I'm doing this series of posts about Christian cultural involvement and the religious right in particular, and they were spurred on by this comment from Chad on a prior post:
I am not a christian (or am a severely lapsed one, however you wish to view that) and I must say that the Religious Right is the pre-emminant reason for this. I do believe in a God, but I can no longer believe in the god of FotF, and in America, at least, the Religious-Right-Arm of the GOP seems to be the modern view of that religion.In further comments on a subsequent post, Chad mentions some things that would indicate that the religious right is dominating the political landscape and Jeremy counters that this is not the case. Without choosing sides in that debate I think it is fair to say that there is a difference in perception here and that raises an important issue.
If the old adage is true that "possession is 9/10 of the law," then it is similarly true that "perception is 9/10 of reality." (That last sentence is a revision based on a helpful comment that David Opderbeck gave). Perception is everything and though I may disagree with a good many of Chad's conclusions I think it is useful to try to understand how he has come to these conclusions. To understand this we need to understand how Christians interface with the world.
The Christian community is a distinct community within the world. We are a nation within the nations, complete with a constitution (the Bible), a form of government in the church, and a culture that can be derived from biblical principles.
However, we are not a closed community – we do interface with the world. I contend that it is the way we interface with the world that is the tricky thing in all of this talk about Christians, the religious right, and the GOP.
We have something today that earlier generations of Christians didn’t have – mass media. There has always been media, but it has not been the mass media of today. In times past, Christians interfaced with local communities simply by living “Christianly” in those communities. Christians interacted with their non-Christian neighbors on a daily basis and if they were living "Christianly," then their love, good deeds, service and devotion became what the world saw.
Things are different today. At least here in America, maybe around the world, we are not a nation of communities, we are a nation of individuals. We isolate ourselves from the people around us through our cars, our homes and our entertainment.
To compound matters, it is a well known fact that for most of the 20th century Christians self-consciously withdrew from the world. We left the world and built our own little Christian universe (something like the Bizarro World of the Superheroes) complete with Shepherd's Guides to steer us to only "Christian" businesses, and Christian radio stations, Christian TV stations, Christian bookstores, Christian colleges and universities, Christian cruises and what-not.
This creeping cultural isolationism, coupled with Christian's self-conscious withdrawal from the world have worked together to insure that Christians by and large have no real interface with the world.
So, we interface with the world through the mass media. The problem this poses for Christians is that the media gravitates to that which is dramatic and spectacular. As James Davison Hunter points out in his book “Culture Wars,” the media gravitates to the extremists in any issue. Also, its the "hot issues" that make the news and that get movies made about them. Politics is always the hottest issue, except when Madonna, Britney, Justin or Janet does something outrageous.
So, when Christians make it into the media it is almost always in regard to one of those things. The meat and potatoes of Christianity are our acts of worship and devotion to Christ and love and service to man, but those things really aren't news. I believe that it is of monumental significance that millions of Christians around the globe gather together for worship on any given Sunday - that is of greater consequence in the divine economy than all of the meetings of any congress or parliament. I believe that a Christian's view on the Trinity, or the doctrine of justification, or the two natures of Christ is of such far greater importance than his position on homosexual marriage, gun control, or the war, that the former things dwarf the latter. I believe that one's simple devotion to their family, and love and service to their neighbor is of far greater consequence than their participation in political causes.
I am not in any way advocating Christian withdrawal from politics; I am simply saying that that which is most essential to Christianity is not something that can be captured by the media. In fact, Jesus warned us against performing acts of righteousness to be seen by men (media).
So, because of the modern Christian withdrawal from the community life, the only time that people see Christians is when they appear in the media to speak out on a political issue or to protest the latest "abomination" by a singer. Thus, when the world sees Christians what they see is people who are defined by their a) political views, and b) reactionary responses.
