Can Christians Come to Christ?

The 8/05 issue of Harper's magazine has a wonderful essay by Bill McKibben titled "The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong." Unfortunately you can read the article in its entirety only in the print version at the moment, but there are some excerpts on the Harper's Web site.

McKibben's basic point is that despite 85% of Americans identifying themselves as Christians, as a nation we fail to behave in a Christian manner. Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek, sell all our belongings and follow him, help the poor, sick, weak, and so on, and yet by any metric we are failing to do these things, even when one factors in the donations to and actions of private and religious charities. Compared to all other wealthy, industrialized nations (including Japan, a non-Christian nation, and many European nations where Christianity has become so anemic that they can be considered secular cultures), we have higher murder rates, higher poverty, less health care, worse school systems, and on and on.


This point has been made before (by me, among other people), but McKibben makes it eloquently. He also very interestingly traces the roots of this phenomenon to a series of theological makeovers Christianity has received in this country. The two major thrusts of this makeover are, on the one hand, the millenarians, who obsessively search for signs of the coming apocalypse in the bar codes at Wal-Mart and in some cases hope to hasten the End Times by advocating, say, war in the Middle East, and the corporates, neo-New Agers who basically promote a feel-good Christian pop-psychology in suburban megachurches that says little about Jesus and lots about you, the worshipper, and how you can feel good about yourself.

Of course there are many variations on (and marriages between) these strands of pseudo-Christianity, but they are what they are because that's how people like to think. We (the people) are obsessed with disaster scenarios (witness the popularity of movies like Independence Day or the truckloads of other science fiction books, movies, video games, and so on that touch on post-apocalyptic themes), and we are fascinated by destruction. I am sure that as the Spaniards watched Tenochtitlan burn, some of them were excited about destroying an entire culture and one of the most amazing cities in the entire world. There is a little bit of Shiva in all of us, so it's no wonder that people find this kind of thing compelling--especially if they think religion will give them the knowledge to predict and to a certain extent influence the outcome of the apocalypse. As for the corporates, they wanna hear about how Jesus is going to make them more content at work and deal with their kids better and how they deserve to keep all the money they make and God helps those who help themselves so you don't have to do it and you're a Christian so you're saved, what's to worry about? No matter that Jesus basically contradicted all that stuff.

As I said in my previous post on this, Jesus had a radical message, and that message was love. He wanted, as McKibben says, to radically reorient human relationships around the principle of love. But as Foucault scholars will be quick to point out, human relations, in large swaths of the American Christian community, are based instead on power, often economic power.

Do I follow Jesus' message? No, I don't. Maybe somewhat, but not to the extend that I wish I did. So I'm a hypocrite, but I'm honest about it. The problem with these modern-day moneylenders in the temple like the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family is that they're not. They say in very loud voices that they represent Christian values when what they really represent is a narrow conservative political view that in a lot of ways is anti-Christian. (Millenarians, get out your pens and start connecting the Antichrist dots.) But they say it so loudly that our culture, as a whole, fails to question them, and a true and vital interpretation of Christianity is pushed to the sidelines. Like McKibben, I hope that one day we will have a truly moral majority, but until that day, all we can do is quietly labor on the sidelines.