We do love to hate on Fox News. Fox can be an excellent foil for all that is wrong with conservative politics and culture, especially when they seek to grab the attention of their pseudo-Christian niche market of bizarre and paranoid fantasists.
THE WAR ON EASTER!!!
This is so clearly a media-manufactured crisis, and of no actual consequence to the world of either religion or politics, that it hardly warrants the effort to poke fun. However, (and this is my first "diary, so I may be doing it all wrong) it struck a chord with me. I have been in Christian ministry for 30 years and I do not recognize what Fox holds up as a defensible Christian faith. But then, I don't recognize much in the publicly presented face of Christianity in America, either from the side of the vehemently anti-religious, or from the side of fundamentalist/evangelical/conservative spokes models. Still, if the goal is advancing the separation of Church and State in America (and it should be for all our sakes) then Fox is a valuable ally.
Like the strident and opinionated Atheists they pretend to abhor, Fox helps highlight the kind of Christianity that makes Christians look bad. Surely the rest of us (Christians) are tarred with the same brush, and this has consequences for congregations all over the country, but in the long run, this is good for us, because:
It is not Christianity that Fox and Fiends is seeking to protect, it is Christendom. It is the theocratic confluence of religious conviction and political power that has dogged the Christian community since the Emperor Theodosius made it the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380. The allure of political power has always been more powerful than the call of faith, thus reducing Christianity to a tool in the toolbox of the state, a weapon to be used against those who did not share a nation's cultural perspective or political goals.
It has been cynically used to legitimate the earthly authority of monarchs, presidents, political parties, and petty despots of all kinds, but it isn't Christianity. It is a mockery of Christianity. It is a model that has regularly conflated faith and nationalism, linking them inextricably in the minds of Americans. In the run up to World War II churches of discernible German origin often felt forced to display the American flag at the altar as a test of loyalty. This was reinforced by the confidence that God had especially blessed the USA after the war concluded. In the sixties and seventies this seemingly natural enmeshment was called into question, stirring the conservative backlash that has grown uglier and more desperate as things have progressed. The Christendom world view is predicated on an incestuous Church/State relationship that imagines God to be a judgmental, militaristic, capitalist with a narrow field of cultural interest.
The form of "christianity" that has adopted politically convenient issues as their primary litmus test for faith, are expressions of a Christendom model that is entirely willing to ignore most of what Jesus taught, in favor of a form of faith that can be used to pit "believers" against non-believers. Christendom, political Christianity, is a zero sum game of faith, requiring insiders and outsiders, saved and damned, winners and losers, in the same way that Capitalism requires poverty and unemployment for its success. It is the exact style of system that Jesus critiqued, the exact style of system that crucified him.
For a while the early church was heavily marginalized, and so was able to maintain its identity as an inclusive community focused on love and mutual care, a movement that ran counter to normative political power. It was a struggle, of course, because human beings naturally love power and fear its loss, but Christian communities, where they really worked, cared for each other (and their neighbors) in some very costly ways. As with Jewish (and later, Muslim) communities, widows, orphans, and the disabled, were cared for, resources were shared, and everyone was welcome. Christians cared for plague victims, prisoners, and abandoned children, often at the cost of their own lives. They did this in large measure because they felt marginalized, because they saw themselves as living in an alternative reality to the prevailing political conditions.
The identification with political power, with nationalism, with consumer oriented religiosity, has ruined Christianity and turned it into a gathering of vicious, self-involved, judgmental, un-loving, entitled, religious dilettantes who pin their vile political opinions to a small handful of scriptures that they have lifted out of any cultural, linguistic, or historical context so they can make them mean whatever they want them to mean. It isn't Christianity, it's Christendom.
And it's dying. Year by year, generation by generation, it has lost its toe hold, lost its footing, and is being rejected and dismissed from both sides. The world is changing rapidly and people fear that, of course. They cling to anachronistic versions of faith, just as they do to outmoded political ideologies. Their fears become a troubling nuisance, and more than troubling when so many of them appear to be so wealthy and invested in a rigid and self-serving opposition to change, but their world is passing.
Real Christianity only thrived when it was able to form a counter-cultural community predicated on an egalitarian inclusion, care, and love. Before Theodosius, before Constantine, before the Church became obsessed with exercising political power, we used to want to make the world a better place. The more we are able to pry faith away from politics, the more likely we may be to recover real passion and purpose. The separation of Church and State, of faith and nationalism, of salvation and consumerism, the healthier we will all be, and Fox News is helping to bring that day about, painful as it may be, just by making us look so bad.