Surreal Faith

...In his appendix, Claiborne, parroting his theological mentor Yoder, strains to explain away the Roman 13 affi rmation of the state as God’s instrument for punishing evildoers...

...The world is branded with America...

...Claiborne liberally quotes from early Christian martyrs who resisted Rome, equally admirable Christian resisters to Nazism, and U.S...

...But Claiborne’s interpretation of Jesus, his few selective quotations from early church fathers notwithstanding, is largely divorced from the universal church’s understanding of the Savior...

...about the communist North Vietnamese regime, whose crimes King did not discern, and which still do not fi t the preferred narrative of purportedly Christian anti-imperialists like Claiborne...

...Maybe it’s time for Christians all over the world to lay down the fl ags of their nations and together raise the banner of God,” he suggests...

...So evidently God countenances “police” actions but not military actions, though Claiborne does not explain the difference...

...But he ultimately justifi es Jesus for President by pledging part of the profits for carbon offsets...

...He likens his mischievously giving away free pizza in a mall food court as a protest against the profi t incentive (and for which he was arrested) to Jesus’ overturning the moneychangers’ tables in the temple...

...Would he simply have looked on in prayerful sympathy...

...military personnel who have repudiated their roles in America’s wars, as though all were of a seamless moral garment...

...Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy...

...He also falls back on a more traditional Anabaptist teaching that the text empowers the state to employ force but does not permit Christian participation in the state’s dirty work...

...Claiborne relies heavily on Yoder and echoes Hauerwas, who is fi erce in his mocking denunciations of all things American...

...But he suggests that the anti-Hitler conspiracists who tried to assassinate the F?hrer only fueled “his reign of terror” and invigorated his quest to “rid the world of evil”—a mission that the German dictator evidently shared with George W. Bush, of course...

...This betrayal of authentic Christianity continued with the early Puritans of New England, who confused their earthly conquest with God’s Kingdom, thereafter setting the permanent imperialistic and genocidal tone of all European Americans for the next four centuries...

...As with most Christian pacifi st absolutists, Claiborne is vague...

...What are Christians to do about extreme evil if all violence is precluded...

...His version of the politics of Jesus sounds remarkably like MoveOn.org and Greenpeace, neither of which professes to be christocentric...

...The America-as-Rome thesis is common now within the pacifi st evangelical left, which is especially enraged by the wars of George W. Bush...

...He observes: “How ironic that he was granted a national holiday by the nation he called the ‘greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.’” King said those words in his famous 1967 denunciation of the Vietnam war at Riverside Church, a speech that has not aged well because of its glaring na?vet...

...Claiborne goes further, berating the seductions of technology and science...

...If depleted uranium is American . . . I am proud to be unAmerican...

...Not many Christians are likely to “vote” for this redefi ned Jesus...

...America’s oppression includes not just military conquests but also economic dominance...

...He asserts that the “sword” referred to in the text was actually a “short dagger” used in police, not military work...

...On so many different levels, Claiborne lacks moral and spiritual perspective...

...He confesses to struggling with the idea of publishing a book, with its reliance on 21st-century media...

...Refusing to run or resist, he instead implored his assailants to desist in God’s name—which they did...

...Supposedly striving for evenhandedness, he cites America’s misdeeds along with Iran’s, North Korea’s and Saddam Hussein’s— though, of course, he never expresses any personal solidarity with any victims of those regimes...

...Claiborne himself does not explicitly reject these doctrines, but as with Yoder, he prefers to direct Christianity to other emphases revolving around social action and community building...

...Supporting Jesus for president, to Claiborne, means accepting the Yoder/Hauerwas thesis: Remove fl ags from the churches, do not serve in the military, denounce U.S...

...But somewhat incongruently, Claiborne more predictably insists that “being born again radically dissolves affection for national borders...

...He denounces the globalized economy, describing the worldwide trade thread that brings coffee to America as leaving a “trench-like trail” across a ravaged earth...

...Ostensibly, according to Claiborne, the Whore of Babylon that John describes in Revelation is the Roman Empire, whose political whoredoms are replicated by modern America, which follows Rome in trying to “slaughter God’s love in the world...

