"D. James Kennedy, RIP. And while we are at it, let us bury American Christendom, too. "
This is the unfortunate closing line from a post by Diana Butler Bass on the God's Politics Blog at Sojourners. I was not a bit devotee of D James Kennedy, but I always found his ideas regarding faith and politics compelling. Which is why I am disappointed and annoyed at the way his ideas are represented in Bass' article. It is a common characature of the "religious right" by the religious left. Bass writes...
"His strongest contribution to the movement was his passionate belief that America was founded as a Christian nation and developing media to carry that message across the globe. 'Our job is to reclaim America for Christ,' he proclaimed, 'whatever the cost.' His preaching, politics, and public ministry flowed from this central idea: to restore Christian America."
By and large that is accurate. Kennedy did believe the United States was founded on Christian principles. What is missing from Bass' attempt at analysis is the amount of evidence Kennedy routinely cited to support his contention. He commonly quoted the founding fathers directly on such matters. Perhaps only David Barton did a better job at documenting the idea that the founding fathers actually had at least a generically "Christian" worldview that inflenced their politics. It did not mean, and Kennedy did not claim, that America was perfect or that all the founding fathers were Christian saints. It did not mean the founders wanted a National Church (they strongly objected to that) or that their goal was to solidify some notion of "Christendom". It meant very simply, that most believed there was a God that rulers and citizens were accountable to and moral principles found in Christian faith were good for the nation.
But the fact that Kennedy regularly documented from the writings of the founders themselves a generally Christian view of the falleness of man, the moral law, the value of the individual, is not mentioned by Bass, and is in fact replaced by an assertion that Kennedy's vision of America was "imaginary".
"Many people from Kennedy’s generation remember—or imagine they remember—a vanished Christian world, an ordered society with Protestant faith at the center. Much of the Religious Right’s energy derives from a desire to restore that world, or to “reclaim America for Christ.” To that end, Kennedy mixed evangelicalism with classical Reformed theology and a kind of soft Christian Reconstruction, creating the spiritual fuel for a right-wing political and media empire that meshed with the longings of a certain age."
Of course there is the phony association of Kennedy to Reconstructionism, which is a slam often leveled at the "religious right". But I don't think it is "imaginary" that prayer and Bible reading were once legal in public schools. It is not imaginary that Continental Congress opened in prayer. As late as 1854 the House of Representatives not only referred to daily prayer, but specifically to Christ. In the Reports of Committees of the House of Representatives Made During the First Session of the Thirty-Third Congress, we read this:
"Whereas, the people of these United States, from their earliest history to the present time, have been led by the hand of a kind Providence and are indebted for the countless blessings of the past and present, and dependent for continued prosperity in the future upon Almighty God; and whereas the great vital and conservative element in our system is the belief of our people in the pure doctrines and divine truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ, it eminently becomes the representatives of a people so highly favored to acknowledge in the most public manner their reverence for God: therefore, Resolved, That the daily sessions of this body be opened with prayer and that the ministers of the Gospel in this city are hereby requested to attend and alternately perform this solemn duty."
Sorry, but this is not an "imaginary" recollection of a bygone era suggested by the happy days of the 1950s. This is an historical document of the kind Kennedy routinely cited. But the facts sometimes get in the way of an agenda. Instead Bass refers to the newer and more enlightened thinking of Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon:
"'The gradual decline of the notion that the church needs some sort of surrounding ‘Christian’ culture to prop it up and mold its young, is not a death to lament,' they claimed. 'It is an opportunity to celebrate.'”
I haven't read Hauerwas and Willimon to comment directly on them, but this quote seems exceedingly cynical. First of all, Kennedy would not have dreamed that the church needs a surrounding Christian culture to "prop it up". That is completely backwards. Kennedy, like many others, argued instead that it is the culture that needs the church to prop it up and the loss of Christian influence in politics, education, law, media and other areas was not a threat to the church, but a threat to the very stability of the country and the safety of its citizens. Laws based on arbitrary standards can quickly degenerate into weapons of the powerful. Politicians and judges who feel no accountability to anything "higher" can quickly become tyrants. It is not Christendom Kennedy was defending, it is civilization he was defending.
This failure to understand the passionate heart of folks like Kennedy to simply see some sanity restored to a culture and to a government that seems to have been completely overrun by secularism, narcissism and relativism is hard to fathom. I can't say whether such a misconstrual is intentional or not. I can say it is frustrating. Kennedy deserves at least a little respect in his passing. He also deserves a little fairness in analysis of his contribution.
No comments:
Post a Comment