slacktivist

L.B.: A Thief in the Night

Jimmy Breslin, God bless him, isn't just a great newspaperman, he's a pretty good theologian too.

Breslin writes of a tragedy -- an infant strangled in the night in a fall from a bunk bed. Part of the reason that Breslin has been so good for so long is that he writes with an expansive compassion -- a love for New York and all the people who live there. He provides a moving portrait of a struggling family barely coping with work, death, violence and the American Dream ("The clothes is what costs ... we need the best for the children"). While capturing the particulars of this family and this neighborhood, he finds something universal in the sad, cruel mystery of this "death in a poor neighborhood for which police were unneeded."

It was the kind of accident that has people everywhere up and looking at sleeping children through all the hours of all the nights. While knowing all the time that the checking still leaves all vulnerable to the mysteries that kill at night.

Breslin's piece is titled "Death a Thief in the Night." The allusion there is to Jesus' apocalyptic discourse in Matthew 24, in which Christ compares the coming of "the end" to, among other things, a thief in the night:

No one knows about that day or hour ... Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left. ...

Whether Breslin himself or some Newsday copy editor wrote that headline, the allusion is apt. The end is sudden, mysterious, imminent and inevitable, yet always a surprise. Suddenly, we are out of time.

More than anything else, this is what pisses me off about the shallow, death-denying, false hope of the false gospel preached by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in their Left Behind series. They would pervert every piece of biblical wisdom about our mortality into a fairy tale of "Jesus coming back to get us before we die." This weird and desperate mythology denies L&J's followers of the comfort, hope, wisdom and solace needed in the face of the death of Daivon Nicolas Richardson, 18 months, or of anyone and everyone else.

A theology that denies the reality, mystery and meaning of death is ultimately irrelevant for us mere mortals.

That's why Jimmy Breslin is not only a better theologian than LaHaye and Jenkins, he's also a better pastor.

L.B.: Weird Science

Left Behind, pp. 6-8

Buck Williams is, as mentioned, the Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time:

At thirty, Cameron Williams was the youngest ever senior writer for the prestigious Global Weekly. The envy of the rest of the veteran staff, he either scooped them on or was assigned to the best stories in the world.

"Global Weekly" is, apparently, like TIME or Newsweek -- except with a reputation for top-notch journalism. As the GIRAT, Williams is assigned to write GW's story on the "Newsmaker of the Year," an Israeli botanist and chemical engineer named Chaim Rosenzweig. (Oddly, he's played in the movie by Colin Fox. Reading the book, I always picture Fyvush Finkel.)

Rosenzweig has already been honored with the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and as TIME's "Man of the Year" for discovering/inventing:

... a synthetic fertilizer that caused the desert sands of Israel to bloom like a greenhouse. ...

Rosenzweig's formula was fast making Israel the richest nation on earth, far more profitable than its oil-laden neighbors. Every inch of ground blossomed with flowers and grains, including produce never before conceivable in Israel. The Holy Land became an export capital, the envy of the world, with virtually zero unemployment.

Yes, prosperity and full employment through agriculture. Thus fulfilling the biblical prophecy "Yea, and in that day I the Lord shall make the land like unto Iowa, and the heathen shall tremble."

Israel is about the size of New Jersey -- you know, the Garden State -- so let's just consider this in terms of acreage.

Right now, only about 17 percent of Israel is arable land -- about 854,000 acres. But, with Rosenzweig's miracle formula, it all becomes arable. So make that 5,024,000 acres. Plus, in the world of Left Behind, the occupied West Bank has been absorbed into L&J's Greater Israel (don't ask how -- they don't really explain this). That adds another, roughly, 1,500,000 acres. (Only a negligible amount of which was arable before Rosenzweig.)

So, okay, we're looking at 6,524,000 acres of fertile farmland. Not just fertile, mind you, but super-duper fertile. Let's guess (L&J don't say) that it's sooo very fertile that the industrious Israeli farmers (can you call farmers "industrious?") are able to plant 4 crops a year on every acre of this land -- a miraculous harvest every season. That would further leverage Israel's agricultural might to the equivalent of 26,096,000 acres!

Or, to put it another way, their agricultural output would be slightly less than the current output of China's peasant farmers. (Source for all the above is the invaluable CIA World Factbook.)

And, anyway, this idea that exotic new produce is the path to economic development -- wasn't that part of the Dukakis campaign? Something about Belgian endive?

