Conservative Christian Says We Have Religious Right All Wrong

Lou Sheldon and Pat Robertson you’ve probably heard of; Dan Jones you probably haven’t.

As outspoken clergymen, Sheldon and Robertson have established themselves in the public arena by fusing religion and politics--a volatile mixture that’s had the predictable result of both alienating some people and rallying others.

Jones, on the other hand, isn’t famous at all. He’s a 32-year-old mail carrier from Irvine, and while he’s not looking for publicity, he said something has been eating at him recently.

Jones contends that the media has stereotyped all conservative Christians, an act of over-generalization that it decries when others do the same thing. He objects to what he considers negative press treatment of people like Sheldon and Robertson being extended to other conservative Christians who may or may not share their strategies or feelings.

More to the point, Jones said, media portrayals of the Christian Right tend to obscure what everyday, anonymous Christians are doing.

“I’m a conservative Christian,” Jones said. “I grew up believing that was right and that we treated people decently.” The church he associates with Christianity, he said, raises money for the needy, for missionaries, offers family counseling, delivers gifts to the children of prisoners and sends food to Los Angeles after the riots last spring.

Jones, the son of a minister, said “we never referred to ourselves as fundamentalists--just Christians. To me, a fundamentalist just believes in the Bible, but the way the term has been used in the last couple years, it’s become something ugly.”

He says he’s miffed at the media “for marginalizing Christians into such a small little thing, as if we’re monolithic in viewpoint or background. Everybody is not a Randall Terry (national anti-abortion leader), a Lou Sheldon, or a Jimmy Swaggart or a Jim Bakker.”

Then, listing another group of Christians--including Housing Secretary Jack Kemp, local minister Chuck Swindoll and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Jones said, “These are positive people, I believe, but it seems that conservative Christians are marginalized to those who are either fallen, hypocritical or highly judgmental.”

Even if I concede a point or two, I said to Jones, don’t you agree it’s not just the media who are complaining about the Christian Right? And don’t you think people complain because their agenda appears moralistic and exclusionary?

Perhaps, Jones said, but it doesn’t mean that all Christians should be portrayed as such. And more to the point, he said, Christians’ views shouldn’t be derided.

“George Bush is a conservative Christian, but he was not out to make some Nazi empire and impose values on anybody else,” Jones said. “As a conservative Christian, I’m not out to impose values on everyone else. However, my values are legitimate political discourse. Everybody has the right to bring their values to the table, whether Satanic, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu. It should be irrelevant where it comes from. The majority rules, but it’s often made out that the Christian Right is a bunch of fascists that are going to impose a theocracy on the American people.”

But, I argued, that’s exactly what the anti-gay and anti-abortion arguments entail--they would impose behaviors or sanctions on other people. There’s no live-and-let-live about it.

“We feel strongly about abortion and I think the homosexual lifestyle is spiritually, physically and emotionally impairing to the person and society,” Jones said, “but we’re not going to go out and round up gays and kill them at the stake. Everything is blown out of proportion, and we’ve been demonized, and it’s unfair and inaccurate.”

Jones and I probably talked for more than half an hour, and it would take more than this tiny column space to fully air all his arguments--or for me to get in my full two cents’ worth. I suggested to him, however, that when people willingly take their religion out of church and into the public arena, they’re fair game.

He concedes that point and said he has no problems with criticisms of the Swaggarts and Bakkers of the world. Nor, he says, does he want favored status for Christians.

“I don’t see the same sensitivity for Catholic or Protestant issues as for Jewish or African-American issues. I’m glad you’re zealous for those issues, but I think The Times has been highly sensitive to their issues but not to Christian issues. It offends me on a personal level and also just on a level that you’re treating one side with a lot of sensitivity but not the other side. I think there should be a consistent standard of denouncing any kind of bigotry, whatever side it comes from.”

For example, he said, “when Christians protest about Jesus in a jar of urine (the subject of a photograph that stirred controversy), we’re called censors and narrow-minded bigots who wanted to close down the National Endowment for the Arts for no apparent reason. But when Louis Farrakhan came to town or Jesse Jackson made his ‘Hymietown’ remarks about New York, nobody framed that as a right of free speech. They denounced the anti-Semitism. . . . Can you imagine if Martin Luther King or a rabbi would have been put in a jar of urine what the response would have been? There would have been front-page denunciations in all editions.”

Call it a matter of style or whatever, but where I had to change channels when Pat Robertson spoke at the GOP convention last summer, talking to Jones was enlightening and challenging.

I told him I’d let him have the floor this morning and, come to think of it, that’s all he said he wanted:

A chance to introduce himself.