Group Asks: What Did Jesus Say?

Group asks: What did Jesus say?
Posted by Frank James at 12:17 PM CDT

I went to a press conference yesterday and a church service broke out.

The press conference at the National Press Club was held by the new Red Letter Christians network, Christian communicators who say they want to change how Christians influence the national public policy debate. The Religious Right, with its focus on a narrow set of issues like abortion and gay rights, has dominated the public arena for too long, says the RLC.

But Jesus, whose words in many Bibles are printed in red, hence the new group's name, was concerned about social justice issues like poverty and discrimination that are as neglected on the RR’s agenda as the robbery victim on the Jericho road in Jesus's parable of the Good Samaritan, say RLC members.

What would Jesus do? is a line popular among Christians. The RLCs add a new wrinkle, a new way for assessing policy and political candidates: What did Jesus say?

So through a series of what amounted to small sermons, the Christian clergy, activists, scholars and writers who attended yesterday’s event, announced that they wanted to elbow their way into the national pulpit, as it were, to give issues of social justice, global warming, peacemaking etc., an emphasis in policymaking they say is now lacking because the RR largely ignores these other issues.

But the RLC has another reason for being, say its members. To be prophetic, that is, to tell a society what God requires of it even when that’s unpopular, means being independent of party politics.

The RLCs criticized the RR for essentially serving the interests of the Republican Party and vice versa.

The press conference was meant to pre-empt the RR's “Values Voter Summit” to be hosted here Washington later this week by FRC Action, part of the Family Research Council, a conservative group that binds fundamentalist Christianity and Republican politics. Featured speakers at the event include conservative favorites William Bennett and Ann Coulter.

(Considering what Jesus did in the temple when he encountered the moneychangers, it’s interesting to consider what his reaction might be if He were sitting in the audience when Coulter dropped some of her more out-there comments like “I'm getting a little fed up with hearing about, oh, civilian casualties” and “I think we ought to nuke North Korea right now just to give the rest of the world a warning.” But I digress.)

“…It’s actually, I would suggest, arrogant to assume that only two issues involve moral values,” said Rev. Jim Wallis, referring to abortion and gay marriage.

Wallis is one of the nation’s leading voices on social justice issues. Head of Sojourners, a progressive Christian group and author of “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It” has been trying to wrest the microphone away from the Religious Right for years.

“And it is hubris to say that only those people with a conservative political position are voting based on values. What should be valued is the broader and deeper question. We want a politics grounded in all of our values and what really appeals to the basic moral concerns of all Americans.”

The RLCs can’t be written off as a bunch of liberal, anything goes, Christians. Wallis has been very public about being pro-life. Rev. Tony Campolo, a well known Christian educator who attended yesterday’s press conference, was very clear about personally opposing gay sex and marriage, what he called “same-sex eroticism.”

So they share some common ground with many people on the Religious Right.

But the contest over whose version of Christianity will win out is going to waged over the differences between the RLCs and the RRs. And by the sound of it, this contest could get pretty heated.

Randall Balmer, a Columbia University professor and expert on American religious history, gave just a sense of the fight that’s brewing.

".. The evangelical faith that nurtured me as a child and that sustains me as an adult has been hijacked by right wing zealots who really have no real understanding of the teachings of Jesus,” he said.

“They have taken the Gospel the Good News of Jesus Christ, something that I consider to be lovely and redemptive, and turned it into something ugly and punitive," he said. "They have cherry picked through the Scriptures wrenching verses out of context and used those verses as a bludgeon against their political enemies.”

Balmer went on to say he has no problem with faith in the public square. His problem was that the RR seemed to view itself as inseparable from the Republican party.

“…There’s a real danger when the faith is identified too closely with anyone political ideology, political party or, in this case in recent years, with a specific administration. Because at that point the faith loses its prophetic power.”

Then Balmer told a story. While he was doing research for a book, he asked eight RR groups for their position on the use of torture. Only two got back to him, saying they agreed with the Bush administration.

“These are people who purport to be pro-life,” he said. “These are people who claim to hear a fetal scream. And yet they’re turning a deaf ear to the very real screams of people who are being tortured in our name. I happen to think that’s morally bankrupt and we need voices speaking out against this sort of travesty.”

Then there was Campolo. “Red Letters Christians are above else a challenge to the Religious Right. We want to challenge them on their own ground,” he said. “They don’t do what has to be done to eliminate abortion as a case in point.

“The Guttmacher Institute recently reported that if you made contraceptives available to lower income women, you could cut the number of abortions in America by 200,000. Add to that this fact, that if you provided medical care for the poor, if you provided daycare for these children who are born, if you provided a raise in the minimum wage, you could cut abortions by another 300k.

“Consequently, there are one million abortions in America. You can cut it by a half a million if you took care of the poor. We challenge the Religious Right that meets at the end of this week to do something about the poor… if they’re rally serious about their pro-life agenda.”

Rev. Romal Tune, an African American who has a community-activism ministry he takes to churches nationwide, accused the RR of being elitist at one point referring to its leadership as “ultraconservative elitist white males.”

He mentioned how his seven-week old cousin was killed by a stray bullet during a drive by shooting two years ago. “The dialogue around gay rights and abortion will do nothing to get guns off the street. It will do nothing to improve legislation and stricter gun laws,” Tune said.

“Rather this conversation will only allow people to hide in their offices or simply cower down behind pulpits rather than stand beside the people who need them most in the inner cities and our rural communities. This is the difference between prophetic ministry and pathetic ministry.”

Alexia Kelley, a founder of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, said: “We stand for peace. But if there’s a culture war that’s needed, it is a war on greed, on poverty, on materialism and on economic security of the middle-class”

Another speaker, Rev. Robert Michael Franklin Jr., a professor at Emory University and president of the Regional Council of Churches of Atlanta, said that as an African American preacher he could speak to the dangers of a group aligning itself to closely to one party, as African Americans have with Democrats.

“We humbly say to our fellow values voters, be cautious in over identifying with a single party and a narrow set of values,” Franklin said . “In the black church we speak from experience here. Because many of us have too often aligned ourselves, uncritically, with a single party.

“But today we urge black church leaders around the nation and evangelicals not to simply endorse Democrats or Republicans out of blind loyalty but to discern the congruence of their policies with God’s politics.”

To that end, the RLC press kit had in it a voters’ guide. It doesn’t tell voters who to vote for. Instead, it provides a framework for how voters can use Christian values in consistent way to inform their choices.

For instance, it suggests Christians should vote for a consistent ethic of life. That means supporting “common-ground “ policies that would lead to fewer abortions while at the same time voting to end capital punishment.

The RLCs also have a blog, Godspolitics.com. This week, Wallis and Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition head, have a debate on Christian values.

“I want to pledge to you we will not treat our opponents the way the Religious Right has treated those who oppose them," Wallis said. “Our conversation will be open and welcoming and civil. We’re not afraid of dialogue. The Religious Right wins when they control a monologue. They begin to lose when dialogue breaks out. Dialogue has just broken out.”


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