This morning, after the drive in (it was 48 degrees and raining hard), I had the chance to attend the Cole Lecture at VDS and to hear (and to meet) a scholar of American religious history who has been influencing me since I first encountered his book Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory as a college sophomore in the Fall of 1994. If you, like me, grew up in the South and/or in the Evangelical subculture, you have to read Randall Balmer. Just stop whatever it is you are doing at this moment, and click here to order this classic and brilliant book. These days he writes as a "jilted lover" who acknowledges being nurtured as a child and sustained as an adult by an evangelical faith that, as Denise Richards might say, is complicated. Although I would not say along with Balmer that I am still sustained by an evangelical faith, I do find myself largely in agreement with just about every word that came out of his mouth this morning and most everything I have read in his recent book, Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament, about which he was speaking this morning and wherein he notes that right-wing zealots have distorted the gospel of Jesus, defaulted on the legacy of nineteenth-century evangelical activism, and failed to appreciate the genius of the First Amendment. He continues:
"[Preachers of the Religious Right] appear not to have read the same New Testament that I open before me every morning at the kitchen counter. . . . They have led their sheep astray from the gospel of Jesus Christ to the false gospel of neoconservative ideology and into the maw of the Republican Party. . . . I challenge my fellow believers to reclaim their birthright as evangelical Christians and examine the scriptures for themselves--absent the funhouse mirror distortions of the Religious Right. For those equal to the task, I suggest a form of shock therapy: juxtapose the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), arguably the highest expression of Christian ethics, with the platform of the Republican Party. Would Jesus, who summoned his followers to be "peacemakers" and invited them to love their enemies, jump at the opportunity to deploy military forces, especially at the cost of so many civilian lives? How do we reconcile reckless consumerism and tax cuts for the affluent with Jesus' warnings against storing up "treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal"? Is the denial of equal rights to anyone--women or Muslims or immigrants or gays--consistent with the example of the man who healed lepers and paralytics and who spent much of his time with the cultural outcasts of his day? I suspect that when Jesus asked us to love our enemies, he probably didn't mean that we should torture or kill them. I doubt that the man who expressed concern for the tiniest sparrow would approve the systematic despoiling of the environment in the interest of corporate profits. Jesus calls his followers to a higher standard."
This is good stuff that gets to the heart of my own existential conflict with the religious experiences and worldview of my adolescence and young adulthood. Again, if you aren't familiar with Balmer, he's very much worth getting to know.
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