I've been thinking about the insanity of right-wing Christianity and its politics. How did we stumble into such an abysmal gutter? How did we get to the point where churches can promote militarism and the second-class segregation of homosexual people and still be taken seriously as moral leaders? How did we get to the point where contraception issues begin to sound like the regurgitation of medieval theological debates?
Any day now I'm wondering if the Republican Party will summon its Catholic and Evangelical pastoral servants together for a new round of debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
It wasn't always like this. It used to be that Christian voices valued commonwealth and cooperative partnership over division. We used to have courageous voices such as Walter Rauschenbusch, Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, Fannie Lou Hamer, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, and Seattle's own Bill Cate and Gertrude Apel practicing what they preached in such a way that they became a moral alternative to the lunacy of unregulated capitalism and military imperialism. They were a moral alternative to the segregation policies enforced against ethnic minorities, women, gay and political dissenters.
But these mainline moral voices lost their confidence and courage.
Perhaps the great democracy movements of the 1960s exhausted them. Having climbed so many mountains and having fought so many battles, they became timid and mute.
In their place new voices rose up that shattered the common good. Voices such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlafly, James Dobson, and Seattle's own Ken Hutcherson and Mark Driscoll began to tear away at the glue that held a diverse people together.
These voices highlighted us versus them, clean versus unclean. They preached that a new moral glue united us: fear.
These voices recreated social boundaries and barriers. They gave moral plausibility to the religious-political culture that has turned post-9/11 society into a shattered, bewildered, divided, trembling mass.
Their religious voices have become the velvet glove covering the fascist fist of corporation-driven militarism.
Meanwhile, the voice of public theology, commonwealth and mutual aid was muted.
In its absence we have witnessed the rise of a hopeless, apocalyptic nihilism in the churches.
We have witnessed the return of patriarchies whose public word is to shut up and do what we tell you, and whose public practice is to create a theocracy of dominance and submission.
We need the return of a public theology of spiritual activism.
We need the fusion of a creation-centered, interfaith pluralism whose voice will urge us toward a future of radical mutual aid and peaceful cooperation. Without a sacred story that reorients our cultural desire toward inclusion, we will be left to the prey of the viciously self-righteous.
It is time for progressive clergy to organize and strategize their return to the public square of ideas and values.