A few years ago I was searching for an alternative to the Religious Right style of Christian politics and came across Jim Wallis as he was doing a media tour promoting his new book God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. It seemed like every website I went to and every news station I watched had a feature on Jim and his form of politics. It was a breath of fresh air to find an alternative way to be a Christian in America other than being in the tank for the Republican Party.
I never read God’s Politics, but I did sign up for regular emails from Sojourners, the organization that Wallis was associated with (I think he founded it, but can’t verify that) that is committed to “articulate the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and building a movement to transform individuals, communities, the church, and the world.” At the onset, I appreciated reading regular alternatives and perspectives on the political topics of the day.
I can say that no longer.
Sojourners has lost all creditability in my view. They are obviously in the tank for the Democratic Party and have lost any and all “prophetic distance” with which to be able to critique our culture, church, and politics.
Perhaps I had not noticed it for the years before the 2008 Presidential campaign and election, but as time went by I noticed increasingly partisan stances from their publications. Fair enough, I thought, perhaps the Republicans are beyond help. I tried to give Sojourners the benefit of the doubt. In the past few days, however, I have noticed something even more troubling: Sojourners talking points are the exact same talking points of the Obama administration and the Democratic representatives in Congress. To know what is coming in my email inbox the next day from Sojourners, all I need to do is watch a press conference with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs or any of the Democratic Senators or Representatives on Meet the Press or This Week.
This week Sojourners has hit an all-time low, in my opinion. Rather than simply advocating for the Democrats version of health care reform, they have taken to the tactic of smearing conservative personalities Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly. For three straight days I have received an email smearing each of these media personalities and supporting their stances with personal anecdotes. Here are some quotes from the closing lines of each of the three emails:
Does Bill [O'Reilly] really think that the health-care crisis is only a problem for poor people? Or that clinics alone are a real solution? While his band-aid suggestions and scare tactics obscure the issue, the health-care crisis is making people poor as costs skyrocket – even for those with coverage…
The major proposals for health-care reform ensure that all people have access to affordable care, either through an employer-based plan or through subsidies to buy insurance in an exchange marketplace. The proposals also ensure that mental health care is included. This affordable access could have allowed Joshua to live out his days and contribute to his community. Rush [Limbaugh's] deliberate misinformation about the health-care crisis in our country could block this important reform.
The major proposals for health-care reform would prohibit insurance companies from arbitrarily canceling insurance and from denying needed care due to pre-existing conditions. This would ensure that all people have access to the care they need, when they need it. If this provision existed, Robin could have had her surgery at an earlier time, before possibly critical months had passed by. [Sean] Hannity’s deliberate misinformation about “government rationing” could block this important reform…
What tips me off to their complete bias is their use of anecdotes to back up their stance, not any sort of economic or statistical data. You can’t make policy decisions for 300 million people based on anecdotes. But you can pull on people’s heart strings. And Sojourners is trying to rally the troops to support Obamacare without using any form of discerning speech, only by appealing to people’s emotions and by demonizing easy right-wing targets.
Christian organizations should always be in the truth-telling business. Both political sides want us to believe that we can reform our current system with no downsides, that all the personal anecdotes about health care atrocities that strike fear into our hearts will disappear if only their plan passes. Well, that is simply not true. No system will be perfect, and Sojourners, as a Christian organization, an organization in the truth-telling business, should own up to the potential downsides of the proposed system, not simply the downsides of the current system.
Sojourners is not a Christian organization, but a lobbying group for the Democratic Party. In my mind, they have lost all credibility.
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Check out this YouTube video on this mayor from Canada. She’s been mayor for 31 years, is 81 88 years old, plays hockey, and runs her city debt-free with $700 million in reserves. I haven’t done any fact-checking, so I’m not sure what the “other side” of the story is, but I’m not sure I care. I would vote for her. Doesn’t look like her city is in need of a bailout. I’m a little perplexed about the $787,000,000,000 bill that was passed in both houses of Congresss today. The full text was not posted until around 11:00 PM last night. It was over 1,000 pages long. Debate in the house started this morning at 11:43 AM. By 11:00 PM tonight, it had passed votes in both the House and the Senate. That means in about 24 hours we had an almost $800 billion dollars go from final draft to law. This is after a Tuesday vote, three days ago, in which the “House unanimously approved a non-binding motion that called for members to have at least 48 hours to review the measure before voting on it.” I’m sure most people in Congress vote on bills without reading them in their entirety. But at least they can let us think they might possibly have the time to read such a significant piece of legislation, couldn’t they? Apparently, they didn’t want to even give us the illusion that they were informed in their vote today. I’ll quit before I say something I regret. Watching people’s passionate involvement in the intense politics of the past month or so has been an interesting phenomenon. We literally had millions of people working in one way or another to get their candidates elected, and last night we watched as euphoria erupted over an election of historic proportions. It left me wondering: Why doesn’t the church drum up this much excitement and passion? My preliminary guess is that politics offers the kind of eschatology that should be offered in the church. With each major election people talk and think about change. New possibilites begin to form in imaginations. “What if…” questions are asked and dreamed about. Nothing is outside the realm of impossibility. We make our stake for what we think the future should like like. Changing the future is an exciting proposition. In the church we talk about the past, about Jesus’s death and resurrection so that we might receive the forgiveness of sins. And we talk about the future that awaits us after our own death and resurrection. But we don’t often talk about the role of the church in between the two, other than the mandate for personal morality. This is unfortunate because the church has a purpose other than as an incubator of souls for heaven. The church is God’s change agent. The church’s mission is found in the proclamation of the gospel, a proclamation that frees captives, heals the sick, and opens blind eyes. Talk about new possibilities! The church is the place where imagining a new future should be a perpetual practice, not just every four years. The church should be about the business of changing the future, not just preparing people for it. We participate in bringing about God’s kingdom on earth, changing old to new, and seeing life where there once was death. The passion that excites the public every four years in our politics is an eschatological passion. And eschatology is the realm of Jesus and His church, not politics and the state. May we learn how to live in that realm. I find it interesting as I read blogs of people of certain theological persuasions during election season because you tend to learn their political leanings as well. In reading through the various blogs this year I’ve noticed that most people on the more liberal end of the theological spectrum are liberal politically, and conservatives are the other way around. Is there anything intrinsic within the different theological positions that gravitate people towards certain political opinions? Why can’t someone more theologically liberal take the opinion that while they staunchly believe in the gospel in all its social outworking that the government is the least qualified institution to administer the social gospel? Is our ecclesiology that weak? Have those from both ends of the theological spectrum given up on the church as an agent of change in the world and retreated to government solve the world’s problems? I just don’t see how fiscal discipline, limited government, and personal responsibility are antithetical to liberal theology. I recently saw a quote from Bono about using $700 billion to bailout Wall Street but we couldn’t find $25 billion to help stop preventable diseases. What ever happened to the church? In the ELCA alone, members gave $2.3 billion in offerings to their congregations. The ELCA is sitting on $20.6 billion in assets. Do we not have some resources to spare? The best I have read thus far (and I have read quite a bit) comes from Inhabitatio Dei. A quote: As far as I can see there is little, if any possibility of a truly non-messianic politics in America, at least on the macro-scale. Our work in our wider communities must, I think take some other form in the years to come, focusing on fostering local economies, generating local bodies of political discourse, and fostering community development initiatives that take place in concrete and sustainable ways.
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