Christian bashing?
by
Matt Giwer (c) 1994 <10/29>

      Christians, particularly the fundamentalist types, are constantly claiming they are under attack. There are two questions involved, are they really under attack? and do they deserve to be under attack?
      To the first we have to determine what is meant by attack. Certainly we can hold the present administration is on the offensive against them when one of the highest appointed officials "preaches" it is time for them to give up a central tenet of their faith which Dr. Elders characterizes as a "love affair with the fetus." That is no different than referencing Dr. Elders' love affair with murdering the innocent. Inflammatory words are not needed.
      It is not only the administration. The Keyries Joel community lost it special school district and the reaction of the media was quite against the finding. When there is a protest against the opening of a MacDonald's in a Hassidic neighborhood because of some primitive superstition about milk and meat in the same dish the media gives it sympathetic coverage. They can smell cheeseburgers a mile away. It does not appear to be noticed that it is an objection from religious fundamentalists when they are Jewish funadamentalists.
      The media and the administration feel quite free to judge Christian religions. More generally they feel free to judge any religion they consider to be fundamentalist. This includes fundamentalist Moslems.
      Strangely this never includes the most primitive and fundamentalist religion of them all, Judaism. Be that as it may it is clear there is a public willingness to condemn certain forms of public expression of religion and not others.
      The next question is, do they deserve it? On one hand one can say, yes, but in so doing one has granted some person, group or agency the power to judge what a group deserves. But if one says no then there is a question of letting any religious belief transformed into action pass as acceptable.
      And there is the point, it is not the belief but the action arising from the belief. Believe what you want but do not put the belief into action. But as all religious thinkers have held in one form or another, belief without action is meaningless.
      And thus religion confronts today's world. The objections to fundamentalists are not in their beliefs but in their actions. They oppose abortion and perhaps even gambling, sex and dancing for all we know. That they would "dare" to take political actions based upon those beliefs is what singles them out for attack.
      Yet we do not see this on the other side. Like it or not the American Civil Liberties Union has the purpose of removing the Christian heritage from the public life of the US. That may or may not be a good cause and is certainly in consonance with the thinking of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and others who were around when this country started.
      So if one religious viewpoint "deserves" it do not they all? And if not, why not? Is there some place in the nation an ultimate arbiter of acceptable actions for a religion?
      In the public mind it has been adjudged that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson may not become rich but Billy Graham can live like a king. [Not only live like a king but pass on his kingdom to his son according to a news report of 12 December 1995. Heritable holiness is a bit of a new idea in Christianity.] The only apparent difference is Dr. Graham does not promote actions based upon belief. And therefore he is not in conflict with anyone's political agenda.
      Faith with and without actions is an interesting question to fundamentalists in that they hold being born again merits salvation as an act of faith but then do go on to promote actions as a demonstration of that faith.
      This perceived duality of between belief and actions springs from the bit of a skeptical, perhaps even hypocritical point of view. Clearly I know I can believe something and not act upon it but how do I know you can? Or rather if you do not act upon your professes beliefs how do I or does anyone know you really believe what you say?
      As we can not get into each other's heads do we take each other on faith or actions? That is not a question I intend to answer here. Suffice to say we can believe Billy Graham because he is harmless and distrust the fundamentalists because they prove they act as they believe.
      There is and continues to be a different standard and the term fundamentalists has become no better than a perjorative. Consider "moslem fundamentalists" when referring to the Middle East when the enlightened of Middle Eastern Muslims makes an Orthodox Jew look like a superstitious primitive.
      It is time to talk of fundamentalist liberals in order to put the perjoratives back where they belong. These are liberals who hold with the core beliefs without regard to any fact or sense of reality that may inflict itself upon their benighted intellects.
      A fundamentalist liberal believes they have the core doctrine of moral superiority over everyone else and brooks no question of their beliefs. Anyone who disagrees is immoral to say the least; to say the very worst, illiberal.
      We have here a competition of religions where the religion of government has supplanted personal religion and the former will brook no interference from the latter save for that pesky 1st Amendment. The reason we are seeing the increasingly more serious attack from the government and from the establishment is simply that we are in the midst of a Jihad, a holy war.
      In a larger sense, it is establishment consensus against independent thought and action by those not in the establishement. The human mind works to choose sides and create us against them scenarios. The political us against the political them it the easiest to establish. That it is fundamentalist liberals against fundamentalist Christians is perhaps the most amusing aspect of all.