A more convincing plot development would have had Israel finding envy-of-the-world prosperity through, say, cold fusion in a jar, or through some miracle mineral discovered in the poisonous depths of the Dead Sea. But L&J were constrained to have the miracle be agricultural prosperity because they see this as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. (It's hard to say which prophecy, specifically -- the whole desert-blooming, flowing with milk and honey motif is really a pretty boilerplate blessing throughout scripture.)

What's really interesting here, though, is the science. There isn't any. The writers of Star Trek recognize that a sci-fi explanation doesn't necessarily have to be detailed and highly plausible, but you've got to give us something. Let Geordi LaForge mumble some gobbledygook about "tachyon pulses" and I'm in -- disbelief willingly, happily suspended. But L&J feel no compunction to provide even the slightest scientific pretense.

It's hard to tell from their description whether Rosenzweig's potion works by science, or by magic. It sounds like magic. They are, after all, growing crops not from soil, but from sand -- producing organic material out of inorganic rock. (What's next? Fishing in the Dead Sea?)

But what's telling is that LaHaye and Jenkins can't seem to make a distinction between science and magic. When you're afraid to engage anything that might challenge your belief that the earth is only 10,000 years old, you don't end up reading a lot of science. This keeps you clueless enough about biology to think it's perfectly plausible that a few drops of Dr. Rosenzweig's Miracle Gro can turn sand into soil. And clueless enough about economics to think that agriculture would be more lucrative than Israel's existing high-tech industrial economy.

L.B.: Meet the GIRAT

Left Behind, pp. 6&7

It's a dangerous thing for a writer to introduce a fictional character who is, the reader is told, the Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time. The pitfall here is the same as if you introduce a character by telling readers he is "the absolute funniest person who ever lived."

You can get away with this, somewhat, if you're writing about a great painter or musician. There you can get away with simply piling on the superlatives, perhaps describing the reaction of others to the artist's work. Readers do not expect you to actually show them a painting or play for them a symphony.

But if you introduce a character, as L&J do with Buck Williams, as a great writer and reporter, the reader has a right to expect that you will provide more than overheated adjectives. Readers want to read what the GIRAT has written.

L&J provide only the briefest snippets of their master journalist's handiwork, and these fall far short of the buildup that Buck is the greatest writer in the world, or even a good or competent journalist.

This is particularly glaring since Buck has been an eyewitness to some astonishing events. In the next few pages, we read of his firsthand involvement in two pieces of unprecedented, world-changing, revolutionary actions, all of which is mere setup for what happens next -- a third, overwhelmingly illusion-shattering incident that forms the premise for all that follows in the book.

Any one of these events should serve, on its own, to invert everything everyone thought they knew. All preconceptions should be altered, the world and world-view of everyone on earth should be irreversibly shaken to its foundation and tentatively rebuilt.

But that doesn't happen. The characters who occupy L&J's fictional world are as oblivious, self-absorbed and incurious as L&J rely on their readers to be.

Take the second incident Williams witnesses: Russia launches a massive undeclared first strike against Israel. Why? That is never explained, and it doesn't occur to the authors or to their master investigative reporter to ask such a simple question.

We are simply told that Russia, unprovoked, launches every missile, every warhead, every plane it has against Israel. That alone should be sufficient to reset everyone's mental calendar. Every person's internal and external frame of reference would be altered to think of the world in terms of Before and After. Think September 11 magnified by several factors of ten.

Yet this event registers as only a flicker in the mind of the GIRAT, even though he was in Israel at the time of the attack.

(The other characters we've met so far -- a pilot and flight attendant whose daily routine consists of international travel, and an End Times-obsessed housewife who would likely watch news about the Middle East more closely than news about her own school district -- don't even seem to have noticed that this all-out nuclear assault happened. We read nothing about any disruptions in international flights following this war. We read nothing about Irene Steele's citing this apocalyptic conflict to her husband in their many arguments about her own interpretation of the Last Days. In coming chapters, the novel becomes preoccupied with the United Nations. Yet scarcely any mention is made of how the unilateral launching of a nuclear war by a permanent member of the Security Council might alter the dynamics of that body.)

Anyway, here's how the GIRAT reported, firsthand, from the scene of an all-out nuclear surprise attack:

To say the Israelis were caught off guard, Cameron Williams had written, was like saying the Great Wall of China was long.

Just remember, when L&J discuss good writing, this is what they mean.

