Here are some thoughts as July 4 draws close.
Conservative Christian politicians like to praise democracy, and they treat the Constitution almost as if it were a sacred document. But why? Democracy is not in the Bible. Most of the Founding Fathers (lo, we capitalize their title) had no specific theology, so they did not bother trying to make a Biblical justification for starting the first true democracy in the world. Even the conventional Christian Founding Fathers did not attempt to do this.
Our very image of God is based on an ancient unquestioning acceptance of the kingdom system of government. Religious people claim that God is a King, not a President or Prime Minister.
In Bible days, nobody could conceive of democracy. Or so we think. Actually the first century Christians came pretty close to it. The second chapter of Acts says that they lived together in communities that resembled communes, in which they held all property in common. They were communists. (BTW, Stalin and his Soviet goons were not communists. They just used communist terminology to justify their oppression of the Russian people and plundering their wealth.) This did not last very long. By the fourth century, there was no longer a church but a Church with a hierarchy that made all the decisions and foisted them on people, a Church that the ruthless Roman Emperor Constantine used for political advantage. Christian theology was back to a God as Absolute King way of thinking.
Furthermore, it is no surprise that many conservative religious people claim that we should torture detainees to get them to confess to things they may or may not have done. Conservative religious people believe in a Hell in which God will torture, consciously and forever, anyone who does not give full assent to all details of Christian doctrine. If you believe in a God like that, it is a small matter to believe that a government dominated by your political party has the right to torture people. In doing so, you are simply reflecting the image of God.
It is time that we get rid of the image of God as King, and as Supreme Torturer. Neither do we need President God or Prime Minister God. What we need is (and this is far from an original thought) an idea of God as our fellow worker for good in the world. If we believe this, if we believe in Comrade God, then we will try to create a system of government whose purpose is to allow people to help one another, to coordinate altruism. We will have a nurturing democracy, rather than the de facto rulership of rich Republicans.
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