Where Are The Good Christians?

[Guest guest]

Where Are The Good Christians?

The fanatics and nutjobs now running the show sure

give honest believers a bad name

 

Source >

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2005/04/06/notes040605.DTL

 

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

 

Wednesday, April 6, 2005

 

 

I know they're out there.

 

I forget, often, too often, just how many there are

but I know they exist in much larger numbers than you

might be led to believe by current spiritually

embarrassing headlines and I know they are just as, if

not more, passionate and healthy and deeply felt in

their beliefs than the overpublicized sects of angry

and frothing " true believers " screeching into the

megaphone of the culture, the ones yanking BushCo's

chain and pounding their Bibles and hiding their

warped porn fetishes and forcing their way into our

lives and laws and bedrooms right now.

 

They are the decent Christians. They are the calm,

morally progressive, compassionate, open-hearted

Jesus-loving folk who don't really give a damn for

archaic church dogma or pious noise or sanctimonious

candlelight vigils, for repressing women or bashing

gays or slamming Islam and, in fact, turned to

Christianity precisely because they believe these

things are abhorrent and wrong and, well,

anti-Christian.

 

They are Episcopalians, for example, that most nimble

and intelligent and groundbreaking of Christian

churches, a rather revolutionary sect that recently

elected its first openly gay bishop and supports gay

marriage and dares to ordain women as priests.

 

And they're still deeply involved in amazing charity

work, AIDS and orphanages and Africa and stuff that

makes you humble and amazed and they have not, due to

this seemingly blasphemous dichotomy and much to the

shock of their homophobic conservative brethren, been

struck by lightning or doomed to hell for all eternity

-- or, rather, if they have, they'll go down happy and

intelligent and singing and believing in Jesus anyway,

all the way down.

 

They are the legions of recovering Catholics, people

for whom the radiant and positive aspects of this most

intense of faiths still hold powerful sway but who

just can't abide by the ridiculous and outdated and

often homophobic and sexist doctrines hurled forth

like so much flaccid manna from the unhappy red-robed

automatons of Vatican City.

 

They are the moderate Christians, the ones who do not

support illegal wars or the killing of all doctors who

perform abortions and who are all for social justice

and who think Bush is a bit of an imbecile, and even

if they find themselves for some unfortunate reason in

support of the Republican cause overall, they still

think it's rather abhorrent that the man dares invoke

God to support his lie-ridden wars and the smashing

down of women's rights and gay rights and abuse of the

environment et al.

 

How do I know they're out there? Because I hear from

them all the time, especially when I get carried away

and lump them all together in my often overly harsh

criticisms of the faith and my utter lack of patience

for its more rabid and small-minded and hateful

practitioners and its more violently self-righteous

elements, stuff so completely antithetical to what

true Christianity, what true faith, true spiritual

connection, is all about, it would make Jesus wince.

 

And these Christians -- let us call them " normal " or

perhaps " natural " or even " organic " (i.e.;, devoid of

poisons or preservatives or Sanctimonious Growth

Hormones) -- they are filling all manner of funky or

progressive (or Unitarian) churches across many a

large city in America, right now.

 

They are streaming into huge beautiful nonjudgmental

buildings all over San Francisco and Chicago and New

York and Boston, etc., places that welcome gays and

oddballs and spiritual nomads and pantheists and

anyone else who might be feeling a divine pull, and

please leave your Jesus extremism at the door and

let's talk about Sufism.

 

And they discuss stuff that sounds much closer to

mystical or cosmological or otherwise paganistic

energy work than the narrow, spittle-filled

believe-in-Jesus-or-burn-in-hell angles of approach

you keep hearing about and that tend to slash at your

heart and insult your soul.

 

They're not radical. They're not rabid. They're not

full of venom and Rapture and they read books other

than the childish Left Behind series and they don't

loathe sex or despise other religions or hate their

genitalia like Tom DeLay loathes congressional law,

and they know full well that Mel Gibson is a rather

insane misogynistic blood fetishist who knowingly

swiped an illiterate 18th-century stigmatic nun's

bizarre and ultraviolent hallucination to use as some

sort of dangerous literal truth. Amen.

 

They are, in short, those who understand the deep

irony that, when it comes to religion, the ones who

scream and stomp and whine the loudest are often the

ones who understand their faith the least.

 

But there is a reason these calm and moderate and

private Christians don't make the news, why, despite

their enormous numbers, they are not setting the

cultural agenda like some sort of sanctimonious

meth-addled monkey (hi, Sen. Santorum!) right now.

 

It's because they are not organized. They are not a

club. They do not have a unified attack agenda. They

do not have pamphlets or advertising budgets or

congressional lobbyists or the complaint line of every

TV network and program except Fox News and " The 700

Club " on speed dial.

 

They do not call themselves the Parent's Television

Council or the Right to Life Marauders or the Family

Values Coalition or some other dumbly misleading and

patently bogus moniker. They are not attempting to

cram already gutted public school textbooks with

imbecilic " Intelligent Design " BS, nor are they

writing uptight letters to the FCC en masse or ranting

about nipples or dildos or low-cut jeans on teenage

girls while at the same exact moment repressing their

own gay fantasies and kiddie-porn collections.

 

They understand that our children are at much higher

risk of moral and spiritual damage from, say,

decimated school budgets and violent presidential

warmongering and noxious Kraft Lunchables than they

could ever be from Janet Jackson or Abercrombie and

Fitch or healthy teen sex.

 

Most spiritually healthy Christians are simply living

their lives, praying deeply, carefully, privately,

seeing the divine all around them and choosing Jesus'

teachings as the best moral compass, especially the

parts about love and healing and empathy and

acceptance and turning the other cheek, about how God

is not some sneering angry bearded puppeteer but

rather a radiant energy force inside everyone and

every living thing, always, just waiting for you to

tap into it. You know, just like every other religion

in existence.

 

They are the ones who understand that Jesus was, quite

simply, one hell of a powerful teacher, and healer,

and mystic, and visionary, a pacifist, a liberal, a

feminist, the ultimate outsider, one of the finest

examples in all of history of how to radiate pure love

and compassion and divine interconnection and Lord

knows we could all use more of that.

 

The bad news is, the rabid evangelical set is growing,

this cluster of lost and weirdly undereducated people

for whom the Bible is literal word-for-word verbatim

truth and the Rapture is imminent and the Earth is

just a disposable lump and the flesh is a disgusting

afterthought and should be ignored and loathed and

made really really fat and sexless and sad. And, to my

mind, these people deserve all the fiery verbiage and

raw satire and intelligent ideological counterforce I

can possibly lob their way.

 

But. Just as there are moderate and wonderfully

articulate pro-choice Republicans and just as there

are moderate and fiscally conservative liberals, so

there are millions of Christians who don't adhere in

the slightest to the narrow and spiritually numb

worldview now being touted by the BushCo Right. And if

we're going to get anywhere with this increasingly

desperate and fractured American social experiment, we

need to remember that.

re

 

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every

Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on

Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe

to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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