I also think it is a little too simplistic to accuse the media of bias against Christians and leave it at that. I think you can make a case that the media misunderstands Christians and is often biased against Christians. But whose fault is that? If we have withdrawn from the world so that the only time the media sees us is when we pop out of our gopher holes to react, protest and talk politics, are they to blame for thinking of us as reactionaries with a political agenda?
The difficult thing in all of this for me is that I genuinely do believe that Christians should have a place at the table in political discussions and that we can and should speak to important cultural issues. But I do think we have gone about it unwisely, at least since the 1980's.
I am working on another post wherein I will contend that the religious right played a political endgame too early back in the 80's and 90's. They went for political power and the media was one of the main vehicles for this. By virtue of their withdrawal from politics in the 20th century, Christians had lost their political capital. There were few, if any great Christian statesmen walking the halls of Congress because for half a century Christians had been told that politics was a worldly calling that they ought not to participate in. There were few on the inside who could bring a Christian worldview to bear on the issues of the day.
Into this vacuum stepped two preachers (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson) and a child psychologist (James Dobson) who would lead the charge on the centers of cultural influence in Washington, New York and LA. Contrary to many outside the church I think these are all three good men. I don't agree with many of their theological positions and methods, but I think they are brothers who are sincerely seeking to honor Christ. But they came as outsiders and protesters with a political agenda in the name of Christ. So, they became the most prominent Christians in the media, and thus in the eyes of the world outside the church. And though they wouldn't have intended this (or, I hope they wouldn't have attended this), their faith became wedded with their political positions. A further consequence of this is that, right or wrong, the world looked at them as the most prominent spokesmen for Christendom and concluded that, for conservative evangelicals, their faith was inextricably interwoven with partisan politics.
What would I do different, you ask? I don't fault Dobson, Robertson and Falwell for going public with their faith in the media nor do I fault them for being concerned about politics. I wish they hadn't used so much war talk, but in principle, going public is not wrong. I think there is a sense in which we haven't gone public enough with our faith and another sense in which we have gone public in a "less than prudent" manner.
In saying that we haven't gone public enough with our faith I am suggesting that it is really only those Christians who are concerned with great cultural issues who have gone public. Those who aren't as hot and bothered by politics and the like (and I count myself as one of them) have remained isolated from the culture.
But, in another sense, our going public, the way we have done so in the media, hasn't been prudent. What I mean is that, although not every Christian has gone public, most of those who have have done so by going forth in the aforementioned protest movement. Whereas before I mentioned how we had lost our cultural capital through our withdrawal, by going public in this manner we lost our cultural good will.
The early Christians in the Roman Empire had a public faith. But the public aspect of their faith, what the world saw, was love and good deeds. They were salt and light in the best sense of the word. Not having access to the power brokers of the world all they could do was serve the poor, care for the needy, bury the dead, rescue discarded children and things like this. In doing so, they built up a tremendous bank of good will so that, even though the government persecuted them, they basically won the hearts of the populace.
Whatever re-engagement we had with society through the influence of the religious right was not financed by the bank of cultural good will. One moment we were uninvolved, the next moment we were involved as aggressors and protesters. In our country we have something the early Christians didn't - a Democratic form of government. If we were to win the hearts of the populace in our country, it could influence the government, whereas this was much harder in ancient Rome. In the 80's and 90's we went straight for governmental influence without building the cultural good will that could have undergirded our political positions. I think we assumed we had the cultural good will, but we didn't fully reckon with great damage our isolationism had done to that sense of good will.
So, when I say we haven't gone public enough I am simply saying that we haven't, en masse, engaged our communities through the good deeds that will cause our communities to praise our Father in heaven.
To summarize, we can't rely on the mass media to present our public face to the world. Even when we have the best of motives, the media only lends itself to a one-dimensional portrayal of Christians. We've got to "go public" in other dimensions - building cultural capital through pursuing excellence in every sphere of culture rather than withdrawing into our own safe, evangelical enclaves. And we've got to "go public" by letting our light shine in such a way that others may see our "good deeds" (not protests and reactionary movements) and praise our Father in heaven.
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