Showing posts with label Christian Right. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian Right. Show all posts

Thursday, 16 August 2012

A reply to Rod Benson's address to the CDP


The Reverend Rod Benson, ethicist and public theologian, of the Morling Baptist College addressed the NSW Christian Democratic Party on Saturday, 11 August 2012. Benson addressed issues like Australia’s Christian heritage and Christians be involvement in politics. Also, Benson stated that “the Christian Democratic Party can … have significant positive influence on the policy direction and moral outlook of a community.” In this it has failed! Let us address that issue last.
Christian Involvement
Benson is right! A Christian can be called to be involved in politics. Christians might not be of this world but God has put us in this world to serve. Politics is one of the ways in which a Christian is called to serve. But the Christian involved needs to remember two important points. The first is that there are no professional politicians or policy advisors. It is that some get paid and others don’t. Some have academic qualifications and others don’t. Their insights are equally valid until proven otherwise.
The other, ethics matter in all policy areas. I never have forgotten Kevin Andrews, a Christian, a prominent member of the ‘Lyons Forum’ and in 2005, the Howard Liberal governments Minister for Industrial Relations statement at the beginning Work Choices debate. He said, “an emphasis on fairness only leads to regulatory excess and inefficiency’. For a Christian, fairness (or social justice) is the ends, not economic efficiency or the cutting of red tape.
Australia’s Christian Heritage
Yes, Benson is right in saying Australia has a Christian foundation, something denied by some historians. For years, when Australia tells it story it is, among other things, anti-religious. Depictions of Christians or Christian institutions have been negative while there positive aspects have either been ignored or downplayed.  An example of the churches relationship with aboriginals in which mistreatment and paternalism have been stressed but the not the Christian role in Aboriginal survival, advocacy and empowerment.
But that Christian foundation was not about the creation of an antipodean Christendom. Most Christian’s involvement in the formation of Australian democracy strove to create a secular democracy, not a ‘Christian nation’. They attempted to find those things that God has disclosed to all (Romans 1:19) and then make them the basis of an Australian law. The Americans pioneered this approach and the European has followed. Benson makes the mistake of thinking secular means anti-religious, not just the rejection of any religious test.
The Christian Democratic Party
However, Benson is wrong in assuming that the Christian Democratic Party has the potential to be a force for good. The CDP has a racist conservative political ideology, not a Christian one. The truth in that charge is shown by the 2009 expulsion of Gordon Moyes . Moyes is a former pastor of Sydney's Wesley Mission. His expulsion occurred after he complained that the party needed to stop being anti-Muslim. Like the Crusaders of old, CDP has laid siege to Muslim immigration and Islamic schools. This was strange because the Islamic community could be a source of support for the CDP. Muslims do not trust anything ‘secular’. If they can afford to, Muslims prefer sending their children to Christian schools, rather than secular state schools. They might prefer to support a Christian political party as oppose to the secular main stream parties.
Moyes other criticism of the CDP was that it has no positive policies. Moyes argued that the CDP was known for being anti-homosexual and anti-abortion. Don't get Myes wrong. He was likand, I believe, still is anti-homosexual and anti-abortion. Yet like me, he could not name a positive policy position the CDP has taken. It had even fail to take what it is passionate about and promote positive policy outcomes. I have always wondered how one can oppose abortion without advocating policies to help the offspring and their families. Yet, at each election the CDP seems to be stone cold silent on ensuring single mothers have adequate income support, teenage mums have equitable access to education, access for all to affordable child care and greater parental support in the community. I have never heard the CDP candidates being passionate about these or any costing of them.
Benson takes a swipe at people like me who object to the word ‘Christian’ in the title of groups like the CDP and the Australian Christian Lobby. He says, “Neither the CDP nor the ACL, nor other groups like them, have ever (to my knowledge) suggested that they speak for the whole Christian constituency.” One contradiction springs to mind but involving the ACL, not the CDP. In 2005 and 2006, during the debate over the ACT’s Civil Marriage Bill 2006, the ACL attempted to speak for ‘a majority of Christians’ but not all Christian groups approved. In keeping their coalition together, the ACL needed to ‘compromise’ its anti-homosexual stance. This got them in trouble with groups like Melbourne’s ‘Saltshakers’ and Perth’s ‘Life Ministries’. David Palmer of Victorian Presbyterian ‘Church and Nation’ committee wrote a good summary of the argument.
But the greater problem is that groups like the ACL and the CDP is the use of the word ‘Christian’ in their titles. In spite of Benson’s assertions, this is an attempt to alienate from the faith all those who reject the CDP’s racist conservatism. Their re-badgine of the CDP into "Australian Christians" has made it worst. I am one of those who say they don’t speak for me! It is un-Christian to promote hatred against Muslims, gays, lesbians and transsexuals. It is unbiblical to deny women the right to reproductive justice, including access to safe and affordable abortions. It is simply stupid to promote celibacy before marriage and fidelity during marriage – it never has worked! The rest of the CDP policies have nothing to do with Christianity but have to do with a racist conservative political agenda being read as the Christian political philosophy.
The Truly Christian Political Party
So what is the most Christian political party? My views are already on the public record. During the 2005 Western Australian State election, I stood for the Greens in Ballajura. The endorsing body asked me to stress my faith, so I wrote my introduction. Benson and the CDP might not like it but I still say the Greens are the closest thing to a Christian party in Australia. I put my money and my vote where my mouth is!

