Our "Christian" Responsibilities
Why should Christians be concerned and involved in what is going on in our country/our world? And, no, I'm not talking about hot button issues of abortion and gay marriages... These writings offer viewpoints, based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, that call us to be activists - involved in issues of peace and justice, and fighting for REAL moral issues, like ending poverty and working to end government corruption and corporate greed, that keep an oppressive thumb on God's children.

Please consider listening to an important speech by Barack Obama from his appearance at the Call to Renewal conference. It deals with faith and politics... An important listen for any person of faith who believes that their faith plays an important role in their public life, their voting, their government. click here to listen

On this page:
Hardliners for Jesus - Harold Meyerson
Christians looking the other way. - David Batstone
The Jesus we haven't followed. - Alvin Alexsi Currier
Christ Among the Partisans - Garry Wills
The Price of Indifference - Robert J. Guinee
In Good Faith (Barack Obama) - Amy Sullivan
More writings on our religions page.

Hard-liners for Jesus
By Harold Meyerson/Wasington Post
Wednesday, December 19, 2007

As Christians across the world prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, it's a fitting moment to contemplate the mountain of moral, and mortal, hypocrisy that is our Christianized Republican Party.

There's nothing new, of course, about the Christianization of the GOP. Seven years ago, when debating Al Gore, then-candidate George W. Bush was asked to identify his favorite philosopher and answered "Jesus." This year, however, the Christianization of the party reached new heights with Mitt Romney's declaration that he believed in Jesus as his savior, in an effort to stanch the flow of "values voters" to Mike Huckabee.

My concern isn't the rift that has opened between Republican political practice and the vision of the nation's Founders, who made very clear in the Constitution that there would be no religious test for officeholders in their enlightened new republic. Rather, it's the gap between the teachings of the Gospels and the preachings of the Gospel's Own Party that has widened past the point of absurdity, even as the ostensible Christianization of the party proceeds apace.

The policies of the president, for instance, can be defended in greater or (more frequently) lesser degree within a framework of worldly standards. But if Bush can conform his advocacy of preemptive war with Jesus's Sermon on the Mount admonition to turn the other cheek, he's a more creative theologian than we have given him credit for. Likewise his support of torture, which he highlighted again this month when he threatened to veto House-passed legislation that would explicitly ban waterboarding.

It's not just Bush whose catechism is a merry mix of torture and piety. Virtually the entire Republican House delegation opposed the ban on waterboarding. Among the Republican presidential candidates, only Huckabee and the not-very-religious John McCain have come out against torture, while only libertarian Ron Paul has questioned the doctrine of preemptive war.

But it's on their policies concerning immigrants where Republicans -- candidates and voters alike -- really run afoul of biblical writ. Not on immigration as such but on the treatment of immigrants who are already here. Consider: Christmas, after all, celebrates not just Jesus's birth but his family's flight from Herod's wrath into Egypt, a journey obviously undertaken without benefit of legal documentation. The Bible isn't big on immigrant documentation. "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him," Exodus says the Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai, "for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."

Yet the distinctive cry coming from the Republican base this year isn't simply to control the flow of immigrants across our borders but to punish the undocumented immigrants already here, children and parents alike.

So Romney attacks Huckabee for holding immigrant children blameless when their parents brought them here without papers, and Huckabee defends himself by parading the endorsement of the Minuteman Project's Jim Gilchrist, whose group harasses day laborers far from the border. The demand for a more regulated immigration policy comes from virtually all points on our political spectrum, but the push to persecute the immigrants already among us comes distinctly, though by no means entirely, from the same Republican right that protests its Christian faith at every turn.

We've seen this kind of Christianity before in America. It's more tribal than religious, and it surges at those times when our country is growing more diverse and economic opportunity is not abounding. At its height in the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was chiefly the political expression of nativist Protestants upset by the growing ranks of Catholics in their midst.

It's difficult today to imagine KKKers thinking of their mission as Christian, but millions of them did.

Today's Republican values voters don't really conflate their rage with their faith. Lou Dobbs is a purely secular figure. But nativist bigotry is strongest in the Old Time Religion precincts of the Republican Party, and woe betide the Republican candidate who doesn't embrace it, as John McCain, to his credit and his political misfortune, can attest.

