Christ and the Culture Wars

This quote by Steven Colbert prompted a lively Facebook debate that focused primarily on whether or not the government should use tax revenue to care for the poor as a matter of principle. My view on this question has evolved over the years, but I'm not going to weigh in on that debate today. I think people of faith can be of the opinion that the government should use tax revenue to help the poor and others can be of the opinion that assistance to the poor should be handled entirely by private charities and, of course, many are somewhere in between along the spectrum. What no Christian can reasonably disagree about is that we have a clear moral responsibility to help the poor.

The problem is, Christians in public life in generally are entirely consumed with Culture War issues like gay marriage, abortion, prayer in schools, etc. to the exclusion of almost everything else. It seems to me that the priorities of American Christians are sorely out of order if they are spending almost all of their time and resources fighting the battle against gay marriage and very little on actively helping the poor.

American Christianity has become more American than Christian. I'm still somewhat baffled by the religious right's love of Ayn Rand--an atheist who preached that sharing and altruism were actually immoral. The Virtue of Selfishness is one of her most famous works. If she had, perhaps, applied this only to economics I could perhaps get on board (and I think many people mistakenly believe that she is only talking about economics). She, however, is literally arguing that selfishness in all facets of life is the ideal way to live. How is that at all compatible with what Christ actually taught? It isn't.

The American myth (using myth in the true sense-not as a representation of falsehood, but rather as a commonly understood symbol that is evoked to represent a culturally understood truth) of the self made man has been highjacked by many members of our society and turned into an excuse to abdicate our responsibility to the poor. No man is an island an no one got where he is purely out of his own efforts. The hyper-individualistic, hyper-antagonistic form of the "Christianity" adopted by some American Christians seems to me to be far removed from anything Jesus of Nazareth would have preached. Some American Christians seem to define themselves more by the people they dislike than by the people they love. I'll add my voice to the calls for civility and unity.