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Is this even Christianity?

May 23, 2012 by Bo Sanders 14 Comments

This past Monday I caught wind of a cooky Southern preacher who preached about a plan to exterminate lesbians, queers and homosexuals. I hear a lot of chatter about this kind of thing so I hoped it would just go away.

By Tuesday night this North Carolina pastor was showing up all over Facebook and Twitter. By Wednesday morning he was the ‘most popular’ link on all of Yahoo! world homepage.

If you have not seen this video, be warned. It is in no way understated. Here is the link: NC Pastor

I have 3 main thoughts about this:

I know tons of people who are not for ‘same sex marriage’ who would not speak of electric fences. Anytime you are suggesting some tactic that the Germans used in WWII you may want to take note.
This is a different TYPE of Christianity – one that is the concerned with governing morals. We going to have to address why the church is even doing State sanctioned marriage in the first place. So often we try to have the second conversation without the first – no wonder it doesn’t go anywhere.
My church and 50 others that I know of and communicate with on a regular basis do kind things and say loving words all the time and no one press covers it. That is the nature of the modern media. Deal with it.

Nothing thus far is that surprising – save the actual sermon by the NC Pastor. Here is my concern:

At what point is some pastor so deep in the Constantinian compromise that he is more Roman than Christ-like? At some point do we say ‘that is not even Christian’ ?
OR is this just one branch of Christianity and it is our obligation to treat this man as a brother who has simply lost his way?
OR is this Preacher doing more harm than good and actually crippling the gospel message – and in that sense he is an enemy of our cause? And at that point, what do we do with Jesus’ admonition to love our enemy?

Admission: I have been re-reading Stuart Murray’s Post-Christendom and … while that is admittedly probably not the best idea … I have to admit that this whole ‘legislating civil unions and marriages’ thing in North Carolina could not come at a worse time for me.

For what it is worth, here is my 2 cents.

This is not Christianity. Well, it might be Christendom but it is not whatever Jesus was after.
This guy is my brother (in humanity even if not christianity) and has simply lost his way.
Whether he is my crazy cousin or my enemy – Christ compels me to love and respect him as a person even as I wholly (and holy) disagree with his inhuman and immoral speech.

I’m not really sure what other course of action I have in this situation. I spent last week in the woods with no technology and unless I want to perpetually retreat away from all this ugliness, I have got to address this kind of craziness at some level. What else is there in the face of hate except to love?

Filed Under: engaging, latest, living, media, news, politics, public policy, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, church, civil union, gay, God, homosexual, jesus, lesbian, love, marriage, NC, North Carolina, Pastor, politics, Queer

Pastors Should Follow Obama & Stop Evolving!

May 10, 2012 by Tripp Fuller 16 Comments

Unless you spent yesterday hiding in the woods you heard that our President came out publicly in support of gay marriage. He was already the most aggressive Presidential advocate the LGTBQ has had, over turning Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, giving executive orders to secure legal rights for gay partners, and ending executive support for the defense of marriage act, so one could think that this public announcement isn’t a significant shift in policy at all and in the end a liability for re-election. Regardless of any long term consequences, I am proud of Obama when he said that “In the end the values that I care most deeply about and she (Michelle) cares most deeply about is how we treat other people.”

You see for those who pay attention to how he has served as President we already knew what he thought. He has been actively supporting the recognition of equal rights for the gay community throughout his first term. Obama was never evolving personally in the White House. What has happened is Obama finally let his conscious speak on an issue that is divided and contentious because it was becoming humorous to here again that his mind is ‘evolving’ while acting like his mind was settled. Yet there is something powerful about the one occupying the White House to believe it out loud! I wonder if the same wouldn’t be true if more Christian leaders stopped evolving and started speaking.

