So many fine memories and testimonials to the spirit of former President Jimmy Carter this past week. The entire nearly three-hour service and many individual clips can be viewed on You Tube from a number of sources. For my money, a touching eulogy from his good friend and foe, former President Gerald Ford, whom Carter vanquished in the 1976 election, may have topped the list.
Ford, of course, is now dead 19 years, but in a pact made between him and Carter long before, they agreed to write eulogies for each other’s funerals, with the survivor delivering the other man’s himself, and the first-deceased arranging for a family member (in this case, Ford’s son Steve) to do the honors of reading it into the record when the survivor finally met his end.
Two archrivals in a hard-fought contest for the most powerful position in the world, out of which came a mutually respectful, lifelong friendship, tinged with playfulness. Just imagine…
There’s no democracy in heaven, which if it isn’t a maxim, should be, to describe this version of modern, radical Christianity’s aims.
Former Georgia congressman, Atlanta mayor and Carter’s U.N. ambassador, the Rev. Andrew Young, now 92, opened his eulogy with a biblical passage emphasizing kindness, compassion and forgiveness.
All those were hallmarks of Carter’s character, recognized and respected even by his antagonists. Young went back decades with Carter, to the heat of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s-70s, Carter notable among white Southern politicians for his overt embrace of the cause.
“The fight for justice requires a tough mind and a tender heart,” Young intoned, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. “That was Jimmy Carter.”
Young shared an anecdote about a particularly nasty Southern sheriff in Carter’s home Sumpter County who had been neither kind, compassionate nor forgiving to Young and his black brethren. At one point, Young brought up the sheriff’s name in conversation and Carter replied, “Oh, he’s a good friend of mine.” (See the references to kindness, compassion and forgiveness above…)
Carter’s Christian faith percolated through his entire being. It was not something he left outside any door, including the White House, where it is always inviting to don the cloak of cynicism and power to vanquish perceived enemies. His was a humble Christianity, wholly in the spirit of his faith’s central figure, a poor barefoot carpenter whose core message was love of one’s neighbor as the surest expression of the holy, in a “neighborhood” inclusive of the entire world.
Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser Stuart Eisenstat is an observant Jew who eulogized Carter as the first president to light a Hanukkah menorah in the White House, and as the prime mover in creation of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Eisenstat also fondly recalled hosting Carter at his home for a Passover Seder just weeks after Carter’s tireless and skillful negotiation of the treaty between Israel and Egypt that won him the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Much of his agenda passed with bi-partisan support, a quaint notion in today’s hyper-polarized politics,” Eisenstat noted.
All of which begets a question: Will Carter’s brand of inclusive, liberal Christianity and its respect for the traditions and mores of one’s neighbors survive what seems to be only intensifying into a “hyper-polarized” religious landscape of fanatic “believers” hell-bent on roping the entire world into the confines of their own aggressively propagated dogmas?
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In the February issue of “The Atlantic” magazine, Stephanie McCrummen takes a deep, participatory dive into the “New Apostolic Reformation” (NAR), a self-described “new dominionism” wing of evangelical Christianity that claims the fidelity, according to a recent Denison University survey, of about 40 percent of American Christians.
Among many of its targets, its adherents look askance at religious tolerance, humility and even secular government.
They instead embrace a muscular faith that sees itself as the last, best protector and enforcer of God’s kingdom on earth. Their mission is to root out every person and institution that stands in the way of their winning “the battle between the forces of God and Satan.”
In that world view, God nods approvingly at their (and only their) version of religion and hears their prayers to “destroy the secular state with equal rights for all, and replace it with a system in which Christianity is supreme.”
That requires the movement to bring to heel what it calls the “7 Mountains of Society”—government, business, education, family, arts, media, and religion itself—in service of its vision, and in preparation for Christ’s return to earth in the final dispensation.
In other words, no more tender-hearted nice guy in the spirit of Jimmy Carter.
Which perhaps goes a long way to explain the movement’s near-idolatrous embrace of Donald Trump’s previous presidency and its ecstatic response to his re-election. This despite the yawning disconnect between Trump’s decidedly opposite behavioral profile to the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount and the tradition’s emphasis on “walking humbly with the Lord.”
Attending an NAR event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin before the election, McCrummen writes:
“It looked like an old-fashioned tent revival, except that it was also an aggressive pro-Trump mobilization effort. Wallnau dabbed frankincense oil onto foreheads, anointing voters into God’s army. Another speaker said that Kamala Harris would be a ‘devil in the White House.’ Others cast Democrats as agents of Lucifer, and human history as a struggle between the godless forces of secular humanism and God’s will for humankind.”
Then the day after the election, this:
“I went to Life Center, the NAR church where Elon Musk had spoken a couple of weeks earlier. The mood was jubilant. A pastor spoke of ‘years of oppression’ and said that ‘we are at a time on the other side of a victory for our nation that God alone—that God alone—orchestrated for us.’”
If these sentiments were the product of groups that have always populated the hysteric fringes of virtually every religious tradition, they could be dismissed as an unfortunate casualty of delusional thinking. But when their adherents are seen roaring their approval and securing unprecedented influence with the president of the United States, claiming a mandate to enforce their views on all of society, it is a very different matter.