The most depressing thing about the Republican presidential race is that the party's rank and file require their candidates to grow meaner with each passing week. And now, inconveniently, inconsiderately, comes Christmas, a holiday that couldn't be better calibrated to expose the Republicans' rank, fetid hypocrisy.

meyersonh@prospect.org

The Price of Indifference

What guaranteed the success of the Holocaust was the indifference of the onlookers. Today we have as many indifferent onlookers as Europe had in the 1930’s and 40’s.

We have had mass murderers doing their thing in Kosovo, mass murdering in Rwanda in which approximately 1,000,000 people were slaughtered in 100 days. That’s about 10,000 murders a day. In the Sudan today we have a situation that the U.N. has labeled genocide, but to no avail. In Rwanda, even with 10,000 people being slaughtered every day, it was not considered genocide. It was labeled “acts of genocide” but not “genocide.”

One reporter asked a State Department representative how many acts of genocide it took to become genocide. But the U.S. State Department, in an extraordinary display of doubletalk, wouldn’t say.

Martin Buber, a Jewish Rabbi, described conditions in Germany with the observation that in Nazi Germany there were five different groups:
• A very few who did not know what was going on;
• Those who knew what was going on and approved it;
• Those who knew what was going on and left because they couldn’t handle it;
• Those who knew what was going on and put themselves at risk to stop it;
• Those who weren’t quite sure what was going on and made quite sure they did not find out.

Down here in the inner-city of San Antonio we have some of the worst conditions for our children living here. They are surrounded by drug dealers, drug users, violence - especially gang violence. Single mothers, and at times single grandmothers, try to cope. The fathers are missing, which is unfortunate. But the church is also missing, which is just as unfortunate.

What is taking place is not a holocaust but a disaster supported by the indifference of the onlookers.

I once heard of an analysis by a Boston drug dealer on why the church was losing to the gangs in the inner city. Selvin Brown, the drug dealer, explained to Rev. Eugene Rivers, a Pentecostal minister, that the main difference was that he was there.

When Johnny goes to school in the morning, I’m there, you’re not.
When Johnny comes home in the afternoon, I’m there, you’re not.
And when Johnny goes out for a loaf of bread at the grocery store, I’m there, you’re not.
I win, you lose.

Robert J. Guinee is the founder and pastoral presence at Potter’s Home Ministries, 2138 S. Calaveras, in San Antonio, Texas.
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Frist, Rove, DeLay: Who's looking the other way?
by David Batstone, Sojourners

Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, the two political operatives in Congress with arguably the deepest support among Christian churches, both face serious allegations of financial trickery. Karl Rove, the Bush administration power broker who speaks almost daily with Christian leaders to coordinate political action, is under investigation for divulging classified information, then covering up his misdeed.

The details of each case can be pursued in most major media outlets. In brief, DeLay was indicted by a Texas grand jury of illegally funneling corporate campaign contributions into Texas legislative races. DeLay, who has stepped down at least temporarily from his position as majority leader of the House of Representatives, is also under federal investigation for his questionable relationship with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, on the other hand, has fallen under serious investigation by federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible insider trading (what got Martha Stewart in trouble), not to mention legislative conflict of interest.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove personally assured President Bush in the fall of 2003 that he had not disclosed to anyone in the press that Valerie Plame, the wife of an administration critic, was a covert CIA employee, according to Associated Press reports. It now appears possible Rove was the source of the leak that destroyed Plame's career and potentially put her life at risk.

I find it more than a bit disturbing that Christians who back Rove, DeLay, and Frist in their political efforts express so little concern about the possibility of corruption at the highest ranks of government. Worse still, many Christians express blind allegiance to these men. Is this what we have come to, when we sell our birthright for a pot of political porridge?

The Jerusalem Post reports DeLay appeared publicly for the first time after his indictment at a Sept. 28 event hosted by "Stand For Israel," an organization of evangelical Christians and Jews who support a Zionist future for Israel. The Post reports that DeLay received a standing ovation, saying, "It's really good to be here among so many old friends and brothers and sisters in the cause for justice and human freedom." Some participants called out, "We love you, Tom," according to the Post.

