The Christian Paradox

by Bill McKibben

Harper’s Magazine 7-27-2005

Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels.. Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.”., which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor..

America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. .somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian..

But is it Christian? . After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they’d fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?

In 2004, as a share of our economy, we ranked second to last, after Italy, among developed countries in government foreign aid. Per capita we each provide fifteen cents a day in official development assistance to poor countries. And it’s not because we were giving to private charities for relief work instead. Such funding increases our average daily donation by just six pennies, to twenty-one cents. It’s also not because Americans were too busy taking care of their own; nearly 18 percent of American children lived in poverty (compared with, say, 8 percent in Sweden). In fact, by pretty much any measure of caring for the least among us you want to propose – childhood nutrition, infant mortality, access to preschool – we come in nearly last among the rich nations, .the overwhelmingly Christian American nation trails badly in all these categories, categories to which Jesus paid particular attention. And it’s not as if the numbers are getting better: the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported last year that the number of households that were “food insecure with hunger” had climbed more than 26 percent between 1999 and 2003.

This Christian nation also tends to make personal, as opposed to political, choices that the Bible would seem to frown upon. Despite the Sixth Commandment, we are, of course, the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate four or five times that of our European peers. We have prison populations greater by a factor of six or seven than other rich nations (which at least should give us plenty of opportunity for visiting the prisoners). Having been told to turn the other cheek, we’re the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus’ strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate – just over half – that compares poorly with the European Union’s average of about four in ten most Americans – which means most believers – have replaced the Christianity of the Bible, with its call for deep sharing and personal sacrifice, with a competing creed… this one straight from the sprawling megachurches of the new exurbs, that frightens me most. Its deviation is less obvious precisely because it looks so much like the rest of the culture. In fact, most of what gets preached in these palaces isn’t loony at all. It is disturbingly conventional. The pastors focus relentlessly on you and your individual needs. Their goal is to service consumers – not communities but individuals: “seekers” is the term of art, people who feel the need for some spirituality in their (or their children’s) lives but who aren’t tightly bound to any particular denomination or school of thought. The result is often a kind of soft-focus, comfortable, suburban faith.

Who am I to criticize someone else’s religion? .. To that I can only answer that I’m a… Christian.

Not a professional one;.. I’ve never progressed further in the church hierarchy than Sunday school teacher at my backwoods Methodist church.

American churches, by and large, have done a pretty good job of loving the neighbor in the next pew. .. But if the theology makes it harder to love the neighbor a little farther away – particularly the poor and the weak – then it’s a problem. And the dominant theologies of the moment do just that. They undercut Jesus, muffle his hard words, deaden his call, and in the end silence him. In fact, the soft-focus consumer gospel of the suburban megachurches is a perfect match for emergent conservative economic notions about personal responsibility instead of collective action. Privatize Social Security? Keep health care for people who can afford it? File those under “God helps those who help themselves.”

Take Alabama as an example. In 2002, Bob Riley was elected governor of the state, where 90 percent of residents identify themselves as Christians. Riley could safely be called a conservative – right-wing majordomo Grover Norquist gave him a Friend of the Taxpayer Award every year he was in Congress, where he’d never voted for a tax increase. But when he took over Alabama, he found himself administering a tax code that dated to 1901. The richest Alabamians paid 3 percent of their income in taxes, and the poorest paid up to 12 percent; income taxes kicked in if a family of four made $4,600 (even in Mississippi the threshold was $19,000), while out-of-state timber companies paid $1.25 an acre in property taxes. Alabama was forty-eighth in total state and local taxes, and the largest proportion of that income came from sales tax – a super-regressive tax that in some counties reached into double digits. So Riley proposed a tax h ike, partly to dig the state out of a fiscal crisis and partly to put more money into the state’s school system, routinely ranked near the worst in the nation. He argued that it was Christian duty to look after the poor more carefully.

Had the new law passed, the owner of a $250,000 home in Montgomery would have paid $1,432 in property taxes – we’re not talking Sweden here. But it didn’t pass. It was crushed by a factor of two to one. Sixty-eight percent of the state voted against it – meaning, of course, something like 68 percent of the Christians who voted. The opposition was led, in fact, not just by the state’s wealthiest interests but also by the Christian Coalition of Alabama. “You’ll find most Alabamians have got a charitable heart,” said John Giles, the group’s president. “They just don’t want it coming out of their pockets.” On its website, the group argued that taxing the rich at a higher rate than the poor “results in punishing success” and that “when an individual works for their income, that money belongs to the individual.” You might as well just cite chapter and verse from Poor Richard’s Almanack. And whatever the ideology, the results are clear. “I’m tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad,” said Governor Riley, “and last in things that are good.”

Since the days of Constantine, emperors and rich men have sought to co-opt the teachings of Jesus. As in so many areas of our increasingly market-tested lives, the co-opters – the TV men, the politicians, the Christian “interest groups” – have found a way to make each of us complicit in that travesty, too. They have invited us to subvert the church of Jesus even as we celebrate it. With their help we have made golden calves of ourselves – become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. It works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come. When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only love of self, they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back for more of the same.

Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the author of many books, including The End of Nature and Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape.