"The Present Acrimony"

Dear Ed,

The quotation marks cite a small-town Presbyterian minister (unusually laconic, by the way, for a minister), referring to the chasm between the “religious” right and the “secular” left in the U.S.A.

I’ve noted that a divide has stood for a long time between “activists” and “pietists,” the former believing that Christ’s mission for us is to minister to the poor, sick, and unfortunate, with or without a message, in contrast to the latter, who believe that the most important thing is to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, dedicate the rest of your life to getting everybody else to do the same (preferably in your church, during an altar call following a hellfire-and-damnation, come-to-Jesus sermon, but we can quibble about the details), and also spend the rest of your life not sinning (being “sanctified” as well as “saved” will help if your theology allows it), especially not committing sins having to do with sex of any kind and “taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

In What I Believe, Tony Campolo, an evangelical, tells of speaking at an evangelical Christian college. He said to the assembly, “Yesterday [some number of tens of thousands] people in the world died of starvation.” He paused. “And you don’t give a shit.” There was an audible gasp followed by hushed silence—I believe that was the way he put it. “You were more shocked that I said ‘shit’ than by the fact that [all those] people died,” he said.

I remember having a similar thought while in a Sunday school class of young adults thirty-five years ago. The teacher was a professor at a nearby university and he was talking about the what he regarded as dirty Hindus who lived on campus—he said that their food preparation was appalling to him and he implied that his interpretation of their “inferior” hygiene was caused by their “heathen” religion. I wanted to say, “You're a damned bigot.” But it was a Sunday school class, I was a visitor, the pastor was my wife's uncle, and the kids there would be scandalized (by my impure word, not by his unchristian attitude). Being more concerned with “sinful” language than with our collective sin of inhumanity to others resulting in their deaths as surely as if we had murdered them in cold blood—that's pietism.

I believe the pietists of today—the “religious right”—are afraid, as they were then. They have been cowed and bullied from their pulpits and told what they must believe to avoid hellfire. Their beliefs used to be only about end times and the Rapture and the Great Tribulation and the Battle of Armageddon and the Antichrist and the Second Coming and Life After Death and how to prepare for them by Accepting Christ and being Born Again and avoiding Sin. The pietists were “in the world but not of it.” They were poor and ignorant and had little hope in this world and someday, if they were good, they would go to a place where there would be no more crying and pain and the beasts of the wild are led by a child. And the rich and worldly would be no part of it.

When I was a little boy I was taught to fear the great calamities described in excruciating detail, imminent and inescapable. I sat in a high-ceilinged church, a captive child of eight, tortured verbally night after hot, humid summer night of revivals, tortured by the horrible, sadistic men who mopped their sweat with a white handkerchief with one hand and held an open, limp bible with the other while they shouted their threats from the pulpit, telling us it was our last chance before the Lord returned and ended it all.

I had an aunt, God rest her, who reminded me of how much a burn hurt and how it would feel like that all over my body in Eternal Hell (where the God who loved us so much would send us forever.) I was scared as much as anyone, maybe more than most, because I have always seen myself as being a terrible coward—so I tried to become a pietist too. But I could not. I just couldn’t buy fire insurance. There must be more to a loving God than that, I always reasoned.

Today, the pietists are no longer poor and ignorant. They have become rich and powerful—and it has been hell on earth ever since. Their beliefs include who to vote for and campaign and lobby for and, in the latest development, to be a political operative for, in league with the likes of Ralph Reed and Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman—in league with the devil. They are still afraid, triply so—the politicians who rule by fear and the televangelicals and fanciful novelists who enrich themselves at the pietists’ expense have joined the preachers in scaring the hell out of them.

But I say that they are still poor and ignorant. It’s just that now—as always—they have all the answers, and the television and radio “ministries” and networks to bombard all of us with those answers. They have all the money and power and a whole political party that has duped them into believing that they are storing up treasures in heaven, when in reality they are storing up treasures in the coffers of the ultra-mega-hyper-rich of this nation. And the rich and worldly—now, in a funny (that’s funny grotesque, not funny ha-ha) twist—own them as they never did.

So we have come to “the present acrimony.” Well, as I dared to say, I am a Christian too, not duped by the cobbled-together coalition of the rich and righteous, and I read the Bible too (even limp-backed ones if they’re the only ones available), and the relevant text about fear is in the First Letter of John (4:18-20):

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because He first loved us. Those who say, “I love God” and hate their brothers and sisters are liars; for those who do not love [those] whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen.”

And Jesus said, “You have heard it said, ‘…love your neighbor and hate your enemy… For if you love [only] those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, … do not even the Gentiles do the same?” (Matthew 5:43 et ff.)

But we Christians, activists and pietists, seem to skip over these texts, required reading in our Sunday schools, and here we are, at the present acrimony. We won’t talk to one another except under the most strained of circumstances. When we do, the most fearful of us try to do all the talking because we have all the answers, and I am reminded of the little kid who sticks his fingers in his ears and shouts, “LA-LA-LA-LA-LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! LA-LA-LA-LA-LA!” to drown out the other’s words.

What are we to do, brothers and sisters in Christ? Can we find some common ground? Some higher ground? Is there anything we might agree on? Maybe not much on beliefs—let’s get over that. But how about Jesus’ commandments? There were only two, actually, and the second has to do with the verses above, about loving our neighbors with charity (agapé, in New Testament Greek), practicing the Golden Rule, feeding, welcoming, clothing “the least of these” as if we were doing the deeds for Christ himself.

I confess that at this moment I feel like a big hypocrite because I have not done nearly my share of good works in my day, and I know pietists—a lot of pietists—who have done and are doing much more than I have and am doing.

But why don’t we do more things together? Maybe while we’re working together to do Christ’s bidding on earth, can we talk about our similarities as well as our differences? Could one group stop saying that the other does not really consist of Christians? And even if it is true that other major world religions are wrong and all the people who sincerely believe in them are damned to hell for all eternity—I don’t believe that myself but apparently there are fellow Christians who sincerely do—even if it is true, can we stop harping on it and just love these people and practice the Golden Rule and extend agapé to them the same as we purportedly do to one another? Red and yellow, black and white, They are precious in His sight. “Who is my neighbor?” Let’s end “the present acrimony.”