopsy showed what her husband knew to be true, that her brain was completely gone.

Oh what mileage the religious fundamentalist politicians got out of the preaching and pontificating over that terrible situation, even though again, a clear majority of the American people--and American Christians--felt horrified and were opposed to their meddling.

Now, Republicans are attempting to put the D.E.A. in a place of decision-making authority over what drugs get approved by the F.D.A.

It's this kind of skewed thinking that "protects" us from meth-users by forcing us to obtain simple decongestants from pharmacies, which does nothing to stop the meth trade. They simply get it from Mexican drug-dealers.

It's also this kind of "protection" that causes people dying of cancer to go to jail if they are caught using medical marijuana to help with the terrible pain of the disease and nausea of the chemotherapy. Even in states that have approved such use, the Bush administration has threatened to arrest anyone using medical marijuana.

Does this make ANY KIND OF SENSE?

In a culture defined by the separation of church and state, President Bush and his allies have mastered the use of religious affirmation as a deflection not only of criticism, but of critical thought. God is thus a trump card, a free pass.
--"All God, All the Time," Boston Globe editorial, October 17, 2005.

When a narrow-minded group of rigid fundamentalist thinkers takes over a government, we are all affected. From what our children are being taught in schools to what kinds of medications we can have access to, to ever more ridiculous reaches into law, like the recent Defense spending bill.

Yeah, Republicans refused to pass a $513 billion defense spending bill until an amendment was added that forced military chaplains to end their prayers with "in Jesus name."

The problem with that is that most military chaplains DIDN'T WANT the provision, because they understand that, no matter what denomination the chaplain may be, their job is to REPRESENT AND SUPPORT THE RELIGIOUS NEEDS OF THE ENTIRE CREW--not just those of the religious right Republicans who rammed the measure through.

You see, even if a chaplain is, say, Catholic, he or she knows that they may be called upon to pray with not only a Protestant, but also Jewish service men and women and maybe even a Muslim member of the service who is in their care. They take this responsibility very seriously, but that didn't matter to fundamentalist lobbyists like Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition, which threatened to get their puppet, Bush, to sign an executive order demanding same if their Republican sycophants didn't tack it onto the spending bill.

When a Democratic representative, Steve Israel of NY offered an amendment to add that chaplains should show, "sensitivity, respect, and tolerance for all faiths," it was defeated along party lines in committee and the Rules Committee did not allow floor debate on the provision--something this Republican Congress often does, as we discussed in earlier blog entries.

And of course, that's not even DISCUSSING what chaplains must do who are, themselves, Jewish or Muslim.

Thanks to fundamentalist ram-rodding, thousands of frozen embryos DESTINED TO BE THROWN IN THE GARBAGE cannot be used for life-giving scientific study into stem-cell research to cure such horrors as Lou Gehrig's disease, Parkinson's, or Multiple Sclerosis because the so-called "right to life" faction has dominated public policy in the Bush administration--even though a CLEAR MAJORITY of the American people believe that they should be used for that purpose.

Teachers can't teach life-saving methods of condom-use in sex-education classes because the religious right has forced them to teach only abstinence, which has been proven again and again, to be pitifully inadequate in preventing teen sex and teenage pregnancies.

I'm sick and tired of this kind of fundamentalist balogney. I'm sick and tired of issues of so-called "sin" suddenly becoming issues of national security. Whether or not gays marry has absolutely NO bearing on my life or the lives of anyone I know. Whether or not my uninsured 25-year old daughter has access to health care when and if she needs it DOES.

I consider myself to be a very spiritual person. As a Christian, I believe in tolerance toward our fellow men and women, no matter what the color of their skin, their race, or their religion. I believe in taking care of "the least of these" who may not be capable of taking care of themselves. I believe that the richest and strongest country in the world should use that strength to promote peace, not war, unless absolutely necessary. I believe in using our God-given minds to search for creative solutions to scientific dilemmas.

And I believe it is the job of the church and of the home to teach morality, not the schools, and most certainly NOT governmental agencies.

"…poverty, peace, and the environment (are) important spiritual issues that have been ignored by the religious right…"Liberal evangelicals are LEAPING out of the closet and are saying, Enough is enough," said Jack Pannell, spokesman for Sojourners, a Washington-based evangelical social justice ministry. "Evangelical Christians are not all white people living in the suburbs and only concerned with abortion and same-sex marriage."
--"Religious Liberals Gain New Visibility," Caryle Murphy and Alan Cooperman, Washington Post, May 20, 2004.

If it hadn't been for churches, and vocal church leaders, the civil rights movement might never have gotten off the ground. Vocal church leaders also led the anti-war movement of the sixties. Great social change has been brought about because people of faith--not just religious fundamentalists--but people of ALL faiths, all denominations, and all spiritual persuasions, have spoken out against social injustice.

It's time we did so again.