Wednesday, April 30, 2014

CHRISTIANIST CHARITY

A Contradiction In Terms

I shared a thing by Andrew Sullivan on Facebook yesterday.  It was a well documented attack on Sarah Palin's statement that "Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists."  More than that--because we all know that anything that Palin says is bound to be so absurd as to make attack unnecessary--he attacked the "Christianists" (his word) who support such sentiment and the gathered NRA convention goers who wildly applauded her statement.

I introduced the post by paraphrasing James Baldwin's wonderful statement on a Dick Cavett show:  "The most segregated hour in the week is high noon on Sunday."  I bastardized that statement with my paraphrase:  "The most unchristian time and place of the week is in church on Sunday."  Okay, so I took some major liberties with Baldwin, but this is a blog so who gives a shit?  Predictably, that overstated paraphrase got some reaction.  Let me paraphrase.  A few folks maintained that in their particular church there was all kinds of Christian charity.  Their church helped those less fortunate.  One person even said that his church had black people in attendance!

But an attack on the good that churches do was not my intention and it certainly wasn't Baldwin's or Sullivan's.  I love churches.  I cannot walk into the sanctuary of any church without feeling overwhelmed.  I almost always start crying.  I can safely say that I have spent more time in churches and on altars dressed in black cassocks and white chasubles than anyone I know who isn't a priest.  I can still recite the prayers at the foot of the altar in Latin and I can't seem to get the text of The Baltimore Catechism out of my head.

Churches are great.  It's the people inside them I'm not so sure about.  You see, I look askance at the kind of charity promulgated by churches.  I think it too often serves as a way to build up credits in one's spiritual bank account, thus enabling the "Christianist" to perpetrate all sorts of damage during the rest of the week.  Of course, there are all kinds of churchgoing Christians who don't limit their charity to one hour on Sunday.  They are Christians 24/7.

But the kind of Christians who Sullivan terms "Christianists" aren't like that.  They go to church, give money to augment the building fund, send donations to some random kid in Africa in need of saving and all the rest.  But when they aren't in Church feeling holy, they are holed up at home listening to FoxNews, getting angry at all those takers--you know, the people of color who are content to live off the hard work of others--who are after their money, cheering every time John Boehner makes fun of immigration reform, or figures out a way to block gun regulations, or insures tax breaks for corporations even as he blocks them for those of us who don't have a deep pocketed lobby working to preserve our power.  Those same "Christianists" are the ones who just a couple of years ago were excited about a new project financed by some right wing foundation or other to rewrite the bible in order to remove its liberal bias--Christ was surely joking when he made that eye of a camel comment, right?  Those same "Christianists" see nothing wrong with torture, or death penalties, or destroying immigrant families who simply want to survive.  Those are the people Andrew Sullivan is attacking and rightly so.  And I join him in that attack.