Fox News: Balanced Between the Pernicious and the Absurd

One of my favorite portions of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church...and yes, I have favorite portions...dates from way, way back in 1789. It's that little bit early on about the importance of seeking truth, and how important that yearning for the true is to a life lived according to the standards of goodness and holiness. It states:

That truth is in order to goodness; and the great touchstone of truth, its tendency to promote holiness, according to our Savior's rule, "By their fruits ye shall know them." And that no opinion can be either more pernicious or more absurd that than which brings truth and falsehood upon a level, and represents it as no consequence what a man's opinions are. On the contrary, we are persuaded that there is an inseparable connection between faith and practice, truth and duty. Otherwise, it would be of no consequence either to discover truth or to embrace it. (G-1.0304)

This has always struck me as one of the most helpful portions of our often-dry constitution. Seeking truth and fighting through the filters of our selfish subjectivity tends to make us more open to loving those who are different. Those who care about the truth have a tendency to bear the fruits of the grace that Christ proclaimed.

Today, I stumbled across a particularly egregious-feeling bit of not-truth, one that troubled me deeply. It was over at..ahem..FoxNews.com.

Yeah, I know. Misrepresentation? On Fox? Surprise, surprise. But as much as I find Fox distasteful, they are still among the top 10 sources of online news. So for many, what they say is, well, news. It defines the perception of reality of a significant portion of the Yoo Ess of Ey.

The bit that caught my eye had this tagline: "Not Again: Meet Obama's Controversial New Pastor." To which I said, "Huh?" I know President Obama has been seriously slack in getting his sorry behind to church. As a pastor and DC denizen, I know he's not made a church selection...and, the way I see it, is unlikely to. So how could he have a new pastor?

Well...he doesn't. Not in any meaningful sense. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The pastor in question is Rev. Jim Wallis, a progressive evangelical and the founder of Sojourner's magazine. Rev. Wallis, though certainly liberal, is a pretty moderate voice. Wallis recently came out against some amazingly ignorant comments that had been made by Glenn Beck about "social justice," in which Beck had condemned a social justice emphasis as both fascistic and communist, and told folks to basically bail on any church that ever quoted from the Gospel of Luke.

So now, in a non-editorial piece that presents itself as news, Fox has declared that Jim Wallis isn't a "progressive evangelical." He is, instead, a "socialist activist who has championed communist causes." Sojourners, the magazine he publishes, is "a far-left magazine" that has, unsurprisingly, also "championed communist causes."

This really rather remarkable bit of 50s throwback agitprop comes to Fox unfiltered from an affiliated right wing group. It represents a perspective so utterly consumed by it's own worldview that the reality of who Jim Wallis is becomes irrelevant. Such a willful disregard for truth isn't just a bit of spin. It's not the sort of thing where you can say, well, gawrsh, that's just my opinion. I'm entitled to my OPINION, aren't I?

Perhaps, in so far as we all have the freedom to misrepresent and deceive to serve our own interests. In doing so, though, the fruits we bear are the farthest thing from the gracious and the holy.

The Little Boy Who Cried Socialist

Having read the text of Obama's controversial pep-talk to school kids yesterday, one of the most striking things about it is that it was total, down-the-line, unrelenting partisan propaganda. At no point did it vary from the party line. Every talking point, every rhetorical flourish, every turn of phrase...all of it...presented a particular ideology. The speech was a flagrant effort to embed that ideology into the hearts and minds of our young people.

That ideology is, of course, the ideology of American conservatism. Work hard. Study hard. No one owes you anything. To succeed, you have to put in effort. You are responsible for your own success. Listen to and respect your elders.

The intense resistance to this fundamentally conservative speech among conservative ideologues may, I think, be part of a turning point for the American right. Conservative parents, panicked by the fear-mongering of their own media, bombarded schools with calls of outrage. Some opted their kids out of the speech, concerned that the message amounted to the indoctrination one might receive from the Dear Leader in a totalitarian state. While this is certainly consistent with the view of Obama that some folks have been pitching, it poses a problem for the right. Here, with crystal clarity, American conservatives have taught a lesson to the children of America about the current nature of their movement.

It has gone mad.

For the vast majority of kids who listened to or dozed their way through this speech, the idea that there was anything evil or socialist about it will be obviously, basically wrong. Not just a little off. Way off. Paranoid schizophrenic off. "Your mom wouldn't let you watch that? What a whackjob."

That's not to say that one can't disagree with the current administration. I do on a range of fronts, particularly in terms of fiscal responsibility. But the reflexive roaring of the right-leaning media and blogosphere increasingly seems less like legitimate opposition, and more like raving. And if conservatives allow themselves to be painted into that corner, the legitimate critiques they have will no longer seem legitimate.

I think Obama knows this. I think some Republicans are realizing this, which is why the Florida GOP chair publicly recanted his accusations of socialist propaganda after he saw the text of the speech. He even went so far as to say he was going to be sure his kids listened to it.

But the damage is done. If you keep shouting the same thing, over and over again, no matter what, you aren't being consistent. You're being that little boy who cried socialist, and eventually, no one will believe you.

The Only Real Christians Live In Denmark

I've just done a fascinating bit of reading over at Public Discourse, a conservative web journal. The article I'd commend to your attention is written by W. Bradford Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist. He opines at totally manageable length about the impact of social democracy on faith, drawing from a recent 33 nation study by two University of Washington sociologists. That study confirmed something many folks have noticed anecdotally: that nations that provide cradle-to-grave care for their citizens tend to be less religious.

For Dr. Wilcox, this reality poses grave concerns for the landscape of American faith during an Obama administration. Given this administration's focus on providing health care, a functioning infrastructure, and an educational system, things could get particularly ugly for the church if all of those things are successfully provided. Why? The answer is simple, says the good doctor:

"The bottom line: as government grows, people’s reliance on God seems to diminish."

Why is this? It isn't that folks aren't religious in countries like Norway and Denmark. There are Christians...just not as many of them. Why? In his review of the 33 nation study, Dr. Wilcox pulls out the core finding:

How do we account for the inverse relationship between government size and religious vitality? As Gill and Lundsgaarde point out, some individuals have strong spiritual needs that can only be met by religion. This portion of the population remains faithful, come what may. But other individuals only turn to churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques when their needs for social or material security are not being met by the market or state. In an environment characterized by ordinary levels of social or economic insecurity, many of these individuals will turn to local congregations for..support.

So let's make the shift from sociology to theology. What does this mean theologically?

It means, if we're attending to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, that the "success" of American Christianity only comes because most American Christians don't have a clue what Jesus actually taught. The findings tell us that we turn to God when we are seeking material well-being. We turn to Christ seeking physical security.

What we do not appear to be seeking is the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. We're as confused as the Samaritan woman at the well, who had trouble grasping the difference between water and Living Water. We come to Jesus not because we feel the yearning to be conformed to the will of God and transformed by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. Instead, it's because we got us a jones for some a dat schweet, schweet Mammon, and we expect that Jesus in his infinitely beneficent blingitude will supernaturally serve it up if we ask real nice.

Perhaps, to flip Dr. Wilcox and his conclusions on their head, what a welfare state actually does is help separate the wheat from the chaff, the True Kirk from the Church of the World, the Heavenly City from the Earthly City. Those who would otherwise go to church seeking first their own interests and their own comfort find what they seek in the state, and fall away.

Those who recognize that there is more to our purpose life than material possessions and security...well, they keep seeking the Holy until they find it.