If you refrain from punching your fist in the air exuberantly
over the holiness, the exaltedness, the eye-spinning
splendiferousness of same-sex marriage, if you fail to demand this
very nanosecond that courts make it the law of the land, Andrew
Sullivan knows what you are: a bigot, a hatemonger, a
torture-supporter, even a Bush-backer. If you happen also to darken
the doorstep of a church, why, faster than Mr. Humphries scampering
across the gentlemen’s department at Grace Brothers to inquire,
“Are you being served?” he’ll have your number. You’re a
“Christianist.”
Christianist?
“So let me suggest,” Sullivan pontificates
in Time, “that we take back the word Christian while
giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist.
Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an
ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between
Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction
we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are
those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam
as a political force and conflate state and mosque.”
You know, Rick Santorum equals that nuke-loving Iranian guy, the
one who looks like an older, Muslim Maynard G. Krebs. Jerry Falwell
is a chubbier Osama bin Laden in a suit off the rack from J.C.
Penney.
Of course Sullivan says that’s not what he means. Not at all.
They’re not terrorists, they’re not violent. It’s only that
Christianists have hijacked Christianity like Islamists have
hijacked Islam. Except they haven’t slammed a plane into the
Pentagon, leveled walls on homosexuals, stashed women in burqas, or
rioted because Jesus appeared on the funny pages. But beyond that,
I’m sure he has a point. Somewhere.
Frankly, the tone of political discourse distresses the
self-described “gay, Catholic conservative” commentator. He finds
it beyond the pale that Ann Coulter calls liberals “godless.” “The
point,” he proclaims urbi et orbi in the Daily
Encyclical, er, Dish, “is to portray your political opponents as
part of a Manichean struggle against existential evil. And so
‘liberalism’ is literally demonized.”
I must have missed something. Is Christianist, then, a term of
endearment? Of all people, Sullivan has to be beyond waging
Manichean struggles against existential evil. Marcionite struggles
maybe, Arian even, but never Manichean.
If one day he discovers Buddhists who have hijacked Buddhism, I
beg him to think twice before he dubs them “Buddhistists.” Tongues
from here to Kyoto will thank him.
Last week, Sullivan appeared on Larry King Live with an
orthodox Episcopal priest (I hope the show’s bookers contacted Fish
and Wildlife’s Endangered Species Program with news of their rare
find), the legendary gay Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, a Roman
Catholic priest, the president of a Southern Baptist seminary, and
a lesbian United Church of Christ pastor from Dallas. Sullivan
explained:
I am a Catholic and people often ask me, how can you be
openly gay and be a Catholic? And my response is always I’m openly
gay, because I’m a Catholic, because God taught me not to bear
false witness to who I am and my faith is something that I really
have no choice over. I’ve tried. I’ve had a terrible struggle with
my own faith, but God wouldn’t let me go and he keeps bringing me
back and he keeps saying to me, in the Eucharist and in the church
I love you and you belong here. And I want you to have a loving
relationship and I feel that my own relationship is a gift from
God. I cannot alone in my conscience before God believe otherwise.
So I can do no other. I’m here because I have no
choice.
Somewhere Martin Luther is wishing he’d had a better intellectual
property lawyer.
No doubt Sullivan has treaded a harrowing road, though that far
from necessitates the conclusions he’s reached. Let’s take out
“openly gay” and add other activities traditionally considered less
than savory. “And my response is always I’m an
extortionist/murderer/rapist/thief/liar/Daily Kos reader,
because I’m a Catholic, because God taught me not to bear false
witness to who I am and my faith is something that I really have no
choice over.” I believe Sullivan here is drawing upon the works of
a famed Doctor of the Church. His name, unfortunately, escapes me,
but I recall he’s the patron of sailors, growers of iron-rich
vegetables, and flat-chested women. “I yam what I yam and that’s
all that I yam,” he says in Against the Blutoians.
After his appearance with Larry King and the gang, Sullivan
told his readers,
I’m absorbing the email flood …and will try and get
back to everyone, but several are asking if I have written on these
subjects. Er, yes. My first book, Virtually Normal, makes
the key arguments about why the Catholic teaching on homosexuality
is incoherent on its own terms. My second book, Love
Undetectable, is a memoir of my faith-journey through the
plague years, an account of the origins of homosexual orientation,
and a celebration of friendship as a core Christian virtue. If
you’re interested, check them out. Part of my next book, The
Conservative Soul, tackles the deeper philosophical issues
behind Catholicism’s treatment of sexuality as a whole — straight
and gay — as well as presenting a defense of a non-fundamentalist
Christianity as the Christian life closest to Jesus’
example.
Isn’t it annoying when authors ride a hobbyhorse to the point of
saddle sores? I’m glad to see Sullivan’s mind boasts more than one
track. I know I’m looking forward to
The Conservative
Soul. It’s on my reading list immediately after
The
Liberal Soul, the new book due out from Jesse Helms. But I
hear he’s not done. Not by a long shot. He’s already at work on
what he hopes to be his masterpiece. As yet untitled, it tackles
why the very design of the universe, from galaxies and quasars to
neutrinos and quarks, points to why that so-called Vicar of Christ
in Rome is nothing more than a goose-stepping reactionary bent on
keeping Andrew from the altar.
In Time, Sullivan thunders against the
Christianists and their machinations. He dings Rush Limbaugh for
hanging the moniker “party of death” on the Democrats “because of
many Democrats’ view that some moral decisions, like the choice to
have a first-trimester abortion, should be left to the individual,
not the cops.” I’ll let pass his howler that implies abortion in
America is limited to the first trimester. If you’re a Christian
and, like your co-religionists since the Age of the Apostles,
believe that abortion is more than a “moral decision,” you’re a
Christianist.
What’s an oppressed, marginalized gay man, with a column in
Time, a blog on the magazine’s website, op-eds in the
Times of London, going to do? “The worst response, I
think, would be to construct something called the religious left,”
he advises. Perhaps he doesn’t get out much, or the Christianist
reign of terror has him under house arrest, but I’d like to
introduce him to the Methodist, United Church of Christ, Episcopal,
and Presbyterian churches. Maybe he’s familiar with them.
“I dissent,” he exclaims, “from the political pollution of
sincere, personal faith.”
If you fail to subscribe sincerely and personally to the faith
as interpreted by Andrew Sullivan, you’re a Christianist and you
have no business in the public square.
