I
Would advise Christians of all variants to truly examine what it means
to be a Christian, and to combat heresies that have the potential to
do grave damage to the life and outreach of the Church.
America is imbued with the spirit of apocalyptic prophecy about how the
world will die and what role America will (or should) have in bringing
about future darkness. The wild popularity of the recent Left Behind
series demonstrates how extensive this appeal is. Of course, the increasingly
profitable enterprise of making absurd predictions is not confined to
religious bigots or mad scientists; I wouldn’t be surprised to see
some readers of The Da Vinci Code believe that the Catholic Church
is conspiring to end all our American freedoms, even though half the country
never bothers to vote in national elections. Many people have, consciously
or not, given credence to the maxim that every crackpot ideology must
be supported by an equally crackpot conspiracy theory. True, not all conspiracy
theories are equal, and there are some that contain quite a bit of truth.
After all, the CIA, for example, has certainly engaged in a fair share
of dirty business in places such as Chile and Nicaragua, not to mention
in the Middle East. But a theory that posits that most U.S. presidents
are members of a rare species of reptilian humanoid (the official scientific
name for “evil white men”) does not pass muster according
to any standard of evidence, even a standard employed in a typical L.A.
courtroom. The history of American nativism is one huge bin of recyclable
conspiracy theories: groups ranging from Jews to Jesuits have been deemed
responsible for such things as the French Revolution, Stalinism, Nazism,
and the ACLU. I don’t like any of these repressive ideologies (especially
the ACLU) but that does not mean I can go find some scapegoat that happens
to hail from outside America.
Spirituality is fine and necessary, but becomes potentially dangerous
when it combines with an unhealthy obsession with prophesies that predict
how the world will in fact end, and especially what America’s
role will be in that final scene. This danger is present in all religions,
and yes, in many political ideologies. In America, many televangelists
offer a message of salvation to those who believe in the name of Jesus,
think the Pope is the Antichrist, and wait for the Rapture to deliver
them from the global cesspool. And if the believer has any political
clout, he might end up influencing foreign policy in order to expedite
the process by which the Apocalypse will come.
Now I don’t want to fall into the same trap of concocting a conspiracy
theory simply because some people think America has a duty to force
God’s hand in world matters. But I would advise Christians of
all variants to truly examine what it means to be a Christian, and to
combat heresies that have the potential to do grave damage to the life
and outreach of the Church. The Church in America would do well to discover
a treasure-trove of intellectual and spiritual resources deposited to
us by twenty centuries of faithful Christian witness as a means of correcting
the Scriptural abuses propagated by the likes of John Hagee or Jerry
Falwell.
Christianity does not advocate that the world is inherently evil (sinful,
but not metaphysically evil) or that heaven is some ethereal place perched
atop the clouds, a destination that has no relation whatsoever
to the world we presently inhabit. Christians do not long to have their
souls liberated from the supposed filth of the world of matter (for
body is not inherently evil). The belief that the globe will roll downhill
towards Hades, and that the faithful should look beyond this decadent
world, is a belief that sustains apathy in the face of pressing world—and
ultimately human—problems: problems such as war, poverty, and
racism, among other perennial challenges.
I’m not advocating utopian paradise or a bloated nanny state:
a state-sanctioned utopia is the opposite heresy that bears its own
rotten fruit (what we affectionately call the 20th century). Nor am
I trying to link Christianity to a program of national salvation: this
is what the Christian Right attempts to do, and I am quite suspicious
of their intentions as well as their methods. I am only advocating,
for the individual believer, a return to historic Christianity, one
that is nearing its 2000th birthday. In a period when people are lulled
into the notion that globs of Botox can delay aging and death indefinitely,
in a wacky world where New Age gurus and pop psychologists promise lifelong
bliss by liberating whatever inner child was stuck in your body, in
a schizoid America that does not know whether it should be a thrifty
democracy or an extravagant empire, Christians must remain committed
to living out the Good News: the triumph of suffering love over sin
and death, a triumph exemplified on the Cross, and the restoration of
mankind to eternal life, an eternal communion with the Triune God sealed
and delivered to us by the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Long Duong ‘07 is an economics major from San Jose, CA.