La Shawn Barber is a Christian writer who is a daily "must read" for me. Today she had an excellent piece about Tiger Woods and Brit Hume.
It seems that not a few individuals are shocked - shocked! - that Hume would engage in "proselytizing" (as Steve Benen of the Washington Monthy put it). Given the tendency of Benen's colleagues to promote leftist positions on a wide range of issues (global warming, the need for health care reform, opposition to the Iraq war, etc.), he might want to be careful about railing against "proselytizing" by Christians.
But Hume's comments raise a larger issue: to what extent can Christianity reform an individual and (by extension) society at large?
Such an issue is far too big to be dealt with effectively in a single post. Large numbers of books could be written - in fact, have been written - on Christianity and its relationship to society. But I would like to comment on what happens when a Christian or a Christian church starts to view the Christian faith as a way to redeem society at large rather than the redemption of lost souls through the proclamation of the Gospel.
Christian activity in reforming society is nothing new. Christianity was instrumental in abolishing the slave trade in first Great Britain and later America. Christianity has been at the forefront of eliminating Jim Crow laws and segregation, and Christians today are putting up a brave fight (sometimes in the teeth of an intolerant media and hostile political leaders) against the genocide of abortion.
But there is always a danger when Christians become politically active. Not so much to society - much of the talk about "right-wing fundamentalist Christianist theocracy" is simple paranoia - but to the Christian community itself.
Some years ago C.S. Lewis wrote an excellent essay entitled Meditations on the Third Commandment. Lewis was commenting upon the desire of some Christians to form a Christian political party. Lewis speculated how such a party would likely split among ideological political lines, and how it would be tempted to downplay Christian beliefs in order to attach itself to a larger secular political party (and in the process perhaps obtain more power and influence).
To me this seems to be the true danger of mixing Christianity and politics: that Christianity will be made to serve secular political goals that are at odds with the Christian faith.
Regardless of your views on politics, if you are a politically active Christian you might want to look at what is happening right now to the ELCA. By voting to allow non-celibate gays and lesbians to become pastors, and by exploring the possibility of blessing same-sex unions, the ELCA is attempting to attach itself to a larger political movement by eliminating parts of Christianity.
To be sure, the ELCA has always been both politically leftist and politically active. But in recent years, the ELCA has become even more strident in its statements on a variety of issues.
Yet this forcefulness is inconsistent, if the ELCA is truly a church. For example: it unambiguously condemns the death penalty, yet waffles on the issue of abortion. On the environment the ELCA promotes a kind of heathen nature worship inconsistent with the Scriptures. On the issues of education and what it called "Economic Life" the aim is purely bureaucratic with the Bible being given only lip service. And the ELCA's views on race and culture are openly hostile to the Biblical teachings of sin being individual rather than corporate.
For a Christian church this would be embarrassing hypocrisy. But for a secular political party the ELCA's views makes sense.
In short, the ELCA must be considered to be a leftist political party with religious trappings - a kind of ecclesiastical Moveon.org. It is not surprising that it has now adopted the gay/lesbian agenda into its party platform, and that Lutherans who don't see the world in the purely political way that the ELCA does are leaving. Put another way - by transforming itself into a political party the ELCA has ceased being a church.
This is the danger of using Christianity to reform society, or (in Brit Hume's case) to transform a single broken individual. Christianity is the acceptance of a Savior who will take away our sins, and the Gospel is a love letter written by God to a fallen humanity.
Perhaps that is what Hume meant by his comments. But I hope that Woods will accept Jesus as his personal Savior in order to reconcile himself to God, and not just to become an example to the world.