I grant that the aforementioned misdeeds are only allegations, so a measured response would be appropriate. DeLay, Frist, and Rove should receive due process. I do recall, however, that many Christian leaders and the religious media did not manifest any such restraint during the moral ineptitude of the Clinton era. At the time, we at Sojourners joined others in the religious world to express our concern - for example, goback to a piece written by Jim Wallis in 1998 titled, "Seeking Moral Consistency." At the time, Jim chided liberal religious leaders: "Why have churches and church leaders been so quiet in this crisis of morality? ...Could it be that this too falls out along political lines? Are those church leaders most sympathetic to Clinton's agenda unlikely to offer much comment on the many ethical issues involved here? Are only those opposed to the president's political agenda ready to speak challenging words to the White House? What are our primary colors?"

It would be comforting to observe that same desire for moral consistency in our body politic at the moment. To be frank, I do not expect Focus on the Family, The 700 Club, or any other influential media network of religious
conservatives to raise a red flag about political corruption in the Republican Party any time soon. The specter of political power seems too enticing, too close within reach, to be held back by traditional values such as honesty and integrity. Oh, woe to us, that we shall we gain the whole world, yet lose our own soul.
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In Good Faith
The real meaning of Barack Obama's speech on religion and politics.
By Amy Sullivan

I don't know about you, but I'm not accustomed to hearing politicians admit to making mistakes. At least not without a smoking-gun document, talkative intern, or FBI wire in the picture, and sometimes not even then. And yet that's precisely what Sen. Barack Obama did in his much-talked-about and just-as-much-misunderstood speech about religion and politics last week (you can listen to it here). Amid the uproar about whether Obama was using the occasion to scold fellow Democrats or to advance a possible 2008 candidacy, it's been overlooked that he started and ended the address with incidents he regrets from his political career.

Obama began with a story about his 2004 campaign for the Senate. In the last months of the campaign, Obama's opponent, the volatile Republican Alan Keyes, declared that "Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama." Against the counsel of his political advisors, Obama fired back. He now admits that his volley was weak. "I answered with what has come to be the typically liberal response in such debates," he told the crowd at Jim Wallis' Call to Renewal conference. "I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can't impose my own religious views on another." Obama's statement was reasonable, but he now thinks it was the wrong one. "My answer did not adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and my own beliefs," he said last week.

Thirty minutes later, Obama concluded his remarks by quoting an e-mail message he received from a pro-life voter during the campaign, a man who had expressed his disappointment that Obama called abortion opponents "right-wing ideologues" on his campaign Web site. "I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion," the e-mailer wrote, "only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words." "I felt a pang of shame," Obama acknowledged.

If it's hard to imagine a speech like this from George W. Bush, he who in a notorious 2004 press conference could not name a single mistake he'd made, that's the point. Obama used the anecdotes to set up a larger theme, about the nature of faith and doubt. And whatever else pundits and bloggers say about the speech, that may be Obama's lasting message and impact.

For the past six years, the most prominent Christian in America has been the president. His belief is not of the "God said it. I believe it. That settles it," sort that fundamentalists embrace. Rather, Bush subscribes to a syllogistic doctrine of presidential infallibility: God works through Christians; I am a Christian; I have decided to do X; therefore, X is God's will.

Bush is known to start each day reading a devotional from My Utmost for His Highest, a collection of essays by 19th-century Scottish minister Oswald Chambers. As Bob Wright explained in the New York Times a few years ago, Chambers had a very simple—some might say comforting—view of divine will. "The basic idea" Wright wrote, "is that once you surrender to God, divine guidance is palpable." The only questioning involved is whether one carries out God's will, not whether one correctly interprets it.

Those who accuse Bush of being a theocrat have made much of his reported belief that God speaks through him. That's not entirely fair, because what Bush refers to is a fairly common hope among believers that God will use each of us to be instruments of justice and mercy and grace. "May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight," from Psalm 19, is a prayer many Christians recite. It's just that most of us don't express this as a confident assertion that God does in fact speak through us. Instead, the prayer is a humble plea.

Obama chose to emphasize this sentiment when he told the story of his own faith journey. The senator was raised in a primarily secular home: His father was born a Muslim but became an atheist as an adult; his mother was "spiritual" but a skeptic of organized religion; his grandparents were nonpracticing Protestants. Obama's first prolonged exposure to the church came when he moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer. Working with African-American churches, he said, "I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world."

