TIA: The Christian Coalition....Isn't

Excerpts of a sermon by Rev. M. Maureen Killoran, Pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville, NC and member of The Interfaith Alliance

It’s an occupational hazard of ministry, that when you publish your sermon titles, you sometimes evoke an... interesting... response. This week my home telephone rang and I was confronted by an angry caller who said (and I quote) “Nobody gives a damn what you think the Christian Coalition isn’t. Getting rid of liberal perverts like you is what it’s all about, and I’m telling you, it’s the Christian thing to do.”

There you have it, folks. A day in the life of a parish minister. Fortunately, the caller hung up, and I didn’t have to respond. Because I admit I was unnerved. With the ring of a bell, that voice of self righteous certainty violated the privacy of my home.

It gave me a tiny insight into how at least some Congressional representatives must feel when angry constituents say they should have voted this way or that because “It’s the Christian thing to do.”

When televangelist Pat Robertson sent a series of letters to members of Congress last fall, he implied that “it was the Christian thing to do” for them to support tax cuts for the wealthy and take away health care, child care and welfare assistance for the poor.

(Pat Robertson, by the way, just published a new book he claims is solidly based on the Bible, in which a Christian militia is raised up to fight a tyrannical American government and a neutron bomb is dropped on Israel. It’s probably worth remembering that Robertson is the one who in 1984 told the Contras in Nicaragua that speaking to them was the high point of his life and a year or so ago said publicly that God should remove Itzak Rabin because his peace efforts stood in the way of Biblical Prophecy — and he says he talks this way because “it’s the Christian thing to do.”)

....[Pat Robertson’s political organization,] the Christian Coalition, claims 1.7 million members, fields stealth candidates, issues biased voter guides and has used its $24 million annual budget to build as smooth a piece of political machinery as this country has ever seen. In the past six years they have elected over 12,000 conservative Christians to 2,500 of this country’s school boards alone. All this, they say, is because it is the “Christian thing to do.”

When you’re on the outside of this — maybe you are one of those many Americans who do not call themselves Christian and don’t pay much attention to the activities of people of faith — when you’re on the outside of all this, it can seem pretty silly... or aggravating... or
scary.

When people flaunt their religion like a flag, when they use it as a hammer and hit people over the head — then, for many people, there’s a tendency to react against the label instead of the action — to react against what the Coalition calls itself instead of what it does.

On the other hand, it may be that you are one of those many Christian Americans who do not identify with the Religious Right, and you find yourself on the defensive, hesitant about naming your beliefs lest you be confused with the crazies on the [extreme] Right; or perhaps you feel angry that one group has had the audacity to claim the entire territory of the Christian faith.

If it’s any consolation, I am convinced that Jesus would have felt the same way. I say to you that in a very real sense, the Christian Coalition is not Christian. I say the Christian Coalition should stop pretending to be acting in the name of Jesus and come right out and say that what they are after is power, political power, theocratic power — big time. I say to you that it is a travesty to say that this is “the Christian thing to do.”

Where is it written that the Jesus who sat down to dinner with the non-persons of his society — with lepers and prostitutes and tax collectors — where is it written that this man would have supported tax cuts for the wealthy and extra cuts in Medicare and programs for the poor?

Where is it written that the Jesus who insisted that children not be ignored, and even when he was desperately in need of time off, cared enough about people to say, “Let the little children come to me....” Where is it written that this man would have cut dollars from school lunch programs and cast votes for legislation which in the most literal sense takes food out of the mouths of babes?

....The Christian Coalition is using the name of Jesus to justify private self interest and the legitimation of greed. If you’re looking for Christian-based ethics, I found more in the words of Pope John Paul II, when he called Americans to be generous to the poor, to welcome immigrants, to celebrate cultural and ethnic diversity, to support an enhanced role for the United nations and to maintain a “spirit of openness and sensitivity to the needs of our neighbors.”

You’ve got to contrast this with a recent conference of the Christian Coalition where the African American holiday of Kwanzaa was ridiculed from the podium, where casual racism was the norm, where a school member got a standing ovation when she said it was “the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” who cast the ballots that elected her by a three-vote lead.

....For the Christian Coalition, life is a war between Good and Evil, and if they label you as Antifamily, you’re on the side of the Devil and any weapons are fair game.

Or am I on target when I conclude that, whatever it may be, the Christian Coalition has no right to the first word in its name? As I see it, if people are acting on the basis of their religion, you ought to be able to tell.

.... Over and over, you find it in the Christian and the Hebrew scriptures, the call to lift up the poor, to use an affluent country’s resources to help those in need, to shore up the weakest links in the chain that creates community. How we treat the least among us — the
least important, the least appealing, the least powerful, the least wanted — surely this is the most important test of anybody’s faith.

....The kind of deeds I envision from a coalition truly based in Christian faith — the kind of ethics with which I seek to unite in an Interfaith community — promote an atmosphere of responsibility and mutual obligation.... They repudiate the name calling and character assassination that poison the atmosphere of public life.

The kind of deeds I long for are those called for by all the great spiritual tradition of the world, actions which reach across barriers, build bridges, open doors, acknowledge that we are one human family on this fragile planet, Earth.

Give me this kind of action, and I will call it Christian, if you like. Or grounded in faith. Or religiously-motivated. Or spiritually supported. Or ethically based. Most of the time I don’t care what you call it — but the Christian Coalition has drawn up the playing cards and with stakes this high, we are simply foolish if we stay out of the game.

And so,... I hereby challenge those parts of the Christian Coalition that we can reach to examine their actions on even one tiny part of their Contract with the American family, to hold themselves accountable in the light of the ethics their religion is supposed to be calling them to believe.

What is going on in this country today is nothing less than an organized attempt to subvert democracy as we know it. The Christian Coalition is a wolf dressed up as Paschal lamb, a vehicle of power masked in the trappings of faith, a vehicle of power masked in the trappings of faith.

Their leaders proclaim that the Bible is the true Constitution of this country and (in Pat Robertson’s own words) their goals are nothing less than the entrenchment of Pro-Family Christians as a working majority of the Republican party, a working majority at all levels of state and local government, a working majority of Congress, and as the incumbent of the majority of Congress, and as the incumbent of the Oval Office of the President of the United States.

The Christian Coalition is large. It is well organized. It is powerful. It is no doubt filled with people who believe themselves to be motivated by faith.

The Christian Coalition is all these things. But it does not deserve the name it has claimed. The Christian Coalition... isn’t. And it is up to us not to despair, but to stand tall and act for what we believe is right.