Jeff_Ricks
31st August 2005, 04:24 PM
Below is an interesting article by John Shelby Spong who is a former Christian bishop. For those not familiar with him, he now calls himself a "post-theist."
Jeff
The Dark Side of Evangelical Religion
I often wonder what Bible it is that people read in America's Bible Belt. I wonder what the religion is that is practiced by the Religious Right. It certainly does not connect with my understanding of Christianity. Perhaps I am the one who is blind to the things they perceive, but seeing their enthusiasm for war, their lack of concern for the welfare of minorities, their overt homophobia, and their violence (as expressed in the number of legal executions in that region), I cannot help but ask those who live in the Bible Belt and those who hold membership in the Religious Right to help me comprehend the religious understanding that they espouse.
This issue was raised sharply for me recently by a remark from Pat Robertson, president and owner of the Christian Broadcasting Television Network. On his 700 Club program, Robertson — one of America's leading evangelical voices — called for the assassination of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. Murder, apparently, is a legitimate Christian solution when you have a disagreement with someone. Robertson, who was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 1988, is a major force in the religious base dedicated to the presidency of George W. Bush. (Bush's "red state" region is the home of the most overtly religious voters in this country.) The president has represented their point of view well with his opposition to abortion, stem-cell research, homosexuality, and the right to make end-of-life decisions. Utterances emanating from Pat Robertson's lips, however, do not sound to me like the words of a religious leader, at least not a Christian religious leader.
This murder recommendation, by the way, was not his only bizarre moral lapse. Writing about the feminist movement in a fund-raising letter, Robertson said: "The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." That does not sound like the feminists I know and is especially offensive to those feminists who are my wife and daughters. About homosexuality Robertson has not only been hostile but also uninformed and judgmental. Additionally he has combined his prejudices by adding the faint odor of anti-Semitism to his homophobia. In a Christmas Eve program, he once said: "The acceptance of homosexuality is the last step in the decline of gentile Christianity." Now he has decided that the murder of Hugo Chavez is within his understanding of Christianity. This is the same man, I remind you, who championed the right of Chief Justice Roy Moore of Alabama to hang the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. Perhaps Robertson has not read those commandments recently, but the last time I looked they still contained the injunction: "Thou shalt not kill."
It was amusing yet frightening to watch some of this nation's other evangelical leaders dance around these comments by their colleague. One of them tried to justify Robertson's words by suggesting that they came during "the political side" of Robertson's television program rather than "the religious side." This strange logic suggests that murder is okay in the political arena, but not in the religious arena. Somehow murder seems to me to be both terminal and evil in either place. Jesse Jackson's request that the Federal Communications Commission discipline Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network for his comments, just as they disciplined CBS and MTV over the exposure of Janet Jackson's breast during the half-time show of the Super Bowl in 2004, was dismissed by the same evangelical leader as not being "in the same category of moral concern," the implication being that the comments were a lesser offense. That argument's value escapes me. A performer's exposed breast is certainly in bad taste but no one died as a result of that insensitive act. To call for the murder of a head of state because you dislike his politics strikes me as of a totally different and far more severe moral dimension. Members of the Religious Right do seem to be more obsessed with issues of sexuality than they are about issues like war and peace or discrimination. Sometimes they remind me of the old joke that "fundamentalists are opposed to sex because it might lead to dancing!"
I grew up a Southern evangelical fundamentalist in the Bible Belt. I certainly needed the security it offered me during the early years of my life, as I dealt with both death and poverty. I left that movement, however, because I found it intellectually bankrupt and morally indefensible. It was their indefensible morality far more than their intellectual bankruptcy that bothered me the most even then. Intellectual issues can be debated, facts cited, and minds changed. I know that from my own spiritual journey. When immoral activity done in the name of religion occurs, however, the scars created by both the pain of disillusionment and the loss of integrity are very long lasting. So out of the embarrassment of listening to a person identified as a Christian calling for an act of murder, I seek answers to my searching questions.
What Bible do people read in that region of America we call the Bible Belt? In that part of our nation, church going is more popular than it is in any other part of America, and people living there hold to their religious affiliations very deeply. Yet that is the same part of America that engaged in slavery until they were required to give up that inhumane practice by force of arms. Is the enslavement of human beings compatible with the Christian life? Certainly quotations from Holy Scripture were used to justify slavery and to remove any pangs of guilt that might have accompanied that institution in the hearts of the "fine Christian slaveholders" of the South. Yet how does slavery square with Jesus' words: "By this will all know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:35). Would they have me believe that slavery is simply a form of love that I do not recognize? Is the calling for the murder of a head of state also a form of love that I just do not understand?
