Compassion in Politics: Christian Social Justice, Non-Profits, and Life Theology

Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times may just be warming up to evangelicals as he points out that church leaders like mega church pastor Rick Warren are coming around on seven key humanitarian issues:

Scorning people for their faith is intrinsically repugnant, and in this case it also betrays a profound misunderstanding of how far evangelicals have moved over the last decade. Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

He goes on to point out a sharp contrast between past evangelicals and current day evangelicals (a distinction that is 100% missed on the new breed of atheists a la Christopher Hitchens et al)  While the older generation can be perceived as polarizing, the new generation is less so.  The old might be said to be: 

Moralizing blowhards showed more compassion for embryonic stem cells than for the poor or the sick, and as recently as the 1990s, evangelicals were mostly a constituency against foreign aid. Yet that has turned almost 180 degrees. Today, many evangelicals are powerful internationalists and humanitarians — and liberals haven’t awakened to the transformation. The new face of evangelicals is somebody like the Rev. Rick Warren, the California pastor who wrote “The Purpose Driven Life.”

Thoughts? How can we come to(h/t to Zack Exley at Revolution in Jesusland)

Steve Paulson of Salon held a great interview with John Haught of Theology professor at Georgetown University on the new atheism. Two questions popped out in my mind in relation to the overall interview:

Your forthcoming book, “God and the New Atheism,” is a critique of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. You claim that they are pale imitations of great atheists like Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre. What are they missing?

My chief objection to the new atheists is that they are almost completely ignorant of what’s going on in the world of theology. They talk about the most fundamentalist and extremist versions of faith, and they hold these up as though they’re the normative, central core of faith. And they miss so many things. They miss the moral core of Judaism and Christianity — the theme of social justice, which takes those who are marginalized and brings them to the center of society. They give us an extreme caricature of faith and religion. Are you’re saying scientists are themselves practicing a kind of religion?

The new atheists have made science the only road to truth. They have a belief, which I call “scientific naturalism,” that there’s nothing beyond nature — no transcendent dimension — that every cause has to be a natural cause, that there’s no purpose in the universe, and that scientific explanations, especially in their Darwinian forms, can account for everything living. But the idea that science alone can lead us to truth is questionable. There’s no scientific proof for that. Those are commitments that I would place in the category of faith. So the proposal by the new atheists that we should eliminate faith in all its forms would also apply to scientific naturalism. But they don’t want to go that far. So there’s a self-contradiction there.

A big hat tip to Jon Henshaw for passing this article to me.  
FYI: You might check out the free beta test for their SEO tools he is offering.

John Haught stakes out a unique position by fusing Darwinism with a the Biblical account of creation in Genesis. More on this is the near future…

Thoughts on new atheism or Haught’s viewpoints?

McLaren suggests at TPM Cafe:

On the one hand, our religions can fan the flames of holy-war narratives –whether expressed in terms of terrorism or counter-terrorism, jihad or crusade. On the other, our religions can inspire us with framing stories of reconciliation and peace. On the one hand, our religions can foment stories of scapegoating and vilification, but on the other, they can inspire us toward compassion and understanding through stories of reconciliation and grace.

Instead of baptizing greed and self-interest, our faith communities can teach us stories which promote the common good, inspiring us to creatively pursue sustainability both environmentally and socially. Instead of sanctifying the consumerism that reduces everything to a financial “resource,” our faith communities can teach us stories that inspire true reverence for the planet and all it contains – opening our eyes to the signature of God in the hawk soaring among the mountains, the school of minnows flashing in the shallows, the cricket singing in the back yard.

Instead of distracting us from this-worldly injustice, our religions can embed in us a sense of stewardship and responsibility, so that we who have been given much gladly accept much responsibility for our neighbors. Instead of preoccupying us with raising our own moral score so we can consider ourselves spiritual winners at the finish line, we can live in a story of hope that turns our hearts towards our neighbor, toward the stranger, and even towards our enemies.

This fundamentally shatters the claims in Dawkins claims and castigations against Christianity. Thoughts? Agree? Disagree?

(h/t to Zach Exley at Revolution in Jesusland)

I’m traveling 10 hours today….so I’m going to post this draft.

The moral and spiritual core of America is slowy being eaten away. In our inner cities, gang life is tearing our neighborhoods limb from limb. In our more affluent neighborhoods tragically broken homes and broken lives are eating away at our spiritual cores. Isolation and spiritual decay almost seems like the new norm. In our corporations, although GDP continues to chug along, below the surface corporate corruption festers and employees fear if their job will be next in line for offshore outsourcing. Internationally, waves of environmental destruction, sexual slavery, and infectious disease are destroying the last vertiges of human life in the developing world. In this context, Hitchens wrote God is Not Great to blame the tragic ills of society on religion. Fortunately, his criticism is dramatically misplaced. Any normative system can be warped, abused, misinterpreted. Our constitutional liberalism is as guilty and certainly humanism is as well. Both the Crusade and Iraq were justified on humanitarian and “we will humanize them” rhetoric as well. To lay these societal and biological maladies as the doors of religion is simply dishonest.

