America

Someone once wrote that the greatest argument against Christianity is Christians. Or something very like that. And, particularly in this day’s religious/political climate, one cannot help but feel sympathetic toward the sentiment. I know of no better reason to turn away from Christianity than to take a look at many of those who call themselves Christian and at the institutions and ideas they have supplanted in the place of the true faith, causing it to now loudly proclaim what the faith does not, and never did declare. I’m talking about the religious right, the so-called moral majority, the Evangelicals—or rather, that politically conservative, intolerant, uncharitable, self-interested, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic network that has absconded with the formerly honorable name and turned it into something that seems foul on the tongue. I’m talking about those who equate Donald Trump with Jesus Christ and hail the man as the appointed of God. I’m talking about the charismatics and the TV preachers who pander to superstition and ignorance, who invent fairytales and call them prophesies, who sell the prosperity gospel to a needy and naïve flock and collect the proceeds in plain sight, and ask for more.

Yes, I can see how these things, and more, would constitute a giant flashing neon advertisement against Christianity. Who after all, Christian or non-Christian, knowing the beauty and mildness of love, would want to associate himself with such unlovely company?

Noted Christian apologist and author Ravi Zacharias writes that the one question that has haunted him the most through his ministry was asked by a Hindu acquaintance: “If this conversion you speak of is truly supernatural, then why is it not more evident in the lives of so many Christians that I know?” In other words, a God who is said to transform should produce people with transformed lives. Similarly, Nietzsche said “I might believe in the Redeemer if his followers looked more redeemed”.

Indeed.

When asked ‘Are you a Christian?, one can longer respond with a simple ‘Yes’ answer. Or at least I cannot. One must first determine what is meant by Christian, which in today’s society, both at home and abroad, will probably mean that you have been pegged as one of those unkind, judgmental sorts of people who have a problem with everybody other than themselves. So, it requires a bit of a theology lesson from the outset, such that you can explain that the Christianity to which you have been called has nothing whatever to do with the profoundly unpleasant doctrine of prejudice, exclusion and intolerance that you are hearing from those who would seem to represent the faith in Protestant America—folks like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell and Joel Osteen and Jesse Duplantis and all their ilk. In other words, Christianity has to do with Christ, who has nothing, really, to do with many of those who are calling themselves his followers these days.

We might well say the same thing about America and Americans in our time—that is, that the most un-American thing about America is the Americans themselves. The nation seems to have wandered far astray from its founding principles and affections and become quite the obverse of what it was intended to be. Rather than a nation committed to liberty, of our own and for others, and to a cooperative relationship with likeminded nations of the world, we have become divisive and untrustworthy, the me-first nation, withdrawing from our natural role in cooperative concerns such as global warming and universal human rights.

As with religion, I must now explain what kind of American I am and what kind I am not. I must explain that what is being called America on many tongues is not America at all—not as I have known it for the last 64 years. It is almost as if people in foreign countries (such as the one I live in) know more about what America is supposed to represent than Americans themselves know any longer. 

And that is pretty sad.