Obama’s situation is not much different than many Christian leaders throughout the country whose jobs and personal security necessitate keeping the mysterious ‘independents’ and ‘moderates’ more happy with you than the other options. The number of influential pastors of large churches, seminary professors, and denominational leaders who have been walking the ‘evolving’ tight-rope around gay marriage in the church are huge. Just from personal conversations I can think of 15 well known church leaders who would loose their jobs if their actual conviction as a Christian was known. If you ask these individuals who have dedicated their lives to the service of the church what they really believe they are open and affirming to the full inclusion of the LGTBQ community into the church and yet their public stance is ‘evolving.’

Just this past week a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship minister from North Carolina said regarding Amendment One, “It’s sad that the only three people at the church voting against the amendment are the three ordained ministers and the congregation will never know.” That is a sad but all too frequent decision by many.

It is my hope that my Brother in Christ Obama’s risky move to make his personal convictions known will inspire the silent ‘evolving’ leaders in the church to do the same. Maybe then we can end the culture war that is costing the church its integrity with a generation and communicating hatred toward our gay brothers and sisters.

Filed Under: engaging, latest, media, news, politics

Our Double Theology of Debt

May 4, 2012 by Stephen Keating 5 Comments

We all have to pay our debts right? Isn’t that the moral thing to do? This is so self-evidently true to us that it seems ludicrous for anyone to challenge it. But that’s exactly what David Graeber does in his important book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I’ve been doing a series of posts on the book over on my personal blog and Tripp asked me to follow up his post on student loan debt.

Discussions of debt quickly turn into moral arguments and because we have forgotten that interest was a technology created by humans, we forget that there is nothing natural about it. Other cultures have rejected the idea of interest, as shown by the following funny story of the Sufi philosopher Nasruddin:

One day Nasruddin’s neighbor, a notorious miser, came by to announce he was throwing a party for some friends. Could he borrow some of Nasruddin’s pots? Nasruddin didn’t have many but said he was happy to lend whatever he had. The next day the miser returned, carry Nasruddin’s three pots, and one tiny additional one. “What’s that? asked Nasruddin. “Oh, that’s the offspring of the pots. They reproduced during the time they were with me.” Nasruddin shrugged and accepted them, and the miser left happy that he had established a principle of interest. A month later, Nasruddin was throwing a party, and he went over to borrow a dozen pieces of his neighbor’s much more luxurious crockery. The miser complied. Then he waited a day. And then another… On the third day, the miser came by and asked what had happened to his pots. “Oh, them?” Nasurddin said sadly. “It was a terrible tragedy. They died.” ~Quoted from Debt

Why does the morality of debt repayment focus solely on the debtor? Graeber argues that we have a double theology of debt, one for the creditors and one for the debtors. The proponents of this double theology use the economic term “supply-side economics.” This theology/economic theory was taught to me in my Economics 101 class in college and is championed by the religious right. You may balk at the linking of economic theory and theology, but examine this stunning example summarized from George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty:

Gilder’s argument was that those who felt that money could not simply be created were mired in an old-fashioned, godless materialism that did not realize that just as God could create something out of nothing, His greatest gift to humanity was creativity itself, which proceeded in exactly the same way. Investors can indeed create value out of nothing by their willingness to accept the risk entailed in placing their faith in others’ creativity. Rather than seeing the imitation of God’s powers of creation ex nihilo as hubris, Gilder argued that it was precisely what God intended: the creation of money was a gift, a blessing, a channeling of grace; a promise, yes, but not one that can be fulfilled, even if the bonds are contually rolled over, because through faith (in “God we trust” again) their value becomes reality.

With reflections like these, supply-side economics became the de facto theological ideology of the religious right, with Pat Robertson going so far as to declare it as “the first truly divine theory of money-creation.” Within this theology, it is imperative that the debtors must always repay. While the creditors are lauded as God’s instrument for the ex nihilo creation of endless wealth. The “job creators/risk takers” are the saints, while those in debt are the wretched sinners. This theology is so widespread that it has been naturalized in our thinking. It doesn’t even occur to the new atheists to challenge it.

