Steve Hayes
2024-12-13 03:38:07 UTC
The Biggest Fallacies About Religion and Politics
by Kappo
Daily Kos, Sunday, Jun. 19, 2022 at 9:19:29am PDT
https://t.co/mkKDtMMPGh
One of the unforeseen consequences of the Trump era is the renewed
debate about the intersection of religion and politics, driven by the
sustained support of self-identified evangelicals for Donald Trump and
the Republican Party.
A host of commentators have written in major media – many quite
thoughtful – trying to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical: how
followers of Jesus of Nazareth and the Christian Bible can support
policies that seem opposite of Christian values and act in such a
hateful manner.
As a political junkie who has lived most of my six decades in the
evangelical world, I applaud the effort to wrestle with subjects that
have consumed my thinking. That said, in my view most of these
ruminations miss the mark, and almost all for two main reasons:
For one thing, they are premised on the idea that religion and
politics are two separate things. Framing the question as “how can
Christians believe X and vote Y?” is a failure to understand that
politics and religion are not separate spheres but have always
represented expressions of cultural views and practices.
Secondly, they assume that there is an objective ideal
Christianity when in fact Christian history is extraordinarily fluid
when it comes to both theology and the role of Christians in society.
Religion was Always Politics
I first wrote about evangelicals and Trump in the summer of 2016, when
many expressed shock that churchgoers would support an irreligious man
with a history of immoral behavior. I wrote before the 2016 election
that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rhetoric coincided almost
precisely (and I think unwittingly at the beginning) with what I’ve
been hearing in evangelical churches for decades.
This idea is that America was a great place until the 1960s, when the
hippies and intellectual college professors ushered in an era of moral
relativism and tore down cultural norms, where men were men, women and
minorities were kept in their place, and we dared not question
tradition. This mindset relies on faith and appeals to authority
rather than facts and science, embraces conspiracies and paranoia, and
despises the media and intellectuals. Far from receding, this cultural
backlash seems to be gaining steam — witness the growing and
increasingly violent attacks on the LGBTQ community.
Those who either aren’t intimately familiar with evangelical culture
or want to maintain an idealistic view of it thus have a difficult
time reconciling how people who identify as evangelicals embrace ugly
political positions. Congressman Adam Kinzinger, one of the select few
Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, lamented in a tweet: “Many
people will leave a church that doesn’t match their politics, but
rarely leave their politics because it doesn’t match their church.”
Peter Wehner, who wrote a mostly perceptive essay in the Atlantic
titled “The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart,” in which he said:
“How is it that Christianity has become, for too many adherents, a
political religion?”
More recently, Tim Alberta wrote in The Atlantic that evangelicals
decades ago set in motion the political fervor of evangelicals: “Not
only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as …
fixed on earthly concerns, a fight for the kingdom of this world – all
of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture – they
were indoctrinated with the belief that because the stakes were
getting so high, any means were justified.”
Here's the thing: as much as I respect these writers, the assumption
that religion and politics are different (or counter to “the commands
of scripture”) displays a misunderstanding of history AND scripture.
The Judeo-Christian religion has been rooted in politics from the
start. Israel was a collection of tribes that conquered its neighbors
based on the idea that it was God’s will to occupy a particular plot
of land. Like all religions at the time Judaism was formed, the power
of the tribal God was directly correlated to the success of the tribe
in battle.
Example: in the book of Exodus, Moses confronted Pharoah and threw
down a staff that God turned into a snake, the Egyptian priests threw
down their own staffs. What happened? Did the Egyptians’ staffs just
lie there because they were merely wooden sticks in the service of a
fake deity? No, the priests’ staffs also turned into snakes, which
presumes that Egypt’s deities had their own power. The snakes
unleashed by Moses ate the Egyptian snakes. The point of the text is
not that other gods didn’t exist, but that Israel’s god was more
powerful.
In the Bible books that relate Israel’s history – including Joshua,
Kings and Chronicles -- the success and failure of Israel is based on
the faithfulness of the Jewish kings and people. All those authors
would be surprised to know that religion and politics were separate
disciplines.
I can hear Christians thinking: but our religion is different, a “new
covenant,” right? Sorry. Jesus was born and grew into adulthood in a
toxic political brew in which decades/centuries of tension between
Jews and their “pagan” overlords had come to a boiling point. A
central tenet of the Jewish religion – that obedience to God’s
precepts would lead to prosperity on earth – was at stake. Devout Jews
felt that because they were faithful, that the time had come for God
to overthrow the oppressive Romans. They expected God would provide
for a miraculous victory, like he did in the histories outlined in
their sacred writings.
