A Short Film to Share and Talk About

Here's a short film by a friend of mine. Devoted loving couples talking about what makes love and devotion so important to them. Watch it. You have to wonder why anyone could think it's wrong for any of these couples to marry.

Here in Minnesota Republicans have put a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would forever limit marriage to one man and one woman.

They say that allowing gay people to marry might endanger their own marriages, make their marriages "less special". I don't recall Jesus ever saying something was more blessed because other people couldn't have it, or that it was wrong to love and care for another person. How can you oppose love? Isn't that a kind of hatred?

Put it another way: conservative "Christians" and Republicans seem to think everyone has a God given right to marry a gay person, as long as that person is of the opposite sex. Does that make sense to you? Doesn't that sound like a recipe for thousands of dishonest, unhappy marriages, and millions of lonely lives?

Watch the film. Share it. Talk about it. Let's vote down this hateful amendment.

The Familiar Anti Christ Rumors

When logic and good sense fail you can always call up the bogeyman. The Republican Party has been working this theme ever since Obama began his run for president. It's one of their dog whistles.

There have been posters of Obama with a Hitler moustache. Obama, the first black president, is "the Other", "Not like us", "Obama isn't an American", "Obama isn't a Christian." (He's both Christian and American born, and having risen from working class roots he's more like us than the patricians running for the Republican nomination, but truth is as irrelevant as logic and good sense.)

Last week someone in the audience shouted that Obama is The Anti-Christ. Which raises the End Times rumors, another useful dog whistle. When Republicans don't want to deal with real problems––joblessness, climate change, financial insecurity, extreme wealth disparity––they call up scapegoats. They blame immigrants, Muslims, African Americans, socialists, communists, Christians of other denominations, unions, children, old people. Satan. The bogeyman. They call the president of another race and political party The AntiChrist (as reported in this NYTimes piece.) They can't handle the present time, so they bring up the End Times.

Is this craziness catching? Is it religion or science fiction? L. Ron Hubbard advised other science fiction writers decades ago that the best way to get rich was to found a religion (as reported in this Wall Street Journal article from 1997) and there have been a lot of strange new "Christian" sects and factions in the past few decades. Many emerged as a way to make money, and fell when the money disappeared, often with the religious leader. But the ride will last as long as the money lasts. (This LATimes article from 1987 will recall the charlatans of that time, Swaggart, Bakker, Robertson and Roberts. Oral Roberts tried to extort $8 million from his followers, saying God would kill him if the money wasn't given to his ministry.)

One of the loopier religious loops out there is the Prosperity Gospel, which preaches worldly riches. (This article from BeliefNet discusses the flaws in this fringe of Christianity.) It appeals mostly to people worried about their security in a time of financial crisis. "If God loves you He will make you rich." The pastor might as well say "rich like me" because the pastors pushing the prosperity gospel are always very prosperous themselves. Big cars, expensive suits, private jets, fancy homes unlike the spartan parsonages most conventional churches provide. These pastors are living proof of their gospel and look prosperous indeed, prosperous out of the pockets of the flock. Michele Bachmann's biggest religious backer, Mac Hammond, has had his own run-in with the IRS which only makes him more beloved by his mesmerized parishioners. Imagined persecution is good for money-raising.

But why preach earthly prosperity when the world is going to hell around you? Why is God making you rich if He's about to take it all away? This is what thinking rational people, even Christians, call a contradiction.

Because the prosperity gospel's flip side is always Armageddon. These demagogues have a private line to the holy truth, a bit like stock touts have an inside line on the next winner. If you've ever heard Michele Bachmann's cooing, bedroom voiced prayer about the End Times, you have to wonder what planet her secret messages are coming from. "God loves the poor––Send me money." It is always tied to a demand for money, for her campaign or the very special pastor who prays for it on radio and TV. Those pantsuits and hairstyles her husband art directs are not cheap.

Why do we take any of these people seriously? Money from heaven in one breath and the rain of fire in the next. I suppose it's good television just as creepy movies about demon possession and secret messages in Da Vinci paintings are good television. Whipping up end times fears gets people talking, and fear gets them into the fold. The prospect of these GOP choices puts the fear of God into me.

If he wasn't being sarcastic in the Gospels, Jesus favored the poor and condemned the rich; so why do these "fundamentalist" "Christians" turn the Gospels on their head?

And again, why if "the end-times are near" are these so-called "Prosperity Christians" piling up money they can't take with them? All the GOP candidates cater to the notion that "Jesus Preferred Rich People", either outright or in code. Creating a false picture of Jesus may be the worst kind of blasphemy.

Actually, to give Bachmann proper credit, many leading Republicans worship a goddess rather than a God, and her name is Ayn Rand. You want values? Hers are definitely HOT. It's all about getting what you want, whatever cost to the people around you. If you want the Anti Christ it won't be a centrist liberal like Obama, it'll be someone toting a copy of Atlas Shrugged, with a cross and a flag on his or her lapel.

The Un-Christian Super-Religious Republican Party

Today there's an excellent Washington Post article by Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, who explains how un-Christian the Republican Party's economic policies really are. Worth reading and worth sharing.

This well-argued opinion piece from the Rev. Jennifer Butler, Executive Director of Faith in Public Life, says the same thing, calling the Republican efforts in Congress downright immoral.

Luckily, even though there are millions of dollars and hundreds of radio and television platforms pushing it, Americans aren't buying this strange Anti-Christian brand of Christian Capitalism. This poll from the Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Religion News Service found that more Americans think capitalism is at odds with Christian values.

