The Politics of Jesus December 11, 2006
The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering The True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted. Obrey M. Hendricks, Jr. Doubleday,2006. ISBN-10:0-385-51664-9. Hardcover, 370pps.$26.00. SPL Call #261.70973 H3845P 2006
When Senator Barack Obama spoke about AIDS before a recent gathering of evangelicals at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Valley Community Church, something boyh new and old was happening in American politics. Warren and his congregation are an audience not prone to liberal politics, and in fact Warren risked the wrath of his fundamentalist congregation and his fellow evangelists by inviting Obama in the first place. A pro-choice liberal, Obama is regarded by some as the devil incarnate, and what he had to say was grounded in a different vision of Christianity than the faith of many of his Orange County audience, who were overwhelmingly Republican, supposedly the very bone and sinew of the conservative followers of George W. Bush. The evangelicals, for their part, signaled that the faith vote was no longer certainly entrained to right wing politics. Obama, on the other hand, brought a reinvigorated spirit of Christian liberalism, a reminder that all Christians subscribe to the interpretation of doctrine most convenient to Republican politicians. Unimaginable even five years ago, the Obama speech before an audience of fundamentalists might indicate a new openness on both sides of that perennial American conversation about religion. Arguing against that interpretation, however, is the indisputable fact that a speech by a liberal Democrat before an evangelical audience is big news, and that kind of big is associated with both breakthroughs and freak storms in politics.
Popular wisdom dictates that the conversation about religion and politics is not one we should have with our neighbors, not if we wish to keep the peace. Yet , one group of politicians has found to its electoral sorrow that the purely secular point of view will not suffice to win over critical constituents of a highly religious polity, while another group has found that a severe and exclusionary rhetoric of holiness has not done much to explain the human diversity, with all its strengths and weaknesses, of American life. Nor have the self-styled representatives of Christianity in our political life merited that appellation. Something is wrong with the intrafaith dialogue. One side has drifted too far from the conversation, while the other has identified itself too rigidly as the guardians of the truth, and claimed without sufficient warrant to be the political representatives of God on earth. In short, now is the time when some liberals are seeking to find a Christian voice, and some Christians are disillusioned with the political status quo. It is the perfect time for Obrey Hendricks Jr. and The Politics of Jesus.
The Politics of Jesus is an erudite, scholarly jeremiad, in which Hendricks outlines a portrait of Christianity’s founder as a liberator of the oppressed and advocate of the poor, and Christianity as a religion of more or less permanent discontent with the motives and roles of established and powerful institutions, not at all content with the present representatives of Caesar in America, and signaling its intent to challenge any such power, whether it be incarnated in conservative and largely evangelical Republicans, as it is presently, or in some future regime of the another party. The book’s message is that all the people who call themselves Christians are under an obligation to read the Gospels critically and closely, to look at what happens to the least in their own time, and to compare the goals and pronouncements of the powerful to their continuously revised readings, readings which take into account the place of Jesus in history, the numerous attempts to neutralize and appropriate the movement, and the ultimately subversive nature of that movement. For while Hendricks’ version of Christianity does not always make power uncomfortable, he certainly believes that the ability and duty to do should always be present.
The book is organized along three closely related lines. The first situates Jesus and early Christianity in a the historical context of Jesus as imperial subject, a member of an oppressed and colonized people . The second part elaborates the political nature of Christianity through close readings of some key terms and passages from the scriptures. Finally, Hendricks compares the Christ that emerges from the readings to the one presented to the public by today’s politicians and evangelicals, and urges the reader to stop and consider whether the exclusionary, status-quo favoring Jesus of the evangelicals and recent administrations has anything whatever to do with the historic Jesus. That figure, Hendricks tells us, was a political revolutionary whose advocacy was for the poor and whose message has nothing to do with ruling elites, inspiring the Iraq war, or legislation that increases to unprecedented proportions the gap between the rich and the poor.
According to Christians, the miracle of the Christ is that its principal figure was born into history but brought a doctrine that transcended temporal constraints. According to Hendricks, the Jewish experience under imperial Rome had much to do with both the transcendent, lasting elements of Christianity and the day to day experience of Jesus,his political importance, and his strategies for resistance. Hendricks outlines several of these, all based close readings of well known scriptures. He considers, for example, what happens when the recurring word “righteousness,” is replaced by “justice”,which is , according to Hendricks, the correct translation in several important passages. What emerges is a religion much less focused on interior guilt and much more on the kingdom of social justice and the ongoing plight of the poor.
Beginning with the Roman emperor Constantine’s conversion, Christianity became a state religion, and according to Hendricks, this seemingly desirable historical stage was anything but: instead of the beginning of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, it was the start of a centuries’ long corruption of the Christian message. Hendricks believes that the most recent expression, and the American culmination of , this long bowdlerization is the appropriation of Christianity to the politics and goals of the Bush administration, with its famous identification of sanctity with its own versions of patriotism. Critical to the process has been a kind of personalization of the message, with an ever growing emphasis on the state, personal guilt, and cultivated disdain for Christ’s messages about social justice. The result is a figure that is vapid, and vacuous, empty at best, and of use for any politician’s identification of a current ideology with divine will. Hendricks cites the musical anodyne “Silent Night” , where the Christ child appears as “warmly ensconced in an uncomplicated setting of total and everlasting peace.”(Hendricks, p. 95) . This is the empty baby , father to the patriot, whose thoughts are one with the powerful. According to Hendricks,the conversion of Constantine to Christianity was soon overshadowed by a much more important development: the conversion of Christianity to Constantine, the appropriation by the state of an inherently subversive religion, a process that has reached its American nadir under George W. Bush.
Hendricks does believe that it is possible to bring politics more into line with true Christian principles, but not as long as the faithful align themselves with wealth and power. He believes that Martin King’s movement represented something more akin to the kind of resistance Christ typified, but the King movement as well as its Christian background have, in Hendricks’ telling, any of the empty arrogance of triumph or complacency so commonly accepted in America today. Although he admires Johnson’s Great Society Programs, Hendricks deplores the lamentable history of the Vietnam War. But Hendricks reserves his true fire for Ronald Reagan, G. W. Bush, the Moral Majority, and others who have explicitly assumed the mantle of Christ while pursuing imperial wars, increasing the wealth of the strong, and impoverishing the weak. Hendricks accuses, but as he does so is careful to support everything he says, and his command of recent political movements and statistics is impressive, learned, and seasoned in detecting the politics of deception. For those of us with a more secular turn of mind, the insistence on holding the state strictly accountable to religion might be more disturbing, were that accountability more disturbing and the author less willing to question and support his own readings. Such critical thinking rarely assumes that it cannot be mistaken, and that ever present hesitancy is all that secularists can ask of the religious, short of not bringing their perspectives to bear in the first place, a development not likely in the United States anytime soon.
This book is scholarly Christianity militant. While it excoriates the present faith based government, let no aspirant Caesar be confused. Hendricks has the kind of theological and critical imagination to inspire wariness in anyone who seeks to appropriate Christianity to power. As the dialog between liberal and conservative Christians begins to unfold with more vigor than we have seen in many years, Hendricks is positioned right where he should be: always a friend of the poor, sometimes a friend to the party, a theologian deeply engaged with life in this, our present world.
