Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

The August issue of Harper's includes a lengthy piece by Bill McKibben, "The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong." I have not yet read the full essay, available only in the print edition, but an excerpt is online at the Harper'ssite.

McKibben says:

Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
[...]
America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox—more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese—illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.

This is not, to say the least, an point of view calculated to warm the cockles of a Bible-thumper's heart. And without having read the full text I'm not sure what, if anything, McKibben prescribes as a solution -- or if the essay is merely meant to diagnose the condition, rather than to help remedy it.

But the argument is undeniably provocative, and at the same time based on observations anyone not blinded by his or her faith could make.

Granted, I grew up in the Northeast in an almost exclusively white working-class town. I was baptized Methodist; was confirmed Lutheran; and later, as an adult, switched back to what might best be described, over the long haul, as intermittent Methodism. So my experiences with Christianity, and with religion in general, weren't exactly of "The deity before all else" variety. People took church seriously but didn't rap one another on the head with the seriousness.

Maybe it was this plain-vanilla religious upbringing which confused me so when I began encountering, in real life, the paradox of people wearing their Christianity on their sleeves without a matching Christianity in their hearts and minds. I (and everybody else) had always, of course, known the latter sort of people -- I'd just never heard them proclaim their godliness. So the paradox was always there, just not so vivid.

(The paradox worked the other way, too. No doubt there were many skeptics or outright unbelievers in my life when I was a kid, but because nearly everybody behaved pretty much the same way -- politely, kindly -- it wasn't very obvious. Only later did I meet people who made a lot of noise about their unbelief... most of whom, weirdly, behaved considerately, compassionately, and politely every day.)

Pointing out things like the source of the "God helps those who help themselves" quotation is fun -- and in the case of noisy hypocrites, I'd argue, an outright civic duty as well. But the paradox of Christians behaving in un-Christian ways has been a fact of American life since the Puritans -- who came here, at least nominally, to escape religious persecution -- first tried closing off aspects of society to everyone else. What's new -- at any rate, we haven't seen it for a long time -- is the elevation of pious hypocrisy to the level of doctrine. That's where analyses like McKibben's (based on the online excerpt) prove more useful the more widely they're disseminated: Pointing out, yes, that the emperor has no clothes -- but also that the Cardinal has no cross.