ELECTING THE MESSIAH
Garvey, John
ELECTING THE MESSIAH JOHN GARVEY I have been trying to figure out what bothers me about the preachers who have been cropping up on television lately. There has been an increase in fundamentalist...
...The reason is that we don't want a president, a chief executive...
...They even vote to put him in power...
...The substance of the religious claim means less, in practice, than the feeling that it is true...
...This distance is ignored...
...A couple of grim-looking men who had probably been dragged along by their wives sat with their arms solidly folded, and God bless them both...
...When a churchgoer hears and takes to heart an uncomfortable part of the Gospel, a statement like "he who seeks his life will lose it," or "sell all you have, give it to the poor, and follow me," he is profoundly unsettled...
...The reaction leads us to a passionate and wrongheaded hope that by transfusing our own energy into politics, or religious belief, or our sex lives, we can make them live, like Frankenstein waiting for lightning to make the damned stitched-up corpse twitch again...
...Growing voter apathy, insofar as it is a refusal to accept the choices offered, is probably a good thing...
...Here are a couple of examples: one of the TV evangelists opened his show not long ago with a gleeful yell to the studio audience, "OK, everybody, how many here are SAVED...
...So people who defend their political choices are likely to to speak of a sense of this, a belief in that, a hope for the other...
...But when he finds himself looking at a preacher who lays molasses around the name of Jesus and is decked out like Johnny Carson in a flashy suit and razor-cut hair, I don't think it is the stark message of the Gospel which makes him uncomfortable...
...There were enthusiastic religious outbreaks in the decades preceding the year 1000...
...All of these enthusiasms involve a projection which was never really very political or religious in the first place...
...No leader is capable of "bringing us together" or "restoring the faith of people in government" (should it be restored, given what we know about government...
...On other evangelical shows you see bright-eyed people who are confident that Israeli victories are signs of the imminent return of Christ...
...ask the certainty junkies...
...As the hosts of these programs exult about "this great Christian ministry" I find myself getting the creeps...
...we want a Holy King, a Leader, a Messiah...
...But there is something beyond the embarrassment...
...There is also a terrible need for feeling certain, for an experienced reassurance that you are right and they are wrong...
...It only encourages them," she said...
...And some people do...
...a similar superstitious regard for the calendar draws wild excitement from people waiting for the millennial zero-flip...
...I've heard sermons done by evangelical ministers which were genuine calls to repentance and conversion...
...There has been an increase in fundamentalist programming around here in recent months, and it is apparently a nationwide phenomenon...
...The falseness lies in the assumption that during the sixties our hopes were honest and clear, and not another version of the thing people are doing now with fundamentalist religion on the one hand and broader religious or psychological therapies on the other...
...Years ago one old lady was asked why she didn't vote, and her answer is perfect for this year...
...This not only lets hired image-makers get away with murder...
...Another time a member of one of the "Jews for Jesus" groups spoke about how in these latter days die Holy Spirit was being poured out everywhere, even on the Jews, and he told of a man who was in the synagogue when "the word of the Lord came to him" and what the word of the Lord said was, "Salvation is not to be found in this place...
...The need to believe triumphs over the substance offered for veneration here as in the case of fundamentalist religion...
...my comfort, however, is obviously not what the Gospel was designed for...
...While this is behind some of the current fundamentalism, it is far from the only thing...
...or of "binding up the nation's wounds...
...There were people who were similarly moved by Nixon's "Bring us together...
...There is in this style a blinkered earnestness which will do everything to make itself loved, a narrowly focused Christianity which tries too hard to reassure all of us unsaved that you can be a Christian and a regular fellow...
...there's something else at work...
...This doesn't apply only to the extremes of religious or political behavior in America but to the mainstream as well, and it is especially apparent during an election year...
...There is a great distance between an honest search for truth -with all of ks darkness and long periods of unknowing-and the feeling that you are in possession of the truth...
...Few commentators bothered to recognize-or acknowledge the recognition, anyway -that Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country" was a profoundly anti-democratic statement, one which would make Jefferson spin in his grave, because the question Kennedy didn't want asked is precisely the right one, and his alternative is fascist-none of these things gets faced...
...It is mildly exciting to watch the odometer of your car move from 1999 to 2000...
...Jimmy Carter places his autobiography with a religious publishing- house (Why Not the Best?, Broadman, $1.95) and Logos International has published the incredibly named The Miracle of Jimmy Carter (Howard Norton and Bob Slosser, Logos, $1.95...
...And we react with the same embarrassment to Billy Graham's golf course ministry and Jimmy Carter's humorless soul-bearing...
...Other signs of the end are a decline in morals (morals usually means sex, dirty language, drugs and a lack of respect for authority), any outbreak of armed hostility and, of course, the spread of fundamentalism...
...What hope is there, then...
...That's part of the message...
...it is a reaction to the meaninglessness we feel when we have anything to do with our political, religious, or social institutions...
...This Florence Nightingale cum Jesus picture is disgusting, and even more disgusting than the politicians' willingness to hawk it is the willingness of so many people to buy it Caveat emptor apparently doesn't work in American politics...
...It isn't that I can't find room in my heart for evangelical Christianity...
...But there are discomforts, and then there are embarrassments...
...I want to see hands . . ." and there they were, an eager forest of arms raised and wriggling, like grade school all over again...
...It has to do with boredom, restlessness, rootlessness...
...They weren't done in a style I'm comfortable with...
...The candidate's actual performance (Nixon's previous dirty tricks, Carter's hawkishness, Ford's blundering) are all less important than the way they make you feel...
...There is a liberal way of looking at the current religious enthusiasms which seems to me completely false...
...That is, the notion that because the hopes of the sixties were "betrayed," we have retreated in our disillusionment to a purely personal approach to life, a naturally fertile ground for religion...
...As unecumenical as this is, it has to be said: it isn't just the style, but the religion itself which disturbs me...
...it leads inevitably to disappointment...
...None" is the right answer at this point, given the choices we are forced to swallow...
...So Jimmy Carter, a hawk right to the end of the Vietnam War, a mourner in Calley's cortege, says "Trust me...
...This need for being ted, without any evidence that the person we are willing to have lead us can zip up his pants, much less do anything decent for the country, is more moody than it is political...
...The same is true of American religion, and this is where they converge: whatever they do on the practical level, they succeed through appeals to feeling, the need for certainty and a glowing missionary righteousness...
Vol. 103 • November 1976 • No. 23