Such an environment was ripe for prophets such as John the Baptizer,
Jesus, the apostle Paul, and Jewish writers such as we read in the
Dead Sea Scrolls, all of whom preached that God would intervene to
create a new order on earth ruled by righteous Jews. Ancient writings
newly uncovered in the last century in caches such as the Dead Sea
Scrolls reveal that the teaching of these foundational Christians was
echoed by Jewish sects of the day.
Jesus’ first recorded sermon was about politics. He stood up in a
synagogue in Nazareth and read from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is
on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of
sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year
of the Lord’s favor.” In our context-free Bible analysis today, we
read that as flowery words, but at the time talking about the poor,
the prisoners, and the oppressed meant calling out the government
(that eventually killed him for his politics).
When Jesus died, he cried out to God: “Why have you forsaken me?” Paul
wrote of Jesus leading an army of freshly resurrected righteous people
who would meet Jesus in the sky and then come down from heaven to
create an everlasting kingdom on earth, presumably in line with Jesus’
teaching. As years went by without this second coming, Paul’s nervous
followers asked what would happen to those who died before this
intervention from heaven occurred. Did they miss out on the kingdom?
Later first-century Jews were so zealous some took matters into their
own hands and started a revolution, which ended badly with the burning
of Jerusalem in the year 70. Christians were said to have fled the
city by then because, like Jesus and Paul, they expected a miraculous
intervention that would lead to a Roman defeat, at which time they
would return to the city.
Cramming centuries of history into few paragraphs requires a great
deal of winnowing and oversimplification. The point, however, is that
when Judaism and Christianity were birthed, religion and politics were
the same thing. To lament today that politics is ruining religion
misses ignores the fact that they part and parcel of cultural identity
and cannot be separated, not only now but from the time and
circumstances in which they were birthed.
What is Christianity, Anyway?
The other misconception is that there is an objective ideal of
Christianity that some evangelicals are missing. Wehner writes: “For
many of us who have made Christianity central to our lives, the pain
of this moment is watching those who claim to follow Jesus do so much
to distort who he really was.”
While I have much respect for the moral standards of Wehner and others
who have this lament, the problem is that such sentiment presumes to
know how Jesus would act today and what represents true Christian
behavior. Since the time of Jesus, however, there has been no
consensus as to who he was and what it means to follow him.
Immediately after Jesus died, there were dozens of ferocious debates
among followers recorded in the New Testament alone. Paul was so angry
at the views of his rivals for leadership who argued that non-Jews
needed to be circumcised that he wrote in Galatians that he wished
they were castrated (accidentally of course). Even more strands of
Christian belief were found in other ancient gospels — such as the
Gospel of Thomas — that were rediscovered over the past century. In
the first few centuries post-crucifixion, Christians forged no
consensus about issues such as Jesus’ relationship to God, whether he
was an appointed human representative or whether he was divine, what
happened to people after death, whether it was necessary to maintain
Jewish customs such as circumcision, and so on. There also was fierce
debate about whether to participate in pagan civil religious practices
that prompted accusations that Christians were atheists and led to
persecution recorded by church fathers.
Again, this is not the space to outline 2,000 years of church history,
but many thousands of Christian denominations have formed during that
span. Christians over the years have embraced forced conversions at
the point of a sword, burning of heretics, Crusades, slavery, and
thousands of other things we recoil from today. At the same time,
Christianity has inspired missionaries that have performed wonderful
acts of charity such as crusading the abolition of slavery. In many
times and locales Christianity has fueled the improvement of human
rights and freedoms.
How does one make sense of the dichotomy? I always come back to the
principle put forth by Albert Schweitzer in his 1906 book “The Quest
of the Historical Jesus.” Schweitzer studied centuries of theological
developments and came to the realization that each generation
reinvents Jesus to fit their own cultural beliefs. In practice, people
read their own cultural views into Scriptures.