Joan Didion on Left Behind

Thanks to "david" in Atrios' comments, I found this essay by Joan Didion in The New York Review of Books.

Didion's frightening question is how much the kind of thinking found in the Left Behind books influences the decisions of President George W. Bush, proud evangelical Christian, doubter of Darwin, and courter of the fundamentalist Christian right.

She cuts through to the scary political implications of these books having a fanbase of 55 million:

We understand immediately: this will be an end-times scenario with a political point. These are not books that illuminate Christian theology. The apocalyptic events of Revelation roll out in their appointed order, each judgment more literal than the last ... famine giving way to pestilence, fire to the falling star to the darkening of the sun by a third ... the plague of locusts to the plague of two hundred thousand brimstone-breathing horses to the plague of boils, the sea turning to blood, and, in Armageddon, the Euphrates drying up. What might seem to be the lesson of the Christian litany, that only through the acceptance of a profound mystery can one survive whatever spiritual tribulation these poetic fates are meant to signify, is not the lesson of the "Left Behind" books, in which the fates are literal rather than symbolic ...

Consider: 55 million Americans believe that such events will occur soon and inevitably.

I spent years working for groups like "Evangelicals for Social Action" -- trying to get Christians to follow the Bible's teachings about justice and mercy for the poor, and the "Evangelical Environmental Network" -- trying to promote a stewardly care for God's creation. In that work I would frequently encounter rapture-maniac Christians of the LaHaye/Bush variety who seemed genuinely to believe that any such efforts to make the world a better place were contrary to the will of God as they understood it.

To such people God's will was for the world to spiral downwards into chaos and ever-increasing suffering. Such a view leads these Christians to pursue the opposite of what Jesus taught. It is, in one word, "Anti-Christ."

L.B.: Meet Buck Williams

Left Behind, pg. 6

Here we meet LaHaye and Jenkins' second protagonist: Buck Williams.

I grew up in Jersey, so I'm a long-time admirer of Buck Williams. The man was a rebounding machine -- dominating the NBA boards for a decade, pulling down more than 13,000 rebounds (No. 12 on the all-time list). Williams is still the Nets all-time leading scorer and rebounder. So who did they get for him in the trade with Portland? Freaking Sam Bowie. Great trade guys.

LaHaye and Jenkins, of course, don't mean that Buck Williams. Like Bill Russell, he doesn't appear in this book at all. Which makes sense, since this story takes place after God has already snatched away his team. The Almighty knows that offense wins headlines, but defense wins championships.

The Buck Williams of Left Behind is even more of a superstar. He's a kind of journalistic James Bond. The Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time.

Note that the dual authors have given us dual protagonists.

Rayford Steele -- the virile, sexually obsessed but chaste hero pilot -- seems to be Tim LaHaye's fantasy wish-fulfillment stand-in. Cameron "Buck" Williams seems to represent the dream self of Jerry B. Jenkins. The aging hack ghostwriter of subculture genre fiction transforms himself into a world-famous, Pulitzer-winning, super-journalist admired by writers and desired by women everywhere.

("Cameron" here evoking both journalist John Cameron Swayze and, oddly, Kirk Cameron, the former "Growing Pains" star who plays Buck in the movie version of Left Behind.)

L.B.: The denial of death

Left Behind, pp. 4-5

Left Behind has been praised by some as an "evangelistic" book, but it's not. Although the book does attempt to scare people into conversion, that is secondary. The authors' real message for those they regard as unsaved is to thumb their nose and do a little victory dance. "You just wait until Jesus gets back and proves we were right and you were wrong. Then we'll see who's laughing at who."

Not the most winsome approach to sharing one's faith.

But the biggest reason this is not an "evangelistic" book is that it does not present the Christian gospel. It presents something else.

Rayford Steele bemoan's his newly converted (and therefore newly sexually repugnant) wife's "preoccupation with the end of the world, with the love of Jesus, with the salvation of souls."

That is a disturbing listing of the content and priorities of L&J's brand of Christianity. Even more disturbing is Irene Steele's one-sentence summary of the gospel:

"Can you imagine, Rafe," she exulted. "Jesus coming back to get us before we die?"

This is the crux of the matter. This is the Gospel According to Tim & Jerry. But it is not the gospel of Christianity.

Christians, in the words of the Nicene Creed, "look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." We believe, in the words of the Apostle's Creed, in "the resurrection of the body."