But—and he is firm about this—conversion wasn't for him the end point. "Faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts. You need to come to church in the first place precisely because you are first of this world, not apart from it," he said last week.

Millions and millions of faithful, including many evangelicals, have this sort of complicated relationship with their God. One of the enduring mysteries of faith is that it's not easy to determine divine will. Most of us who consider ourselves religious are engaged in a constant struggle to discern God's will for us, and we're always aware of just how far we fall short of meeting that standard. Obama received one of his loudest ovations when he admitted: "The questions I had didn't magically disappear."

This humbler version of faith has been in the shadows for the past few years, derided as moral relativism or even a lack of true belief. Obama stepped up not to defend this approach to religion, but to insist on the rightness of it. That should be comforting to anyone who has been deeply discomfited by Bush's version of Christianity. A questioning faith is a much better fit for a society like ours than one that allows for no challenge or reflection. It also acts as a check against liberals who would appropriate God for their own purposes, declaring Jesus to be the original Democrat and trotting out New Testament verses to justify their own policy programs. Liberals don't have the answer key to divining God's will any more than conservatives do.

Obama's speech, delivered to an audience of the frustrated religious left, was not a tactical plan for electoral success in November or in 2008. It wasn't a "We are too religious!" rebuttal to Republicans. It was, for the first time in modern memory, an affirmative statement from a Democrat about "how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy," as Obama put it. John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Mario Cuomo in 1984 each gave seminal speeches on faith and Democratic politics, but they were primarily concerned with defining their own faith—Catholicism—in terms of what it was not.

Obama's goal was different and larger. The speech worked partly because the senator speaks with easy-going confidence about his faith, weaving spiritual phrases into his speech without needing to announce them to his audience as so many of his colleagues do ("This debate about tax cuts reminds me of that verse from the Book of Hebrews …"). But more important, he doesn't recount the story of his conversion in order to establish his religious bona fides; he does it in the service of a broader argument. And he doesn't defend progressives' claim to religion; he asserts the responsibilities that fall to them as religious people. Americans are looking, Obama said, for a "deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country." He started that conversation. A few others are joining in. It's time for everyone else to catch up.
Amy Sullivan, a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly, is writing a book about religion and the left.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2144983/

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The Jesus We Haven't Followed
- Alvin Alexsi Currier

This article is excerpted from a sermon Alvin Alexsi Currier preached to expatriated Americans at St. Andrews Anglican Church of Lakeside, Jalisco, Mexico on August 21, 2005. He writes, "The sermon was very well received by about half of the congregation. Another third or so remained sort of neutral or didn't quite understand what was happening. And about twenty percent exploded. Actually they ended up by shooting themselves in the foot, in that they forbid that the sermon be posted on the church website or published in hardcopy. This censorship is stirring up a bit of a storm, with people seeking copies of this ‘censored sermon’ to see what it is all about."

Teachings about Jesus are alive and well in our churches. What haunts me this morning is the question of what has happened to the teachings of Jesus?

Is he not the one who warned that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it was for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God? Is he not the one who admonished Peter: “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword”? Did he not command us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves?

What has happened to these teachings? The answer to this question is disturbing, for the truth seems to be that we as Christians have preferred to focus on what Jesus did for us, rather than follow what he preached, taught, and commanded us to do in his name.

The reason for this is clear: The teachings of Jesus are radical. And because his teachings are so challenging and radical, it is much more comfortable to focus on a quiet, private, personal relationship with the Lord than it is to follow his teachings that call for a public prophetic witness.

The teachings of Jesus are radical because Jesus took the command to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and pushed the definition of who is our neighbor, out, out, and still further out, until it reached to the ends of the earth and included all of humanity—all of God’s children.

We do a fairly commendable job of loving our neighbor in the next pew or row of chairs, and we do a fairly decent job of loving each other of us who live together here in this expatriate community. And actually, we do a rather admirable job of loving and serving the Mexican world all around us. But the teachings of Jesus reach out to encircle a world much wider, broader, and deeper than these little concentric circles of our community.

The good shepherd is not content with the ninety and the nine; he goes out, out, out, until the last of the lost is found. Foxes have holes and birds of the air have their nests but the Son on Man, goes out, out, out, and has no place to lay his head.

The world is awash with the hungry, thirsty, naked, homeless, sick, and imprisoned, and Christ calls us to go out, out, out, even unto the least of these our brothers and sisters.