Here’s McCrummen again:
“By last year, 42 percent of American Christians agreed with the statement ‘God wants Christians to stand atop the ‘7 Mountains of Society,’ according to Paul Djupe, a Denison University political scientist who has been developing new surveys to capture what he and others describe as a ‘fundamental shift’ in American Christianity. Roughly 61 percent agreed with the statement that ‘there are modern-day apostles and prophets.’ Roughly half agreed that ‘there are demonic ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ who control physical territory,’ and that the Church should ‘organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer to displace high-level demons.’”
What are Christians in the mold of Jimmy Carter and the secular humanists with whom he made common cause to do in the face of this radical, no-longer-fringe element of the faith that regards them as agents of Satan—and aims to treat them accordingly?
Offer rational arguments, pointing to countless scriptural references as well as the U.S. Constitution that would challenge their world view and warn against its overreach?
As the contemporary maxim goes, “Good luck with that…”
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Here’s the conundrum: If you’re at odds with someone on a political or cultural issue that will affect both of you on a policy level, you try to find some common ground, some give-a-little-get-a-little negotiation that can keep the peace and help you live in necessarily pluralist harmony. But if your interlocutor suddenly inserts the deity into his or her side of the argument, clearly implying if not outright claiming that any other view reflects the forces of Satan, the negotiation is effectively over.
How can the push-and-pull of democracy possibly cope with one side claiming divine sanction to do everything possible to destroy its opponents? The answer is that it can’t, and even more troublingly, NAR’s radicalized Christians don’t have a problem with that.
Theirs is a triumphant, maximalist vision that takes no prisoners in what they regard as the ultimate battle, Armageddon-style, between the forces of good and evil. There’s no democracy in heaven, which if it isn’t a maxim, should be, to describe this version of modern, radical Christianity’s aims.
Remember, this rise of a heavily politicized evangelical Christianity is occurring at the same time that mainstream American religions in the Jimmy Carter mold continue in their long-running slide toward irrelevance, their pews sparsely filled, their churches consolidating, the leftovers turning into museums or town halls.
Today, 28% of Americans describe themselves as “atheists, agnostics” or “nothing in particular,” when asked about their religion by the Pew Research Center. A Gallup poll had that figure at 2% in 1948. Does this cohort, along with what remains of liberal Christianity, know what they’re facing from the “Army of God?”
McCrummen and the multiple religious scholars she consulted for her article don’t think so, one telling her:
“Certain segments of society have not been willing to understand where these people are coming from. For me, it’s part of the story of our times. It’s a movement that has continued to rise, gathered political strength, attracted money, built institutions. And the broad center-left doesn’t understand what’s happening.”
And if that “broad center-left” and others who find no appeal in Christian hegemony were to come fully awake, what might be their answer to the overt threats they now face? In a democracy, the ultimate answer always lies at the ballot box, but if a plurality of voters embrace the very religious authoritarianism that NAR and its allies espouse as their God-sanctioned right, then what?
The answer to that may indeed be the “story of our times,” one unfolding in slightly different forms here and in many other countries around the world.
Changing hearts and minds to counter that trend looks to be a monumental task, but it’s not as if there’s a surfeit of choices on how to go about it.
Taming the worst instincts of any religion’s claims to be the all-embracing truth for all humanity will necessarily be a long game, occurring one voter, one article, one conversation, one well-educated child and well-reasoned argument at a time, stirring deep in every person’s consciousness, where the forces of reason, emotion, self-interest and selfless love conduct their eternal, roiling battle for control of “a tough mind and a tender heart.”
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Predictably, the performance of this song in a Christian cathedral set off something of a social media firestorm, various critics lambasting its universalist, no-religion message at a service heavily emphasizing the deceased’s Christian faith. While I understand the seeming disconnect, it should be noted that President Carter made it known it was his favorite song, and he loved Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, who also sang the piece at Rosalynn Carter’s memorial, and who long worked with Carter to advance the cause of Habitat for Humanity, which was so dear to his heart.
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Last week, in heaven, one humble carpenter apprentice was warmly greeted by the master carpenter whose wisdom guided this kind mortal on a truly good path through a world beset by evil-mindedness. Then, beyond this gate, he saw his beloved wife and ran to her like a child coming downstairs on Christmas morning. On earth, he never lifted his hammer in anger; he only swung it tenderly. He used tolerant nails to hold his life’s work together. He brushed a thick coat of paint over the fire-and-brimstone graffiti left by the usurpers of his faith. He did his level best to treat everyone as he wished to be treated. His saw cut through hypocrisy as cleanly as any instrument can. He drilled his points home with unfettered sincerity, purity of spirit and deep faith in humanity. He was simply a man for all seasons.
Will this new dominionism be able to silence forever the moral teachings put forth in His Sermon on the Mount? Will this new dominionism raze the 7 Mountains of Society and in its place mold a brave new world where a radicalized, political Christian theocracy reigns? I have my doubts for Rome had seven hills, and its empire collapsed.