“Self-righteous liberals tell us that Jesus had a heart for the poor, which is undeniable. But Jesus never directed that government be the agency used to help the poor. He was talking about charity proceeding from individuals and His church.”—Sean Hannity, Conservative Victory, p. 207
Don’t get Sean Hannity started on the “Christian left.” Only a communist, or worse, would even suggest that Christ’s injunctions to take care of the poor and vulnerable had anything to do with government. Those who believe such nonsense, he concludes, “would do well to remember the scriptural commandments against stealing and coveting.” Taxing me to give food to a hungry person is a violation of two of the Ten Commandments. True religion is not about who you feed; it’s about whether or not we can post all ten commandments above our lockers.
I have argued before that the contemporary Tea Party movement mixes and matches positions from the Founding era to create an ideological mishmash that any Founding Father would have seen (for different reasons) as ideologically incoherent. But the historical incoherence of the movement pales in comparison to the theological incoherence of trying to hold, simultaneously, that
1) America is a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles by Christian Founders who always intended that religion remain an important part of public life. Liberals who accept a false notion of “separation of church and state” are actually persecuting Christians and ignoring the Founders by trying to disallow prayers in public schools, nativity displays on municipal property, and public postings of the Ten Commandments.
2) America has no business trying to use the government to feed hungry people, give shelter and clothing to the poor, or provide educational opportunities and health care to those who cannot afford it on their own. This is the responsibility of private charities and Churches. Jesus never said that the government was supposed to do these things.
Each of these propositions contains a hidden theological assumption that Christians must question before drinking the Hannity-Beck-Levin Kook Aid.
The first proposition—that America’s Christian heritage means that we must allow minor expressions of religion in the public square—dramatically overstates the importance of, well, minor expressions of religion. To listen to Hannity and others defend the right to post the Ten Commandments on a school wall, or to put up a crèche display at city hall, one would think that these were vital to the free exercise of religion—that Christians could screw up their salvation by failing to walk underneath the 3% of the Jewish Law represented by the Ten Commandments.
But guess what? Most Christians don’t post the Ten Commandments anywhere (they being Jewish laws and all). And most denominations believe that Christians can go to heaven even if they lived all their lives in towns that didn’t display nativity scenes on public property. These things really aren’t that important to the Christian tradition.
Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and all that stuff, however, is REALLY important to the Christian tradition. This was not an incidental component of Jesus’s earthly mission; it WAS his earthly mission, and He made it pretty clear that it is supposed to be our earthly mission as well.
But you say (if you happen to be Sean Hannity), Jesus still doesn’t say that we are supposed to use the GOVERNMENT to do all of this feeding and clothing and visiting. This is what they set up the Church to do.
I have a hard time imagining that any adult could read the New Testament and think that it had anything to do with dividing responsibilities for the poor between Church and State—concepts that nobody at the time could have understood. An essential part of the Christian message is that societies have a responsibility to care for their most vulnerable members. We do not do this because it is spiritually ennobling for rich people to give their money to the poor; we do it because the poor and the vulnerable need taking care of. How we do this, really, is up to us, with the implication that the best way to take care of them is the way that takes care of them the best.
What Hannity & Co. tell us (when they are talking about money) is that Jesus imagined a great divide between what the government is supposed to do (Rome, we presume, but possibly Judea) and what “His church” is supposed to do. Taking care of people is good, if individuals do it by themselves or through a Church, but bad if individuals band together and structure a government that does it. (This logic does not, of course, apply to moments of silence in public schools).
One of the core assumptions of democracy, however, is that people have a right to try to structure their government in way that supports their values. Both liberals and conservatives believe this, but they believe it about different things. Most liberals (like most moderates and most conservatives) believe that their government should reflect the values of charity and compassion—values that can be found in all religious traditions as well as in most forms of secular humanism. The shrillest voices from the extreme right, however, see these things as outside of the government’s purview. They prefer that we focus our religious attention on graduation prayers, crèche displays, and making sure that schools give equal time to the dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark.
Jesus actually had an expression for just such a worldview. It had to do with swallowing a camel.