What is radical about the teachings of Jesus is that he took the command to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and once he had extended that command to cover the whole of the human race, he commanded us to go down, down, down to the least, last, lost, and poorest one of these our brothers and sisters.

Down, down, down to the wounded Samaritan lying unconscious beside the road. Down, down to the woman taken in adultery encircled by the mob yearning to stone her. Down to the thief hanging on the cross. Down to the starving, fear-ridden faces on the scorched earth of Darfur. Down to the destitute hopelessness of those trapped in the sprawling slums of a hundred festering cities. Down to the terrified faces of soldiers and civilians alike caught in the bloodstained carnage of war in Iraq.

Yes, the teachings of Jesus are radical. The simple truth is that the teachings of Jesus pull us inescapably toward confrontation with the explosively loaded and emotional issues of our lives, culture, nation, politics, and the world.

A Christian community that confesses Jesus Christ as its Lord and King and yet shies away from wrestling with his teachings will soon atrophy and dwindle away into irrelevance. It is a testimony to the health of this congregation that it recently faced, both courageously and boldly, the issue of homosexuality.

It is an undeniable truth that the teachings of Jesus commission us to this prophetic ministry. It is an equally undeniable truth that obedience to this prophetic ministry is one of the hardest parts of our Christian calling.

I am not a hero. I confess to wrestling constantly with potent insecurities, but as I was given this text to preach on, and as I came to struggle over the last three weeks with what it means to confess Jesus, both as the Son of the Living God, and as my Lord and King, suddenly, but very simply, it became utterly clear to me what I knew I had to do.

All of us live daily with the escalating horror of the war in Iraq. Whether we are citizens of the United States or the United Kingdom who have armed forces that are fighting over there, or whether we are from the countries such as Canada or Mexico that have refused to join in the conflict, all of us cannot escape from a daily confrontation with that scene of horror, carnage, and death.

I went to Germany as an exchange pastor some forty-six years ago. One evening while I was visiting with the young German pastor with whom I was exchanging, he told me about his experience in his home city of Karlsruhe on Kristalnacht, that infamous night in November of 1938 when Nazi thugs and mobs all over Germany smashed and burned Jewish synagogues. He said that when he arrived at his school the next morning his teacher entered the room and spoke only one sentence. Shaking with emotion he said: “What happened last night is wrong, wrong, wrong!” Then he dismissed the class.

The incident behind that story took place nearly sixty-eight years ago, but throughout my long life it has always been my own personal example of the prophetic stance and personal witness that our Lord might someday call us to.

Now my time has come.

As I wrestled with this text and this sermon over the last weeks I became convinced by both my conscience and my heart that I was called to raise with you this morning, and from this pulpit, the following question: If we confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, then must we not also follow his teachings?

And does not following his teachings mean that we must also question our support for, or our failure to condemn, the horror, carnage, and death of the war in Iraq that was initiated, and is now being prosecuted, wholly or at least partially, in our name?

And as I wrestled I also became convinced by both my conscience and my heart that I was called to bear a prophetic witness from this pulpit, this morning, to my own personal conviction that in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and following his teachings, we must now boldly cry out to the world that this war in Iraq is wrong, wrong, wrong. So help us God. Amen.

This article was obtained from bruderhof.com

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Christ Among the Partisans
By GARRY WILLS, New York Times Op-Ed Contributor

THERE is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. Jesus told Pilate: "My reign is not of this present order. If my reign were of this present order, my supporters would have fought against my being turned over to the Jews. But my reign is not here" (John 18:36). Jesus brought no political message or program.

This is a truth that needs emphasis at a time when some Democrats, fearing that the Republicans have advanced over them by the use of religion, want to respond with a claim that Jesus is really on their side. He is not. He avoided those who would trap him into taking sides for or against the Roman occupation of Judea. He paid his taxes to the occupying power but said only, "Let Caesar have what belongs to him, and God have what belongs to him" (Matthew 22:21). He was the original proponent of a separation of church and state.

Those who want the state to engage in public worship, or even to have prayer in schools, are defying his injunction: "When you pray, be not like the pretenders, who prefer to pray in the synagogues and in the public square, in the sight of others. In truth I tell you, that is all the profit they will have. But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father, and your Father who sees you in hiding will reward you" (Matthew 6:5-6). He shocked people by his repeated violation of the external holiness code of his time, emphasizing that his religion was an internal matter of the heart.

