Reflections on Liberal Christianity in Illiberal Times.

First Baptist Church of Andrews, North Carolina. Photo by John Foxe, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The Christian faith is, perhaps, best known for what it isn’t as much as what it is. And by what it isn’t I focus first on a method for implementing Christ’s actual teaching in the four Gospels. What with Christ being a Jew seeking to save Jews from their own apostacy, Paul’s interpretations of Christ’s preaching – and his extension of Christianity to Gentiles – are a hard driver for nearly all Christian denomination and traditions, including the liberal arm of the Presbyterian Church where I was raised.

Sadly, too many American Christians seem to have run away screaming from both Christ’s initial teachings and Paul’s interpretations of them for a Gentile Church. Take the duty to care for the sick and injured – both Christ (via the good Samaritan parable) and Paul (in 1 Timothy 5 and elsewhere) exhort Christians to care for those less fortunate. Christ goes so far as to mandate that His followers do so in the tradition of a non-believer, as if perhaps he was suggesting that we do so in the way Muslims or Buddhists might today. And yet modern fundamentalist American Christians recoil politically from the notion that they should care for those who don’t look or worship or love or vote like they do, and they actively oppose pooling resources under the auspices of government to that end – even though Christ said absolutely nothing about the mechanism of that care. Interestingly they also seem to think that a lot of their personal, faith-based spending should be directed to Africa.

These fundamentalist Christians also seem to believe that while humans are made in God’s image, LGBTQA+ humans are not. Take the now well-known case of Kim Davis, who used her faith to try and deny marriage licenses as a matter of secular state function – while working for the state – to gay and lesbian couples. More recently, Texas has a state policy that parents working with physicians and psychologists (both required reporters) to help transgendered youth are committing child abuse (which blessedly has been enjoined by the courts). And in Kansas, a teacher is claiming her faith PREVENTS her from displaying compassion to children by calling them by their preferred names and pronouns.

Now yes, we live in an open society. And yes, we have a First Amendment that protects speech. It also says that Congress shall make no law regarding state imposition of religion.

And yet in Texas, Georgia, and elsewhere, “believers” are seeking to use the law (or high state office) to impose allegedly religiously based bigotry on segments of society that Christ would most certainly recognize as oppressed – the very people He was referencing when he said:

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me … Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:35-36, 40)

Those words grow from the Great Commandment where Christ told us to love God with all our heart, soul mind and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Christ, and Paul, were calling for liberal, leftist, socialist things to be done in God’s name for the benefit of the community, not the individual. They were radically reaffirming human dignity – Christ chose as female disciples former hookers, ate publicly with tax collectors, and healed lepers. And his resurrection was revealed first to those women, which strongly suggests they should be seen as equal to if not above their male counterparts.

Yet sadly, much of American Christianity has gotten away from that message and its obligations as they seek to preserve the status quo ante politically where they are “in charge.” They prefer to keep the trappings of Christianity as a performative shell to wrap their hard prejudices in, so that they can both keep their allegedly superior economic and political positions intact. Much like their patriotism, they are hoping for the wrappings of their “faith” will prevent anyone noticing they are running 180 degrees away from the actual things – hard things – they are called to do in the world. And they do this with sincerity and surety that they will be saved, because they follow a tradition that says simply repenting and claiming the yoke and mantle is all that is required to get into heaven.

Unfortunately, Christ makes His views on this well knows in John Chapter 8:

“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

Meaning that those committing the sin of bigotry have little likelihood of achieving His kingdom, especially when that bigotry is in the service of human politics.