[Mb-civic] Act Like Christians

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Act Like Christians
By Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation

Posted 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. 

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20507/
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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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