by Bruce Bawer
Though they may occasionally sermonize, moreover, about the excesses of fundamentalism, such ministers and members of their flocks have almost invariably failed to connect their moral and social concerns explicitly and publicly with their faith. Ralph Reed himself has pointed out this failure. "The reason religious conservatives have risen as an effective political movement in recent years," he writes, "is that the left dropped its use of religious and moral language in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The religious left lost its soul, and we stepped into the vacuum." There is a great deal of truth here—not only about the Left but about the center. Liberalism once looked for inspiration and leadership to religious figures like Rauschenbusch and Fosdick (and, more recently, Martin Luther King); today, liberal Christians are usually made to feel that if they spoke openly of their faith in political contexts, it might give offense to non-Christians or invite mockery. Though many active liberals today are Christians whose activism is motivated by their faith, such people do not usually bring their faith openly into the public square.
This has, to be sure, begun to change. Recently a group of mainstream Christian and Jewish leaders calling themselves the Interfaith Alliance have begun to speak up against the Christian Coalition agenda. Founded in 1984 as a grassroots movement, the Interfaith Alliance has sought to challenge the Christian Coalition by, among other things, mailing out its own voter guides, which feature candidates' positions on such issues as health care and tobacco subsidies. In a mid-1995 press conference taking exception to the "Contract with the American Family," many of the religious figures associated with the Interfaith Alliance—among them Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Unitarian clergy, as well as Reform Jews—spoke eloquently about the obligation of religious institutions to the helpless, suffering, and oppressed. Yet the press conference had little clout: It was televised after midnight on C-SPAN, was not covered widely in the papers (with the notable exception of an approving Frank Rich column in the New York Times), and received no attention on the network news programs.
What's more, the conspicuous presence of representatives of nonreli-gious liberal groups like the People for the American Way blunted the focus on faith as the basis for a dissenting response to the Religious Right; in the end, the conference came off less as a faith-motivated statement by religious people than as a parade of liberals mouthing political cliches.
The same unfortunate strategy was still being pursued in March 1997, when the Interfaith Alliance sent out a fund-raising letter signed by Walter Cronkite and attacking the Christian Coalition as a "radical movement." The selection for this purpose of Cronkite—a television journalist who has never been known for his religious beliefs, if any, and who for many conservatives, indeed, is the very personification of the secular liberal media—only reinforced the impression that the Interfaith Alliance was pursuing familiar secular-liberal approaches rather than trying to stir the spirits of people of faith.
Another grassroots organization, Call to Renewal, was founded in 1995 by the liberal evangelical minister Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners. Like Interfaith Alliance, Call to Renewal brings Christian clergy together with leaders of other religions and with secular liberals in support of a liberal social and economic agenda. So far it is not clear how effective a counterweight Call to Renewal will prove to be. One problem is that its familiar Great Society rhetoric about racism and poverty fails to answer conservative arguments that some entitlement programs do more harm than good; another problem is that Call to Renewal pragmatically refuses to speak up emphatically for that group of Americans—namely gays—that has been most consistently reviled by the Religious Right. It is to be hoped that Interfaith Alliance or Call to Renewal will develop into an effective movement to promote a genuine Church of Love, but, given the secular influence in both groups, the tiredness of much of their political rhetoric, and their reluctance to address homophobia head-on, it is hard to see how either group, without serious changes in tone and emphasis, can reasonably be expected to inspire a broad cross-section of nonlegalistic Christians to weigh in publicly against the Religious Right and for the Church of Love.
Love. In early 1996, in preparation for an article about the then-pending heresy trial of Episcopal Bishop Walter Righter, who had been charged with ordaining a sexually active homosexual, I placed calls to a couple of the "presenters," the bishops who had brought the charges against Righter. They were downright hostile. I don't know whether they knew I was gay, but perhaps that didn't matter: They knew I was writing for the New York Times, and that may have been bad enough. When one of them quoted scripture to me in defense of the heresy charge, I asked if he believed that every word in the Bible was literally true. He shot back, perplexingly, "Is every word in the New York Times true?"
These bishops' rancor, their fierce determination to cling to manifest untruths about the nature of sexual orientation, and their enthusiasm for law, dogma, and institutional order, made clear their allegiance to the Church of Law. When the time came for me to travel to Wilmington, Delaware, for the pretrial hearing I didn't look forward to it. Talking on the phone with these mean-spirited bishops was unpleasant enough. What would it be like to sit in a cathedral meeting hall surrounded by dozens of them, and be obliged as a journalist to keep my feelings to myself?
On the morning of the hearing I took the elevator down to the lobby of my hotel and asked for a cab. Another hotel guest, a distinguished-looking man of about sixty-five, was also heading for the cathedral. So when a cab came, we shared it. As we drove off, we introduced ourselves. I recognized his name. He was a theology professor who had written an essay that I'd read in which he declared that homosexual orientation was a sign of the Fall. In other words, something that is intrinsic to my identity and to the way I experience love is, in his view, not a reflection of God's love but the very opposite of that. We made polite small talk.