Monday, 19 July 2010

The Abortion Myth - Book Excerpt from 'Thy Kingdom Come' by Randall Balmer

In the 1980s, in order to solidify their shift from divorce to abortion, the Religious Right constructed an abortion myth, one accepted by most Americans as true. Simply put, the abortion myth is this: Leaders of the Religious Right would have us believe that their movement began in direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Politically conservative evangelical leaders were so morally outraged by the ruling that they instantly shed their apolitical stupor in order to mobilize politically in defense of the sanctity of life. Most of these leaders did so reluctantly and at great personal sacrifice, risking the obloquy of their congregants and the contempt of liberals and "secular humanists," who were trying their best to ruin America. But these selfless, courageous leaders of the Religious Right, inspired by the opponents of slavery in the nineteenth century, trudged dutifully into battle in order to defend those innocent unborn children, newly endangered by the Supreme Court's misguided Roe decision.

It's a compelling story, no question about it. Except for one thing: It isn't true.

Although various Roman Catholic groups denounced the ruling, and Christianity Today complained that the Roe decision "runs counter to the moral teachings of Christianity through the ages but also to the moral sense of the American people," the vast majority of evangelical leaders said virtually nothing about it; many of those who did comment actually applauded the decision. W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press wrote, "Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision." Indeed, even before the Roe decision, the messengers (delegates) to the 1971 Southern Baptist Convention gathering in St. Louis, Missouri, adopted a resolution that stated, "we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother." W.A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, expressed his satisfaction with the Roe v. Wade ruling. "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," the redoubtable fundamentalist declared, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed."

The Religious Right's self-portrayal as mobilizing in response to the Roe decision was so pervasive among evangelicals that few questioned it. But my attendance at an unusual gathering in Washington, D.C., finally alerted me to the abortion myth. In November 1990, for reasons that I still don't entirely understand, I was invited to attend a conference in Washington sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Religious Right organization (though I didn't realize it at the time). I soon found myself in a conference room with a couple of dozen people, including Ralph Reed, then head of the Christian Coalition; Carl F. H. Henry, an evangelical theologian; Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family; Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; and Edward G. Dobson, pastor of an evangelical church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and formerly one of Jerry Falwell's acolytes at Moral Majority. Paul M. Weyrich, a longtime conservative activist, head of what is now called the Free Congress Foundation, and one of the architects of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, was also there.

In the course of one of the sessions, Weyrich tried to make a point to his Religious Right brethren (no women attended the conference, as I recall). Let's remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.

Bob Jones University was one target of a broader attempt by the federal government to enforce the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Several agencies, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, had sought to penalize schools for failure to abide by antisegregation provisions. A court case in 1972, Green v. Connally, produced a ruling that any institution that practiced segregation was not, by definition, a charitable institution and, therefore, no longer qualified for tax-exempt standing.

The IRS sought to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in 1975 because the school's regulations forbade interracial dating; African Americans, in fact, had been denied admission altogether until 1971, and it took another four years before unmarried African Americans were allowed to enroll. The university filed suit to retain its tax-exempt status, although that suit would not reach the Supreme Court until 1983 (at which time, the Reagan administration argued in favor of Bob Jones University).

