Yale law professor Stephen Carter, in his book, The Culture of Disbelief, warns against “reaching conclusions on political grounds and, afterward, finding religious justification for them, instead of letting genuine religious conviction shape honest political judgments” (as quoted in The Soul of Politics, p. 34). And Jim Wallis concludes that “perhaps the best test of the spiritual integrity of our political commitments is their predictability or unpredictability” (The Soul of Politics, p. 34). It seems to me that most of what is coming out of the larger Christian community in America is extremely predictable.
The problem is that no one is talking to each other. If the last three elections have taught us anything, they have taught us that the polarization of America is complete. And American religion is just as polarized . . . a polarized American church that is the mirror image of the polarized culture.
Jim Wallis, in The Soul of Politics, concludes that “the inability of either liberalism or conservatism to lead us forward is increasingly clear” (p. 21). He says that “the two dominant forms of religion in our time have failed to provide the spiritual guidance that might inform a politics of moral conscience. Both conservative and liberal religion have become culturally captive forces that merely cheer on the ideological camps with which each has identified” (p. 36). Wallis warns, “Religion as a political cheerleader is invariably false religion” (p. 36).
The religious right, for instance, feeling pushed to the margins, “woke up” in the 1970’s and 80’s and decided to become a prophetic force in American politics, and I applaud that thought. If it’s really the thought that counts, they are to be highly commended. I am just left wondering where this “great moral force” was in the civil rights battles of the 1950’s and 60’s. Most Southern White Baptist Churches were eerily silent during those years when our nation desperately needed a moral compass and a prophetic voice. Or even worse, they were very vocal on the side of evil. And, more recently, I have to wonder if they did not have a severe case of laryngitis when our country entered into an unprovoked war, against the better judgment of most of the rest of the world.
This is hard for me. I love my country. I’m an avid Olympics fan, and I tear up every time I hear the national anthem. I feel the pain of every American athlete who didn’t have a good day. AND I feel the pain of being pushed away from the national conversation because of my Judeo-Christian perspective. Jim Wallis writes that Stephen Carter, in The Culture of Disbelief, “contends that a prejudice against the influence of religious commitment upon political issues now characterizes many sectors of American society, including the media, academia, the law, and the corridors of political power.” Carter notes that “religious conviction is trivialized and becomes quickly suspect when it seems to be affecting political matters” (The Soul of Politics, p. 32).
In plain English . . . the Christian Church in America is being pushed to the margins. And, as a member of an ethnic minority in America, I say to the church . . . “Welcome to the margins!! We’ve been waiting for you!!” I agree with most of the values of the religious right. Where I think they get it wrong is that they see being pushed to the margins as a bad thing – something to fight against. I see it as a good thing. In fact, it may be the very thing that saves American Christianity.
The church cannot serve a socio-political ideology and Christ at the same time. The church can speak prophetically only from the margins of society . . . only from outside the corridors of power . . . never from the seat of power. Both the left and the right seem to be fighting for a place at the center of political power. And any Christianity operating from that position will be a controlling, legalistic, and spiritually oppressive force, unable to distinguish the voices of political allies from God’s voice. And, I would add, that is the very kind of institution that will wither under the weight of globalization. It is, therefore, imperative that we remain distinctively Baptist because we have the right recipe to be a prophetic voice, speaking from the margins, in a shrinking and dynamically changing world.
Being Authentically Baptist – for the Sake of the Poor, the Hurting, and the Lost
The other aspect to globalization that I want to briefly mention is what Friedman calls “Open‑Sourcing.” In his book, The World is Flat, Friedman discusses the 10 forces that flattened the world. Flattener #4 is “Open-Sourcing,” or what Friedman calls “Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities.” It is, essentially, “thousands of people around the world coming together online to collaborate in writing everything from their own software to their own operating systems to their own dictionary to their own recipe for cola – building always from the bottom up rather than accepting formats or content imposed by corporate hierarchies from the top down” (p. 81). Everyone in the group is allowed to add their improvements to the product . . . and, oh yeah . . . they offer the product for free . . . talk about grace! It’s like the Cooperative Program on steroids. It’s beyond that. It’s the walls coming down . . . all of them . . . and it’s messy. If you don’t like messy, then you’re going to have a very difficult time in the 21st century.
