liadanslyre

The Christian Paradox
How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong

Posted on Wednesday, July 27, 2005.
in harper's weekly
What it means to be Christian in America.
An excerpt. Originally from August 2005. By Bill McKibben.

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. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation’s educational decline, but it probably doesn’t matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. 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. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up…

* * *
Ours is among the most spiritually homogenous rich nations on earth. Depending on which poll you look at and how the question is asked, somewhere around 85 percent of us call ourselves Christian. Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish. It is true that a smaller number of Americans—about 75 percent—claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church every week. Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about American behavior is
essentially also a measure of the behavior of professed Christians. That’s what
America is: a place saturated in Christian identity. But is it Christian?

This is not a matter of angels dancing on the heads of pins. Christ was pretty
specific about what he had in mind for his followers. What if we chose some
simple criterion—say, giving aid to the poorest people—as a reasonable proxy for
Christian behavior? 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, and often by a wide margin. The point is not
just that (as everyone already knows) the American nation trails badly in all these categories; it’s that 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” hadclimbed 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. That average may be held down by
the fact that Europeans marry less frequently, and by countries, like Italy,
where divorce is difficult; still, compare our success with, say, that of the
godless Dutch, whose divorce rate is just over 37 percent. Teenage pregnancy?
We’re at the top of the charts. Personal self-discipline—like, say, keeping your
weight under control? Buying on credit? Running government deficits? Do you need
to ask?