At the cathedral I took my seat in the press section of the large meeting hall. In front of me two men were sitting together, one with a clerical collar and the other with a briefcase on his lap. It turned out to be full of propaganda against the accused, which he shoved at reporters enthusiastically. Across the aisle, a couple of the presenters sat surrounded by their allies. I looked at them, trying to find something in their faces that would help me understand their devotion to their cause.
During the breaks we mingled. It was not a situation that I had looked forward to. And yet I felt weirdly exhilarated. At the end of the day, when the head of the court asked us to stand and pray, I did so. I stood and bowed my head and closed my eyes and prayed in the midst of these people who considered my life, my identity, an abomination. And I prayed for them. And it was then, as I stood there praying, that I realized why I felt so joyful: It was because I knew that what these people thought about me ultimately didn't matter. What they did, ultimately didn't matter. I knew, not only in an abstract intellectual sense, but with all my heart and soul and strength, that however hard they tried, they could not separate me from the love of God.
"Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." Saint Paul, whose pronouncements are not always perfectly consistent with the spirit of the gospel, was never closer to its core than when he wrote these words to a group of outcasts who worshipped together in catacombs in the capital of the known world. And yet the history of Christianity since then has been, to an appalling extent, a history of one group of self-identified Christians after another bringing charges, condemning, and doing their damnedest to separate other people from the love of God. Many of the early church fathers declared one another heretics, because they disagreed over abstruse doctrinal points that today can seem entirely semantic. In the Middle Ages, Crusaders slaughtered countless Moslems because they didn't accept Christ as their savior. The Inquisition did the same thing to the Jews. In later centurie
s, Protestants did it to Catholics, and Catholics to Protestants. Today, millions of legalistic Christians claim that if you don't read the Bible the way they do, you aren't a true Christian at all. Over the centuries, those who have preached and dreamed and served and longed for a true Church of Love have found themselves challenged, disfellowshipped, tried, stoned, crucified by those whose highest loyalty is to the Church of Law.
When you examine the historical record, in fact, it's miraculous that the real message of Jesus wasn't washed away centuries ago in the rivers of blood shed in his name. It's miraculous that when Francis of Assisi came along and lived his life in a truly Christlike way, people around Italy, even at the Vatican, actually recognized him as a saint—eventually. They even recognized that one of the saintly things he did was to walk into that mosque in Egypt, to pray there with a Moslem, and to say to him, "God is everywhere." For Francis, God's love was a palpable fact and a source of joy. So full was he of that joy, and so eager to share it with the world, that he preached the good news of God's love to everyone who would listen, even birds and animals. But for some Christians—many of whom, curiously enough, think of themselves as evangelicals—God's love just isn't any fun unless you can find somebody else to deny it to.
Of course Paul's Epistles contain other lines, too, including passages routinely cited in support of slavery, female submission, and the claim that being gay is "unnatural." All too often Saul the Pharisee, the upholder of law and the reviler of all things carnal, gets in the way of Paul the Apostle, who knew that love was higher than the law, and the spirit not hostile to the flesh. Ultimately, which of these men you choose to listen to—Saul or Paul—depends on which of them reflects your sense of what Jesus is about. Is Jesus about enforcing rules that deny equality, freedom, and personal integrity to a considerable proportion of the creatures God made in his image? Or is he about love?
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind," Jesus said. "And love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." The thrust here is not that love liberates us from law—it's that Christian loving can be far more difficult than obeying the law, and can sometimes compel us to set the law aside. To abide in the love of Christ is a calling that challenges us in a profound and mysterious way that the black-and-white regulations of Leviticus do not. And it's a calling that tells us in our hearts that nothing is more unchristian than saying to someone else, or believing of someone else, that we're loved and they're not.
Why, after all, do—should—we become Christians? Because we think God is going to love us more than he loves non-Christians, and will give us a ticket to eternity that he denies to them? Because we think he'll give us everything we want and solve our problems exactly the way we want him to? No. We become Christians because we can't help becoming Christians—because we've fallen helplessly in love with what Jesus is about. We become Christians knowing that God loves non-Christians every bit as much as he loves us and knowing that in our baptismal covenant we promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons and to respect the dignity of every human being. We become Christians knowing that some of the most Christlike people in our society are atheists and that some people who do call themselves Christians have made the term a synonym for horrible things. We become Christians knowing what a lie it is to suggest that any of us is a model of Christian love. We become Christians knowing that even if we're sinful, God will love us and forgive us—but precisely because we do know that, we struggle not to be sinful. And we struggle, and struggle, and struggle.
