Watch Brave New Films coverage of SC Primaries — with me January 26, 2008
Posted by Zack in South Carolina | write a commentMy friends at Brave New Films are interviewing various nefarious characters from the political world (including me) about the South Carolina primary. Check it out — and watch Brave New Film’s commentary on the primary lasting all night.
Evangelical, and for Obama September 21, 2007
Posted by Zack in South Carolina | write a comment[Cross posted from The Huffington Post.]
Speculation that disgust with the GOP could cause many evangelical Christians to stay home in 2008 has raised the possibility of Democrats “hunting for evangelical votes.” Unfortunately, the discussion about this potential in the media and especially the progressive blogosphere has pigeon-holed evangelicals as people who only care about two things: banning abortion and opposing civil rights for gays. Many candidates are following suit by attempting to pander on those issues, although at least a few candidates show some awareness that a deeper connection could be forged with evangelicals by promising action on domestic and global poverty, health care, compassion for immigrants and other justice issues.
A couple weeks ago, when I was filing my last Obama story from a coffee shop, I noticed a college-aged, clean-cut man reading Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope. A little later, I looked up saw him and a friend with their heads down and hands joined in prayer. When I later broke in to their conversation to find out more about them, I learned they they had been praying to kick off a planning session for an anti-poverty program for their church.
I asked about the Obama book, and both said they supported Obama more than any other candidate and had been looking for ways to get involved in the race. One of them agreed to an audio interview and has eventually agreed that I post it, but only anonymously, explaining that he doesn’t want to get involved publicly in politics (I’ll call him Matthew). You can listen to selections from the interview here:
For a while now, I’ve been trying to convince many of my progressive friends that there’s a huge and vibrant social justice movement rising now among evangelical Christians–but it’s just too far outside of their picture of evangelicals for them to believe. Therefore, I got out my recorder to collect some hard evidence.
Before I began recording, Matthew and his friend explained that they were ardently anti-abortion but they both believed that criminalizing abortion would likely only lead to more abortions and more dangerous ones. They agreed with each other that education was one of the best ways to prevent abortion and that it seemed to them that Republicans were against that. Matthew’s friend also asked, rhetorically, “Have the Republicans done anything at all that’s actually prevented abortions?”
This “progressive evangelical” movement is based, above all, in the Bible. Millions of evangelicals are either recent converts to Christianity or grew up the children of recent converts. One consequence of that is they’re reading the Bible with fresh eyes. Matthew said he’s been a Christian only for a few years. That means that over these past few years he’s almost certainly spent countless hours in Bible study groups, reading what Jesus actually said, not what Christian right leaders say he said.
He’s closely aware of the debates that Jesus had with the religious right of his own day — “The hypocrites,” the Pharisees (the Rabbis who represented the religious establishment in Jesus’ day) “who prayed out in public on the streets so that people could see them” — and he’s not afraid to apply that Biblical awareness to the politics of our own time. He says that candidates who pander in this day and age will gain nothing with him, but rather that, if they’re Christians, they should just “hold true to being a Christ follower.” According to Matthew’s reading of the Bible that’s about, “love…loving God and loving other people…loving yourself and loving your neighbor.”
Among the current all-Christian slate of candidates, only a few are genuinely attempting to connect with Matthew’s definition of Christ follower as someone who “loves the poor and the people who don’t have a voice.” Just going by his rhetoric, Mike Huckabee may be doing the best job of it. But neither Matthew nor his friend knew anything about him. Obama has said enough to convince them that he believes in the same Jesus they do. Hillary Clinton has also invoked Jesus as the God of the poor and the oppressed in the immigration debate as well as joining Matthew in equating today’s religious right with the self-righteous Pharisees of Jesus’ day.
However, while the votes of millions of these “progressive” evangelicals are theoretically up for grabs, there will almost certainly not be any organized effort to channel their votes as a block, the way there was among evangelicals in general in 2000 and 2004.
