Christianity in America

Many people will wonder how I as a person with high moral values and a conservative bent can have such a strong dislike for Christianity. I suppose it is my experiences with the current American variety of Christianity which appears to be a shallow mockery of historical Christianity and Christian belief.

The most irritating thing about modern American Christianity is the failure of Christians to follow the most tenet of their faith, The Golden Rule; “Treat others as you would have others treat you.” What is so hard about that? I’m not a Christian and I try to live by it.

Every time I encounter one a particularly vile corporate American pest such as the back stabbing practitioner of office politics or the petty minded bureaucrat who mindlessly enforces corporate regulations regardless of their effect on others I find them to be a Christian. The most insensitive and cruel persons invariably have Bible quotes on their walls and Bibles on their desks. I once had the experience of being fired from a job and escorted out of the building for no reason by a particularly loutish corporate apparatchik who had the nerve to lecture me about his faith.

Beyond the failure to treat their fellow human beings decently, which is supposed to be a tenet of their faith; is the lack of humility of today’s Christians. Every time we turn on the TV it seems we get treated to another example of this noxious Christian arrogance.

A particularly odious example of this is California preacher and Vietnam War era draft dodger Rick Warren who has the arrogance to vet presidential candidates about values and civic duty. Another is Fox News mouthpiece Britt Hume who used Tiger Woods travails to rant and rave about the superiority of Christianity over Buddhism (Yes folks Tiger is a Buddhist). Hume had the arrogance to think that Tiger wouldn’t have cheated on his wife if he had just read the Bible and went to church. There are I suppose millions of women who married and divorced “good Christian men” who can disprove Mr. Hume’s idiotic theory.

Now the lack of rudimentary Christian behavior on the part of self proclaimed Christians is to be expected. The vast majority of Christians I encounter seem to have no knowledge of Christian theology, history or even many basic Christian concepts. Most of them claim to have read the Bible but that’s about it.

In particular the lack of knowledge of Christian history on the part of anyone besides a few Catholics is quite distressing. The imbecilic and poorly written “Left Behind” novels are a perfect example of Christian ignorance. They are simply a repackaging of End Time dogma that prophets and preachers have been spewing out for 2,000 years. Any one with any knowledge of basic Christian history or theology can poke the theories presented in them full of holes.

Rick Warren is another example of Christian ignorance. His service doctrine is simply the progressive Christianity of the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries repackaged. This drivel gave us such wonderful things as Prohibition, the income tax, segregation, the draft and World War I. His attempts to reestablish missionary outreach to the poor heathen in Africa (where most people are now Christians) show us how ignorant the man is of the rest of the world and our own history. I wonder will Rick Warren be there when the missionaries he sends out get lynched by a mob of the natives (probably stirred up and led by a Bible thumping preacher) they are trying to “help.” One can only hope God is that just.

Finally, there is the failure to understand the importance of the separation of church and state. The Founding Fathers (some of whom were devout Christians) wisely sought to keep religion out of the public sphere and avoid the catastrophic religious wars that had devastated Europe. Today both Left Wing and Right Wing Christians seem to be eager to tear down the barrier that protects the state from the church and just as importantly the church from the state. Obviously these people forget about “Render onto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.”

School prayer, faith based initiatives, the peace movement, etc are all efforts to get the state into the church. The faith based initiative is particularly loathsome because it is a blatant grab for tax money by self proclaimed Christians. Since all of these efforts seem to be bent on creating a theocracy it seems quite certain that those behind them are ignorant of history.

Every theocracy in history whether Christian, Islamic, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu or Marxist has ended in corruption and oppression. Indeed the most corrupt regimes in history such as the Arab Caliphate, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Renaissance Papacy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, Communist China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia were theocracies. The believers’ efforts to create heaven on Earth invariably ended in corruption, war and oppression.

So it’s obvious that, unlike the Founding Fathers, most of today’s Christians haven’t read their history or worse read it very selectively. This makes me wonder if these people really are Christians. Their faith is nothing like historical Christianity such as that of the Founders.

Perhaps today’s Christians should follow one of Jesus’ most important teachings: “Remove the log from your eye before criticizing others.” I suppose that’s too much to ask because it would require the basic Christian value of humility.