When slavery was made illegal in the Bible Belt following the American Civil War, its bastard stepchild, known as segregation, took its place. Black people were separated from white people by law. Their children were forced to go to inferior schools. They were not allowed access to public libraries, public parks, or public toilets. They were refused service in both hotels and restaurants, and they were prohibited from trying on clothes in department stores and dress shops. Black people had no standing and few rights in the white-dominated courts. Enforcing these brutal practices was an organization called the Ku Klux Klan, which used the primary Christian symbol, a cross, turning it into an instrument of intimidation and fear by setting it ablaze. The Klan was also served by a "Khaplain," who invariably articulated the values of what was called white, gentile Christianity, while at the same time seeking to dominate and coerce people of color with physical violence. The great majority of the white people of the Bible Belt supported segregation until it was declared to be illegal in 1954 by a unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court. Even then the white Christians of the South resisted that law by every possible means, legal and illegal. "Massive resistance to the law of the land" was the motto adopted by the church-going political organization run by Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia. It was fully supported by the junior senator from that same state, A. Willis Robertson, who along with his wife, were quite overtly religious, God-fearing, church-going Christians. They were also the parents of evangelist Pat Robertson. Perhaps neither the Byrds nor the Robertsons ever read Jesus' words describing his purpose as that of bringing life, abundant life to all (John 10:10). Or perhaps they were able to convince themselves that segregation offered enhancement, not diminishment, of the humanity of black people.
What kind of religion was being practiced in the Bible Belt of the South when lynching, mostly of black males, occurred there with great regularity until the mid-twentieth century with the full support of both the white law-enforcement officials and the white dominated courts? How was it possible that Southern sheriffs, police officials, judges, and juries, who winked at this murder of black people, were also God-fearing, Bible-reading, church-going Christians? If they could square the lynching of "offensive" black males with the Christianity they practiced in the Bible Belt, then calling for the murder of an offending head of state in Venezuela by a well-known Southern Christian evangelist a generation later should be easy to understand.
America's Religious Right was appalled at the sexual misconduct of President Clinton. So was I. But again their moral compass seems askew when they are not equally appalled at the behavior of a president who has taken us into a war based on blatantly false intelligence data. He has presided over a tremendous abuse of human rights in both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo for which no persons other than enlisted personnel have yet been convicted. His actions have cost the lives of some 1,900 American service persons, the wounding of thousands more, to say nothing of his responsibility for the deaths of uncounted Iraqis. His religious supporters appear to feel no outrage about this. Yet this president claims that his religion guides his every action.
I am glad Pat Robertson got caught with his moral pants hanging at half-mast, for it is time that the citizens of this country awaken to the dark side of the religious coalition that threatens, if it has not already done so, to seize power in the United States.
So, I return to my questions: What Bible do they read in the Bible Belt? What kind of religion do those who are said to be members of the Religious Right practice? What kind of Christian evangelist is it who thinks it is moral to call for the murder of a head of state? I would love to have an answer. So would an increasingly larger and larger segment of the citizens of the United States.
— John Shelby Spong
Jeff
The Dark Side of Evangelical Religion
I often wonder what Bible it is that people read in America's Bible Belt. I wonder what the religion is that is practiced by the Religious Right. It certainly does not connect with my understanding of Christianity. Perhaps I am the one who is blind to the things they perceive, but seeing their enthusiasm for war, their lack of concern for the welfare of minorities, their overt homophobia, and their violence (as expressed in the number of legal executions in that region), I cannot help but ask those who live in the Bible Belt and those who hold membership in the Religious Right to help me comprehend the religious understanding that they espouse.
This issue was raised sharply for me recently by a remark from Pat Robertson, president and owner of the Christian Broadcasting Television Network. On his 700 Club program, Robertson — one of America's leading evangelical voices — called for the assassination of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. Murder, apparently, is a legitimate Christian solution when you have a disagreement with someone. Robertson, who was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 1988, is a major force in the religious base dedicated to the presidency of George W. Bush. (Bush's "red state" region is the home of the most overtly religious voters in this country.) The president has represented their point of view well with his opposition to abortion, stem-cell research, homosexuality, and the right to make end-of-life decisions. Utterances emanating from Pat Robertson's lips, however, do not sound to me like the words of a religious leader, at least not a Christian religious leader.
This murder recommendation, by the way, was not his only bizarre moral lapse. Writing about the feminist movement in a fund-raising letter, Robertson said: "The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." That does not sound like the feminists I know and is especially offensive to those feminists who are my wife and daughters. About homosexuality Robertson has not only been hostile but also uninformed and judgmental. Additionally he has combined his prejudices by adding the faint odor of anti-Semitism to his homophobia. In a Christmas Eve program, he once said: "The acceptance of homosexuality is the last step in the decline of gentile Christianity." Now he has decided that the murder of Hugo Chavez is within his understanding of Christianity. This is the same man, I remind you, who championed the right of Chief Justice Roy Moore of Alabama to hang the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. Perhaps Robertson has not read those commandments recently, but the last time I looked they still contained the injunction: "Thou shalt not kill."
