No Right Turns on the Journey to Bethlehem

Does God take sides in American politics? Yes and no. The real God, who talks in riddles and writes with crooked lines, probably doesn’t. But the God of jokes, who talks in one-liners, plays golf--remarkably well--and owns Montana, takes sides like crazy.

Unfortunately, he registers three different ways to vote. God the Father is presumably a Republican--a stickler for discipline, with several military campaigns under his belt and a dazzling rescue operation. His son is naturally a liberal Democrat, but with a slight father fixation: There is no generation gap in heaven. And the Holy Ghost is the spirit of History, the ultimate independent, who knows exactly where the wind is blowing because he is the wind.

Joke or no joke, the consortium loosely known as the Christian right has so far shown itself to be well to the right of God the Father himself, on his angriest day, in matters of compassion. For instance, there may be good reasons why the government shouldn’t raise a finger to help the old, the sick and the helplessly young, but to insist, with pulses pounding, that public assistance be cut to the bone this very minute, before we’re sure the alternative works, doesn’t sound Christian at all but more like the Big Bad Wolf disguised as a Christian.

Something else a real Christian would surely have done a long time ago is disassociate himself from the wilder reaches of Clinton bashing. Anyone raised on the Gospel instinctively senses that when one sees a crowd throwing rocks at someone, the guy at the receiving end is usually the hero--and never mind who’s supposed to be the sinner around here and who claims to be righteous.

“Blessed are you when men revile you.” Surely that doesn’t apply to Mrs. Clinton? “I’m no Hillary!” piped Al D’Amato when a miraculous market payoff turned up under his name, too. But the sainted Al was playing with sulfureous matches. “Thank God, I am not as other men” crows the Pharisee, and the sinner with the bowed head sweeps past him to the head of the Lord’s table.

All in all, Christianity is a tough platform to run on because you’re not allowed to boast about your own virtues, and you can’t slander the other guy’s, and stone-throwing is out unless you happen to be without sin. “Thank God my family values are not as other men’s” might just pass, except that all politicians have exactly the same family values, pretested in focus groups. Can they walk the walk as well? The price of finding out what these guys really do after lights go out is eventual government by gossip and by Secret Service memoir, if not simply by Australian publisher. And no Christian could possibly want that.

So, what do we use for mud pies? “Judge not lest ye be judged.” “Turn the other cheek.” The near-impossibility of rich folk entering heaven. One imagines a born-again politician frantically surfing the Gospels for ammunition. Where, for instance, is the Protestant work ethic? Nowhere to be found, alas. The Gospels are actually quite subversive about work. “The lilies of the field,” for instance, who neither toil nor spin but are gorgeous anyway, sound like theological welfare queens. while the story of Martha and Mary actually promotes the value of talking to the Lord over that of housework.

Values like hard work and self-control are in fact universal pagan necessities and Christians do well to heed them if they want their countries to survive. But they have nothing to do with the blinding revelations that made Christianity such a scandal and a turning point, and to foist them off on Jesus seems like a typical trick to get kids to do their homework. Surely one isn’t born again just for that.

The prickliest aspect of Christianity is that it is particularly harsh on those who would use it for worldly purposes, or who preach their own gospel in its name. And there has been at least one small sign this year that someone on the Christian right may have looked up from his Godly work of finding overlooked denunciations of homosexuality in the book of Ecclesiastes and realized this.

This summer, the trendy Ralph Reed maneuvered his Christian Coalition into apologizing for its collective sins of racism, and it would be uncharitable to say “what took you so long?” because it has taken the whole church 2,000 years and counting to begin to root out this most basic of human vices, xenophobia, the fear and hatred of strangers.

Nevertheless, Reed and his brethren would have to be called Johnny-come-latelys even on this slow-moving scene. And so Christian humility now suggests they should step back a moment and just contemplate the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is at the very heart of the Christian revolution. The stranger, it seems, is not just our equal: He may be Christ himself.

Previous religions, with the interesting exception of Buddhism, had been local, tribal or caste-specific. Christianity was aimed, for better or worse, at every man, woman and child on the planet absolutely equally. Anyone who has just discovered this and started to act on it might not seem quite ready to be a Christian spokesman. So perhaps for a while, anyway, we could, in Yogi’s sublime phrase, let the Almighty sit back and enjoy the ballgame, while the spokesmen figure out exactly what the word “Christian” means, and also whether they might not do better with Confucianism and its great family values, or Shinto with its unparalleled work ethic. Their kingdoms are at least of this world. Jesus Christ’s is not, and you bandy its name at your peril.