Southern Bread

It’s been said that when you get to the top of the military brass the officers become indistinguishable from politicians. In our time – and for a long time – this has been true of big business as well. Washington is dominated by businessmen that flow in and out of the private/public sector revolving door with each administration. Their just as at home in a congressional staffer’s office as they are in a Manhattan investment bank board room. What’s often left out of these examples are the religious leaders who are the same way. It’s easy to look back upon history and see the incestuous relationship between the church and the state in pre-colonial England and farther back. It’s much harder to identify it in our own country today. Do we think it’s gone away? Do we think that the church is simply no longer political? I hope you don’t think that, because nothing could be further from the truth. The relationship might be a little different in some ways but the fuel of that relationship is the same as it’s always been. Money and power.

It’s disturbing to watch the Christian right come out in constant support of the government during times of “conservative” administrations. It seemed that there was no end to the praise for all things Bush/Cheney during the last eight years coming from them. But what did Bush do besides grow government just like a democrat. To be sure, most times he was indistinguishable from a liberal when it came to anything but foreign policy. But while the so-called “religious right” may have been in the spotlight for the last decade, it’s the religious left’s turn to step up to the plate and drink from the government kool-aid stand now. People such as Jim Wallis are simply bonkers for Obama. They get all starry eyed at every speech he makes. It’s sickening. It’s sickening because if you look at the old Jim Wallis from the 70’s, he’s now turned a complete 180. He’s gone from a young, Christian radical, skeptical of all things government and trying to lead a “return to the bible”, to now being a shill for Obama’s big government oppression machine.

In some ways you can clearly see how this happened to Wallis and many others in that camp. He was sharply influenced by the Vietnam war, as were so many others of that era. But he took it further and was actually a member of the radical orginazation called Students for a Democratic Society. If you’ve never heard of them then it’s enough to know that it’s the same group that spawned Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. There was a split of SDS in 1969 and the more violent faction that included Ayers broke away, but the group as a whole has produced many, many of todays liberal power brokers. It’s the Chicago Organizing/SDS/Labour Union environment that was so influential to Wallis and his group Sojourners(originally called The Post-American) in it’s formative years, just as Obama has been influenced by the same bunch today. Robert Booth Fowler makes this comment:

And here we can clearly see how much has changed with Wallis. Gone is the guy who would never seek for strength in “bureaucratic structures.” He’s now so invested in Obama that he has almost completely discredited his objectivity. No matter how paradoxical his views used to be, it was clear that the anti-evangelicals of his day were not in bed with the state by any means. But that’s all changed now. He’s made himself into the left’s version of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Fascism is the merging of the state with private business in a sort of unholy alliance, and I’m afraid that’s what we’ve had for a long time in this country. Go into any normal evangelical church of any denomination and you’ll hear no official criticism of the state from the pulpit. No, they are now slaves to their tax-exempt status. A typical baptist preacher won’t even endorse a candidate for fear of losing a few bucks from the evidently sacred tax exemption they enjoy. It’s about money when it should be about freedom.

And that gets to the crux of my point. You have Wallis on the “left” and perhaps Dobson on the “right.” That very terminology should show you how deeply influenced the church has become by petty partisan politics. Dobson and Wallis should be crusading together, not warring against each other in the name of some respective political party they endorse. They both claim to want the same things: christian community, biblical obedience, a heart for the poor, etc. Where they differ is in their politics when it comes to matters of state involvment. In my view, that’s a worthless waste of time. Jim Wallis has no excuse for putting his faith in big government after the life he has lived and the things he has fought for. And James Dobson has no business endorsing half-hearted neocons that feign interest in freedom but never deliver. If either one had any integrity at all they would both endorse somebody like Ron Paul and champion his platform of real, drastic reduction in state oppression and power.

Returning freedom and liberty to people is the only sensible way to create real Christian fellowship and community. Freedom is the reducing of taxes to the point where tax exemption for churches is irrelevant and they can move on and be free to speak the truth again. Liberty is not having to fill out a thousand government forms and go through mountains of red tape just to hand out some food to the homeless. Liberty and freedom are tides that will raise all ships involved. What’s better? Having a million bureaucrats and power-elites pretend to pay attention to your cause as they wrest more and more freedom from you, or having a government that’s so small you barely even know it’s there so you can spend your money and time in a more biblically productive way. It’s time for this religious “right” and “left” garbage to stop, and for all involved to realize that the true enemy, huge secular government, has been manipulating us all along.

Let’s remember Paul’s admonition to Timothy:

A quiet life that is honoring to Christ can’t be achieved by wielding the state like some sort of tool. I’ve made the analogy before that trying to use the leviathan state for your pet agenda is like trying to use a firehose to fill an ice tray. It’s too massive and too hungry, and it tends to crush everything it touches. No, a quiet, christ-centered life, even the community that folks like Wallis crave, is best achieved through getting government out of our lives so that the church can be the church again, and not an appendage of the state.