Several years ago, a major religious figure made quite a stir when he had some stern words for homosexuals. A gay couple came to see me
seeking my support and blessing. I had to explain our teachings he said, according to the London Daily Telegraph. I don't mind ' but I can't condone this way of life.
Earlier this year, a group of prominent American co-religionists got together and issued a statement about global warming. Couching their words in spiritual terminology, the signers explained that they were worried about what climate change might mean for the poor of the world.
The major religious figure was the Dalai Lama, and the American anti-global warming group is an organization of big-name Evangelical Christians. Surprise!
It's a surprise to us Americans, because we have our ideas about religion and politics already neatly lined up. The Buddhists are liberals; the Dalai Lama won't have any problem with homosexual acts. The Evangelicals are conservatives; they won't go for global warming fights. Right?
Well, wrong, obviously. But why do we smack religious traditions with such labels in the first place? Where are we getting the Buddhists liberal; Evangelicals
conservative idea?
I hate to admit it, but the biggest culprit is probably the media. The press is a political animal ' not in the sense of bias, but in the sense that politics is its chief fascination. The problem is that everything else in our society often gets smashed into an unwieldy political paradigm by journalists who are either lazy or who can't imagine that there are topics that don't lend themselves to such a reporting template.
Thus, when Pope John Paul II died in 2005, the general public was treated to the sight of the national media twisting itself into pretzels while trying to figure out how it ought to portray the deceased. It was a great dilemma: Which shallow, two-dimensional caricature should be used in the front-page obituary? Was the late Holy Father an anti-war liberal or a pro-life conservative? Was he an anti-death penalty progressive or an anti-gay marriage reactionary? The short answer is, The Pope is a Catholic
but that point seemed utterly lost on certain sections of the media.
Worse, this attitude has infected believers themselves and produced some Grade-D thinking. Take, for instance, the popular bumper sticker that proclaims, Jesus was a liberal! If a nineteenth-century ghost were to rise from its Athens grave and begin to scream, Jesus was a Whig! or Jesus was a Constitutional Unionist! we would all have a good laugh at his expense and blithely go back to scrolling through our cell phones. It would be clear to everyone that those political labels, entrenched as they are in the muck and grime of the past, are ultimately inseparable from their particular moment in history and cannot be appropriately applied to a Jew who lived and died two thousand years ago and is believed to be currently reigning in Heaven.
Because of a lack of mature reflection, there are some folks who haven't made the leap to applying this understanding to our modern partisan brand names. Thus, we find many Volvos plastered with patently ridiculous Jesus was a liberal! bumper stickers. Ironically, in Europe and Australia, the phrase Jesus was a liberal! would suggest that the Lord was quite gung-ho about free trade and corporate welfare, which is not at all what oh-so provincial Americans mean to convey when they slap the sticker on their automobiles.
I don't wish to be unfair to my friends on the left-hand side of the spectrum. There are plenty of conservatives who so conflate their political and religious goals that they seem to believe that the president died for their sins, rose on the third day and shortly thereafter ascended into the White House. That's patently ridiculous, too.
What believers on each side need to remember is that it's necessary to put first things first. No one would deny that participation in our democracy is important, but in the long run, political agendas ought to come second to spiritual goals. Authentic religious traditions transcend the use of labels and don't describe themselves as progressive or reactionary or conservative or liberal. They describe themselves as entirely other. Which is as it should be.
' Maggie Kostendt is a senior journalism major and copy editor for The Post. Send her an e-mail at mk657603@ohiou.edu.
17
Archives
