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On a Wing and a Prayer Author Kathleen Kennedy Townsend on her latest - Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God with Politics and Losing Their Way BY KATHLEEN KENNEDY TOWNSEND Growing up in a big Catholic family, I knew a faith that was big, broad, universal - yes, Catholic. It dealt with big questions and embraced the future with a sense of hope and joy. We were on earth to do God's work ... and that was to be an exciting, if difficult, calling. Over the last twenty years, I have watched my Church being pulled to the right. And I wanted to stop it. I thought the churches were failing the faithful - and failing our nation. There are many ways to change the world - politics, advocacy, teaching. All those have I done. But I thought that this moment demanded something more: a grounding in history, a new language, a shift in perspective, a vision of what should be. Writing is the best way to convey a vision. I wrote Failing America's Faithful both to awaken people of faith to the true roots of Christianity - and to alert those who are not believers that there is a more inclusive faith that has been all but buried. It is time to resurrect the good that has been our legacy and make it our future.
The problem with the Religious Right's focus on so-called values questions is that it has the effect of making our faith seem undemanding. Nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus suggest that His followers should be content with their own righteousness and be judgmental of others. If the Gospels teach us anything, it is that we must be forgiving of others while always expecting more of ourselves: more sacrifice, more compassion, more love for our neighbor. And yet the leaders of the Christian Right have made Christianity seem effortless, because they sermonize most often and most intensely on the sins their congregations for the most part can avoid. It's always someone else who's doing the sinning - Hollywood, homosexuals, the Darwinists, the feminists - and so the judgments can come tumbling down fast and furious. It's always someone else who is responsible for the moral breakdown of society. But when it comes to the hard stuff, the stuff that demands that all of us give of ourselves to better the lives of those around us, the right-wing preachers are nowhere to be found. It's as if they believe that Jesus healed the sick, fed the hungry, and cared for the poor just so we don't have to. Jesus cautions us to judge not. If there is a central message to Christianity, if there is an enduring lesson to the example Jesus set during His time on earth, it is that none of us is without sin. None of us is perfect. When one follower called him "Good teacher," Jesus responded, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone." What an extraordinary challenge to His followers. If even Jesus expected more of Himself, how can we not apply the same moral introspection to our own lives? Jesus didn't give up His life to make it easier for us to damn those who are different from us. He gave His life so that we could learn how to redeem our own. And He lays out precisely how we are supposed to do that: by serving those around us.
Here is where I believe modern evangelical leaders stray so far from the Gospels. Conservative Christians are fervent supporters of the anti-tax, anti-environment, pro-corporate policies of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. But it isn't that they are lending religious credibility to causes and issues about which Jesus says nothing. Rather, they always seem to be working directly against Jesus' explicit instructions. In Mark, a rich man approaches Jesus and asks Him, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Christ doesn't mince words: "Go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Come, follow me." Over the past generation, the country's wealth has become increasingly concentrated within the richest families at the top. In the past thirty years, for instance, the percentage of American wealth owned by the richest one percent of the country increased from 22 percent to 40 percent. And yet for the past few years, the Christian Coalition has made its top legislative priority "Making permanent President Bush's 2001 federal tax cut." They seemed unconcerned that these tax cuts would provide a windfall to the wealthy and thereby make it much harder for them to "squeeze through the eye of the needle" into heaven. There's something deeply troubling and inconsistent about evangelical support for conservative economic policies. Essentially, they've chosen to abandon any notion of shared responsibility and the idea, well supported by both the Hebrew prophets and Jesus Himself, that we have an obligation to improve the world, an idea that was central to both Catholic and Protestant political traditions throughout our history. Indeed, Christian conservatives admit as much. In March 2005, decrying the renewed efforts of a few evangelicals to help the poor and become better stewards of God's creation through environmental action, the conservative columnist Cal Thomas wrote a column that seemed to sum up the conservative attitude: "There is no biblical expectation," he wrote, "that a ‘fallen' world can, should, or will be improved prior to the return of the One to whom evangelicals are supposed to owe their complete allegiance ... Jesus is appropriated these days for all sorts of things with which he would have nothing to do." Thomas, I should say, distinguishes himself from many on the Religious Right by saying that Christians shouldn't be focused on any politics, left or right, but on spiritual conversion. But even so, he's reading the Scriptures rather selectively, and a growing majority of evangelicals seems to agree with the interpretation. Increasingly, "health and wealth" Christianity, and the politics it spawns, has become accepted as gospel. Rather than believing that Jesus asks us to serve and sacrifice for the sake of one another, Christians seem to think that so long as we say and feel the right things, it doesn't matter if we do the right thing. But as it says in the hymn "Lead On, O King Eternal," "For not with swords' loud clashing, nor roll of stirring drums; with deeds of love and mercy, the heavenly kingdom comes."
