Every cable news show has weighed in on the failure of the GOP this election. Lots of experts and smart people have pointed at potential culprits for their profound losses. I’d be lying if I said that I was at all concerned about the tarnishing of the GOP brand. However, what concerns me is what their very off-message message has done to the GOD brand.
When I first became a Christian it was automatic. Like it was one of our civic duties, you believe in Jesus you vote GOP. If you didn’t, you were “secular” you were “worldly”. I know those things sound silly to be called, but they are grave insults to Christians. No one wanted to be those things. Those things meant that you didn’t love God and, in the Christian community how much you can talk about loving God is the gold standard of the who’s who.
I’ve always had a hard time around elections. During an announcement, a soft endorsement would come across a pulpit. A less than subtle reminder that we were supposed to vote against abortion rights, Gay rights, and any other kind of right that may impede our agenda. I was never all the way ok with it, but I won’t say that I didn’t go along. It was passive aggressive and, it always left me unsettled and uneasy. As a lifelong champion for the underdog and, a bleeding heart for any and all types of injustice, it never sat well with me. It didn’t change how I felt about Jesus, but it sure changed how I felt about the party.
I hate the fact that the GOP has the God market cornered. Despite the President openly declaring himself a born again Christian, no one really believes he’s an Evangelical. Evangelicals are bible-thumping, crazy, judgmental people who tell you, you’re going to burn in hell for your sins and, that tragedy is God’s will. He’s too intellectual, too interested in equal rights. He believes welfare should be a safety net, thinks that the judicial system needs sentence reform. He’s too okay with Gay marriage. It makes me uncomfortable. I’m all of those things, well maybe except for the intellectual part, but I know that I’m a Christian. Well at least I think? I’m not apostatizing. I just know that if the standard for belief is agreeing with the GOP’s platform, it’s going to take more than holy water to get me into heaven.
This election created a struggle for me. It’s embarrassing what the Conservative movement has made my faith look like. I feel forced to apologize for their behavior. Saying things like “I’m not one of those Christians”. I find myself trying to explain that though God has a “best life” He plans for you, He loves you whether you live it or not. Publicly, the zealots have reduced Christian to what degree of bigotry it supports. Privately, I pray more ardently for someone to come along and undo the damage the GOP has done. I want to be called something else. In the inner circles, we refer to ourselves as “Believers” not Christians. Christians are people who like to quote scripture and not live by any of the values they espouse. Believers are those that say remarkably little about the scripture they know and live the power of that scripture out loud.
The semantics make me feel better. It gives me a little room to breathe and a safe place for my faith. What of those who don’t have that space? What about the people who meet Christians or worse yet see them on TV and have no idea and no way of telling the difference? Kim Kardashian calls herself a Christian, so does Oprah, TD Jakes, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Bishop Gene Robinson, Clay Aiken and Joel Osteen. By God’s rules, they all can be Christians, by our rules? Not so much.
Kim has a sex tape, Oprah talks about there being other paths to God than Jesus, Jakes is the real deal but his wealth makes people uncomfortable. Beck is crazy, O’Reilly an unapologetic and insulting blowhard. Bishop Robinson is an openly gay priest. Aiken denied being gay forever but, we all knew better and, Osteen is the reigning king of Evangelical Christian television with the biggest mega-church in the country. I doubt that any of the people on this list would say that their faith is questionable to them.
My frustration with the popular idea of what Christian means keeps me up at night. I enjoy my relationship with my God and His Son. I am passionate about it. I want to share that relationship. I want to tell people that it’s the source for my life without it muddled by some outlandish agenda I don’t support. The GOP has all but robbed me of that privilege. It has tainted, corrupted and made demagogues of us. It has abused us in intimate ways that profoundly wound. It has surged up through the cracks in the pavement like magma and dried cold and hard locking many out and scorching whatever it didn’t bury. Like the post civil rights home grown terrorists, so called “good” Christians have made it that much harder to fight the good fight.
My God is not a God of racism, misogyny, homophobia, inequality, malice or abuse. However, my best efforts may never be able to change the minds of those that His name has been used to vilify, contain or oppress. I struggle with wanting my faith to be impactful enough to overwhelm the abusers of it, who, determined to establish their own dogmatic righteousness, ignore the real impact of using God to get rich, famous or, both. I wonder about the generation left in the wake of this raping of religion. I pray for the sons and daughters of Gay Americans, told that their parents were less than full citizens. I wonder about the children whose parents died fighting insurance companies because health care is still a for-profit and uncompassionate institution. I hurt for the children of immigrants that listened to their parents referred to as illegals as if their very existence were criminal. The war orphan because veteran care costs too much or the homeless child sleeping in shelters or park benches because the party of God sees no need to care for the poor.
If you believe in God, nothing I just said can sit well with you, because you know that at the beginning and end of all that matters to God is justice, fairness and love. The GOP didn’t just destroy their chances of “taking back” America. They may well have created an America where the fear of God isn’t reverence for Him, but a literal fear of what happens if the god they serve gets his (their) way.
Dear GOP, if America becomes an atheist nation, you built that.
Sincerely,
One pissed off believer sick of you maligning my faith.
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