It was amusing yet frightening to watch some of this nation's other evangelical leaders dance around these comments by their colleague. One of them tried to justify Robertson's words by suggesting that they came during "the political side" of Robertson's television program rather than "the religious side." This strange logic suggests that murder is okay in the political arena, but not in the religious arena. Somehow murder seems to me to be both terminal and evil in either place. Jesse Jackson's request that the Federal Communications Commission discipline Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network for his comments, just as they disciplined CBS and MTV over the exposure of Janet Jackson's breast during the half-time show of the Super Bowl in 2004, was dismissed by the same evangelical leader as not being "in the same category of moral concern," the implication being that the comments were a lesser offense. That argument's value escapes me. A performer's exposed breast is certainly in bad taste but no one died as a result of that insensitive act. To call for the murder of a head of state because you dislike his politics strikes me as of a totally different and far more severe moral dimension. Members of the Religious Right do seem to be more obsessed with issues of sexuality than they are about issues like war and peace or discrimination. Sometimes they remind me of the old joke that "fundamentalists are opposed to sex because it might lead to dancing!"
I grew up a Southern evangelical fundamentalist in the Bible Belt. I certainly needed the security it offered me during the early years of my life, as I dealt with both death and poverty. I left that movement, however, because I found it intellectually bankrupt and morally indefensible. It was their indefensible morality far more than their intellectual bankruptcy that bothered me the most even then. Intellectual issues can be debated, facts cited, and minds changed. I know that from my own spiritual journey. When immoral activity done in the name of religion occurs, however, the scars created by both the pain of disillusionment and the loss of integrity are very long lasting. So out of the embarrassment of listening to a person identified as a Christian calling for an act of murder, I seek answers to my searching questions.
What Bible do people read in that region of America we call the Bible Belt? In that part of our nation, church going is more popular than it is in any other part of America, and people living there hold to their religious affiliations very deeply. Yet that is the same part of America that engaged in slavery until they were required to give up that inhumane practice by force of arms. Is the enslavement of human beings compatible with the Christian life? Certainly quotations from Holy Scripture were used to justify slavery and to remove any pangs of guilt that might have accompanied that institution in the hearts of the "fine Christian slaveholders" of the South. Yet how does slavery square with Jesus' words: "By this will all know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:35). Would they have me believe that slavery is simply a form of love that I do not recognize? Is the calling for the murder of a head of state also a form of love that I just do not understand?
When slavery was made illegal in the Bible Belt following the American Civil War, its bastard stepchild, known as segregation, took its place. Black people were separated from white people by law. Their children were forced to go to inferior schools. They were not allowed access to public libraries, public parks, or public toilets. They were refused service in both hotels and restaurants, and they were prohibited from trying on clothes in department stores and dress shops. Black people had no standing and few rights in the white-dominated courts. Enforcing these brutal practices was an organization called the Ku Klux Klan, which used the primary Christian symbol, a cross, turning it into an instrument of intimidation and fear by setting it ablaze. The Klan was also served by a "Khaplain," who invariably articulated the values of what was called white, gentile Christianity, while at the same time seeking to dominate and coerce people of color with physical violence. The great majority of the white people of the Bible Belt supported segregation until it was declared to be illegal in 1954 by a unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court. Even then the white Christians of the South resisted that law by every possible means, legal and illegal. "Massive resistance to the law of the land" was the motto adopted by the church-going political organization run by Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia. It was fully supported by the junior senator from that same state, A. Willis Robertson, who along with his wife, were quite overtly religious, God-fearing, church-going Christians. They were also the parents of evangelist Pat Robertson. Perhaps neither the Byrds nor the Robertsons ever read Jesus' words describing his purpose as that of bringing life, abundant life to all (John 10:10). Or perhaps they were able to convince themselves that segregation offered enhancement, not diminishment, of the humanity of black people.
What kind of religion was being practiced in the Bible Belt of the South when lynching, mostly of black males, occurred there with great regularity until the mid-twentieth century with the full support of both the white law-enforcement officials and the white dominated courts? How was it possible that Southern sheriffs, police officials, judges, and juries, who winked at this murder of black people, were also God-fearing, Bible-reading, church-going Christians? If they could square the lynching of "offensive" black males with the Christianity they practiced in the Bible Belt, then calling for the murder of an offending head of state in Venezuela by a well-known Southern Christian evangelist a generation later should be easy to understand.
America's Religious Right was appalled at the sexual misconduct of President Clinton. So was I. But again their moral compass seems askew when they are not equally appalled at the behavior of a president who has taken us into a war based on blatantly false intelligence data. He has presided over a tremendous abuse of human rights in both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo for which no persons other than enlisted personnel have yet been convicted. His actions have cost the lives of some 1,900 American service persons, the wounding of thousands more, to say nothing of his responsibility for the deaths of uncounted Iraqis. His religious supporters appear to feel no outrage about this. Yet this president claims that his religion guides his every action.
I am glad Pat Robertson got caught with his moral pants hanging at half-mast, for it is time that the citizens of this country awaken to the dark side of the religious coalition that threatens, if it has not already done so, to seize power in the United States.
So, I return to my questions: What Bible do they read in the Bible Belt? What kind of religion do those who are said to be members of the Religious Right practice? What kind of Christian evangelist is it who thinks it is moral to call for the murder of a head of state? I would love to have an answer. So would an increasingly larger and larger segment of the citizens of the United States.
— John Shelby Spong