By Becky Garrison 

In my role as Senior Contributing Editor for The Wittenburg Door for over twelve years, I have become accustomed to the slings and arrows, as well as the occasional threatened lawsuit hurled by the Religious Right and the Progressive Left, whenever our satire magazine implies that they are behaving less than charitably, unchristian if you will. 

Whenever I report on their misdeeds, I “try” to remain faithful to The Door’s goal to “satirize something I love – the Church, and more generally people of faith – with the hope that my prodding might generate some course corrections while inducing a laugh or two... or three. Around the 2004 election, I got sick and tired of seeing Christians throwing each other to the lions. As I pondered this dichotomy between Jesus’ teachings and this Christian cat fighting, I started writing Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church: Eyewitness Accounts of How American Churches are Hijacking Jesus, Bagging the Beatitudes and Worshipping the Almighty Dollar  (Jossey-Bass, 2006).

Throughout this book, I offer a series of satirical reflections on hot button issues such as the environment, prayer in the schools, and abortion that illuminate both the plank in the Religious Right’s eye as well as the speck that blinds the extreme Progressive Left. All too often Christians confuse acceptance of others with approval of their position, refusing at times to extend love towards those whose political views do not meet with their tacit approval. What happened to this love thy neighbor biz?

While Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church highlights the battles between the warring political factions, I also note those all too rare instances when instead of creating ideological havens for like-minded political souls to gather, the church has chosen to receive the other based on the Greatest Commandment of all.
(In The Lost Message of Jesus) Steve Chalke and Alan Mann ask these challenging questions: “To what extent does the Church model the spiritually and socially inclusive message of Jesus? Are we liberators of excluded people or simply another dimension of their oppression? We may not exclude tax-collectors or hemorrhaging women, but what about schizophrenics, divorcees, single people, one-parent families, drug users, transsexuals or those struggling with their faith?” To this list I would add Christians we see as our political adversaries.
When we put partisan politics above seeking the kingdom of God, we get what we deserve. Mike Yaconelli reflected, “The impotence of today’s Church, the weakness of Christ’s followers, and the irrelevance of most parachurch organizations is directly related to the lack of being in the presence of an awesome, holy God, who continually demands allegiance only to Him—not to our organizations, to our churches or our theology.”

The Sojourners’ slogan has it right: God is not a Democrat or a Republican but rather Lord of all. And as Christians, it is our duty to let His light shine through instead of trying to advance our own personal and at times petty sociopolitical agendas. As Christians, we are called to be the salt of the world, but when we fail to follow Him, we’re just dishing out Christ’s teachings sans any seasoning (see Matthew 5:13). As Chalke and Mann note, “We get the Christianity we deserve—we just can’t pass the buck. The Church in the West—with some notable exceptions—has a tame faith because it has been giving a tame message for centuries. You can’t breed a radical, revolutionary movement on passive, middle-of-the-road rhetoric.”

Stanley Hauerwas notes that “Christians’ first political responsibility is to be the church, and by being the church, they should understand that their first loyalty is to God, the God we worship as Christians, in a manner that understands that we are not first and foremost about making democracy work, but about the truthful worship of the true God.” The challenge I present to U.S. churches is to seek to create the type of worshiping communities where red and blue Christians can come together not as political rivals seeking to do battle but in communion, joined together through baptism as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Will this happen? I dunno. As we approach the 2006 election, these political battles keep getting funnier and funnier. Let’s see, we have Hillary Clinton calling Jesus and the Good Samaritan illegal aliens even though they hail from Nazareth and Samaria respectively. Looks like the progressive clergy were so busy trying to secure a spot at her right hand that they failed to take her to task and suggest that her biblical interpretations might but, I dunno, wrong. Then you have Republican Congressman Mark Foley lending a unique twist to Jesus’ saying “let the children come to me (Luke 18:16). Given the Religious Right’s obsession over what unmarried people do with their genitals, coupled with their skewering of Clinton’s Oval Office escapades, I have to wonder what’s behind their silence here. 

Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of activity on the religious front right about now but not much in terms of actual transformation taking place. You know something’s just plain wrong when churches sponsor seminars, protests, conferences, and other actions in an attempt to defeat temporal “enemies” named Clinton or Bush.

This foolish quest to conform Christ’s teachings to the whims of a particular political party has really started hitting the faith and it’s been stinking up the local churches big time. I know Jesus was born in a barn but do churches have to smell like one as well? I dunno about you, but I think it’s high time we started mucking out the stables.

Becky Garrison is Senior Contributing Editor for The Wittenburg Door, the nation’s oldest, largest and only religious satire magazine and author of Black and Blue Church: Eyewitness Accounts of How American Churches are Hijacking Jesus, Bagging the Beatitudes, and Worshipping the Almighty Dollar (Jossey-Bass, 2006). She lives in New York City.