At the end of the seventeenth century in the British colony of Massachusetts, twenty-four people who were perceived as guilty of witchcraft were hung or tortured to death. The mass hysteria generating the Salem witch trials was the product of a conservative brand of Christianity called Puritanism. Church leaders served as an advisory board to government officials; together they forged a coalition, a seventeenth century version of a moral majority regarding themselves as duty-bound to carry out the will of God. With illustrious “disciples” of Christ like preacher Cotton Mather urging the hangman to snap the noose around the neck of one warlock even while he unflinchingly recited the Lord’s prayer, how could the good people of Salem go astray?
Despite the barrier between church and state that some have imagined the Constitution erected one hundred years later, religion and politics have been flirting on the North American continent for more than three centuries. In fact, the two have been carrying on an affair, sometimes more flagrant than clandestine. And while it may seem that the voice of the moral majority that shrieked in Salem in 1692 was muted by the twentieth century, there is a little doubt that it is blaring from high-tech stereo speakers today.
Interestingly, however, the Republican party has become the almost exclusive paramour of conservative Christianity only within the last twenty-five years. As recently as the 1960’s, Democratic Governor of Alabama George Wallace was the darling of many southern Protestant denominations. The collective mission of Wallace and his Christian soldiers was not to keep the world safe from witchcraft, but to preserve the status quo of segregation across the South at a time when left-wing jurists - - no doubt Communists in the grip of Satan! - - were handing down landmark civil rights’ rulings. Certainly this confederacy of Southern Baptists that formed in the fifties, sixties, and seventies could never be accused of “liberalism”, despite membership in the Democratic party.
In 1976, another southern Democrat, Jimmy Carter, became the first president of the United States to describe himself as a born-again Christian. Though Carter shared Wallace’s formal party and religious affiliations, he was a political moderate who infuriated many southern Christians with his progressive views.
Alliances between church and state, then, are nothing new in American history. What is of recent vintage is that the Republican party, long the bastion of mainstream Christians like Episcopalians and Presbyterians, has become the stronghold of the Christian far right of almost every geographical region as the twenty-first century continues groping its way through its first dark decade. One faction of one political party has honed an image of itself as the bride of Christ. Correspondingly, by publicly exploiting ties to fundamentalism, conservative Republicans have convinced many voters that they have a monopoly on moral values.
The contemporary fusion of card-carrying Republicans and fundamentalist Christians traces its genesis to 1979 when Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a political action group composed of conservative Christians. Lobbying for prayer in schools and against such diabolical, feminist-driven plots as the Equal Rights Amendment, the Moral Majority promoted highly conservative candidates until officially disbanding in 1989. Its gauntlet was taken up by the Christian Coalition that distributed voters’ guides throughout the nineties, explicitly backing most of the Republican platform and conservative Republican candidates like George W. Bush, who became its poster boy. Today, what can only be deemed a theocracy has emerged from the marriage of the fundamentalist faithful and the now spacious right wing of the Republican party. Despite laying the blame for September 11th at the door of feminists, gays, and civil libertarians, this marriage is rock solid, spawning legions of adherents among otherwise rational Americans.
While those of the Religious Right are convinced their world view is grounded in the Bible, clearly, Jesus himself was not a conservative. In fact, the life and message of Jesus was antithetical to the conservative Jewish world into which he was born. A revolutionary who threw the money lenders out of the Temple (Mark 11:15), Christ was a bleeding heart liberal who befriended whores, thieves, and lepers. He preached a Gospel of almost unadulterated anti-capitalism, admonishing a rich man to sell his possession and distribute the proceeds to the poor “and you shall have treasure in heaven . . . For it is easier for camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”(Luke 18: 22-25). Evidently, members of the Christian Right gloss over this and other parallel passages as they steadfastly support tax cut for the wealthiest of the wealthy.
The Religious Right, moreover, claim that their God directed, in 2003, a preemptive strike against a sovereign nation, yet Jesus sermonized on the Mount: “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9). Time and again, Jesus urged his listeners to love not only their brethren but their enemies as well (Luke 6: 27-35). While the Christian Right mocks peace activists, they eschew the fact that Jesus was the Prince of Peace himself. It is probably safe to conclude as well that Jesus would express outrage if consulted about yet another kind of violence, that directed against the world’s poor. The question “what would Jesus do?’ on a planet in which, every 3.6 seconds, another precious life is lost to starvation is a rhetorical one. Put another way, those same “pro-lifers” of the Christian Right ignore the admonitions of their savior when they support political agendas protective of mega-billionaires and the corporations they control. Jesus urged his followers to feed the hungry and clothe the naked for “whatever you [do] for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you [do] for me” (Matthew 25: 35-46). Imagine a dialogue, then, between ultra-conservative Christians and their Lord about a state of affairs in which 15 million children die of hunger annually, yet the world’s entire sanitation and food requirements could be met by the 13 billion dollars the Western world spends onperfume alone each year.
Certainly, I concede that one can identify biblical passages that seem to bolster the views of the Religious Right. For example, Christ said “Think not that I come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). And Paul in the New Testament states that homosexual offenders “will not inherit” the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:10). But a strong case can be made that a ChristianLeft can be found in the very words of Jesus. And abundant proof is at hand in the Bible that Jesus today would disapprove as heartily of large sections of the Republican as of the Democratic planks. Jesus, and in fact Mohammed, Buddha, and every great prophet the world has known, belong to all of us, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, the mighty and the powerless. The God who sent them all is a God of social justice, a God of mercy, a God of the entire Universe, or He is nothing at all.
* A poet, university lecturer, and attorney, Dr. O’Brien has been in recovery from conservativism for several years. Because it is a heredity condition, many of her relatives remain in its velvet clutches.