The above piece was produced through OffTheBus, a citizen journalism project hosted at the Huffington Post and launched in partnership with NewAssignment.Net. For more information, read Arianna Huffington’s project introduction. If you’d like to join the Off the Bus blogging team, sign up here. If you’re interested in other opportunities, you can see the list here.
Welcome to Jesusland September 8, 2007
Posted by Zack in South Carolina | write a commentA couple weeks ago, Elizabeth and I threw all of our stuff into storage and began a cross-country writing project about local leaders who are fixing America’s biggest problems. We’re writing about those leaders at HeartlandInnovators.org.
Right away, as we began meeting with local leaders in North and South Carolina, we realized that there was another story to tell out here: the story of a mass movement among American Christians to redeem their communities. They’re setting insanely big goals—goals like “eliminate homelessness in our city” and “raise everyone above the poverty line in our county.” And they’re working toward them with reckless, innocent abandon. They’re coming out of churches that are poor and wealthy; black, white and Latino; rural, urban and suburban. They are sometimes pastors or other leaders inside their churches, and sometimes ordinary congregants who are dragging their churches, often kicking and screaming, outside of the safety of the “four walls.”
Therefore, we decided to start up this additional blog, “Revolution in Jesusland,” where you’ll be able to read all of the stories of leaders that we’re gathering for HeartlandInnovators.org—PLUS, absolutely free:
- A running chronicle and analysis of the radical—dare we say, revolutionary—spirit that is right now taking American Christians by storm; and also,
- Our amusing and insightful stories from the road.
I have spent my whole life in left-wing, progressive circles. Elizabeth has spent her life in Republican, conservative circles. I left college to become a union organizer and was first mentored by communists. She left college to become a missionary. My posts on here will mostly take the form of letters back to the left, the “progressive movement,” usually going something like this: “Holy misunderestimation! Look at what the American people are up to out here! You guys have got to see this…” (I think Elizabeth will probably be coming from a different angle, but she’ll explain that herself.)
Right after the 2004 elections, a cynical map made the rounds of lefty inboxes everywhere that separated “Jesusland” from the “United States of Canada” (in later versions, “The United States of Liberty and Education” and other self-righteous riffs). Part of the reason we started this project to gather counterstereotypical stories of leaders in the “Heartland” was to help undo that cynicism toward the American people not only among progressives, but also the whole political-media elite, both left and right. Nowhere is that needed more than when it comes to perceptions of Christians, who just happen to make up something like 90% of the population.
Here on Revolution in Jesusland, we’ll step back and try to flesh out the larger context of this movement that is producing so many exceptional leaders, and do it in terms that any outsider can understand—by simply asking the Christian revolutionaries that we meet to explain themselves to those outside their culture.
Revolutionary Christians comprise the fastest growing and most surprising of American social movements right now. From mega churches to tiny country churches, evangelical Christians (as opposed to mainline or liberal Chrsitians) are rediscovering the “gospel of the God of the oppressed.” In the millions, white suburban evangelicals are stepping outside of their comfort zones to get “into relationship” with the poor, the oppressed, the homeless, prisoners — the people whom Jesus said,
Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me….Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. —Matthew 25
They build houses for and teach job skills to homeless people, they create tutoring programs for kids in failing schools, they pay health care bills and rent for people living on poverty wages—and there’s even a movement afoot among these people to move their young families out of wealthy suburbs and into forsaken inner city neighborhoods, putting the kids into broken and violent public school and the whole nine yards.
I realize that it seems almost impossible to believe that “fundamentalist Christians”—–i.e. people who believe that Jesus actually walked on water, is coming back to Earth and so on—could be doing all this. I grew up with the same stereotypes as you did about these folks. And so on this blog we’re going to be going out of my way to explain the inner logic of this culture’s narratives, theologies and passions.
So—welcome to Jesusland. We hope you enjoy the tour.
