I wrote this blog after reading Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. To those who see merit in religion and value in American democracy, the book is a horror story told in twenty-one chapters and an epilogue by a man well-versed both in Christianity and in the current religio-politico scene. What Alberta does not say is that many evangelicals are extremists in supporting the Republican Party and former president Donald Trump.
Everyone knows that Christianity in America has been in trouble, increasingly so in the past decade. Common opinions about Christian churches are that non-mainline denominations are rabid, mainline denominations are insipid, and neither provides much in the way of non-political moral or ethical guidance. Church affiliation and attendance are down. The average age of church members is rising because younger people are opting out or not joining. With a few notable exceptions, many churches are struggling, splintering, or closing.
Of the many reasons for Christian fissiparousness, my two may be unconventional. The first traces back to the apostles and their missions to different lands, peoples, and cultures. The apostles themselves were a varied lot who had different understandings of Jesus and his message. In preaching to different audiences, they not only preached according to their understanding, but also tailored their message to their audiences’ interests. By preaching different messages to different audiences, they established different Christian beliefs, some of which survived underground despite homogenizing efforts by the Catholic Church and which, if they re-emerged, it declared heresies. One such heresy was Protestantism, with a tendency to fissiparousness built in. For allowing individual interpretation of scriptures inevitably means different opinions. To forestall theological dissension and social chaos, Protestant leaders organized local and regional churches, from then to now, splintering into smaller churches, merging into larger ones.
The second reason for Christian fissiparousness is a codified theology without a codified ethics. Establishing this ethics-free Christianity are the two early, essential creeds: the Nicene and the Apostles’. Both mention the miraculous birth and miserable death of Jesus; both ignore his life, his message, and their meaning. The Catholic Church deals with this void by claiming that faith without works is faith without effect but does not stipulate what counts as good works. Protestant churches declare that faith alone justifies and say nothing about works. Love, which can mean anything, everything, or nothing, does not specify ethical conduct. So Christians have no credal basis to argue about “culture war” issues. For example, abortion rages as an issue creating contention among Christians of many denominations. Although both sides cite Christian verses to support their positions, abortion is not mentioned in either the Old or New Testaments, not that opportunities to do so did not exist, given its occurrence. The void, which a Christian ethics sketched out in the creeds might have precluded, is filled with this and other political and social issues promoted by some Christians and protested by others.
Abortion is only one, though perhaps the most bitterly contested, political or social issue among American Christians. Jesus had no position on abortion, but he would have had a position on the acrimonious exchanges between the two contentious sides. Given their aggressive conduct, he would think that one or both could not call themselves Christian on the basis of his pacifistic inclination evident in two of his most prominent messages: turn the other cheek and resist not evil. So, in the context of our contentious times, it makes sense to ask, not what would Jesus do, but what would he say about conduct underlying claims on both sides to be Christian. The answer depends on his life and message to provide criteria defining what is Christian and what it not.
Doing so, in the simplest terms, means starting with the basic facts of Jesus’ life. He was a Jew throughout his life; he was born a Jew, circumcised as a Jew, educated as a Jew, lived and taught as a Jew, and died a Jew. With few exceptions, everything which he professed is compatible with Judaism. One exception—resist not evil conflicts with the Jewish commitment to justice—is a forgivable one under a repressive Roman occupation, for non-resistance meant survival. Yet nothing about what he professed or practiced is incompatible with the creeds and could not be included in them.
A notable fact about Jesus was his recurrent conflicts with Jewish authorities, the basis of which was the difference between observance of ritual and obligation to others. One way to visualize the difference is to consider that Jewish law has two axes. One is a vertical axis for rite, or the laws governing the relationship between God and man. The other is a horizontal axis for right, or the laws governing relationships between man and man. The Ten Commandments sort themselves on one or the other axis, the first four of rite, the last six of right. For Jesus, the priorities of his teachings were laws of conduct; as he said, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Pharisees criticized him for violating rite when he had done right.
The Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds fit the primary Christians observances, the rites of Christmas and Easter. Nothing about Jesus, his life, or his message would rule out bridging the gap between his birth and death with generalized statements sacralizing his ethics: his concern for service to others, as is clear from his Sermon on the Mount, or his concern with right, as defined by the Ten Commandments. As a devoted Jew, Jesus would understand the need to enlarge upon them or, as Jewish scholars say, put a fence around the Torah. For instance, he put a fence around the Seventh, the proscription of adultery, by proscribing lust.
Jesus’ messages are for all times and thus for our time, especially for our politics. The Sermon on the Mount can serve as a Christian rationale for social programs to help the disadvantaged, whatever their disadvantages. The Ten Commandments, with fencing extended outward to protect them in today’s world, can serve as ethical criteria for what is Christian and what is not. I offer expanded versions of four commandments as I think Jesus would have expanded them.
Fifth: Honor your father and thy mother. Jesus would extend this commandment beyond the family to society in respecting, not necessarily blindly following, tradition.
Sixth: You shall not kill. Jesus would extend this commandment to prohibit violence, including threats of violence or other acts of intimidation or harassment, against another person.
Eighth: You shall not steal. Jesus would extend this commandment to prohibit fraud, extortion, and other violations of trust in transactions involving anything of value.
Nineth: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Jesus would extend this commandment to prohibit lying about, smearing, libeling, or slandering another. He would insist on truth-telling because, as he said, the truth will set you free.
With these fences around the Ten Commandments, anyone who wants to distinguish true from false Christians can do so. For example, in today’s political environment, those who self-identify as Christians yet support Trump are fakes. Their departures from these standards in speech and conduct reveal their moral bankruptcy, as I have argued before. The same may be said of Christian nationalists as well; it is not possible to be a Christian and a nationalist. For they render unto Caesar not only what is Caesar’s, but also what is God’s. Ultimately, evangelicals, Republican politicians, and others supporting Trump are ungodly, neither Christian nor right.
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