800 Pound Hypocrisy, Vol. 1

Perhaps my greatest fear in opening this Pandora's box is that any chance at legitimate dialogue will get buried under the insidious, irrepressible rhetoric of left v right. It's so much easier, after all, to retreat with Linus into our respective pumpkin patches of ideology. But I could never look Thoreau in the eye if I didn't voice today's hard words that I am convinced need voicing. After the Presidential election and all the attendant clutter, what remains unaddressed - since before the Reagan era - is a critique of the religious right that is not diminished by either the left's cowardly refusal to articulate it or the right's cowardly refusal to acknowledge it. But someone must file the complaint, must articulate the grievance, must voice the disconnect between dogma and do.

Qualificatory Aside: Perhaps as a challenge to those would-be ideologues plagued in the closet by a thorn-in-the-flesh revulsion against the 800 pound hypocrisy in the room, perhaps because some of my favorite people are evangelicals implicated in this debate, and perhaps because I just relish being a smart-ass, I offer the following palatable excuses to stop reading:
a) I voted for Obama - not against McCain/Palin, as a friend intimated recently.
b) I think Clinton (his under-the-table philandering notwithstanding) was the most effective and globally beneficial American President since FDR (Nixon could have been the standard, damn it, if only he'd had the courage to own, rather than deny, his sins), and
c) I don't buy for a second the idea that because God may have blessed America with unlimited opportunity, He blesses inherently every American endeavor.

Are you still here? Don't say I didn't warn you.

If only in this blog, on the field of battle I delineate here, those who aspire to a moral majority must consider and respond to the hypocrisies inherent in certain touchstone issues. If they can't...or choose not to...then they should retire to the silence reserved for the hypocritical Sadducees who didn't actually crucify Christ, but did nothing to intervene, either. See, it's just that you cannot claim moral superiority in the culture wars while either ignoring or embracing moral repugnancy on other fronts. Following the letter of the commandments while ignoring their original spirit never satisfied Christ, so why should we expect that it would satisfy those we pray/wish/fear will come to Christ? See, the great thing about Christ - the divine and emblematic and maddening thing about his ministry - was that his actions and words agreed. Instead of wearing a T-shirt advocating "Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner" while condemning to Hell the most politically vulnerable sinners of the day, Christ actually did hate the sin, and he actually did love the sinners. And the sinners - both within and without the church - responded to him in droves. If His "followers" do not or can not imitate him in this essential dichotomy, they will never achieve his success...or even maintain relevance. I could pick any number of specific issues, and I promise to; there is no strategic calculus to the order. This is observation 1; there will be others.

Homosexuality

Contrary to popular belief, Christ never addressed what we, in the 20th/21st Centuries, call homosexuality. The word in English, as defined today, did not appear in literature until the late 1800s. But as sins go, He specifically did address issues like: the paradigm of peace v war (can anyone provide a New Testament verse supporting the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war?), overt religious hypocrisy (there was this woman with a penny...), prostitution (drawing in the dirt v throwing stones), the death penalty (Seriously? This has to be explained to Christians?), the conjoining of capitalism with the worship of God (the only Holy violence recorded - in any gospel or contemporary historical account), the consumption of alcohol (Jesus voted for), and the idea of religious litmus tests in general (how many dinners did he share with the ruling establishment?) Others in the New Testament referenced homosexual activity - which is a very different thing, just ask Ted Haggard - but in each case the reference appears as an entry in a grocery list of sins (gossip was among them, as was slander) so ubiquitous as to indict us all - it was never isolated or privileged or reified in the way it has become a lightening rod for the religious right today. See, there's a monumental spiritual difference between repudiating the practice of- the active participation in - homosexual acts, and the defining and condemning of the practitioner as evil.

Does this mean that The Breach promotes homosexuality? Certainly not. The argument here is that isolating, privileging, and participating in jihad against any single class of sinners - including the denial of basic legal rights - is a position that simply cannot be supported by the Red Letters. Nor should it be. What the gay bashers overlook, intentionally or not, is that sexual acts as indicators of morality are entirely beside the point - with Christ it was never so much about the sin itself as it was about the motives, the heart, that produced them. Limbaugh and O'Reilly can scream into their microphones all they want...American families are not threatened by same-sex sex any more than they are threatened by sex education or birth control or funding for health clinics in Darfur that may or may not practice abortion. These are actions, choices, positions, talking points...these are symptoms. Christ never preached against symptoms. He did reach out frequently to mitigate them, but he never preached against them. He knew the heart mattered much, much more.

American families are threatened by narcissism, by lust, by selfishness, by consumerism, by unnecessary wars, by $3.00 gas. While it may assuage my conscience to vent my righteous indignation at the gay couple two blocks down, what I have to admit is that the most insidious threat to my own family is the father who is chronically obsessed with his job and a self-imposed isolationism. It's the heart of the father, in my home, that threatens disaster; it's not what two women down the street do in their bedroom.

So what's the real wolf at your door? And isn't that the question Christ would ask, of you?

Next up? Torture. Stay tuned...