RELIGION FOR DUMMIES
The Christian Right and Obama.
R.J. Rushdoony was a Presbyterian preacher, who claimed that he based his beliefs on the teachings of Calvin and Dooyeweerd No wonder Calvinism does not have a good name nowadays because one of his quotes was: “The heresy of democracy has worked havoc in church and state … Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies.” He proposed that Old Testament laws should be applied to modern society.He wanted to see the country ruled by God’s law as recorded in the five Books of Moses so he started a movement now known as ‘Dominionism’. He wrote: “We are very much in need now of Christian pioneers. This means a people who are zealous to grow and to exercise dominion in Christ.” That sounded OK to me until he defined ‘dominion,’ referring to the sort of ‘dominion’ that is found in Genesis 1: 28 in the King James translation: “Ye shall have ‘dominion’ over land and sea. When Jesus talked about ‘power’ he said that he had come to serve and not to be served. In Genesis 2:15 God asked the human race to take care of the earth. I have been told that the Hebrew word used there is the same as in Joshua 24: 15 where Israel’s leader tells his people: “As for me and my household we will serve the Lord.” In the same way we must ‘serve’ creation. Bonhoeffer wrote that God, creation and the human race belong together. Of course, it’s God’s creation and we belong to it with every sinew of our existence.
This brings me to today’s Republican Party.
Religion for dummies: just keep the rules, believe that the world is created in 6 days, no voice for women, the earth is there to be exploited, is basically evil and, since we are going to be raptured anyway, we can safely leave behind the mess we made. Dummy religion is where black is black, white is white, and where there is no dialogue.
Today all religions suffer from this simplification. Islam has its Taliban. Judaism has its conservative element. Christianity, both Roman Catholic and Protestantism have their own fundamentalist wings. I left a Christian Reformed congregation in St. Catharines, On. when its minister proved inapproachable. He later left the denomination to serve in the Orthodox Reformed Church.
There’s something afoot in religion, something new. Here is what I read in the New York Times: “Take the New York Jewish population which is quite large. Among the general Jewish part many are no longer attending synagogue. There has been religious growth, but this growth was almost all among Orthodox Jews. The city’s Reform and Conservative populations continued to drop, as did Jewish religious observance over all. As a result, New York’s Jewish community is increasingly polarized, with more Jews at the most traditional end of the theological spectrum, more Jews entirely detached from the institutions of their ancestral faith — and ever-fewer observant Jews anywhere in the middle. What’s happened in New York is happening nationally; a recent Pew Study found a similar pattern of growth among the Orthodox and a similar waning of religious practice and affiliation in the rest of the American Jewish population.
“This is not just a Jewish story. It’s been the story of religion in the West for over 40 years. The most traditional groups have been relatively resilient. The more liberal, modernizing bodies have lost membership, money, morale. And the culture as a whole has become steadily more disengaged from organized faith. There is still a religious middle today, but it isn’t institutionally Judeo-Christian in the way it was in 1945. Instead, it’s defined by nondenominational ministries, “spiritual but not religious” pieties and ancient heresies reinvented as self-help.
“Of late, this process of polarization has carried an air of inevitability. You can hew to a traditional faith in late modernity, it has seemed, only to the extent that you separate yourself from the American and Western mainstream. There is no middle ground, no center that holds for long, and the attempt to find one quickly leads to accommodation, drift and dissolution.” So far the New York Times article
If you want to have a thriving church, dumb it down. Go to the Old Testament, pick and choose something that is easy to do and not difficult for people to grasp and you can start a mega church and become rich in the process. Of course this works only in the USA, where the general level of education is pretty low. Adults in Japan, Canada, Australia, Finland and multiple other countries score significantly higher than the United States which came in 16th overall in reading, math and problem solving.
A few more rules: Don’t mention Christ and his love commandment. Don’t mention Paul who said that we have to investigate everything and retain what is viable (1Thessalonian 5:21). Don’t tell them that (Philippians 2:12) “We have to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” Why? Because to be a Christian is hard work, involves a constant struggle and a lot of prayer and uncertainty, especially since most churches are no help at all: they are stagnant and unable to evolve.
In these last days to be relevant means the integration of the Created Word with the Written Word. Churches don’t know how to do that even though they have the correct formulation such as the Belgic Confession which says: “We know God first by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book…. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: “all these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.”
I call creation God’s Primary Word. His Secondary word, as defined in this same article says: “Secondly He makes himself known to us more openly by his holy and divine word, as much as we need in this life for his glory and for the salvation of his own.”
