I received a comment a few days ago from a guy who said he had written something on the Religious Right I might find interesting. It was interesting. It was an insider’s look. Good reading, and I have some comments.

Dignan’s 75 Year Plan: Inside the “Religious Right”

I would die for the fact that Jesus truly died and was resurrected. However, I am open to the possibility that I am wrong about political issues.

That’s about half right. I think that what we die for is not a particular scientific/historic claim (although I myself believe strongly in the resurrection as history), I also feel that what we are called to die for is not what stance we have on that, but how we RESPOND to the life Jesus lived and calls us to follow in his steps. Someone who DOES NOT belive in the historical resurrection, but LIVES as Jesus taught is more Christian than one who “believes all the right stuff” and yet does not DO SO. I cannot stress that enough. You do NOT “believe” by intellectual assent, but by life decisions and how you live. People object that this is WORKS theology. You bet. It is a requirement of faith. It is the instigator, the affirmer, and the fruits of faith. It is RESPONDING to the call. Do the theology , and learn the theology of all that after all that.

As for the ability/willingness to be “open to the possibility that I am wrong about political issues”, that certainly is somethig we’d like to see. Somehow, the Southern Baptists got along quite well for several years, until the dogmas about orthodoxy and what “prerequisites” had to be accepted in ordser to be “counted amongst the true believers” took hold as certain reactive fundamentalist elements took power, and brought with them a dogmatic insistence on the virtues of Republicanism over Democratism. Prior to that, even as I learned of The Church of the Saviour, Clarence Jordan, and entered Southern Seminary in 1978, I had never encountered any “leanings” amongst Church folks toward one party or the other.

Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority began to draw the inferences, and my Seminary profs began to react, and to point to the deeper dimenisons of “morality” and ethivs, such as war and peace, poverty, and the social issues around abortion. Glen Stassen opened my eyes to a lot of this, but the way had been prepared by Clarence Jordan and Gordon Cosby (and the Church of the Saviour) to the social justice issues in the faith. In 1984, I began to learn of the Sanctuary Movement, which arose in response to issues around the
El Salvador, Nicaragua, (Central America) civil wars. Churches had become involved in providing sanctuary to immigrants from these countries whom the United States was denying entry , maintaining that they were not suffering real persecution.

For people to whose patriotism kept them from giving legitimacy to the stories of missionaries about the situation in Central America, there was insistence that the viewpoint of our government leaders was the righteous argument, and that people who sided with the people with whom they served (such as missionaries to these Central American countries who began to speak out against the policies of our government) , these people were communisit sympathizers.

I wonder what this seemingly more open, more rational, more tolerant “Religious Right” person thinks of in regard to the almost fanatical need of the Religious Right to defend the milatarism of the United Satets, particularly post 9/11 and the Iraq scandal (for to me, and many Christians, this war IS a scandal, even more so than many other wars that are mostly wrong as well). He doesn’t mention this issue, and yet I find this the biggest point of division between myself and the Religious Right. I feel it in the absolute sense of disgust and sadness I feel when I see a sign in a yard over the Holidays that say “Jesus is the Reason For the Season” alongside “Bush/Cheney” signs, and realize that this is nearly always the case: that the majority of Religious Right Supporters almost have to sign on to the militaristic agenda, since Christians who eschew violence and war would not see much common ground with an allegiance so blind that it enables them to go to fantastic lengths to theologically justify how this fits with a Jesus ethic; or is somehow consistent with “what would Jesus do?”. The absence of that whole argument from that story really bothers me.