The larger Christian witness in America doesn’t like messy. They like clean lines; black-and-white; a place for everything and everything in its place; doctrinal purity (as if that were really possible). The problem with those who seek to purify the church has always been that they wind up looking more like those who crucified Jesus than those who followed him.
It seems to me that, in a day when all of the walls that have separated nations and people groups are coming down – making room for larger and more effective cooperation – the larger Baptist witness in America is pulling out of collaborative efforts and building more doctrinal walls than ever before. It is one of the most frustrating problems in Baptist life today. It is absolutely essential that we hold close and dear the precious ingredients of our Baptist recipe that allow us to ride the wave of collaborative communities. If we don’t . . . I’m not sure who else will, AND if we don’t, the ones who suffer the consequences of our failure are the poor.
Remember – we do it for the sake of the poor, the hurting, and the lost. We must preserve a distinctively Baptist witness in the world, because the poor, the hurting, and the lost are depending on it. Gandhi said, “Poverty is the worst form of violence” (Seeds of Peace, p. 127). I pastored for 10 years in the poorest county in Texas and one of the poorest in the nation. The poverty in our state and world is simply overwhelming. The poor are depending on our witness in the face of the strongholds of systemic evil in our state and nation – what Walter Wink calls “the domination system” or “the powers that be” (The Powers that Be, p. 32).
The larger Baptist witness in America seems to have fixated on a few politically salient issues and, although those issues are not unimportant, in fixating on them we have largely abdicated our prophetic voice where it counts the most. We have failed to throw the full weight of our Baptist strength behind the life-and-death issues that affect the most people. I speak here of the multiplicity and complexity of issues surrounding the plight of the poor.
Tony Campolo points out that the Christian Coalition, the most successful religious lobbying group in American history, was formed to address the need for the government to support “traditional family values,” as it defined them . . . and yet, the voter guides that the Christian Coalition distributed to millions of Christians completely ignored the needs of the poor (Speaking My Mind, p. 126).
The Poor – Jesus’ All-Consuming Concern
I don’t have to remind this audience of Jesus’ concern for the poor. It was all-consuming for him. In the Old Testament, the subject of the poor is the second most prominent theme. Idolatry is the first, and the two are often connected. In the New Testament, one out of every 16 verses is about the poor. In the Gospels, the number is one out of every 10 verses; in Luke’s Gospel, one of every seven; and in the book of James, one of every five.
All of the politically-charged issues of Jesus’ day were (it seems to me) side-stepped by him in lieu of his concern for the poor. In his inaugural homecoming message at Nazareth, Jesus sets the agenda for his ministry when he says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Luke 4:18a, NIV).
Jesus starts his most famous sermon by saying, “Blessed are the poor” (Luke 6:20). And, if Hans Dieter Betz is right in identifying the literary genre of the Sermon on the Mount as the Greek “epitomai” (The Sermon on the Mount from the Hermeneia series) – and I believe he is – then the epitome of Jesus’ teaching (as compiled by Matthew) is his concern for the poor and the marginalized and the oppressed . . . the 90% of the population (in his day) who, because of the Roman and Temple taxation systems, could not afford to both tithe and live, and were, therefore, labeled the “unrighteous ones” (the “Am Harez” of the land) . . . the working poor.
According to Richard A. Horsley, around the 1st century, there arose, for the first time in Hebrew history, a minority class of people who lived in the cities (mainly Sepphoris and Tiberias) and produced nothing, living instead off of the taxation system. These citizens of the “consumer city” were an elite class living off of the working poor (Archaeology, History and Society in Galilee, p. 79). The working poor (labeled the “Am Harez,” or the “unrighteous ones”) were the ones who loved Jesus the most . . . because he first loved them. His heart was always with them. In fact, there is no written record that Jesus ever entered the cities of Sepphoris or Tiberias, the two largest and most important 1st-century cities in Galilee. He spent all of his time, it seems, in the small villages . . . with the poor.
