the partisan artisan

In America we have made a craft out of towing lines of faith and politics. The right-wing generation of Moral Majority followers, pro-lifers, and home schoolers have often taken the Gospel and shoved it right into the glass bottle, like a model schooner, the bottle is America and the ship is faith. The alternate extreme is happening with the offspring of the religi-cons. Twenty-somethings across the country have become socially conscience and found solace in the Democratic Party. Issues like Abortion are negligable collateral damage as we fight for "Biblical Issues" like the environment and the poor.

Independents clog American democracy with their micro-selections in voting and policy support. For the purist, independents ruin democratic progress and/or conservation because they slow movements and grid lock ventures. Joining a political party requires some compromise and submission, but it greases the gears. For the Christian, these compromises and submissions are actually impossible. Simply put, Christians face at least two major conflicts.

First, Jesus said you cannot serve two masters. Claiming something like this is not some sort of divine proverb of philosophical implication, its an observation of the human condition. Jesus was not simply a hippy in burlap sitting on a rock postulating about masters and servants. Humans find loyalty difficult to multitask, which explains war, greed, lust, consumerism and so much pain in the world. Of course to any member of humanity who does not believe in Jesus as the pivot point of spirituality, its possible to hope someday for multitasking who we serve.

Thats what motivates things like Product Red or the Moral Majority...they help us to indulge materially and relieve our guilt with benevolence or reconcile political ambitions with faith. But alas, these only work independent of a belief in Jesus, which many could soundly dismiss as foolish religion with valid philosophy. Only those who actually claim Jesus is the hub are subject to indictment for the hypocrisy of towing these lines of mastery.

The second issue is slightly more suspect/subject, simply debatable. Some of Jesus' actions are interpreted differently. Easter is a complex, dramatic tension between death and life, which is the broad blanket covering Christianity as a whole. Both the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus are documented historically, but independently. Sources have soundly proven a man claiming to be Jesus of Nazareth was put to death by the Roman Empire and that a man claiming to be Jesus of Nazareth was alive and active three days later, many conspiracies and a third of the world's faith diversely explore the in between. If you can submit to the mystical nature of such an occasion and believe Jesus was God and did raise from the dead, as Christians believe, then you must assume He knew of the resurrection in the moment of death. The fact that Jesus would die at the hands of a government and a religious aristocracy could introduce a very powerful protest. A man with the power to stop his own execution by simply recanting former claims and does not, is a tragic hero. If you believe Jesus knew the crucifixion was the means to an end, then it was a protest, his way of saying no ruler better governs the earth than God who made it. He will decide his own life and death and as such he made the secondary commentary through his action of saying, "no man will govern the world's ways, because only God can do so", making the crucifixion a triumphant protest, not a tragic execution.

Again, the argument assumes you are willing to suspend suspicions of things unprovable, so we cannot argue political parties are wrong, nor are governments, or serving different systems or ideals...unless of course you do believe. The baby-boomer religi-cons with their dismissal of governance and fight against abortion and the post-modern evange-libs with their embrace of environmentalism and advocacy for the poor are empassionately engaging democracy on behalf of God, but neither functions unless they are willing to part ways with any system for the sake of Jesus being God and again...the pivot point.

A Peacemaker Revolution

If ever there were a cause and reaction so demonstrative and necessitating of peacemakers, it is this. Please read Jason Evans' experience in San Diego, CA with the new border fence.


Ecclessia Collective



I've commented, I hope you'll enter the discussion as well.

AP

Democracy: Redemption Politicized

Before going anywhere, its important to stipulate the ideas here reach beyond the current political climate and characters. While many things discussed in this article are relevant in the present, they've been timeless traditions and flaws of American democracy and its participants.

Even if a political figure is intelligent and inspiring, the aware citizen has the compass to perceive it is the process, not the person, that powers the gears of democracy's clock. Anyone can see the propensity of our society these days to demonize and canonize public figures; and politicians seem to polarize most dramatically. Some create a Satan vs. God complex of duality, worshiping one person with complete disregard of the more complex truth that each is human and therefore given to triumph and failure. Many of us watch with fantasy, and fascination, and daydreams of the potential power harnessed by our deity, if they one day become victorious.