Deeds of love and mercy are few and far between among some luminaries of the Christian conservative movement. In a 2004 Newsweek profile of Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the Left Behind series (which has sold 62 million copies worldwide), the reporter asked LaHaye how he reconciles his luscious lifestyle (as he describes his home, "this beautiful place, and that drop-dead gorgeous view of the mountains" in Rancho Mirage, California) "with Jesus' injunction to sell all you have and give to the poor." LaHaye responded, "I can accomplish far more from my present lifestyle and the giving that I do to Christian work. If I just sold everything and gave it to the poor, I can't see where that would advance the Gospel as much as I'm doing." "But wouldn't it advance the poor?" the reporter asked. "Well," LaHaye replied, "you know how much I pay in taxes?" And yet, said Jesus, "Do you lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consume and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." I am somewhat sympathetic to the conservative complaint that throwing money at the problem does not always solve it. There were certainly some misjudgements in the War on Poverty. But the difficulty of a task is no excuse for giving up. My father would always quote Marcus Aurelius, who said, "Prefer the hard." And there is lots of evidence that public action can have no real positive effects on the missions Jesus called us to. Food stamps have reduced the number of starving children, the Earned Income Tax Credit has helped stabilize families - as have the increase in child care subsidies and family leave benefits. Social Security has raised the elderly from the poorest demographic group to a much more financially secure position - and one that is healthier, too. When Jesus says, "For you always have the poor with you," He was not gving His followers carte blanche to ignore their needs. Conservatives often interpret this verse to mean just that, conveniently ignoring the thousands of other verses in the Bible enjoining us to commit ourselves to charity and mercy. So when faced with the shortcomings of, say, health care, the Christian position should be, "If this isn't working, let's find something that does." The Religious Right, however, says, "This isn't working, so let's do nothing."
Keys to The Castle Norman Mailer provides personal insight on his latest work, The Castle in the Forest INTRODUCTION BY FIN LAY L EWI S Insurrection was in the air on that day in 1967 when a multitude of antiwar protestors assembled for a march on the Pentagon. In their midst as an observer, participant and chronicler was the brilliant writer Norman Mailer, whose memorable account of the moment - Armies of the Night - won the Pulitzer Prize. That was closely followed by Mailer's observations of the Republican and Democratic national conventions a year later and published as Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Together those were seminal works capping the most tortured decade since the Civil War. Mailer returned to Washington on March 26 to promote his latest book, The Castle in the Forest - a richly textured imagining of the young Hitler. At a PEN/Faulkner patrons' dinner party Mailer mused about the great tyrants of the 20th Century. Which was the worst bane on humanity, Hitler or Stalin? The novelist gave the nod to his book subject, observing that while Stalin killed for "tactical reasons," Hitler's murders seemed to spring from a warped and diabolical grand design - one infected, Mailer suggested, by "a virus for evil." But he sounded despairing when talk turned to the fate of the modern novel - an art form that Mailer suggested no longer seemed devoted to the grand themes of good and evil. As for Washington itself, it was hard not to recall how its now tranquil streets had once formed the tumultuous backdrop for that famous march four decades ago. Mailer's accounts of that epoch illustrate the transformative potential of literary journalism, and deserve, for that and a multitude of other reasons, to serve as texts for the generation of reporters and editors now coming on the scene.
NORMAN MAILER: When I was nine years old, in 1932, my mother - who was not tremendously educated but very intelligent and sensitive - knew that Hitler was going to be disaster for the Jews. "He's going to kill us all," she predicted. So I grew up knowing that there was a man in Germany who was going to kill all the Jews. It had a profound effect on me. About four years ago, I started reading about Hitler's life. I must have had my nose in about 200 books. I came to the conclusion that there were two stances in writing about Hitler. One of them was to write about his childhood, which is perfect for a novel. The second and more important was the choice of narrator. The author as narrator opens up all sorts of pitfalls. The reader asks, "Well, what views did Mr. X, the writer, have?" I abandoned my voice to a character: the narrator. The perfect narrator for this novel was the assistant to the Devil. ON WHY HE CHOSE THE DEVIL'S ASSISTANT...
ON WRITING ABOUT GOOD AND EVIL... The point I wanted to make [in The Castle in the Forest] is that humans are engaged with gods and devils - or with God and the Devil. It is impossible to understand Jesus Christ, and yet people believe in Him. There must be a Satan out there as well, for a great simple reason: for every action there is a reaction. Sooner or later, every force has its "counterforce." This makes more sense than assuming that humans succeed or fail entirely on their own.
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