But how did we get to here? This perverse reversal of theology into a means of perpetual bondage for debtors could not be any farther from the liberative texts of the bible. They are unanimous and univocal in their condemnation of all forms interest and differentiating wealth. Jose Porofino Miranda, in Communism and the Bible, says the condemnation of differentiating wealth in the Bible is “so obvious and abundant that it will show us the prodigies of tergiversation (the evasion of clarity) and voluntary blindness that the theologians and exegetes, and even the translators of the Bible, have had to deploy in order to muffle a book whose solitary intent was the change the world and eliminate injustice.”

In that book, Miranda undertakes a detailed examination of the texts, but I want to highlight one important point. Without a single exception, every time that the word for interest is used in the Bible, it is condemned. Deuteronomy 23:19 condemns it three times “You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent.” The universal condemnation of usury is not isolated to Liberation Theologians, but was well-known to the early church. Take for example this excerpt from a sermon by St. Basil from 365 CE:

The Lord gave His own injunction quite plainly in the words, “from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.” But what of the money lover? He sees before him a man under stress of necessity bent to the ground in supplication. He sees him hesitating at no act, no words, of humiliation. He sees him suffering undeserved misfortune, but he is merciless. He does not reckon that he is a fellow-creature. He does not give in to his entreaties. He stands stiff and sour. He is moved by no prayers; his resolution is broken by no tears. He persists in refusal. Then the suppliant mentions interest, and utters the word security. All is changed. The frown is relaxed; with a genial smile he recalls old family connection. Now it is “my friend.” (emphasis added)

Notice how Basil’s moralizing is the direct opposite of today’s, he condemns the one who lends. It only took a short while after the cross-bearers became allied with the cross-builders for the theology to change. The theology of the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and the rest of the bible is one-way: the way of liberation. Interest isn’t natural. It’s evil.

Filed Under: engaging, latest, media, news, politics, public policy

Hell On Earth: A Sex Trafficking Survivor’s Story

May 2, 2012 by Tripp Fuller 5 Comments

*****Warning: this post contains graphic details of a sex trafficking story.*****

This is the testimony of a young woman I met last week on my trip to Tijuana with Centro Romero. She was extremely courageous to share her story with us. The transcript below is translated from her Spanish:

“I was sold to a gentleman from the U.S. by my sister when I was 13 years old. I already had a baby. In the exchange, I was sold under the agreement that he would help me out with my kid because my baby was ill. I ended up being trafficked to Anchorage, Alaska. He basically kidnapped my baby away from me and didn’t allow me to see him. I was in prison, not able to see anyone for a long, long time. At that time, I was forced to have sex with men and women. Obviously, I was aware that my baby was not getting the care that we were promised. Our diet was basically rice and beans and nothing else. At the main market, at least in my case, I was 14, about to be 15, I was sold to have sex with other women.

“So, unfortunately my baby’s condition got worse. He never allowed me to see my baby and my baby was never provided with the medical care he needed, even when he was in the process of dying, he never thought about providing care for my baby. My baby had leukemia at the time, but of course I didn’t know that.

“Probably because of my mothering instinct, one day I decided that I didn’t care what happened, I needed to take care of my baby. So I found a way to escape and to take my baby to a place in which I was pretty sure that he would get the care that he needed. But the problem was that I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t know the area or the town or even where I was. And unfortunately my baby passed away.

“When I ended up getting to a place, before my baby passed away, the people that received me didn’t want to take care of my baby. After the baby passed away, due to the lack of care, I noticed that I suddenly started receiving gifts. As I think about it now, I think they were probably trying to keep my mouth shut because they didn’t want me to denounce them or anything like that.

“After my baby passed away, instead of burying him, they invited me to cremate my baby. It was a tough situation for me because I was only 15, so I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. After my baby was cremated, the only thing that I had to be in touch with what I felt was a part of me was the ashes. Unfortunately, he basically kidnapped the ashes and I was recaptured and put out to have sex once again. I used to cry, just asking him to allow me to touch the ashes of my baby, but he never allowed me to do that.