Old Testament scholars point out that the writings of the Hebrew Bible
represent a debate among authors with varying views. In some loose way
they correspond to our debates today. Ancient “conservatives”
contended that God wanted the Jews to be harsh to the unbelievers,
leading to events such as the bloody march to the Holy Land filled
with war. More “liberal” authors believed that God wanted the Jews to
act with justice, mercy, and hospitality, which is reflected in books
such as Jonah and the prophets.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is an example. In Genesis, the author
seems to use the story to illustrate God punishing cities for rampant
sexual misconduct. The prophet Ezekiel, however, says that God’s
punishment was judgement for the cities’ inhabitants inhospitality and
ill treatment of the poor. Setting aside historicity, how does one
reconcile the discrepancy, except that the authors told a story in a
way that justified their own cultural practices and beliefs?
In the same way today, right-leaning Christians read authoritarian
views into the Bible, with a Jesus who divided the sheep and the goats
and sharply called out doom on his enemies. Liberals focus on the
parts that discuss love and forgiveness, emphasizing the “hippie”
Jesus who talks about peace, love, and charity. Neither are “wrong.”
Both elements are in the Bible, which is a collection of writings of
people at different times in different cultures with different beliefs
whom I believe would agree on little if brought back to life and put
in a room together.
Religion is as Religion Does
One of the problems with this debate is that there is no accepted
definition of evangelical. There are many “evangelical” denominations
with divergent beliefs. Even surveys that discuss evangelical support
for Trump rely on self-identification, which is not an exact science.
The New York Times published an article in 2021 that noted that the
term evangelical had become so synonymous with the Republican party
that people who either practice other religions or are unchurched
identify themselves as evangelical because they support Republicans.
While that poses analytical problems and makes survey results more
than a little problematic, it also confirms the idea that religion and
politics are not separate spheres but expressions of culture. Politics
and religion constantly evolve to reflect the cultural views of
adherents. (A trivial modern example: when I was young, rock ‘n roll
music was widely seen in evangelical churches as a tool of Satan. Now
those same churches who denounced rock music have elaborate praise
bands with guitars and drums.)
The upshot to me is that Trump and Republicans reflect the attitudes
and beliefs of people who identify as evangelicals. Trying to
determine if that reflect some ideal of Christianity is a fools game
because no such thing exists. In any event, Christianity is not a
fixed thing and is constantly changing. In the light of those two
tenets, both the evangelical support for Trump, and the opposition of
the political left, makes a lot more sense.
Source:
<https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/19/2103351/-The-Biggest-Fallacy-About-Religion-and-Politics>
by Kappo
Daily Kos, Sunday, Jun. 19, 2022 at 9:19:29am PDT
https://t.co/mkKDtMMPGh
One of the unforeseen consequences of the Trump era is the renewed
debate about the intersection of religion and politics, driven by the
sustained support of self-identified evangelicals for Donald Trump and
the Republican Party.
A host of commentators have written in major media – many quite
thoughtful – trying to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical: how
followers of Jesus of Nazareth and the Christian Bible can support
policies that seem opposite of Christian values and act in such a
hateful manner.
As a political junkie who has lived most of my six decades in the
evangelical world, I applaud the effort to wrestle with subjects that
have consumed my thinking. That said, in my view most of these
ruminations miss the mark, and almost all for two main reasons:
For one thing, they are premised on the idea that religion and
politics are two separate things. Framing the question as “how can
Christians believe X and vote Y?” is a failure to understand that
politics and religion are not separate spheres but have always
represented expressions of cultural views and practices.
Secondly, they assume that there is an objective ideal
Christianity when in fact Christian history is extraordinarily fluid
when it comes to both theology and the role of Christians in society.
Religion was Always Politics
I first wrote about evangelicals and Trump in the summer of 2016, when
many expressed shock that churchgoers would support an irreligious man
with a history of immoral behavior. I wrote before the 2016 election
that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rhetoric coincided almost
precisely (and I think unwittingly at the beginning) with what I’ve
been hearing in evangelical churches for decades.
This idea is that America was a great place until the 1960s, when the
hippies and intellectual college professors ushered in an era of moral
relativism and tore down cultural norms, where men were men, women and
minorities were kept in their place, and we dared not question
tradition. This mindset relies on faith and appeals to authority
rather than facts and science, embraces conspiracies and paranoia, and
despises the media and intellectuals. Far from receding, this cultural
backlash seems to be gaining steam — witness the growing and
increasingly violent attacks on the LGBTQ community.
Those who either aren’t intimately familiar with evangelical culture
or want to maintain an idealistic view of it thus have a difficult
time reconciling how people who identify as evangelicals embrace ugly
political positions. Congressman Adam Kinzinger, one of the select few
Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, lamented in a tweet: “Many
people will leave a church that doesn’t match their politics, but
rarely leave their politics because it doesn’t match their church.”