L&J are not interested in resurrection. Resurrection is something that happens to dead people, and L&J don't want to die. Death scares them. And that, more than anything else, explains what rapture-mania is all about.

Christianity is about death and resurrection, not about the denial of death. Not about "Jesus coming back to get us before we die."

This escapist fantasy of a gospel isn't just bad theology. It's cruel. Consider the poor souls clinging to this hope who get the big bad news from their doctor. Consider those who have lost a husband, wife, mother, father, daughter or son. Consider all those who have died and all those they have left behind.

More on this later.

Left Behind: Pretrib Porno

Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Tyndale House Publishers, 1995.

Pages 1-3.

The first words of Left Behind are "Rayford Steele," the protagonist's name.

It sounds like a porn star's name -- and in a sense it is. The Left Behind series is dispensational porno, but it's more than that. One of the most disturbing things about this book is the way LaHaye and Jenkins portray men, women and the relationships between them.

Note that Tim LaHaye's wife is something of a professional misogynist. She runs the 500,000-member "Concerned Women for America" -- jokingly referred to by its critics as "Ladies Against Women." For years, while Beverly LaHaye's husband pastored a church in San Diego, Mrs. L. spent most of her time 3,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C., running a large organization committed to, among other things, telling women they should stay at home and sacrifice their careers for their husbands. She is not an ironic woman and doesn't seem to find any of this inconsistent. (Nor, as I found out firsthand, does she appreciate jokes about the Freudian implications of the view from her L'Enfante Plaza office window. Sometimes the Washington Monument is just a cigar.)

Our porn star hero, Rayford Steele, interacts with women just like any porn star does -- minus, of course, the sex. It's all about dominance, exploitation, titillation and the stroking of -- in this case -- egos.

The character Rayford Steele is, like the authors, no longer a young man. Younger authors might not have been compelled to give their protagonists names -- "Steele" and "Buck" -- that seem such a blatant assertion of male virility. Bev is apparently not the only LaHaye who seems oblivious to phallic imagery.

If you're thinking I'm reading too much into all this, that this theme isn't really as present in the text as I'm making it out to be, consider the opening lines:

Rayford Steele's mind was on a woman he had never touched. With his fully loaded 747 on autopilot ...

That's more than just subtext.

The name of the woman about whom Steele is fantasizing is "Hattie Durham." (Eldridge Cleaver could have written volumes trying to unpack all the Southern sexual myths crammed into that name.)

A paragraph later we read that Steele's wife, Irene, was "attractive and vivacious enough, even at 40." The authors do not say "enough" for what, but the choice of adjectives -- the first description we have of Irene -- is tellingly reductive. Then there's that "even at 40." L&J would not approve of an older, steely, fully loaded man betraying his wife for a younger trophy bride -- but they sure seem to appreciate the impulse.

Irene's 40-ish attractiveness cannot compete with Hattie's youthful good looks. The first thing L&J tell us about any female character is whether or not she is attractive. Hattie is, they tell us, "drop dead gorgeous." Like so much in this book, Hattie's beauty eludes the authors' powers of description, forcing them to fall back on cliche. There are enough hackneyed phrases in the first chapter of this book for a whole album of Bon Jovi songs.

Despite L&J telling us that Steele's "libido" had "caused his mind to wander" (aha -- somebody has been reading Freud!), their description of Steele's behavior toward Miss Durham betrays another motive at work:

They had spent time together, chatting for hours over drinks or dinner, sometimes with coworkers, sometimes not. He had not returned so much as one brush of a finger, but his eyes had held her gaze, and he could only assume his smile had made its point.

Steele's "libido" seems firmly in check. He keeps it -- like Hattie -- subservient to his need for emotional dominance. Throughout the book, Rayford keeps Hattie in her place -- waiting for signals from him, but always withholding those signals. The authors seem to regard this as a sign of Steele's virtue and self control, but it reads more like something deeply kinked and cruel. He gets off on this.

On the third page of the book we read:

He was no prude, but Rayford had never been unfaithful to Irene. He'd had plenty of opportunities. He had long felt guilty about a private necking session he enjoyed at a company Christmas party more than 12 years before. Irene had stayed home, uncomfortably past her ninth month carrying their surprise tagalong son, Ray Jr.

