The new book I've been promoting across the fruited plain -- The Messiah of Morris Avenue -- isn't nice to Baptists. (You can get the details from my podcasts -- or as I prefer to call them Godcasts) In a nutshell it's a satire wherein the fundo right runs America and the true Christ returns (poor, Latino, from the Bronx). This isn't at all to the Baptists' liking. So, naturally, they crucify him.
Couple weeks ago, I'm in Kansas City to do a reading. I'm a tad nervous. It's one thing to be safe on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and boldly go where no satire has gone before; quite another to trek deep into the red bits. These days, Kansas is a passionate and polarized place. You never know on which side of the literal-Bible debate the guy in the front row of plastic chairs at Borders, might be. After all, according to the Book of Revelation (Rev 23.11), when Christ returns He'll have a concealed-carry permit. All good Christians pack heat. Blessed are the piece-packers...
So imagine my joy when my escort tells me that the reading has been moved from the bookstore to...a Baptist Church. Cheese and crackers! What will I read? My reviews? Perhaps I can sing a hymn. Onward Christian Satirists? Or fake a cardiac event. My only consolation: they wouldn't gun me down in front of a crucifix would they? Yes they would. That's exactly where they'd score maximum Rapture-points.
Ah Jaysus jocksa! Now we're driving through the plain white suburbs and arriving at the plain white Baptist church. Here I am standing in the plain white meeting area, waiting to be greeted by the plain white, piece-packing Leviticus-spouting preacher-man. And he's...
...a WOMAN! A trim, smiling, welcoming, steely-haired embodiment of all that's best in the Mid-West. It's an American Baptist Church! The good Baptists! The Baptists who ordain gay pastors! The Baptists who birthed the greatest American Christian of the 20th century: Dr Martin Luther King. Phew!
The pastor takes her pew among the other smiling faces and I read. They laugh like drains in all the right places. Their faces grow solemn in all the other right places. When I'm done, this excellent woman tells me not just that she likes the 'Messiah': she's already preached a sermon on it. This is the greatest compliment my book has ever been paid.
A week later in Grand Rapids at venerable Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing -- here skewing more to Calvinists (obviously) and Lutherans, the Messiah comes up many times and again the aspects of it that I feared would offend Christian audiences, don't. They seem to get that's it's about two mutually exclusive versions of Christ. And the fundo right's version -- Christ as a mile-high VelociRapture obligingly murdering their enemies by the billion, is NOT the version these good people go for.
OK, OK you're right -- enough about the damn book. But here's the point. These encounters (and others like them) brought home to me a fascinating political reality: the black-white (or red-blue) polarization between Christians and non-believers, a divide we tend to take as gospel, is inaccurate in one very important way. Yes, the general polity has been polarized by the pseudo-Christian fundo right and its Republican enablers. But so has the Christian community itself. Moderate people of faith are just as appalled by the fundo right and the cretin from Crawford's pandering to them, as Democrats are. More in fact, because they KNOW their Gospels, they KNOW the precious principles that are being twisted, polluted and exploited.
Ever since Karl Rove -- and other rightwing strategists like Lee Atwater and Ralph Reed -- hijacked the Christian bus for the GOP, there's been a reactive assumption among Democrats that their party is therefore the party of the secular. We're never going to make headway with people of faith goes the assumption, so let's just focus on the great secular center. This is the usual Dem mistake of accepting the right's definition of terms, choice of battlefield and political analyses.
I'm not sure that the secular center the Democrats now talk so eagerly about galvanizing, is so big anymore. Far more potent and substantial are Christians of various denominations who are deeply alienated by naked war-mongering, murderous neglect of the poor, looting public funds for the super-rich, wanton destruction of the environment and above all by the hypocrisy of doing these things while insisting you're a Christian.
But instead of respecting and including their natural allies in radical change -- what Michael Tomasky brilliantly suggests as a new Democratic ideal of "the common good" -- Democrats routinely ignore them or demean them. Moderate Christians may be offended by the fundo right but they're just as offended by the offhand anti-religious assumptions and utterances of the liberal-left chatterati. Even Tomasky -- not one of them -- when calling for "Faith in America and its power to do good" hastens to add that it's 'not religious faith'
Yet the great thing about Tomasky's 'common good' is that not only is it a classic republican (small 'r') principle, it's a Christian principle, one moderate Christians can embrace whole-heartedly. Consider a central element in his notion of the 'common good': universal healthcare. To see ill-health as a profit center is one of the least Christian things imaginable. Yet pseudo-Christians like Frist do. (Perhaps he's a Fristian?) In a civilized nation, health -- meaning freedom from as much sickness as possible through equal access to best available care -- is not an option, it's a human right. Christ killed no-one during his brief spell on earth -- but he cured one helluva lot of people. The first thing he did was to practice health-care. Far as I recall, he didn't charge for miracles.
The 'morality' and 'family values' which comprise most of the fundo agenda (and which boil down to sexual fears and obsessions) were way down Christ's list if they were ever even on it. In fact -- to be an inerrant Bible literalist for a moment -- the only sexual activity Christ specifically proscribed in the Gospels was adultery.
And never forget, o ye homophobic fundo Pharisees, that his 12 best friends were...men.
The bedrock Christian principle according to my understanding of Christ's teaching, is that no-one's existence is less precious than mine. That is NOT a Republican or a fundamentalist principle. Quite the contrary. But it is a Democratic one.
The Democratic Party if it's to survive, has got to become a place where moderate people of faith (of whom Christians are by far the largest bloc) are not just comfortable but welcomed into the leadership. No basic change in the nation's direction ever took place without a strong religious underpinning. The War against slavery and the civil rights movement will do as examples; or -- on the other side of the coin -- the Reagan-Atwater-Gingrich-Rove military-corporate counter-revolution.
As that counter-revolution starts to rot and stink, Democrats like Tomasky are rightly saying that the nation yearns for a basic change in direction. But that won't happen without committed, long-term support from people like the good Baptist pastor I met in Kansas and her congregation.
Yes, purple is the color you get when blue penetrates red. But it's also the color of the cloth, the color of the pastors, priests, bishops, ministers and presbyters of mainstream centrist Christianity. If the Democrats can make that color theirs, they will forge a truly Christian coalition, (in the sense of being, as Christ's message was, for all people, not just the soon-to-be-Raptured). A coalition for the common good that binds people of faith to atheists, gays, immigrants, agnostics, unionists, the secular, the activists, the poor, the well-off and the middle class, a coalition that can return America once more to the community of civilized nations and rule it -- again -- for generations.
P.S. This weekend I'm honored to be a guest on my friend Kurt Andersen's show Studio 360. (Join us on your local NPR station).