Initially, I found Weyrich's admission jarring. He declared, in effect, that the origins of the Religious Right lay in Green v. Connally rather than Roe v. Wade. I quickly concluded, however, that his story made a great deal of sense. When I was growing up within the evangelical subculture, there was an unmistakably defensive cast to evangelicalism. I recall many presidents of colleges or Bible institutes coming through our churches to recruit students and to raise money. One of their recurrent themes was,We don't accept federal money, so the government can't tell us how to run our shop—whom to hire or fire or what kind of rules to live by. The IRS attempt to deny tax-exempt status to segregated private schools, then, represented an assault on the evangelical subculture, something that raised an alarm among many evangelical leaders, who mobilized against it.

For his part, Weyrich saw the evangelical discontent over the Bob Jones case as the opening he was looking for to start a new conservative movement using evangelicals as foot soldiers. Although both the Green decision of 1972 and the IRS action against Bob Jones University in 1975 predated Jimmy Carter's presidency, Weyrich succeeded in blaming Carter for efforts to revoke the taxexempt status of segregated Christian schools. He recruited James Dobson and Jerry Falwell to the cause, the latter of whom complained, "In some states it's easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."

Weyrich, whose conservative activism dates at least as far back as the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964, had been trying for years to energize evangelical voters over school prayer, abortion, or the proposed equal rights amendment to the Constitution. "I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," he recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

During the meeting in Washington, D.C., Weyrich went on to characterize the leaders of the Religious Right as reluctant to take up the abortion cause even close to a decade after the Roe ruling. "I had discussions with all the leading lights of the movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, post–Roe v. Wade," he said, "and they were all arguing that that decision was one more reason why Christians had to isolate themselves from the rest of the world."

"What caused the movement to surface," Weyrich reiterated,"was the federal government's moves against Christian schools." The IRS threat against segregated schools, he said, "enraged the Christian community." That, not abortion, according to Weyrich, was what galvanized politically conservative evangelicals into the Religious Right and goaded them into action. "It was not the other things," he said.

Ed Dobson, Falwell's erstwhile associate, corroborated Weyrich's account during the ensuing discussion. "The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion," Dobson said. "I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something."

During the following break in the conference proceedings, I cornered Weyrich to make sure I had heard him correctly. He was adamant that, yes, the 1975 action by the IRS against Bob Jones University was responsible for the genesis of the Religious Right in the late 1970s. What about abortion? After mobilizing to defend Bob Jones University and its racially discriminatory policies, Weyrich said, these evangelical leaders held a conference call to discuss strategy. He recalled that someone suggested that they had the makings of a broader political movement—something that Weyrich had been pushing for all along—and asked what other issues they might address. Several callers made suggestions, and then, according to Weyrich, a voice on the end of one of the lines said, "How about abortion?" And that is how abortion was cobbled into the political agenda of the Religious Right.

The abortion myth serves as a convenient fiction because it suggests noble and altruistic motives behind the formation of the Religious Right. But it is highly disingenuous and renders absurd the argument of the leaders of Religious Right that, in defending the rights of the unborn, they are the "new abolitionists." The Religious Right arose as a political movement for the purpose, effectively, of defending racial discrimination at Bob Jones University and at other segregated schools. Whereas evangelical abolitionists of the nineteenth century sought freedom for African Americans, the Religious Right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination. Sadly, the Religious Right has no legitimate claim to the mantle of the abolitionist crusaders of the nineteenth century. White evangelicals were conspicuous by their absence in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Where were Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington or on Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Martin Luther King Jr. and religious leaders from other traditions linked arms on the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to stare down the ugly face of racism?

Falwell and others who eventually became leaders of the Religious Right, in fact, explicitly condemned the civil rights movement. "Believing the Bible as I do," Falwell proclaimed in 1965, "I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ, and begin doing anything else—including fighting Communism, or participating in civil-rights reforms." This makes all the more outrageous the occasional attempts by leaders of the Religious Right to portray themselves as the "new abolitionists" in an effort to link their campaign against abortion to the nineteenth century crusade against slavery.

Excerpted from Randell Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens  America (New York: Basic Book, 2006), pp.11-17.

Tuesday, 26 January 2010

Fundamentalist Perverts Education

Many have had concern about fundamentalists running secondary and primary schools. The anti-academic approach to knowledge has been borne out by the University of California not accepting students from a so called 'Christian School.' The University had ruled some courses of Calvary Chapel School of Murrieta in California, US, inadequate preparation for University admission. The courses failed to provide a broad enough grounding in the subjects of biology, history, politics and religion. In August 2005, the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), the school itself and six students took the University of California to court over this ruling. The US court system found for the University. The fundamentalists exhausted all appeals on the 20 January 2010.