“One time, after the cremation of my baby, I was forced to have sex with a woman and him, and he was so involved with what was happening that I was able to escape through a window. I was able to make contact with a policeman and they took me to a place where they used to take minors who are in trouble. Because I didn’t know any English, they kept asking me where I was from. They kept me in the shelter for minors for a few months.

“I found out that the man who bought me was 33 years-old, that he had a criminal record as a sex offender, and had been involved with minors in the past. But he, as a predator, kept looking for me. After a few months in the care of the police department, I realized that I was once again pregnant.

“He showed up, presenting himself as a relative. He promised me that he would be gentle with me if I came back to his place. Without the support of the police department, being 15, I didn’t have any option other than to believe in him again. At least during my pregnancy he was very loving. But, after the birth of my baby, as soon as my baby was born, he put me under the “care” of the immigration officers. He told them that I didn’t have the capacity to care for my baby and that my first baby had passed away because I physically abused him.

“I was deported from Anchorage to Tijuana. Even under those conditions, I started working at a bar in Tijuana because I wanted to put some money together for airfare in order to go back to Alaska for my baby. And I ended up going back to Alaska. I was looking for my baby and then my abuser kept telling me not to leave him because he was finally in love with me. He was getting government support because he was a single father. He asked the government to facilitate the process of getting a house for the family in San Diego county. Two months after that, we got a house in San Diego and he moved himself to San Diego, but without me because I had to come back to Tijuana. He promised that he would bring my baby girl to Tijuana so I could see my daughter. But, if I wanted to see her, I had to pay him $100.

“My pain and suffering was just too much, so I decided to give up and think that my baby was dead in the same way that I lost my first child. I decided to stay away from him. Even though being apart from him would hurt me a lot because of my child, I knew that it was the best thing that I could do for me and for her.”

At this point she was overcome and unable to continue the story.

I’ve struggled with what to say to close this post. The hell on earth that this precious young woman experienced is devastating. Unfortunately, there is no simple solution to the problem of sex trafficking. It is a global and complex problem. But I want to issue a challenge to men: We are the primary source of the demand for sex trafficking and we must begin to challenge the male-culture that says that putting others down makes us feel better about ourselves. Every single time that we make a joke about rape, call a girl a slut or a whore, or objectify women through pornography, we contribute to a culture that makes possible the stories like the one above. The fact that we are unaware that there are literally millions of stories like the one above shows how desperately we try to suppress them. If we want to end sex trafficking, we must start with ourselves.

* This is a guest post from Stephen Keating who is covering this sex trafficking conference for HBC. Thanks to Stephen for sharing what he’s learning with us!

Filed Under: engaging, latest, living, news, politics, public policy

The Slave Trade Chain

April 28, 2012 by Tripp Fuller 2 Comments

I emphasized some statistics in the last post, but now I want to share a story. How does a girl become a trafficking victim? Friday afternoon our group from Centro Romero went into Tijuana and visited several different sites. We met a man (I’ve omitted his name for safety) in Tijuana who runs a safe house for girls told us about the economic chain involved. The trafficking occurs along a well-established route:

A large number of victims are taken from communities of extreme poverty in places like Honduras and Guatemala. Traffickers go down into these communities and identify potential children. They approach the mother of the child and say “That’s a beautiful daughter, can I buy her for $100?” Because of the extreme poverty, lack of education, and the dire needs of their large families, the mothers often agree to sell their children (often with the added incentive of violence). Once the traffickers have purchsed the children, they are moved to port towns and then on to warehouses in Chiapas (southern Mexico). In these huge warehouses, there are rows and rows of children with signs hung around their neck with prices. Brothel owners, pimps, and other traffickers go to the warehouse to purchase the children for approximately $200-500. They are then moved from southern Mexico up to border towns like Tijuana. At this point, the children are sold again for $500-2000. In Tijuana, a girl on the street can be propositioned by U.S. “sex tourists” for 10 minutes for $40. A very young girl will go for $200-500, virgins for even higher. Pratically anything you want, if you have the money, you can get. The girls are sold to 10-15 times a day.

