This is a powerful article. My hope and prayer is that more and more of us will seek to increasingly align our actions with our words, which is certainly a humbling, challenging, but important process for us all. May we grow individually and collectively in caring, courage, and compassionate action... Peace & blessings ~ Molly
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Richard T. Hughes
Richard Hughes is Senior Fellow in the Ernest Boyer Center at Messiah College.
Richard Hughes is Senior Fellow in the Ernest Boyer Center at Messiah College.
This two-part series of articles is based on Hughes' recent book, Christian America and the Kingdom of God (Illinois 2009).
In part 1 of this article, we posed this riddle: why do so many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians -- people who clearly honor the Bible -- so often disregard the two requirements that are central to the biblical vision of the kingdom of God, namely peacemaking and justice for the poor? (Part one is here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-t-hughes/a-riddle-of-life-and-deat_b_487476.html.)
Why Focus on "Conservative Christians"?
Some readers quite correctly pointed out that conservatives tend to be more generous toward the poor than liberals, but to frame the issue like that only muddles it. The Bible never suggests that we adequately fulfill our responsibilities through "generosity" toward the poor. Rather, the Bible summons Christians to radical solidarity with the poor and radical opposition to those demonic, systemic structures -- what the Bible calls "the principalities and powers -- that sustain the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and the dispossessed.
Historically, Christians in the United States -- both liberal and conservative -- have been extraordinarily reluctant to take up that battle. To appreciate this point, one need only consider the American church's long, 350-year complicity in slavery and segregation.
Further, to claim that conservatives are more generous than liberals sidesteps the fact that neither group is all that generous toward the poor to begin with. It also sidesteps the fact that neither conservative Christians nor liberal Christians are called to compare themselves with one another. Instead, if Christians are serious about following Jesus, the only meaningful comparison is with Jesus' picture of the kingdom of God, and when measured by that standard, American Christians across the board -- liberals and conservatives alike -- fall woefully short.
Why, then, would I write a two-part article that singles out conservative rather than liberal Christians for a comparison with that biblical vision. First, conservative Christians are typically far more adamant than liberals in their claims that they are "Bible-believing Christians" who take the Bible seriously at every point. It is therefore fair to ask how successfully they live out a theme that stands at the center of the biblical text -- the biblical vision of the kingdom.
The second consideration is perhaps even more important. For almost forty years, the most visible representatives of the Christian religion in the United States have been conservatives, not liberals. I have in mind the electronic evangelists -- those leaders of the Christian Right like Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, James Kennedy, Pat Robertson, and a host of others -- who have been extraordinarily vocal about their vision of the United States as a Christian nation. Not once have I heard any of those preachers define the Christian religion in terms of either (1) peacemaking or (2) justice for the oppressed, the poor, the marginalized, and those who suffer at the hands of the world's elites -- themes that are central to the biblical vision of the kingdom of God.
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Whether you believe in God or not does not matter so much, whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much. You must lead a good life.
~ Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose.
~ Bishop Desmond Tutu
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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