An interesting article. Take a look and then let's discuss this one.
My Problem with Christianism
Sunday, May. 07, 2006
By
ANDREW SULLIVAN
Are you a Christian who doesn't feel represented by the religious
right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated
by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others
begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.
The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is
many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that
Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of
government power. There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout,
are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women's
equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers
who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of
their core understanding of what being a Christian is. They have no
problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or
people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to
them--and respecting their neighbors' choices. That doesn't threaten
their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own
faith better.
And there are those who simply believe that, by
definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and
souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain
of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or
the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a
gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a
doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow.
That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an
enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on
anyone else.
I would say a clear majority of Christians in the U.S. fall into one
or many of those camps. Yet the term "people of faith" has been
co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity
as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and
believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy
for everyone. "Sides are being chosen," Tom DeLay recently told his
supporters, "and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of
virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our
trust in Christ, they never will." So Christ is a conservative
Republican?
Rush Limbaugh recently called the Democrats the
"party of death" because of many Democrats' view that some moral
decisions, like the choice to have a first-trimester abortion, should
be left to the individual, not the cops. Ann Coulter, with her usual
subtlety, simply calls her political opponents "godless," the title of
her new book. And the largely nonreligious media have taken the bait.
The "Christian" vote has become shorthand in journalism for the
Republican base.
What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct
something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and
not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either. In
fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party,
Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white
ones. "My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus insisted. What part of
that do we not understand?
So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving
the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in
this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an
ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the
distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who
follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a
political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are
violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that
the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the
religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the
term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it
must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that
religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws
for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.
That's
what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent
from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most
strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and
that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and
wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I
abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the
quiet majority of believers took it back.
Visit Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, at time.com
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1191826,00.html