Two quotes I saved from a piece in the New York Times called “The New Designer Despair,” take issue with a destructive tolerance that leaves souls shriveled and minds tired. The subject was education in moral judgment. The writer quotes the principal of his daughter’s school: “We encourage our children by telling them that there are no bad ideas.” He also references Modern Times by the English, Roman Catholic historian, Paul Johnson: “the church is the last place in the world where we make the distinction between good and bad ideas.”
If the biggest, baddest, and best story of 2004 is religion, religion in politics and public life, then the designer despair generated by too much tolerance is gone. There are scores of religious people who tell us what is good or bad. The presidential election was shamelessly religious. Jerry Falwell ran a partisan voter registration campaign in countless congregations, and Democrats cast their usual nets into African-American churches. The church was up to its steeple in politics, and politicians played the ‘faith card’ at every opportunity. Consultants were called in to teach Democratic candidates how to speak about their faith.
There are also people, including the president of Bob Jones University, who tell President George W. Bush to take no prisoners in the war he won against the godless (liberals). And dangerous religious lobbyists want to heat up the war between Israel and Palestine in order to rush to Armageddon. I saw an interview with a mother of three children who said she prayed ceaselessly for the end of the world. “It can’t come fast enough for me,” she said. A financially secure woman with a strong family who lives in a safe neighborhood with a swimming pool in her back yard is not exactly an example of the audience for which John wrote his Apocalypse.
Because of these anomalies, the church is being taken seriously. That is in our favor; and in favor of the gospel, if we learn to speak courageously about the difference between right and wrong, and become the place where people hear what is true about Jesus and what is not true; the place where we Christians confess what is a matter of life or death, and what we may ignore as of little importance. This speaking is not only about one side winning; we speak to open up a reality that would not exist had we not spoken, or had we taught children that there are no bad ideas.
There are plenty of bad ideas. I am reminded of our important task by an unsigned editorial December 9, 2004 in the Richmond Times Dispatch: “WDJLL” (What Did Jesus Look Like?) It was about why the liberal media has no affect on the President. The first two reasons were 1) bias and 2) the sympathy of viewers for anyone “beat up” by elites. The third reason demands an answer. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up. I wish I were.
The third reason the media have no effect is that “Jesus is bulking up.” The image of Christ has changed from Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ” to Mel Gibson’s not unmuscular Jesus in flashback scenes in “The Passion of the Christ.” Some recent depictions make him look like a professional wrestler, and in the popular “Left Behind” series Jesus’ words wreak destruction on those who are not born again. (“Men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin.”) “Such imagery,” the editorial says, “speaks to a muscular evangelism that is tired of turning the other cheek.”
If muscular evangelism does not turn the other cheek, it is not evangelism. It does not proclaim the Jesus we meet in the gospels. Evangelism that does not turn the other cheek is the old, old story of sordid, unending violence that destroys human life even as it claims to save. Muscular evangelism is a lie without saving power. It is not of God, whom we know as Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate precisely because he did turn the other cheek, whether played by a muscular actor or a starry-eyed nerd. He died and was buried, and on the third day he rose from the dead, vindicating for all human beings in every age that turning the other cheek is the way of Christian discipleship. [Note well, this is not about governance or foreign policy.]
Jesus is Lord of the church, of “the dance,” and of the universe. Through him all things hold together. Jesus does not need bulking up — cannot be bulked up by the sinister, calculating minds that vomited out the “Left Behind” novels. Nor does he need a makeover by misguided idiots who exploit him for economic gain, market him to the masses, or “make” him relevant. There are some very bad ideas about Jesus. And we learn from the beginning (in all four gospels) that there always have been. They did not prevail, and they will not. But they can destroy multitudes.
Thank God for the opportunity delivered into our hands in this New Year of our Lord, 2005, to speak the truth about Jesus Christ. In our speaking may we be faithful.