If we lose our distinctively Baptist heritage, there will not be a unified, coherent Baptist voice speaking for the “Am Harez” of our state and our nation . . . and a greatly diminished one speaking for the “Am Harez” of the world. Both the left and the right in American Christianity have sold out to one political perspective for 30 pieces of silver (promises that never come true, and trickle-downs that never trickle). Their political litmus tests ignore the largest and, in global terms, the most devastating issues of our times: all of the issues fueled by abject poverty. Their alliances (or, more often, their failure to align with certain groups) betrays their deeper concern with preserving the American Way of life and the truth as America sees it, rather than standing with the one who said, “I am the Way, and the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6, NIV).
Richard Lischer, in his Lyman-Beecher lectures at Yale, said, “Contemporary religion focuses on its own successes and avoids at all costs the paradox of the cross, a move that has produced a flood of compensatory words” (The End of Words, p. 9).
Following Wherever Jesus Leads Means Following Him to the Poor
The larger Baptist witness in America is in grave danger of a great “Christological distance” – what Erhardt Guttgemann calls “the distance created by the tendency to redefine Christ in some more ‘contemporary’ meaning, less dependent on just who the crucified Jesus was” (The Politics of Jesus, p. 120). You know who Jesus was . . . he was poor; he was born poor; he lived poor and with the poor; he died poor; and he rose again for the poor.
John Howard Yoder, in his The Politics of Jesus, reminds us that “to follow after Christ is not simply to learn from him, but also to share his destiny” (p. 124). “Wherever He leads I’ll go. He drew me closer to His side, I sought His will to know, And in that will I now abide, Wherever He leads I'll go. I'll follow my Christ who loves me so, Wherever He leads I'll go” (The Baptist Hymnal, #285). Really? Wherever he leads? He leads us to the doorsteps of the poorest of the poor. He points to them and then turns to us and says, “Whatever you have done for the least of these, you have done for me” (Matthew 25:40, NIV).
To follow Christ wherever he takes me . . . WHEREVER He takes me . . . without being labeled a socialist or a communist or a liberal or, even worse, dare I say . . . a Democrat. I don’t believe that I’m any of those labels. And, at one time or another, I have probably been all of them . . . and will be again. But the words of Paul keep ringing in my ears, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10-11, NIV).
I want to know Christ! And so, I follow NO MAN, NO SOCIO-POLITICAL IDEOLOGY, NO DENOMINATIONAL APPARATUS, NO CAREER PATH – I WANT TO KNOW JESUS – I WANT TO FOLLOW JESUS – WHEREVER HE LEADS, I’LL GO – AND JESUS ALWAYS LEADS US TO THE POOR!
My mother is at the age where she is starting to give her children (my sister, my two brothers, and me) pictures from her treasured collection of family albums . . . some of her most treasured memories preserved by Kodak. I told her that there is only one picture I want. It is my father’s first-grade class picture (from 1939). If you look closely, you’ll find him on the third row, three kids over from the right. The reason I want that picture is that there is a hole in it . . . a hole where my father’s feet should be. Apparently, he was one of only two children in the class who were too poor to own a pair of shoes. There are about 40 kids in the picture. They took the picture, and my father didn’t have shoes. At the age of 7, he somehow understood that there was something wrong about that and, therefore, something wrong with him. So he brought the picture home and, before anyone could see it, he cut his own feet out of the picture. I can see my father – as a little 7-year-old boy – so filled with shame that he takes out his pocketknife and carefully cuts out his own feet.
I want that picture, because it defines my father’s life: Work hard, work hard, work hard, to make as much money as you can so that none of your children will ever have to cut their feet out of the picture.
We must preserve our distinctive Baptist witness, because no child should ever have to cut their own feet out of the picture.
In the spirit of Nehemiah . . . I say to you . . . “You see the bad situation we are in . . . let us rebuild our Baptist heritage and identity . . . so that we will no longer be a reproach.” And may we as a people respond by saying, “Let us arise and build.” And may the generations that follow say of us . . . “So they put their hands (together) to working for the common good” (Nehemiah 2:17-18, NRSV).