Peter Wehner, who wrote a mostly perceptive essay in the Atlantic
titled “The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart,” in which he said:
“How is it that Christianity has become, for too many adherents, a
political religion?”
More recently, Tim Alberta wrote in The Atlantic that evangelicals
decades ago set in motion the political fervor of evangelicals: “Not
only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as …
fixed on earthly concerns, a fight for the kingdom of this world – all
of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture – they
were indoctrinated with the belief that because the stakes were
getting so high, any means were justified.”
Here's the thing: as much as I respect these writers, the assumption
that religion and politics are different (or counter to “the commands
of scripture”) displays a misunderstanding of history AND scripture.
The Judeo-Christian religion has been rooted in politics from the
start. Israel was a collection of tribes that conquered its neighbors
based on the idea that it was God’s will to occupy a particular plot
of land. Like all religions at the time Judaism was formed, the power
of the tribal God was directly correlated to the success of the tribe
in battle.
Example: in the book of Exodus, Moses confronted Pharoah and threw
down a staff that God turned into a snake, the Egyptian priests threw
down their own staffs. What happened? Did the Egyptians’ staffs just
lie there because they were merely wooden sticks in the service of a
fake deity? No, the priests’ staffs also turned into snakes, which
presumes that Egypt’s deities had their own power. The snakes
unleashed by Moses ate the Egyptian snakes. The point of the text is
not that other gods didn’t exist, but that Israel’s god was more
powerful.
In the Bible books that relate Israel’s history – including Joshua,
Kings and Chronicles -- the success and failure of Israel is based on
the faithfulness of the Jewish kings and people. All those authors
would be surprised to know that religion and politics were separate
disciplines.
I can hear Christians thinking: but our religion is different, a “new
covenant,” right? Sorry. Jesus was born and grew into adulthood in a
toxic political brew in which decades/centuries of tension between
Jews and their “pagan” overlords had come to a boiling point. A
central tenet of the Jewish religion – that obedience to God’s
precepts would lead to prosperity on earth – was at stake. Devout Jews
felt that because they were faithful, that the time had come for God
to overthrow the oppressive Romans. They expected God would provide
for a miraculous victory, like he did in the histories outlined in
their sacred writings.
Such an environment was ripe for prophets such as John the Baptizer,
Jesus, the apostle Paul, and Jewish writers such as we read in the
Dead Sea Scrolls, all of whom preached that God would intervene to
create a new order on earth ruled by righteous Jews. Ancient writings
newly uncovered in the last century in caches such as the Dead Sea
Scrolls reveal that the teaching of these foundational Christians was
echoed by Jewish sects of the day.
Jesus’ first recorded sermon was about politics. He stood up in a
synagogue in Nazareth and read from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is
on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of
sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year
of the Lord’s favor.” In our context-free Bible analysis today, we
read that as flowery words, but at the time talking about the poor,
the prisoners, and the oppressed meant calling out the government
(that eventually killed him for his politics).
When Jesus died, he cried out to God: “Why have you forsaken me?” Paul
wrote of Jesus leading an army of freshly resurrected righteous people
who would meet Jesus in the sky and then come down from heaven to
create an everlasting kingdom on earth, presumably in line with Jesus’
teaching. As years went by without this second coming, Paul’s nervous
followers asked what would happen to those who died before this
intervention from heaven occurred. Did they miss out on the kingdom?
Later first-century Jews were so zealous some took matters into their
own hands and started a revolution, which ended badly with the burning
of Jerusalem in the year 70. Christians were said to have fled the
city by then because, like Jesus and Paul, they expected a miraculous
intervention that would lead to a Roman defeat, at which time they
would return to the city.
Cramming centuries of history into few paragraphs requires a great
deal of winnowing and oversimplification. The point, however, is that
when Judaism and Christianity were birthed, religion and politics were
the same thing. To lament today that politics is ruining religion
misses ignores the fact that they part and parcel of cultural identity
and cannot be separated, not only now but from the time and
circumstances in which they were birthed.
What is Christianity, Anyway?
The other misconception is that there is an objective ideal of
Christianity that some evangelicals are missing. Wehner writes: “For
many of us who have made Christianity central to our lives, the pain
of this moment is watching those who claim to follow Jesus do so much
to distort who he really was.”
