Mark Morford, a columnist on
SFGate.com out of San Francisco, has a unique outlook on things to be sure. Occasionally he can be shrill and over-the-top, and I tend to read his work sparingly. However, he has struck a chord with me today, especially in light of my
essay on faith from Easter Sunday. Morford asks, quite aptly, "
Where are the good Christians?"
This deserves an admittedly-lengthy excerpt:
[The "good Christians" are] 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.
Unfortunately, my area in Florida is infested with the sanctimonious, self-righteous variety of Christian, the kind who would vote for pandering gasbags like
Dave Weldon and
Tom Feeney and, oh yeah, a couple of Bushes. It's important to remember, though, as Morford reminds us, that there are those among us who treat religion as the intensely
personal - as in singular - experience that it ought to be, wholly separate from government and politics. Not all Christians behave - or believe - like many of the most vocal (and hypocritical) ones.
(Unabashedly cross-posted on Blast Off!.)
Update [2005-4-6 11:12:20 by Sinfonian]: Sojourners has been mentioned a couple of times in the comments, so I wanted to give a link.