Do Christians Need Corrective Lenses When Looking In The Mirror?

Alan Noble (click here for very brief bio) recently wrote an opinion piece for Christianity Today that claimed that America needs to elect a Christian President in these Post Christian times (click here for the article). What spurred him into writing this piece was an article written by Jennifer Hecht on why our nation might need a president like Bernie Sanders (click here for that article). Hecht's assertion is based on Sanders' lack of formal religious belief as opposed to the other candidates all of whom have formal Christian ties and thus an assumed impartiality due to that lack of formal religious association.

Noble questions the wisdom of Hecht's claims in the light of today's issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. He also brings up our nation's tendency to elect Christians as Presidents.  In the end, Noble recognizes that we live in a divided Post Christian nation and that we need a leader who can bridge the gaps between the groups so as to protect each group's liberties and concerns. Oddly enough, some of the groups he mentions here with us Christians are those whom we have persecuted at least now and then: the LGBTQ community, immigrants, Muslims, Blacks, poor Whites, the police, and others.

Why, according to Noble, does our nation need a Christian President when Christianity's influence is dying? According to Noble, it is because we now know what it is like to be marginalized, or a "challenged" group. And because of our new place in society, we are the best hope for providing a leader who can be empathetic to all the other groups that are struggling.

The problem is that neither history nor current events supports Noble's claim that Christianity produces the empathy and patience needed to bring marginalized and antagonistic groups together. In fact, whether Christianity is now a marginalized group is very debatable seeing that it has had a privileged place in this nation since Europeans landed on this continent. We relgiously conservative, White Christians have been active in marginalizing others based on race, gender, religion, and now sexual orientation and identification. We have been the leaders in putting those who are different in their places. Yet now that we no longer have the pull to control society's mores and marginalize others, we see ourselves as being marginalized and thus can immediately be empathetic to the others.

If we think of the current support for and efforts of Christians to pass the new religious freedom laws that allow Christians to discriminate against same-sex weddings and those in the LGBT community in various ways, how can Noble believe what he is writing let alone trying to convince others of his point?

Calling us religiously conservative Christians a "challenged" group in society simply because society's sexual mores have publicly switched away from our sexual morals indicates a desire to magnify our loss of prestige and privilege in controlling society. But how does that put us Christians on the fringe of society? The next claim that the nation needs us to provide for them a Christian for the office of President shows another kind of inflation  only this one is on our sense of our own importance to others. Some might call the latter magnification a mild case of having delusions of grandeur.

We Christians in America have spent centuries trying to control society while not caring about the multitudes we have hurt or neglected on the way. American Christianity started very much as a White man's religion. Yes, Blacks were brought to Christ, but our religion's teachings here still favored the White race for such a long time if it still doesn't. We have been cold and merciless to the LGBT community. And we have, from the beginning, proclaimed ourselves as the 'city on the hill.' So in a sense, inflating our losses and our remaining importance to others can simply be described as the same-old, same-old as when we were in charge.

Noble's article here indicates that some of us religiously conservative Christians have lost touch with social reality. And the reason for that lack of connection is that we feel the need to have a more important role in society than any of the ones we fell into. Certainly not all Christians share this lack of awareness of our real place in society.But this article he wrote was posted in the Christianity Today's website proves that Noble is not alone in his delusional understanding of our place in society.

Mr. President, What Big Ears You Have

I'm afraid that our nation's only hope no longer rests at all in its elections, but rests in an unprecedented event that would occur between election day in 2016 and Inauguration Day of 2017. Sometime between those two days we need a big bad wolf to commandeer the White House and to lay waiting in the Lincoln Bedroom, disguised as President Obama of course, for the next President elect to arrive. And when that person arrives and gets around to asking the wolf what big ears he has. The wolf can answer: 'The better to hear everyone with.' And with that, the big bad wolf can lock the President elect up with Obama and take over the President's elect 4 year term. And after those 4 years, we can decide on whether we should either keep the big bad wolf as President or let Obama and the President elect come out of the closet.

The moral of this story is that the qualities we most need in our next President and all other elected officials is that of wanting and being able to listen. But here, I am not just referring to having a President putting up with listening to us people moan and groan. Included with that is for the next President to listen to us as we provide at least half of the solutions to our nation's problems.

See, every election we say we want change. We say that we want our nation back. But it beats the heck out of us to figure out who has our nation in the first place and we are too ignorant of history to really know who had it in the first place. And while saying we want change, we still vote in the 2 major parties despite their track record and their dependence on others who are monetarily well-endowed. 

We also say that we want America to be great again. But at what point in our history has America been great without relying significantly on exploiting others? Do we really want to exploit more people to be great when we are in denial of those whom we have already abused and taken advantage of? So how can anyone take us seriously when we say the things we do? 

If our nation was really honest with itself, we would admit the following about what we want with every election. We want to elect officials whom we can ignore until the next election.  For some of us that means that we want our elected officials do not get in the way of our own pursuits in life, many of which are trivial. For others of us it means that we want our elected officials to make it look like they are helping those whom we don't want to touch. 

Of course there are those who want to get as much out of the government as they can. The worst offenders here are the financial elites. They don't fit the voters described above because they don't ignore those whose elections they've paid for. And so we vote for authoritarians to get our wish. Why authoritarians? Because it takes authoritarians to run government without our input and guidance. And if you look at the current field, it is, without exception, filled with authoritarians.

The idea of greater citizen participation was one of the two main messages of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). Certainly OWS wanted to draw attention to the misdeeds of the 1%. But just as much if not more than that was the idea that we wanted more citizens to take an active role in our democracy noting here that democracy is more than just voting every x number of years. The reduction of democracy to just voting is probably one of the biggest reasons why we have the kind of government we have now and that is regardless of the political party in power.

So what we really need from any future President is that he/she would demand that we, the citizens, persistently participate in government in ways in addition to voting. Those candidates who do not call on us to do so are mere authoritarians who are, because of the complexity of the job, ill-equiped to approach the job that way. 

And if we want government to change, we have to change ourselves first. We can no longer vote for the candidates whom we think we can ignore until the next election. We must demand that our next President, as well as all of our other elected officials, include us not just in the identification of problems, but in the finding of solutions. To not change to that means that we could confine ourselves to our own individual pursuits, but it also includes living in a nation on the decline led by a government that exists to serve itself. And that means that eventually, we will not the choices we have today.