BSODmyself

Tonight, a McCain-Obama forum is being conducted at the Saddleback megachurch in California.  I’ve not been turned on by the prospects of watching this event since I’ve long supported a separation of politics and religion, no matter who the candidates are.  I probably won’t watch it.  Well, maybe I will.  While I could be bitter about this event, since my dog, and a number of dogs to whom I’m more sympathetic, were not allowed to participate.  But since this is a forum billed as being about faith and “the social gospel”, that’s what my commentary will center around, not on the horserace of who will win the most Evangelical voters.

Christians must seek to understand Christianity, which is based off of what Jesus discussed and advocated.  He most assuredly talked about the poor, the homeless, the meek, those living and dying by the sword, etc.  But the biggest problem I have with a concept of a “social gospel” that requires forums to ask political candidates what they will do as government officials to enact these ideas is that this isn’t what government does or is supposed to do.

In Jesus’ day, he went to individuals and groups of individuals and asked them to do things about the sick, the poor, and every social problem that existed.  He could have easily gone to the government and used his awesome powers to change government and government bureaucrats.  Even if you know absolutely nothing about the Bible, if you’ve watched “The Ten Commandments“, you know how well this worked for Moses.  Thus government and politicians being what they are, Jesus and his followers would have had to deal with the Roman government — a government that believed in torturing prisoners and publicly executing them.  Now contrast that with the American government of today.

But Jesus didn’t try to change the rulers of his time.  If better government was the answer, I’m pretty sure Christ could have hooked that up.  But that’s not what Jesus did, he took his message directly to the people who could actually do something about the issues, the people who actually experienced the suffering and the hurt, he took his message to you.  He said, in a sense, “I want you to do something about poverty, sickness, and morals.”  He didn’t ask you to lobby for laws that may only help the suffering in an indirect way (if it truly helped at all) or vote for the lesser of two evils.  Jesus asked you to be more direct in your actions in order to know compassion and closeness to others, as opposed to the distance and robotic nature at which government claims to fix problems.

While I am theologically universalist and do not believe that some people go to heaven (or a desert oasis filled with virgins) and others do not, there are those who believes this is a mechanism for justice in the universe.  For those, who do believe this, believe in the importance of a social gospel, and still crawl to kings and presidents for the resolution of all perceived societal problems, what will Judgement Day be like?  Will you be held accountable for government’s failure to live up to a Christian vision of helping your fellow man?  I kind of think using “the Devil made me do it” excuse (or in this case “the government made me do it”) to describe why the homeless haven’t been given homes won’t fly.

So what we’ll see tonight is anyone’s guess.  Maybe they’ll spin, or triangulate, or have a genuine religio-politico epiphany right on stage.  I’m sure the media will continue with its nit-wit blather about “who won the Evangelicals” as if a group of people, especially Christians, could be owned by a politician or political party.  Anyway, I’m pretty certain that we’ll see the emergence of a huge Pander Bear of enormous proportions, which in this case would seem to be an eighth circle of hell situation.  We definitely won’t see much social change in this world until we all understand that what we do in this life is up to us — for good, for evil, for indifference, for apathy — and not up to the governments and politicians.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Politics, Rants, Religion.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.