Saturday's Star Tribune has an interview with Randall Balmer, evangelical author and professor of religious history at Columbia University.
Well, thank God Katherine Kersten doesn't write for the religious pages... if she did, I'm sure that instead of this fine piece we'd be getting yet another installment of her argument as to why "Minnesotans" (by which she presumably means we taxpayers) should for "the common good" foot the bill for renovating the landmark Catholic Cathedral of St. Paul. Which sounds remarkably like an argument for the establishment of religion by the state, but I digress...
Balmer's new book is Thy Kingdom Come: How The Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament. Not a book Ms. Kersten would enjoy reading, I imagine.
On the historical legacy of evangelicalism, now abandoned by the religious right:
I am a traditional evangelical Christian in that I honor the teachings of Jesus as well as the noble legacy of evangelical activism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Evangelicals throughout most of American history engaged in political and social activism on behalf of those on the margins of society. I'm thinking here of the antislavery movement, the temperance crusade (a progressive cause in the 19th century), public education, advocating equal rights for women and trying to mitigate the effects of predatory capitalism around the turn of the 20th century. Only relatively recently, with the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s, have evangelicals drifted toward the political right.
So, yes, I am a traditional evangelical; it is the right-wing zealots of the religious right who have hijacked my faith. They have taken the gospel, the "good news" of the New Testament, which I consider lovely and redemptive, and turned it into something ugly and punitive.
On the absence of outrage from the religious right concerning the use of torture in the war in Iraq:
I happen to think that's morally reprehensible. These are people who claim to be "pro-life," who profess to hear a "fetal scream," yet they turn a deaf ear to the very real screams of fully formed human beings who are being tortured in our name ...
I suspect that when Jesus asked us to love our enemies, he probably didn't mean that we should torture or kill them.
On the establishment of religion by the state:
Religion always functions best from the margins of society and not at the centers of power. When it is too closely aligned with the power structure, it loses its prophetic voice.
On faith in God:
As a person of faith, I decided years ago that I would refuse to allow the canons of Enlightenment Rationalism to be the final arbiter of truth. I elect to live in an enchanted universe where there are forces at work beyond my understanding and control -- and where faith, not empiricism or complex apologetic proofs for the existence of God, serves ultimately as my guide ...
I sometimes describe myself as a "lovers' quarrel" evangelical. By that I mean that I have been, and I continue to be, profoundly shaped by evangelicals and by evangelicalism. I take the Bible very seriously as the word of God, and I believe in the transformative power of Jesus, in part because I've witnessed that transformation both in myself and in others.
On what is "biblical" Christianity:
Would Jesus, who summoned his followers to be "peacemakers" and who invited them to love their enemies, jump at the chance to deploy military forces, especially at the cost of so many civilian lives? Is the denial of equal rights to anyone -- women or immigrants or Muslims or gays -- consistent with the example of the man who healed lepers and paralytics and who spent much of his time with the cultural outcasts of his day?
In the past couple of years I've developed a new respect for cutting edge evangelicals like Balmer, Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis and Brian McLaren. They, along with liberal writers like John Shelby Spong and Marcus Borg, have helped me rediscover a rich and meaningful faith in God. One that has developed in counterpoint to the religious extremism and moral bankruptcy of the religious right and much of what is stands for (and against).
I hope more and more people read books like this. The crux of this issue is much more than a mere disagreement over theology or Christian piety. The religious right has hijacked the Christian faith, and we must understand how this has happened and what to do to take it back -- if we want to be able to continue to live in a world where all people are honored as children of God, where democracy is both a possibility and a reality, where the gospel of Jesus continues to work in and from the margins to transform the world, and where "peace on earth, goodwill among men" is more than a platitude written on Christmas cards.
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