Digging deeper into our religious roots

I've received a lot of personal response to my last post on whether the US is a Christian Nation (it's not), most of it positive, and even the negative has been civil, which I appreciate.  Most of those that disagree go back further in the nation's history to the Puritan immigrants who landed in New England.  My understanding of the nature of the Puritan settlements doesn't change my opinion.  I can agree that the Puritans were a religious people, but not necessarily Christian in nature.
We've all heard that the Puritans fled England because "religious persecution" but that persecution was instigated by the Puritans' persecution of anyone who wasn't of their mindset.  Yes, the Puritans were fundamentalists who had decided that everyone but them was destined for Hell.  Even today that ends to piss people off.  
Of course, it is also not true that the Puritans fled England.  It was more like they were invited to leave.  there was a great deal of rejoicing in English government when they left because they no long had to spend resources protecting them from the angry mobs that wanted to do them in.  The Puritans just wore out any goodwill that might have existed for them in their home country.  So they left... for Holland.
Yep, the Puritans actually took up residence in the land of wooden shoes and windmills for a decade where they continued to push their legalistic beliefs on the Dutch.  Their new countrymen didn't really complain much (the Dutch are a quiet bunch) because they were an extremely tolerant society.  And that really ticked off the Puritans.  After 11 years, they decided that the influence of tolerance was infecting their children.  They needed to go elsewhere, and quick.  But they couldn't go back the England... especially because England didn't want them.  
So with the help of both Dutch and English government officials, the Mayflower became made available for the Dutch Puritans and those that had remained in England to take them to the New World.
What is really strange about this is that one of the leaders of this group, Roger Williams, preached against what he called  the "enforced unformity of religion" in the Church of England, and when they established themselves in the American colonies, they did exactly the same thing.  
When I look at our society today, I can see that tradition in spades.  Everyone is absolutely sure that there way is the right way.  We have entire broadcast networks dedicated to one view of the world over another.  If you want to say that America is a religious nation, then I can completely agree with you.  It's hard to find someone who isn't religious about something, even if it's being religious against religion.  That is what is both very right and very wrong about America.
But if you want this nation to be considered Christian, then you are going to have to abandon a strong focus on whether something is a sin or if something is sinful.  For this nation to become Christian we are going to have to agree that Jesus Christ died to eliminate sin past, present and future.  It's not about who is wrong or right.  It's about who God loves.  And He loves us all, no matter what.  He paid too high a price to have that fact adulterated.

If not a Christian nation, then what?

Last week I wrote about the myth of the US as a Christian nation based on the religious beliefs of the founding fathers. Since I debunked that idea I've been considering what the founders actually gave us, and I have good news, bad news and, depending on your position, really bad news.

The good news is that what they gave us is a tradition of intolerance for intolerance. Say what you want about the Enlightenment, it opened up a lot of doors for discussion. you could believe practically anything you want and talk about it openly. And they did. Without TV and movies, entertainment often consisted of attending lectures on unpopular subjects. Easy access to printing technology (the internet of the 17th to early 20th centuries) made it possible for the most fringe elements of society to get their opinion out. Everyone had an opportunity to freely state what was on their mind.

The bad news is that, while they fully embraced freedom of speech, they didn't much care for the idea of freedom of responsibility for what you say. If you said something unpopular and got a lot of flack for it...even the occasional punch in the nose to the extreme response of a challenge to a duel, well that's what you get. The freedom to be angry at someone for what they said was as acceptable as the freedom to say it.

Today, we don't much like the idea of having to take any kind of flack for what we say. Conservatives were appalled when Democrat congressmen booed George Bush during a state of the union address (which included Nancy Pelosi), and liberals got all huffy (including Nancy Pelosi) when a lone congressman catcalled Barack Obama. But rude reactions to a president are well in keeping with the tradition of our founders. We like to call for a "return to civility" but there never was any when it came to opinion in this country. The only thing that is different now is we are calling for punishment for anyone who disagrees with us.

When I stated last week that the founders of this country were, by and large, not Christian, I did not mean to imply that we religious people in this country are not following their example. One of the primary products of the Age of Enlightenment was the complete abandonment of the doctrine of grace that came out of the Reformation.

"Enlightened" people of the 17th and 18th centuries were all about personal accomplishment and achieving good works. They were not into forgiveness. Washington, Jefferson and Adams took grudges to the grave and it gnawed on them to their deathbed. Alexander Hamilton died in a duel because he could not forgive Aaron Burr.

That's the really bad news is that most Christians in the US, be they liberal or conservative, still follow that example. We talk about grace as a good thing, but don't cross us, especially politically. And for heavens sake, make sure you toe the line in conversation in church. There is no intolerance for intolerance and there is no grace for the "sinner" in our midst.

And that's something we all need to work on

Picking up the pieces and putting something together

The California Supreme Court today upheld the constitutionality of Proposition 8 (called by some to be the Defense of Marriage Amendent, and other the Anti-Gay Marriage act).  The rhetoric on both sides is amping up, but I would like to submit a third option.

Let's drop the whole issue of marriage and start considering the concept of legal civil unions.

As we've seen, the faith community is pretty adamant about the theological concept of marriage and as long as the gay community continues to fight to apply that term to its unions, they will receive significant opposition to attaining equal rights in their unions.  In many countries around the world, most specifically in Europe, the government recognizes "civil unions" on the same level as traditional marriage.  In doing so, those countries have overcome any opposition from the faith community.  They may not like it, but they are willing to accept it.

