 |  | | March 5, 2015 |  | No. 161 | | By Jonathan V. Last | |  |  |  | | | | COLD OPEN |  | | | Being a Christian in the public square can be a difficult thing. Last week we talked at some length about Scott Walker being asked by Washington Post reporters if President Obama was a Christian. This moment suggested how the difficulty runs in both directions: From Scott Walker's perspective, he was being singled out with a particularly foolish question, asked in bad faith, precisely because he was a Christian. And from President Obama's perspective, his Christian faith was being put at issue by the reporters because his public actions do not always conform to the conventional archetype of a Christian believer.
Over the weekend liberal columnist Ana Marie Cox waded into the fray by "outing" herself-her word, not mine-as a Christian. You can read her essay here. Parts of it are lovely:
Here is why I believe I am a Christian: I believe I have a personal relationship with my Lord and Savior. I believe in the grace offered by the Resurrection. I believe that whatever spiritual rewards I may reap come directly from trying to live the example set by Christ. Whether or not I succeed in living up to that example is primarily between Him and me.
Here's how she concludes it:
What Christ teaches me, if I let myself be taught, is that there is only one kind of judgment that matters. I am saved not because of who I am or what I have done (or didn't do), but simply because I have accepted the infinite grace that was always offered to me.
My hope is that His love is somewhere underneath the ego and grievances that inspired me to write this. I believe that it is. What I pray is that you can find it for yourself as well.
In between those two sections, Cox uses her essay to defend President Obama's Christian identity:
I am not sure if there is anything Obama could do to make someone like Erick Erickson believe he is Christian in a "meaningful way." For a thousand reasons, mostly bad ones, I presume for me he and his compatriots would set the bar lower. But how low?
Not going to church low? For Erickson and others, that's passive evidence against Obama, even though Reagan didn't go to church, either. What about Bible literacy? Mine is mostly limited to dimly remembered excerpts from the Old Testament we read in my college humanities class and a daily verse email. I read spiritual meditations, but the Word is still a second language I speak less than fluently. If Obama's occasional mangling of scripture is proof positive that he's not a "real" Christian, I have so much studying to do I may never catch up.
And to the extent that she claims any worries about "coming out" for her beliefs, Cox says that she's unconcerned about being accepted by her modernist friends. Rather, she's worried about the reception she'll get from other Christians:
My hesitancy to flaunt my faith has nothing to do with fear of judgment by non-believers. . . .
No, I'm nervous to come out as a Christian because I worry I'm not good enough of one. I'm not scared that non-believers will make me feel an outcast. I'm scared that Christians will.
We should be able to dispose of that fear in reasonably short order because, at least in the Catholic view, all Christians are bad Christians. We do our best, but even the saints have weaknesses and almost none of us are saints anyway. If we are saved it is entirely through God's mercy, which is so vast as to be beyond imagination. Beyond, even, our greatest, most secret hopes.
Because God's mercy is unfathomable, Christians really shouldn't spend a lot of energy thinking about who is saved and who is not in the specific sense. And most Christians-at least the ones I know well-don't. They pray for everyone on the perfectly good assumption that we all need prayers. Though this isn't to say that there aren't some Christians out there who struggle with the matter. (We're all bad Christians, QED.)
But even so, Cox's essay points to some problems with how Christians ought to conduct themselves when they live in the public world of ideas. We'll talk about that down below. | | | | LOOKING BACK | | | | | "I feel like I've known Hunter S. Thompson for most of my life. I first encountered him in 1981, when I was 12. A family friend had moved out after a long stay in the guest room, and I decided to find out what he'd left behind. On the nightstand I found a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I liked the cover art, so I read it. It changed my life.
"The book made me want to drop everything (specifically, the sixth grade) and take up journalism. It made me want to travel the world with a pen and notebook, having adventures, recording my observations, and speaking fearlessly on behalf of truth as a sworn guardian of the First Amendment. But mostly, it made me want to do drugs."
-Tucker Carlson, "When the Fun Stopped," from our March 7, 2005, issue.
Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe. | | | | | | | | THE READING LIST | | | | | The death of blogging and the future of writing on the internet.
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Mike Russell's advice and thoughts on creativity.
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Fistfights, lawsuits, and a $1,000 ice cream sundae. | | | | INSTANT CLASSIC | | | | | "In Salt Lake City, police officer Eric Moutsos lost his job because he declined to march in a gay pride parade. Note well: he did not refuse to provide police security for the parade; he declined to march in it. . . .
"What Moutsos is learning-what all traditional Christians will soon learn-is that there is no accommodation to be made. You are the Enemy, and must be crushed. You will be forced to advocate for things that violate your conscience, and if you refuse, it doesn't matter how far you are willing to go to be accommodating: you will be branded a hater, and forced out of your job. . . .
"[As British moral philosopher Oliver O'Donovan says] 'The flowering of an idea comes when it assumes a structural role that determines what else may be thought.'"
-Rod Dreher on the clash of gay rights and religious freedom, February 26, 2015. | | | | THE LAST WORD | | | | | So granting that we shouldn't be in the business of demarcating what "real" Christians should do or think, we ought to be able to come up with some guidelines for Christians in the public square. There are some basic-which is not to say easy-tasks they ought to assign themselves, regardless of where they live on the political spectrum.
The first, and most basic, is that they ought to strive to operate from a place of honesty. To believe that Jesus is the Truth means that you have to believe in truth. So when, for instance, President Obama makes public declarations about his faith and a political position, which he privately says is a lie, that's not really helpful to the Christian cause. It's fine to be wrong about something, or to change your mind, so long as do so in honesty and good faith.
The other basic rule is that Christians ought to work to engage the world around them with intellectual charity. See, for instance, this passage where Cox issues the following judgment about conservative motives:
I know that when conservatives talk about Obama's faith, they are also talking race, fear, society, and status, as well as winning elections. Obama's Christianity-or lack of it-matters to them only to the extent that it proves an existing hypothesis about who he is at his core.
That's an awfully uncharitable set of assumptions about a very large group of people.
So while Christianity might not demand this or that specific political position from Christians-quick, where is Jesus on the Ex-Im Bank?-it probably asks that they conduct themselves, intellectually, at least, in certain ways. Which isn't always easy.
But it's even harder than you think. A Christian's faith must necessarily trump his political identity because modern American politics is a woefully insufficient answer to the demands of Christ's Truth. Neither the Republican party nor the Democratic party, neither conservatism nor progressivism, is equal to what Christianity proposes. And so, if you're a Christian who operates in the political world, your ideological priors ought to make you uncomfortable sometimes. For conservatives, to pick just one example, the plight of the poor is difficult to square with libertarian free-market economics. Progressives will find their own contradictions between the diktats of liberal ideology and Christ's call. They won't have to look very hard.
Again, the point here isn't to insist that a Christian must embrace this or that political position, but rather to suggest that a Christian operating in good faith should almost certainly reject some aspects of their prior political ideology, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum. (Kirsten Powers is a fine example of this from the left.)
I'm tempted to say that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for someone in political or public life to live his (or her) Christian faith well. But it only seems that way. Because with God all things are possible.
We'll go back to demographics and comic books next week. I promise. In the meantime, here's the great James Lileks with a remembrance of Leonard Nimoy.
Best,
JVL
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