Actually, when you sit down and read the New Testament, read it with your heart not your bank book, Jesus does sound like a Socialist, if not a downright Marxist. This liberal Jesus doesn't jibe with the Romney/Bachmann/Perry/ Cain/Santorum/Paul/Christie/Boehner wing of the Republican Party (all of the Republican Party these days) who think Jesus was sent by our Heavenly Father to make us very wealthy and provide us with an affordable servant class. The Republican Big Idea is that the poor should learn how to obey their masters.

This article from Religion Dispatches speaks to this harsh anti-worker, anti-union thread. Republican strategists have been aggressively pushing in that direction, using carefully lifted Bible verses. Verses that spoke to the lives of slaves in Biblical times are being used to justify slavery today, sometimes saying, as Bachmann has, that slaves had it better than today's unemployed. Suggesting that slavery would be a good solution to today's problems. That Jesus was, by some bizarre misinterpretation, a hard capitalist, an anti-liberal, pro-slavery, anti-tax anti-public school right winger. Fruitcake theology.

Was Jesus a socialist or was he a banker? When you read him do you think his heaven on earth would look like Scandinavia or would it look like pre-Mandela South Africa? This post on the Real Economics blog sorts the different threads of Christian economics.

Jesus Was a Socialist:

"The Protestant Reformation may have started in Martin Luther's Germany, but the reformist impulse would not stop there. Luther had one especially radical notion—that everyone could through the tools of literacy and study come to an understanding of his or her relationship to God. With this idea, the authoritarian relationship of the church was shattered. The Protestant Reformation shattered Christianity into thousands of sects large and small. Yet out of this cacophony would emerge dominant themes.

"In political terms, the center would be occupied by Luther and his followers. On one hand, his teachings about the worth of the lowliest among us would inspire the Peasant's Revolt of 1524-25. On the other, he would encourage the secular authorities to brutally suppress the uprising. Lutherans would run the governments of the Nordic countries for hundreds of years and were a part of feudalism, yet there were plenty good Lutherans in those countries who could find reasons to explain why Jesus and Luther would have loved cooperatives and become Social Democrats. Lutherans have more or less put themselves out of business as a religion but their cultural heritage still makes it true that if a social welfare system works anywhere, there's a good chance it is happening where Lutherans once roamed the earth.

"The Reformation's left would be occupied by the followers of Menno Simon—the Swiss Anabaptist. Now it may be pretty hard to imagine the very culturally conservative Mennonites and Amish as lefties but consider this—Christianity had managed to keep silent or encourage the practices of human slavery for over 15 centuries before Simon and friends wrote principled objections to it in 1534. They are SERIOUS about staying out of wars and have been since their founding. Their economic beliefs encourage sharing and community, and because they are so honest, a lot of the expensive apparatus of contracts is avoided. Not surprisingly, they are usually very prosperous. You can think of them as hippies—only with skills and excellent work habits."

Or Jesus Was a Pure Market Capitalist:

"And then we come to the right. John Calvin was Frenchman living in Geneva who would literally set Christianity on its head. For example, usury had been considered the mortal sin for over 1000 years. Now Calvin would teach that Jesus did not mind moneychangers so much—he just didn't want them setting up shop in the temples. For most of history, Christians were the poor, the folks with the shit jobs, the slaves. Now Calvin would teach that God made people rich to show that he loved them.

"Calvinism would migrate to USA in many forms but the dominant one was through the Puritans who came to Massachusetts. These folks would organize our most prestigious schools like Harvard and Yale. When people talk about WASPs, they are talking about worship-the-rich Calvinists. But the Calvinists are not limited to the snooty set. Oh no, no, no. Find some mouth-breather that denies evolution or climate change and thinks Jesus rode a dinosaur to church and in USA, the chances are about 99% you are talking to a Calvinist. Calvinism so defines the American culture that one is not wrong to think that when someone calls themselves a Christian and is not Catholic, that person is an off-shoot of the Calvinist impulse."

Do we believe the Martin Luther King Jesus or the Milton Friedman Jesus? The Jesus of "feed the poor, help the afflicted" or "money grows on trees"? Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney believe Jesus was an MBA, that being rich is the most crucial part of Christianity. The richer you are the more Christian you are. Whose Bible did that come out of? The Gospel of Riches version of Christianity is the church of Swiss Bankers and Wall Street.

American voters need to know the difference. We need to be worried about what the hard Right Wing has in mind. The bankers' side is all Republican. Wall Street's Jesus is Republican. The former slave states are all Republican. What does that tell you? Jesus wasn't necessarily anti-capitalist, but he preached a softening of capitalism's hard edge. That is Liberalism. Jesus was a Liberal. He was on the side of the little guy, of the masses, the owner of the hardware store down the street, the small farmer, the public school teacher with forty kids in her class, the two-earner family whose earners are unemployed and have a mortgage to pay.

Fundamentalist "Christians" and Israel

I'm surprised no one makes this comparison.

The fundamentalist "Christians" on TV and Colorado Springs and other enclaves across America "love" Israel the way prospective heirs used to "love" the dying rich relative in nineteenth century novels.

They love Israel because they know Jesus will come when an independent Israel is consumed in fire and bloodshed according to the book of Revelations, or according to some interpretations of the book of Revelations. They don't care so much about Israel qua Israelis but Israel as a stepping stone to ancient prophecy. These "Christians" are less interested in preserving our world as they are in ending it in a specific way, and soon.

Just some thoughts I had reading Michael Tracy's Mother Jones piece this morning. I wish more political commentators would make this comparison.