Getting on Message: Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of The

getting on message getting on message Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel edited by rev. peter laarman beacon press /boston Beacon Press 25 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892 www.beacon.org Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations. © 2006 by Peter Laarman All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 09 08 07 06 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992. Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Getting on message : challenging the Christian right from the heart of the Gospel / edited by Peter Laarman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8070-7721-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Modernist-fundamentalist controversy. 2. Liberalism—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Liberalism (Religion) 4. Christianity and politics. 5. Religious pluralism—Christianity. 6. Religious right. I. Laarman, Peter BT82.3.G48 2006 273Ј.9—dc22 2005030608 contents peter laarman Introduction vii marilynne robinson Hallowed Be Your Name 1 bill mckibben The People of the (Unread) Book 13 james m. lawson, jr. Higher Ground: The Nonviolence Imperative 26 joan chittister When Love Is Stronger than Death: Making Peace One Heart at a Time 36 ched myers Easter Faith and Empire: Recovering the Prophetic Tradition on the Emmaus Road 51 vivian denise nixon A Christian Response to Mass Incarceration: Unbind Them! 68 rick ufford-chase Who Is My Neighbor? Reflections on Our Changing Neighborhood in the Global Economy 84 chloe breyer Women, Childbearing, and Justice 97 patrick mccormick Burying the Executioner’s Ax: A Christian Rejection of Capital Punishment 112 alexia salvatierra Honoring Those Who Work 134 bill sinkford Whom God Hath Joined Together 147 heidi neumark Strangers No More 159 vincent miller The iPod, the Cell Phone, and the Church: Discipleship, Consumer Culture, and a Globalized World 173 garret keizer Putting Our Money Where God’s Mouth Is: The Biblical Case for Economic Justice 192 acknowledgments 211 about the contributors 213 Introduction peter laarman Recently a small group of students from Occidental College in Los Angeles approached my organization, Progressive Christians Uniting, with the message that despite the college’s deep commitment to diver- sity, there is literally no social space there for liberal Christians. Or as one of the students put it, “I am involved in all kinds of groups on campus that support social justice. Then one day it occurred to me that the reason I do all this is because of my Christian faith—so where is the Christian community on this campus that can support me?” Thanks to the efforts of this student and others like her, there soon will be a progressive Christian presence at Occidental. But what an odd historical twist and what a commentary on the culture that even at our best liberal arts colleges, the only form of public Christianity on offer is what Rick Hertzberg and others have rightly labeled Christianism: an exclusivist creed that is fueled more by fear than by love. The 2004 election and its aftermath—the Terri Schiavo drama, un- precedented attacks on the judiciary, the relentless advance of “intelli- gent design,” and continuing assaults on gay equality and abortion— all bespeak a phenomenon that no one could have predicted. In the middle of the last century it was generally agreed that fundamentalism —a late and peculiarly American reaction to biblical criticism and to modernism generally—had been decisively defeated as a cultural force. Pundits assumed that it would live on in the South and in pockets of the Midwest but would never again pose a serious threat to enlightened liberalism and rational progress, let alone to core understandings concerning the separation of church and state. Thoughtful Christians would remain firmly committed to an ideal of secular, scientific progress. As education spread, the influence of primitive religion would dwindle almost to extinction. It did not work out that way. In a classic demonstration of the Re- turn of the Repressed, an old-style militant Christianity fusing super- vii introduction patriotism, male supremacy, and rigid biblicism has reemerged as a potent cultural and political force in the space of five decades. This dra- matic turnabout can rightly be seen as a brilliant feat of organizing on the part of a handful of conservative visionaries—and it certainly is that —but it can also be seen as a commentary on the spiritual vacuousness of the liberal project and as a rebuke of liberalism’s inability to shield working people from the ravages of the corporate state. It can even been seen as an encrypted expression of white rejection of multiculturalism, despite the presence among the new Christianists of many leaders of color. There is room for many construals, each of them bearing part of the truth of what has happened. Some of the essays in this book hint at the sources of the new Chris- tianism that roils our politics, but the book is not intended to uncover the historical roots so much as deplore the practical effects. Many of the contributors to this volume—a diverse mix of preachers, thinkers, and activists along the moderate to progressive spectrum—fear that the message and meaning of Jesus have been all but drowned out by the noise machine of the Christian Right. Bill McKibben’s essay puts this challenge directly: he ponders why nearly all public expressions of Christianity in America today bear little or no relation to what Jesus of Nazareth said and did. Reclaiming Jesus is a central concern for these essayists. This book is also intended to take the Bible back from the blinkered biblicists and reemphasize the scriptural primacy of justice and mercy —what Marilynne Robinson in her essay calls generosity. Rather than take on the biblicists, many progressive Christians have simply walked away from the Bible. This is a strategic mistake inasmuch as tens of millions of Americans continue to respect and even revere the Bible’s authority. But it is also a substantive mistake inasmuch as the heart and soul of the scriptural testimony is on the side of peace and justice. A plain reading will find Jesus and the prophets fiercely at odds with the kinds of social arrangements (notably rule by and for the wealthiest) now prevailing in the United States. The essayists represented here would have us reading the Bible more, not less, but would also have us viii introduction doing so with a degree of sophistication and always with the caveat that Jesus Christ—his spirit, his generosity, his compassion—remains the true canon for faith and practice, which also means that anything “scriptural” that is not in accord with the spirit of Jesus cannot claim final authority. I am convinced that there is a profound hunger in our culture now for the religion of Jesus—for a generous and compassionate Christianity that desires mercy, not sacrifice, and that actively pursues peace at every level. In Southern California progressive Christians by the hundreds who have no church home have begun show up at the rallies and teach- ins presented by my organization. These are passionate, justice-seeking people who have not yet found a congregation that is sufficiently at- tuned to their own sense of urgency. They are outraged by the direction of the nation and by conservatism’s suffocating grip on public discourse. If these “free radical” Christians could be organized to work in tandem with the millions of churchgoing progressives—and if both groups be- gan to work strategically with enlightened secular forces in the culture —America’s long night of conservative domination would be at an end. This is why seemingly sectarian and intramural struggles over what the Bible really says and who Jesus really is matter hugely to all progressives. In France the idea that enlightened public policy might hinge on getting one’s theology right would be laughable, but this is America. If moderate and progressive Christians can’t get on message and get their act together, we will remain in a world of trouble (and let us remember that the Christianists welcome Armageddon). But if moderates and progressives do find a way to reclaim and express the heart of the gospel in ways that resonate, there may yet be hope for the democratic dream. Out of the depths, life-giving progressive voices are beginning to be heard. That these voices should become a mighty chorus: that is my hope and that is the animating premise of this volume. ix Hallowed Be Your Name marilynne robinson You shall be holy, for I the lord your God am holy. —Leviticus 19:2 I realize that in attempting to write on the subject of personal holiness, I encounter interference in my mind between my own sense of the life of the soul and understandings that are now pervasive and very little questioned The phrase, in what at present is its received sense, suggests a preoccupation with (usually) minor, nameable, and numerable sins and the pious avoidance of them where possible. It suggests a regime of pious behaviors whose object is the advantage of one’s own soul. It suggests also a sense of security concerning final things that is understood as a virtue, though it is in fact a confidence not claimed even by the Apostle Paul. If this is a view of the matter commonly held by the un- churched and the irreligious, it is nevertheless a fair account of the thought and practice of many who do indeed aspire to personal holiness or who feel they have achieved it.

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