...His colorfully illustrated book is laden with photos of American tanks and bombs and suffering Iraqis who are victimized by the heavy imperial arm of President Bush’s AmeriKa, amplifi ed by political and historical assertions by secular leftists such as Noam Chomsky and Harold Zinn...

...Predictably, Claiborne claims that NAFTA and other free trade agreements echo Rome’s imperialism...

...Shunning violence and profi t-making, Claiborne’s Christianity demands a new monasticism, which he has attempted to create in his Philadelphia ministry called “The Simple Way...

...Widely popularized by his best-known disciple, Stanley Hauerwas of Duke, Yoder deemphasized Christ’s substitutionary atonement and focused, instead, on the church as a new community that rejects all earthly powers...

...Claiborne quotes Hitler’s secretary as claiming “any hopes for peace were lost” after the 1944 attempt against Hitler, as though a peaceful settlement to World War II was averted only thanks to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s failure to uphold his pacifi st convictions...

...America’s wealth is carried “on the backs of cheaper laborers” overseas, he charges, while American cities are “blighted with hundreds of abandoned factories and a hundred more abandoned homes...

...Although purportedly rejecting worldly ideologies, Claiborne, like Hauerwas, repeats the secular left’s political mantras...

...If the apostle were writing his Apocalypse today, he would use a “phrase such as ‘mission accomplished’ or describe the image of a fl aming oil fi eld under a sky of black smoke...

...Just as Caesar had his image on everything, America has its stamp,” Claiborne laments...

...But Claiborne does not explain how he might have reacted had he come upon a pregnant woman, or child, or elderly person, being beaten in an ally by less spiritually intimidated attackers...

...In Jesus for President Claiborne wants Christians to disavow their country and all civil governance in favor of exclusive allegiance to a nonviolent Jesus whose chief mission is resisting “empire...

...instead he is denouncing the United States as a uniquely reincarnated Roman Empire and, therefore, the enemy of God whom Christians should shun...

...Instead, Claiborne insists on a narrowly reinterpreted Jesus as distilled by Yoder and several others in 20th-century America for whom Jesus is more social critic than Resurrected Redeemer...

...Besides Yoder, Claiborne relies on deeply heterodox theologians such as John Dominic Crossan, Walter Wink, and Walter Brueggemann, none of whom, because of their rejection of Christian doctrines about Jesus Christ’s deity, atonement, and bodily resurrection, would inspire confi dence in orthodox Christians...

...America’s imperialistic hubris became personal for Claiborne when his shame over the impending U.S.-led war in Iraq took him to Baghdad, where he composed a ditty after CBS News asked him whether he was a traitor: If this bloody, counterfeit liberation is American . . . I am proud to be un-American...

...foreign policy as imperialism, and reject the ostensible materialism of free market capitalism...

...So Claiborne on trade sounds a little like Pat Buchanan...

...If the imposed “peace” of Pax Americana is American, I am proud to be un-American...

...Many of its adherents rely on the theology of John Howard Yoder, the 20th-century Mennonite who reinterpreted Christ’s crucifi xion as a renunciation of all violence...

...Claiborne repeats the conventional narrative that early Christians abandoned their martyrdoms to become the empowered oppressors when Constantine Christianized the empire...

...and Allied missiles landed...

...BY MARK TOOLEY Shane Claiborne is a Christian counter-culturalist and pacifi st who went to Baghdad in 2003 to express solidarity with Iraq when the fi rst U.S...

...In one genuinely impressive anecdote, Claiborne recalls being surrounded by angry inner city hoodlums who trapped him and a friend in an ally while bashing them with sticks...

...Jesus for President was published in time for this year’s elections, but Claiborne was not backing any earthly candidate...

...He is highly distressed that American churches display American fl ags, but his concern would be ameliorated if they similarly displayed Afghan and Iraqi fl ags in “solidarity” with God’s family...

...Claiborne likes to quote Martin Luther King Jr., not admitting that King himself was a believer in the dreaded “myth” of American exceptionalism...

...Still in his thirties, he is not an aging hippie but a post-modern, “emergent” evangelical of sorts, who appeals to a new generation of believers anxious to shun traditional evangelical stereotypes...