Some of the girls are moved from town to town to keep their profits high. Others are moved across the border. Traffickers may connect with Americans and pay them to use their children’s birth certificates to move the trafficked child into America. Once in America, they are sold for approximately $15,000.

This whole process can occur in 15-30 days. Throughout the process, the children are raped and their spirits are broken. They are manipulated into believing that they are worthless. Pictures of their brothers and sisters are shown to them and they are told that If they ever speak out to anyone, their family will be attacked.

The Mexican government estimates that 137,000 children, women, and men are currently caught in this chain. In reality, that number is probably much, much higher.

* This is a guest post from Stephen Keating who is covering this sex trafficking conference for HBC. Thanks to Stephen for sharing what he’s learning with us!

Filed Under: engaging, latest, news, politics, public policy

What Is Sex Trafficking?

April 27, 2012 by Tripp Fuller 2 Comments

This weekend I’m at the Romero Center in sunny San Ysidro, CA. We are just south of San Diego and a 5 minute walk from the Mexican border town of Tijuana. Dr. Carlos J. Correa Bernier, the director of the center, is hosting a Sex Trafficking Consultation and we have an incredible group of participants (just one example: Sally, a retired opthamologist from a UCC church in Laguna Beach who participates in a yearly medical missions trip for a month in El Salvador).

If you’re like me, sex trafficking is something that you may have heard of but are not aware of the extent of the problem. The immersion program at the Romero Center focuses on sexual exploitation on both the Mexican and U.S. sides of the border. We learned today about how the problem of trafficking is shockingly huge. Estimates vary, but anywhere from 12-45 million people are victims of human trafficking each year worldwide. That’s almost 1 person in modern-day slavery for every 1,000 people on the planet. Women, men, and children are trafficked from or within almost every country.

So what is human trafficking? In short, it is the recruiting, harboring, and/or moving of people. Traffickers use force, fraud, or violence to obtain their victims. There are a number of purposes that people are trafficked for, including: involuntary servitude, debt bondage, slavery, and sex. Human trafficking is the third most profitable illegal industry behind the trafficking of drugs and weapons. This is not just a problem “out there” in the ‘third-world’ but it is something that we are tied up in. After Germany, the U.S. is the second largest destination/market for sex slavery in the world. But it’s not just sex, many of the products that we buy in our stories are the result of slave labor (take the slavery footprint quiz).

We have a hard time imagining that there could be such a huge problem, especially within our own borders. Partly, this is because we have bought into the ideology of progress which says that our system is the most efficient that the world has ever seen and things are better than they have ever been. These ideas have been shaken a bit in recent years by the economic downturn, but regardless of how true or untrue our belief in progress is, it makes it very difficult to recognize that slavery is not over. We have a culture-wide denial of the real problems that vulnerable people in our world face.

As people of faith, this should be deeply troubling to us. The book of Amos, one of the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures, begins with a list of nations that God will soon judge, all enemies of the Israelites. It is easy to imagine myself in the crowd as the prophet proclaimed the message. “Yeah God, go get those evil people! All of our enemies are going down!” I cry as Amos lists off offence after offence. As the crowd moves into a frenzy of judgment and condemnation of the pagans, Amos turns the tables: “God says: For the sins of Israel, I will not hold back punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” (2:6) With our insatiable desire for cheap food, cheap clothes, and cheap sex, we have sold the needy for a pair of sandals. How long must the victims wait for us to change our ways?

———-

Tomorrow we’ll be heading into Tijuana to meet and speak to both victims and local activists. Check back in to the blog for more updates and tweet me @stephenmk if you have any questions. This is a guest post from Stephen Keating who is covering this sex trafficking conference for HBC. Thanks to Stephen for sharing what he’s learning with us!

Filed Under: engaging, latest, news, public policy

Secular Scientists…the Present Day Noah!

April 17, 2012 by Tripp Fuller 2 Comments

I am busy editing and reworking my keynote for the Sustainable Faith conference later this week in St. Petersburg Florida. I was going back and forth between making a biblical illusion to either Noah or Job when I read this post by Church historian Bill Leonard. Now that he used it oh so well in this post I guess I will link it and go for Job! If you are local come join us for a conversation on “ecology, incarnation and the interconnectedness.”

