The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall has an interesting piece about what liberal activists and academics say conservatives get right. What’s remarkable is just how familiar it all sounds. I live in Washington, D.C., where almost everyone self-identifies as liberal. And yet I can’t count how many times I’ve heard my friends confess - often in hushed tones - how they wouldn’t mind if the left did more to emphasize individual responsibility, acknowledge the social importance of good parenting, or use policy to promote the “institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family).” Actually, not even my friends, smart as they are, use the term "exoskeleton" in polite conversation. But that's one thing Jonathan Haidt, a liberal professor of psychology at UVA, is quoted as saying conservatives get right.
All of which led me to wonder what it is about fundamentalist Christianity that those of us on the so-called left side of the protestant-evangelical-catholic-orthodox spectrum of Christianity would praise. Here are my suggestions:
- Their reverance of the Bible as the living, breathing Word of God that speaks to us directly and intimately, so much so that Moses, Ruth and the woman at the well come to feel more like friends, family members and neighbors than characters in an ancient text.
- Their willingness to ask basic, pressing questions of everyday life, such as how the hell can I learn to put up with my asshole/bitch boss (though typically, of course, they do so without using profanity).
- Their gumption in calling sin, sin, and good, good, and evil, evil (even if I don't always agree with their conclusions regarding the same). All too often liberal and moderate Christians come across as timid, even neutered creatures who lack the courage of our convictions. I'll never forget the moment I realized this, when, as a teacher's assistant at Duke Divinity School, I was reading a paper about a film that featured a flawed hero who had murdered a man after discovering he'd had an affair with his wife. The murder was, the paper noted dryly, an act of which "many of us would not approve." Indeed!
- Their awareness that Jesus did not just come to save “the poor,” if by that we mean those who are different from or have less money than we, but every single one of us, including those of us who are materially well off and about whom Jesus said: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt. 10:24-25). In contrast, liberal congregations tend to take it for granted that their central mission is to the “less fortunate,” an entirely secular phraseology that almost always means people other than those in attendance and that in practice turns Jesus’ beatitudes on their head (“Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.” (Luke 6:20-21; KJV)).
- The way they take church seriously, if not always in their ecclesiology, then certainly in their actual practices, such as lingering in the sanctuary after Sunday worship to catch up with one another, sharing their weekly ups and downs in Sunday school, and eating supper together on Wednesday nights (at least in the wonderful Southern Baptist I grew up in).
- Their continuing use of the King James Version of the Bible, the Bible I grew up reading and memorizing in the 1980s and 90s and which even the famous atheist Christopher Hitchens praised thus:
Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really is something “timeless” in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening. From the stricken beach of Dunkirk in 1940, faced with a devil’s choice between annihilation and surrender, a British officer sent a cable back home. It contained the three words “but if not … ” All of those who received it were at once aware of what it signified. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar tells the three Jewish heretics Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that if they refuse to bow to his sacred idol they will be flung into a “burning fiery furnace.” They made him an answer: “If it be so, our god whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thy hand, o King. / But if not, be it known unto thee, o king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”
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