Likewise, in California, polls have shown that the clear majority of voters would accept equal treatment between marriage and civil unions as long as the term remain separate.

Now we can start picking nits with a "separate but equal" argument but we have to ask, are we trying to get equal treatment under the law or legally imposed approval of a lifestyle.  If you are going for the former,  you have an easy path in front of you.  If you want the latter, get ready to divide our communities even more.

People of faith who were on the Pro Prop 8 side need to think about this as well.  You need to ask yourselves if you want to maintain the integrity of your theological terms, or do you want to impose a theocratic position on people who have not freely chosen your faith.

To me, it's a no brainer.  Let's start working this out.

Getting the job done

As I pointed out previously, the controversy over gay marriage in the US, especially in California, has isolated the faith community from those that community wants to reach. The gay population, in particular, will have nothing to do with the evangelical churches and have virtually closed their minds to the potential of ever joining that community, regardless of what any evangelical Christian might say.

And that's good news. Evangelicals, for most of the past 100 years, have relied on government to enforce its view of morality. They've done it through blue laws that hampered commerce on Sundays (except for restaurants that evangelicals like to visit for lunch after church). The laws sought by evangelicals are designed to control lifestyle choices that evangelicals look down on and generally avoid by practice, like alcohol and drug use, pornography, prostitution and, of course, homosexual practices. These are the bad sins. For the latter they like to point to Romans 1:27 as the justification for that point of view. But they conveniently look away from Romans 1:29-32. That passage points out that those that practice envy, strife, deceit and malice, gossips, betrayal, bullying and boasting are guilty of the same "sin" hoomosexuality.

Now of course we're not going to push for laws for those things...because we haven't been able to stop doing them. After all, gossip is part of our human nature, isn't it? It's not a choice, is it?

OK, I'm getting snarky here. The point is that we Christians have a responsibility to be examples, not sources of legislative direction. Jesus gave us the commission in Matthew 28 to go into the world and be examples of Christ. Some translations say "preach the Gospel" but the original definition of "preach" to demonstrate. That means example. He didn't say "get laws passed." He said to be examples. We have forgotten that. Oh, we try to be examples to the people in our church. In other words, we put on the image of being holy. But we rarely show the example of Christ to people outside the church.

1 John 2:6 says "Anyone who claims to be intimate with God ought to live the same kind of life Jesus lived." How exactly did he live? Well, for one he never condemned anyone's lifestyle; not prostitutes, not thieves, not even corrupt rulers. Oh, wait. He did condemn one lifestyle. He condemned religious leaders and what we would call, holiness people. He would even insult them when he sat down to eat with them. Why? Because people who set a hard line on how people live close any discussion about the relative value of lifestyle decisions.

Second, when it comes to law, Jesus said in Matthew 22 that there are two laws that take precedence in life: Love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself. He said that in those two commandments is "ALL the law and the prophets. If that is all we concentrate on, everything else falls into place. We don't need any more laws in life. We need grace.

Our job, as representatives of the body of Christ, are to open the doors to relationship with Christ; to opening the opportunity to talk about destructive lifestyles and how to escape them; and demonstrating the same kind of tolerance (not acceptance or approval) that Jesus showed to people of all types.

The motto for the modern church needs to be: Get them saved and let God sort them out.

The camel's in the tent

There's an old Arab proverb that you should not allow a camel to get his nose in your tent, because soon after, the camel will take over the tent.

I feel very much like that in the issue about Proposition 8 in California.

One of the primary arguments for Prop 8 was that the definition of marriage was laid out in the Bible. That's a fallacy of course, because what the Bible lays out is the relationship between men and women, not the definition of marriage. A Biblical interpretation encourages polygamy (for example, Abraham, Jacob, David, etc.)

What we know as the traditional form of marriage was codified under the Roman Emperor Constantine. Constantine had a problem. Romans were marrying and divorcing with alarming alacrity. the tenuous nature of marriage made it difficult to know who owned what when marriages failed and people remarried. And that meant it became difficult to know who to tax. So Constantine looked around the empire for an answer and noticed that Christian and Jewish families were absolutely rock stable. He called the leaders of those communities in and said he was going to put the power to define, monitor and perform marriage in the empire. The idea was to put the fear of God into the populace. It worked, of course. Divorces dropped precipitously. Soon after Constantine converted, and the Holy Roman Empire was off and running.

That's where we got the modern definition of marriage as between a man and a woman and what the fight is over. Not the Bible.

For almost 1800 years the definition of marriage has resided in the religious community of the Western world... Until Tuesday, November 4, 2008. On that day, the church gave the definition back to the states of California, Arizona and Florida.

The next step is the definition of what is a man and what is a woman. Think I'm crazy? Coming up on ABC, Barbara Walters is going to be doing a special on Thomas Beatie, a former woman who got a sex change operation, but kept the reproductive organs. It's title is: "What is a man? What is a woman?"

As a Christian, are you weirded out by that? If you voted for Proposition 8, too bad. You no longer have a say. You gave it to the state. Now that the state has the authority to define marriage, it has to define gender now. Without the input of the church. And with that, the camel is in the tent.

More to come...