Let us frankly acknowledge that the word “evangelical” has become a working synonym for the religious right and is thus beyond salvaging. I have given up on the e-word. I am effectively post-evangelical. If you share this sad distinction, we need to talk. Many post-evangelical … Continue reading Is the Bible God a loving God?
What if God just changes his mind about gay marriage. It wouldn’t be the first time, you know.
By Alan Bean
God delights in all of us, all the time, no matter what.
We have been talking about the silence of “messy middle” churches and the need for a prophetic public theology.
Our silence, I have suggested, is a consequence of ideological diversity. Messy middle pastors can’t address issues like immigration, poverty, homelessness and wealth inequality without sparking a culture war meltdown in the pews. We have nothing to say on the big issues of the day because nothing can be safely said.
Some of my readers agree with my diagnosis of the disease but have suggested, politely and off the record, that nothing can be done. Churches can engage in ministries of charity (food pantries, soup kitchens and the like), or we can focus on issues like payday loans and human trafficking that enjoy wide, bipartisan appeal. But a big-picture prophetic public theology is a non-starter.
I have more sympathy with this counsel of despair than you might imagine. Prophetic preaching often goes wrong because it starts wrong. (more…)
By Alan Bean
With the first presidential debate looming, Mitt Romney has moved to the center on the immigration issue. He still promises to oppose the DREAM act, if elected, to veto the bill if it passes congressional muster. But Romney now says he would honor the work visas which, at President Obama’s direction, are currently being awarded to young undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.
As Ross Douthat (with admirable cynicism) pointed out in a recent column, when it comes to the immigration issue, presidential aspirants can win votes by exhibiting compassion (George W. Bush, Rick Perry) or by playing mean (Mitt Romney during the primary season), but there is no advantage to waffling between these two strategies. Like most right-leaning pundits, Douthat favors using immigration as a wedge issue:
Taking a more restrictionist position and using the issue to portray the Democrats as beholden to their party’s ethnic interest groups and out of step with blue collar Americans’ concerns.
The wise course, in other words, is to drive a wedge between hardworking Latinos and Anglos. Nice, Ross. A self-proclaimed “Christian” columnist advocates this sort of nastiness and no one cries “for shame!” That’s the America we live in. Christianity, it seems, has no moral application unless we’re talking about abortion.
Texas politicians like George W. Bush and Rick Perry are “soft on immigration” because their support base includes a lot of agribusiness people who couldn’t survive without cheap undocumented labor. Alienating Latino voters might benefit Republicans in the short-term; but it is a long-term loser.
It is also devilish, but hey, in American politics you’ve got to give the devil his due.
Romney and Obama are both waffling on the immigration issue. Obama claims to be working for comprehensive immigration reform (known as CIR in immigration reform circles), but he also deported a record 400,000 undocumented immigrants last year, three-quarters of them to Mexico. To put that in context, that’s the same number of undocumented residents the United States deported between 1908 and 1980. In theory, the feds are deporting criminals, “the worst of the worst”. In reality, half of the deportees have no criminal record and most of the “criminals” represent little threat to American public safety.
Historically, American politicians of both parties have waffled on immigration, bouncing between compassion and demagoguery. In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed a bill that exchanged amnesty for many undocumented immigrants for assurances that the border would be closed to new arrivals. Typically, the approach has been to privilege on group of undocumented Americans at the expense of other undocumented groups. The DREAM act, for instance, would allow young people who came to the United States as children to obtain work permits and apply for citizenship, but their parents, and children who arrived too late, would be out of luck.
This good-immigrant-bad-immigrant approach is fundamentally unfair and utterly unworkable. We gain nothing by kicking the immigration can down the road.
Politicians like Obama and Romney can’t be more progressive (or regressive) than the American middle. A new poll suggests that the majority of Americans now favor providing a path to citizenship over mass deportation. This shift occurred, I suspect, because Barack Obama found the courage to protect (albeit temporarily) DREAM act young people from immediate deportation.
Few of us think our way to an opinion. We listen to what significant others are saying and follow suit. We don’t all march to the same drummer, but few of us supply our own drum track. True reform will come when both major parties realize that they can get one of their people elected president, or they can enrage the Latino electorate, but they can’t do both.
Friends of Justice 