Response to a friend when discussing corruption and Ralph Reed ...

In Suday School we're going through a DVD on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is absolutely excellent (available on Amazon, directed by a guy named Doblmeier, or something like that; look it up and rent it or something). Anyway as we were in the 3d installment yesterday, and the sermon was on the Mark passage where Herod executes John the Baptist and how Herod and the state he controlled was an example of a "principalities and powers" in the NT, I was just struck -- as I am almost daily -- by how this administration, the most overtly "Christian" that we have had, even more so than Carter's, has chosen a path of "preemptive" war (to which virtually all the historic Christian denominations objected, with the notable and telling exception of Southern Baptists) first rather than diplomacy and negotiation that it would seem a "Christian" administration would prefer, or to make as its first priority tax cuts for the well off in society rather than succor to "the least of these". When there is tension over any issue -- nukes in Iran or Korea, or unrest in Palestine -- it chooses not to engage the opposition, but to issue pronouncements laced with threats which if not overt are explicit in their implicitness. I just don't see this as a characteristic of a Christian nation at all. Characteristic of the bullying triumphalism that I (and G. W. Bush?) grew up with in Texas and the South, but not what I learn from Jesus. The word "irony" is incredibly weak as a descriptive term for this situation.

The state has always endeavored to co-opt the church, and the Bonhoeffer movie showed one of the worst examples of its success during the last century. Today it is endeavoring in this country to do so again, and I suppose that, while it should not be a pleasant thing to contemplate, it should not come as a surprise, either. What to me is most distressing, however, is the degree to which the state has succeeded -- the degree to which it has the enthusiastic cooperation of what are supposedly the "faithful". When this happens "the gospel" is always tainted, at best, and for me at this stage of life, the situation leaves me wondering how the gospel could really be valid, or if it is valid whether there is any power in it.