Religion without Spirituality

Michael Feingold has a piece in The Village Voice that starts out like nearly every other post election rant from the left side of the aisle. Somewhere in the middle however are a couple of paragraphs that are worth repeating.

But the paradox of this election is that it was won not on the basis of the issues at stake or the actual conditions of our life, but on matters of good and evil. The majority that voted for Bush—the slimmest an incumbent president has received since 1916-did so not because they agreed with him on any important issues, but because they viewed his opinion on matters like abortion and same-sex marriage as good, and any alternative opinion as evil. The two great failures of this election were the failure of democracy as a concept in the public mind, and the failure of Christianity as a religion.

For make no mistake, this is the election in which American Christianity destroyed itself. Today the church is no longer a religion but a tacky political lobby, with an obsessive concentration on a minuscule number of social topics so irrelevant to questions of governance that they barely constitute political issues at all. These are the points of contention tied into what are blurrily referred to as "moral values," though they have almost nothing to do with the larger moral question of how one lives one's life, and everything to do with the fundamentally un-Christian and un-American idea of forcing others to live the way you believe they should. The displacement of faith involved is eerie, almost psychotic: Here are people willing to vote against their own well-being and their own children's future, just so they can compel someone else's daughter to bear an unwanted child and deprive someone else's son of the right to file a joint income tax return with his male partner.

If this isn't Christianity-and it isn't-still less is it in any respect like democracy. The whole meaning of America was predicated by the founding fathers on the right of citizens to practice their own faith and conduct their lives as they saw fit; to interfere actively in others' lives, on the basis of "moral values" about which there is no agreement, is the most radical repudiation of constitutional values in our electoral history, reducing the word conservative to absurdity. Today the Republican Party is not the right wing of anything; it is a band of violent radical reactionaries preaching medieval totalitarian bigotry. And Christianity as currently preached and practiced in Middle America is virtually Satan, by the standards of anyone who strives to follow the teachings of Jesus. Having degraded themselves to the level of political lobbies, most Christian churches should certainly be compelled to register as lobbyists and pay taxes.

While I agree with most of what he says he does show a lack of knowledge of the history of Organized Christianity. The modern Christian Church for most of it's history has been as much a political institution as a spiritual one. The creed of the Roman Catholic Church and it's modern offspring is based almost entirely on the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew was written about 80 years after the death of Christ and some 60 years after the other three gospels. Matthew frequently contradicts the earlier gospels and describes events that are not mentioned in the earlier works. One thing it does do is make Christianity politically correct for the ruling Romans. Christianity became the "State" religion of the Roman Empire shortly after Matthew was written and was the major political force in Europe until the reformation. In England, after Henry VIII for reasons of his own give the Catholic Church the boot, the Anglican Church remained the major political power broker in England. The only interruption was the brief period the Calvinists (the origin of Evangelical Christianity in the US) gained control. As we can see the organized Christian Church has historically been a political player. The secular government in the United States has been an anomaly rather than the norm.