By this point, Rayford Steele's warped sexuality -- the book's primary theme thus far -- has become so blatant that one begins to hope the authors are attempting something more subtle and artful. Perhaps Steele is an antihero -- an unreliable narrator like something out of Nabakov? (The voice is not first person, but our omniscient narrator is, so far, focused on Steele's P.O.V.)

But little in the rest of the book supports such a view. The only unreliable narrators here are the authors themselves, apparently agreeing with Steele that his "private necking session" (who talks like this?) with a nameless, undescribed, inconsequential female does not constitute "unfaithfulness" to his pregnant wife.

"Left Behind" is evil

The apocalyptic heresies rampant in American evangelicalism are more popular than ever.

It's easy to dismiss these loopy ideas as a lunatic fringe, but that would be a mistake. The widespread popularity of this End Times mania has very real and very dangerous consequences, for America and for the church. ("Premillennial dispensationalism" -- the technical terms for what these prophecy freaks teach -- teaches that the Sermon on the Mount does not apply to Christians living today. It also undermines the core of Christianity -- Jesus' death and resurrection, and the hope of that resurrection. These are not tangential matters for Christians.)

The cultural standard bearer for these Very Bad Ideas is the "Left Behind" series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. These books have become so popular that every pastor in America is now confronted with the task of gently, pastorally explaining to their congregation why the theology of these books is misguided and misguiding.

I'm not a pastor, so I won't be pastoral here. These books are evil, anti-Christian crap. This weekend, I'm beginning a new series of posts in which I'll go through these books, page by page.

Millions of your fellow citizens are reading these books. Millions. If you're wondering what that means for you, read the following, from Glenn Scherer in E magazine:

In his book The Carbon Wars, Greenpeace activist Jeremy Leggett tells how he stumbled upon this otherworldly agenda. During the Kyoto climate change negotiations, Leggett candidly asked Ford Motor Company executive John Schiller how opponents of the pact could believe there is no problem with “a world of a billion cars intent on burning all the oil and gas available on the planet?” The executive asserted first that scientists get it wrong when they say fossil fuels have been sequestered underground for eons. The Earth, he said, is just 10,000, not 4.5 billion years old, the age widely accepted by scientists.

Then Schiller confidently declared, “You know, the more I look, the more it is just as it says in the Bible.” The Book of Daniel, he told Leggett, predicts that increased earthly devastation will mark the “End Time” and return of Christ. Paradoxically, Leggett notes, many fundamentalists see dying coral reefs, melting ice caps and other environmental destruction not as an urgent call to action, but as God’s will. Within the religious right worldview, the wreck of the Earth can be seen as Good News!

Some true believers, interpreting biblical prophecy, are sure they will be saved from the horrific destruction brought by ecosystem collapse. They’ll be raptured: rescued from Earth by God, who will then rain down seven ghastly years of misery on unbelieving humanity. Jesus’ return will mark the Millennium, when the Lord restores the Earth to its green pristine condition, and the faithful enjoy a thousand years of peace and prosperity.

Hide the beer, the pastor's here

"It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; [Islam], not Christianity, is the teetotal religion." -- C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

In this intriguing article in New York magazine, Craig Horowitz explores the strange alliance between pro-Israel Jewish groups and conservative American evangelicals.

Without realizing it, Horowitz relates one howling faux pas from Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews:

"More and more Jews see the Evangelical community as a strategic ally for Israel. ... In fact, the Evangelicals may now be seen as even more important allies than the American Jewish community itself. But are Jews willing to have a beer with them? I'm not so sure."

A beer!?! Eckstein has spent more than 20 years working with evangelical Christians in America and he still doesn't realize that evangelicals don't drink beer?

This is a religious subculture that -- despite its claims of a strictly "literal" hermeneutic -- believes that Jesus and his disciples drank non-alcoholic grape juice at the Last Supper. They believe Christ's first miracle was turning water into Welch's at the wedding in Cana.

Drinking beer will get you kicked out of Biola, Bethel, Westmont, Calvin, Liberty and just about any other evangelical institution.

It Horowitz had asked Jerry Falwell, Richard Land, Tim LaHaye or any of the other right-wing evangelicals about sitting down to "have a beer" they would have explained that they can't do that because the Bible teaches them it's a sin.

Horowitz would, one hopes, treat such a claim with a responsible journalist's skepticism, something like: "The reverend explained that he did not drink beer because his interpretation of the Bible teaches it is a sin."

It would be a problem if Horowitz just accepted this teetotalling claim credulously, repeating it without qualification, as in: "The reverend does not drink beer, which is forbidden by the Christian Bible."

