Billoblog ®

In the next few days, I plan to write a critique of Jim Wallis’ book “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.” It will probably take up a couple of posts because the book held such promise for me, but was such a disappointment I feel it necessary to address a number of points he makes.

But first, I should define a couple of terms I’m going to use. The first is the distinction between a “Liberal Christian” and a “Christian Liberal,” and correspondingly a “Conservative Christian” and a “Christian Conservative.”

When speaking about Christians, there is a distinction between their theology and their politics. A lot of secular liberals mistakenly believe that anybody who takes the Bible literally, or who believes in the actual diety of Christ or in a personal God must also be politically conservative. Conversel,y a lot of secular conservatives seem to believe that anybody who views the Bible in the classic terms of “true myth” or one of its variants, that Christ is an archetype, etc. must also be politically liberal. Neither are right. There is a correlation, of course, but it is not as great as a lot of people think.

So, let me define my terms. As you might expect (and probably already know) there are a zillion terms for different flavors of theology. I don’t want to get into that. Instead, I will just use a broad brush of “conservative” and “liberal.” A “conservative Christian” to me is a person who has a relatively conservative theology — not fundamentalist necessarily by any means, but someone who has a rather concrete understanding of his or her relationship with God. On the other hand, a “liberal Christian” is one who has a more abstract approach to their faith — that the Bible does not represent literal truth as much as broad inherent values, that Jesus was not truly divine, etc.

So, to play the Jeff Foxworthy game, “You might be a conservative Christian if….”

1) You believe that Jesus really is divine in more than that mushy “we are the world” sense of divine
2) You believe that Jesus really did die and rise from the dead
3) You believe that Jesus really did perform miracles as described
4) You believe that God really talked to Paul in real words on the road to Damascus
5) You believe in a real hell and a real heaven
6) You believe in a real afterlife in which you remain “you” in a substantive way
7) You believe in real evil and real good
You believe in a real Satan as a real being
9) You believe in a real substantive Holy Spririt that can communicate God’s will to you

You might be a liberal Christian if you…

1) Believe that Jesus was just a human who probably had some good ideas
2) You don’t think that Jesus really rose from the dead. Maybe he was just comatose or something, but it doesn’t really matter.
3) You believe that Jesus had some important things to say, but all this talk about miracles is pretty much early Christian propaganda
4) Paul had some good insight and interpreted that epiphany as God’s voice
5) There isn’t a real heaven and a real hell
6) You really aren’t sure what happens after you die, but that’s not the point anyway.
7) We are all imperfect, but there’s no such thing as true evil.
Satan is an archetype — a personification of collective views of distance from God
9) The Holy Spirit is an anthropomorphic view of our own insight.

In contrast, both conservative and liberal Christians can be politically liberal or politically conservative. Thus there are conservative Christian liberals, and liberal Christian conservatives. Secularists who divide Christianity into two parts — “good” liberal Christians who don’t take all this God stuff all that seriously, and “evil” fundamentalists who want to return to the period of the Inquisition — will have a difficult time comprehending what’s going on.

But it is vitally important when reading the writings of a Christian who addresses politics to understand both how that person sees his or her relationship with God and how he or she translates that theology into a political philosophy. It’s not as simple as the petty antichristians make it seem.

And in my criticism of Wallis’ work, I do so as one Christian talking about another Christian. I acknowledge and value his view of God, even though it is not mine, and will criticize his work not on the basis of that, but on the basis of taking it and making it into a political call for action.