As for Noah, Bill Leonard asks a bunch of questions – good ones. Be wise. Listen to his awesome visit to the podcast & go check out his post on Noah.

When did the people of Noah’s day finally realize that what was happening to them was more than just a stationary front? Why do some religious folks take the Noah story literally but resist the possibility of a contemporary global catastrophe, one essentially of human creation?

Is biblical literalism clearer for the past than the present? How many glaciers must collapse and heat waves smolder before we literally read the “signs of the times?”

Wouldn’t it be weird if “secularists” turned out to be the ones who discerned earth’s impending judgment on our lives and lifestyles? What if global warming is true and we don’t have sense enough to see the planet itself as ark?

Like Noah, we still could labor together to find “grace in the eyes of the Lord.” Or just turn up the church air conditioning.

If you wondered exactly what our modern day Noah has to say check out Paul Gilding’s recent TED talk ‘the earth is full.’

Filed Under: engaging, latest, news, politics, public policy, science

Power & Politics in Theology with Laurel Schneider

April 17, 2012 by Tripp Fuller 9 Comments

Why should everyone care about theology? Laurel Schneider joins us this week for some good theo-nerding. We have too much fun tackling just a few non-controversal theological topics like…Politics, Culture, Power, Social Justice, Feminism, Church History, Economics, Freedom, Liberty, Queer Theory, Occupy Wall Street, Ayn Rand, Karl Barth, Capitalism, Democracy, and a few other goodies.

Laurel Schneider is Professor of Theology, Ethics, and Culture at the Chicago School of Theology. If you are wise you have surely gotten yourself a copy of Laurel’s edited volume Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation since both Catherine Keller and John Thatamanil have discussed it on previous episodes. Now you just got check out Laurel’s Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity.

Check out Lauerl’s “It Gets Better” video here.

* SUPPORT the podcast by just getting anything on AMAZON through THIS LINK.We really appreciate your assistance in covering all the hosting fees which went up 20 bucks a month due to the growing Deaconate!

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Filed Under: features, news, philosophy, podcast, politics, pomo, public policy

Hunger Games and a Better Atonement: TNT E-book Extravaganza

March 30, 2012 by Bo Sanders 4 Comments

One Click to the Homebrewed Hotline!

Two of the podcast’s best friends have published E-books in last month and they are both here for a Theology Nerd Throwdown!

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First up, Bo chats with Julie Clawson about the book she wrote about the Hunger Games. (you can find her first podcast appearance here)

Then Tripp and Bo skype with the self-appointed Sr. Deacon – the Doctor! – Tony Jones about a Better Atonement. (you can find his most recent visit here)

Join Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Bernice Powell Jackson, Myself, & others as we explore the connection of ecology, incarnation and the interconnectedness of all. April 19-20 in St. Petersburg, Florida for the A Sustainable Faith Conference. Join me the day before for a cigar, brew, convo. on Hell, & a discount for the event. Sunday I will be preaching at the Missio Dei.

Tripp & Bo are really excited about reading Beyond the Spirit of Empire & Tony Jones is digging The Predicament of Belief by Philip Clayton.

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Filed Under: bible stuff, books, emergent, engaging, latest, media, news, podcast, post-something, thinking, TNT Tagged With: atonement, Julie Clawson, Tony Jones

The Death of the Liberals is killing us

March 23, 2012 by Bo Sanders 17 Comments

In chapter 1 of his book Death of Liberal Class, Chris Hedges sketches both the height of the Liberal era in the 19th century and its cataclysmic implosion with the arrival of World War in the 20th. The disillusionment of human evil, aggression, and suffering deflated the optimism of innate human goodness and inevitable progress that Liberalism is founded upon.

To understand the profound impact of Liberalism’s demise, it helps to make sure one understands the difference between Classical Liberalism and it’s contemporary milquetoast descent that slinks around in straw-man form on our 24 hours news cycle.