Success for the fundamentalist would only come if they could prove discrimination of the basis of religion. Wisely, US courts have refused to rule on academic standards. The University need to prove that its decisions were not based on a rejection of a particular political or religious viewpoint.

The Biology textbook used by Calvary Chapel College proves that the University's concerns were justified. The textbook was Biology for Christian School Second Edition (Bob Jones University Press, 1999). Its introduction states "The people who prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second" (p. vii)." It advocates creationism and even has a rejection of the 'gap' theory. Given that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' could never be to prepare a student to study Biology at a university level.

My problem with the text is that I don't think the book is even Christian! I have two reasons for this. The first is the denial of a historical grammatical approach to scripture. It has imposed some idea of that scripture that traditional Christianity refused to recognise. From the early church to Augustine to the reformer did not see the Bible as a scientific textbook. To use the cliché, "the Bible teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go!" Occasionally, the church has slipped into some insane literal interpretation. A good example is Bishop Usher's syncretism when he combined it with Christianity with Hume's empirical epistemology. As science advance, Usher age of the earth looked increasingly stupid.

The other reason is related. What is the Bible and what is science? Whatever the bible is, it has never been a science textbook. Science is about drawing knowledge on how the world works. It does this by a lengthy community process and then disseminates knowledge to the wider world. This textbook confuses the roles.

It just took the US legal system four years to dismiss another fundamentalist attempt to destroy knowledge!

Monday, 16 November 2009

Why Read Christian Right Blogs like CultureWatch

Confessions, I do like to read Bill Muehlenberg’s CultureWatch blog. Yes, it is an extreme Christian right political blog. The Christian right believe that the oppression of women, the hatred of those with other sexualities, the idiocy of creationism, the desecration of the natural world and the evils of capitalism have been all ordained by God. They are totalitarian, mocking those who disagree with them. They hold a right wing dominion theology.

So why bother reading? First and foremost, whatever I think of the vile opinions of Muehlenberg and other extreme Christians right wingers they are my brothers and sisters in Christ. They are family. Christ want me to do more than just be civil, Christ requires me to love them like a blood relative. Love requires, among other things, to care what they think and to correct. This means I must engage in debate with them. They might deny me legitimate Christian faith because of my opinions. Since neither of us have a copy of Lamb’s Book of Life (Revelations 21:27), I refuse to return the rudeness.

The second is to correct my own opinions. I am fallible; no matter how much I want to delude myself otherwise. There are two ways to test ones views. Both ways involve study of scripture, prayer, reason and understanding Christian tradition. One is to do this constantly talk with those who agree with you. Another way is to engage in study under some neutral tutor. Finally and most importantly, is to talk and debate with those who you disagree with. Why is that most important? It is because that way my ideas are tested by the purifying fire of debate.

And finally, one needs to know what your opponents think. How am I going counter the views of those I oppose without first listening to my opponents first? Forgive me, if I think that is too obvious

There is another reason I read Bill Muehlenberg’s blog besides the reasons above, I enjoy it! I am nothing but a theological tragic. I love the interplay between Christianity and public policy. So does Muelenberg.

Friday, 12 December 2008

Hillary Clinton on Idealism and Realism

President-Elect Barak Obama has nominated Hillary Clinton has his US Secretary of State. Therefore, Fora TV reminded its subscribers of a Hillary Clinton speech delivering to the US Council on Foreign Relations on the 31 October 2006. It was her reflections President George W Bush’s foreign policy disasters. In it she says....
Third, our foreign policy must blend both idealism and realism in the service of American interests. If there's one idea that has been floated about over the last six years that I would like to see debunked, with all due respect to some of the political scientists in the room, it is this false choice between realism and idealism. Is it realist or idealist to stop nuclear proliferation? Is it realist or idealist to come together on global warming? Is it realist or idealist to help developing nations educate their children, fight diseases and grow their economies? And is it realist or idealist to believe we must turn around the ideology underpinning terrorism?

Hillary Clinton is right! In the quote, Clinton was responding to President George W Bush’s rejection of idealism in favour of realism. The Hawke and Keating Labor governments rejected realism in favour of pragmatism. Clinton made me think that we need policies that understand the current reality and has a pragmatic path to achieve the ideal.

It would have been better if Obama had nominated Hillary Clinton as the US Attorney General. She is very well qualified for that position. The thought of Attorney General Clinton would have the caused many in the Christian right to receive their eternal rewards much sooner. After doing such a good job she could pursue the Foreign Secretary’s position.