While I have much respect for the moral standards of Wehner and others
who have this lament, the problem is that such sentiment presumes to
know how Jesus would act today and what represents true Christian
behavior. Since the time of Jesus, however, there has been no
consensus as to who he was and what it means to follow him.
Immediately after Jesus died, there were dozens of ferocious debates
among followers recorded in the New Testament alone. Paul was so angry
at the views of his rivals for leadership who argued that non-Jews
needed to be circumcised that he wrote in Galatians that he wished
they were castrated (accidentally of course). Even more strands of
Christian belief were found in other ancient gospels — such as the
Gospel of Thomas — that were rediscovered over the past century. In
the first few centuries post-crucifixion, Christians forged no
consensus about issues such as Jesus’ relationship to God, whether he
was an appointed human representative or whether he was divine, what
happened to people after death, whether it was necessary to maintain
Jewish customs such as circumcision, and so on. There also was fierce
debate about whether to participate in pagan civil religious practices
that prompted accusations that Christians were atheists and led to
persecution recorded by church fathers.
Again, this is not the space to outline 2,000 years of church history,
but many thousands of Christian denominations have formed during that
span. Christians over the years have embraced forced conversions at
the point of a sword, burning of heretics, Crusades, slavery, and
thousands of other things we recoil from today. At the same time,
Christianity has inspired missionaries that have performed wonderful
acts of charity such as crusading the abolition of slavery. In many
times and locales Christianity has fueled the improvement of human
rights and freedoms.
How does one make sense of the dichotomy? I always come back to the
principle put forth by Albert Schweitzer in his 1906 book “The Quest
of the Historical Jesus.” Schweitzer studied centuries of theological
developments and came to the realization that each generation
reinvents Jesus to fit their own cultural beliefs. In practice, people
read their own cultural views into Scriptures.
Old Testament scholars point out that the writings of the Hebrew Bible
represent a debate among authors with varying views. In some loose way
they correspond to our debates today. Ancient “conservatives”
contended that God wanted the Jews to be harsh to the unbelievers,
leading to events such as the bloody march to the Holy Land filled
with war. More “liberal” authors believed that God wanted the Jews to
act with justice, mercy, and hospitality, which is reflected in books
such as Jonah and the prophets.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is an example. In Genesis, the author
seems to use the story to illustrate God punishing cities for rampant
sexual misconduct. The prophet Ezekiel, however, says that God’s
punishment was judgement for the cities’ inhabitants inhospitality and
ill treatment of the poor. Setting aside historicity, how does one
reconcile the discrepancy, except that the authors told a story in a
way that justified their own cultural practices and beliefs?
In the same way today, right-leaning Christians read authoritarian
views into the Bible, with a Jesus who divided the sheep and the goats
and sharply called out doom on his enemies. Liberals focus on the
parts that discuss love and forgiveness, emphasizing the “hippie”
Jesus who talks about peace, love, and charity. Neither are “wrong.”
Both elements are in the Bible, which is a collection of writings of
people at different times in different cultures with different beliefs
whom I believe would agree on little if brought back to life and put
in a room together.
Religion is as Religion Does
One of the problems with this debate is that there is no accepted
definition of evangelical. There are many “evangelical” denominations
with divergent beliefs. Even surveys that discuss evangelical support
for Trump rely on self-identification, which is not an exact science.
The New York Times published an article in 2021 that noted that the
term evangelical had become so synonymous with the Republican party
that people who either practice other religions or are unchurched
identify themselves as evangelical because they support Republicans.
While that poses analytical problems and makes survey results more
than a little problematic, it also confirms the idea that religion and
politics are not separate spheres but expressions of culture. Politics
and religion constantly evolve to reflect the cultural views of
adherents. (A trivial modern example: when I was young, rock ‘n roll
music was widely seen in evangelical churches as a tool of Satan. Now
those same churches who denounced rock music have elaborate praise
bands with guitars and drums.)
The upshot to me is that Trump and Republicans reflect the attitudes
and beliefs of people who identify as evangelicals. Trying to
determine if that reflect some ideal of Christianity is a fools game
because no such thing exists. In any event, Christianity is not a
fixed thing and is constantly changing. In the light of those two
tenets, both the evangelical support for Trump, and the opposition of
the political left, makes a lot more sense.
Source:
<https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/19/2103351/-The-Biggest-Fallacy-About-Religion-and-Politics>