[cross-posted at Street Prophets]
It's a tough environment where I live. I can't even go to the ministerial associaion meetings any more because the chairman, in spite of his good efforts in some areas, uses it as a platform to promote his pro-life agenda. Once he even handed out petitions to put a constitutional ban on gay marriage on the ballot. At one of our ministerial association meetings this winter, the chair recognized a guest to talk to us about the NDP, who said America is a Christian nation and we are holding this event to help America turn back to God. He even handed out brochures with a dozen or so quotations from our "founding fathers" which, divorced completely from their context, seem to make our civic heroes sound like fundamentalists and religious nationalists.
I tuned out and didn't plan on attending the NDP event or promoting it in any way. However, my boss (the senior pastor) noted that last year, a prominent church member complained that no one from our church attended. This church member happens to be the most recognized politician in our community and an honorary chairman of our local NDP event.
Realizing I had to at least be present for part of the 3 hour event, I made a few calls and was sufficiently assured that this was a generic "God and country" thing and not a call to arms for militant Christian nationalism. Convinced that I would not be embarrassed to attend, I went.
At the event, which was held in an 8,000 seat arena (though fewer than 300 people attended), I was surprised that the organizers took some care to keep the religious nationalist themes in check. There was lots of red, white, and blue, but knowing some of the people involved, I am telling you it was not NEARLY as bad as I'd feared, from a political point of view. Honestly, with President Bush at 32%, and only 55% among white evangelicals, I'm sure the Christian soldier themes at events around the country were majorly toned down from the past two years.
Would I have signed off on every statement made? Of course not. The pastor who prayed for "education" made it sound like the schools are overtly hostile to Christians. Almost every speaker equated America's economic prosperity with God's "blessing." But it was pretty nonpartisan. And I was impressed that several black and Latino/a pastors spoke. Naturally their prayers covered a wider range of important themes than the white evangelicals.
So, if this event was relatively generic and nonpartisan, why was I utterly despondent when I left? Because the "God and country" theme rolls around in church life a few times a year: Memorial Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and the National Day of Prayer. It's not my thing, I think people get carried away, but I can live with it. What I can't live with is the fundamentalism that pervades church life every day. I saw, for the first time, a cross section of my community, religiously speaking. I doubt there were many Catholics, and I saw only one member of the church I serve, so I doubt there were many mainline Protestants there, either. But I saw plenty of white evangelicals, and I was not impressed. Almost every statement made from the podium or by song leaders at the event exposed the speaker as a fundamentalist.
As a minister, I use religious language all the time. And I am hyper-sensitive and perceptive about the religious language other people use. As a United Methodist, my church is not fundamentalist, but many of my parishoners are. Yet I was stunned at how different the language of my local church is from that of surrounding churches. The differences are subtle, perhaps. We use the same words, even sing a lot of the same songs. Maybe that's how some of these ordinary people, many of them partially educated, who grew up in mainline churches are now attending fundamentalist churches.
I feared that I might leave the event distraught by the Christian nationalist fringe. That wasn't the bigger problem, after all. I was embarrassed - not because of Christian nationalism, but because of the pervasive fundamentalism that persists somehow though it has absolutely nothing to offer the modern world. As it turned out, I learned a different lesson on the National Day of Prayer. There is religious nationalist fringe out there, but there are tens of millions of fundamentalists out there in our communities, in our government, in our churches, in our schools. They are not the fringe, for, as Bill Moyers reminded us, "The delusional has become mainstream." By silencing Catholic and mainline Protestant voices, to say nothing of non-Christians, the National Day of Prayer shows the ascendancy of the Christian right and lets them, once again, claim to represent the public face of American religion (a point this diary, "rescued" by SusanG, makes eloquently.
And, I am telling you, it is not a pretty sight.