July 1, 2008

This story is not about voting for Jesus this November. He is often a popular write-in, but he won’t be on the ballot and I’m not sure what would even happen if he won. This story is about a movement that makes liberal-leaning Christians sound a lot likely socially minded Jews. It focuses on the message of Shane Claiborne, owner of a mean set of dreadlocks and co-author of “Jesus for President.”

“This whole project is about the political imagination of what it means to follow after Jesus,” Claiborne said. “The language of Jesus as Lord and savior is just as radical as it would be to say ‘Jesus as our commander in chief’ today.”

Young evangelicals represent an important swing-voting bloc. They’re not a lock for Republicans as their parents were. Their feet are firmly planted on issues dear to both parties. Traditional family values are, as they have been in the past, an important issue.

But these voters say views on abortion and homosexuality won’t define them in November. The environment and social justice are moving to the forefront of their discussions.

(skip)

Back on stage Claiborne takes the crowd through a multimedia presentation.

“With the respectability and the power of the church comes the temptation to prostitute our identity for every political agenda.”

Controversially, he quotes Harry S. Truman and Adolph Hitler, saying each used Christianity to support their ideologies.

The speech is fiery at times, pensive at others. It emphasizes caring for the poor and the downtrodden.

He talks about war and the environment. He also talks about how Jesus stood up to the Roman Empire, a message he believes is relevant to the United States now.

“For many of us, Caesar has colonized our imagination, our landscape and our ideology,” he says while a picture of Mount Rushmore flashes behind him. On the screen “Vandalism” pops up in black letters.

Trading lines back and forth from a script with Haw, they save the most wrath for Christians who they say have missed the point of the cross.

“We’ve profaned the blood at the foot of the cross and turned it into Kool-Aid and marketed it all over the world. We’ll make an art and a business out of taking the Lord’s name in vain,” Claiborne says as images of Christ on the cross and the American flag flash behind him.

They endorse no candidate and make no effort to sway the voters for one party or another.

Yada, yada, yada—the evangelical vote will matter this fall.

Let’s, however, not kid ourselves: Claiborne and his fellow travelers are not in the mainstream of American evangelicalism. This is not a bad thing. It’s just something that should be noted in a CNN story that provides little context. Indeed, social and environmental awareness are increasingly important to younger evangelicals, and emergent-church types. And many share the sentiment that Christianity has been abused for political means. But Claiborne is a radical, nonetheless; in fact, that is the subtitle of his book. The worthy question is whether he represents the vanguard of the Christian future. Unfortunately, I don’t know the answer.

(Team Jesus for President will be in California July 11-13, but won’t make it farther south than Ventura. Here Sam Barrington shares his experience listening to Claiborne, “a great prophetic voice,” in Michigan.)

Readers of this blog have likely noticed that the old RSS feed no longer works. It died with the launch of the new Web site. So, if you want to receive regular notifications of new content on The God Blog, click on the orange-and-white icon to the right, just below “contact,” or on this link.

I didn’t use to subscribe to RSS feeds, but since signing up for Google Reader last month, at the advice of LAist Zach Behrens, I’ve found it a lot easier to keep track of postings on my favorite blogs.

I’m not one to brag, but it’s important to note before going on that I’m a bestselling author. You’ve know doubt heard of my book, The Bible, but it’s not always so clear you—that’s the universal you—know what is in it. For example: I told Adam quite early on that man would one day leave his father and mother (yes, this was confusing for Adam, who had no parents) to take a beautiful bride. Marriage and family and offspring, amen!

But too many of my children these days have missed a crucial part of that statement: “shall leave his father and mother.” You’ve heard of them. They’re called Twixters, and they are like Tom Hanks in “Big”—growing older and larger but not yet ready to forgo free rent, even, in many cases, after they have cleaved to a spouse.

I am not pleased.

(Fear not if you think this commentary a ridiculous topic; you will not be smited. Just leave your comments below.)

It’s the same story, over and over again, now from The New York Times, and with this interesting tidbit:

Between now and November, the Obama forces are planning as many as 1,000 house parties and dozens of Christian rock concerts, gatherings of religious leaders, campus visits and telephone conference calls to bring together voters of all ages motivated by their faith to engage in politics. It is the most intensive effort yet by a Democratic candidate to reach out to self-identified evangelical or born-again Christians and to try to pry them away from their historical attachment to the Republican Party.

Yes, Obama has been a campaign rockstar. But can he be a Christian rockstar?