I bring this up because Horowitz, like far too many journalists, is just this naive and credulous when relating these evangelicals' bizarre theories about the End of the World. For example:

Many Jews believed that what the Christians really wanted was to convert them. Or to persuade all of them to move to Israel as part of some devious plan to hasten the coming of the end of days as laid out in the New Testament.

Or, even worse:

Evangelicals believe in the end of days as much as they believe in everything else in the Bible. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins have written a collection of novels called the “Left Behind” series that use the Bible’s apocalyptic events as their core.

At one point Horowitz even uses the word "biblical" as a synonym for "Manichaen":

George W. Bush ... is a born-again, Scripture-loving Christian who sees the world in stark, almost biblical, terms (“You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists”).

On what basis is Horowitz deciding that this "stark," dualistic view is "almost biblical"?

The problem with all of this is that Jerry Falwell spouts his theories of "the end of days as laid out in the New Testament" and Horowitz simply passes this on, uncritically, as the literal gospel truth. He accepts -- without a hint of skepticism -- that LaHaye's sensational brand of 19th-century Darbyism is "in the Bible" just because LaHaye claims it is.

Really? Ironsides' charts and Hal Lindsey's apocryphal checklists are in the Bible? Where? To put it in good evangelical language -- show me chapter and verse. (Perhaps it's in the same chapter as the verse that says "Thou shalt not drink Yuengling Lager, for verily it is a frothy and refreshing abomination unto the Lord.")

The only Bible where you'll find LaHaye's weird apocalyptic fantasies is a Scofield Reference -- and that's only in the convoluted and arbitrary footnotes below the text. Nowhere is this vision "laid out in the New Testament." It is the bastard child of "premillennial dispensationalism" -- a tortured and torturous hermeneutic that carves up Scripture like a veg-o-matic and functions as a kind of American evangelical cabala.

"Secrets of Bible prophecy revealed" read the advertisements for the thousands of "prophecy seminars" promoting this nonsense every week across the country. "Secrets ... revealed" -- can you get any more gnostic than that?

We often refer to evangelical Christians as "conservative" -- which accurately reflects their cultural and political views. But there is nothing "conservative" about the obsession with prophecy theories that has twisted so much of the American church.

It would be nice if journalists stopped pretending these people speak for all Christians everywhere.

In the sweet by and by

The birthdays in the previous post are from Dr. Mac's Cultural Calendar, which also notes that today, Sept. 23, is also in a sense the birthday of a peculiarly American version of Christianity.

On this day in 1667 in Williamsburg, Virginia, a law was passed barring slaves from obtaining their freedom by converting to Christianity.

Consider what the implications of this were for these Christian slaves and the Christians who bought and sold them. How could these Christians read together the words of St. Paul's letter to the slave-owner Philemon, delivered on behalf of Philemon's runaway slave Onesimus?

Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back for good-- no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother. He is very dear to me but even dearer to you, both as a man and as a brother in the Lord.

Or how could these Williamsburg Christians read this, from Paul's epistle to the Galatians?

For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

The law in Williamsburg, which was later embraced throughout the colonies (slavery, in 1667, was not only a southern phenomenon), meant that the body of Christ now encompassed both slave-owners and their slaves. How could these people still be said to be "one body" or "all one in Christ Jesus"?

Something had to give. The behavior and lifestyle of colonial Christians was in conflict with Christian teaching. They would either have to change their behavior, or change the teaching. Guess which seemed easier?

The Great American solution to the conflict between slavery and Christianity was a shifting of focus from this world to the next. American Christianity became wholly otherworldly, preoccupied with heaven and unconcerned with earth. All questions of justice became purely eschatological. The sin of slavery produced the heresy of "pie in the sky when you die."

(The relationship between bad theology and bad behavior -- heresy and sin -- is a chicken-and-egg conundrum. The case of American slavery is a classic example of this cause-and-effect-and-cause downward spiral.)

This otherworldly focus continues today as it began -- as an excuse for injustice. In the centuries since Williamsburg passed its law it has become more refined. It's most popular -- and complex -- form today is the apocalyptic premillennial dispensationalism described in the "Left Behind" novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

One of the things "left behind" by this American religion is the Christian imperative for justice. When justice in this world appears difficult, costly or inconvenient, the temptation will always be to look away, turning our eyes, instead, to the sweet by and by.