Curiously God’s Secondary Word is called holy and divine while God’s Primary Word by which men stand convicted and left without excuse is not mentioned as holy and divine. It is about time for the church to remove that difference. Psalm 119: 105 combines these two Words beautifully: God’s Word- his Secondary – is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path (in God’s Primary Word.) We stare so much into the light- the Bible- that we are blinded to see our way clear in God’s Created Word.
Back to those ‘religious’ Republicans.
Chris Hedges, an investigative journalist, has made a special study of the religious background of the Republican movement in which the Christian Right has found its home. He writes: “There is a desire felt by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment, radically diminish the role of government to create a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and force a recalcitrant world to bend to the will of an imperial and “Christian” America.”
He continues: “Its public face is on display in the House of Representatives. This ideology, which is the driving force behind the shutdown of the government, calls for the eradication of social “deviants,” beginning with gay men and lesbians, whose sexual orientation, those in the movement say, is a curse and an illness, contaminating the American family and the country. Once these “deviants” are removed, other “deviants,” including Muslims, liberals, feminists, intellectuals, left-wing activists, undocumented workers, poor African-Americans and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace this peculiar interpretation of the Bible—will also be ruthlessly repressed. The “deviant” government bureaucrats, the “deviant” media, the “deviant” schools and the “deviant” churches, all agents of Satan, will be crushed or radically reformed. The rights of these “deviants” will be annulled. “Christian values” and “family values” will, in the new state, be propagated by all institutions. Education and social welfare will be handed over to the church. Facts and self-criticism will be replaced with relentless indoctrination.”
Pretty radical stuff and taken word for word from the Rushdoony script, rooted in a radical ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights.
The current debt ceiling gives these people a perfect excuse to implement their fundamentally unbiblical view of religion, totally based on the Old Testament, totally ignoring the teaching of Christ who has given a new commandment, one much more simple and much more difficult: “Love God and his creation above all and your fellow citizen of whatever colour and sexual orientation as yourself.” The Republican Party fuses the Christian religion with the script and language of American imperialism and nationalism and combining it with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism, in the process flagrantly distorting and misusing the Bible.
Politics in the USA is in shambles, has been for a long time. Politics always everywhere is a matter of compromise. The first criterion is the welfare of the land and the betterment of the poor. Obamacare is trying that and the Republicans- 75 % of its supporters are church-goers –are dead-set against that. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies. Science is dismissed as undemocratic. Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister, would perfectly fit in that Republican Party if he were a US citizen.
Let me speculate a bit. Where does this irrationality come from?
I believe that this irrational stance has something to do with the times we live in. People are baffled, angry and armed to the teeth. They fear for the future. The ruling element in the Republican Party is the white middle class, living in the Southern states where the colour bias has never disappeared. They see having a black person in the White House as an abomination. They hate Obama and will do anything to thwart his ways. They also are deeply influenced by Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” and the “Left Behind” series, both predicting a speedy end to this world, and Rapture, the unbiblical idea that the true believers will be fetched up into the sky to meet Christ.
This means that there is a distinct suicidal element in this latest political drama. Combine this with the prospect that we are on the way to economic slowdown and possible collapse, and the scene is set for great anxiety and false explanations.
Here is what Stephen D. King, chief economist at HSBC, the author of “When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence” has to say. (The HSBC is one of the world’s largest banks.) “As bad as things in Washington are — the federal government shutdown since Tuesday, the slim but real potential for a debt default, a political system that seems increasingly ungovernable — they are going to get much worse, for the United States and other advanced economies, in the years ahead. ….The numbers no longer add up. Even before the Great Recession, rich countries were seeing their tax revenues weaken, social expenditures rise, government debts accumulate and creditors fret thanks to lower economic growth rates….We are reaching end times for Western affluence. …….In the United States, which ostensibly has the right institutions (if not the political will) to deal with its economic problems, a potentially explosive fiscal situation could be resolved through scurrilous means, but only by threatening global financial and economic instability. Interest rates can be held lower than the inflation rate, as the Fed has done. Or the government could devalue the dollar, thereby hitting Asian and Arab creditors. Such “default by stealth,” however, might threaten a crisis of confidence in the dollar, wiping away the purchasing-power benefits Americans get from the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.”
Religious Dummies believe that there is a simple answer to a very complicated problem. They opt for this illusion because the reality is too bleak to bear. But as the current fiscal crisis demonstrates, facing the pain will not be easy. And the waking up from our collective illusions has barely begun.
Welcome to Century 21. The short 20th Century started in 1914 and lasted till 1989 with the break-up of the USSR, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The interim period is over. We now have entered an even more devastating new era.