*Updated: Obama just delivered a speech in Zanesville, Ohio, in which he touted the value of faith-based programs:

The fact is, the challenges we face today – from saving our planet to ending poverty – are simply too big for government to solve alone. We need all hands on deck.

Time’s Joe Klein

Yeah, I’m late to this story, but talk about shaking a hornet’s nest. Last week, Time’s Joe Klein made claims about the Iraq war that has bloggers buzzing, burning,foaming, fuming and, a few, applauding. The reason: his blog post’s penultimate paragraph included some juicy charges of Jewish dual-loyalties prompting an unnecessary war. The Commentary folks—the clearest target of Klein’s attack—took particular issue, and Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman has since chastised Klein.

Here is what Klein, who is Jewish, wrote in that Swampland paragraph:

The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked—still smacks—of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives—people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary—plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question—made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis—of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies.

Later that day, Klein added this response to his critics:

You want evidence of divided loyalties? How about the “benign domino theory” that so many Jewish neoconservatives talked to me about—off the record, of course—in the runup to the Iraq war, the idea that Israel’s security could be won by taking out Saddam, which would set off a cascade of disaster for Israel’s enemies in the region? As my grandmother would say, feh! Do you actually deny that the casus belli that dare not speak its name wasn’t, as I wrote in February 2003, a desire to make the world safe for Israel? Why the rush now to bomb Iran, a country that poses some threat to Israel but none—for the moment—to the United States…

First off, the drumbeat for war with Iran, which I would argue had a lot more to do with protecting Israel than invading Iraq, has cooled. As for the issue of dual-loyalty, maybe Klein was ignorant about how sensitive Jews are to this charge, a major source of global anti-Semitism, long before Jonathan Pollard and even 1948. That, however, is not the question that needs to be answered. The real question is: Was Klein’s assessment correct?

Clearly, most of President Bush’s closest defense and foreign-policy advisers were neoconservatives. Many also were Jewish. But to say that Wolfowitz and Feith were neoconservatives because they were Jewish is as strained an argument as saying Tonya Harding became a screwed up skater/person because her mom allegedly dragged her off the ice by her hair (and as strained as that analogy). The Joint Chiefs of Staff, not Jewish. Donald Rumsfeld, not Jewish. Dick Cheney, not Jewish. You get the picture.

More importantly, American foreign policy for the past almost four decades has held that Israel’s best interest is in the U.S.‘s best interest. In other words, if the protection of the Jewish state from Saddam’s whims played a role in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq—an ill-advised act at that—it likely has as much to do with American policy as American Jewish interest or, as Joe Klein called it, dual loyalty.

This foreign-policy finger-pointing makes a column my editor wrote in 2002 seem all the more prescient. It was titled, “The Jewish War,” and it wasn’t about Judas Maccabeus. It was about my editor, Rob Eshman, noticing a lot of mainstream voices—not just conspiracy theorist Pat Buchanan but “Hardball’s” Chris Matthews and The Nation, for example—referring to Bush’s pro-war advisers mainly as Jews.

Whether you agree with the planned invasion of Iraq or not, to call it a war fomented by American Jewry to serve Israel’s interests is ludicrous. For one, American Jewish legislators are divided on the issue. While Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) is a strong supporter, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who chairs the important Senate Armed Services Committee, has consistently urged caution. Jewish groups are divided as well. All strongly oppose Saddam, but no major group has reached a consensus on the use of force to bring about his downfall or on unilateral action against him. And it’s fair to point out—as long as Matthews and others are checking IDs here—that the focus on Iraq is the policy of a Christian president, his mostly Christian advisers, his Christian Cabinet and a largely Christian Congress acting at the behest of a majority of their Christian constituents.

(skip)

But should America get sucked into a debilitating conflict, if Israel appears to have gained strategic ground at the expense of large numbers of American lives, the fringe will move onto center stage, and the calls to label Bush’s policy a Jewish war will rouse us, sharply and painfully, from our couches.

As I’ve written before, Jews clearly have mixed emotions when it comes to the place they call home. This is not a radical statement; it is reality. American Jews since the time of Haym Solomon have been blue-blooded patriots. But Israel, for many, will always be their spiritual home. Does this mean American Jews are loyal to both this country and that country? Of course. But does it mean that, as a point of policy, that Jews sacrifice one for the other? I don’t believe that for a minute—unless we are talking about giving up on Israel for the U.S. That is a quite common phenomenon.