For years
now, Republicans have been screeching that the scary Muslim from Kenya was
going to destroy American capitalism and Christianity. And the irony is that
Obama has actually saved both.
More than
anyone else, Obama saved capitalism. He stopped the slide in the markets and
employment, he saved the financial industry and the auto industry, he saved
five million jobs despite Republican opposition, and he began undoing the
damage and the fractured policies of the Republicans who preceded him.
But he also
may have saved Christianity.
For forty
years now, Christianity in America has been hijacked by right-wing zealots who
read the Old Testament but got bored and stopped reading before Jesus entered
the picture. And they were so enthralled with this judgmental, Leviticus-driven
view of the world that they tried to export these religious views out into the
world of policy, politics, economics, science, education and medicine. They
forced the whole country to put their most cherished political issues at the
top of the agenda.
They went
gunning after women on abortion and contraception. They went after our kids,
and their own kids too, on school vouchers, school prayer, evolution, sex
education, banning books, HPV shots. They hammered away at the separation of
church and state by putting the Commandments in courtrooms and by pursuing
faith-based initiatives. They invaded science by declaring war on stem cell
research and cloning, infected the medical world with their views on assisted
suicide, resuscitation and euthanasia, and showed their social brutality with
their views on gays and lesbians.
Two
thousand years after Saint Paul did all he could to expand Christianity by
removing the need for the Jews and pagans of the Roman world to follow outmoded
Mosaic laws, American Christians tried to take their faith backward, not just
to the days of Jesus, but to the days of Moses, invoking the Torah to condemn
anyone who didn’t meet their standards of behavior. As the Republican big tent
shrunk, so did the Christian big tent.
So a lot
of people turned away from Christianity. The rightwing loons made Jesus uncool.
People who sang along with Jesus Christ Superstar forty years ago, sang “Jesus
is just alright with me” in the 1970s, joined the kumbaya guitar-strumming
churches, boasted of being born again in the 1980s, began to feel embarrassed.
Many left their churches, or suffered in silence while the faithful around them
spewed hate and intolerance. The ranks of atheists, agnostics, Pastafarians,
Wiccans, Buddhists and other “Others” grew by leaps and bounds. Polls showed
that the number of people attending church went down, but the number of people claiming to be churchgoers went up:
people were turning away from the churches but were afraid to admit it publicly
and were looking for some other path to faith.
Not
long ago there was a young Christian who was fed up with the current state of
the faith. She rolled her eyes when church people said the way to get young
people into the pews again was to have cool church music, a preacher in jeans,
a cool coffee shop in the lobby, a cool website. She said the problem wasn’t
style: it was the substance. She wanted her church to stop the culture wars,
embrace science, stop being against everything, ask questions without getting
boilerplate answers, step away from the Republican party, welcome gays, live
the Sermon on the Mount.
Now, sane
people want to reclaim Christianity, to restore the Sermon on the Mount to
their faith, to shift away from hate and toward compassion in hard times.
Likewise a tsunami-like backlash is beginning to react against the unholy,
destructive alliance of Republican politicians and Taliban-like evangelicals
which dominated American society for thirty years.
Obama,
when you look closely, has been at the center of all this. He is breaking up
that unholy alliance, forcing religious people and conservatives to reexamine
what they really believe and to wonder where their intolerance has taken them.
He is reaching out to his own allies without pandering to them: he is forcing
his friends in the black churches to reexamine gay rights, and impelling his
Latino friends to reconsider the bêtes noires of the Catholic Church,
contraception and abortion. He has put us on a path toward a future in which
religion and politics stay in their own respective lanes, in which religious
belief can grow, keep up with the times, and rediscover tolerance. It took the
Catholic Church three hundred years to admit that man was an animal and the
earth was a satellite, but perhaps modern religion, freed from the grip of the
arch-conservative zealots, can move more quickly and remain relevant for a
modern America.
But that
can only happen with someone like Obama at the helm. Whenever a Republican
takes over, evangelicals succumb to the delusion that they are God’s chosen
leaders for our nation, that only their religious views matter, that you can’t
be a liberal and a good Christian.
