ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 2, 1996 TAG: 9601020152
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GLEN MARTIN
IN THIS past Christmas season, we heard much about keeping Christ and Christian spirituality in Christmas. The commercialism and glitter of the season must not make us forget, we were told, the transforming hope and joyous news of redemption that entered the world with the birth of the infant Jesus.
I wish to suggest that such a focus is not the same as sentimentalizing Christmas. It is not the same as evoking vague, pious emotions as country-and-Western stars sing "Joy to the World" on our television screens. Nor is Christian spirituality the same as accepting, uncritically, with a vague patriotism mixed with religious emotions, the brutal and un-Christian institutions that dominate our country.
In my own upbringing in a Christian home, I was taught that if one is established in faith in God's redeeming love, then one will try to follow Christ's command to love all other human beings with the nondiscriminating love that, "like the sun and the rain," falls equally upon us all. I was also taught that the words meant something when we prayed: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth, as it is in heaven", and that Jesus' central message was the establishment of God's kingdom upon the Earth.
Imagine my shock as I went to college and graduate school, and began a lifetime in search of truth, to discover over and over the ugly and brutal world we humans have created for ourselves.
In our "democracy," I had been taught, the people rule, and our dominant institutions care for justice, human rights and dignity. But I have found that the more the truth is pursued independently of popular opinions, the less just and decent our society looks.
Do the dominant institutions and government of our society reflect the majority of its citizens? Our economic institutions are based on the motivations of greed and competition, and their goal is the private accumulation of wealth. Our government serves these institutions and the private wealth that rules in this country.
Where is God's kingdom of love, justice and peace in all this? This is not God's command to love our neighbor and to create a world of justice and peace, but rather the twisted logic of an economic system that creates vast poverty and misery at home and abroad, with incredible riches for the few.
Thirty million Americans live at or below the poverty line, and several million of these wander the streets, homeless. Is this the logic of Christ, which says that in the kingdom of God the poor shall be first and the rich shall be last? One Christian theologian calls our system "institutionalized sin," since it is based on the opposite of how Jesus teaches us to live in the Gospels.
But please don't believe me. Find out for yourselves, think for yourselves. If God is real, then the truth can only be on the side of God, and we should not be afraid to question popular ideologies.
Study, for example, the top-secret documents of our government leaders as these become declassified. One example (of many) is "Policy Planning Study 23," written by George Kennan, who headed the State Department planning staff until 1950. Kennan writes, "We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population. ... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. ... We should cease to talk about the vague, and ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."
Many of those who are well-off in this country are so not only because of their own hard work, but because they are beneficiaries of our global capitalist exploitation of other peoples, promoted here by Kennan as State Department policy.
In the Bible, God consistently takes the side of the poor and the oppressed. For example, "You multiply your prayers, I shall not listen. Your hands are covered with blood. ... Cease to do evil, learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed; do justice to the orphan, plead for the widow." (Isaiah 1:15 and 17). : Luke 10:29-37.
All the people of the world are God's children equally, and the starving masses in the Third World kept in check by brutal U.S.-supported dictatorships are just as precious to God as you and I.
Jesus died the horrible, ignominious death on the cross in part as a political criminal for struggling nonviolently against the vast oppression of the Roman Empire and against the hypocritical "leaders of society" who supported the injustice of this system within their own country while they defended the international status quo.
Today, the American economic empire stretches across the world. We live not in Jerusalem, but in Rome (where St. Peter was crucified). People are being tortured and murdered, and many children starve to death daily, to keep that empire in place. To keep Christ in Christmas is, in part, to ask forgiveness for our own complicity in this murderous system, while prayerfully asking for guidance in the struggle to realize God's kingdom in opposition to this system.
If God is Truth, then education and research into the facts cannot be alien to us. We have been victims in this country of a vast ideological deception. There are volumes of concrete evidence demonstrating U.S. support for brutal dictatorships, the actual destruction of other democracies by the CIA, and our repeated bombings, invasions and attacks on other countries.
These facts are available to anyone who wishes to make the effort to find out the truth. Without informed, thoughtful and active citizens, democracy cannot function. Neither can God's kingdom even begin to be realized.
In this country, we citizens are throwing away our democracy, as well as our spirituality, through lazy acceptance of a false view of the world promoted by our government and our dominant economic institutions.
Jesus struggled with the hypocritical Pharisees who supported the government and dominant institutions of his own day. And he gave us a description of God's judgment on us, which sums up much of his teaching. He says that the "Son of man" will gather "the nations" (not persons) for judgment. He makes very clear that it is the hungry, the poor, the naked, the sick and the prisoners for whom he is concerned. What have the nations done for these whom the rich and powerful ignore?
Why should we be concerned with the oppressed peoples of the Earth (or of our own society)? He answers: "When you have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, you have done it unto me." We continue to do it unto him: His face appears to us today in the face of the poor, the homeless, the oppressed and the starving peoples of the Earth. With each new day, we crucify Christ yet again.
Glen Martin is an associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at Radford University.
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