The hilarity is the irony of democracy's design. Worshiping a politician is so often done by educated people and its one of the most naive choices a democratic citizen can make. The beauty of democracy is it's design is completely entangled with recognition of sin and grace. Often democracy is an exaggerated illustration, more definable than how sin and grace show up in everyday life even, to understand how humanity functions without failing completely.

Democracy is a great theater to act out the idea of the body of Christ, but not at all in the context many Christian political leaders have defined it in the past. Those like the Moral Majority, who seek a sort of American Christendom of dimensions that would shame Constantine's efforts, are onto the fundamental basis that democracy is deeply rooted in some of God's designs for humanity and community, but miss the inherent nature that democracy's keystone is recognition of the individual's need for communal accountability. You cannot argue man is completely benevolent and working for the benefit of all mankind and equally recognize the democratic system, unless you are foolish enough to believe your like-minded peers are the only participants above reproach.

Thats why democracy itself, unlike its moving pieces (politicians and participants themselves) is completely protected from being worshiped, because only a fool would worship a system whose foundation is for communal processing to minimize sin's hold on our daily decisions. This fact proves it is not God's exclusive, choice political system, because in the Garden of Eden, check and balances were not necessary. It also retards the idealist's argument that Jesus was a communist or socialist, because those theories can only operate in a vacuum devoid of sin.

So we pray "God bless America". Not because our system is superior, but because our system is rooted in the recognition of our failings and subsequent need for something bigger than the ourselves...both God and community, to save us from fading into selfish chaos.

painting the steeple green

You may have heard, the environment is an issue. The consequences of the Industrial Revolution are being realized in periodical spikes in environmental awareness. In the 1970's air and water pollution became recognized as deeply troubling issues, in the 1990's recycling and the O-zone became more and more talked about, and now its the sustainability of how we power things, namely electricity sources and automobile powering.

The upside is the church is becoming aware of the obvious link between Genesis 1 (God's call for man to care for his creation...not rule) and environmental issues. Some churches, such as Mars Hill in Grand Rapids, Michigan have put the environment in its core structure of action for awhile, but whats more encouraging is a person like Mike Huckabee, who was criticized by some conservative "good ole boys" over his claim that the environment is an essential issue to evangelicals; citing Genesis 1.

If Christian music is any sign though, the church should be hip to copying this in about 7 years. In recent years churches have become more like entertainment companies with marketing departments. The 1990's saw booms in both industries in secular society and it was only a matter of time before the church got in bed with them. As Steve Stockman, Presbyterian pastor and U2 biographer pointed out, the church saw the hot trash of shopping malls and brought it into the sanctuaries. The irony is the U2 pop-mart and Zoo TV era was a deliberate Screwtape style mockery of the evils lights and sounds had perpetrated on distracting the human soul from spirituality, which churches copy for the "sake of relevance."

Here are three philosophies churches have invited into their company...

1. Batteries...any sizable church with a sound system uses a disgusting number of batteries to power its wireless microphones. Whats worse, there is a widespread argument that rechargeable batteries have too unpredictable a decay, and therefore would "interrupt the show" if they died, so many churches will discard 1 battery, per microphone, per service.

2. Paper...churches with somewhere in the range of 1,000 members can easily spend $10,000 a year simply on paper. From the bulletins, to mailings, to invite cards...and the more colorful and glossy...the less recyclable.

3. Electricity...computers of employees left on all night, lights turned on in entire buildings so people "feel welcome", night time signs, exterior flood lights, sound systems, all drain huge amounts of energy and are all able to be scaled back.

SO be responsible, ask the session or a staff member at your church what the paper budget is, ask how many batteries they throw away, ask if the staff is responsible about power usage.

Even these guys agreed on it...