The science alternative is equally problematic. Science unchecked by ethics is a nightmare transcending the likes of Brave New World. Tuskeegee and the Nazi trial aren’t exactly examples you want to be defending.Hitchens misidentifies the source of society’s decline. Its actualluy men’s quest for power and domination, not faith or Christianity that is the root cause of all the problems he identifies. Religion was just the rhetorical baggage that was attached to the misguided efforts of power hungry humans. That is where the poison truly lies. Be a little more honest and not so glib, Hitchens.

In addition to Hitchens misidentification he also falls prey to two significant logical fallacies. First, is the poisoning of the well. It’s the logical fallacy that says that Jimbo is an insane liberal, so all liberals must be insane. This makes his book fail on its face in its own rational humanist terms. Actually I’m really curious how the Unitarians, who I can’t imagine his book deals with are reacting to his stridently discriminatory hate speech directed at religious and cultural minorities.The notion that MLK did his acts despite his religion is preposterous. First, if you read his books you would know his passion for religion was the heartbeat of who he was. Second, he was able to mobilize hosts of church folk behind him. Mother Thereas and Ghandi are sizable counter-examples.

Next, Hitchens falsely accuses religion of totalitarianism. This isn’t an example for you as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are hardly applications of Gods love or a fair application of the Golden Rule. His work is dramatic act of prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination. The worst outgrowths of hate and intolerance.

The leftist academics should rightly label his work as essentialism and totalizing in the same way he criticizes Christians for being so. First, hes just using the metaphor of religion and the religion of a bygone era. Also, the small group movement is an counterexample to this other abuses Hitches and others falsely apply to the church. William Wilberforce’s struggle against slavery and the civil rights movement is a radical counterexample.Cognitive infallibility? Reason, science, liberalism and humanism all claim supposed infallibility and engage in the same solipsims he lays at the feet of religious theology. The new generation’s Christians only provincially adopt doctrine and constantly re-birth their faith by re-interpreting the text.Increasingly, religion and more specifically Christianity is seeing the error of its ways and moving beyond the top down and exclusionary practices of the past. Its including the issues of the environment, poverty, social justice and AIDs as backbones of the Church. In this ways its going back to the church and re-birthing Jesus’s church in the 21st century.Hitches comes off as a snide misanthrope in interviews, perhaps if he found the love of Jesus in his heart, he might actually learn to show compassion, love, and a smile now and then. Instead, Hitchens is content to rig the intellectual game in his favor by dismissing mainsteam counter-examples like Ghandi, Mother Theresa, and King.

If you want more information, I invite you to sample the relatively robust discussion on this thread and to read the scathing criticism of Hitchens in Commonweal. Also, I wrote two responses in the comments section yesterday afternoon which dovetail and substantiate the positions I’ve advanced here.Hope you enjoyed these initial notes! Have a great day!

So what do you think? What are your feelings? Do you see Christianity as on balance good? How about atheism? Is there a spiritual yearning in society? Is materialism the answer?

thanks to Jane Dahlin for the flickr photo

I’m doing some research on “God is Not Good” by Christopher Hitchens for an upcoming blog post, which I’ll probably post on Monday or Tuesday. Unforuntately for him, Hitchens criticism largely relies on what is commonly called a “straw person” or “straw man”. In simple terms, a straw person is when someone warps or otherwise mischaracterizes what another person is saying in order to appear to win a given discussion. Also, Hitchens uses a vast hasty generalizations to paint a picture of all religions, which fail to realize the nuance and diversity between religions.

Given the above its not surprising that Eugene McCarrher in Commonweal points out that for, “Anyone expecting a masterful demolition of all things sacred will be disappointed. Bullying and shallow” McCarrher continues, “Then again, this is a writer who understands religion only as a mélange of prohibition and superstition, plus an incitement to violence, and so large parts of the story get erased. Hitchens’s claim that the God of Moses “never mentions human solidarity and compassion at all” is preposterous, given the Torah’s injunctions about forgiveness of debts, redistribution of land, or openness to strangers, or the prophets’ exhortations to mercy, justice, and beating swords into ploughshares.”

In addition to those devastating problems I found this quote which is pretty problematic to his entire thesis, because an emphasis on (secular) science is the logical alternative to a de-emphasis on religion:
‘Religion Kills,’ Hitchens titles a chapter with typical bravado, as though science doesn’t. The history of scientific inquiry is filled with examples of incompetence, chicanery and outright torture and homicide undertaken in the name of “reason” and “progress.” Yet Hitchens continues to imply that evil is the prefecture of religion rather than a resident of both secular and spiritual worlds.” —Dennis Covington

You can check out a debate he had with Doug Wilson at Christianity Today here. PS. God is Great. I probably didn’t have to tell you that, though….

Any feelings about the issue? Any good quotes? Have you read any good criticisms of Hitchens? If you haven’t, I highly highly recommend Eugene McCarrher’s Commonweal article is a ideological and theological blitzkreig attack on Hitchens hollow work, thats well worth the read.