There is a great piece in the
September issue of Atlantic Magazine about what it means to be a Christian in America and it features a fascinating discussion about a central paradox. While we profess to be a "Christian Nation," it's a lot less clear that we're all talking about the same thing.
Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation's educational decline, but it probably doesn't matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture.
The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans--most American Christians--are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
And that is one reason that I generally fight attempts to bring faith and Biblical teachings into the public space. Not because I dislike religion (far from it), and not because I'm some Bible-hating atheist commie.
It's because even the most simplistic of biblical teachings can be interpreted many different ways. Millions of Baptists believe in a "Left Behind" version of Revelations that isn't just a recent idea--it's not one that is supported in the Bible. Many Christians argue over the true meaning of individual words in the Bible at the same time that many Biblical scholars have accepted the idea that the words in the Bible have evolved and changed in the 2,000 years since it was written.
And then there's the matter of whether or not we act as a "Christian Nation." When I'm asked by conservatives how I can both believe in God and be a liberal, I respond that it's because I'm a Christian that I remain a liberal. Because the best of liberalism encompasses the core teachings of Jesus.
Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion--say, giving aid to the poorest people--as a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they'd fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?
In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it's not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It's also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose--childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool--we come in nearly last among the rich nations, and often by a wide margin. The point is not just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it's that the overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it's not as if the numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last year that the number of households that were "food insecure with hunger" had climbed more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003.
And yet, when you listen to the leading voices of conservative Christianity, we are already doing too much. Conservatives worry that we are being taken advantage of, they preach "personal responsibility" rather than charity. Conservatives champion a number of political beliefs that I just don't find personally troubling, but morally repugnant.
Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers. We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners). Having been told to turn the other cheek, we're the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus' strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate--just over half--that compares poorly with the European Union's average of about four in ten. That average may be held down by the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by countries, like Italy, where divorce is difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy? We're at the top of the charts.
The far right is championing the idea that America is facing the abyss because of flaccid, liberal touchy-feeling thinking.
But the facts show otherwise.