But doesn't Jesus say to care for the poor? Repeatedly and insistently, but what he says goes far beyond politics and is of a different order. He declares that only one test will determine who will come into his reign: whether one has treated the poor, the hungry, the homeless and the imprisoned as one would Jesus himself. "Whenever you did these things to the lowliest of my brothers, you were doing it to me" (Matthew 25:40). No government can propose that as its program. Theocracy itself never went so far, nor could it.

The state cannot indulge in self-sacrifice. If it is to treat the poor well, it must do so on grounds of justice, appealing to arguments that will convince people who are not followers of Jesus or of any other religion. The norms of justice will fall short of the demands of love that Jesus imposes. A Christian may adopt just political measures from his or her own motive of love, but that is not the argument that will define justice for state purposes.

To claim that the state's burden of justice, which falls short of the supreme test Jesus imposes, is actually what he wills — that would be to substitute some lesser and false religion for what Jesus brought from the Father. Of course, Christians who do not meet the lower standard of state justice to the poor will, a fortiori, fail to pass the higher test.

The Romans did not believe Jesus when he said he had no political ambitions. That is why the soldiers mocked him as a failed king, giving him a robe and scepter and bowing in fake obedience (John 19:1-3). Those who today say that they are creating or following a "Christian politics" continue the work of those soldiers, disregarding the words of Jesus that his reign is not of this order.

Some people want to display and honor the Ten Commandments as a political commitment enjoined by the religion of Jesus. That very act is a violation of the First and Second Commandments. By erecting a false religion — imposing a reign of Jesus in this order — they are worshiping a false god. They commit idolatry. They also take the Lord's name in vain.

Some may think that removing Jesus from politics would mean removing morality from politics. They think we would all be better off if we took up the slogan "What would Jesus do?"

That is not a question his disciples ask in the Gospels. They never knew what Jesus was going to do next. He could round on Peter and call him "Satan." He could refuse to receive his mother when she asked to see him. He might tell his followers that they are unworthy of him if they do not hate their mother and their father. He might kill pigs by the hundreds. He might whip people out of church precincts.

The Jesus of the Gospels is not a great ethical teacher like Socrates, our leading humanitarian. He is an apocalyptic figure who steps outside the boundaries of normal morality to signal that the Father's judgment is breaking into history. His miracles were not acts of charity but eschatological signs — accepting the unclean, promising heavenly rewards, making last things first.

He is more a higher Nietzsche, beyond good and evil, than a higher Socrates. No politician is going to tell the lustful that they must pluck out their right eye. We cannot do what Jesus would do because we are not divine.

It was blasphemous to say, as the deputy under secretary of defense, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, repeatedly did, that God made George Bush president in 2000, when a majority of Americans did not vote for him. It would not remove the blasphemy for Democrats to imply that God wants Bush not to be president. Jesus should not be recruited as a campaign aide. To trivialize the mystery of Jesus is not to serve the Gospels.

The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair. If that is all they are, then we may as well make Socrates our redeemer.

It is true that the tamed Gospels can be put to humanitarian purposes, and religious institutions have long done this, in defiance of what Jesus said in the Gospels.

Jesus was the victim of every institutional authority in his life and death. He said: "Do not be called Rabbi, since you have only one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no one on earth your father, since you have only one Father, the one in heaven. And do not be called leaders, since you have only one leader, the Messiah" (Matthew 23:8-10).

If Democrats want to fight Republicans for the support of an institutional Jesus, they will have to give up the person who said those words. They will have to turn away from what Flannery O'Connor described as "the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus" and "a wild ragged figure" who flits "from tree to tree in the back" of the mind.

He was never that thing that all politicians wish to be esteemed — respectable. At various times in the Gospels, Jesus is called a devil, the devil's agent, irreligious, unclean, a mocker of Jewish law, a drunkard, a glutton, a promoter of immorality.

The institutional Jesus of the Republicans has no similarity to the Gospel figure. Neither will any institutional Jesus of the Democrats.

Garry Wills is professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University and the author, most recently, of "What Jesus Meant." This article was orginally printed in The New York Times OpEd page.

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