And, like Paul, we evangelize—we spread the good news of God's love. We don't do this by buttonholing people with pamphlets warning of hellfire. We don't do it by becoming Bible-thumping missionaries. We do it by loving. Loving. When on May 15,1996, the Episcopal Church's Court for the Trial of a Bishop dismissed the charges against Bishop Righter and proclaimed that no "core doctrine" of the church forbids ordaining people in committed same-sex relationships, it marked a small step toward an American church that is truly about love and not power, a church that does not reject the commandments of God in favor of the traditions of men, a church in which there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, gay or straight. But the struggle continues. On the day before the charges were dismissed, I received a phone call from a newly out friend of mine, a young man of seventeen who lives in a tiny Indiana town. He told me that his mother, who was raised in a conservative Lutheran family, had ordered him out of the house that morning, saying that his homosexuality was against her religion. Falling to the floor and clinging to her ankles, he begged her not to throw him out. He cried, "You have to love me." She replied, "Unless you change, you're going to hell." Eventually, in order to be allowed to stay at home for another year and finish high school, he had to promise to drop his gay friends and never again speak of being gay. His mother gave him one last brief phone call to me. This was it.
"What does her religion say about love?" I asked him.
"I don't know," he replied flatly and defeatedly, "and I don't care."
I wanted to say more to him about God. I wanted to tell him that it was for people like him that Jesus had conducted his ministry and gone to the cross. "I give you a new commandment: Love one another," Jesus said. "As I have loved you, so you are to love one another." Jesus came to tell his disciples "you are loved," not "you are going to hell." But in the home of that boy's parents, God is a trump card for bigotry. How do you talk about God to somebody who thinks his only hope lies in getting far away from people who talk about God, and who has to get off the phone in five minutes? All you can do is give him love. All you can do is assure him that you care about him and are there for him, and pray that the Holy Spirit will help him to discern, to accept, and to return that higher, all-subsuming love that no one can take away from him. That, in this world, is our job as Christians.
Legalistic churches do have one lesson to teach nonlegalistic churches: a lesson about evil. The fact is that most churches that seek to be Churches of Love need to acknowledge evil more often and more emphatically than they do. One appeal of the legalistic church for people who have difficult lives is that it offers a clear answer to the question of why such difficulty exists: It's because of the Devil, and because of certain groups of people (such as homosexuals, foreigners, and university professors) who are of the Devil. Some mainline Protestant ministers who preach a God of love, by contrast, fail in their preaching not only to account for the existence of evil but also sometimes even to acknowledge its power, its horror, its scope. Unless one is a privileged person who has had a very fortunate life, one will eventually find such preaching inadequate to one's situation. Though one can scarcely expect the mainline churches to pull out of a hat a thoroughly satisfying answer to the age-old problem of evil, there is certainly room for more recognition of its reality.
What mainline Protestants need not do, in their attempts to make the church of tomorrow less a Church of Law and more a Church of Love, is to feel that they must dismiss theological traditions entirely and pluck new doctrinal formulations out of thin air. On the contrary, both the Anglican and the Baptist heritages, to name two, offer strong foundations for a twenty-first-century Church of Love that honors reason, conscience, and experience. In a sense these two very different traditions—one of which originated in a rebellion against the other— are perfectly complementary: While the liturgical majesty, theological sophistication, and homiletical polish of the finest Anglican churches come together to convey a powerful sense of God's transcendence and grandeur, Baptist churches, at their best, achieve in their services a simplicity, urgency, and intimacy of worship that communicate with zeal and conviction the immanence of God and the equality of all human beings before their Maker. The two traditions may be understood as encapsulating the two halves of the Great Commandment: Love God and love your neighbor. Both traditions place great importance on conscience. Too often in the mainline churches, one runs
across the unfortunate attitude that because God loves us no matter what we do, it doesn't matter what we do. The answer to that problem is not more legalism, more institutional control over individual thought and action, but more emphasis on individual conscience—and I mean conscience understood not as a civil right but as a sacred responsibility.
There is also a need for greater emphasis on spirituality. Contemporary American experience seems almost to have been consciously designed in such a way as to shut the spiritual out of our lives. Many of us keep a television on constantly to avoid the silence—to drown out the still, small voice. We are used to having things handed to us neatly—food processed, illness and death sanitized, all uncomfortable aspects of reality removed from our sight so that we don't have to think about them. We exaggerate the value of material possessions grotesquely, and in the name of prosperity and convenience rob ourselves of beauty by dotting the landscape with mile after mile of strip malls and fast-food outlets. It is no wonder that traditional liturgical churches make many Americans uncomfortable: Such churches make them realize, on some level, how far removed their lives really are from the truly spiritual. Naturally millions of Americans respond more enthusiastically to mall churches and to The 700 Club—for they present religion as another consumer item, and sell faith like a can of spray-on hair. And their theology appeals to the American sense of competitiveness, the need to have a bigger house or a nicer car than one's neighbor: Ha, you're going to spend eternity in a lake of fire and I'll be at the right hand of God!