IN "GIFT AND TASK," the book in which Walter Brueggemann gives the lectionary readings, commentary and a prayer for every day of the Episcopal liturgical year in 2017, on Proper 10 he asks the question of what it says about the church that it's so domesticated that it isn't causing the powerful, the rich and the culture in general to feel uneasy with it. I would say that that's too true of "the church" while being untrue in a number of particular instances. A number of those working inside the structures of mainline Protestantism and Catholicism regularly make those comfortable in and with the powers that be everything from uncomfortable to angry to furious. In Catholicism Pope Francis has certainly gotten the opposition to the rich and powerful through his environmental theology, his theology of economic and social justice, his theology of mercy to those who the Catholic Church has traditionally excluded, LGBTQ+ (despite his unfortunate use of an anti-gay slur a while back), his proposal to include divorced and remarried Catholics, his outreach to non-European People and cultures, etc. And there are those in the Catholic Church who make him uneasy with their insistence on equality for Women in the priesthood and diaconate within the Catholic Church.
Whenever someone in the Church takes the teachings of the Gospels and Epistles, the Prophets and the Sinai tradition seriously, the results won't rest easily with the rich and powerful or in those who want the Church to be comfortable instead of prophetic.
If there's one thing that anyone trying hard to follow the teaching of Jesus as laid out in the New Testament, in the Epistles as well as the Gospels, they wouldn't be making anyone with lots of money or political power happy, whether they were outside of or inside of the various Churches. As I've quoted him before, the atheist, secularist radical Noam Chomsky has said that the Gospel is radical, I say far more radical than any secular attempt to imitate it. I can't remember which younger commentator I heard online who noted that atheists who promote anything left of predatory capitalism by way of equality or morality got their morality directly from the Jewish-Christian tradition, though we're finding out today that some of that came through Islam as well. You have to go to those who were influenced by other religious traditions, Native American, Asian, etc. to find those who got some of that from elsewhere but none of it comes through secularism which doesn't contain what you need to make those. If anything the history of America demonstrates that secularism is far more likely to dissolve that morality from life than to support it. Economic liberalism, in the sense of allowing the already rich to get richer at the expense of the non-rich and to enjoy their wealth without government getting involved is a product of "enlightenment" secularism. It is the fatal genetic disease embedded in liberal democracy and in many less than democratic forms of republican government.
I wrote a long, long piece this weekend in response to someone who complained about something I recently wrote, basing it on a piece that Rick Perlstein wrote for the nation nine years ago, When Leftists Become Conservatives. My conclusion is that in every case he mentions that I'm familiar with, the "leftism" of the lefties in question, which turned out to be less than a durable lifetime commitment, was problematic due to its secularism, materialism and anti-religious content. I think it's due to that amorality that led so many of them to go from that atheist-materialist-scientistic "left" to the vulgar materialist right. The likes of Max Eastman, Ronald Radosh and David Horowitz figured in my arguments. I'm never surprised, anymore, when I hear about such lefties turning to Republican-fascism, whether in the racist National Review of the Buckley era or of the Bush II regime or the Hudson Institute and The New Criterion. I distrust such would be intellectual enterprises about as much as I distrust capitalism and Marxism and Catholic integralism and its millionaire owned Vatican in Napa.
I don't know if I want to go at length into slamming that ersatz left again, though I was all ready to do that in light of what the Greens and the massive asshole RFK jr. are still up to. If I do it will be from a Christian point of view instead of some impotent stand of secularism. I don't find that at all effective and it's an inadequate basis for attacking the enemies of equality and democracy, economic justice and the environmental basis of life.
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