Without Precedent

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Leonard Pitts Jr. is a national treasure. So many of his Op-Eds make such unwavering good sense that it is difficult to believe he’s not a household name. His recent piece in the Miami Herald concerning Jimmy Carter’s announcement that he has cancer is a case in point. Many reporters would be quick to point to the tragedy since, although the Carter administration is generally undervalued, nobody would ever say that Carter is less than a true gentleman. Pitts, however, takes us deeper. He looks at this understated announcement in terms of faith. Faith, as he points out, in a world where it has taken on an unsavory, if not downright evil, flavor. We do indeed hear about faith that moves mountains, but it is with the power of fully fueled passenger jets. We hear about the faith that builds mega-churches while the homeless and hungry sleep in the city streets. Pitts is quite right, our faith requires a shot in the arm.

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I sometimes wonder how we have come so far down what seems to be obviously the wrong road. Our religion has become a charade and it is used for people to get what they really want rather than to make the world a better place. I always thought true religion was putting others before yourself. Nothing like working in Manhattan to show you how totally off-base such sentiments might be. Jesus can sell books, but his teaching is definitely passé. Yesterday. Old-school (but not in the good way). We have faith in money because immortality, or at least the antidote for mortality, is readily for sale. There’s one born every second. This, we are told, is what gives life meaning.

Of the presidents who’ve retired, we generally hear very little. They sequester themselves and write their memoirs to gain even more money for themselves. Carter has been known to be out there building houses for the poor, living what presidents all say they believe when they ask us to cast our votes in their direction. I’ve always been proud that the first president I ever voted for was Carter. Of course, it was in the beginning of those recent Dark Ages known as the Reagan Administration, and I had voted for the underdog. My faith in the political system has been severely challenged since then. I have seen stolen elections treated as legitimate by those who can’t possibly do too much for themselves. And I remembered my first lowly vote given for a man who, perhaps more than any other, showed Americans their misplaced faith after he had been denied a second term in office. Although Pitts doesn’t say it, I can see it in his pen: the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

Biblically Married

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The Bible says—. Fill in the blank. Go ahead, someone will believe you. The problem with biblical literalism is that it is often held by people who don’t read the Bible. Well, it is a gosh-darn big book—well over a thousand pages—do you know how much quality television watching time that represents? So many fundamentalists are surprised to find out how little the Bible has to say about marriage. In fact, it says almost nothing. There are no marriage rites given, and marriages are mentioned but not described in detail. So when modern-day readers want to find guidance about political policy they have to—to be frank—make a lot of stuff up.

Take North Carolina, for example. Next week they are scheduled to vote on an issue of defining marriage. The intent, apparently, is to bring the state in line with the Good Book. In comes Matthew Vines, an evangelical Christian who’s also gay. Being a Harvard student, he has immediately impressive credentials. He has an on-line biblical exegetical exploration of what the Bible says, and more importantly, doesn’t say, about homosexuality. The other solution, to actually read the Bible, is a little too much to ask. Another part of the problem is that the Bible was written in a very different context, and to understand the Bible’s view on anything, you need to fit it into its context. All this Bible reading—and context too? Better leave it to someone on the television to explain it all.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist that I’ve come to trust. His good sense comes through in all his work. In Wednesday’s column, he highlights Matthew Vines’ hour-long talk as an example of what happens when common sense meets the Bible. For those who bother to read it, it will become clear that the Bible nowhere defines marriage. It says nothing about sexual orientation. The few passages on homosexual acts have a narrow context (that word!) that must be considered. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament is marriage considered a religious matter. It’s simply what people do. So as North Carolina heads to the polls, Bibles clutched in hands, but not in their heads, it might do to watch Matthew Vines as homework. I haven’t seen the video myself. An hour is just too long to take from my busy television-watching schedule.

Evolving in America

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Columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. is one of the most sensible men in America right now. Witty, humble, and bright, he sees clearly and shoots straight. In an allegory entitled “A tale of a giant grown stupid” he illustrates the frustration many intelligent people feel in a country where thinking is viewed askance, and accepting empirical data is rife with suspicion. He begins his article by citing a statistic in Science that indicates some 60 percent of high school biology teachers in the United States inform their students that they don’t have to believe in evolution, they just have to know enough to get through the test. And evolution is not alone in the field of falsified information. Americans are regularly fed a high-fat, low-fiber diet of poor quality religion and told it is the only correct one.

While the remainder of the developed world has moved on to more important issues, we in America are still stuck in Fundamentalist kindergarten. The constant barrage of insipid theology from self-proclaimed doyens of the Scriptures assures the masses that the price of heaven is a healthy dose of creationism. Making matters worse, most biblical scholars choose not to engage these misguided spokespersons, choosing instead to believe they’ll eventually just go away. But why go away when you’re winning the fight?

Evolution is such an odd issue over which to argue. Neither serious biologists nor serious biblical scholars have any problem with it. Only a society increasingly under the power of a jacked-up, over-eager, offensive Christianity buys the feeble creationist rhetoric. And buys it in bulk. That is the American way. For many, society’s ills may be blamed on too much thinking. The Bible requires no thought, just the ability to see in black and white. And the Bible has proven a more powerful weapon than an H-bomb in the educational curriculum of our bright young minds. America itself is evolving. Unfortunately it is evolving into a nation satisfied with simplistic solutions to complex problems. And Bible scholars do nothing and wonder why everyone ignores them. Once upon a time there was a giant. Only it was not sleeping, it was already dead.