From the 5/15/06 article of TIME Magazine

I debated whether or not I should post this article here because it is copyrighted and because I believe that Mr. Sullivan and TIME Magazine deserve to be paid for the things they create.

However, I realized that most readers would not pay the $2.50 TIME requires to read this essay, which justified for me my plan to post it in its entirety. If you would've paid the $2.50 to read it, then please visit TIME and pay it. If not. . .well, enjoy.

Essay
My Problem with Christianism
A believer spells out the difference between faith and a political agenda
By ANDREW SULLIVAN
May 15, 2006

Are you a Christian who doesn't feel represented by the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.

The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power. There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women's equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is. They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them--and respecting their neighbors' choices. That doesn't threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.

And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.

I would say a clear majority of Christians in the U.S. fall into one or many of those camps. Yet the term "people of faith" has been co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy for everyone. "Sides are being chosen," Tom DeLay recently told his supporters, "and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will." So Christ is a conservative Republican?

Rush Limbaugh recently called the Democrats the "party of death" because of many Democrats' view that some moral decisions, like the choice to have a first-trimester abortion, should be left to the individual, not the cops. Ann Coulter, with her usual subtlety, simply calls her political opponents "godless," the title of her new book. And the largely nonreligious media have taken the bait. The "Christian" vote has become shorthand in journalism for the Republican base.

What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either. In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones. "My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?

So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

That's what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back.

Visit Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, at http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/

Fine, douchebag, here it is

Yesterday I got a text message from a dear friend that said, and I quote, “Update your blog, crapbag. I am bored of the old one.”

I have been thinking over lots of things lately: community, generosity, joy & wonder, spiritual gifts, relationships, etc.

And I’ve pretty much just ended up with questions and no answers.

I have, though, become convicted of the fact that I need to be living in community, not just worshipping in it or going to lunch with it, but eating, sleeping, showering, praying, thinking and talking in it. (Wait, that sounds a little shady. I’d sleep and shower by myself, but would know that someone else was going to need hot water, too, or able to get up later than me or whatever.)

Sure, living in community is somewhat annoying, but only because it reminds me that everything is not about me—that life is not the Me Show. And I find that highly irritating, but it’s a reminder that I need.

I just finished Blue Like Jazz (which I thoroughly enjoyed, even though it was not quite up to par with Traveling Mercies), and the author says that “Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in front of our televisions. Jesus wants us interacting, eating together, laughing together, praying together. Loneliness is something that came with the fall.”

He also says some other things about living in community and how important it has been in his life, and those comments helped me to realize that the Me Show is too much a part of my life, and I need to freakin’ get over myself. And into some real community.

I have sort of a community in the singles group at church, but I think we’re still in the Fake stage of community. (For those of you who haven’t done Mission Year, the four stages of community, as sold to us, are Fake, Fight, Fart, Family.) We might be moving into Fight, but I’m not sure.

Building community takes time and effort and more time, and I know that. But one of the biggest problems with this community is that I’m not sure that they understand me. And that could make community-building really difficult. I mean, I like them and we have fun together, but I’m sad that they don’t understand the things I do about Jesus and poverty and social justice. I’m tired of coming home from church with a proverbial bloody tongue.

Last week we went to lunch together after church (what I consider Communion), and we all sat around and had an hour-and-a-half conversation about dating and expectations and stuff. And it was good. And it was interesting. And there were some things in there that I didn’t completely agree with, but that’s normal, after all. Probably as a result of my Femi-Nazi ways. But when I tried to tell them about how I’m going to rescind the name “Christian” and start using something else to describe myself, they all looked at me as if I had just told them I had a communicable disease. Or three nipples. Or that my three-nipple syndrome was catching.

So I explained to them that the word Christian had been used to describe so many bad people who had done so many bad things throughout history. Remember the crusades? What about George Bush? Or the fact that Focus on the Family has nothing better to do than castigate Spongebob Squarepants for “being gay”? Or those people who protest at the funerals of gay men and women? I mean, who wants to be associated with that? Not me.

This was an idea presented to us in Mission Year, but it is really starting to make sense to me now. I mean, I got it then, but I’m really considering at this point. And yet even after I explained it to my friends, they continued looking at me like I had just suggested that they join the Democratic party.

I get that I have been labeled the Flaming Liberal of the group. And for good reason. But I am getting very lonely having to uphold the title all by myself. Right now, all I really want is someone to understand what I’m saying. To listen and consider. . .and maybe even agree every once in a while.

And while I have at least one other Flaming Liberal friend in the area (I don’t want to blow her cover, but she knows who she is), it’s just not the same. Shouldn’t these people who are working to build community so we can grow together at least register some sort of recognition when I put forth an idea that makes complete and total sense to me, especially when it deals with “Christianity” or spirituality?

And shouldn’t they help me use the gifts I’ve been given? I have been vocal, too, about the fact that I have some teaching gifts, but unfortunately, those are not seen as gifts that are appropriate for women to use, at least not by many at our church, including many in my group of friends.

And yet I can’t blame them for believing what they do, can I? The fact remains that I got involved in their group at their church because they were welcoming and loving and compassionate. And they were the first group that was genuinely interested in me. And that meant something. It still does. I needed them then, and I need them now. I just need someone to understand me, too.

(I need to bear in mind, as well, that I can’t expect them to read my mind, especially not at this point. If I have some reasonable expectations, then I am responsible for communicating those if I expect them to get met.)

And I think about my Mission Year roommates, and how I pushed them as far away as possible after the year ended because of some hurts I endured, whether they were real or imagined. And I was tired. But now I wonder if I should’ve tried harder, tired or not, because now I need someone to understand what I mean about Christian being a dirty word. And how I’m struggling to live my faith in an authentic way that lands somewhere between MY and my former life.

Don Miller, the author of Blue Like Jazz, also says the following, and when I read it, it was like a light bulb went on in my head: “In the churches I used to go to, I felt like I didn’t fit in. I always felt like the adopted kid, as if there was ‘room at the table for me.’ Do you know what I mean? I was accepted but not understood. There was room at the table for me, but I wasn’t in the family.”

I don’t figure that one community will meet all my needs or even my expectations, but then that means that I need to find one that will meet my other needs that aren’t getting met at this point. So any liberal Jesus-followers in my neck of the woods wanna form community with me? It’ll be an interesting ride, to say the least--right now I'm dragging my church friends on a journey to (re)discover joy and wonder. But that's another post.

Good art Gone bad

When I lived in and traveled in Europe for a semester in college (thanks again, parents!) I visited lots of art museums and famous places, and was often disappointed that I couldn’t get closer or see better the great works of art and famous relics that exist to be enjoyed. I could see them, but they were often roped off or set behind bullet-proof glass or protected by mean yet sleepy-looking security guards. I couldn’t even get a good picture of Michelangelo’s Pieta – a marble statue of Mary the mother of Jesus holding the crucified Christ, which sits on display at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican – because of the huge walls of glass encasing it.

Apparently, some years ago, a crazy nationalist took a hammer to this priceless work of art, and while the Vatican artists were able to restore the statue to a state very near its original condition, it now sits in an inaccessible place, one that makes it difficult for the viewer to become immersed in the art.

What is it about people that makes us so destructive to the things we love most?

Have you noticed this trend? We love land, so we overdevelop and therefore destroy it. We love our children, so we spoil them into little brats who can’t handle it when they don’t get what they want. We’re the most horrible to the people closest to us because we can get away with it, and if we tried that crap at the office or in public we’d get fired or shot.

B says that we all have a gene that makes us want to complicate our lives. Sometimes I think she’s right.

Do you agree? What is it?