kathleen parker

Kathleen Parker, a generally ‘conservative’-leaning columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, wrote an editorial piece yesterday that raises some very good questions about the future of conservative American evangelical political religion — and political religion in general.

Among other things, Parker notes that “armband religion is killing the Republican party… And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican party — and conservatives with it — eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs.”  See the entire editorial here.

While I agree with Parker’s premise, I’m not sure I can agree with her conclusion.  Sure, I love to hear critique of that part of Christ’s one Body that runs screaming from all things ‘progressive’ — including the full humanity of glbtq individuals, the reasonable care of the earth, the necessary redistribution of consolidated wealth, and the biblical mandate to love our enemies and to seek peace with them.  Yes, there’s much to criticize there, but I love to see them criticized not because they’re injecting faith into politics, but because the faith they’re injecting is almost completely unrecognizable to me, a fellow Christian and co-member of Christ’s one Body.

You see, for me, Jesus only began to make sense when I finally rejected the predominant notion of ‘heaven’ as some sort of parallel galaxy far, far away and adopted, instead, the prophetic biblical expectation of a new ‘heaven’ here on earth — the center-piece of Jesus’ own proclamation that “the kingdom of God has come near you.”

The very real and practical tension between these two competing paradigms — different faiths, in fact — was most apparent when I visited Nicaragua during the summer of 1996 to travel with the local Jesuit base community priest, Fr. Arnaldo Zenteno.  Having just read Roger Lancaster’s Thanks to God and the Revolution as a junior at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, I wanted to go to the source of the book’s reflection on the political conflict in Nicaragua, and elsewhere in Latin America, between an emerging American-funded pentecostal Christianity and an indigenous, grass-roots ‘liberationist’ Christianity.  The former was actively subverting and discouraging political involvement, focusing instead on the individual soul, while the latter encouraged political involvement as the appropriate expression of gospel-based socio-political reform — or, as we call it, ‘kingdom building.’

I know, it’s flip-flop there — the ‘conservatives’ withdrew from formal politics, while the ‘progressives’ engaged it fully as the best way to re-form the world to be as God intends it.  And, for me, that’s the difference — not that Christians should or shouldn’t be involved in the formal political process, but when we do, what do we imagine God’s intentions for us to be?

The religious right, which Parker takes to task, imagines one thing — that we ‘conserve’ what has been inherited, including all the bad habits of a by-gone era.  Religious progressives on the other hand, those who’ve generally kept religion as a private matter, imagine a world faithfully ‘progressing’ toward God’s promise of a ‘new creation,’ something more like the peaceable kingdom, where diversity complements rather than competes, and where the dignity of all creation rules the day.

It would be both sad and unfaithful if, as Parker suggests, this progressive “religion is returned to the privacy of one’s heart where it belongs.”  Take the hurtful and hateful stuff to the closet if you will, but the cause of freedom and joy and peace for all people always requires public proclamation and defense.  A return to the heart would quickly become a return to the navel and, as the cliche goes, we’d soon become much more concerned with ‘me’ and much less concerned with ‘we.’

So what do you think?  Is your faith public or private?  Why?