One of life’s minor pleasures is the spectacle of ‘progressives’ calling for Christians to pay more attention to the Bible. Here’s David Sirota writing in Salon:
As the Pew Research Center recently discovered, “Most people who agree with the religious right also support the Tea Party” and its ultra-conservative economic agenda. Summing up the situation, scholar Gregory Paul wrote in the Washington Post that many religious Christians in America simply ignore the Word and “proudly proclaim that the creator of the universe favors freewheeling, deregulated union busting, minimal taxes, especially for wealthy investors, and plutocrat-boosting capitalism as the ideal earthly scheme for his human creations.”
Mr. Paul would, I think, benefit from a calming cup of tea and a nice lie-down. Nevertheless let’s look at the issue that he is trying to address rather than the childish caricatures he deploys. Few successful religions are static. They develop. They change. They split. They borrow from other faiths and traditions. The syncretism and supple nature of an always evolving Christianity is one of the sources of its strength and endurance. We should not be surprised that there is also room within it for variants more friendly to the free market than one confined within a crudely literal interpretation of some of the reported comments of a figure who was (probably) born more than two thousand years ago.
But Mr. Sirota, it seems, is more comfortable with at least some (ideologically congenial) strains of fundamentalism:
The good news is that this may be starting to change. In recent years, for instance, Pew has found that younger evangelicals are less devoutly committed to the Republican Party and its Tea Party-inspired agenda than older evangelicals. Additionally, surveys show a near majority of evangelicals agree with liberals that the tax system is unfair and that the wealthy aren’t paying their fair share. Meanwhile, the organization Faith in Public LIfe has highlighted new academic research showing that even in America there is growing “correlation between increased Bible reading and support for progressive views, including abolishing the death penalty, seeking economic justice, and reducing material consumption.”
And Mr. Sirota tut-tuts at those whose (presumed) studies of Christianity do not measure up to the standard that he deems appropriate.
Of course, many Americans who cite Christianity to justify their economic conservatism may not have actually read the Bible…
Or maybe they have just read it a different way from that laid down by Mr. Sirota. The notion that the Bible is a collection of texts that can, quite reasonably, be interpreted in many different ways does not appear to be one that he is prepared to accept, or debate. No wonder he likes those fundamentalists of his…
I regularly comment (under a different screen name) at the Washington Post’s On Faith site. (BTW, it would help their site immensely if they had a secular conservative in their contributor mix; it’s all religious right, religious left; secular left.) Whenever someone asks why the religious right rejects the economic teachings of Jesus, I always point out that he was an apocalyptic who believed God was going to overthrow the prevailing social order within a human lifetime, and that his economic opinions aren’t relevant to a continuing society.
OTOH, there’s a big difference between believing well-regulated markets work well, and believing that simply having a market constitutes a form of regulation. That kind of thinking brought us Enron and the mortgage-driven meltdown. Markets also won’t protect the environment or discourage 50 states from racing to the bottom to attract employers.