Hedges explains (pp. 6-7) “Classical liberalism was formulated largely as a response to the dissolution of feudalism and church authoritarianism. … (It) has, the philosopher John Gray writes, four principle features, or perspectives, which give it a recognizable identity. It is :

individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against any collectivity;
egalitarian, in that it confers on all human beings the same basic moral status;
universalist, affirming the moral unity of the species;
and meliorist, in that it asserts the openended improvability, by use of critical reason, of human life

Both John Cobb (Mainline) and Clayton Crockett (Radical Political Theology) use very similar formulations in their recent Homebrewed podcasts. Cobb, by focusing on the demise of the Mainline and Crocket, by focusing on the Evangelical and Religious Right, articulate the monumental shift in the religious-political landscape in the past century.

The Mainline denominations are in a collapse narrative and it makes perfect sense why when one examines both the way liberal thought partnered with power in the 20th Century and the way that conducted itself (largely) within the shifting landscape of post-war realities at home and globalization abroad.

“In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements, making the liberal class a useful component within the power elite. But the assault by the corporate state on the democratic state has claimed the liberal class as one of its victims…

The inability of the liberal class to acknowledge that corporations have wrested power from the hands of citizens, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have become irrelevant, and that the phrase consent of the governed is meaningless, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality. It has lent its voice to hollow acts of political theater, and the pretense that democratic debate and choice continue to exist.” (pp. 9-10)

We talked yesterday about the fictitious nature of the supposed Left-Right spectrum. For those of us who participate in christ centered communities and organizations, what does this mean? While incomplete, here is my little experiment to come up with a game-plan for a start.

We stop using the label ‘Liberal’ generically for anything that is not Conservative… especially to be dismissive. Liberal is a very specific ethical framework and it takes quite a commitment to liberal. It is not a default position.
We disavow the left-right , conservative-liberal split as farcical. It doesn’t exist. Obama is a Centrist Democrat. Romney is a Centrist Republican. Any idea that Obama is a radical is ridiculous.* We repent of lazy language & thought.
We wake up as the church that the role the Liberals used to play in the system does not function. There is no moderating or buffering presence to bring a corrective to the system. Thus, participating in the system as-it-now-exists will not fix the system. The corporate hold over every aspect of our political system is pervasive.
We step up as the church in the revelation that government is not going to fulfill the expectation to

bring good news to the poor (Economy)
restore sight to the blind (Medical)
release to the captive (Legal)
lift up the broken hearted (Compassion)

The church can do these things! We have deferred to the political system for too long. We have outsourced our responsibility to society but now live with the remains of the bloated carcass Christendom. With the death of the liberal class resistance to corporate rule and unchecked consumerism is impotent. The Citizen’s United ruling is just one step on long trail … but we know where it leads.

There are churches in every community and there may be no greater existing potential than us! ** I know it sounds dreamy, but in the rest of this series I want to flesh it out. By the end, it might not seem as far-fetched as it does right now.

- Bo Sanders

*Wall Street campaign funding, legalizing assassination, and Guantanamo Bay are your first 3 hints.
** The danger of course is that we keep voting based on two issues while turning a blind eye to corporate rule, environmental deregulation, and perpetual war.

Filed Under: engaging, latest, media, news, politics, random, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, church, Citizen's United, Clayton Crockett, democracy, ecology, economy, environment, evangelical, globalization, God, Hedges, jesus, Liberal, liberalism, liberals, Mainline, Obama, radical, Religious Right, War

Is this even Christianity?

Pastors Should Follow Obama & Stop Evolving!

Our Double Theology of Debt

Hell On Earth: A Sex Trafficking Survivor’s Story

The Slave Trade Chain

What Is Sex Trafficking?

Secular Scientists…the Present Day Noah!

Power & Politics in Theology with Laurel Schneider

Hunger Games and a Better Atonement: TNT E-book Extravaganza

The Death of the Liberals is killing us

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