- It's become fashionable to take shots at the Christian religion. In a lot of otherwise civilized circles, the faithful and the faith itself are an easy object of prejudice; and worse, it's a prejudice you can get away with.
...I call it secular fundamentalism — one more example of the strict maintenance of doctrine, without actual experience of "the other," a bubble that actively screens out different points of view. What secular fundamentalists ignore is that ad hominem attacks on Christianity make permissible ad hominem attacks on any religion or philosophy. Who's next?
...The connection between Christianity and political power is enough to make this believer hang her head. And yet, to attack this Christianity as all of Christianity is, of course, an error. It ignores the fact that medieval Christianity was reformed — by Martin Luther and the Church of England, among others. But most of all, it neglects a history that includes someone such as the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who organized the Confessing Church to resist Nazi exclusion laws, joined the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and paid for it with his life.
Bonhoeffer believed that the heart of what it meant to be a Christian was to act on behalf of the marginalized — the helpless, the sick, the poor, the friendless. He distinguished between what he called "cheap grace," that form of lip service I think we can all identify with, and "costly grace," meaning the kind that gets you into trouble.
If I think of costly grace, I remember the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks; the abolitionists; the Christians of Jubilee 2000 who successfully pressured Britain and the United States to forgive the developing world's crippling debt; the Quakers who protect and advise pacifists; the women and men who work daily in soup kitchens, for living-wage ordinances, against torture at Guantanamo Bay. None of us has done enough, and that is partly why so many people only know about the Christianity that cozies up to power.
...If I could, I'd return to early Christianity, before it became a state religion under Constantine, before its connection to the state, when it was a company of friends whose inspired leader once said that the one without sin should pick up the first stone.
2 comments:
brilliant, simply brilliant.
If my studies in history is sound, it seems to me that all this comes in cycles, it is unfortunate that it appears worse. Maybe not, though, maybe it is seems bad just in the media... I wonder what if we stopped reporting on anything and just observed how we treated each other if it would change, we would behave with greater kindness because we lacked the labels to attach to each other?
Thanks for the fabulous link, Jordan! Finally someone sticking up for the Christians that have done good things.
Of course, some of the sterner "secular fundamentalists" I know would argue that if they did good things, they weren't Christians!
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