They’re edgy and authentic, because they cuss: the son of Jim Bakker and a programmer with messy hair want to know how it’s all gone so terribly wrong:

What the hell happened? Where did we go wrong? How was Christianity co-opted by a political party? Why are Christians supporting laws that force others to live by their standards? The answers to these questions are integral to the survival of Christianity.

I bet you’ve never heard this one before: it seems that Conservative Christianity has been co-opted by the Republican party, which has drained it of the pure, unadorned Message of Jesus. No, for real:

His parables and lessons were focused on love and forgiveness, a message of “come as you are, not as you should be.” The bulk of his time was spent preaching about helping the poor and those who are unable to help themselves. At the very least, Christians should be counted on to lend a helping hand to the poor and others in need.

This brings us to the big issues of American Christianity: Abortion and gay marriage. These two highly debatable topics will not be going away anytime soon. Obviously, the discussion centers around whether they are right or wrong, but is the screaming really necessary? After years of witnessing the dark side of religion, Marc and I think not.

So Christians—by which I mean the dorky, untattooed, Republican kind—can’t be counted on to lend a helping hand to the poor. This would come as a surprise to Syracuse University professor of public administration Arthur Brooks, whose recent book argued at length that religious conservatives are in every measure more generous than secular liberals. Perhaps Jay means they can’t be counted on to disburse public funds for the benefit of the poor, which is much closer to the truth. I suppose if they were cool, tattooed, Democrat Christians, this failing would be remedied.

Moving on, surely we can agree that “the screaming” about abortion and gay marriage isn’t necessary. Surely Jay and Marc mean we should engage key aspects of Christian ethical orthodoxy in respectful, rational dialog, rather than the strident garbage that too often infects our discourse. Either that or they mean “Christians should be able to look past their differences and agree to disagree.” Which I take to mean keep abortion legal and enact marriage rights for all, just like you had coolness and tattoos of your own.

It is becoming a tired emergent trope that American Christianity (or Christ-following, or whatever you want to call it) has been wedded to conservative politics, and the answer, rather than dissolve that unholy union, is to get it hitched to liberal American politics. If they would merely say that the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the United States are two separate entities never to be conflated, I would cheer them and their dangerous haircuts and their scary tattoos all day long. Many an American evangelical needs to hear this message. But they don’t stop there. When they say God isn’t a Republican, they really seem to mean that he is, in fact, a Democrat.

And it’s not just disaffected emergent youths. I’ll never forget a sermon I heard by a well-known and deservedly very respected leader in American urban ministry. He was talking about where we could expect to find the locus of truth, and ticking off various institutions that could be expected to turn up empty. “You won’t find it in the Republican Party!” he thundered at one point. “You won’t find it in the Dem—in the liberal Democratic party!”

Uh-huh. I guess that tells me where to look. Bakker and Brown seem to be pointing me there too. Thanks for disabusing me of my reactionary and unthoughtful politics, boys!

Check out Bakker’s church if you’re interested. The decade in which my son enters his teens will see television ministry by a man named Bakker, just like his old man.

I’ll leave you with this: RevolutionNYC.com uses table-based layout again, just like the Christ Follower people. Plus the DOCTYPE is jacked, so it renders in quirks mode. Hipness has a price, guys. The piper will invoice you, guaranteed.

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• Posted by Tim on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 6:33:53 pm PST
• Category: Politics, Religion
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