[Mb-civic] Act Like Christians

Tue Nov 16 18:12:18 PST 2004

Act Like Christians

By Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation
 Posted on November 16, 2004, Printed on November 16, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20507/

Of all the loathsome spectacles we've endured since Nov. 2  the
vampire-like gloating of CNN commentator Robert Novak, Bush embracing his
"mandate"  none are more repulsive than that of Democrats conceding the
"moral values" edge to the party that brought us Abu Ghraib. The cries for
Democrats to overcome their "out-of-touch-ness" and embrace the predominant
faith all dodge the full horror of the situation: A criminal has been
enabled to continue his bloody work with the help, in no small part, of
self-identified Christians.

With their craven, breast-beating response to Bush's electoral triumph,
leading Democrats only demonstrate how out of touch they really are with the
religious transformation of America. Where secular-type liberals and
centrists go wrong is in categorizing religion as a form of "irrationality,"
akin to spirituality, sports mania and emotion generally. They fail to see
that the current "Christianization" of red-state America bears no
resemblance to the Great Revival of the early 19th century, an ecstatic
movement that filled the fields of Virginia with the rolling, shrieking and
jerking bodies of the revived. In contrast, today's right-leaning Christian
churches represent a coldly Calvinist tradition in which even speaking in
tongues, if it occurs at all, has been increasingly routinized and
restricted to the pastor. What these churches have to offer, in addition to
intangibles like eternal salvation, is concrete, material assistance. They
have become an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not only on
"faith" but also on the loyalty of the grateful recipients.

Drive out from Washington to the Virginia suburbs, for example, and you'll
find the McLean Bible Church, spiritual home of Sen. James Inhofe and other
prominent right-wingers, still hopping on a weekday night. Dozens of
families and teenagers enjoy a low-priced dinner in the cafeteria; a hundred
unemployed people meet for prayer and job tips at the "Career Ministry";
divorced and abused women gather in support groups. Among its many services,
MBC distributes free clothing to 10,000 poor people a year, helped start an
inner-city ministry for at-risk youth in D.C. and operates a "special needs"
ministry for disabled children.

MBC is a mega-church with a parking garage that could serve a medium-sized
airport, but many smaller evangelical churches offer a similar array of
services  childcare, after-school programs, ESL lessons, help in finding a
job, not to mention the occasional cash handout. A woman I met in
Minneapolis gave me her strategy for surviving bouts of destitution: "First,
you find a church." A trailer park dweller in Grand Rapids told me that he
often turned to his church for help with the rent. Got a drinking problem, a
vicious spouse, a wayward child, a bill due? Find a church. The closest
analogy to America's bureaucratized evangelical movement is Hamas, which
draws in poverty-stricken Palestinians through its own miniature welfare
state.

Nor is the local business elite neglected by the evangelicals. Throughout
the red states  and increasingly the blue ones too  evangelical churches
are vital centers of "networking," where the carwash owner can schmooze with
the bank's loan officer. Some churches offer regular Christian businessmen's
"fellowship lunches," where religious testimonies are given and business
cards traded, along with jokes aimed at Democrats and gays.

Mainstream, even liberal, churches also provide a range of services, from
soup kitchens to support groups. What makes the typical evangelicals' social
welfare efforts sinister is their implicit  and sometimes not so implicit 
linkage to a program for the destruction of public and secular services.
This year the connecting code words were "abortion" and "gay marriage": To
vote for the candidate who opposed these supposed moral atrocities, as the
Christian Coalition and so many churches strongly advised, was to vote
against public housing subsidies, childcare and expanded public forms of
health insurance. While Hamas operates in a nonexistent welfare state, the
Christian right advances by attacking the existing one.

Of course, Bush's faith-based social welfare strategy only accelerates the
downward spiral toward theocracy. Not only do the right-leaning evangelical
churches offer their own, shamelessly proselytizing social services; not
only do they attack candidates who favor expanded public services  but they
stand to gain public money by doing so. It is this dangerous positive
feedback loop, and not any new spiritual or moral dimension of American
life, that the Democrats have failed to comprehend: The evangelical
church-based welfare system is being fed by the deliberate destruction of
the secular welfare state.

In the aftermath of election 2004, centrist Democrats should not be flirting
with faith but re-examining their affinity for candidates too mumble-mouthed
and compromised to articulate poverty and war as the urgent moral issues
they are. Jesus is on our side here, and secular liberals should not be
afraid to invoke him. Policies of pre-emptive war and the upward
redistribution of wealth are inversions of the Judeo-Christian ethic, which
is for the most part silent, or mysteriously cryptic, on gays and abortion.
At the very least, we need a firm commitment to public forms of childcare,
healthcare, housing and education  for people of all faiths and no faith at
all. Secondly, progressives should perhaps rethink their own disdain for
service-based outreach programs. Once it was the left that provided
"alternative services" in the form of free clinics, women's health centers,
food co-ops and inner-city multi-service storefronts. Enterprises like these
are not substitutes for an adequate public welfare state, but they can
become the springboards from which to demand one.

One last lesson from the Christians  the ancient, original ones, that is.
Theirs is the story of how a steadfast and heroic moral minority undermined
the world's greatest empire and eventually came to power. Faced with
relentless and spectacular forms of repression, they kept on meeting over
their potluck dinners (the origins of later communion rituals),
proselytizing and bearing witness wherever they could. For the next four
years and well beyond, liberals and progressives will need to emulate these
original Christians, who stood against imperial Rome with their bodies,
their hearts and their souls.